Analog SFF, May 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  It's evening now. The sun is just setting.

  I'm sitting on my back porch, looking at what used to be the Fergusons’ yard. The piece of plastic skin is on the table before me, a glass of tea beside it. Across the yard, three depressions mark the spots where machines were once buried. The sky above grows darker, and the stars begin to shine.

  My hand hurts from where I hit the man.

  The thought of him makes me mad again, but this time the feeling is closer to home, close to the bone. What did I know of Tomas or Willie Ferguson? I lived next to them for half a year, and knew nothing. It never bothered me that I didn't know them—never crossed my mind that we should have them over for dinner or evening drinks. They lived in their house, as Kal and Della do in theirs, and as Halle does in hers, and we do in ours. During the day some of us emerge from these houses and drive our cars to work, waving sprightly to each other from behind our windshields. At night we come home, collect the mail, and retreat into our havens to watch television.

  We are separate.

  We are alone.

  I think about government agencies that pretend to wield real power. I think about shrinks, and media personalities prowling for stories. I think about the man in the mall who would have accepted tall, white Tomas and Willie Ferguson at face value—as I, too, had done—yet threw vitriol at a teenage girl whose DNA came from Mexico.

  Are we different, this man and I?

  I reach out and touch the quicksilver material.

  And I wonder if we truly deserve what is coming.

  Copyright © 2011 Ron Collins

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  Novelette: BLIND SPOT by Bond Elam

  Memory is a tricky thing, and depends very much on who—or what—is remembering.

  Think about it,” Effie said. She poked me in the chest with one of the maintenance bot's stainless-steel fingers. “Haven't you ever wondered why you have to repeat a phone number over and over again, but you can remember a face after just one glance?"

  "Come on, Effie.” I grimaced down at my watch. “Van Buren's going to be here any minute. Can't we just cut to the part about his neural overlays?"

  Effie lowered the bot's eye hoods in a disapproving scowl. “You spend far too much time peeping through keyholes, Harry. You need to see the big picture—the view from twenty thousand feet."

  Effie is strictly software. She doesn't have a body of her own, so she's taken to commandeering the building's maintenance bot whenever she feels the need to assert herself physically. She's a whiz-bang at finding things on the Net, but ask her the time of day and not only does she tell you how to build a clock, she explains the quantum principle behind the vibrating crystal lattice at its core.

  "The problem is your brain,” she said. She gave a meaningful tap to the side of the squarish housing that served as the bot's head. “Back when your ancestors were swimming with the trilobites, Mother Nature realized that you'd have a real advantage if you could retain certain bits of information in those primitive neural networks of yours—like how swimming toward the light got you more food. The problem was your brain wasn't big enough to store all the information coming in through your senses, which meant she needed some way to decide what to keep and what to throw away. What she decided on was repetition. If something kept happening over and over again, your brain—or what passed for your brain back in those days—made a permanent record of it. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that you're intelligent enough to make your own decisions about what you want to keep in long-term storage, all that repetition makes for a lot of extra work."

  "So you're saying that's why I have to repeat a phone number over and over to remember it? Because that's how Mother Nature makes her decision about what to keep and what to throw away?"

  "Exactly,” she said. “It has nothing to do with the nature of information itself, which is why you can distinguish a face with virtually no effort, even though that requires you to memorize hundreds of data points. It's all in the way your brain evolved."

  "Which, I take it, gets us to Lucas Van Buren's overlays.” I gave her an encouraging smile.

  She paused, tilting the bot's head to one side as though listening. “Actually, I believe that gets us to Lucas Van Buren himself."

  "Huh?"

  "I just spotted him on the security cameras,” she said. “He's on his way up."

  She bobbed the bot's head goodbye and retreated to the safety of my in-house network. The maintenance bot, freed of her control, spun on its casters and scurried toward the door. It reached it just as Lucas Van Buren came through.

  "What the hell?” he wheezed. He batted at the fleeing bot with his cane, then turned his rheumy gray eyes on me. “You Harry Carver?"

