by Greg Egan
And though I could picture Dallaporta outside the court with a placard, once the challenge to the implant legislation began, I found it hard to imagine the author of these moderate words killing Grace Sharp in cold blood―and harder still to imagine him discovering the means to do it.
I was growing tired of desk work, but I spent the next few hours studying the fragmentary portrait of the man offered by the net. He was forty-seven years old, divorced five years, with two daughters in their mid-teens. Presumably his ex-wife had custody of both children, since all the data suggested that he lived alone. He’d been a teacher in government high schools all his working life; in his late twenties, he’d published some poetry in literary journals, but unless he’d adopted an undocumented pseudonym, there’d been nothing since. He seemed to belong to no organization but the State School Teachers’ Union, and if he subscribed to any religion, no marketing demographer had yet managed to pin it down.
So much for the electronic profile. I didn’t believe for a moment that he could have killed Grace Sharp―but I wasn’t prepared to rule it out until I’d met him in the flesh.
I found a calendar of events for the Laurence Brereton Memorial High School. There was a parent-teacher night in three days’ time.
I arrived late enough not to have to loiter outside for too long before catching sight of a few departing parents, still wearing their name badges. I got a good look at the style and the materials used―but I was even luckier than that: one man dropped his badge into a recycling bin right before my eyes. I’d come prepared with a variety of cardboard samples, safety pins and clips, but all I had to do was fish out this discarded one, match the font on my notepad’s printer, and spray my own―borrowed―name onto the blank side.
No one challenged me as I entered the crowded hall and walked straight past the desk where parents were queuing up to register their attendance and collect their badges. I spotted a row of work stations dispensing guidance; I walked up to one and tried to make an enquiry, but it was too clever by far: the only entry point was “parent’s name”―apparently all it needed in order to highlight every relevant teacher on a personalized map of the hall. I stood back and watched other people use the software, until Dallaporta’s name appeared.
It seemed an odd time of year for an event like this; Mick’s high school had held an orientation night before the start of term, but they hadn’t yet invited me back. The buzz of conversation around me sounded remarkably amiable, though; maybe it was a good strategy to drag the parents in as early as this, and try to nip any problems in the bud.
John Dallaporta was tall and slender, clean-shaven, slightly balding. He was being talked at loudly by someone’s proud father―and though his eyes were glazed, and his smile a little wooden, he didn’t strike me as a man who’d been sleepless with guilt for the past five weeks.
When the father departed, I approached purposefully. Dallaporta offered his hand and said smoothly, “Good to see you, Ms. Stone.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I―”
I smiled disarmingly. “No, you don’t teach my daughter. But I wanted to speak to you, and this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all. But I should explain: I’m not the head of department this year. It rotates between the senior teachers, so Carol Bailey―” He glanced around, then pointed her out. “Do you see―?”
I shook my head apologetically. “It’s not a departmental matter. I just wanted to meet you. I read an essay you wrote, a few years ago: The Bit-Stream of the Rose. And I liked what you had to say there, very much. So when I realized you were teaching in my daughter’s new school … “
Dallaporta eyed me curiously, a little bemused, but he betrayed no obvious unease or suspicion. “That’s so long ago now, I’m surprised you remember it at all. Let alone the name of the author.”
“Of course I remember! And I just hope the rest of the department share your values on those … issues. I used to teach English, myself. I know the kind of pressures you’re facing. And of course I want my own children to be technologically literate―but some of us have to take a stand, or who knows what ‘technologically literate’ will mean, in twenty years’ time?”
Dallaporta nodded affably, but now I could see muscles tightening at the sides of his jaws―the ones which contract when you’re trying too hard not to let anything show. Proving what? Nothing at all―except that he had stronger feelings about TAP than he cared to discuss with a total stranger in a crowded hall.
I kept pushing. “When I started high school, myself, if you didn’t have your own PC on your desk at home, you were marginalized. These days the work stations come for free―if you sign up for a thousand-a-month worth of ‘vital’ net access. And any child who can’t interview Afghani nomads for a geography assignment―or get a live feed from the latest Venus probe via JPL―might as well quit and go work at McDonalds. When does it stop? When my grandchildren are twelve, what will ‘entry level’ be, for them?”
Dallaporta laughed, not quite naturally. “I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess. But I have faith in people. In common sense.”
I made direct eye contact, trying to decide if he was genuinely rattled―or just didn’t trust himself to get on the soapbox, even for such an obviously sympathetic listener.
