by E. M. Foner
“Well, uh, don’t drain him or anything,” the president said. “We need Hep to run the project, and he’s supposed to be meeting with a group of ambassadors in our offices in another forty minutes.”
“We’ll have him ready,” Lucy promised. “Have your guests had their coffee yet? There should be a fresh pot in the break room, and I brought in three dozen donuts this morning, so you’re welcome to whatever the boys haven’t eaten.”
“Coffee sounds good to me,” Joe said.
“Thank you,” Kelly and Samuel chorused.
The president led them into the lunch room that EarthCent headquarters shared with QuickU, and the McAllisters all stared in astonishment at the framed images on the walls. Half of them showed Thomas looking debonair in his Bond suit, or Chance mid-spin in her tango shoes and dress.
“I guess we’re so used to seeing them that we forget how good-looking they are,” Joe commented.
“Well, if you’re going to take out a mortgage with the Stryx to pay for a body, there’s not much point in going down-market,” the president pointed out. “Grab yourselves a drink and a donut, but remember that we have catering coming for after Hep’s presentation to the steering committee.”
“If it’s a spy thing and I can’t be there, can I hang out at QuickU and see how they do stuff?” Samuel asked. “Maybe they’ll make a copy of me for artificial boys.”
“That’s very noble of you, Samuel, but we actually invited the press to this briefing, so you’re welcome to participate,” Stephen responded.
“Is that wise?” Kelly asked, as she rifled through the donut boxes. “I thought the members of the steering committee were supposed to be confidential, and—come to Momma!” she concluded, uncovering a triple chocolate donut languishing alone in the third box.
“I take it you missed the Grenouthian documentary on human espionage through the ages that wrapped up with an analysis of EarthCent intelligence, including an organizational chart with faces, names, and contact information,” Stephen replied, but Kelly was lost in chocoholic heaven and didn’t even nod in acknowledgement.
After the crumbs settled, the president led the McAllisters into EarthCent headquarters, which turned out to be an office suite not much larger than the embassy on Union Station. The hall led past two side-by-side doors with nameplates reading, “President Stephen Beyer,” and “PR Director Hildy Greuen,” and then ran into an open reception area about half the size of QuickU’s shared workstation space. The receptionist’s desk had been pushed over against a wall, and the room had been filled with rows of folding chairs, one of which had been moved to prop open the front door.
“I wasn’t expecting much, but how can you run EarthCent out of this place?” Kelly asked in dismay.
“If I’m actually running anything, I’d like to know what it is,” the president replied. “Besides, our offices are spread all over Earth, and we had over four hundred resident employees at last count. When EarthCent was first established, somebody thought that putting the headquarters in New York made sense, but that was before the Stryx announced the budget. Other than Hildy and the receptionist, the only other people working out of this office are our resident cultural attaché and a communications specialist. QuickU took over the lease years ago, and we actually sublet from them.”
“Drat,” Kelly said. “I was looking forward to confronting your human resources department about a few open issues.”
“Luckily for them, they all work overseas,” the president replied.
The front door pushed open, and Ambassador Zerakova entered with her husband and daughters, all toting their luggage. Joe went over to prop the chair back in the door after it shut itself, just in time to admit Ambassador White, who was wheeling a deceptively large carry-on behind her.
Over the next twenty minutes, the rest of the ambassadors on the intelligence steering committee trickled in, some with family members, all with luggage. The wall near the door began to resemble the unclaimed bags section of a spaceport. Leon arrived with his camera and tripod, and Samuel immediately offered to serve as his assistant again. The only other press to appear was a fourteen-year-old girl who presented credentials from the Lower East Side Student Journal. A minute before the meeting was scheduled to start, Hep wandered in from the back hallway, and the president stepped up to introduce him.
“Before we begin, I’d just like to remind everybody that this meeting is attended by press, so let’s try not to blurt out any secrets. Without further ado, our guest speaker is Hep, who is spearheading our project to restore the original Drazen jump ship under contract to their museum, I mean, Drazen Foods.”
“It’s not the original Drazen jump ship, it’s the first one that worked,” Hep corrected the president.
“Of course. So do you have a presentation you would like to give, or shall we just ask questions.”
“Whichever is faster,” Hep replied. “I really need to get back to work.”
“Then we’ll just go with the questions,” the president continued unperturbed. “Could you start by explaining how jump technology works?”
“No,” Hep replied bluntly.
“Is that because it would take too much time?”
“If I had twenty years to explain it wouldn’t help,” Hep said. “Don’t you think if I understood how jump drives worked I would be creating my own design rather than attempting to reverse-engineer half-million-year-old Drazen technology?”
“But we’ve been assured by the Verlocks that you’re the best human for the job,” the president protested.
“I’m not in a position to argue with the Verlocks about anything, though I’d like to see their proof,” Hep replied seriously. “I’ve been studying Verlock mathematics for most of my life, and I’m the only human to attain the degree of first rank mathematician.”
