by Vernor Vinge
"Good going, Juan." For once, Miri Gu sounded pleased with him.
The path was still wide and sandy, the gnarled pines hanging fists of long needles right above his head—and right in the Goofus's face. Amid the park trivia that Juan had downloaded was the claim that this was the last place on earth these pines existed. They rooted in the steep hillsides and hung on for years and years against erosion and draught and cold ocean breezes. Juan glanced back at William's gangly form shambling along behind them. Yeah. Ol' William was kind of like a human ‘Torrey Pine'.
They were in the top of the fog now. Towering and silent, pillars of haze drifted by on either side of them. Starlight dimmed and brightened.
Behind them, the node Juan had left was dimming toward a zero data rate. He picked out a second breadcrumb, gave it correct startup call, and dropped it to the side of the trail. The low-layer diagnostics showed its pale glow, and after a second it had picked up on the first node, now bright again. "They linked ... I'm getting data forwarded from the first node." Hah. Normally you didn't think about details like that. The gadgets kind of reminded Juan of the toy network his father had bought him, back when Pa still had a job. Juan had been only five years old, and the toy nodes had been enormous clunkers, but laying them down around the house had engaged father and son for several happy days—and given Juan an intuition about random networks that some grownups still seemed to lack.
"Okay, I see them," said Miri. "We're not getting any communication from beyond the dungballs, are we? I don't want anything forwarded out to the world."
Yeah, yeah. This is a local exam. "We're isolated, unless we punch out with something really loud." He threw out five or six more breadcrumbs, enough so they could figure their relative positions accurately; in his diagnostic view, the locator gleams sharpened from misty guesstimates to diamond-sharp points of light.
Fog curled more thickly over them, and the starlight grew hazy. Ahead of him, Miri stumbled. "Watch your step.... You know, there's really not enough light anymore."
In patches, the fog was so thick that VIS AMP was just colorful noise.
"Yeah, I guess we should switch back to thermal IR."
They stopped and stood like idiots, fiddling with manual controls to do something that should have been entirely automatic. Near infrared was as bad as visual: for a moment he watched the threads of NIR laser light that flickered sporadically between the data ports on their clothes; in this fog, the tiny lasers were only good for about five feet.
Miri was ahead of him. "Okay, that's a lot better," she said.
Juan finally got his goggles back to their thermal infrared default. Miri's face glowed furnace-red except for the cool blackness of her goggles. Most plants were just faintly reddish. The stairstep timber by his feet had three dark holes in the top. Juan reached down and discovered that the holes felt cold and metallic. Ha, metal spikes holding the timber in place.
"C'mon," said Miri. "I want to get down near the bottom of the canyon."
The stairs were steep, with a heavy wood railing on the dropoff side. The fog was still a problem, but with TIR, you could see out at least ten yards. Dim reddish lights floated up through the dark, blobs of slightly warmer air. The bottom was way down, farther than you'd ever guess. He threw out a few more breadcrumbs and looked back up the path, at the beacons of the other nodes. What a bizarre setup. The light of the breadcrumb diagnostics was showing on his contact lenses, where he normally saw all enhancements. But it was the USMC goggles that were providing most of the augmentation. And beyond them? He stopped, turned off his wearable enhancement, and slipped the goggles up from his face for a moment. Darkness, absolute darkness, and chill wet air on his face. Talk about isolation!
He heard William coming up behind him. The guy stopped and for a second they stood silent, listening.
Miri's voice came from further down the steps. "Are you okay, William?"
"Sure, no problems."
"Okay. Would you and Juan come down by me? We wanna stay close enough to keep a good data rate between us. Are you getting any video off the dungballs, Juan?" Bertie had said they contained basic sensors.
"Nope," Juan replied. He slipped the goggles back on and walked down to her. Any breadcrumb video would have shown up on his contacts, but all he was getting was diagnostics. He started another breadcrumb and tossed it far out, into the emptiness. Its location showed in his contacts. It fell and fell and fell, until he was seeing its virtual gleam "through" solid rock.
