Identity Theft and Other Stories

by Robert J. Sawyer

  At last, though, Captain Plato turned toward the White House; he seemed somewhat startled by the holographic “Great Eats” sign that floated above the Rose Garden. He turned back to the people surrounding him. “I didn’t expect such a crowd,” he said. “Forgive me for having to ask, but which one of you is the president?”

  There was laughter from everyone but the astronauts. Chin prodded Hauptmann in the ribs. “How about that?” Chin said. “He’s saying, ‘Take me to your leader’!”

  “There is no president anymore,” said someone near Plato. “No kings, emperors, or prime ministers, either.”

  Another fellow, who clearly fancied himself a wit, said, “Shakespeare said kill all the lawyers; we didn’t do that, but we did get rid of all the politicians…and the lawyers followed.”

  Plato blinked more than the noonday sun demanded. “No government of any kind?”

  Nods all around; a chorus of “That’s right,” too.

  “Then—then—what are we supposed to do now?” asked the captain.

  Hauptmann decided to speak up. “Why, whatever you wish, of course.”

  Hauptmann actually got a chance to talk with Captain Plato later in the day. Although some of the spacers did have relatives who were offering them accommodations in their homes, Plato and most of the others had been greeted by no one from their families.

  “I’m not sure where to go,” Plato said. “I mean, our salaries were supposed to be invested while we were away, but…”

  Hauptmann nodded. “But the agency that was supposed to do the investing is long since gone, and, besides, government-issued money isn’t worth anything anymore; you need corporate points.”

  Plato shrugged. “And I don’t have any of those.”

  Hauptmann was a bit of a space buff, of course; that’s why he’d come into the District to see the landing. To have a chance to talk to the captain in depth would be fabulous. “Would you like to stay with me?” he asked.

  Plato looked surprised by the offer, but, well, it was clear that he did have to sleep somewhere—unless he planned to return to the orbiting mothership, of course. “Umm, sure,” he said, shaking Hauptmann’s hand. “Why not?”

  Hauptmann’s weblink was showing something he’d never seen before: the word “unknown” next to the text, “Trustworthiness rating for Joseph Tyler Plato.” But, of course, that was only to be expected.

  Chin was clearly jealous that Hauptmann had scored a spacer, and so he made an excuse to come over to Hauptmann’s house in Takoma Park early the next morning.

  Hauptmann and Chin listened spellbound as Plato regaled them with tales of Franklin’s World and its four moons, its salmon-colored orbiting rings, its outcrops of giant crystals towering to the sky, and its neon-bright cascades. No life had been found, which was why, of course, no quarantine was necessary. That lack of native organisms had been a huge disappointment, Plato said; he and his crew were still arguing over what mechanism had caused the oxygen signatures detected in Earth-based spectroscopic scans of Franklin’s World, but whatever had made them wasn’t biological.

  “I really am surprised,” said Plato, when they took a break for late-morning coffee. “I expected debriefings and, well, frankly, for the government to have been prepared for our return.”

  Hauptmann nodded sympathetically. “Sorry about that. There are a lot of good things about getting rid of government, but one of the downsides, I guess, is the loss of all those little gnomes in cubicles who used to keep track of everything.”

  “We do have a lot of scientific data to share,” said Plato.

  Chin smiled. “If I were you, I’d hold out for the highest bidder. There’s got to be some company somewhere that thinks it can make a profit off of what you’ve collected.”

  Plato tipped his head. “Well, until then, I, um, I’m going to need some of those corporate points you were talking about.”

  Hauptmann and Chin each glanced down at their weblinks; it was habit, really, nothing more, but…

  But that nasty “unknown” was showing on the displays again, the devices having divined the implied question. Chin looked at Hauptmann. Hauptmann looked at Chin.

  “That is a problem,” Chin said.

