The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Dixie Mae held out her hand. “Give me the notepad, Victor. We’ll take the pictures.”

  For a moment it looked like he was going refuse. Then he saw how her other hand was clenched into a fist. And maybe he remembered the lunchtime stories she had told during the week. The week that never was? Whatever the reason, he handed the notepad over to her. “You think I’m working for the bad guys?” he said.

  “No,” Dixie Mae said (65 per cent truthfully, but declining), “I just don’t think you’ll always do what Ellen suggests. This way we’ll get the pictures, but safely.” Because of my superior self control. Yeah.

  She started to hand the notepad to Ellen, but the other shook her head. “Just keep a record, Dixie Mae. You’ll get it back later, Victor.”

  “Oh. Okay, but I want first xmit rights.” He brightened. “You’ll be my cameragirl, Dixie. Just come back on me anytime I have something important to say.”

  “Will do, Victor.” She panned the notepad camera in a long sweep, away from him.

  No one bothered them as they walked halfway around the ground floor. The blackout job was very thorough, but just as at buildings 0994 and 0999, there was an ordinary door with an old-fashioned card swipe.

  Ellen took a closer look. “We disabled the locks on 0999 just for the fun of it. Somehow I don’t think these black-plastic guys are that easygoing.”

  “I guess this is as far as we go,” said Victor.

  Dixie Mae stepped close to the door and gave it push. There was no error beep, no alarms. The door just swung open.

  Looks of amazement were exchanged.

  Five seconds later they were still standing at the open doorway. What little they could see looked like your typical LotsaTech ground floor. “We should shut the door and go back,” said Victor. “We’ll be caught red-handed standing here.”

  “Good point.” Ellen stepped inside, followed perforce by Victor, and then Dixie Mae taking local video.

  “Wait! Keep the door open, Dixie Mae.”

  “Jeez.”

  “This is like an airlock!” They were in a tiny room. Above waist height, its walls were clear glass. There was another door on the far end of the little room.

  Ellen walked forward. “I had a summer job at Livermore last year. They have catch boxes like this. You walk inside easy enough – and then there are armed guards all around, politely asking you if you’re lost.” There were no guards visible here. Ellen pressed on the inner door. Locked. She reached up to the latch mechanism. It looked like cheap plastic. “This should not work,” she said, even as she fiddled at it.

  They could hear voices, but from upstairs. Down here, there was no one to be seen. Some of the layout was familiar, though. If this had been Building 0994, the hallway on the right would lead to restrooms, a small cafeteria, and a temporary dormitory.

  Ellen hesitated and stood listening. She looked back at them. “That’s strange. That sounds like . . . Graham!”

  “Can you just break the latch, Ellen?” We should go upstairs and strangle the two-faced weasel with his own ponytail.

  Another sound. A door opening! Dixie Mae looked past Ellen and saw a guy coming out of the men’s room. Dixie Mae managed to grab Victor, and the two of them dropped behind the lower section of the holding cell.

  “Hey, Ellen,” said the stranger, “you look a bit peaked. Is Graham getting on your nerves, too?”

  Ellen gave a squeaky laugh. “Y-yeah . . . so what else is new?”

  Dixie Mae twisted the notepad and held it so the camera eye looked through the glass. In the tiny screen, she could see that the stranger was smiling. He was dressed in tee-shirt and knee-pants and he had some kind of glittering badge on a loop around his neck.

  Ellen’s mouth opened and shut a couple of times, but nothing came out. She doesn’t know this guy from Adam.

  The stranger was still clueless, but – “Hey, where’s your badge?”

  “Oh . . . damn. I must have left it in the john,” said Ellen. “And now I’ve locked myself out.”

  “You know the rules,” he said, but his tone was not threatening. He did something on his side of the door. It opened and Ellen stepped through, blocking the guy’s view of what was behind her.

  “I’m sorry. I, uh, I got flustered.”

  “That’s okay. Graham will eventually shut up. I just wish he’d pay more attention to what the professionals are asking of him.”

  Ellen nodded. “Yeah, I hear you!” Like she was really, really agreeing with him.

