Equinox

by Christian Cantrell

  “Is that what you used on her?”

  “It is how all surgery is done here now.”

  There was a moment of silence during which Cadie imagined the man inspecting the complex device, perhaps running a finger along one of its multijointed appendages.

  “Kind of makes you obsolete, doesn’t it?” the man observed.

  “Absolutely not,” the doctor countered. “The capsule is just a tool. It is useless without a skilled surgeon to operate it.”

  “Job security,” the man remarked. “Can’t let the machines get too smart.”

  “It is not a matter of intelligence,” Abbasi told the man. “It knows far more about physiology than any human could ever know. What it lacks are experience and intuition and creativity. It needs a human as much as a human needs it.”

  Cadie was surprised that Abbasi seemed to feel she needed to justify herself to a man she clearly had so little respect for. She wondered if there was more to the conversation than just what she was overhearing. Perhaps this was a population undergoing rapid technological change—the kind of modernization that tended to outpace the ability of the human psyche to internalize it.

  “I don’t care how good of a team you two make,” Cadie heard the man say. “That thing is scary as hell. I hope I never see it from the inside.”

  “Let us hope,” the doctor said. “Even with all the technology we have access to now, so much can still go wrong.”

  Another moment seemed to pass between the two of them, and Cadie wondered if the man had detected the doctor’s subtle threat. Whatever this place was technologically, it was far from any sort of social or cultural utopia. The very first exchange Cadie witnessed beyond simple instructions between medical staff seemed to be full of innuendo, subtext, and posturing.

  “Anyway,” the man eventually said, “is she ready?”

  “No,” Abbasi said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Will she be able to walk, or am I going to have to wheel her out of here?”

  “She will be able to walk,” Abbasi said. “She is significantly stronger and healthier now than when you brought her in.”

  “Good. Same time tomorrow, then.” There was a pause, and then the man spoke again—this time in a very different tone. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “What would’ve happened if the power had gone out while she was inside that thing?”

  “During the surgery?” the doctor asked. “Either she or the baby could have died. Perhaps both.”

  “That’s what I figured,” the man said. “I don’t know why they didn’t waterlock that little bastard. Can you believe they let him get away with what he did? It’s a miracle he didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Yes,” the doctor agreed. “But perhaps that was the point.”

  The man sounded surprised. “To kill someone?”

  “Not to kill,” the doctor said. “To show us how much is truly at stake.”

  Cadie heard the man scoff. “Don’t tell me you’re taking his side.”

  “My job is not to take sides,” Abbasi said. “My job is to save lives.”

  “Right,” the man said. “Save lives at all costs. Even when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.”

  The surgeon’s tone was challenging and impatient. “When does it ever not make sense to save a life?”

  “When that life has no purpose,” the man responded. “All we needed was the baby. You knew that. I distinctly recall making that very clear to you when I brought her in here.”

  “That is your business,” the doctor told him. “Not mine.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that my job is to heal. To treat everyone equally. What you do with her when she leaves here is your business, but my business is to make sure she receives the best care I can possibly provide.”

  “Even when it’s a complete waste of time and resources?”

  “Principles are never a waste,” the doctor said. “Not of time. Not of money. Not of anything. In the end, it is all any of us really has.”

  “That’s a really beautiful sentiment,” the man sarcastically observed, “but principles aren’t something all of us can afford.”

  “Principles are there for the taking,” the doctor replied. “For the wealthy and the poor alike.”

  “It isn’t about wealth,” the man countered. “It’s about value. You’re the best doctor on the rig, which means people respect you. That gives you power, and power gives you options.”

  “All of us have power over our own actions.”

  “Just stop with all the philosophical bullshit,” the man said. “What power do I have? Do you think I want to come back here tomorrow and do what I have to do?”

  “Tell me,” the doctor said. “What would happen if you did not?”

  “If I ignored a direct order?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, and Cadie realized that at some point, Abbasi’s responses to the man had softened somewhat. “What would happen if you chose principle over obligation?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what would happen,” the man said. “I’d disappear. And then someone else would be here tomorrow instead of me, and in the end, absolutely nothing would change.”

  “You do not believe you can make a difference?” the doctor asked.

  Cadie heard the man let out a quiet laugh of resignation. “Doctor, I realized a long time ago that the world’s going to keep on going in the direction it’s going whether I’m part of it or not. I’m pretty sure the best I can do is just stay alive long enough to watch some of it go by.”

  The doctor’s next words were gentle, and Cadie imagined her leaning in close to the man—perhaps even reaching out and touching his arm. “We can do more than just watch,” she told him. “We can act.”

  Cadie envisioned the man giving the doctor a patronizing smile. “Look, Doctor, I respect what you’re trying to do for that girl in there. Really. But let’s not forget the fact that despite all your talk of principles, you still took her unborn child. You and that machine of yours cut her open, pulled the baby right out of her, and then closed her back up. I know you did it because if you refused, somebody else would have done it instead, and probably much less skillfully and humanely, but the reality is that principles only get us so far in this place. As much as we might pretend we’ve built some kind of advanced and enlightened civilization here, underneath it all, everyone is still just doing what they’re told—even you.”

