Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Even the number-two chair in Tomas Vanya’s office kicked major ergonomic azz. Murray settled into it and popped some of the controls experimentally until the ess of his spine was cushioned and pinioned into chiropractically correct form. Tomas unbagged a Fourbucks Morning Harvest muffin and a venti coconut Frappucino and slid them across his multi-tiered Swedish Disposable Moderne desque.

  “A little welcome-back present, Murray,” Tomas said. Murray listened for the sound of a minimum-wage security guard clearing out his desk during this exit-interview-cum-breakfast-banquet. He wondered if Global Semi would forward-vest his options and mentally calculated the strike price minus the current price times the number of shares times the conversion rate to Canadian Pesos and thought he could maybe put down 25 percent on a two bedroom in New Westminster.

  “Dee-licious and noo-tritious,” Murray said and slurped at the frappe.

  “So,” Tomas said. “So.”

  Here it comes, Murray thought, and sucked up a brain-freezing mouthful of frou-frou West Coast caffeine delivery system. G0nz0red. Fi0red. Sh17canned. Thinking in leet -hacker crap made it all seem more distant.

  (Leet is an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet. It uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters. For example, leet spellings of the word leet include 1337 and l33t; eleet may be spelled 31337 or 3l33t. The term leet is derived from the word elite.)

  “It’s really great to see you again,” Tomas said. “You’re a really important part of the team here, you know?”

  Murray restrained himself from rolling his eyes. He was fired, so why draw it out? There’d been enough lay-offs at Global Semi, enough boom and bust and bust and bust that it was a routine, they all knew how it went.

  But though Murray was an on Air Canada jet headed for Vangroover, Tomas wasn’t even on the damned script. “You’re sharp and seasoned. You can communicate effectively. Most techies can’t write worth a damn, but you’re good. It’s rare.”

  Ah, the soothing sensation of smoke between one’s buttocks. It was true that Murray liked to write, but there wasn’t any money in it, no glory either. If you were going to be a writer in the tech world, you’d have to be —

  “You’ve had a couple weeks off to reassess things, and we’ve been reassessing, too. Coding, hell, most people don’t do it for very long. Especially assembler, Jesus, if you’re still writing assembler after five years, there’s something, you know, wrong. You end up in management or you move horizontally. Or you lose it.” Tomas realized that he’d said the wrong thing and blushed.

  Aw, shit.

  “Horizontal movement. That’s the great thing about a company this size. There’s always somewhere you can go when you burn out on one task.”

  No, no, no.

  “The Honorable Computing initiative is ready for documentation, Murray. We need a tech writer who can really nail it.”

  A tech writer. Why not just break his goddamned fingers and poke his eyes out? Never write another line of code, never make the machine buck and hum and make his will real in the abstract beauty of silicon? Tech writers were coders’ janitors, documenting the plainly self-evident logic of APIs and code-structures, niggling over punctuation and grammar and frigging stylebooks, like any of it mattered — human beings could parse English, even if it wasn’t well-formed, even if you had a comma-splice or a dangling participle.

  “It’s a twelve month secondment, a change of pace for you and a chance for us to evaluate your other strengths. You go to four weeks’ vacation and we accelerate your vesting and start you with a new grant at the same strike price, over 24 months.”

  Murray did the math in his head, numbers dancing. Four weeks’ vacation — that was three years ahead of schedule, not that anyone that senior ever used his vacation days, but you could bank them for retirement or, ahem, exit strategy. The forward vesting meant that he could walk out and fly back to Canada in three weeks if he hated it and put 30 percent down on a two-bedroom in New West.

  And the door was closed and the blinds were drawn and the implication was clear. Take this job or shove it.

  He took the job.

  A month later he was balls-deep in the documentation project and feeling, you know, not horrible. The Honorable Computing initiative was your basic Bond-villain world-domination horseshit, of course, but it was technically sweet and it kept him from misting over and bawling. And they had cute girls on the documentation floor, liberal arts/electrical engineering double-majors with abs you could bounce a quarter off of who were doing time before being promoted up to join the first cohort of senior female coders to put their mark on the Valley.

  He worked late most nights, only marking the passing of five PM by his instinctive upwards glance as all those fine, firm rear ends walked past his desk on their way out of the office. Then he went into night mode, working by the glow of his display and the emergency lights until the custodians came in and chased him out with their vacuum cleaners.

  One night, he was struggling to understand the use-cases for Honorable Computing when the overhead lights flicked on, shrinking his pupils to painful pinpricks. The cleaners clattered in and began to pointedly empty the wastebins. He took the hint, grabbed his shoulderbag and staggered for the exit, badging out as he went.