“So you’re as smart as any of them,” the president said.
“First rank is the bottom, like the first rung on a ladder, or the first step on a journey.”
“What about all the other humans in the Verlock academies?” Kelly asked.
“They haven’t reached the first rung yet,” Hep informed her. “Let me tell you a brief story. Last year I took my vacation from the project to return to Fyndal and my trip coincided with the visit of a Cayl scientist. The Verlocks were more excited than I’d ever seen them, and they declared a planetary holiday for their guest’s lecture on multiverse mathematics, an area where the Cayl excel among the known biologicals.”
“Did you make a recording?” Ambassador White asked eagerly. “It could prove the key to everything.”
“I was able to follow the Cayl’s derivation for exactly forty-three seconds,” Hep replied sadly. “Verlocks all around me were getting up and leaving the lecture hall because they consider it rude to stay for a presentation which one doesn’t understand. Since that’s not a human tradition, I remained as the crowd thinned out. By the end of the presentation, the only two Verlocks remaining were the head of the academy, and young Fryklem, whose specialty is True Math.”
“If a young Verlock was able to understand, it must be a question of inborn ability, of genius,” Ambassador Fu observed.
“Fryklem is young for a Verlock mathematician, but he’s well over three hundred in our years, and has been studying the whole time. I consider him a friend, so I didn’t allow the normal rules of academic propriety to stop me from asking him to explain in dumbed-down terms what the Cayl had discussed. Fryklem told me that it was a proof for a mathematical transform that makes certain types of non-observable events computable, and that he expected it would keep him busy for the next five hundred years or so.”
“What’s this ‘True Math’ that you mentioned?” Kelly asked.
“At the risk of oversimplifying because my own understanding is defective, it’s a complete reworking of the Verlock system that requires all solutions to be expressed utilizing a limited set of symbols that are believed to be valid everywhere, not just in our univers
e.” Hep paused and let out a sigh, like a young man longing for an absent lover. “Think of it as a combination of mathematics and poetry, except the aesthetics are inaccessible to all but a few. It’s nothing new to the Verlocks, but I’m told that only a handful of mathematicians in each generation are capable of contributing to the field and fully appreciating its beauty.”
“So where do you see us in five hundred years?” the president asked. “Will our top people reach the level of the Drazens or the Hortens?”
“I can’t predict the future, but I can tell you what we’ll know five hundred, or even five million years from now,” Hep replied. “Humans will discover the answers we are capable of comprehending to the questions we have the ability to conceive.”
“Is that a riddle?” Ambassador White followed up.
“No,” Hep said. “Anyone on Earth might look up and ask what happened if the moon suddenly went missing, but that’s because we all know that it was there the night before. Our ability to ask questions, useful questions, depends on our current state of knowledge. In some ways, simply seeing what the advanced species are doing gives us a huge head start, but in other ways, it may hurt our development.”
“What do you think about teacher bots?” the president asked. “Does having instant access to so much information improve a child’s chance of growing up to be a creative and productive person?”
“Can I say something?” Leon spoke up. “My own experience with Stryx teacher bots is that they only respond to questions if humans have already figured out the answers. The lock screen on the bot always displays the message that its function is to help you teach yourself. It presents texts and problems, and it checks your progress by asking for solutions, but the corrections part is kind of limited.”
“So if you make an error, the teacher bot doesn’t always provide the solution,” Kelly surmised.
“Not right away,” Leon elaborated. “There isn’t one right answer to lots of the stuff that we studied, but if you really can’t figure out your mistake, you can put in a request for a more detailed solution and it usually shows up in a day or two. But the teacher bot always pushes you to try the community answer pool first, to see if another kid can explain it. That part is kind of fun.”
“The teacher bots aren’t true AI, but their programming often produces responses you might expect from a Stryx station librarian,” Hep concurred. “The Stryx will decline to answer most questions involving advanced alien technology, in part because they want to see us develop organically, and in part because they see such knowledge as competitive information. The aliens, most of them anyway, are not hiding their basic math or sciences from us. The answers are in front of our faces, but we don’t have the context to understand them.”
Sixteen
“How’s Ballmageddon going?” Chastity asked her mother, hopping up to sit on the edge of Donna’s display desk in the outer office of the EarthCent embassy. She twisted her neck in an attempt to read some of the hundreds of overlapping electronic notes displayed.
“I wish you and your sister would stop referring to the ultimate planning event of my life by that atrocious name,” Donna replied irritably, clearing her display desk with a swipe. “Your ace reporter, Steelforth, has been in here twice a day pestering me with questions.”
“Bob’s a sweetheart, Mom. Besides, if he wrote anything about the ball that slipped by Walter and myself, you know that Libby handles our distribution over the Stryxnet. I’m sure she’d stop anything that could spoil the surprise. Wouldn’t you, Libby?”
“Of course I would,” the Stryx librarian replied. “But the information blackout is no longer necessary, as the ambassador and her family have left Earth and are on their way to boarding the Vergallian freighter for the trip home.”
