InterstellarNet- Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  Her recent interests suggested only one organizing principle: they could scarcely be further removed from Joshua.

  How grandiosely paranoid he and Corinne made each other! Happily, Aaron had brought him to his senses. Denise, apparently, had done the same for Corinne.

  He missed Corinne anyway.

  Tacitus had moved on to pontificating about primitive man hunting various Ice Age megafauna to extinction. Back Joshua went, by fly’s-eye views, to reexamine a museum exhibit.

  Overcast day faded into ominous night with little visible sunset between. The streets emptied. A cab passed, two blocks ahead on a cross street, and Joshua cringed. Would he never be over this?

  A golf-ball-sized lump of rock lay in his path. With a well-placed kick, he sent the stone skittering along the sidewalk.

  Tacitus, meanwhile, had segued to human evolution. Joshua dutifully revisited the Neanderthal burial diorama. “That hand axe is at least ten thousand years too advanced,” Tacitus netted. “Notice the delicate flaking on the working edge. It would not hurt to update these displays on occasion.”

  “Stone flaking.” Joshua caught up with his stone and gave it another punt. “You see the exhibit that clearly?”

  “You can, too.” Tacitus briefly vanished, his avatar replaced for those seconds by a zoomed view from inside the museum. “I do not get why you went physically. Between guards keeping you back and crowds blocking your view, how did you expect to see anything?”

  Joshua had made the day trip to DC precisely because of the crowds. Especially on weekdays, museums teemed with schoolchildren; his residual infamy registered mostly with adults. The legions of kids paid him no attention. The teachers and chaperones were too frazzled, if they even recognized him, to care. He had basked in their indifference.

  That was then. Now, Joshua felt anxious. Not from roaming deserted streets—he was only a few blocks from home. Not about the foreboding sky. He couldn’t decide why. As Tacitus tried to engage him in a discussion of prehistoric trade routes for flint, Joshua polled nearby public-safety cameras.

  He banished the pedantic lecture from his thoughts. Cycling views from the sensors atop the historical district’s faux gas lamps revealed nothing of interest. Although a few faces did strike Joshua as familiar ….

  This was stupid. He often walked in this neighborhood. The familiar faces would be people who did the same. Quit being paranoid. Images flickered as Joshua continued cycling through the real-time feeds.

  A burly man in a broad-brimmed black hat had been strolling a block behind Joshua. Black Hat had turned down a side street. Now a tall woman in a tan overcoat trailed behind Joshua. She wandered off, replaced by a man clutching a furled umbrella.

  Cameras one block over showed Tan Raincoat had turned to parallel him. Black Hat paralleled him from the opposite side. Alarmed, Joshua downloaded buffers from the public-safety cameras along his perambulating path. Each buffer kept thirty minutes of vid.

  These people had taken turns following him!

  His neural link dissolved in a hiss of static. A cab careened around a corner, its brakes squealing. A passenger leapt out, weapon in hand. A Taser?

  Joshua’s jaw dropped. He knew that face. Brush-cut gray hair; dark, piercing gaze; aquiline nose, cleft chin—

  The waiter from his ill-fated party!

  Joshua whirled to run, only to see Umbrella Man dashing straight at him—

  Until a honking, speeding black van, jumping the curb, sent Umbrella Man diving between two parked cars.

  The waiter looked wildly about, then leapt back through his still-open cab door. The van swerved, clipping the cab’s rear bumper, bouncing the cab into a lamppost.

  Umbrella Man and now Black Hat came racing at Joshua.

  The van’s back door slid open. “Get in!” shouted a familiar voice. “Quick!”

  It was Corinne.

  • • • •

  Corinne kept checking her rearview mirror. Too soon, the cab shuddered to life.

  She thought she’d smacked it thoroughly, but she waited to see that it wasn’t keeping up before turning down a cross street and speeding away.

  Her van had a nasty shimmy from the collision.

  “Th-thanks,” Joshua managed. “What just happened?”

  “Hold that thought,” she said. The nearby public-safety cameras showed nothing significant on the all but empty streets. More interesting was the slowly moving region in which cameras failed to respond. Somewhere in that blanked-out area was the battered cab. What did a little illegal jamming matter, after all, compared to attempted kidnapping? “Are you all right?”

