Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  He closed the door behind him, made sure that the taped-over camera was still taped-over, and gently knocked on Jenny’s door.

  Getting to know Jenny was the oddest thing he’d ever done, Sai realized.

  He couldn’t count on Tilly to have made sure ahead of time that they would have topics to talk about. He couldn’t rely on Tilly’s always apropos suggestions when he was at a loss for words. He couldn’t even count on being able to look up Jenny’s ShareAll profile.

  He was on his own. And it was exhilarating.

  “How did you figure out everything Tilly was doing to us?”

  “I grew up in China,” Jenny said, wiping a strand of hair behind her ear. Sai found the gesture inexplicably endearing. “Back then, the government watched everything you did on the Network and made no secret of it. You had to learn how to keep the insanity at bay, to read between the lines, to speak without being overheard.”

  “I guess we were lucky, over here.”

  “No.” And she smiled at his surprise. He was learning that she preferred to be contrarian, to disagree with him. He liked that about her. “You grew up believing you were free, which made it even harder for you to see when you weren’t. You were like frogs in the pot being slowly boiled.”

  “Are there many like you?”

  “No. It’s hard to live off the grid. I’ve lost touch with my old friends. I have a hard time getting to know people because so much of their lives are lived inside Centillion and ShareAll. I can peek in on them once in a while through a dummy profile, but I can never be a part of their lives. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing the right thing.”

  “You are,” Sai said, and, though there was no Tilly to prompt him, he took Jenny’s hand in his. She didn’t pull away.

  “I never really thought of you as my type,” she said.

  Sai’s heart sank like a stone.

  “But who thinks only in terms of ‘types’ except Tilly?” she said quickly, then smiled and pulled him closer.

  Finally, the day had come. Rushgore had come to Chapman Singh to prepare for a deposition. He was huddled up with the firm’s lawyers in one of their conference rooms all day long.

  Sai sat down in his cubicle, stood up, and sat down again. He found himself full of nervous energy as he contemplated the best way to deliver the payload, as it were.

  Maybe he could pretend to be tech support, there to perform an emergency scan of his system?

  Maybe he could deliver lunch, and plug the drive in slyly?

  Maybe he could pull the fire alarm, and hope that Rushgore would leave his laptop behind?

  Not a single one of his ideas passed the laugh test.

  “Hey,” the associate who had been with Rushgore in the conference room all day was suddenly standing next to Sai’s cubicle. “Rushgore needs to charge his phone—you got a Centillion charging cable over here?”

  Sai stared at him, dumbfounded by his luck.

  The associate held up a phone and waved it at him.

  “Of course!” Sai said. “I’ll bring one right to you.”

  “Thanks.” The associate went back to the conference room.

  Sai couldn’t believe it. This was it. He plugged the drive into a charging cable and added an extension on the other end. The whole thing looked only a little odd, like a thin python who had swallowed a rat.

  But suddenly he felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and he almost swore aloud: He had forgotten to turn off the webcam above his computer—Tilly’s eyes—before preparing the cable. If Tilly raised questions about the weird cable he was carrying, he would have no explanation, and then all of his efforts at misdirection, at hiding, would be for naught.

  But there was nothing he could do about it now but proceed as planned. As he left his cubicle, his heart was almost in his throat.

  He stepped into the hallway, and strode down to the conference room.

  Still nothing from his earpiece.

  He opened the door. Rushgore was too busy with his computer even to look up. He grabbed the cable from Sai and plugged one end into his computer, and the other end into his phone.

  And Tilly remained silent.

  Sai woke to—what else?—“We Are the Champions.”

  The previous night of drinking and laughing with Jenny and her friends had been a blur, but he did remember coming home and telling Tilly, right before he fell asleep, “We did it! We won!”

  Ah, if Tilly only knew what we were celebrating.

  The music faded, stopped.

  Sai stretched lazily, turned to his side, and stared into the eyes of four burly, very serious men.

  “Tilly, call the police!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sai.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “These men are here to help you. Trust me, Sai. You know I know just what you need.”

  When the strange men had appeared in his apartment, Sai had imagined torture chambers, mental hospitals, faceless guards parading outside of dark cells. He had not imagined that he would be sitting across the table from Christian Rinn, Founder and Executive Chairman of Centillion, having white tea.

  “You got pretty close.” Rinn said. The man was barely in his forties and looked fit and efficient—kind of like how I picture a male version of Tilly, Sai thought. He smiled. “Closer than almost anyone.”

  “What was the mistake that gave us away?” Jenny asked.

  She was sitting to Sai’s left, and Sai reached out for her hand. They intertwined their fingers, giving each other strength.

  “It was his phone, on that first night he visited you.”

  “Impossible. I shielded it. It couldn’t have recorded anything.”

  “But you left it on your desk, where it could still make use of its accelerometer. It detected and recorded the vibrations from your typing. There’s a very distinctive way we strike the keys on a keyboard, and it’s possible to reconstruct what someone was typing based on the vibration patterns alone. It’s an old technology we developed for catching terrorists and drug dealers.”