  The first evidence of real trouble was on the noon newscast. Plato watched aghast with Chin and Hauptmann as the story was reported. Leo Johnstone, one of the Olduvai’s crew, had attempted to rape a woman over by the New Watergate towers. The security firm she subscribed to had responded to her weblink’s call for help, and Johnstone had been stopped.

  “That idiot,” Plato said, shaking his head back and forth, as soon as the report had finished. “That bloody idiot.” He looked first at Chin and then at Hauptmann, and spread his arms. “Of course, there was a lot of pairing-off during our mission, but Johnstone had been alone. He kept saying he couldn’t wait to get back on terra firma. ‘We’ll all get heroes’ welcomes when we return,’ he’d say, ‘and I’ll have as many women as I want.’”

  Hauptmann’s eyes went wide. “He really thought that?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Plato. “‘We’re astronauts,’ he kept saying. ‘We’ve got the Right Stuff.’”

  Hauptmann glanced down; his weblink was dutifully displaying an explanation of the arcane reference. “Oh,” he said.

  Plato lifted his eyebrows. “What’s going to happen to Johnstone?”

  Chin exhaled noisily. “He’s finished,” he said softly.

  “What?” said Plato.

  “Finished,” agreed Hauptmann. “See, until now he didn’t have a trustworthiness rating.” Plato’s face conveyed his confusion. “Since the day we were born,” continued Hauptmann, “other people have been commenting about us on the web. ‘Freddie is a bully,’ ‘Jimmy stole my lunch,’ ‘Sally cheated on the test.’”

  “But surely no one cares about what you did as a child,” said Plato.

  “It goes on your whole life,” said Chin. “People gossip endlessly about other people on the web, and our weblinks”—he held up his right arm so that Plato could see the device—“search and correlate information about anyone we’re dealing with or come physically close to. That’s why we don’t need governments anymore; governments exist to regulate, and, thanks to the trustworthiness ratings, our society is self-regulating.”

  “It was inevitable,” said Hauptmann. “From the day the web was born, from the day the first search engine was created. All we needed were smarter search agents, greater bandwidth, and everyone being online.”

  “But you spacers,” said Chin, “predate that sort of thing. Oh, you had a crude web, but most of those postings were lost thanks to electromagnetic pulses from the Colombian War. You guys are clean slates. It’s not that you have a zero trustworthiness rating; rather, you’ve got no trustworthiness ratings at all.”

  “Except for your man Johnstone,” said Hauptmann, sadly. “If it was on the news,” and he cocked a thumb at the wall monitor, “then it’s on the web, and everyone knows about it. A leper would be more welcome than someone with that kind of talk associated with him.”

  “So what should he do?” asked Plato. “What should all of us from the Olduvai do?”

  There weren’t a million people on the Mall this time. There weren’t even a hundred thousand. And the mood wasn’t jubilant; rather, a melancholy cloud hung over everyone.

  But it was the best answer. Everyone could see that. The Olduvai’s lander had been refurbished, and crews from Earth’s orbiting space stations had visited the mothership, upgrading and refurbishing it, as well.

  Captain Plato looked despondent; Johnstone and the several others of the twenty-five who had now publicly contravened acceptable standards of behavior looked embarrassed and contrite.

  Hauptmann and Chin had no trouble getting to the front of the crowd this time. They already knew what Plato was going to say, having discussed it with him on the way over. And so they watched the faces in the crowd—still a huge number of people, but seeming positively post-Apo
calyptic in comparison to the throng of a few days before.

  “People of the Earth,” said Plato, addressing his physical and virtual audiences. “We knew we’d come back to a world much changed, an Earth centuries older than the one we’d left behind. We’d hoped—and those of us who pray had prayed—that it would be a better place. And, in many ways, it clearly is.

  “We’ll find a new home,” Plato continued. “Of that I’m sure. And we’ll build a new society—one, we hope, that might be as peaceful and efficient as yours. We—all twenty-five of us—have already agreed on one thing that should get us off on the right foot.” He looked at the men and women of his crew, then turned and faced the people of the Free Earth for the last time. “When we find a new world to settle, we won’t be planting any flags in its soil.”

