by Larry Niven
From time to time, a little breeze whips in the hole, and the flowers dance as freely as those of a wild neep might. And Mads Poulson feeds me all the while.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 10
Copyright © 2014 by K. C. Norton. All rights reserved.
Effect and Cause
by Ken Liu
.ssengnihton, neht dnA
Flash white blinding a.
“Brace for impact,” says the computer.
The superheated air cools. Out of the white light, things emerge: the instrument panels; myself in the chair, clutching the handholds; the jagged edges of the cockpit wall knit themselves into a pristine whole.
“T minus one. Shields breached.”
Through the porthole, I see a silvery fishlike shape depart. Already, it’s kilometers away.
“T minus ten.”
The silver light winks out at the edge of visibility like a dying star.
* * *
Dashing about the cockpit, I frantically punch lit up buttons to make them go dim. The anxiety subsides.
I run backwards out of the cockpit until I end up in the galley.
The klaxon goes off.
“Incoming: theta six-one, phi one-four-eight, distance six-five-five, velocity one-oh-seven.”
Ignoring this, I sit down at the table and pick up a cup to spit scalding hot coffee into it. Then I proceed to vomit food onto my plate so I can sculpt it with a knife and fork into peas, carrots, an omelette.
* * *
A shiver, and my thoughts flow forward again.
“What … happened?” I ask.
“Unknown.” The computer pauses. “System clock is out of sync with sidereal observations.”
“It’s like someone just took his finger off the REWIND button.” I set down the cup of coffee that had just come out of me, nauseated. “We were dead.”
“Affirmative.” The computer hesitates. “And impossible.”
“An Azazin ship,” I say.
* * *
We know almost nothing about the Azazin save that they’ve made repeated incursions into this region of Union space. My one-man sentry ship is our first line of defense.
“They seem to believe in preemptive attacks,” I say.
“Hypothesis: we hit a temporal anomaly that briefly reversed the flow of time,” the computer says.
“I’m going to return fire.”
“But if time has been reversed, our attack now would be unprovoked.”
I shrug. “The military lawyers can sort out causality later.”
From the trajectory of the projectile that hit me, it’s easy to calculate the location of the stealth Azazin ship.
“Subphotonic missile ready.”
The click from the big red button is satisfying.
I press up against the porthole. Watching flickering numbers on a screen is never as good as the actual explosion.
“T minus ten.”
The passing seconds seem to slow down.
“T minus zero.”
But there is no dazzling flare, no new star in the sky.
“.orez sunim T”
The arrow of time.
… The missile reverses its course, now flying backwards, retracing its arc back to the launch tube…
… I rush around the cockpit, frantically pushing buttons …
* * *
The galley. Spitting coffee. Someone takes his finger off the REWIND button.
We’ve been through it dozens of times. Sometimes I shoot at them; sometimes they shoot at me. But always, we end up back here, fifteen minutes earlier.
“They can temporarily reverse the local flow of time in a bubble for up to fifteen minutes,” the computer says. “Perhaps it’s even triggered automatically when their ship is destroyed.”
“I think the time-reverser is designed to allow those in its field, including the Azazin, to keep their thoughts and experiences,” I say, finally understanding. “They’re repeating the experiment to gather intel on our tactical responses, like running rats through a maze.”
* * *
Ignoring the computer’s vociferous objections, I engage the manual override targeting system.
I press the big red button; the click is satisfying.
The faint trail of the missile approaches the spot in space where I know the Azazin ship is hiding.
“T minus ten.”
So close—
My heart is in my throat.
—nothing.
“A miss. Closest approach to target: fifty meters.” There’s a faint trace of I-told-you-so in the computer’s voice.
Time continues to flow forward. The Azazin were able to tell that I was going to miss, and they didn’t bother to reverse time for my useless attack.
No choice now. “Set a collision course. Full speed ahead.”
“They will simply rever—”
“DO IT!”