  Jenny cursed under her breath, and Sai realized that until that moment, on some level, he still hadn’t quite believed Jenny’s paranoia.

  “But I didn’t bring my phone after that first day.”

  “True, but we didn’t need it. After Tilly picked up what Jenny was typing, the right alert algorithms were triggered and we focused surveillance on you. We parked a traffic observation vehicle a block away and trained a little laser on Jenny’s window. It was enough to record your conversations through the vibrations in the glass.”

  “You’re a very creepy man, Mr. Rinn,” Sai said. “And despicable too.”

  Rinn didn’t seem bothered by this. “I think you might feel differently by the end of our conversation. Centillion was not the first company to stalk you.”

  Jenny’s fingers tightened around Sai’s. “Let him go. I’m the one you really want. He doesn’t know anything.”

  Rinn shook his head and smiled apologetically. “Sai, did you realize that Jenny moved into the apartment next to yours a week after we retained Chapman Singh to represent us in the suit against ShareAll?”

  Sai didn’t understand what Rinn was getting at, but he sensed that he would not like what he was about to find out. He wanted to tell Rinn to shut up, but he held his tongue.

  “Curious, aren’t you? You can’t resist the pull of information. If it’s possible, you always want to learn something new; we’re hardwired that way. That’s the drive behind Centillion, too.”

  “Don’t believe anything he says,” Jenny said.

  “Would it surprise you to find out that the five other paralegals in your firm also had new neighbors move in during that same week? Would it also surprise you to learn that the new neighbors have all sworn to destroy Centillion, just like Jenny here? Tilly is very good at detecting patterns.”

  Sai’s heart beat faster. He turned to Jenny. “Is this true? You planned from the start to use me? You
got to know me just so you’d have a chance to deliver a virus?”

  Jenny turned her face away.

  “They know that there’s no way to hack into our systems from the outside, so they had to sneak a trojan in. You were used, Sai. She and her friends guided you, led you by the nose, made you do things—just like they accuse us of doing.”

  “It’s not like that,” Jenny said. “Listen, Sai, maybe that was how it started. But life’s full of surprises. I was surprised by you, and that’s a good thing.”

  Sai let go of Jenny’s hand and turned back to Rinn. “Maybe they did use me. But they’re right. You’ve turned the world into a Panopticon and all the people in it into obedient puppets that you nudge this way and that just so you’d make more money.”

  “You yourself pointed out that we were fulfilling desires, lubricating the engine of commerce in an essential way.”

  “But you also fulfill dark desires.” He remembered again the abandoned houses by the side of the road, the pockmarked pavement.

  “We unveil only the darkness that was already inside people,” Rinn said. “And Jenny didn’t tell you about how many child pornographers we’ve caught, how many planned murders we’ve stopped, or how many drug cartels and terrorists we’ve exposed. And all the dictators and strongmen we’ve toppled by filtering out their propaganda and magnifying the voices of those who oppose them.”

  “Don’t make yourself sound so noble,” Jenny said. “After you topple governments, you and the other Western companies get to move in and profit. You’re just propagandists of a different ilk—for making the world flat, turning everywhere into copies of suburban America, studded with malls.”

  “It’s easy to be cynical like that,” Rinn said. “But I’m proud of what we’ve done. If cultural imperialism is what it takes to make the world a better place, then we’ll happily arrange the world’s information to ennoble the human race.”

  “Why can’t you just be in the business of neutrally offering up information? Why not go back to being a simple search engine? Why all the surveillance and filtering? Why all the manipulation?” Sai asked.

  “There’s no such thing as neutrally offering up information. If someone asks Tilly about the name of a candidate, should Tilly bring them to his official site or a site that criticizes him? If someone asks Tilly about ‘Tiananmen,’ should Tilly tell them about the hundreds of years of history behind the place or just tell them about June 4, 1989? The ‘I Trust You’ button is a heavy responsibility that we take very seriously.

  “Centillion is in the business of organizing information, and that requires choices, direction, inherent subjectivity. What is important to you—what is true to you—is not as important or as true to others. It depends on judgment and ranking. To search for what matters to you, we must know all about you. And that, in turn, is indistinguishable from filtering, from manipulation.”

  “You make it sound so inevitable.”

  “It is inevitable. You think destroying Centillion will free you, whatever ‘free’ means. But let me ask you, can you tell me the requirements for starting a new business in the State of New York?”

  Sai opened his mouth and realized that his instinct was to ask Tilly. He closed his mouth again.

  “What’s your mother’s phone number?”

  Sai resisted the urge to reach for his phone.

  “How about you tell me what happened in the world yesterday? What book did you buy and enjoy three years ago? When did you start dating your last girlfriend?”

  Sai said nothing.

  “You see? Without Tilly, you can’t do your job, you can’t remember your life, you can’t even call your mother. We are now a race of cyborgs. We long ago began to spread our minds into the electronic realm, and it is no longer possible to squeeze all of ourselves back into our brains. The electronic copies of yourselves that you wanted to destroy are, in a literal sense, actually you.

