Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  But then the robot did do a peculiarly human thing. It looked at Conrad and said, “Will you release my arm, please? You are impeding my progress.”

  “Very well,” Conrad said, letting go, and then followed the thing along a sidewalk, and into a building marked PLANNING OFFICE. From there, they followed a surprisingly long and twisting set of corridors to a wall marked B. B., PRESIDENT.

  “You may wait here until your appointment,” the robot told him. “Your appointment is in two minutes. If you wish reading material, music, or other entertainments, you may request them from the wall.”

  “I'm familiar with the principle, yes,” Conrad answered testily. Although, to be fair, that sort of enlivened, enlibraried wellstone surface had become rather rare in the colony of late. And the world was full of children who probably had no idea how things were supposed to work. He waved a hand at the robot and said, “You're released. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “It is never a bother to serve,” the robot answered dutifully. And although it is well known that robots possess no emotion and little self-awareness, they do have different operating modes and different levels of priority or urgency, and the thing did seem inclined to hurry away from Conrad, lest its morning rounds be further disrupted.

  It was a foolish prejudice for an overgrown Irish lad to harbor, but Conrad had given up all hope of ever liking robots, or even pretending to. And why should he? No matter where he traveled or how much he saw, he never felt too far removed from Camp Friendly, where it seemed to him that his adult life had begun. Where the Palace Guards had ruled humorlessly, with the constant threat of revoked privileges and the painful sting of tazzers. And worse. The very last thing you needed was something brilliant and inhuman running your life for you, and if the bad taste had not left Conrad's mouth by now, then surely it never would.

  Damn the King and Queen of Sol, anyway, for imposing that final injustice upon him. More than any other single thing, that act had precipitated the Revolt and thus given birth to this struggling colony. Because of them, he was standing here now.

  But this reflection had little to do with the business at hand, so Conrad faced the word “President” on the wall and said, “Door, please.”

  Obligingly, a rectangular seam appeared in the wall around the sign's lettering, and the material within it folded aside like a thick, stiff curtain. Inside was an office, surprisingly small in comparison to the building around it. It was dominated by a large wellwood desk, with Brenda Bohobe sitting behind it in a red-black chair with spreading, highly stylized wings at the top. Not the wings of an angel, but those of a really fast aircraft.

  Brenda herself had a swelled head—literally, almost half again as big as a normal human's. Nor was that the only change; since Conrad had last seen her she'd given up her blue skin in favor of a rich, deep brown, and behind her eyes Conrad thought he could see a faint glow of wellstone. Hypercomputers on the brain? She wouldn't be the first person to try it.

  She looked up, unsurprised because of course the robot had told a computer who was coming, and the computer had told Brenda. Her studying gaze made a piece of equipment out of Conrad, ruling and measuring, judging his quality and condition.

  “Conrad Mursk. Well, well. I haven't seen your shadow across my path in dog decades. Didn't you give it all up to become a fisherman or something?”

  “Marine wildlife ecologist,” he corrected. “But that was years ago. I've given myself a new assignment now.”

  And Brenda, the same as ever, favored him with a sly, sour look, all-knowing and preemptively displeased. “And it brings you here to me. How very fortunate, and surprising. Let me guess: you're investigating the fax shortage.”

  “You always were a smart one,” he told her honestly. “But really, do you get outside the cities much? Because life has gotten pretty bad out there in the countryside. And brief.”

  She absorbed that without surprise, and then said, less acerbically, “I'm aware of that, yes. All I can tell you is, we're doing all we can. Did you seriously believe otherwise?”

  Well . . .

  “In hindsight,” she continued, “our economy is frightfully small for this sort of undertaking. Faxware production has always been a small fraction of the Queendom's total industry, but out here, one way or another, over half the population is tied up in it. And that's too much; it leaves too many holes. I suppose that wasn't evident two centuries ago, but gods, is it evident now.”

  “I don't understand.”

