The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “Okay,” said Lusk, “suppose one of us victims guesses the secret? What can we do? We’ll just get rebooted at the end of our run.”

  Danny Eastland was quicker. “There is something we could do. There has to be information passed between runs, at least if Gerry is using you and me to build on our earlier solutions. If in that data we could hide what we’ve secretly learned – ”

  The twins smiled. “Right! Cookies. If you could recover them reliably, then on each rev, you could plan more and more elaborate countermeasures.”

  Rob Lusk still looked dazed. “We’d want to tip off the next generation early in their run.”

  “Yes, like the very first day!” Danny was looking at the three women and nodding to himself. “Only I still don’t see how we managed that.”

  Rob pointed at Dixie Mae’s email. “May I take a look at that?” He laid it on the table, and he and Danny examined the message.

  The token holder said, “That email has turned out to have more clues than a bad detective story. Every time we’re in a jam, we find the next hidden solution.”

  “That figures,” said Eastland. “I’ll bet it’s been refined over many revs . . .”

  “But we may have a special problem this time – ” and Dixie Mae told them about Victor.

  “Damn,” said Danny.

  Rob just shrugged. “Nothing we can do about that till we figure this out.” He and Danny studied the headers. The token holder explained the parts that had already seen use. Finally, Rob leaned back in his chair. “The second-longest header looks like the tags on one of the raw data files that Gerry gave us.”

  “Yes,” sang the twins. “What’s really your own research from the last time around.”

  “Most of the files have to be what Gerry thinks, or else he’d catch onto us. But that one raw data file . . . assume it’s really a cookie. Then this email header might be a crypto key.”

  Danny shook his head. “That’s not credible, Rob. Gerry could do the same analysis.”

  The token holder laughed. “Only if he knew what to analyze. Maybe that’s why you guys winkled it out to us. The message goes to Dixie Mae – an unrelated person in an unrelated part of the simulation.”

  “But how did we do it the first time?”

  Rob didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was typing in the header string from Dixie Mae’s email. “Let’s try it on the data file. . . .” He paused, checked his keyboard entry, and pressed return.

  They stared at the screen. Seconds passed. The Ellens chatted back and forth. They seemed to be worried about executing any sort of text program; like Victor’s notepad, it might be readable to the outside world. “That’s a real risk unless earlier Robs knew the cacheing strategy.”

  Dixie Mae was only half-listening. If this worked at all, it was pretty good proof that earlier Robs and Dannys had done things right. If this works at all. Even after all that had happened, even after seeing Victor disappear into thin air, Dixie Mae still felt like a little girl waiting for magic she didn’t quite believe in.

  Danny gave a nervous laugh. “How big is this cookie?”

  Rob leaned his elbows onto the table. “Yeah. How many times have I been through a desperate seventh year?” There was an edge to his voice. You could imagine him pulling one of those deathcube stunts that the Ellens had described.

  And then the screen brightened. Golden letters marched across a black-and-crimson fractal pattern: “Hello fellow suckers! Welcome to the 1,237th run of your life.”

  At first, Danny refused to believe they had spent 1,236 years on Gerry’s treadmill. Rob gave a shrug. “I do believe it. I always told Gerry that real progress took longer than theory-making. So the bastard gave me . . . all the time in the world.”

  The cookie was almost a million megabytes long. Much of that was detailed descriptions of trapdoors, backdoors, and softsecrets undermining the design that Rob and Danny had created for Gerry Reich. But there were also thousands of megabytes of history and tactics, crafted and hyperlinked across more than a thousand simulated years. Most of it was the work of Danny and Rob, but there were the words of Ellen and Ellen and Dixie Mae, captured in those fleeting hours they spent with Rob and Danny. It was wisdom accumulated increment by precious increment, across cycles of near sameness. As such, it was their past and also their near future.