  When the doctor didn’t respond, the man continued.

  “We both know that whatever it is we tell ourselves about what we do doesn’t make it any less wrong. But more importantly, it doesn’t make the people we wrong any less dead.”

  That was the last thing Cadie heard the man say. A moment later, the surgical pod began moving again, and the door slid closed behind it. Cadie waited, but the doctor did not come back into her room for the rest of the day.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  RECOMPOSITION

  AS SOMEONE WHOSE JOB IT was to create something out of nothing, Luka took a special historical interest in the concept of counterfeiting. In particular, he was fascinated by its evolution over the course of thousands of years. When he first began searching the archives, he was surprised to learn that for most of its history, counterfeiting was associated with inferior materials and substandard quality. When the coinage of money began in 600 B.C., those who possessed more cunning and ingenuity than wealth learned that they could shave the edges off legal tender, melt down the resulting slivers, and use the precious liquid metal to plate less expensive base metals. Bladesmiths servicing the needs of Vikings discovered that simply by stamping the hilt of their work with the Ulfberht brand, they could sell swords hammered out of brittle local Northern European iron—instruments likely to shatter under the demands of battle—for the same exorbitant price as those that were forged from ingots of crucible steel brought back from the furnaces of Afghanistan and Iran. And at the very height of the distribution of cou
nterfeit pharmaceuticals, fake antimalarial drugs, antibiotics, painkillers, amphetamines, and sexual enhancements killed as many people as their legitimate counterparts saved, comforted, or augmented.

  But rapid technological advances revolutionized crime just as it did legitimate industry, and fierce competition among counterfeiters motivated steady increases in quality. Inexpensive scanners, high-resolution and multimaterial 3D printers, five-axis laser CNC machines, home injection-molding kits, and hobbyist nanofabrication photolithography stations made additive and subtractive small-scale manufacturing accessible to almost anyone with a little disposable income and an entrepreneurial (if slightly unscrupulous) spirit—especially when combined with all the thriving ecosystems of stolen and reverse-engineered formulas and schematics openly available through any number of darknets. Chinese- and Russianmade counterfeit watches bearing luxury European insignias began to match and even exceed Swiss quality, becoming valuable and highly sought-after collectors items in their own rights. And in some parts of the world, logos intentionally and subtly modified by proud “reproductionists” frequently elicited more respect and reverence than the brands that inspired them. There were even several well-publicized instances of underground organizations poaching top talent from their sanctioned analogs. The only thing that generated more demand than the mystique of exclusivity, the fashion industry learned, was that of the forbidden.

  Of course, where wealth is generated in one economic sector, it must be sacrificed in another. The global high-end art market—long considered a relatively recession-proof microeconomy by investors and collectors alike—finally crashed due to counterfeiting, never to recover even a fraction of its former extravagance. The collapse started in China when artists who had spent decades honing and perfecting their crafts by emulating the old masters found it was far more convenient to capitalize on their predecessors’ posthumous success than spend several more decades trying to establish their own. And then a team of graduate students at MIT showed that in less than twelve hours, they could 3D print a Monet, Picasso, or a Van Gogh—canvas and frame included—with such fidelity that they had to build in a secret digital watermark to distinguish the facsimile from the original, though before they could reveal how to detect it, they were kidnapped by the Russian mafia never to be heard from again. But it was the wholesale sacking of several of the world’s top art museums by small armies of well-trained mercenaries that caused the greatest erosion of confidence. In every case, no fewer than half a dozen law enforcement officials and detectives claimed to have recovered the very same pieces, most of them receiving endorsements from internationally recognized historians, appraisers, and insurance adjusters. Increasing numbers of auctions went unclaimed since anyone capable of creating a convincing forgery could, of course, likewise forge a certificate of authenticity, and the very rich were finally forced to find all new ways of illustrating their elitism.

  And then there was the world of digital intellectual property—infinitely copyable bits instantly available from anywhere on, or in close proximity to, the entire planet. As scarcity-based business models with roots that dated back to the bygone era of physical goods became increasingly insulting to consumers’ common sense, the industry responded in desperation with ever more sophisticated forms of DRM. But the problem with all complex systems of control was that those intelligent enough to conceive and implement them were also smart enough to recognize their fallacies and false promises, and therefore cracks and hacks and mods were seldom far behind.

