by Ed Greenwood
The boat slowed, settling into the water as the turbine wound down. It drifted toward the rocking boats.
“Will you be waiting, or will I need to call another taxi?” Marszalek asked.
“Waiting, if you wish,” the taxi replied.
It slid into a gap alongside the floating dock and the cabin door slid open.
“Please mind your step,” said the machine.
She walked onto the dock. Waves lapped against the boats, and a pair of ducks quacked as they paddled hopefully toward her. Wind roared from Nemo’s air exchangers and the smell of grilled fish and french fries mixed with the scent of the lake. The elevator was in a small glass booth at the hub of the floating docks.
The transparent bubble closed around her, sinking into the dark water. Air bubbles fled toward the surface, sparkling in receding sunlight; she felt rather than heard the slither of the cable dragging her down.
A voice startled her–“Would you care to order a drink?”–from a concealed speaker.
“A margarita, please.”
She could make out lights below and in wavering neon blue letters: “Captain Nemo’s.” The restaurant lay on the bottom of Shasta Lake. Underwater floodlights outlined the structure, constructed in the shape of a fantasy-spawned submarine. Air snorkels and elevator cables terminated in the conning tower.
As her bubble entered the conning tower and stopped, she heard the clank and whir of machinery. Lights came on inside the elevator and its door slid open. After a moment, the metal door to the submarine opened and she stepped into the dimly lit bar.
“Your drink, ma’am,” said a young woman in a sailor uniform. In unmilitary fashion, the shirt was half-unbuttoned to reveal brightly tattooed cleavage.
Marszalek sat down at the bar. There were a couple dozen people in the room, most at little tables near the portholes. From her position, she couldn’t see farther forward into the restaurant, but heard the clink of dishes. Music played softly. She tried to imagine Howard the janitor coming here.
She caught the bartender’s eye and he came over. He was a tall black man with a goatee and sailor suit.
“I’m looking for someone,” she said.
“Aren’t we all?” He smiled, revealing a gold tooth.
She placed Howard’s birthday card on the bar and he watched the image.
“Hey, Victoria.” He gestured to the woman who’d brought her the drink and she came to the bar. “Wasn’t he one of the professor’s friends?” he asked, pointing to the card.
Victoria nodded. “Coke drinker. A rental rat: couldn’t have been in more than a few times.”
“Yeah,” said the bartender. “Must’ve been a few weeks ago, at least.”
“Who’s this professor?” asked Marszalek.
“A local,” said the bartender. “Why don’t you ask your friend?”
“I haven’t seen him since he rented the boat,” Marszalek replied. “He never came home.”
“You his wife?”
She shook her head. “A friend of his sister’s.”
The bartender looked at Victoria.
“She looks harmless,” Victoria said. “I’ll take her over.”
“The professor spends a lot of time beneath the lake?” Marszalek asked as she followed the woman. Victoria was heading toward a corner table occupied by an old man typing on a holoslate.
The woman pretended not to hear. They reached the table, and the man looked up in annoyance. A half-empty glass lay on the dark polished wood.
“Sorry to bother you, Professor,” said Victoria.
“I’m looking for Howard Setelman.” Marszalek produced the card. “His sister’s worried about him.”
The man waved the card away. “Sit down.”
Marszalek placed her margarita on the table and sat down as Victoria moved away toward another table.
“Howard,” began the professor, “is the ideal student.”
He said nothing further, and Marszalek sipped her drink.
“A typical response,” he said.
“What?”
“I offer a hypothesis, and the typical student, you in this case, sits there like mold in a Petri dish.”
“What do you teach, Professor?”
“I don’t. Not anymore.”
“What did you teach Howard?”
“I didn’t teach Howard anything. We pondered the mysteries of the universe. And Howard solved one.” He sipped his drink.
“I see. And where did he go with his solution?”
“I presume he went to find God on Titan. Maybe he just left to escape the Minsky machine.”
“God’s on Titan?”
