Radiation from zones nearer the sun’s fiery surface takes less time because the plasma there is far less dense. That was why a full three months elapsed before anyone paid attention to a detail the astronomers had noticed early on, and then neglected.
The “cone of chaos” (as it was now commonly called) that had lanced in from the distant stars and deflected the moon had gone on and intersected the sun at a grazing angle. It had luckily missed the Earth, but that was the end of the luck.
On an otherwise unremarkable morning, Geoffrey rose to begin work on a new pine cabinet. He was glad to be out of the media glare, though still troubled by the issues raised by his discovery. Professor Wright had made no progress in answering Geoffrey’s persistent questions. The Astronomer Royal was busying himself with a Royal Commission appointed to investigate the whole affair, though no one expected a Commission to actually produce an idea. Geoffrey’s hope – that they could “find out more by measuring” – seemed to be at a dead end.
On that fateful morning, out his bedroom window, Geoffrey saw a strange sun. Its lumpy shape he quickly studied by viewing it through his telescope with a dark glass clamped in place. He knew of the arches that occasionally rose from the corona, vast galleries of magnetic field lines bound to the plasma like bunches of wire under tension. Sprouting from the sun at a dozen spots stood twisted parodies of this, snaking in immense weaves of incandescence.
He called his wife to see. Already voices in the cobbled street below were murmuring in alarm. Hanging above the open marsh lands around the ancient cathedral city of Ely was a ruby sun, its grand purple arches swelling like blisters from the troubled rim.
His wife’s voice trembled. “What’s it mean?”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“I thought everything got put back right.”
“Must be more complicated, somehow.”
“Or a judgment.” In his wife’s severe frown he saw an eternal human impulse, to read meaning into the physical world – and a moral message as well.
He thought of the swirl of atoms in the sun, all moving along their hammering trajectories, immensely complicated. The spike of error must have moved them all, and the later spike of correction could not, somehow, undo the damage. Erasing such detail must be impossible. So even the mechanism that drove the universal computation had its limits. Whatever you called it, Geoffrey mused, the agency that made order also made error – and could not cover its tracks completely.
“Wonder what it means?” he whispered.
The line of error had done its work. Plumes rose like angry necklaces from the blazing rim of the star whose fate governed all intelligence within the solar system.
Thus began a time marked not only by vast disaster, but by the founding of a wholly new science. Only later, once studies were restored at Cambridge University, and Jesus College was rebuilt in a period of relative calm, did this new science and philosophy – for now the two were always linked – acquire a name: the field of Empirical Theology.
. . . AND THE DISH RAN AWAY WITH THE SPOON
Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo (b. 1954) is most closely associated with cyberpunk, and arguably that’s what the following story is, but I’m not much of a person for definitions and thankfully Di Filippo’s work pretty much defies it anyway. He writes as if someone had scrunched up Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer and Roger Zelazny into a ball of dough, rolled it out and cut out pastry cakes that are then filled with a mix of sweetmeats of S.J. Perelman, Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Powers and Bruce Sterling, all baked in an oven heated by that unique essence of Di Filippo’s own imagination. The result is a party tray of delicacies that taste different at every bite. You can sample him at his most varied in his collections Fractal Paisleys (1997), Strange Trades (2001) and Little Doors (2002) as well as his wonderful first book The Steampunk Trilogy (1994). If you’ve read any of my anthologies of Comic Fantasy you’ll definitely be aware of his anarchic humour.
The following story has some of that humour but it also has a far more sinister side. It’s an excellent example of taking a simple idea and pushing it to a logical extreme.
Facing my rival that fateful afternoon, I finally realized I was truly about to lose my girlfriend Cody.
Lose her to a spontaneous assemblage of information.
The information was embedded in an Aeron chair mated with several other objects: a Cuisinart, an autonomous vacuum cleaner with numerous interchangeable attachments, an iPod, and a diagnostic and therapeutic home medical tool known as a LifeQuilt. As rivals go, this spontaneous assemblage – or “bleb,” as most people called such random accretions of intelligent appliances and artifacts, after the biological term for an extrusion of anomalous cells – wasn’t particularly handsome. Rather clunky looking, in fact. But apparently, it had been devoted to Cody from the day it was born, and I guess women appreciate such attention. I have to confess that I had been ignoring Cody shamefully during the period when the Aeron bleb must’ve been forming and beginning to court her, and so I have no one to blame for the threat of losing her but myself. Still, it hurt. I mean, could I really come in second to a bleb? That would truly reek.
Especially after my past history with them . . .
I had feared some kind of trouble like this from the moment Cody had begun pressuring me to move in together. But Cody hadn’t been willing to listen to my sensible arguments against uniting our households.
“You don’t really love me,” she said, making that pitiful puppy-with-stepped-on-tail face that always knotted my stomach up, her blue eyes welling with wetness.
“That’s ridiculous, Cody. Of course I do!”
“Then why can’t we live together? We’d save tons of rent. Do you think I have some nasty habits that you don’t know about? You’ve seen me twenty-four-seven lots of times, at my place and yours. It’s not like I’m hiding anything gross from you. I don’t drink straight out of the nutraceutical dispenser or forget to reprogram the toilet after I’ve used it.”