“That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear,” Donna said. “Please release the invitations for humans as soon as the freighter leaves Earth’s orbit. Thanks to Kelly travelling direct rather than nonstop, there should be plenty of time for the president and the ambassador’s family to attend if they feel like making the trip.”
“Invitations queued and ready to go,” Libby confirmed.
“Have you watched the Grenouthian documentary about balls yet?” Donna asked her daughter. “They’ve been running it three times a day.”
“And I’ll bet you’re watching it three times a day,” Chastity replied. “If you really want them to stop, knuckle under and send invitations to the bunnies who appeared in the production. That’s obviously what they’re after.”
“Dring is in charge of the alien invitations, and he was already here telling me to do just that,” Donna admitted. “He thinks the Grenouthians are doing Kelly a great honor by publicly pleading for a chance to attend. Sometimes I don’t understand his logic. I suspect he’s watching the documentary three times a day himself.”
“I don’t know where he’d find the time. Dring is meeting with every important alien functionary who accepted his invitation, and they started arriving two days ago to take advantage of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to speak with a Maker. Whenever he has an hour free, he’s at our place taking tune-up lessons with Marcus or dancing with little Vivian. He’s surprisingly light on his toes for a reptilian shape-shifter.”
“Dragon sounds nicer,” Donna reminded her blunt daughter. “Oh, I almost forgot why I asked you here. Daniel wants to see you.”
“What about?”
“His conference, of course. What else does he care about this time of year? He said something about you suddenly having better sources of information on some of ‘his’ worlds than he does, and he gets regular updates from EarthCent Intelligence, as well as from conference members.”
“Oh, we’ve been expanding our coverage,” Chastity said casually. “Is he in now?”
“He’s waiting for you.”
The publisher of the Galactic Free Press approached Daniel’s office, the door to which was open, and saw that the EarthCent consul was indeed waiting for her expectantly. The door slid closed after she entered.
“Hey, Chas.”
“Hi, Daniel,” she responded, taking the chair in front of his desk. “Was there something I could help you with?”
“I saw an interesting story in the paper this morning about a shortage of pizza toppings on Chianga.”
“Do you have friends in the pizza toppings business?”
“Through my wife, though none of them sell dried Sheezle bugs.”
“No, I don’t imagine they would,” Chastity replied cautiously.
“Then there was the story from Dolag Twelve about how the weather satellite grid was temporarily disabled by a massive solar flare and it rained for two days straight on the southern continent.”
“That couldn’t have been any fun for the human laborers,” Chastity said. “The work on those Dollnick ag worlds doesn’t wait on the weather.”
“Oddly enough, the story didn’t mention the crops or the work conditions at all. It focused on the cancellation of a soap box derby due to muddy road conditions.”
The publisher of the Galactic Free Press shifted uncomfortably in her chair as she saw where Daniel was heading.
“My favorite story of the day is from a Drazen open world owned by the Two Mountains consortium,” he continued. “It seems the miners broke into an ancient tunnel system with glassy smooth walls which may have been created by a long extinct species that vaporized rock in their mining process.”
“That is interesting,” Chastity said, and began to rise from her chair. “Well, if there’s nothing else…”
“The focus of the correspondent was on the potential for using the tunnels as water slides,” Daniel concluded.
The publisher of the Galactic Free Press sank back down into her seat, and there was a moment of awkward silence before she asked, “Libby? Does our contract allow me to talk to Daniel about this?”
“He’s not currently on the list, but I’ll add him,” the station librarian replied.
>
“Does this make me a party to the contract?” Daniel inquired. “I promised Shaina not to sign any business deals without checking with her first.”
“Just the nondisclosure agreement, unless you wish to decline,” Libby replied.
“Fine, I accept. What’s going on with the in-depth kiddy reporting?”
“Libby began experimenting with making the teacher bot infrastructure available for student newspapers many years ago,” Chastity explained. “It grew out of the community answers functionality.”
“What does Libby have to do with teacher bots?” Daniel asked.
“You didn’t know that they’re one of her projects?”
“I thought the Stryx just provided the basic programming and had them mass-manufactured on the Chintoo orbital.”
“She does provide the basic programming, and the curriculum is modeled on her experimental school which your son just started attending. But so many human children have no access to real schools, and Libby wanted to provide a richer learning experience than they could get from a simple bot. Teacher bots that are close enough together form their own peer-to-peer network, and if the planet has a Stryxnet connection, it allows her access.”
“In real-time?”
“Too expensive,” Libby interjected. “Each bot network batches all of its daily communications for a single burst when the bandwidth is cheapest. If students have questions that need my attention, I reply the same way. I think the delay has actually proved beneficial since it gives the children a chance to work out the answers on their own or with other students.”
Chastity shot Daniel a wry smile. “I thought InstaSitter was really something back when we first added the ‘Over one billion sentients babysat,’ to our ads, but Libby babysits over a billion students by herself.”