He studied the diagnostics a moment more. "You know, I think they are sending low data rate video—"
"That's fine. I'll settle for wireless rate." Miri was leaning out past the railing, staring downwards.
"—but it's not a format I know." He showed her what he had. Bertie's Siberian pals must be using something really obscure. Ordinarily, Juan could have put out some queries and had the format definition in a few seconds; but down here in the dark, he was just stuck.
Miri made an angry gesture. "So Bertie gave you something that could be useful, but only if we punch out a loud call for help? No way. Bertie is not getting his warty hands on my project!"
Hey, Miri, you and I are supposed to be a team here. It would be nice if she would stop treating him like dirt. But she was right about Bertie's tactics. Bertie had given them something wonderful—and was holding back all the little things that would make it useable. First it was the enable-protocol, now it was this screwball video format. Sooner or later, Bertie figured they'd come crawling to him, begging him to be a shadow member of the team. I could call out to him. His clothes had enough power that he could easily punch wireless as far as network nodes in Del Mar Heights, at least for a few minutes. Getting caught was a real risk; Fairmont used a good proctor service—but it was impossible for them to cover all the paths all the time. This afternoon, Bertie had as much as bragged they would cheat that way.
Damn you, Bertie, I'm not going to break isolation. Juan reviewed the mystery data from the breadcrumbs. There seemed to be real content; so given the darkness, the pictures were probably thermal infrared. And I have lots of known video I can compare them to, everything that has been seen through my goggles during the last few minutes! Maybe it was time for some memory magic, the edge he got from his little blue pills: If he could remember which blocks of imagery might match what the breadcrumbs could see, and pass that to his wearable, then conventional reverse engineering would be possible.... Juan's mind went blank for a few seconds, and there was a moment of awesome panic ... but then he remembered himself. He fed the picture pointers back to his wearable. It began crunching out solutions almost immediately. "Try this, Miri." He showed her his best guess-image, and sharpened it over the next five seconds as his wearable found more correlation spikes.
"Yes!" The picture showed the roots of the big pine a dozen yards behind them. A few seconds passed and there was another picture, black sky and faintly glowing branches. In fact, each breadcrumb was generating a low-resolution TIR image every five seconds or so, even though they couldn't all be forwarded that fast. "What are those numbers all about?" Numbers that clustered where the picture detail was most complex.
Oops. "Those are just graphical hierarchy pointers." That was true, but exactly how Juan used them was something he didn't want pursued. He made a note to delete them from all future pics.
Miri was silent for several seconds as she watched the pictures coming in from the crumbs above them on the trail, and from the one that he'd dropped way down. Juan was on the point of asking for payback, like some straight talk about exactly what they were looking for. But then she said, "This picture format is one of those Siberian puzzles, isn't it?"
"Looks like."
Those formats were all different, created by antisocials who seemed to get a kick out of not being interoperable. "And you untangled it in fifteen seconds?"
Sometimes Juan just didn't think ahead: "Yup," he said, blissfully proud.
The uncovered part of her face
flared. "You lying weasel! You're talking to the outside!"
Now Juan's face got hot too. "Don't you call me a liar! You know I'm good with interfaces."
"Not. That. Good." Her voice was deadly.
Caray. The right lie occurred to Juan a few seconds too late: He should have said he'd seen the Siberian picture format before! Now the only safe thing to do was ‘confess' that he was talking to Bertie. But Juan couldn't bear to tell that lie, even if it meant she would figure out what he had really done.
Miri stared at him for several seconds.
William's begoggled face had turned from one of them to other like a spectator at a tennis game. He spoke into the silence, and for once sounded a little surprised: "So what are you doing now, Miriam?"
Juan had already guessed: "She's watching the fog, and listening."