  "The very same,” I said, sliding my feet off my desk. “Just like it says on the door."

  Furrowing his brow, he squinted at the legend stenciled across the pebbled glass. “Says here you're a private detective. You any good at it?"

  "Of course he's good at it,” a young woman said, coming through the door behind him. She shot me a quick smile, then took Van Buren by the arm and started him across the office. “Mr. Carver comes highly recommended. He's very good at what he does."

  When she'd called for an appointment earlier that afternoon, Virginia Radcliff had described herself as Van Buren's Executive Assistant. Now, helping him into one of the worn leather chairs in front of my desk, she looked every inch the part—pinstriped suit, black-rimmed glasses, blond hair pulled tightly back from her forehead. But it was the woman behind the neatly tailored facade who caught my attention—a very attractive woman, with long slender legs and pale blue eyes that gleamed in the sunlight slanting in through my dusty windows.

  "Thieves and scoundrels are what they are,” the old man grumbled as he settled into his chair. “If I were twenty years younger, I'd go after them myself."

  "Now, now, Lucas, that's why we have Mr. Carver,” his assistant said. “I'm sure he'll do everything he can to help us.” She lowered herself into the chair beside him, then turned her full attention on me. “You will help us, won't you, Mr. Carver? As I told Lucas, you do come highly recommended."

  I wasn't sure who had recommended me, exactly. On the phone, Ms. Radcliff had said something about a lawyer associate of an associate, but I hadn't pursued the matter. The truth was, neither she nor Van Buren were the kind of people who usually made it up the narrow stairway to my office. In fact, neither was the kind of person who usually made it to my side of town. Van Buren was the founder and CEO of Nano-Mnemonics, a privately-held pharmaceutical company that had carved out a niche for itself in what the news feeds called the burgeoning field of neuropharmacology. Rumor had it that he'd stolen the patents for his neural overlays from his college-professor partner before forcing the other man out of the business. But that had been twenty years ago. Now, he was a pillar of the community, a business leader whose face appeared regularly in photos of all the city's big charity events. Not exactly my kind of guy, but I figured his money was as green as anyone else's.

  Ms. Radcliff, on the other hand, had class. Real class. Too much class, I should have realized, to be working for a crusty old curmudgeon like Van Buren.

  "On the phone you mentioned something about an e-mail,” I said. “Maybe if I took a look . . ."

  She opened her black attaché case and lifted out a sheet of white paper, which she slid toward me across the desk. “We were told you're a man of discretion,” she said. “If word of this ever gets out . . . well, I'm sure you can appreciate the ramifications."

  The e-mail was brief and to the point. Ms. Radcliff was to deliver a painting that currently hung in Van Buren's office to a locker in the Market Street train station at exactly 6:00 pm that evening. If she failed to do so, the sender would begin randomly distributing Nano-Mnemonics’ latest experimental drug—something codenamed Oblivion—to the public at large. There were to be no police, no tails, no nothing, the note said. And Ms. Radcliff w
as to deliver the painting personally. Otherwise, the sender would begin distributing the Oblivion immediately. The key to the locker would be delivered to Van Buren's office exactly thirty minutes before the drop, which would give Ms. Radcliff just enough time to get to the station by the 6:00 pm deadline.

  "They can't have it,” Van Buren growled. He leaned toward me, his gnarled fingers gripping the top of his cane. “I worked hard for that painting. It's mine, and I'm not giving it up. I don't care what they say."

  "It's an original Botticelli,” Ms. Radcliff explained. “Egg tempera on a wooden panel. Unfortunately, it's not the kind of thing we can go to the authorities about. It's worth a good deal of money in the right circles, but its provenance is, well . . .” She gave me a tight smile. “Let's just say that Lucas wouldn't want to lose it."

  I nodded, drawing my lips back against my teeth. Now I understood why they'd come to me rather than the police—or, at least, I hought I did. If I'd really understood, I might not have taken the case. Then again, with a woman like Virginia Radcliff sitting across the desk, gazing at me with those pale blue eyes, it's hard to know what I would and would not have done.