  Brenda sighed, the reflexive sourness dropping away from her face. She looked tired, and truthfully a little bit scared. “Oh, Conrad. The issues are complex, really.”

  “There's an angel outside, by the way. Said he needed help.”

  “Don't they all? We get them here sometimes: pilgrims expecting to be healed. We shoo them onward to the Domesville hospital.”

  “Where they can wait their turn like good little troopers?”

  She sighed again. “I'll give you a tour of the facilities, all right? And then maybe you'll understand what I'm talking about.”

  “Are you sure you can spare the time? Things seem rather busy around here.”

  “I'll print a copy.”

  Conrad raised an eyebrow, suddenly feeling somewhat sour and accusatory himself. “‘Well, well, rank doth have its droit du seigneur, don't it just?'”

  That was a quote from Wenders Rodenbeck. Conrad couldn't remember which play, but Rodenbeck was considered the premier wordsmith and storyteller of the age—or had been when Newhope left the Queendom, anyway—and such memorable lines were instantly recognizable to anyone who'd grown up with them. That one came from a scene much like this, a citizen confronting a bureaucrat of some sort, and finding a whiff of corruption. Tilly and the Don of Chefs, in Midcentury Blah?

  Brenda was not amused. “Just shut up, Conrad. Don't you come barging in here with that shit. Do you want the tour, or not?”

  And in reply, all that occurred to Conrad was another ill-advised line from Rodenbeck: “‘I would, madam, that every entity in this sphere were as helpful as thy smallest nail.'”

  The tour was in fact illuminating. The print plates were “stitched” together atom by atom, in house-sized vacuum chambers, by crossed beams of laser light playing over silicon chips covered in tiny, tiny manipulator arms. The process was invisible to the naked eye, but the walls of the assembly building were covered in a bewildering variety of sensors and indicators, including little holie screens which showed the atoms coming together in a blur that was almost, but not quite, too fast to see.

  The “nip chips,” as the manipulator arrays were called, had a “mean time between failure” of one billion hours, which meant that by the end of a single pid one or two of them in a batch were probably on the brink of failure. So when the pid's second shift came in, the machines were shut down and the nip chips swapped out and recycled.

  This created a huge demand for nip chips—which had no other use except the manufacture of fax machine print plates—so they were produced on-site as well, and then tested extensively before being placed into inventory. “Inventory” in Conrad's experience had always meant a room or building with an element-sorting mass buffer, a fax machine, and enough floor space to assemble and disassemble the equipment you were faxing. Here, though, it referred to an old-fashioned warehouse full of vibration-dampening shelves, holding row after row after row of tiny diamond vials filled with chemically inert argon, in which the nip chips awaited their turn on the print plate assembly floor.

  There were other warehouses as well, for the storage of ore and semipurified element stock, and there were traditional inventories—here called “smalters”—which fed the element stock into mass buffers, which in turn fed, through “teleport valves,” the tiny fax machines which produced the atoms which were assembled into print plates by the stitching machines. And then there were the “clean rooms,” which were also filled with argon, so that the workers inside had to wear space suits. Ther
e were test chambers, where finished plates were tortured with heat and cold, vibration and caustic chemicals, electric fields and ionizing radiation. Those that survived were then tested functionally—faxing a series of increasingly complex objects—and then torture-tested again just to be sure.

  Conrad was no genius, but it didn't take one to grasp what a huge undertaking this all was. Even sweeping the floors of this place was a formidable—and constant!—task. And yet the output—the brace of shipping crates in the finished product warehouse—was tiny. Despite the scale of the operation, the facility produced an average of just one print plate per day. And although their quality fell along a “multivariate continuum of lifetimes and probable failure modes,” the plates were sorted into three sales categories: personal, industrial, and medical.