Miri nodded. "If Orozco is sneaking out on wireless, I'd hear it. If he's using something directional, I'd see sidescatter from the fog. I don't see anything just now."
"So maybe I'm squirting micro pulses." Juan's words came out all choked, but he was trying to sound sarcastic; any laser bright enough to get through the fog would have left an afterglow.
"Maybe. If you are, Juan Orozco, I will figure it out—and I'll get you kicked out of school." She turned back to look over the drop off. "Let's get going."
* * *
The steps got even steeper; eventually they reached a turn and walked on almost level ground for about sixty feet. The other side of the gorge was less than fifteen feet away.
"We must be close to the bottom," said William.
"No, William. These canyons go awfully deep and narrow." Miri motioned them to stop. "My darn battery has died." She fumbled around beneath her jacket, replacing a dead battery with one that was only half dead.
She adjusted her goggles and looked over the railing. "Huh. We have a good view from here." She waved at the depths. "You know, Orozco, this might be the place to do some active probing."
Juan pulled the probe gun from the sling on his back. He plugged it into his equipment vest. With the gun connected, most of the options were live:
BAT:LOW SENSORS BAT2:LOW
PASSIVE ACTIVE
VIS AMP OK GPR OK
NIR OK SONO OK
>TIR OK XECHO OK
SNIFF NA GATED VIS OK
AUDIO NA GATED NIR OK
SIG NA
"What do you want to try?"
"The ground penetrating radar." She pointed her own gun at the canyon wall. "Use your power, and we'll both watch."
Juan fiddled with the controls; the gun made a faint click as it shot a radar pulse into the rock wall. "Ah!" The USMC goggles showed the pulse's backscatter as lavender shading on top of the thermal IR. In the daylight pictures that Juan had downloaded, these rocks were white sandstone, fluted and scalloped into shapes that water or wind could not carve alone. The microwave revealed what could only be guessed at from the visible light: moisture that etched and weakened the rock from the inside.
"Aim lower."
"Okay." He fired again.
"See, way down? It Looks like little tunnels cut in the rock."
Juan stared at the pattern of lavender streaks. They did look different than the ones higher up, but—"I think that's just where the rock is soaking wet."
Miri was already hurrying down the steps. "Toss out more dungballs."
* * *
Down and around another thirty feet, they came to a place where the path was just a tumble of large boulders. The going got very slow. William stopped and pointed at the far wall. "Look, a sign."
There was a square wooden plate spiked into the sandstone. William lit his flashlight and leaned out from the path. Juan raised his goggles for a moment—and got the dubious benefit of William's light: everything beyond ten feet was hidden behind the pearly white fog. But the faded lettering on the sign was now visible: "FAT MAN'S MISERY".
William chuckled—and then almost lost his footing. "Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It's passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it."
"Yeah, sure. But can I point through it and find out what it thinks it means?"
William doused his flashlight. "I guess it means the gorge gets even narrower further on."
Which we already knew from Miri's maps. At the trailhead, this had looked like a valley, one hundred feet across. It had narrowed and narrowed, till now the far wall was about ten feet away. And from here....
"Scatter some more dungballs," said Miri. She was pointing straight down.
"Okay." They still had plenty of them. He carefully dropped six breadcrumbs where Miri indicated. They stood silently for a moment, watching the network diagnostics: the position guesstimate on one crumb was twenty-five to thirty feet further down. That was darn near the true bottom of the gorge. Juan took a breath. "So, are you ever going to tell us what precisely we're looking for, Miri?"
"I don't precisely know."
"But this is where you saw the UCSD people poking around?"
"Some, but they were mainly south of this valley."
"Geez, Miri. So you brought us here instead?"
"Look you! I'm not keeping secrets! I could see the hills above this canyon from the tourist scopes on Del Mar Heights. In the weeks after the UCSD guys left, there were small changes in the vegetation, mostly over this valley. At night, the bats and owls were at first more active and then less active than before.... And now tonight we've spotted some kind of tunnels in the rocks."