  "What about this experimental drug of yours?” I asked. “This Oblivion?"

  "It's based on the same nano-transporters we use in our neural overlays,” Virginia said. “You may have seen our ads on the evening news feeds."

  "I've seen the view from twenty thousand feet,” I said, scowling up at Effie, who I knew would be watching from the security camera in the corner. “But I'm a little foggy on some of the details."

  Van Buren gave me an impatient grunt. “We hire experts,” he said. “World-class experts in any number of different fields. Then we run them through a series of questions about their fields of expertise and map the synapses that light up as they think about the answers. Once we have our map, we program our nano-transporters to build exactly the same network of synaptic connections in your brain. It's all a matter of neurotransmitters and axons. You deliver enough dopamine to the right axons, and you can build any network you want."

  I probably should have accepted his explanation and moved on, but I felt like he was trying to rush me; when your client tries to rush you, it usually means he has something to hide—something that can come back and bite you in the backside when you can least afford it. I didn't know enough to challenge what he was telling me, so I asked the only question I could think of. “I thought dopamine was all about addictions. You're not talking about addicting people to something, are you?"

  "No, no, nothing like that,” he said with a dismissive wave. “Dopamine's nothing but a neurotransmitter, just like half a dozen others. We use it to stimulate the growth of new axon terminals in the hippocampus. That's how we create the long-term memories that underlie our networks—by stimulating the growth of additional terminals to reinforce the synapses."

  "But I thought everybody's brain was different,” I said. “How's my brain going to find its way around someone else's network?"

  "That's where phase two comes in,” Virginia cut in. She offered me a placating smile—a sharp contrast, I couldn't help noticing, to her boss's gruff tone. “Once we've built the network, we have you read through the same questions as our expert. The transporters watch which synapses in your brain are activated in response to the questions and link them to the entry points in your new network. It's like building a superhighway over the center of a city, then putting in onramps where people can get the most use from them."

  "And my brain doesn't mind you building your superhighway over the top of what's already there?"

  "Most of your neurons are already involved in hundreds of networks,” Van Buren said. “One more isn't going to make any difference."

  I frowned, trying to integrate what they were telling me with what Effie had explained earlier. “So what happens if instead of reading through your questions, I decide to watch my favorite episode of ‘Orbit Wars?’ What gets linked up then?"

  "That's why Lucas came up with Oblivion,” Virginia said. “It uses the same nano-transporters as our overlays, but in this case they carry an enzyme that will dissolve away the connections between your new overlay and the memory of whatever you were watching."

  "Assuming that's what you're thinking about when you take it,” Van Buren said.

  "And if I'm not?"

  "Unfortunately, Oblivion dissolves away whatever you happen to be thinking about when you take it,” Virginia said. “That's why we're so concerned."

  "So if I'm not thinking about what's in my overlay . . . ?"

  "Let me put it this way,” Van Buren said, again leaning forward over his cane. “If someone had spiked the punch at a NASA convention where everyone was talking shop, we wouldn't have made it into orbit to fight your wars in the first place."

  I sank back in my chair. “I see."

  "Fortunately, Lucas never needed to use Oblivion,” Virginia said. “It turns out that it doesn't make any difference what you have to think about to access the information in your overlay. It's like those mnemonics you learned as a child to help you remember the names of the planets. After you've exercised the overlay for a few weeks, your brain builds so many connections that you no longer need the mnemonic. Once Lucas realized that, he put Oblivion back on the shelf and forgot about it."

  "Until now, you mean."

  Van Buren nodded grimly. “I should never have put Michael in charge of R and D. All he cares about are his lady friends. Them and those wild parties he throws at that penthouse apartment of his."

  "Michael is Lucas’ son,” Virginia said. She rested a hand on Van Buren's forearm, offering him a supportive smile. “To be fair, Michael had good reason to look at Oblivion.” She turned to me. “The patent on our nano-transporters is getting ready to expire, and Michael was looking for new applications we could use to extend it."