  His car was one of the last ones in the lot, a hybrid Toyota with a lot of dashboard geek-toys like a GPS and a back-seat DVD player, though no one ever rode in Murray’s back seat. He’d bought it three months before Liam died, cashing in some shares and trading in the giant gas-guzzling SUV he’d never once taken off-road.

  As he aimed his remote at it and initiated the cryptographic handshake — i.e., unlocked the doors — he spotted the guy leaning against the car. Murray’s thumb jabbed at the locking button on the remote, but it was too late: the guy had the door open and he was sliding into the passenger seat.

  In the process of hitting the remote’s panic button, Murray managed to pop the trunk and start the engine, but eventually his thumb mashed the right button and the car’s lights strobed and the horn blared. He backed slowly towards the office doors, just as the guy found the dome-light control and lit up the car’s interior and Murray got a good look at him.

  It was Liam.

  Murray stabbed at the remote some more and killed the panic button. Jesus, who was going to respond at this hour in some abandoned industrial park in the middle of the Valley anyway? The limp-dick security guard? He squinted at the face in the car.

  Liam. Still Liam. Not the skeletal Liam he’d last seen rotted and intubated on a bed at San Jose General. Not the porcine Liam he’d laughed with over a million late-night El Torito burritos. A fit, healthy, young Liam, the Liam he’d met the day they both started at Global Semi at adjacent desks, Liam fresh out of Cal Tech and fit from his weekly lot-hockey game and his weekend dirtbike rides in the hills. Liam-prime, or maybe Liam’s younger brother or something.

  Liam rolled down the window and struck a match on the passenger-side door, then took a Marlboro Red from a pack in his shirt pocket and lit it. Murray walked cautiously to the car, his thumb working on his cellphone, punching in the numbers 9-1-1 and hovering over “SEND.” He got close enough to see the scratch the match-head had left on the side-panel and muttered “fuck” with feeling.

  “Hey dirtbag, you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Liam said. It was Liam.

  “You kiss your mother after I’m through with her mouth?” Murray said, the rote of old times. He gulped for air.

  Liam popped the door and got out. He was ripped, bullish chest and cartoonish wasp-waist, rock-hard abs through a silvery club-shirt and bulging thighs. A body like that, it’s a full-time job, or so Murray had concluded after many failed get-fit initiatives involving gyms and retreats and expensive home equipment and humiliating early-morning jogs through the sidewalk-free streets of Shallow Alto.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Murray said, looking into the familiar eye
s, the familiar smile-lines and the deep wrinkle between Liam’s eyes from his concentration face. Though the night was cool, Murray felt runnels of sweat tracing his spine, trickling down between his buttocks.

  “You know the answer, so why ask? The question isn’t who, it’s how. Let’s drive around a little and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Liam clapped a strong hand on his forearm and gave it a companionable squeeze. It felt good and real and human.

  “You can’t smoke in my car,” Murray said.

  “Don’t worry,” Liam said. “I won’t exhale.”

  Murray shook his head and went around to the driver’s side. By the time he started the engine, Liam had his seatbelt on and was poking randomly at the on-board controls. “This is pretty rad. You told me about it, I remember, but it sounded stupid at the time. Really rad.” He brought up the MP3 player and scrolled through Murray’s library, adding tracks to a mix, cranking up the opening crash of an old, old, old punk Beastie Boys song. “The speakers are for shit, though!” he hollered over the music.

  Murray cranked the volume down as he bounced over the speed bumps, badged out of the lot, and headed for the hills, stabbing at the GPS to bring up some roadmaps that included the private roads way up in the highlands.

  “So, do I get two other ghosts tonight, Marley, or are you the only one?”

  Liam found the sunroof control and flicked his smoke out into the road. “Ghost, huh? I’m meat, dude, same as you. Not back from the dead, just back from the mostly dead.” He did the last like Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in “The Princess Bride,” one of their faves. “I’ll tell you all about it, but I want to catch up on your shit first. What are you working on?”

  “They’ve got me writing docs,” Murray said, grateful of the car’s darkness covering his blush.

  “Awwww,” Liam said. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I kinda lost it,” Murray said. “Couldn’t code. About six months ago. After.”

  “Ah,” Liam said.

  “So I’m writing docs. It’s a sideways promotion and the work’s not bad. I’m writing up Honorable Computing.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, it was after your time. It’s a big deal. All the semiconductor companies are in on it: Intel, AMD, even Motorola and Hitachi. And Microsoft — they’re hardcore for it.”