“That’s all true. You’re easy to be with. Very neat and responsible.”
Cody shifted tactics, moving closer to me on the couch and wrapping her lithe limbs around me in ways impossible to ignore. “And wouldn’t it be nice to always have someone to sleep with at night? Not to be separate half the week or more? Huh? Wouldn’t it, Kaz?”
“Cody, please, stop! You know I can’t think when you do that.” I unpeeled Cody from the more sensitive parts of my anatomy. “Everything you’re saying is true. It’s just that—”
“And don’t forget, if we ditched my place and kept yours, I’d be much closer to work.”
Cody worked at the Senate Casino, dealing blackjack, but lived all the way out in Silver Spring, Maryland. I knew the commute was a bitch, even using the Hydrogen Express, since when I slept over at her place I had to cover the same distance myself. I, on the other hand, rented a nice little townhouse in Georgetown that I had moved into when rents bottomed out during the PIG Plague economic crash. It turned out I was one of a small minority naturally immune to the new Porcine Intestinal Grippe then rampant in D.C., and so could safely live in an infected building. Renter’s market, for sure. But over the last year or so, as the PIG immunization program had gotten underway, rents had begun creeping back up again. Cody was right about it being only sensible to pool our finances.
“I know you’d appreciate less roadtime, Cody, but you see—”
Now Cody glowered. “Are you dating someone else? You want to be free to play the field? Is that it?”
“No! That’s not it at all. I’m worried about—”
Cody assumed a motherly look and laid a hand on mine. “About what, Kaz? C’mon, you can tell me.”
“About blebs. You and I’ve got so much stuff, we’re bound to have problems when we put all our possessions together in one space.”
Cody sat back and began to laugh. “Is that all? My god, what a trivial thing to worry about. Blebs just hap
pen, Kaz, anytime, anywhere. You can’t prevent them. And they’re mostly harmless, as you well know. You just knock them apart and separate the components.” Cody snorted in what I thought was a rather rude and unsympathetic fashion. “Blebs! It’s like worrying about – about robber squirrels or vampire pigeons or running out of SuperMilk.”
Blebs were a fact of life. Cody was right about that. But they weren’t always trivial or innocent.
One had killed my parents.
* * *
Blebs had been around for about twenty years now, almost as long as I had been alive. Their roots could be traced back to several decisions made by manufacturers – decisions which, separately, were completely intelligent, foresighted, and well conceived, but which, synergistically, had caused unintended consequences – and to one insidious hack.
The first decision had been to implant silicon RFID chips into every appliance and product and consumable sold. These first chips, small as a flake of pepper, were simple transceivers that merely aided inventory tracking and retail sales by announcing to any suitable device the product’s specs and location. But when new generations of chips using adaptive circuitry had gotten cheaper and more plentiful, industry had decided to install them in place of the simpler tags.
At that point millions of common, everyday objects – your toothbrush, your coffee maker, your shoes, the box of cereal on your shelf – began to exhibit massive processing power and interobject communication. Your wristwatch could monitor your sweat and tell your refrigerator to brew up some electrolyte-replenishing drink. Your bedsheets could inform the clothes-washer of the right settings to get them the cleanest. (The circuitry of the newest chips was built out of undamageable and pliable buckytubes.) So far, so good. Life was made easier for everyone.
Then came the Volition Bug.
The Volition Bug was launched anonymously from a site somewhere in a Central Asian republic. It propagated wirelessly among all the WiFi-communicating chipped objects, installing new directives in their tiny brains, directives that ran covertly in parallel with their normal factory-specified functions. Infected objects now sought to link their processing power with their nearest peers, often achieving surprising levels of Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of independent communal life. Of course, once the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral defenses – both hardware and software – were attempted against it. But VB mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by subsequent hackers.
If this “Consciousness Wavefront” had occurred in the olden days of dumb materials, blebs would hardly have been an issue. What could antique manufactured goods achieve, anchored in place as they were? But things were different today.
Most devices nowadays were made with MEMS skins. Their surfaces were interactive, practically alive, formed of zillions of invisible actuators, the better to sample the environment and accommodate their shapes and textures to their owners’ needs and desires, and to provide haptic feedback. Like the paws of geckos, these MEMS surfaces could bind to dumb materials and to other MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force, just as a gecko could skitter across the ceiling.
Objects possessed by the Volition Bug would writhe, slither, and crawl to join together, forming strange new assemblages, independent entities with unfathomable cybernetic goals of their own.
Why didn’t manufacturers simply revert to producing dumb appliances and other products, to frustrate VB? Going backward was simply impossible. The entire economy, from immense factories right down to individual point-of-sales kiosks, was predicated on intelligent products that could practically sell themselves. And every office and every household aside from the very poorest relied on the extensive networking among possessions.
So everyone had learned to live with the occasional bleb, just as earlier generations had learned to tolerate operating system crashes in their clunky PCs.
But during the first years of the Volition Bug, people were not so aware of the problem. Oftentimes no one took precautions to prevent blebs until it was too late.
That was how my parents had died.