  To Luka, the most interesting aspect of counterfeiting was that over the course of its history, its very definition sometimes became ambiguous. Rather than trying to copy a product, additional runs of the actual item could simply be manufactured in the exact same factory as those that were sold through legitimate outlets. These “third-shift products” (so-called because they were typically produced during the night shift—not so that managers wouldn’t find out, but rather to provide them with plausible deniability if they got caught) frequently contained identical materials, branding, and packaging. The only difference might be a slightly lower stitch count, invalid serial numbers, or substituted components that may or may not affect the items’ functionality. In fact, it was not at all uncommon for products that went out the back door of a factory to eventually find their way into mainstream distribution channels and end up on store shelves right alongside those that had gone out the front—the only real difference being the trail of money they left behind.

  And then came the age of applied nanotechnology. If outsourced manufacturing and supply chain management made the concept of counterfeiting somewhat ambiguous, the age of molecular assemblers made it wholly irrelevant. But of course, as predicted by historical precedent, the notion that ideas, creativity, and ingenuity simply could not be contained never for a moment discouraged those who stood to gain from trying.

  There were several layers of DRM built into the collection of assemblers in the San Francisco’s foundry. The most basic checked the cryptographic hashes of schematics directly against a database of banned items such as weapons, munitions, potentially hazardous materials, certain kinds of narcotics, specific configurations of organic molecules, and various articles associated with identity theft. The next layer used various forms of probabilistic logic in an attempt to infer, predict, or intuit the existence of anything potentially illicit. And the third—which was by far the most computationally expensive layer of DRM—used a technique known as course-grained fuzzing where spooled-up schematics were compared against billions of randomly generated “mutations” of items in the prohibition database. The final return value of all three sequentially executed processes was a floating point decimal between zero and one expressing the probability that the item about to be assembled—or some possible manifestation or configuration of said item, or of one or more of said item’s components—was potentially unlawful. Calculations exceeding a certain threshold automatically notified a foreman whose job it was to make the final determination of whether the warning was cause for legitimate concern, or yet another false positive.

  As sophisticated as the foundry’s DRM was, like all forms of artificially imposed restriction, it was also not impossible to subvert. Luka’s technique for assembling curious yellow was imparted years ago by a fellow technician who probably learned it from a friend or relative who helped design one or more of the DRM subsystems. It exploited a vulnerability known as binary code injection, which allowed for the limited rewriting of instructions in an assembler’s memory between the time the schematics were verified and the assembly process began. Unfortunately, this only worked on certain older assemblers and, for reasons that were explained to Luka but he only pretended to grok, the new instructions couldn’t be more than a few kilobytes, which meant that he only had a handful of molecules to work with. The upshot was that binary code injection could be leveraged to furtively assemble simple molecularly repetitive substances like curious yellow, but nothing with an overly complex, diverse, or varied atomic structure.

  The counterpart to software injection was, naturally, hardware injection—sometimes also referred to as trojan assembly. From what Luka understood, it was possible to design legal and legitimate items such that they contained smaller illegitimate items that none of the layers of DRM could detect. Apparently the trick was for your objective to span multiple components, which were themselves benign. The canonical example passed down as part of Mission Street Foundry lore was the emergency manual filtration pump that, when stripped down and with the addition of a single strategically drilled hole, became an excellent water pipe. Of course the problem with hardware injection was that it was a classic cat and mouse game. The DRM subsystems were constantly growing and learning, so what worked one day might—after an overnight heuristics upgrade—land you on Hexagon Row the next.

  The most complex and sophisticated form of bootlegging was a technique known as “recomposition.” A common misconception of recomposition was that it con
stituted a method of circumventing or otherwise defeating the assemblers’ DRM. In truth, the concept was far more elegant. Recomposition simply exploited the fact that humans were still more creative than machines. While machines had many times the computing power of the human brain at their disposal, they were still limited by their often-imbecilic programming. Humans, on the other hand—when confronted with limitations, obstructions, and dead ends—could always take a step back, move in a new direction, throw away all of their preconceptions and everything they thought was true in order to look at something from an entirely new and fresh perspective. Although machines had dozens or even hundreds of kilocores over which to distribute the task of comparing billions of components against billions of variations of abstract models, it was still a relatively trivial thing for a human to assemble any number of perfectly legitimate components, take them apart, and then put them back together into an enormously subversive configuration.

  Luka received two messages from a completely anonymous account with the username Tycho. The first contained a set of schematics showing how to put together a set of components he had never seen before, but that subsequently appeared over the course of two days as he packaged up several orders for shipping and discovered that he had parts left over. Among the seemingly miscellaneous hardware that accumulated in a crate Luka kept in the back of a storeroom was a set of electromagnetic tracks, a miniature solid-state armature for generating tremendous electromotive force, two giant rings of solid tungsten carbide ball bearings, a lightweight carbon tube, and a battery receiver. When combined according to Tycho’s instructions—and when outfitted with a standard power supply—the components became a clearly improvised but conspicuously menacing handheld weapon qualifying as a class of simplified railgun capable of silently and almost instantaneously accelerating small metal balls to a velocity just below that needed to pierce the hull of a ship, but more than enough to penetrate not only most types of body armor, but all of the layers of muscle, organs, and bones behind it.