  Kata

  Bindu

  Many years ago, with great trepidation, I approached Gregory Benford, the king of hard SF, and asked him to read my novel Starplex, and, if he liked it, to offer a blurb for the cover. He did so: “Starplex is complex but swift, inventive but real feeling, with ideas coming thick and fast; for big time interstellar adventure, look no farther.”

  That was flattering enough, but the best was yet to come: Greg remembered me and, in 2001, when he was putting together an anthology of stories about microcosms, he asked me to contribute. This story is the result of that invitation.

  We sometimes contemplated giving ourselves a name. “Those Who Had Been Flesh” appealed to us. So did “The Collective Consciousness of Earth.” And “The Uploaded.”

  But, to our infinite sadness, there was no need for a name—for there was no one to speak with, no one to proffer an introduction to, no possible confusion about the referents of pronouns. Despite centuries now of scanning the sky for alien radio signals, we’d found nothing.

  Because of that, we’d never even had to resolve the question of whether we should refer to ourselves in the singular or the plural. Granted, we had once been ten billion individuals; plurals were no doubt appropriate then. But after almost all members of Homo sapiens had taken The Next Step, we had surrendered that individuality, slowly at first, then with abandon—for who would not want to take into themselves the genius of the world’s greatest mathematicians, the wit of the cleverest comedians, the virtue of the most altruistic humanitarians, the talent of the most gifted composers, and the tranquility of the most serene contemplatives?

  Ah, but it turned out there were some who did not want this. Mennonites were long gone; Luddites were likewise a thing of the past. But there was one last group left, in Africa, that still lived by traditional means. They did not want to take The Next Step—and so we instead gave them that famous giant leap: we moved them all to the Moon.

  What else could we have done? Although we had been about to become something more than human, we were, and are, still humane: we certainly weren’t going to just eliminate them. But we couldn’t leave anyone here on Earth, for once we’d uploaded our consciousnesses, once we had merged into the global web, a fanatic could disable the computers, could destroy our helpless, noncorporeal selves.

  To send hunter-gatherers to the Moon might seem, well, lunatic: establishing a colony of the least technologically advanced people in a place where technology was the only thing making life possible. But we rationalized that we were actually being beneficent: with their hearts laboring under gentle lunar gravity, they would likely live decades longer, and their elderly—who, on the African veldt, had had no access to artificial hips or even wheelchairs—would be far more mobile than they had been on Earth.

  More: we no longer cared what happened to Earth’s ecosystem, and, indeed, we knew that the inevitable impact of an asteroid would eventually cause worldwide calamity here. The Last Tribe, of course, could do nothing to avert a meteor strike, and we, no longer physical, could do nothing on their behalf. But now that they were on the airless, waterless moon, only a direct hit to their domed ecosystem would do any real damage. We had likely granted their civilization tens of millions of years of additional life.

  Safety for us, and a better life for them.

  It should have been a win-win scenario.

  Prasp fashioned his wings from elephant skin spread between elongated wooden fingers. When Kari, his woman, helped him strap the wings to his arms, they stretched several times as wide as Prasp was tall.

  The old stories, handed down now for a thousand generations, told of wind, the invisible hand of one of the gods moving through the air, pushing things about. But wind, like the stars of legend, did not exist here; Prasp wondered, despite the spellbinding stories he’d heard, whether it had ever existed even in Kata Bindu, the Old Place. Indeed, he wondered whether the Old Place itself was a myth. How could lights—and even orbs, one of fire, another of stone—have moved across the sky? How could people have weighed five or six times as much as they do here? The ancients were said to have been no bulkier, indeed, to have if anything been shorter, than people of today. By what magic could they have acquired additional weight?