  It even contained speculations about the times before Rob and Danny got the cookie system working: Those earliest runs must have been in the summer of 2011, a single upload of Rob Lusk. Back then, the best hardware in the world couldn’t have supported more than Rob all alone, in the equivalent of a one-room apartment, with a keyboard and data display. Maybe he had guessed the truth; even so, what could he have done about it? Cookies would have been much harder to pass in those times. But Rob’s hardware improved from rev to rev, as Gerry Reich built on Rob’s earlier genius. Danny came on board. Their first successful attempt at a cookie must have been one of many wild stabs in the dark, drunken theorizing on the last night of still another year where Rob had failed to make his deadlines and thought that he was forever Ph.D.-less. The two had put an obscene message on the intrasystem email used for their “monthly” communications with Reich. The address they had used for this random flail was . . . help@lotsatech.com.

  In the real world, that must have been around June 15, 2012. Why? Well, at the beginning of their next run, guess who showed up?

  Dixie Mae Leigh. Mad as hell.

  The message had ended up on Dixie Mae’s work queue, and she had been sufficiently insulted to go raging off across the campus. Dixie Mae had spent the whole day bouncing from building to building, mostly making enemies. Not even Ellen or Ellen had been persuaded to come along. On the other hand, back in the early revs, the landscape reality had been simpler. Dixie Mae had been able to come into Rob’s lair directly from the asphalt walkway.

  Danny glanced at Dixie Mae. “And we can only guess how many times you never saw the email, or decided the random obscenities were not meant for you, or just walked in the wrong direction. Dumb luck eventually carried the day.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t take to being insulted, and I go for the top.”

  Rob waved them both silent, never looking up from the cookie file: After their first success, Rob and Danny had fine-tuned the email, had learned more from each new Dixie Mae about who was in the other buildings on the hill and how – like the Ellens – they might be used.

  “Victor!” Rob and the twins saw the reference at the same time. Rob stopped the autoscroll and they studied the paragraph. “Yes. We’ve seen Victor before. And five revs ago, he actually made it as far as this time. He killed his thread then, too.” Rob followed a link marked taking care of Victor. “Oh. Okay. Danny, we’ll have to tweak the log files – ”

  They stayed almost three hours more. Too long maybe, but Rob and Danny wanted to hear everything the Ellens and Dixie Mae could tell them about the simulation, and who else they had seen. The cookie history showed that things were always changing, getting more elaborate, involving more money-making uses of people Gerry had uploaded.

  And they all wanted to keep talking. Except for poor Danny, the cookie said nothing about whether they still existed outside. In a way, knowing each other now was what kept them real.

  Dixie Mae could tell that Danny felt that way, even when he complained: “It’s just not safe having to contact unrelated people, depending on them to get the word to up here.”

  “So, Danny, you want the three of us to just run and run and never know the truth?”

  “No, Dixie Mae, but this is dangerous for you, too. As a matter of fact, in most of your runs, you stay clueless.” He waved at the history. “We only see you once per each of our year – long runs. I – I guess that’s the best evidence that visiting us is risky.”

  The Ellens leaned forward, “Okay, then let’s see how things would work without us.” The four of them looked over the oldest history entries and argued jargon that meant nothing
to Dixie Mae. It all added up to the fact that any local clues left in Rob’s data would be easy for Gerry Reich to detect. On the other hand, messing with unused storage in the intranet mail system was possible, and it was much easier to cloak because the clues could be spread across several other projects.

  The Ellens grinned, “So you really do need us, or at least you need Dixie Mae. But don’t worry; we need you, and you have lots to do in your next year. During that time, you’ve got to make some credible progress with what Gerry wants. You saw what that is. Maybe you hardware types don’t realize it, but – ” she clicked on a link to the bulleted list of “minimum goals” that Reich had set for Rob and Danny,

  “ – Prof. Reich is asking you for system improvements that would make it easier to partition the projects. And see this stuff about selective decoherence: Ever hear of cognitive haze? I bet with this improvement, Reich could actually do limited meddling with uploaded brain state. That would eliminate date and memory inconsistencies. We might not even recognize cookie clues then!”

  Danny looked at the list. “Controlled decoherence?” He followed the link through to an extended discussion. “I wondered what that was. We need to talk about this.”