  "What he found is a way to put us all out of business,” Van Buren grumbled.

  "Is there any chance Michael could be involved?” I asked.

  "He is involved,” the old man said. “There's no question about it.” He picked up the white sheet of paper and waved it in my face. “This e-mail is from his personal account."

  "His account?"

  He nodded.

  "Then it sounds like we need to talk to Michael, doesn't it?"

  "Good luck,” he said.

  "We spoke with Michael this morning,” Virginia said. “Right after we received the e-mail."

  "And . . . ?"

  She drew in a breath. “And,” she said, “that's how we know whoever is behind this already has the Oblivion."

  "They wiped his mind clean,” Van Buren said, staring down at the floor. “The damned fool doesn't remember a thing about any of this."

  * * * *

  If it had just been Lucas Van Buren, I probably wouldn't have taken the case. I hadn't liked the old man from the outset. But the case involved more than Van Buren. There was also Virginia Radcliff to think about. Virginia was one of those tall, untouchable blonds that P.I.'s in dingy second-floor offices are supposed to spend their hot summer afternoons dreaming about. At least that's how it works in the late-night vids. I never figured a street-hardened gumshoe like me would go for an old cliché like that; but at ten minutes till six that evening, I found myself sitting in the Market Street train station waiting for that same untouchable blond to come walking through the door.

  The Market Street station is as much a shopping mall as a hub for the underground trains that serve the city. At street level, shops and specialty boutiques face onto a wide walkway that overlooks the train station proper on the level below. The shops offer everything from women's clothing to luggage, all of it displayed in large show windows to catch the attention of the passersby who work in the downtown offices. There's even an open-air restaurant staffed with robot waiters and waitresses—little oil-derrick-like constructions with arms and casters that project holographic images that give them the appearance of real people. The imag
es change from week to week. This week they looked like characters from a Japanese animé, with large eyes, diminutive noses, and flowing manes of orange and blue hair.

  Several of the restaurant's tables were positioned against the railing overlooking the train station, which gave me a perfect view of the lockers on the floor below. Van Buren hadn't much liked the idea of using his painting as bait. I didn't like it either, but if we were going to recover the stolen Oblivion, it wasn't enough simply to catch whoever came for the painting. We needed to make sure I could follow him back to the stolen drugs. If he discovered the painting wasn't in the locker or wasn't the real Botticelli, there was no telling where he might lead me.

  Once we'd worked out our plan, I'd gone back to Van Buren's office with him and Virginia in the hope that I'd have a chance to talk to the son, Michael, but he'd been at their manufacturing facility in another part of town. So, after helping Van Buren and Virginia load the painting into the suitcase she'd be using to bring it to the station, I'd gone ahead to take up my position at the restaurant, while she waited for the courier who would bring the key for the locker.

  "What about the courier?” the waitress asked, setting the cup of coffee I'd ordered on my table. “Don't you think you should have talked to him?"

  "What?” I looked up into a pair of oversized violet eyes peering down at me from beneath the waitress's mop of orange hair.

  "The courier,” she said. “The one who's bringing the key to Van Buren's office. You don't think maybe you should be following him?"

  "Effie? Is that you?"

  That's the other thing about Effie—you never know where you're going to bump into her. Or more correctly, where she's going to bump into you. The freelance cyber-consultant who'd given her to me—as payment for finding the girlfriend who'd run off with half his gear—had described Effie as a personalized interface to an open-source search engine that borrowed unused processor cycles from unsuspecting nodes on the Net. I wasn't sure what that meant, but she didn't hesitate to jump over, under, and through firewalls to gather whatever information I needed—assuming they weren't governmental, which she seemed to avoid for reasons she'd never explained and I hadn't asked about. All of which led me to believe that she'd probably escaped from some high-tech research facility, and that one day men in black suits and dark glasses would come knocking on my door to demand her return.