  “Y’see, Graham’s not splitting the topics properly. The idea is to be both broad and deep.”

  Ellen continued to make understanding noises. The talkative stranger was full of details about some sort of a NSA project, but he was totally ignorant of the three intruders.

  There were light footsteps on the stairs, and a familiar voice. “Michael, how long are you going to be? I want to – ” The voice cut off in a surprised squeak.

  On the notepad display, Dixie Mae could see two brown-haired girls staring at each other with identical expressions of amazement. They sidled around each other for a moment, exchanging light slaps. It wasn’t fighting . . . it was as if each thought the other was some kind of trick video. Ellen Garcia, meet Ellen Garcia.

  The stranger – Michael? – stared with equal astonishment, first at one Ellen and then the other. The Ellens made inarticulate noises just loud enough to interrupt each other and make them even more upset.

  Finally Michael said, “I take it you don’t have a twin sister, Ellen?”

  “No!” said both.

  “So one of you is an impostor. But you’ve spun around so often now that I can’t tell who is the original. Ha.” He pointed at one of the Ellens. “Another good reason for having security badges.”

  But Ellen and Ellen were ignoring everyone except themselves. Except for their chorus of “No!”, their words were just mutual interruptions, unintelligible. Finally, they hesitated and gave each other a nasty smile. Each reached into her pocket. One came out with a dollar coin, and the other came out empty.

  “Ha! I’ve got the token. Deadlock broken.” The other grinned and nodded. Dollar-coin Ellen turned to Michael. “Look, we’re both real. And we’re both only-children.”

  Michael looked from one to the other. “You’re certainly not clones, either.”

  “Obviously,” said the token holder. She looked at the other Ellen and asked, “Fridge-rot?”

  The other nodded and said, “In April I made that worse.” And both of them laughed.

  Token holder: “Gerry’s exam in Olson Hall?”

  “Yup.”

  Token holder: “Michael?”

  “After that,” the other replied, and then she blushed. After a second the token holder blushed, too.

  Michael said dryly, “And you’re not perfectly identical.”

  Token holder Ellen gave him a crooked smile. “True. I’ve never seen you before in my life.” She turned and tossed the dollar coin to the other Ellen, left hand to left hand.

  And now that Ellen had the floor. She was also the version wearing a security badge. Call her NSA Ellen. “As far as I – we – can tell, we had the same stream of consciousness up through the day we took Gerry Reich’s recruitment exam. Since then, we’ve had our own lives. We’ve even got our own new friends.” She was looking in the direction of Dixie Mae’s camera.

  Grader Ellen turned to follow her gaze. “Come on out, guys. We can see your camera lens.”

  Victor and Dixie Mae stood and walked out of the security cell.

  “A right invasion you are,” said Michael, and he did not seem to be joking.

  NSA Ellen put her hand on his arm. “Michael, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  “Indeed! I’m simply dreaming.”

  “Probably. But if not – ” she exchanged glances with grader Ellen “ – maybe we should find out what’s been done to us. Is the meeting room clear?”

  “Last I looked. Yes, we
’re not likely to be bothered in there.” He led them down a hallway toward what was simply a janitor’s closet back in Building 0994.

  Michael Lee and NSA Ellen were working on still another of Professor Reich’s projects. “Y’see,” said Michael, “Professor Reich has a contract with my colleagues to compare our surveillance software with what intense human analysis might accomplish.”

  “Yes,” said NSA Ellen, “the big problem with surveillance has always been the enormous amount of stuff there is to look at. The spook agencies use lots of automation and have lots of great specialists – people like Michael here – but they’re just overwhelmed. Anyway, Gerry had the idea that even though that problem can’t be solved, maybe a team of spooks and graduate students could at least estimate how much the NSA programs are missing.”

  Michael Lee nodded. “We’re spending the entire summer looking at 1300 to 1400UTC 10 June 2012, backwards and forwards and up and down, but on just three narrow topic areas.”

  Grader Ellen interrupted him. “And this is your first day on the job, right?”