  “Faxing a cup of coffee is one thing,” Brenda explained. “You can tolerate a lot of impurity and displacement. The human body is a lot more difficult. You want it to still be living when it steps out, right? More than that, you want to preserve all its electrical potentials, or the person will be unconscious or dazed or amnesic. Sometimes psychotic. And the collapsing potentials have to be perfectly synchronized, or you'll see epilepsy and cardiac fibrillation, or worse. Testing on the medical-grade fax machines can get pretty ugly for this reason. The vast majority are rejected. And Conrad, seriously, don't ever let anyone talk you into feeding your body through an industrial plate. Even if it's life or death, you're better off taking your chances.”

  While she was speaking, she handed a wellstone sketchplate off to another copy of herself. This place turned out to be crawling with Brendas—dozens or perhaps even hundreds of them. About one person in twenty was a Brenda, and they all looked tired and unhappy. A few glanced at Conrad in surprise, but hurried on with their business. The others simply ignored him, too wrapped up in their own affairs to pay any attention.

  “Do you integrate all these copies?” Conrad asked, trying to keep the amazement out of his voice. His own brain threatened overload when he merged even three or four copies back together. He hadn't run any more plural than that even in the best of times, for fear that he'd damage his neural wiring and have to scrap the memories anyway.

  “Only the variances,” she said. “I developed a filter for it: anything significant, anything that deviates from the norm, is weighted and blended with my baseline daily experience. I let the copies run for a few weeks, and reintegrate them in groups of five, then reintegrate the fivers to update the canonical me, whom you spoke with earlier.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  She shrugged. “You get used to it. Anyway, no one else wants to volunteer for medical testing. I burn a lot of copies that way as well.”

  “Ouch,” he said, with genuine sympathy.

  “Yeah, tell me about it. I don't know what a hard failure feels like, because the memories of it are destroyed in the process, but judging from the sounds I make and the looks on my face, it's pretty damned unpleasant.”

  “So every medical fax that comes out of this place has produced at least one Brenda?”

  “More like a hundred,” she said, looking about as uncomfortable as people ever did while still keeping their composure. “We have to be sure there isn't a glitch somewhere. Unfortunately, generally speaking, there usually is.”

  “Ouch,” Conrad said again. Then, feeling her need to change the subject, he said, “Tell me again why you can't just fax more fax machines? I've always known it was so, but I've never understood it.”

  The unease of her expression was displaced by irritation. “I wish one person could come through here without asking me that. Really. Look, inanimate systems like a metal beam, or even a diamond monocrystal, are extremely forgiving. They practically assemble themselves, which is why even a personal fax machine can produce them. Food is even easier to build, although it's chemically more complex, because the placement of molecules in a dead biological system is kind of arbitrary. If the cell walls don't quite come together, who cares? You're just going to digest it anyway.

  “Living bodies are difficult for the reasons we've already discussed, but even there you've got considerable slop in where and how you place the pieces. Our bodies are wet, flexible, self-correcting mechanisms. If you're careful, you can make near-perfect copies of them with only nanometer precision on the placement of atoms. DNA and proteins and fats are all extremely stable. The atoms want to fall into those patterns, or life could never have arisen in the first place. Wellstone is about as complex, though for different reasons.

  “But a print plate is a whole other thing. In technical terms, it's a heterogeneous mix of quantum-wave structures supported by the level fluctuations of valence electrons. Even the sorriest, crappiest fax machine—a garbage disposal, say—requires zero impurities, zero defects, and picometer precision on assembly, which is five hundred times better than the fax itself can achieve.

  “And even then, you've still got to get the waveforms right. Once they're established, the plate does fortunately have some damage tolerance. If it didn't, we could only use them in a bath of liquid helium, and the first object you printed would destroy the machine. But to get the fields up and running, you have to build the plate exactly right on the very first try. Ninety-five percent of the plates we manufacture go straight into the disposal.”

  “So,” Conrad said as he struggled with all this new information, “you're using fully half the colony's resources, but the medical-grade faxes are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of your total output.”