“Common sense? I hope you’re right. I’ve heard some rumours lately which don’t bear thinking about―”
Dallaporta blanched visibly. Meaning he knew about the court case? And now assumed that I had some connection to whoever had given him the news? I offered him a conspiratorial smile: Relax, I’m a friend, we’re on the same side.
I said, “Look, I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. But it was so nice to meet you, finally.” I held out my hand, and Dallaporta shook it, slipping back onto autopilot with obvious relief.
I walked out into the warm evening. There was a real Lydia Stone, with a daughter who’d just started Year 8; Dallaporta might check the records, but I didn’t think he was likely to confront the girl’s teachers and ask them to sketch an identikit for comparison.
I glanced up at the washed-out sky, at the handful of visible stars―and thought once more: this moment would be a single word, in TAP. <
I’d actually meant most of what I’d said to Dallaporta―but the more I thought about the issues, the more ambivalent I became. No one was trying to “force” TAP onto anyone, except their own children―and to raise a child at all was to impose a set of choices, one way or another. Actively or passively. Consciously, or through sheer conformity or neglect. The prospect of TAP-heads meddling with their children’s brains―just so they could share an artificial language―still filled me with instinctive, visceral outrage … but was it any more virtuous for the rest of us to insist that no child be given the implant until their brains were fully formed in the ten-thousand-year-old mould of our own Stone Age preconceptions? Weren’t both sides just attempting to shape future generations in their own image?
And putting aside prejudice, instinct, and nostalgia … which first language really would provide the best tools for dealing with the modern world?
That was a good question. It just wasn’t the one I was being paid to answer.
I planted a dozen small recor
ding devices in pay phones near Dallaporta’s apartment, and the school. Which was highly illegal―but both less risky, and more likely to succeed (if he was actually guilty of anything), than trying to bug his home. I’d sampled his voice at the parent-teacher night, so the bugs could discard everyone else’s conversations. I cycled by and queried them daily.
I finally tracked down Tom Davies, Grace Sharp’s domestic aid―a TAP-head himself. The curtains of the study were always left open, he said. Grace liked to work looking out across the skyline; she’d chosen the apartment for the view.
I couldn’t help asking, sarcastically, “Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to visit some rich friend’s apartment―and memorize the TAP words for everything she saw?”
He laughed. “Of course. And she could have written scenery in her head to put any ten-million-dollar harbour view to shame.”
“So why didn’t she?”
“Do you know how Grace defined ‘reality’?”
“No.”
“The ten thousand bits that are left when you’ve argued everything else out of existence.”
After weeks of persistent harassment, I persuaded Maxine Ho, one of Third Hemisphere’s senior engineers, to talk to me off the record. She stuck to the official line, though: the <
“Of course a neural implant can kill you. A pacemaker can kill you. A work station can kill you. Any piece of technology can fail. But if someone died sitting at a work station―and when I took it apart there was no sign of a loose wire or a break in the insulation―I wouldn’t say: ‘She must have been running the legendary <
It was a specious analogy. Perfectly functioning TAP implants routinely sent signals to the hypothalamus, which in turn stimulated the adrenal gland; perfectly functioning work stations weren’t set up to dispense electric shocks at any dose.
Still, I thought she was being basically straight with me. If she believed that the implant had failed at all, she believed it was a one-in-a-million glitch: less a design flaw than a tragic proof of the intrinsic unpredictability of any real device out in the real world―the kind of thing which would have been excused as “natural causes” if an equally robust biological system had failed.
On March 5th, the High Court challenge to the implant restrictions became public knowledge. The case wasn’t scheduled to be heard until September―but the reaction to the news was immediate.
Helen Sharp had been right about one thing: her mother’s death was seized upon by almost every commentator as proof that a successful challenge would amount to the legalization of infanticide. Not that Their Honours could be influenced by emotive editorials―perish the thought―but even if they weren’t, it was clear that the Federal government would be ready with the necessary amendments within days of any decision which put the State criminal law in doubt. I set my knowledge miner digging, but reasoned debate about the merits of the case―the actual merits, not the legal ones―could barely be found outside obscure neurolinguistics journals. (TAP speakers’ netzines were in TAP, and I had no translation software.)
The night the news broke, Mick declared, “I want one.”
“Then you’ll just have to wait six years, won’t you?”
“Not if they win.”
“If they win, you’d better start mowing lawns and washing windows. Six years should do it either way.”
He accepted that without protest―but then asked innocently, “So what’s your favourite medium?”
“Text. And I know: I’m a boring old fart, but you’re still not―” He wore a pained expression―and not just because “old fart” was cringe-inducing baby-talk. I’d missed the point.
“I’m sorry. What were you going to say?”