We dive towards the invisible target, the oldest, most desperate tactic known to man. But, perhaps, they cannot believe that I will actually go through with it.
.ssengnihton, neht dnA
Flash white blinding a.
The ship zooms backwards, in front of me a dark, looming bulk that quickly fades against the stars.
And then the finger is off the REWIND button. It’s fifteen minutes earlier.
“A miss—”
Before the computer can finish, I punch a small black button: my jury-rigged secret. It sends a signal that shuts off the antimatter containment field in the subphotonic missile’s warhead.
A dazzling flare, and then the most beautiful sight in the universe: the spinning, glowing vortex of a matter-antimatter annihilation explosion.
“Well done,” says the computer.
I gambled that the Azazin time reverser could not be triggered twice in quick succession. The missile was meant to come close, but miss. My suicide collision course was calculated to take exactly fifteen minutes. When the Azazin reversed time’s arrow, they brought the missile back to its point of closest approach. Effect became cause.
“Thinking backwards hurts,” I say, as we continue to watch the spinning vortex.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 2
Copyright © 2013 by Ken Liu. All rights reserved.
Ghost in the Machine
by Ralph Roberts
Marcus Teague sat hunched over in the cramped confines of the 16-gigabyte USB thumb drive. The muscles on his mighty arms rippled as he cleaned his wizard’s sword, running the polishing spell up and down the blade with precision. It might be all virtual, but he was buff with bulging biceps, a mighty chest, a narrow waist, bronzed skin, ready for any battle. The sleeveless T-shirt with its mystical symbols in hex and octal, and the Microsoft and Ubuntu certification badges, emphasized that.
“Looks like Bill could spring for a bigger ready room,” he said, “maybe a 64-gig thumb drive or, better, a 120-gig solid state drive, huh?”
He looked up when Oscar did not answer.
The old man didn’t look good—battered and bruised, moaning whenever he moved, flat on his back, exhausted. Troubleshooting hardware took it out of you. Blown power supplies, crashed hard drives, loose cables, and all those intermittent ills that kept Oscar in dark old machines for hours when no telling what was going to jump him.
When time permitted, Marcus went along to watch his friend’s back. Besides, he enjoyed chopping up fanged viruses, stomping malware data-mining dwarves, tearing apart virus ogres, erasing script dragons, and all the rest of it. Bring on those Trojans in their virtual Greek armor. They were no match for the wiz!
Marcus shook his head. Oscar had insisted on keeping the same physique—he was the same old man now as the virtual-reality-helmet-wearing body laying currently on the broken-down couch in the littered backroom of Billal’s Computer Repair. Billal’s was maybe the most unprofitable computer shop in Chicago—but it had two things no other shop anywhere in the world had: it had him and Oscar. It also had Bil
l, who tried hard but was the most incompetent shop manager possible, and the shadowy, probably criminal partner, Al—who had bankrolled the place but was never around much. Well, scratch that last; Al hung out in the shop a lot more of late.
With some grunting, Oscar managed to roll over a little and looked at Marcus.
“Bill can’t afford it. Shop’s losing money, which suits that sleazebag Al just fine. He wants the secret of how we do this.”
Marcus shrugged and went back to working on his sword. He just wanted to do his job. He liked it, even if minimum wage was all they got. He’d made all this work after Bill invented the concept. Coded it, debugged it, and was the first to try it. This was his baby! He’d given it birth—virtual computer repair. And, yes, he knew Al—who had to be connected to organized crime—was hot after this technology. That’s why the gangster dribbled out only enough funds to keep the shop doors open.
“Marcus, what do you want out of life?” Oscar said.
Marcus thought about it and shrugged. “Enough money for me to upgrade my hardware at home and to find true love—in whichever order, but I want a 24-core CPU soon.”
Oscar painfully laid flat again. “You won’t get them things here.”
A tone beeped and a work order with an IP address popped up on a tiny virtual screen.
“For me?” Oscar asked, his voice weary.