  “Oh, no. We’ve been at this for almost a month now.” He gave a little smile. “My whole career has been the study of contemporary China. Yet this is the first assignment where I’ve had enough time to look at the data I’m supposed to pontificate upon. It would be a real pleasure if we didn’t have to enforce security on these rambunctious graduate students.”

  NSA Ellen patted him on the shoulder. “But if it weren’t for Michael here, I’d be as frazzled as poor Graham. One month down and two months to go.”

  “You think it’s August?” said Dixie Mae.

  “Yes, indeed.” He glanced at his watch. “The 10 August it is.”

  Grader Ellen smiled and told him the various dates the rest of them thought today was.

  “It’s some kind of drug hallucination thing,” said Victor. “Before we thought it was just Gerry Reich’s doing. Now I think it’s the government torquing our brains.”

  Both Ellens looked at him; you could tell they both knew Victor from way back. But they seemed to take what he was saying seriously. “Could be,” they both said.

  “Sorry,” grader Ellen said to NSA Ellen. “You’ve got the dollar.”

  “You could be right, Victor. But cognition is my – our – specialty. We two are something way beyond normal dreaming or hallucinations.”

  “Except that could be illusion, too,” said Victor.

  “Stuff it, Victor,” said Dixie Mae. “If it’s all a dream, we might as well give up.” She looked at Michael Lee. “What is the government up to?”

  Michael shrugged. “The details are classified, but it’s just a post hoc survey. The isolation rules seem to be something that Professor Reich has worked out with my agency.”

  NSA Ellen flicked a glance at her double. The two had a brief and strange conversation, mostly half-completed words and phrases. Then NSA Ellen continued, “Mr. Renaissance Man Gerry Reich seems to be at the center of everything. He used some standard personality tests to pick out articulate, motivated people for the customer support job. I bet they do a very good job on their first day.”

  Yeah. Dixie Mae thought of Ulysse. And of herself.

  NSA Ellen continued, “Gerry filtered out another group – graduate students in just the specialty for grading all his various exams and projects.”

  “We only worked on one exam,” said grader Ellen. But she wasn’t objecting. There was an odd smile on her face, the look of someone who has cleverly figured out some very bad news.

  “And then he got a bunch of government spooks and CS grads for this surveillance project that Michael and I are on.”

  Michael looked mystified. Victor looked vaguely sullen, his own theories lying trampled somewhere in the dust. “But,” said Dixie Mae, “your surveillance group has been going for a month you say . . .”

  Victor: “And the graders do have phone contact with the outside!”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said grader Ellen. “I made three phone calls today. The third was after you and Dixie Mae showed up. That was voicemail to a friend of mine at MIT. I was cryptic, but I tried to say enough that my friend would raise hell if I disappeared. The others calls were – ”

  “Voicemail, too?” asked NSA Ellen.

  “One was voicemail. The other call was to Bill Richardson. We had a nice chat about the party he’s having Saturday. But Bill – ”

  “Bill took Reich’s ‘job test’ along with the rest of us!”

  “Right.”

  Where this was heading was worse than Victor’s dream theory. “S-so what has been done to us?” said Dixie Mae.

  Michael’s eyes were wide, though he managed a tone of dry understatement: “Pardon a backward Han language specialist. You’re thinking we’re just personality uploads? I thought that was science fiction.”

  Both Ellens laughed. One said, “Oh, it is science fiction, and not just the latest Kywrack episode. The genre goes back almost a century.”

  The other: “There’s Sturgeon’s ‘Microcosmic God’.”

  The first: “That would be rich; Gerry beware then! But there’s also Pohl’s ‘Tunnel Under the World’.”

  “Cripes. We’re toast if that’s the scenario.”

  “Okay, but how about Varley’s ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’?”

  “How about Wilson’s Darwinia?”

  “Or Moravec’s ‘Pigs in Cyberspace’?”

  “Or Galouye’s Simulacron-3?”

  “Or Vinge’s deathcubes?”

  Now that the ‘twins’ were not in perfect synch, their words were a building, rapid-fire chorus, climaxing with:

  “Brin’s ‘Stones of Significance’!”