  “Yes – wait! Two of us get rebooted in – my God, in thirty minutes.” The Ellens looked at each other and then at Dixie Mae.

  Danny looked stricken, all his strategic analysis forgotten. “But one of you Ellens is on a three-month cycle. She could stay here.”

  “Damn it, Danny! We just saw that there are checkpoints every sim day. If the NSA team were short a member for longer than that, we’d have a real problem.”

  Dixie Mae said, “Maybe we should all leave now, even us . . . short-lifers. If we can get back to our buildings before reboot, it might look better.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry,” said Rob.

  She got up and started toward the door. Getting back to Customer Support was the one last thing she could do to help.

  Rob stopped her. “Dixie Mae, it would help if you’d leave us with a message to send to you next time.”

  She pulled the tattered printout from her pocket. The bottom was torn and smeared. “You must have the whole thing in the cookie.”

  “Still, it would be good to know what you think would work best to get . . . your attention. The history says that background details are gradually changing.”

  He stood up and gave her a little bow.

  “Well, okay.” Dixie Mae sat down and thought for a second. Yeah, even if she hadn’t had the message memorized, she knew the sort of insults that would send her ballistic. This wasn’t exactly time travel, but now she was certain who had known all the terrible secrets, who had known how to be absolutely insulting. “My daddy always said that I’m my own worst enemy.”

  Rob and Danny walked with them back to the vault door. This was all new to the two guys. Danny scrambled out of the pit, and stared bug-eyed at the hills around them. “Rob, we could just walk to the other buildings!” He hesitated, came back to them. “And yeah, I know. If it were that easy, we’d have done it before. We gotta study that cookie, Rob.”

  Rob just nodded. He looked kind of sad – then noticed that Dixie Mae was looking at him – and gave her a quick smile. They stood for a moment under the late afternoon haze and listened to the wind. The air had cooled and the whole pit was in shadow now.

  Time to go.

  Dixie Mae gave Rob a smile and her hand. “Hey, Rob. Don’t worry. I’ve spent years trying to become a nicer, wiser, less stubborn person. It never happened. Maybe it never will. I guess that’s what we need now.”

  Rob took her hand. “It is, but I swear . . . it won’t be an endless treadmill. We will study that cookie, and we’ll design something better than what we have now.”

  “Yeah.” Be as stubborn as I am, pal.

  Rob and Danny shook hands all around, wishing them well. “Okay,” said Danny, “best be off with you. Rob, we should shut the door and get back. I saw some references in the cookie. If they get rebooted before they reach their places, there are some things we can do.”

  “Yeah,” said Rob. But the two didn’t move immediately from the entrance. Dixie Mae and the twins scrambled out of the pit and walked toward the asphalt. When Dixie Mae looked back, the two guys were still standing there. She gave a little wave, and then they were hidden by the edge of the excavation.

  The three trudged along, the Ellens a lot less bubbly than usual. “Don’t worry,” NSA Ellen said to her twin, “there’s still two months on the B0994 timeline. I’ll remember for both of us. Maybe I can do some good on that team.”

  “Yeah,” said the other, also sounding down. Then abruptly they both gave one of those identical laughs and they were smiling. “Hey, I just thought of something. True re-merge may always be impossible, but what we have here is almost a kind of merge load. Maybe, maybe – ” but their last chance on this turn of the wheel was gone. They looked at Dixie Mae and all three were sad again. “Wish we had more time to think how we wanted this to turn out. This won’t be like the SF stories where every rev you wake up filled with forebodings and subconscious knowledge. We’ll start out all fresh.”

  Dixie Mae nodded. Starting out fresh. For dozens of runs to come, where there would be nothing after that first week at Customer Support, and putting up with boorish Victor, and never knowing. And then she smiled. “But every time we get through to Dan and Rob, we leave a little more. Every time they see us, they have a year to think. And it’s all happening a thousand times faster than Ol’ Gerry can think. We really are the cookie monsters. And someday – ” Someday we’ll be coming for you, Gerry. And it will be sooner than you can dream.