“Nope, it’s for me—some guy’s computer’s running slow and probably full of nasty little beasts.” He smiled enthusiastically, gave his sword one more pass with the polishing spell, and sheathed it. Grinning, he hoisted his backpack of diagnostic spells and the like.
Oscar gave him a disgusted look. “Don’t enjoy it too much, and be careful. Something weirder than usual is going on out there.”
Marcus carefully moved to the hatch. “You get a call, let me know where, Oscar, and don’t hesitate to use that emergency abort utility I wrote for us. The red button: take it out, flip off the safety cover, press ABORT.”
Oscar shook his head. “No, not that. You said yourself you weren’t sure it would work. No telling what would happen to our real bodies. You said that.”
Marcus shrugged. “Last resort, guy. Just don’t get killed. That would mess up your real body even more. At least take some of those routines I built from the data in the Shaolin temple’s computer.”
Oscar shook his head despondently. “Haven’t got the energy to use them, Marcus.”
Worrying about his friend, Marcus flowed into the USB port that led to the shop’s dinky server. A hand reached out to help him get to his feet. It was Beep, the USB driver.
“Thanks, Beep.”
Beep.
“You have a good day, too, buddy.”
The server itself was an old quad-core clunker he’d gotten off eBay for $50, for which Bill still owed him. But it had some memory, the latest version of Ubuntu, and gave him space to write and develop his spells and scripts. He always had been good at coding.
One-handed, Marcus air-typed up a large virtual screen with webcam, then smiled at his image. A mixture of Conan the Barbarian and King Arthur’s Merlin the Magician—he could swing a sword or wave a wand with the best of them. Blond, blue-eyed, well-developed muscles—not a bit like his concave-chested, bespectacled, short, geeky body recumbent out there in the backroom.
A real chick magnet! Unfortunately, all the women who might be impressed were out there in the real world. He waved the screen away and headed for the cable modem port—no fast fiber optic or wireless connection for this cheap shop. Uploading was a pain. Slow!
He nodded to bits of software he passed; in this computer he knew them all and they trusted him. A bunch of little memory monkeys ran by carrying bits of this and bytes of that to here and there, ones and zeros flashing in their beady little eyes. “Hi, Marcus, hi Marcus,” they chanted.
Passing the power supply, he patted one of the cables. Sparks playfully tickled his fingers. As a small boy he’d been fascinated with electricity and quickly made friends with it. That friendship often paid off in his current job. Whoa! Current job? He laughed.
Squeezing into the cable modem, he slowly climbed to the nearest intersection with one of Chicago’s fiber optic backbones. This was the problem using just a regular cable connection. Fast download, yes, but slow upload. Servers needed a way to push data out quickly as well as pull it in.
Marcus broke out of the slow upload—like swimming through molasses—and stepped out on the crowded platform. All sorts of things shuffled around, waiting on the next train of data packets—email messages, SQL commands off to visit some database and retrieve info, lots of web URL queries, always rushing about to keep their human surfers sated.
He sensed the attack even before the monstrous Python script reared its ugly head over the railing at the back of the platform. He dived and rolled as a blast of red-hot electrons struck the spot where he had been.
He laid a more spell on it and didn’t see anything to worry him in its code, so no use being nice. Marcus air-typed rm dragon. His erase code killed the process, wiped the Python file, and the fearsome towering head and body poofed into nothingness. At least he hoped it had. Erasing computer files was not always permanent. He was okay, but the attack had left behind a good deal of destruction. Its deadly breath, missing him, had killed a number of innocent pieces of software going about their legitimate duties.
Marcus knelt next to a whimpering, frightened jpeg—an image of a beautiful baby being sent by its proud mother to the baby’s grandmother. Now that image would never arrive, fading away as he held it in his arms.
Sadly he stood, watching the surviving data constructs rush around in panic. This was just wrong! An attempt on him had destroyed good data, useful utilities and other programs—something very much against his principles. It was all a waste.