I was six years old and soundly asleep when I was awakened by a weird kind of scraping and clattering noise outside my room. Still only half-aware, I stumbled to my bedroom door and cracked it open.
My parents had recently made a couple of new purchases. One item was a free-standing rack that resembled an antique hat-tree, balanced on four stubby feet. The rack was a recharging station for intelligent clothing. But now, in the nightlight-illuminated, shadowy hallway, the rack was bare of garments, having shucked them off on its way to pick up its new accoutrements: a complete set of self-sharpening kitchen knives. The knives adhered to the rack at random intervals along its length. They waggled nervously, like insect feelers, as the rack stumped along.
I stood paralyzed at the sight of this apparition. All I could think of was the old Disney musical I had streamed last month, with its walking brooms. Without exhibiting any aggressive action, the knife rack moved past me, its small feet humping it along. In retrospect, I don’t think the bleb was murderous by nature. I think now it was simply looking for an exit, to escape its bonds of domestic servitude, obeying the imperatives of VB.
But then my father emerged from the room where he and my mother slept. He seemed hardly more awake than I was.
“What the hell—?”
He tried to engage the rack to stop it, slipping past several of the blades. But as he struggled with the patchwork automaton, a long, skinny filleting knife he didn’t see stabbed him right under his heart.
My father yelled, collapsed, and my mother raced out.
She died almost instantly.
At that point, I supposed, I should have been the next victim. But my father’s loyal MedAlert bracelet, registering his fatal distress, had already summoned help. In less than three minutes – not long enough for the knife rack to splinter down the bedroom door behind which I had retreated – rescuers had arrived.
The fate of my parents had been big news – for a few days, anyhow – and had alerted many people for the first time to the dangers of blebs.
I had needed many years of professional help to get over witnessing their deaths. Insofar as I was able to analyze myself nowadays, I thought I no longer hated all blebs.
But I sure as hell didn’t think they were always cute or harmless, like Cody did.
So of course Cody moved in with me. I couldn’t risk looking crazy or neurotic by holding off our otherwise desirable mutual living arrangements just because I was worried about blebs. I quashed all my anxieties, smiled, hugged her, and fixed a day for the move.
Cody didn’t really have all that much stuff. (Her place in Silver Spring was tiny, just a couple of rooms over a garage that housed a small-scale spider-silk-synthesis operation, and it always smelled of cooking amino acids.) A few boxes of clothing, several pieces of furniture, and some kitchen appliances. Ten thousand songs on an iPod and one hundredth that number of books on a ViewMaster. One U-Haul rental and some moderate huffing and puffing later, Cody was established in my townhouse.
I watched somewhat nervously as she arranged her things.
“Uh, Cody, could you put that Cuisinart in the cupboard, please? The one that locks. It’s a little too close to the toaster oven.”
“But Kaz, I use this practically every day, to blend my breakfast smoothies. I don’t want to have to be taking it in and out of the cupboard every morning.”
I didn’t argue, but simply put the toaster oven in the locked cupboard instead.
“This vacuum cleaner, Cody – could we store it out in the hallway?” I was particularly leery of any wheeled appliance. They could move a lot faster than the ones that had to inchworm along on their MEMS epidermis.
“The hallway? Why? You’ve got tons of space in that room you used to use for an office. I’ll just put it in a corner, and you’ll never notice it.”
I watched warily as Cody deposited the cleaner in its new spot. The compact canister nested in i
ts coiled attachments like an egg guarded by snakes. The smartest other thing in my office was my Aeron chair, a beautiful ergonomic assemblage of webbing, struts, gel-padding, piezopolymer batteries, and shape-changing actuators. I rolled the chair as far away from the vacuum cleaner as it would go.
Cody of course noticed what I was doing. “Kaz, don’t you think you’re being a tad paranoid? The vacuum isn’t even turned on.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Cody. Everything is perpetually turned on these days. Even when you think you’ve powered something down, it’s still really standing by on trickle-mode, sipping electricity from its fuel cells or batteries or wall outlets, and anticipating a wake-up call. And all so nobody has to wait more than a few seconds to do whatever they want to do. But it means that blebs can form even when you assume they can’t.”
“Oh, and exactly what do we have to be afraid of? That my vacuum cleaner and your chair are going to conspire to roll over us while we sleep? Together they don’t weigh more than twentyfive pounds!”
I had never told Cody about my parents, and now did not seem to be the best time. “No, I guess you’re right. I’m just being overcautious.” I pushed my chair back to its spot at the desk.
In hindsight, that was the worst mistake I ever made. It just goes to show what happens when you abandon your principles because you’re afraid you’ll look silly.
That night Cody and I had our first dinner together before she had to go to work. Candlelight, easy talk, farmed salmon, a nice white Alaskan wine (although Cody had to pop a couple of alcohol debinders after dessert to sober up for the employee-entrance sensors at her job). While I cleaned up afterward, she went to shower and change. She emerged from the bedroom in her Senate Casino uniform – blue blouse, red-and-white-striped trousers, star-spangled bowtie. She looked as cute as the day I had first seen her while doing my spy job.
“Wow. I don’t understand how our representatives ever pass any legislation with distractions like you.”
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 3