  “Yes,” she said unhappily. “We've improved the equipment as much as we possibly can out here. It's nearly as good as the Queendom's best, but we don't have anything like the Queendom's industrial base. They can afford to recycle all but the best of the best Here, the most we can do is decertify the plates which don't pass medical, and squeeze the maximum functionality out of the few that do.

  “We've got the most advanced filtering algorithms that have ever existed, anywhere, in fourteen star systems. Unless some other colony has leaped ahead of us and the broadcast hasn't arrived yet, which I suppose is possible. But here on P2 we had the advantage of a nearly breathable atmosphere. That challenge—being tantalizingly close to the good life but not quite in it—has given us a big head start.”

  As they walked, she looked him over again in that same critical, vaguely disappointed way, and Conrad realized suddenly that she was seeing not so much a person as a dynamic and very complex object which had passed, many times, through her fax plates and filters. When she looked at him, she was admiring her handiwork. Seeing its flaws, wondering how she could do better.

  “You've been without a fax for what, fifteen years now?” she asked.

  “Fourteen,” he answered, counting it out on his fingers.

  She nodded. “All right, fourteen. Biologically, you should be in middle age by now. Turning fat and gray, with wrinkles around the eyes.”

  “You always were a charmer,” he told her grumpily.

  “But you aren't!” she said, protesting his anger. “Have you looked in a mirror? You're fine. You're a handsome young man, and I'd guess a virile one as well. Even fourteen years ago, our morbidity filters were attacking the aging process at its base—reversing not only the symptoms, but the causes. No one has ever needed to do that before, and believe me, it's not easy. But I'll estimate you're aging at about a third the natural rate. Maybe even a quarter.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Really?” She thought he was handsome? Now that was news. Nearly everyone was physically handsome, of course, and the people who weren't either didn't want to be or simply had bad taste. So in using the word, people generally meant something more than the obvious skin-deep. And she thought he was “virile,” too! Another loaded word. This was so much at odds with what he thought she thought of him that for the time being he wasn't sure he could believe it. Surely she was flattering him, currying his favor for some reason.

  “You probably are due for a faxing, thoug
h,” she said, still studying him. “If you'd care to risk it, I've got a medical-grade machine in the latter stages of testing. It's intended for the Bupsville hospital, and it has my latest, greatest filter that should keep you fit for several centuries.”

  “Hmm,” he said, considering that. “Wow. You have been making progress here. Can I make a backup first?”

  Her laugh was sour. “I'll insist on it, Conrad. What kind of place do you think we're running here?”

  “All right, all right, no offense meant. Sure, I'll give your machine a try.”

  It turned out she was leading him toward it already—the last stop on his tour. In another minute they were there, in a much smaller testing chamber than any he'd seen previously. The machine stood in the room's exact center, with lights shining down on it from above. The number 449 was emblazoned on it in glowing red numerals. Conrad sniffed the air, finding it rich with . . . something.

  “That's the new fax smell,” she said, catching his look. “Ionization on the plate and polymer outgassing from the surrounding chassis. Plus a hint of neodymium, and of course the cleaning solution. There's nothing else quite like it.”

  And then she said something dark and strange that Conrad didn't fully process until much later: “I'm glad you got to smell it this once.”

  Back at her office again, she called for a door, ushered him inside, and moved back around to sit behind her desk. Conrad settled into one of the armchairs, which was made of plush wellcloth—currently a brightly glowing yellow—and was probably the most comfortable thing he'd parked his ass on in half a century.

  “Ooh,” he said. “Wow. Nice.” His ass was new as well, so the fit was close to perfect.

  “So. Have I answered your questions? Do you understand the issues we're faced with?”

  With effort, Conrad summoned up a bit of the outrage that had brought him here. “Well, no, not completely. I mean, for example, better fax filters aren't going to help with accidental death. Which is all death, right? I haven't heard of anyone dying of old age.”