  “Rattled, but okay.” He coughed. “Terrified and relieved all at once.”

  Relieved? “Did you recognize them?” she asked.

  “The man from the cab.” Joshua squirmed in his seat. “He was the waiter that night at my party.” His voice turned wistful. “I wish I could prove that.”

  She cruised a seedy neighborhood until she found a block without public-safety cameras. Shot out, not jammed. They would walk to the maglev station and take their chances on a mugging. She pulled to the curb. “Joshua, the van stays here. Your waiter and his friends will be looking for it.” He stared as Corinne wiped the controls and door latches. “Our story is the van was stolen.” If the rental company disbelieved her, the wiped-off areas would suggest a thief erasing his fingerprints. She had no intention of admitting to having disabled autodrive, much less having rammed the cab.

  “What about DNA?” he asked. “I mean mine. Shed skin. Hair.”

  “You were in the van before it was stolen. We’ll work out details later.”

  Would anyone ask? Corinne doubted it. Public-safety cameras had been suppressed at the crash site. Joshua’s assailants wouldn’t report the incident. Had they meant to involve the police, they would have left behind their mangled vehicle. Instead, they had driven off in it.

  “Now we talk online,” Corinne netted. “Heavy encryption. We don’t want anyone to overhear.” She set a brisk pace toward the maglev station.

  “Why are you even in Charleston? How did you know?” Joshua’s avatar shrugged, somehow plaintively. “What is going on?”

  “Why?” she echoed. I’m stubborn was an inadequate response. “Despite everything”—including Denise’s skepticism—“your situation gnawed at me. I got to data mining, and I turned up something interesting. Joshua, you’re not the first to see InterstellarNet coincidences.”

  “I never assumed I was.”

  “The thing is, Joshua, bad things happen to those who notice. Two cases involved media projects on the topic, timed for the centennial of the ICU.” Was he up to this? “People died. Others disappeared—permanently.”

  The neighborhood improved as they approached the station. He looked around for the first time at their surroundings. “Where are we going?”

  “New York,” she netted. “Joshua, there’s an obvious question ….”

  “Uh-huh. Why am I still here? Maybe I’m too conspicuous to harm overtly. Someone decided discrediting me was better.” In the real world, Joshua punted another stone with feeling. It clattered along the sidewalk. “Who are they? No, that can wait. How did you happen to turn up in the nick of time?”

  They plunged into the station, on whose platform dozens of people milled about. A train was just pulling in. Corinne relaxed, if only a little, for the first time since arriving in Charleston. “After uncovering those earlier incidents, I came to watch you. I was worried about you.” She admitted, “It wasn’t happenstance that I pulled up when I did. I’d been following you for several hours.”

  He gave her a hard stare, but didn’t comment on her using him as bait. “I’ve gone from infamous to amusing to old news. Everyone ‘knows’ I’m a world-class drunk. Now I can be safely vanished. Or maybe this time I’ll come back dead, seemingly from alcohol poisoning or some other kind of overdose. Same old, same old, people will say. That’s why, this time, they didn’t care if I saw
them coming.”

  Time to change the subject. “I didn’t forget your other question: what’s going on? I only wish I knew.” Corinne used cash to buy two access chips from the kiosk, and they boarded the maglev. An hour to home. They took seats in a mostly empty passenger car. Half their fellow riders were glassy-eyed, off somewhere in the infosphere. The rest looked asleep.

  Joshua sat stiffly, hands clasped. “Something is going on. Someone is after me. You’ve seen it, too, but we have no proof.”

  True, Corinne thought, but now we’ve both seen it. That’s one hell of an improvement.

  • • • •

  A soft trill returned Joshua’s thoughts to the present. No one in their maglev car seemed to be paying him any attention. He bookmarked his files and connected.

  “You’re back online, I see,” Tacitus netted. “Good. I decided you’re right.”

  Joshua had been surveying Corinne’s latest research. The disappearances and untimely deaths went back almost to First Contact with the Leos. For such a wide-ranging and long-lived conspiracy, it had remarkably limited resources. A cab and four people? None of which could be on Tacitus’ mind. “Of course I am. Right about what?”