The attacking script had been crude but powerful. Someone or something out there was ruthless in its hatred of him. Well, he would see about that! He would make it his mission to hunt down this killer!
The train of data packet cars whizzed to a stop and all the data and snippets of code hurried to get on before another dragon could come along.
Marcus started to enter a car and a wall of stench hit his virtual nose. Spam! Of all things in the Internet universe he hated spam the most, spam and the evil humans who caused it to spew like so much sewage from their computers.
This packet was crammed to the ceiling with the slimy, stinky stuff. All spam must die! He donated them a couple of filter bombs from his backpack, ducking as tons of fragments blew through the packet’s sides and more or less neatly landed in bit bins on the platform.
Satisfied, he moved to the next packet, boarded, and took a seat.
He called up a screen and scrolled the work order. Hmmm … An anonymous IP address—not usual, and it cost extra. Spammers, hackers, and other evil humans, they liked to have anonymous IPs. He had a bad feeling about this.
A tall black gentleman in a three-piece suit slid into the seat next to Marcus. He held out a check for four million dollars, smiling broadly.
Marcus tapped the certification patches on his T-shirt. “No phishing around here.”
The software’s eyes widened and he jumped up, motioning several of his kind to turn back. “Copper! Run! It’s John Law!” he yelled in a Nigerian accent.
Several pieces of legitimate email nodded their thanks to Marcus. Phishing gave them all a bad name—almost as much as spam did.
A stream of porn oozed into the car. Marcus pointed to the next packet and they left. Porn was pretty mindless stuff, but it knew when the wiz was around.
Speaking of such stuff, Marcus turned around in his seat looking for Gwen. He had not seen her in a week or more. Gwen did some racy stuff, but she was a real woman and far from mindless. Some men paid a lot for interaction. She was the only other virtual human he’d seen down here besides himself and Oscar. They’d had some great conversations, riding together. He knew she hated what she had to
do for a living. Certainly she didn’t want her only family—her brother, who was an attorney with a big firm downtown—ever finding out.
Gwen’s virtual body was as voluptuous as his was buff. She’d confided that her real body was a female geek, flat, not curvy. She even had a computer science degree and loved to code, but couldn’t find a programming gig so was reduced to this—her face showed her disgust—“job.” And she told him about her server—she also favored Ubuntu as her Linux of choice—and mentioned how she had backup virtual reality software on it. Even told him her real name, Gwendolyn Louise Baker.
Wow! Beautiful, and she knew computers and Linux, too? What … a … woman!
Marcus surprised himself by hugging her on their last ride. He didn’t do well with girls, not nearly confident enough usually to initiate affection. What’s more, she’d returned the hug! That was the last time he’d seen her.
* * *
He landed after his wireless jump from the platform via a 40mb up-and-down connection at the IP address on his work order. It was a very fancy and powerful Internet connection with tons of bandwidth, but the port into the computer was foreboding—dark inside with a blackened ring around the port where a firewall had once flamed. No telling what had wandered in there. All the place needed was a sign: THIS IS A TRAP, DUFUS. COME RIGHT IN.
He pulled out his wand with his right hand and waved a work light sphere into existence with the other. With the bright light preceding him, Marcus confidently walked into the machine.
The first software he saw was a keyboard driver.
“Hey, guy, what computer is this?” he asked.
“CLACK, CLACK, CLACKITY, CLACK … busy … CLACK CLACK,” the driver said. “Master types commands to kill you. CLACK CLACK CLACKITY!”
A sudden whoosh and a wall of heat caused Marcus to whirl around. A white hot firewall now closed the exit port. He gestured at it to re-open a port—any port would do right now—but nothing happened.
The pounding of heavy boots caused him to spin again, this time to see heavily-armed and armored gigantic troll-like virus fighters bearing down on him waving swords, battle axes, and rifles with wicked-looking bayonets as long as the rifles.