William sounded mystified. "That's all, Miriam?"
The girl didn't blow up when it was William asking. Instead she seemed almost abashed. "Well ... there's context. Feretti and Voss were behind the trips to the park in January. One is into synthetic ethology; the other is a world-class proteomics geek. They both got called to San Diego all at once, just like you'd expect for a movie teaser. And I'm sure ... almost sure ... they're both consulting for Foxwarner."
Juan sighed. That wasn't much more than she'd said in the beginning. Maybe Miri's biggest problem wasn't that she was bossy—it was that she was too darn good at projecting certainty. Juan made a disgusted noise, "And you figure if we just poke around carefully enough, solid clues will show up?" Whatever they may be.
"Yes! Somebody has to be the first to catch on. Using our probe gear and—yeah—Bertie's dungballs, we're not going to miss much. My theory is Foxwarner is trying to top what Spielberg/Rowling did last year with the magma monsters. This will be something that starts small, and is overtly plausible. With Feretti and Voss as advisors, I'll bet they'll play it as an escape from a bioscience lab." That would certainly fit the San Diego scene.
The new breadcrumbs had located their nearest neighbors. Now the extended network showed as diamond-sharp virtual gleams scattered through the spaces both above and below. In effect, they had twenty little ‘eyeballs', watching from all over the canyon. The pictures were all low-resolution stuff, but taken together that was too much data to forward all at once across the breadcrumb net to their wearables. They would have to pick through the viewpoints carefully.
"Okay then," said Juan. "Let's just sit and watch for a bit."
The Goofus remained standing. He seemed to be staring upward. Juan guessed that he was having some trouble with the video Juan was forwarding to him. Things were going to get pretty dull for him. Abruptly, William said, "Do either of you smell something burning?"
"Fire?" Juan felt a flash of alarm. He sniffed carefully at the damp air. "... Maybe." Or it might just be something flowering in the night. Smells were a hard thing to search on and learn about.
"I smell it too, William," Miri said. "But I think things are still too wet for it to be a danger."
"Besides," said Juan, "if there was fire anywhere close, we'd see the hot air in our goggles." Maybe someone had a fire down on the beach.
William shrugged, and sniffed at the air again. Trust the Goofus to have one superior sense—and that one
useless. After a moment, he sat down beside them, but as far as Juan could tell, he still wasn't paying attention to the pictures Juan was sending him. William reached into his bag and pulled out the FedEx mailer; the guy was still fascinated by the thing. He flexed the carton gently, then rested the box on his knees. Despite all Miri's warnings, it looked like the Goofus wanted to knock it back into shape. He'd carefully poise one hand above the middle of the carton, as if preparing a precise poke ... and then his hand would start shaking and he would have to start all over again.
Juan looked away from him. Geez the ground was hard. And cold. He wriggled back against the rock wall and cycled through the pictures he was getting from the breadcrumbs. They were pretty uninspiring.... But sitting here quietly, not talking ... there were sounds. Things that might have been insects. And behind it all, a faint, regular throbbing. Automobile traffic? Maybe. Then he realized that it was the sound of ocean surf, muffled by fog and the zigzag walls of the canyon. It was really kind of peaceful.
There was a popping sound very nearby. Juan looked up and saw that William had done it again, smashed the mailer. Only now, it didn't look so bent—and a little green light had replaced the warning tag.
"You fixed it, William!" said Miri.
William grinned. "Hah! Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better." He was silent for a second and his shoulders slumped a little. "Well, different anyway."
Juan looked at the gap in the canyon walls above them. There should be enough room. "Just set it on the ground and it will fly away to Jamul," he said.
"No," said William. He put the carton back in his bag.
O-kay, so the box is cool. Have a ball, William.
They sat listening to the surf, cycling through the video from the breadcrumbs. There were occasional changes in the pictures, quick blurs that might have been moths. Once, they saw something bigger, a glowing snout and a blurry leg.