  “Mass extinctions,” Tacitus answered. “That’s the key.”

  If so, Joshua didn’t recognize the lock. Corinne snored softly beside him, making this conversation all the more surreal. “Mass extinctions?”

  “Dinosaurs. Trilobites. Mastodons. Isn’t that what you went to the Smithsonian to study?”

  “Mass extinctions.” Maybe, subconsciously, that was how he picked exhibits. Maybe he just liked dinosaurs. “Go on.”

  The virtual sky darkened. Virtual stars twinkled above the avatar. “I checked with all the agents. Every InterstellarNet species reports mass extinctions.”

  So asteroid strikes and ice ages happened elsewhere. “That’s not surprising.”

  In the imaginary night, his imaginary face pale and shadowed, Tacitus nodded. “Agreed. Still, allow me an observation. It’s odd that the InterstellarNet species are so well matched in capability. So closely … synchronized.”

  “Right,” Joshua netted. “Very odd.”

  “Then you will find this at least as weird.” Tacitus banished the stars. “Occasionally two or even three worlds had mass extinctions at about the same time. And then there’s this—

  “All eleven home worlds experienced a radical, biosphere-altering event at the same time, about 550 million years ago.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Cambrian Explosion: the rapid appearance on Earth, about 550 million years ago, of complex multicellular life forms. Duration estimates generally range from 10-40 million years. Even the long end of that range would ordinarily be an evolutionary eye-blink.

  The Cambrian Explosion is noteworthy for both its biological innovation and concurrent mass extinctions. Many new animal species emerged in a variety of novel body plans. In marked contrast, no new phylum of animal life has appeared since the Cambrian bout of evolutionary creativity (although many phyla and classes from this era disappeared in later extinctions).

  Unlike most evolutionary turning points—such as, for example, the better known Cretaceous/Tertiary asteroid strike that doomed the dinosaurs—scientists cannot point to any conclusive cause(s) for the Cambrian occurrences.

  Only the origin of life is a more dramatic biological event.

  —Internetopedia

  • • • •

  Corinne had paid their way to New York. Suddenly, Joshua had other ideas. He led her off the maglev during its brief stop in Richmond, onto a local subway to Arthur Ashe Memorial Spaceport, and aboard a commercial scramjet flight to the other side of the world. So why Australia? Her questions about their new destination got her only an enigmatic smile.

  Joshua’s harness could scarcely keep him in his acceleration couch. He brimmed with newfound energy. Adrenaline from their narrow escape? Uncertainty banished by a second incident—this time stone-sober, with her present as a witness? New data? Maybe all three, she thought. In any event, he was a changed man.

  She sort of missed the middle child, underachiever, trust-fund dilettante. This take-charge Joshua reminded her too much of … her.

  In the run-up to launch, Joshua hit her with a massive info dump. Mid-speech, he linked in an AI colleague named Tacitus. Mass extinctions. Emergence of phyla. Divergence of species. The Cambrian Explosion. Netting meant never stopping to take a breath.

  Being on the receiving end was like drinking from a fire hose.

  The torrent did not abate until the final launch warning. It was a lot to take in.

  Acceleration mashed Corinne into her seat. Only a few minutes of this, she told herself. A suborbital hop was mostly coasting.

  As always, those were a long few minutes. When the engines cut off, she turned toward Joshua. He was gazing longingly at the blue-and-white globe receding beneath them. He looked pale. His hand felt clammy. Space sick?

  Joshua seemed to have lost the will to communicate. Poor guy. “I need time to process all that information,” Corinne said, yawning. She closed her eyes, the better to organize her thoughts. She yawned again. “And I have a call to make.” They had more than an hour until reentry and comm blackout.

  Let him conclude she was letting Denise know about their detour. She should do that, but Denise was accustomed—resigned—to no-notice jaunts. That Tanaka Astor would not take Joshua’s calls did not mean the secretary-general wouldn’t take Corinne’s. At least once.

  Celebrity had its perks.

  Quit stalling, Corinne.