The professor’s mouth turned up at the corners, not quite a smile. “Perhaps.”
“Where?!” exclaimed Ginny. They were seated on the couch in her living room.
“It’s a moon of Saturn,” Marszalek explained.
“Well, I knew it was out there somewhere, but how did Howard get there?”
“He’s the smartest man in the world, remember? The torch ship Schrodinger, accelerating and decelerating at a constant one g, reached orbit around Saturn three days ago. I searched the web for the crew list. One of the crew is simply named ‘Substitute’. I followed the link for ‘Substitute’ and the net informed me I didn’t have clearance.”
“That doesn’t prove it’s Howard.”
“I’m following a trail, Ginny. I think it’s the right one, but you’re the one paying the bills. You can tell me to stop.”
“I don’t know.” She clasped her head in her hands. “Sheila says I have to stop throwing money away. And it’s not just her, now: she’s been talking to Daddy. He thinks I’m spending his money. It’s money I earned...but we pool everything, so it’s really our money.”
“Which means it’s Howard’s, too.”
Ginny tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out that way. “He was spending money on lottery tickets. Jesus! I wonder how much he threw away like that? Probably more than Sheila spends on her hair, and at least she pretends that’s for work. I’m taking peanut butter sandwiches for lunch every day, and I don’t even buy soda from the vending machines. So who’s the stupid one in this family?”
“Don’t say that, Ginny.”
“I can’t afford to send you to Titan!”
“Of course not. But I’ll query the research dome on Titan. If I still can’t track down Substitute, I’ll rent sensory tank time for a link to a zombie droid on Titan. That’s probably going to cost you ten times everything you’ve spent up to now. Or we can just wait and hope he contacts you.”
“Ten... times?”
Marszalek nodded. “That’s less than a thousandth of what it would cost to actually travel there. I’ll need it all in advance.”
The inquiries failed to divulge Substitute’s name, but he was male and a citizen of Northwest America. All other information had been deleted.
Now, here she was in a sensory immersion tank in Oakland, spending her client’s peanut butter sandwich money. Naked, Marszalek floated in the warm water. Where her body stopped and the water began, she could no longer tell. She was in a void, waiting for the first sensations of connection to the zombie droid on Titan, an hour and twenty minutes away at lightspeed.
The zombie droid was no Minsky machine, but it had enough brains to make decisions based on the goals she’d transmitted. If it decided wrong, it would take her an expensive two hours and forty minutes to correct from Earth.
Abruptly, with a shock of new sensations, she was on Titan in a four-legged metal body. The air in the research dome was hot and her arms and legs clicked on the artificial stone floor. Unwilled, her head tilted up to survey the deep red sky through layers of glass and the pressure dome outside, then scanned the corridors around her. Marszalek had no idea where she was in the dome—wherever the zombie’s last inhabitant had left the body.
The zombie droid clinked into a corridor, leaving the sky behind to search for Substitute. Instead of showing he
r own face on its user ID viewplate, she transmitted an image of Howard. One sign of recognition from anyone in the dome was all the proof she’d need.
It took her ten minutes to realize her droid was being followed by another zombie. It stayed far enough away that she couldn’t see its ID plate. After another ten minutes, a stray reflection revealed the image showing on her zombie’s viewplate. With a shock, she saw it wasn’t Howard’s face, but a test pattern.
Someone had tampered with the image, but from Earth or Titan? If she changed the zombie’s goals now, it would be two hours and forty minutes before she’d see results. There was no alternative: she sent new instructions.
Her body proceeded through the dome, asking everyone in its way where Howard was and gesturing at its ID plate. Most of the scientists ignored her. A few looked at the plate in puzzlement. Her time–and Ginny’s money–trickled away.
After two hours and forty minutes, the zombie headed for a portal leading outside of the dome. On the way, a voice whispered in her head, saying that her paid transmit time had ended. She’d experience the next two hours and forty minutes from Titan, but a new renter was already sending goals to the zombie.