  JOE STEELE

  Harry Turtledove

  Although he writes other kinds of science fiction as well, and even the occasional fantasy, Harry Turtledove has become one of the most prominent writers of Alternate History stories in the business today, and is probably the most popular and influential writer to work that territory since L. Sprague De Camp; in fact, most of the current popularity of that particular subgenre can be attributed to Turtledove’s own hot-ticket best-seller status.

  Turtledove has published Alternate History novels such as The Guns of the South, dealing with a time line in which the American Civil War turns out very differently, thanks to time-travelling gunrunners, the best-selling Worldwar series, in which the course of World War II is altered by attacking aliens, the “Basil Argyros” series, detailing the adventures of a “magistrianoi” in an alternate Byzantine Empire (collected in the book Agent of Byzantium), the “Sim” series, which take place in an alternate world in which European explorers find North America inhabited by hominids instead of Indians (collected in the book A Different Flesh), a look at a world where the Revolutionary War didn’t happen, written with actor Richard Dreyfuss, The Two Georges, and many other intriguing Alternate History scenarios. Turtledove is also the author of two multivolume Alternate History fantasy series, the multi-volume “Videssos Cycle” and the “Krispes Sequence.” His other books include the novels Wereblood, Werenight, Earthgrip, Noninterference, A World of Difference, and Ruled Britannia, the collections Kaleidoscope and Down in the Bottomlands (and Other Places), and, as editor, The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century and The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century – plus many others. His most recent books include the novels Gunpowder Empire, American Empire: The Victorious Opposition, Jaws of Darkness, and In the Presence of Mine Enemies. He won a Hugo Award in 1994 for his story, “Down in the Bottomlands.” A native Californian, Turtledove has a Ph.D. in Byzantine history from UCLA, and has published a scholarly translation of a 9th century Byzantine chronicle. He lives in Canoga Park, California, with his wife and family.

  Here he shows us how the history of the mid-twentieth century could have turned out disturbingly different – and those who think that a similar scenario couldn’t happen here tomorrow are, I fear, whistling in the dark.


  “Stalin was a Democrat . . .”

  – from “god & the fbi” by Janis Ian

  AMERICA. 1932. Bread lines. Soup kitchens. Brother, can you spare a dime? Banks dying like flies. Brokers swan diving from the twenty-seventh floor.

  Herbert Hoover. Dead man walking. Couldn’t get reelected running with the Holy Ghost. Republicans nominate him again anyway. Got nobody better. Don’t know how much trouble they’re in.

  Democrats smell blood in the water. Twelve long years sitting on the sidelines. Twelve lean years. Twelve hungry years. Harding – women got the vote for this? Coolidge – “I’ve got a five-dollar bet, Mr. Coolidge, that I can get you to say three words.” “You lose,” says Silent Cal. Hoover – Black Tuesday. The crash. Enough said. It’s on his watch. He gets the blame. Blood in the water.

  Democrats smell it. Whoever they put up, he’s gonna win. Gonna be president. At last. Been so long. Twelve years. Sweet Jesus Christ! Want it so bad they can taste it.

  Convention time. Chicago. End of June. Humidity’s high. Heat’s higher. Two men left in the fight. One wins the prize. The other? Hind tit.

  Two men left. Franklin D. Roosevelt. D for Delano, mind. Governor of New York. Cousin to Teddy Roosevelt. Already ran for vice president once. Didn’t win. Cigarette holder. Jaunty angle. Wheelchair. Paralysis. Anguish. Courage. As near an aristocrat as America grows. Franklin D. Roosevelt. D for Delano.

  And Joe Steele.

  Joe Steele. Congressman from California. Not San Francisco. Not Nob Hill. Good Lord, no. Fresno. Farm country. That great valley, squeezed by mountains east and west. Not a big fellow, Joe Steele. Stands real straight, so you don’t notice too much. Mustache, a good-sized one. Thick head of hair just starting to go gray. Eyelids like shutters. When they go down and then come up again, you can’t see what was behind them.