  “Since it’s impossible to live without these electronic extensions of ourselves, if you destroy Centillion, a replacement will just rise to take its place. It’s too late; the genie has long left the bottle. Churchill said that we shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us. We made machines to help us think, and now the machines think for us.”

  “So what do you want with us?” Jenny asked. “We won’t stop fighting you.”

  “I want you to come and work for Centillion.”

  Sai and Jenny looked at each other. “What?”

  “We want people who can see through Tilly’s suggestions, detect her imperfections. For all that we’ve been able to do with AI and data mining, the Perfect Algorithm remains elusive. Because you can see her flaws, you’ll be the best at figuring out what Tilly’s still missing and where she’s gone too far. It’s the perfect match. You’ll make her better, more compelling, so that Tilly will do a better job.”

  “Why would we do that?” Jenny asked. “Why would we want to help you run people’s lives with a machine?”

  “Because as bad as you think Centillion is, any replacement is likely worse. It was not a mere PR move that I made ‘ennobling the human race’ the mission of this company, even if you don’t agree with how I’ve gone about it.

  “If we fail, who do you think will replace us? ShareAll? A Chinese company?”

  Jenny looked away.

  “And that is why we’ve gone to such extraordinary lengths to be sure that we have all the data we need to stop competitors as well as well-meaning, but naïve, individuals like you from destroying all that Centillion has accomplished.”

  “What if we refuse to join you but tell the world what you’ve done?”

  “No one would believe you. We will make it so that whatever you say, whatever you write, no one will ever find it. On the Net, if it can’t be found by Centillion, it doesn’t exist.”

  Sai knew that he was right.

  “You thought Centillion was just an algorithm, a machine. But now you know that it’s built by people—people like me, people like you. You’ve told me what I’ve done wrong. Wouldn’t you rather be part of us so that you can try to make things better?

  “In the face of the inevitable, the only choice is to adapt.”

  Sai closed the door of the apartment behind him. The camera overhead followed.

  “Will Jenny be coming over tomorrow for dinner?” Tilly asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “You really need to get her to start sharing. It will make planning much easier.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, Tilly.”

  “You’re tired,” Tilly said. “How about I order you some hot organic cider for delivery and then you go to bed?”

  That does sound perfect.

  “No,” Sai said. “I think I prefer to just read for a while, in bed.”

  “Of course. Would you like me to suggest a book?”

  “I’d rather you take the rest of the night off, actually. But first, set the wake-up song to Sinatra’s ‘My Way.’”

  “An unusual choice, given your taste. Is this a one-time experiment or would you like me to incorporate it into your music recommendations for the future?”

  “Just this once, for now. Good night, Tilly. Please turn yourself off.”

  The camera whirred, followed Sai to bed, and shut off.

  But a red light continued to blink, slowly, in the darkness.

  © 2012 Ken Liu.

  Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nature, Apex, Daily SF, Fireside, TRSF, and Strange Horizons, and has been reprinted in the prestigious Year’s Best SF and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year anthology series. He has won a Nebula and been nominated for the Hugo and Sturgeon awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Swanwatch

  Yoon Ha Lee

  Officially, the five exiles on
the station were the Initiates of the Fermata. Unofficially, the Concert of Worlds called them the swanwatch.

  The older exiles called themselves Dragon and Phoenix, Tiger and Tortoise, according to tradition based in an ancient civilization’s legends. The newest and youngest exile went by Swan. She was not a swan in the way of fairy tales. If so, she would have had a history sung across the galaxy’s billions of stars, of rapturous beauty or resolute virtue. She would have woven the hearts of dead stars into armor for the Concert’s soldiers and hushed novae to sleep so ships could safely pass. However, she was, as befitted the name they gave her, a musician.

  Swan had been exiled to the station because she had offended the captain of a guestship from the scintillant core. In a moment of confusion, she had addressed him in the wrong language for the occasion. Through the convolutions of Concert politics, she wound up in the swanwatch.

  The captain sent her a single expensive message across the vast space now separating them. It was because of the message that Swan first went to Dragon. Dragon was not the oldest and wisest of the swanwatch; that honor belonged to Tortoise. But Dragon loved oddments of knowledge, and he could read the calligraphy in which the captain had written his message.

  “You have good taste in enemies,” Dragon commented, as though Swan had singled out the captain. Dragon was a lanky man with skin lighter than Swan’s, and he was always pacing, or whittling appallingly rare scraps of wood, or tapping earworm-rhythms upon his knee.

  Swan bowed her head. I’d rather not be here, and be back with my family. She didn’t say so out loud, though. That would have implied a disregard for Dragon’s company, and she was already fond of Dragon. “Can you read it?” she asked.

  “Of course I can read it, although it would help if you held the message right side up.”

  Swan wasn’t illiterate, but there were many languages in the Concert of Worlds. “This way?” Swan asked, rotating the sheet.

  Dragon nodded.

  “What does it say?”

  Dragon’s foot tapped. “It says: ‘I look forward to hearing your masterpiece honoring the swanships.’ Should I read all his titles, too?” Dragon’s ironic tone made his opinion of the captain’s pretensions quite clear. “They take up the rest of the page.”