The droid cycled the airlock. Titan’s super-chilled wind roared in her ears, and she marched down the grooved ramp. Mechanized crawlers had worn deep ruts in the ground, allowing liquid ethane to pool. Her floodlights reflected off more ruts in the distance. Overhead, Saturn and its rings were hidden from view by dense clouds. Whatever god had picked Titan for its home had a lousy real estate agent. Her zombie chose a pair of ruts and began following them. Periodically, it stopped and made marks in the chemical frost on the ground: “Ginny loves Howard” with a heart for the word “loves”.
Two hours later, she found herself splashing in a tank of warm water as its lid hissed open. She hadn’t found Howard, she hadn’t found out who Substitute was, and she hadn’t found out who had operated the other zombie. She had, however, spent a small fortune of Ginny Setelman’s.
That evening, Sheila met her at the door of the Setelmans’ house. For once, she wore a smile, but it was a pitying one. “Ginny!” she called.
Ginny ran down the stairs, waving a piece of paper.
“It’s from Howard!” she exclaimed. “He slated it from Mexico City. And he uploaded a lot of money, which means I can pay the rest of what I owe you now.”
“Mexico City?” a confused Marszalek responded.
“Yes. He’s taking a vacation. He told us not to worry; he’s fine. He’s going to travel for a month or two.”
“So you can take your money and get out,” said Sheila.
“You tried, even if it was a goose chase,” Ginny said. She seemed too happy to care.
“I’m sorry I didn’t find him.” Marszalek showed her account statement to Ginny, who keyed the final transfer on her card. “Can I see Howard’s letter?”
Ginny handed it to her. The letter was hand-written, not typed. It looked like the samples of Howard’s printing she’d seen before, with similar spelling and grammar errors. At the bottom was “Howard loves Ginny” with a heart for the word “loves”.
“Does he usually sign letters like this?” Marszalek asked, pointing at the heart.
Ginny shook her head. “First time. Why?”
When Marszalek got home, there was a voice-only message waiting. She had the best call-trace software money could buy, but this message had no routing information on it at all.
“Hello, Ms. Marszalek,” said Howard’s voice. “If you’re still curious, go see the professor.” The message ended.
When she tried to replay it, it was gone. She resolved to ignore it. When your client is happy, your client has paid, and your client says the case is closed, you don’t try to reopen it.
But dawn found Marszalek already on the road, driving to Shasta Lake. It took her a while to locate where the professor’s houseboat was docked. Solar arrays covered its roof. She rapped on the gunwale and called for the professor.
He poked his head out of the cabin.
“You’re early,” he grumbled. “Howard predicted you wouldn’t be here till after lunch.”
“Howard? You’ve talked to him?”
“Come inside.”
She walked down the gangplank and stepped onto the gently swaying deck. The professor ushered her into the cabin and pushed a button on the gunwale. Behind her, the ramp withdrew with an un-oiled screech.
“I think we should go for a ride,” he said. “Minsky machines are creatures of the datanet, and the dock electronics are part of that.”
While he was freeing the lines, she peeked into the houseboat’s other rooms. It was broad daylight and there didn’t seem to be anyone else on board, but she still felt uneasy.
The professor came back and sat in the captain’s chair. The electric prop started with a hum, and he backed the boat away from the dock.
“He sent his family a letter,” she said.
“He told me.”
The boat slowly moved away from shore, and Marszalek sat in a chair beside the professor. Ducks swam out of the boat’s path. Wind ruffled the surface of the lake.
“Where is he?”
“There’s little point in asking questions you already know the answer to, is there?”
“Does the Minsky machine at Berkeley want him back?”
The professor nodded.
“Why?”
“Howard’s an experiment. Mr. Chitare’s contract specified more than an evaluation period. It made Howard a ward of Berkeley Labs under the mental competency laws of North California.”
“Then what he needs is a good lawyer.”
“Court cases take years, Ms. Marszalek. Howard believes his life expectancy is a matter of weeks.”