Mick spoke carefully. “How’d you like it if every time you picked up a book, you had to swallow everything the writer said? If you couldn’t stop mid-sentence and think: ‘This is … bullshit.’ If you lost the power to argue in your head with every word.”
“I’d hate it.”
He said, “That’s where VR’s heading. Without TAP.”
I was taken aback by the bleakness of this forecast―but it rang true. Without a language as powerful as the medium, there was little room for argument, little room for doubt. Just unearned suspension of disbelief.
I reached over to the cable which snaked from his headset to the work station, and looped it absentmindedly around one finger. I said, “If it’s as bad as that, then stop using it. It’s your choice.”
One look answered that; he didn’t need to elaborate. Why should he be forced to abandon his own favourite medium? Why shouldn’t he have the chance to salvage it, reinvigorate it, instead? Present at the birth of spoken language, would I have fought to abolish it, like some fanatical Zen terrorist afraid of its power to deceive? Or would I have fought to enrich it, to balance that power with scepticism and analysis?
I said lamely, “There’s more to life than VR.”
Mick grinned triumphantly. “Exactly. But there isn’t more to life than TAP.”
I took on other cases: runaway children, minor computer fraud―routine work, but at least it gave me the satisfaction of swift results. Helen Sharp could no longer afford to keep me on full-time―and I’d virtually run out of productive ways to spend her money, anyway. If her mother had died from some unrepeatable glitch, biological or otherwise, nobody would ever prove it. So I offered no false hopes, and worked on the assumption that in a few more months, she’d come to her senses and tell me that the case was closed.
Then, in the middle of April, one of my pay phone bugs finally spoke.
I was dutifully cycling past, checking them all in the pouring rain, though I no longer seriously expected anything. When my notepad chimed the code for success, I almost dropped it into a storm drain.
Playing back the recording on the bike, in the rain, would have been impossible. Playing it back on a crowded train would have been stupid―I didn’t have the headphones―but I was tempted. By the time I reached the office, I’d convinced myself I’d hear nothing but a service call: Dallaporta complaining that his home connection was out of order.
I was wrong.
Dallaporta whispered urgently, “You have to help me. I need your advice.” It was a monologue; he was leaving a message. “I didn’t get rid of it, on the night. I thought: it’s not illegal―so why not keep it, just in case?” My skin crawled. He didn’t elaborate, but I could guess exactly what he meant: Just in case it becomes expedient, at some time in the unforeseeable future, to kill another prominent TAP-head.
He inhaled deeply, as if trying to calm himself. “That was … insane, I know. I wasn’t thinking straight. But now … I can’t just throw it in the river! What if the police are watching me? What if they’re going through my garbage?” That was unlikely, but I was grateful for his paranoia―and his incompetence: whispering into a public phone with (I imagined) a hand shielding lips and mouthpiece wouldn’t have done him much good if he had been under police surveillance.
“I’ve wiped the code, now.” Shit. “I followed the instructions, I’m sure it worked. But I have to get rid of the machine. I need to know the best way―the safest way―to do it. Please. Call me back at the usual place.”
I decoded the number he’d called, from the tones―but it was a commercial message rerouting service―and one that was far too classy to be bribed or hacked.
I sat at the desk, still dripping, trying to decide what to do next. The humidity control system in the north window was pumping water vapour into the room; I’d never get dry unless I went and stood
out in the hall for an hour.
Everything I had so far would be less than useless to the police; the illegality of the phone bugs aside, every connection between Dallaporta and Grace Sharp’s death remained pure speculation. And I wasn’t even sure I had enough to convince Helen Sharp, who didn’t believe in <
But it sounded like I still had a very slim chance to photograph “the machine”, in situ.
The message had been left at 6:23 that morning. I glanced at my watch; school would be out in two hours. I had no way of knowing how long it would take for Dallaporta’s backers (Natural Wisdom? The Fountain of Righteousness?) to come to his rescue―assuming they didn’t just decide to abandon him―but I couldn’t risk waiting another day.
I knew I’d be cutting it fine, but I didn’t seem to have much choice.
There were six hundred apartments in Dallaporta’s building―and the sheer weight of numbers had its advantages. I stood across the street behind a bus shelter and waited for someone to approach the main entrance. When a young man appeared, key in hand, I dashed across the road and caught up with him, breathless, soaked, umbrella-less, fumbling. He let me through without a moment’s hesitation. I hung back in the lobby shaking water from my coat so I wouldn’t have to talk to him in the elevator; I hadn’t had time to prepare any plausible lies, and if he’d so much as asked me how long I’d lived in the building, I probably would have been struck dumb.