  Tanaka Astor accepted the connection request, appearing as an iridescent sphere in a featureless space. “Ms. Elman,” she acknowledged flatly.

  Tacitus’ Roman persona had been only mildly idiosyncratic. Most of Corinne’s AI acquaintances, in fact, assumed human avatars. Some honored progenitors. Others possibly projected human forms as subtle reminders of their legal equality. Like Tanaka Astor, the Augmented almost exclusively manifested the opposite way: impersonal and austere. Because their human partner assured their citizenship, perhaps that austerity revealed true AI disdain.

  It was only four a.m. in Geneva. Likely only Astor, the AI facet, was awake, and might be much easier to deal with than two personalities. More logical, too—or so, anyway, Corinne told herself. “Good morning, Doctor.”

  “You may call me Madame Secretary-General,” Astor said. “What is this about?”

  Corinne looked and felt bedraggled. She revealed none of that online. “I have new information about the Joshua Matthews situation. I would appreciate your reaction.

  “To begin, my research has revealed similar cases. Knowing that, I followed him. That was fortunate, because tonight I rescued him from assailants. They jammed the local network, however, so there isn’t any surveillance vid.”

  “How convenient.” Even the shimmering of the sphere was somehow icy.

  Of course the Augmented seldom exhibited emotion. AIs only feigned it. Corinne knew she was psyching herself out. “Nonetheless.” She explained it all. Past disappearances among likeminded researchers. The cab. The waiter and his cronies. Only gradually did Corinne suspect Robyn Tanaka had joined the conversation. The seamlessness of that transition was creepy.

  She/it/they netted, “You would have me believe in the persecution of historians of like persuasion to Joshua Matthews. You infer a conspiracy more than a century old, prosecuted by waiters and taxicabs.

  “That you saved Matthews from a mugging, and that the muggers had stolen a cab, is far more plausible.” Some nuance of delivery too subtle to pinpoint finally convinced Corinne that the Robyn Tanaka facet had taken charge. “Ms. Elman, one wonders if you share any of Dr. Matthews’s habits.”

  Corinne would not have minded a stiff drink, even squeezed from a freefall bulb. What hard evidence could she offer? That the caterer denied assigning a waiter to Joshua’s party. Even she hadn’t found that assertion convincing. Nothing else was new
, except—

  “Madame Secretary-General, I expect you’ve heard mention of the Matthews conundrum. That is: why are a few nearby stars home to technological species? There is a second incongruity that Joshua can explain in more detail than I, and that seems as counterintuitive as the first. Epsilon Eridani is a billion years old; Barnard’s Star more than ten billion. Both gave rise to species possessed of very similar capabilities. Yet a few hundred years ago, there were no radios with which to coordinate.”

  The glistening sphere radiated indifference. “We communicate with those species able to communicate. Any hypothetical intelligences in other solar systems by definition remain unknown to us.”

  Not indifference! Nothing. No cues. You’re doing it to yourself! “Allow me a final observation. Our era is not the first synchronization. Are you familiar with the Cambrian Explosion?”

  “Ir am Augmented, Ms. Elman.” Tanaka might as well have said: I am now. “How is that relevant?”

  “It’s relevant, Madame Secretary-General, because eleven InterstellarNet species synchronized then, too.”

  Now, unchanged, the sphere somehow radiated impatience. “I assume you are in communication with Dr. Matthews.”

  Beside Corinne, oblivious to this conversation, Joshua looked ever paler. “Yes,” Corinne netted. “Also his AI historian colleague, Tacitus 352.”

  “Mir advice, Ms. Elman, if you value your credibility, is that you break off those contacts. Of course the journalist’s role is to ask questions, but those questions must be grounded in reality. These aren’t.

  “You speak of a time when, except for perhaps lichen—and, Dr. Matthews would have you believe, waiters—Earth’s continents were bare. And at sea, what? A conspiracy of trilobites?

  “Ir will accept no further communications from either of you.”

  The sphere vanished like a pricked soap bubble.

  • • • •

  A strident alarm interrupted Corinne’s funk. Imminent reentry. She tightened her seat harness then double-checked Joshua’s. He smiled wanly. On the ground would be soon enough to update him on her latest fiasco. Her failure.