“What?!”
“The custom biochips work like a cancer, drawing on Howard’s body to create new nerve tissue throughout itself. It’s fortunate that Howard was a fat man to start with.”
“The Minsky machine must have known this.”
The professor nodded. Outside the No Wake zone, he increased power and the boat accelerated through the water.
“You said he went to Titan to find God.”
“Well, he found something. He’s scheduled time through China’s deep space network for us to talk this afternoon. I have a narrow-beam dish on my boat; I’ll relay via a pirate satellite that I don’t think Berkeley can tap.”
For lunch, the professor served potato chips and root beer. They sat on the battery housing at the stern, watching the sailboats and talking–mostly about Howard.
“How did he find you to start with?” asked Marszalek.
“He fast-learned some of my online lectures from a library kiosk in Santa Rosa. I think he devoured the entire library in a matter of days. He wanted to talk to someone besides the Minsky machine, and I was in commuting distance.”
“Why didn’t he call his family?”
“He knew they wouldn’t understand what was going on. Any publicity, and Berkeley would have quarantined him and them immediately.”
After they went inside, the professor readied the satellite link. There was no immersion tank this time—just a holophone wired to the dish on the roof. The pirate satellite guaranteed a secure link to the Chinese deep space network. They sat at the table in the galley, sipping root beer and waiting.
When the picture came through, it showed a jiggling, shifting landscape. Waves on a dark shore reflected faintly in the floodlights, and the camera was descending toward the beach.
“You remember Anomaly 24, the Cassini wobble?” said Howard’s voice. “I think I’ve arranged an appointment with the entity that was responsible. I’m taking the crawler down to Teach’s Bay, on the shore of an ethane sea. I’ll be outside the crawler part of the time, but still in radio contact if you want to talk to me. Of course, if nothing happens, I may be back at the dome by then. Is Ms. Marszalek there?”
“I’m here,” she said, waving to the camera. An hour and
twenty minutes from now, he’d hear her reply.
The camera moved downslope. Drops of clear liquid spattered the lens and were blown away by the wind. The sky was the color of dried blood. On the shore, the camera stopped. There was a whir of machinery and it jiggled again. A moment later, Howard stood before the camera, cold vapor swirling like steam around his bulky pressure suit. Then she realized the suit wasn’t bulky: Howard was. He must have put on a hundred pounds since Ginny’s birthday card. A hundred more pounds of brains, layered all over his body. His forehead and cheeks were puffed up as though covered by massive bruises.
“I’ve programmed the camera to track me,” Howard said. “Ms. Marszalek, I’d like you to give a copy of the professor’s recording to my family, but not for a couple months. I want Ginny to think I’m on vacation.”
A turbine whined, getting closer, and she realized it was outside the boat. Through the porthole, she saw a lake taxi speeding toward them. The professor was engrossed in the images from Titan. Warily, Marszalek got up and went to the door.
The taxi slowed abruptly, deflating its skirts and pulling up alongside the houseboat. The door to the taxi’s cabin opened automatically.
What emerged wasn’t a person, but a zombie droid like the one she’d rented on Titan. This one was painted bright safety yellow, like a construction robot. Instead of showing a person’s face, it had a digital test pattern on its user ID plate.
“Professor!” she shouted.
The taxi’s gangplank extended and in automatic response, the houseboat’s slid to meet it. The taxi edged closer, and the four-legged machine stepped onto the plank.
“Get off!” she shouted. “Go away!”
It stepped forward carefully on the narrow plank.
“Howard?” it called, in perfect imitation of Ginny’s voice. “Howard, I need you!”
“No! It’s only a machine!” shouted Marszalek.
The two boats rocked gently, not in perfect rhythm, and the planks were narrow. The zombie reached the midpoint, half on the taxi’s plank and half on the houseboat’s, and Marszalek pressed the button on the gunwale. The houseboat’s gangplank retracted with a screech.