  “Or Kiln People!”

  “No, it couldn’t be that.” Abruptly they stopped, and nodded at each other. A little bit grimly, Dixie Mae thought. In all, the conversation was just as inscrutable as their earlier self-interrupted spasms.

  Fortunately, Victor was there to rescue pedestrian minds. “It doesn’t matter. The fact is, uploading is only sci-fi. It’s worse that faster-than-light travel. There’s not even a theoretical basis for uploads.”

  Each Ellen raised her left hand and made a faffling gesture. “Not exactly, Victor.”

  The token holder continued, “I’d say there is a theoretical basis for saying that uploads are theoretically possible.” They gave a lopsided smile. “And guess who is responsible for that? Gerry Reich. Back in 2005, way before he was famous as a multi-threat genius, he had a couple of papers about upload mechanisms. The theory was borderline kookiness and even the simplest demo would take far more processing power than any supercomputer of the time.”

  “Just for a one-personality upload.”

  “So Gerry and his Reich Method were something of a laughingstock.”

  “After that, Gerry dropped the idea – just what you’d expect, considering the showman he is. But now he’s suddenly world-famous, successful in half a dozen different fields. I think something happened. Somebody solved his hardware problem for him.”

  Dixie Mae stared at her email. “Rob Lusk,” she said, quietly.

  “Yup,” said grader Ellen. She explained about the mail.

  Michael was unconvinced. “I don’t know, E-Ellen. Granted, we have an extraordinary miracle here – ” gesturing at both of them, “ – but speculating about cause seems to me a bit like a sparrow understanding the 405 Freeway.”

  “No,” said Dixie Mae, and they all looked back her way. She felt so frightened and so angry – but of the two, angry was better: “Somebody has set us up! It started in those superclean restrooms in Olson Hall – ”

  “Olson Hall,” said Michael. “You were there too? The lavs smelled like a hospital! I remember thinking that just as I went in, but – hey, the next thing I remember is being on the bus, coming up here.”

  Like a hospital. Dixie Mae felt rising panic. “M-maybe we’re all that’s left.” She looked at the twins. “This upload
ing thing, does it kill the originals?”

  It was kind of a showstopper question; for a moment everyone was silent. Then the token holder said, “I – don’t think so, but Gerry’s papers were mostly theoretical.”

  Dixie Mae beat down the panic; rage did have its uses. What can we know from here on the inside? “So far we know more than thirty of us who took the Olson Hall exams and ended up here. If we were all murdered, that’d be hard to cover up. Let’s suppose we still have a life.” Inspiration: “And maybe there are things we can figure! We have three of Reich’s experiments to compare. There are differences, and they tell us things.” She looked at the twins. “You’ve already figured this out, haven’t you? The Ellen we met first is grading papers – just a one-day job, she’s told. But I’ll bet that every night, when they think they’re going home – Lusk or Reich or whoever is doing this just turns them off, and cycles them back to do some other ‘one-day’ job.”

  “Same with our customer support,” said Victor, a grudging agreement.

  “Almost. We had six days of product familiarization, and then our first day on the job. We were all so enthusiastic. You’re right, Ellen, on our first day we are great!” Poor Ulysse, poor me; we thought we were going somewhere with our lives. “I’ll bet we disappear tonight, too.”

  Grader Ellen was nodding. “Customer-support-in-a-box, restarted and restarted, so it’s always fresh.”

  “But there are still problems,” said the other one. “Eventually, the lag in dates would tip you off.”

  “Maybe, or maybe the mail headers are automatically forged.”

  “But internal context could contradict – ”

  “Or maybe Gerry has solved the cognitive haze problem – ” The two were off into their semi-private language.

  Michael interrupted them. “Not everybody is recycled. The point of our net-tracking project is that we spend the entire summer studying just one hour of network traffic.”

  The twins smiled. “So you think,” said the token holder. “Yes, in this building we’re not rebooted after every imaginary day. Instead, they run us the whole ‘summer’ – minutes of computer time instead of seconds? – to analyze one hour of network traffic. And then they run us again, on a different hour. And so on and on.”