The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  Victor had an explanation. “It’s the wind. You see this in lots of exposed land near the coast. Or maybe they just don’t water very much up here.”

  An Ellen—from behind, Dixie Mae couldn’t tell which one—said, “Either way, the fabrication is awesome.”

  Right. A fabrication. “That’s something I don’t understand,” said Dixie Mae. “The best movie fx don’t come close to this. How can their computers be this good?”

  “Well for one thing,” said the other Ellen, “cheating is a lot easier when you’re also simulating the observers.”

  “Us.”

  “Yup. Everywhere you look, you see detail, but it’s always at the center of your focus. We humans don’t keep everything we’ve seen and everything we know all in mind at the same time. We have millions of years of evolution invested in ignoring almost everything, and conjuring sense out of nonsense.”

  Dixie Mae looked southward into the haze. It was all so real: the dry hot breeze, the glint of aircraft sliding down the sky toward LAX, the bulk of the Empire State Building looming up from the skyscrapers at the center of downtown.

  “There are probably dozens of omissions and contradictions around us every second, but unless they’re brought together in our attention all at once we don’t notice them.”

  “Like the time discrepancy,” said Dixie Mae.

  “Right! In fact, the biggest problem with all our theories is not how we could be individually duped, but how the fraud could work with many communicating individuals all at once. That takes hardware beyond anything that exists, maybe a hundred liters of Bose condensate.”

  “Some kind of quantum computer breakthrough,” said Victor.

  Both Ellens turned to look at him, eyebrows raised.

  “Hey, I’m a journalist. I read it in the Bruin science section.”

  The twins’ reply was something more than a monologue and less than a conversation:

  “Well…even so, you have a point. In fact, there were rumors this spring that Gerry had managed to scale Gershenfeld’s coffee cup coherence scheme.”

  “Yeah, how he had five hundred liters of Bose condensate at room temperature.”

  “But those stories started way after he had already become Mr. Renaissance Man. It doesn’t make sense.”

  We’re not the first people hijacked. “Maybe,” said Dixie Mae, “maybe he started out with something simple, like a single superspeed human. Could Gerry run a single upload with the kind of supercomputers we have nowadays?”

  “Well, that’s more conceivable than this…oh. Okay, so an isolated genius was used to do a century or so of genius work on quantum computing. That sounds like the deathcube scenario. If it were me, after a hundred years of being screwed like that, I’d give Gerry one hell of a surprise.”

  “Yeah, like instead of a cure for cancer, he’d get airborne rabies targeted on the proteome of scumbag middle-aged male CS profs.”

  The twins sounded as bloody-minded as Dixie Mae.

  THEY WALKED ANOTHER COUPLE OF HUNDRED YARDS. The lawn degenerated into islands of crabgrass in bare dirt. The breeze was a hot whistling along the ridgeline. The twins stopped every few paces to look closely, now at the vegetation, now at a guide sign along the walkway. They were mumbling at each other about the details of what they were seeing, as if they were trying to detect inconsistencies:

  “…really, really good. We agree on everything we see.”

  “Maybe Gerry is saving cycles, running us as cognitive subthreads off the same process.”

  “Ha! No wonder we’re still so much in synch.”

  Mumble, mumble. “There’s really a lot we can infer—”

  “—once we accept the insane premise of all this.”

  There was still no “Building 0917,” but what buildings they did see had lower and lower numbers: 0933, 0921…

  A loud group of people crossed their path just ahead. They were singing. They looked like programmers.

  “Just be cool,” an Ellen said softly. “That conga line is straight out of the LotsaTech employee motivation program. The programmers have onsite parties when they reach project milestones.”

  “More victims?” said Victor. “Or AIs?”

  “They might be victims. But I’ll bet all the people we’ve seen along this path are just low-level scenery. There’s nothing in Reich’s theories that would make true AIs possible.”

  Dixie Mae watched the singers as they drifted down the hillside. This was the third time they had seen something-like-people on the walkway. “It doesn’t make sense, Ellen. We think we’re just—”

  “Simulation processes.”