  Regardless, Prasp was pleased that his weight was what it was. Even with the great wings he’d built, he could barely get aloft. Yes, they did well for gliding from tree to tree—on those rare occasions when he managed to climb a tree without damaging his fragile contraptions. But to take to the air as the birds did still eluded him. Oh, even without the wings, Prasp could jump twice his own body height. But he wanted to go much higher than that.

  Prasp wanted to touch the center of the world’s roof.

  It was easy enough for us, for—The Uploaded; yes, that’s what we’ll call ourselves—to access information. Indeed, for us, to wonder was to know.

  We knew that the refuge for the last primitive humans was in Copernicus, a lunar crater ninety-three kilometers wide. The roof over it consisted in part of two transparent silicone membranes, the outer of which was coated with 2.5 microns of gold. That gold layer was thin enough to screen out UV and other radiation, while still letting most visible light through—sunglasses for the entire sky.

  Between those two membranes was a gap twelve meters thick filled with pure water. Transparent gold, transparent membranes, transparent water—the only thing that should have marred the primitives’ view upward from the inside of the dome was the crisscrossing network of load-bearing titanium cables, which divided their sky into a multitude of triangles.

  If the water only had to shield the habitat from solar radiation, a thickness of 2.5 meters would have been enough. But this multilayered transparent roof—appearing almost flat, but really a section out of a vast sphere—had to contain the habitat’s atmosphere, as well. The air inside was almost pure oxygen, but at only 200 millibars: quite breathable, and no more prone to supporting combustion than Earth’s own atmosphere, which had a similar partial pressure of O2.

  Still, even that attenuated atmosphere pressed upward with a force of over two tonnes per square meter. So the water shield had been made twelve, rather than two-and-a-half, meters thick; the air pressure helped keep the roof up, and the water’s weight eliminated stresses on the inner silicone membrane that would have otherwise been caused by the atmosphere trying to burst out into the vacuum of space.

  It was a simple, elegant design—and one that required virtually no maintenance. But there was one more component to the roof, a topmost layer, an icing on the transparent cake. A thin film had been applied overtop of the gold-covered outer membrane, a polarizing layer of liquid crystals that, under computer control, simulated a night of Earthly length by making the dome opaque for eight out of every twenty-four hours during the two-week-long lunar day. It also darkened the sky during the fourteen-day-long lunar night when the Earth was full or nearly full.

  And indeed, the sky had blackened just as it should have one evening at 2100 local time, the sun fading and then completely disappearing as the crystals polarized, darkening the re-creation of southern Africa that filled the bottom of Copernicus. The only light came from the lamps locat
ed at each crisscrossing of the load-bearing cables; collectively, they providing as much illumination as the full moon did on Earth’s surface.

  The night had continued on like any other, with beasts prowling, and humans huddling for warmth, and protection, and companionship.

  But sometime during that night, the computer controlling that circadian winking, that daily shifting of the sky from opaque to transparent, had crashed. When morning should have come, the polarizing membrane did not clear. The world of the last biological humans was cut off from the rest of the universe by a night that seemed as though it would never end.

  Prasp ran, each stride taking him two bodylengths farther ahead. He flapped his arms, moving the great wings of skin and sticks, beating them up and down, up and down, as fast as he could, and—

  Yes! Yes!

  He was rising, lifting, ascending—

  Flying!

  He was flying!

  He rose higher and higher, the ground receding beneath him. He could see the savannah grasses far below, the giant, sprawling Acacia trees diminishing to nothing.

  He kept flapping the wings, although he could feel that his face was already slick with sweat and he was gulping in air as fast as he could. His arms were aching, but he continued to move them up and down, his body rising farther and farther. He’d always known the faint lines crisscrossing the dome were actually thick cords, as big around as his own waist, for he had seen them where they touched the mountains that encircled the world. And now he was getting up far enough that he could see that thickness, see the pinpoints of light at each of their intersections resolving themselves into glowing disks, and—