  “Yeah, simulation processes, inside some sort of super super-computer. But if that’s true, then whoever is behind this should be able to spy on us better than any Big Brother ever could in the real world. We should’ve been caught and rebooted the minute we began to get suspicious.”

  Both Ellens started to answer. They stopped, then interrupted each other again.

  “Back to who’s-got-the-token,” one said, holding up the dollar coin. “Dixie Mae, that is a mystery, but not as big as it seems. If Reich is using the sort of upload and simulation techniques I know about, then what goes on inside our minds can’t be interpreted directly. Thoughts are just too idiosyncratic, too scattered. If we are simulations in a large quantum computer, even environment probes would be hard to run.”

  “You mean things like spy cameras?”

  “Yes. They would be hard to implement, since in fact they would be snooping on the state of our internal imagery. All this is complicated by the fact that we’re probably running thousands of times faster than real time. There are maybe three ways that Gerry could snoop: he could just watch team output, and if it falls off, he’d know that something had gone wrong—and he might reboot on general principles.”

  Suddenly Dixie Mae was very glad that they hadn’t taken more volunteers on this hike.

  “The second snoop method is just to look at things we write or the output of software we explicitly run. I’ll bet that anything that we perceive as linear text is capable of outside interpretation.” She looked at Victor. “That’s why no note-taking.” Dixie Mae still had his notepad.

  “It’s kinda stupid,” said Victor. “First it was no pictures and now not even notes.”

  “Hey, look!” said the Ellens. “B0917!” But it wasn’t a building, just a small sign wedged among the rocks.

  They scrambled off the asphalt onto a dirt path that led directly up the hillside.

  Now they were so near the hill crest that the horizon was just a few yards away. Dixie Mae couldn’t see any land beyond. She remembered a movie where poor slobs like themselves got to the edge of the simulation…and found the wall at the end of their universe. But they took a few more steps and she could see over the top. There was a vista of further, lower hills, dropping down into the San Fernando Valley. Not quite hidden in the haze she could see the familiar snakey line of Highway 101. Tarzana.

  Ellen and Ellen and Victor were not taking in the view. They were staring at the sign at the side of the path. Fifteen feet beyond that was a construction dig. There were building supplies piled neatly along the edge of the cut, and a robo-Cat parked on the far side. It might have been the beginning of the construction of a standard-model LotsaTech building…except that in the far side of the pit, almost hidden in shadows, there was a circular metal plug, like a bank vault door in some old movie.

  “I have this theory,” said the token holder. “If we get through that door, we may find out what your email is all about.”

  “Yup.” The twins bounced down a steeply cut treadway into the pit. Dixie Mae and Victor scrambled after them, Victor clumsily bumping into her on the way down. The bottom of the pit was like nothing before. There were no windows, no card swipe. And up close, Dixie Mae could see that the vault door was pitted and scratched.

  “They’re mixing metaphors,” said the token holder. “This entrance looks older th
an the pit.”

  “It looks old as the hills,” Dixie Mae said, running her hand over the uneven metal—and half expecting to feel weirdo runes. “Somebody is trying to give us clues…or somebody is a big sadist. So what do we do? Knock a magic knock?”

  “Why not?” The two Ellens took her tattered email and laid it out flat on the metal of the door. They studied the mail headers for a minute, mumbling to each other. The token holder tapped on the metal, then pushed.

  “Together,” they said, and tapped out a random something, but perfectly in synch.

  That had all the effect you’d expect of tapping your fingers on ten tons of dead steel.

  The token holder handed the email back to Dixie Mae. “You try something.”

  But what? Dixie Mae stepped to the door. She stood there, feeling clueless. Off to the side, almost hidden by the curve of the metal plug, Victor had turned away.

  He had the notepad.

  “Hey!” She slammed him into the side of the pit. Victor pushed her away, but by then the Ellens were on him. There was a mad scramble as the twins tried to do all the same things to Victor. Maybe that confused him. Anyway, it gave Dixie Mae a chance to come back and punch him in the face.

  “I got it!” One of the twins jumped back from the fighting. She had the notepad in her hands.

  They stepped away from Victor. He wasn’t going to get his notepad back. “So, Ellen,” said Dixie Mae, not taking her eyes off the sprawled figure, “what was that third method for snooping on us?”

  “I think you’ve already guessed. Gerry could fool some idiot into uploading as a spy.” She was looking over her twin’s shoulder at the notepad screen.

  Victor picked himself up. For a moment he looked sullen, and then the old superior smile percolated across his features. “You’re crazy. I just want to break this story back in the real world. Don’t you think that if Reich were using spies, he’d just upload himself?”

  “That depends.”

  The one holding the notepad read aloud: “You just typed in: ‘925 999 994 know, reboot’. That doesn’t sound like journalism to me, Victor.”

  “Hey, I was being dramatic.” He thought for a second, and then laughed. “It doesn’t matter anymore! I got the warning out. You won’t remember any of this after you’re rebooted.”

  Dixie Mae stepped toward him. “And you won’t remember that I broke your neck.”

  Victor tried to look suave and jump backwards at the same time. “In fact, I will remember, Dixie Mae. See, once you’re gone, I’ll be merged back into my body in Doc Reich’s lab.”

  “And we’ll be dead again!”

  Ellen held up the notepad. “Maybe not as soon as Victor thinks. I notice he never got past the first line of his message; he never pressed return. Now, depending on how faithfully this old notepad’s hardware is being emulated, his treason is still trapped in a local cache—and Reich is still clueless about us.”

  For a moment, Victor looked worried. Then he shrugged. “So you get to live the rest of this run, maybe corrupt some other projects—ones a lot more important than you. On the other hand, I did learn about the email. When I get back and tell Doc Reich, he’ll know what to do. You won’t be going rogue in the future.”

  Everyone was silent for a second. The wind whistled across the yellow-blue sky above the pit.

  And then the twins gave Victor the sort of smile he had bestowed on them so often. The token holder said, “I think your mouth is smarter than you are, Victor. You asked the right question a second ago: Why doesn’t Gerry Reich upload himself to be the spy? Why does he have to use you?”

  “Well,” Victor frowned. “Hey, Doc Reich is an important man. He doesn’t have time to waste with security work like this.”

  “Really, Victor? He can’t spare even a copy of himself?”

  Dixie Mae got the point. She closed in on Victor. “So how many times have you been merged back into your original?”

  “This is my first time here!” Everybody but Victor laughed, and he rushed on, “But I’ve seen the merge done!”

  “Then why won’t Reich do it for us?”

  “Merging is too expensive to waste on work threads like you,” but now Victor was not even convincing himself.

  The Ellens laughed again. “Are you really a UCLA journalism grad, Victor? I thought they were smarter than this. So Gerry showed you a re-merge, did he? I bet that what you actually saw was a lot of equipment and someone going through very dramatic convulsions. And then the ‘subject’ told you a nice story about all the things he’d seen in our little upload world. And all the time they were laughing at you behind their hands. See, Reich’s upload theory depends on having a completely regular target. I know that theory: the merge problem—loading onto an existing mind—is exponential in the neuron count. There’s no way back, Victor.”

  Victor was backing away from them. His expression flickered between superior sneer and stark panic. “What you think doesn’t matter. You’re just going to be rebooted at 5 P.M. And you don’t know everything.” He began fiddling with the fly zipper on his pants. “You see, I—I can escape!”

  “Get him!”

  Dixie Mae was closest. It didn’t matter. There was no hazy glow, no sudden popping noise. She simply fell through thin air, right where Victor had been standing.

  She picked herself up and stared at the ground. Some smudged footprints were the only sign Victor had been there. She turned back to the twins. “So he could re-merge after all?”

  “Not likely,” said the token holder, “Victor’s zipper was probably a thread self-terminate mechanism.”

  “His pants zipper?”

  They shrugged. “I dunno. To leak out? Gerry has a perverse sense of humor.” But neither twin looked amused. They circled the spot where Victor had left and kicked unhappily at the dirt. The token holder said, “Cripes. Nothing in Victor’s life became him like the leaving it. I don’t think we have even till ‘5 P.M.’ now. A thread terminate signal is just the sort of thing that would be easy to detect from the outside. So Gerry won’t know the details, but he—”

  “—or his equipment—”

  “—will soon know there is a problem and—”

  “—that it’s probably a security problem.”

  “So how long do we have before we lose the day?” said Dixie Mae.

  “If an emergency reboot has to be done manually, we’ll probably hit 5 P.M. first. If it’s automatic, well, I know you won’t feel insulted if the world ends in the middle of a syllable.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m going to use the time.” Dixie Mae picked her email up from where it lay by the vault entrance. She waved the paper at the impassive steel. “I’m not going back! I’m here and I want some explanations!”

  Nothing.

  The two Ellens stood there, out of ideas and looking unhappy—or maybe that amounted to the same thing.

  “I’m not giving up,” Dixie Mae said to them, and pounded on the metal.

  “No, I don’t think you are,” said the token holder. But now they were looking at her strangely. “I think we—you at least—must have been through this before.”

  “Yeah. And I must have messed up every time.”

  “No…I don’t think so.” They pointed at the email that she held crumpled in her hand. “Where do you think all those nasty secrets come from, Dixie Mae?”

  “How the freakin’ heck do I know? That’s the whole reason I—” and then she felt smart and stupid at the same time. She leaned her head against the shadowed metal. “Oh. Oh oh oh!”

  She looked down at the email hardcopy. The bottom part was torn, smeared, almost illegible. No matter; that part she had memorized. The Ellens had gone over the headers one by one. But now we shouldn’t be looking for technical secrets or grad student inside jokes. Maybe we should be looking for numbers that mean something to Dixie Mae Leigh.

  “If there were uploaded souls guarding the door, what you two have already done ought to be enough. I think
you’re right. It’s some pattern I’m supposed to tap on the door.” If it didn’t work, she’d try something else, and keep trying till 5 P.M. or whenever she was suddenly back in Building 0994, so happy to have a job with potential…

  The tree house in Tarzana. Dixie Mae had been into secret codes then. Her childish idea of crypto. She and her little friends used a tap code for sending numbers. It hadn’t lasted long, because Dixie Mae was the only one with the patience to use it. But—

  “That number, ‘7474’,” she said.

  “Yeah? Right in the middle of the fake message number?”

  “Yes. Once upon a time, I used that as a password challenge. You know, like ‘Who goes there’ in combat games. The rest of the string could be the response.”

  The Ellens looked at each. “Looks too short to be significant,” they said.

  Then they both shook their heads, disagreeing with themselves. “Try it, Dixie Mae.”

  Her “numbers to taps” scheme had been simple, but for a moment she couldn’t remember it. She held the paper against the vault and glared at the numbers. Ah. Carefully, carefully, she began tapping out the digits that came after “7474.” The string was much longer than anything her childhood friends would have put up with. It was longer than anything she herself would have used.

  “Cool,” said the token holder. “Some kind of hex gray code?”

  Huh? “What do you expect, Ellen? I was only eight years old.”

  They watched the door.

  Nothing.

  “Okay, on to Plan B,” and then to C and D and E, etc, until our time ends.

  There was the sound of something very old breaking apart. The vault door shifted under Dixie Mae’s hand and she jumped back. The curved plug slowly turned, and turned, and turned. After some seconds, the metal plug thudded to the ground beside the entrance…and they were looking down an empty corridor that stretched off into the depths.

  FOR THE FIRST QUARTER MILE, no one was home. The interior decor was not LotsaTech standard. Gone were the warm redwood veneers and glow strips. Here fluorescent tube lights were mounted in the acoustic tile ceiling, and the walls were institutional beige.