  “So what is it?”

  Murray turned onto a gravel road, following the tracery on the glowing GPS screen as much as the narrow road, spiraling up and up over the sparse lights of Silicon Valley. He and Liam had had a million bullshit sessions about tech, what was vaporware and what was killer, and now they were having one again, just like old times. Only Liam was dead. Well, if it was time for Murray to lose his shit, what better way than in the hills, great tunes on the stereo, all alone in the night?

  Murray was warming up to the subject. He’d wanted someone he could really chew this over with since he got reassigned, he’d wanted Liam there to key off his observations. “OK, so, the Turing Machine, right? Turing’s Universal Machine. The building-block of modern computation. In Turing’s day, you had all these specialized machines: a machine for solving quadratics, a machine for calculating derivatives, and so on. Turing came up with the idea of a machine that could configure itself to be any specialized machine, using symbolic logic: software. Included in the machines that you can simulate in a Turing Machine is another Turing Machine, like Java or VMWare. With me?”

  “With you.”

  “So this gives rise to a kind of existential crisis. When your software is executing, how does it know what its execution environment is? Maybe it’s running on a Global Semi Itanium clone at 1.6 gigahertz, or maybe it’s running on a model of that chip, simulated on a Motorola G5 RISC processor.”

  “Got it.”

  “Now, forget about that for a sec and think about Hollywood. The coked-up Hollyweird fatcats hate Turing Machines. I mean, they want to release their stuff over the Internet, but they want to deliver it to you in a lockbox. You get to listen to it, you get to watch it, but only if they say so, and only if you’ve paid. You can buy it over and over again, but you can never own it. It’s scrambled — encrypted — and they only send you the keys when you satisfy a license server that you’ve paid up. The keys are delivered to a secure app that you can’t fuxor with, and the app locks you out of the video card and the sound card and the drive while it’s decrypting the stream and showing it to you, and then it locks everything up again once you’re done and hands control back over to you.”

  Liam snorted. “It is to laugh.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s bullshit. It’s Turing Machines, right? When the software executes on your computer, it has to rely on your computer’s feedback to confirm that the video card and the sound card are locked up, that you’re not just feeding the cleartext stream back to the drive and then to 10,000,000 pals online. But the ‘computer’ it’s executing on could be simulated inside another computer, one that you’ve modified to your heart’s content. The ‘video card’ is a simulation; the ‘sound card’ is a simulation. The computer is a brain in a bottle, it’s in the Matrix, it can’t trust its senses because you’re in control, it’s a Turing Machine nested inside another Turing Machine.”

  “Like Descartes.”

  “What?”

  “You gotta read your classics, bro. I’ve been catching up over the past six months or so, doing alot of reading. Mostly free e-books from the Gutenberg Project. Descartes’ “Meditations” are some heavy shiznit. Descartes starts by saying that he wants to figure out some stuff about the world, but he can’t, right, because in order to say stuff about the world, he needs to trust his senses, but his senses are wrong all the time. When he dreams, his senses deliver full-on THX all-digital IMAX, but none of it’s really there. How does he know when he’s dreaming or when he’s awake? How does he know when he’s experiencing something or imagining it? How does he know he’s not a brain in a jar?”

  “So, how does he know?” Murray asked, taking them over a reservoir on a switchback road, moonlight glittering over the still water, occulted by fringed silhouettes of tall California pines.

  “Well, that’s where he pulls some religion out of his ass. Here’s how it goes: God is good, because part of the definition of God is goodness. God made the world. God made me. God made my senses. God made my senses so that I could experience the goodness of his world. Why would God give me bum senses? QED, I can trust my senses.”

  “It is like Descartes,” Murray said, accelerating up a new hill.

  “Yeah?” Liam said. “Who’s God, then?”

  “Crypto,” Murray said. “Really good, standards-defined crypto. Public ciphersystems whose details are published and understood. AES, RSA, good crypto. There’s a signing key for each chip fab — ours is in some secret biometrics-and-machineguns bunker under some desert. That key is used to sign another key that’s embedded in a tamper-resistant chip –”

  Liam snorted again.

  “No, really. Not tamper-proof, obviously, but tamper-resistant — you’d need a tunneling microscope or a vat of Freon to extract the keys from the chip. And every chip has its own keys, so you’d need to do this for every chip, which doesn’t, you know, scale. So there’s this chip full of secrets, they call the Fritz chip, for Fritz Hollings, the Senator from Disney, the guy who’s trying to ban computers so that Hollywood won’t go broke. The Fritz chip wakes up when you switch on the machine, and it uses its secret key to sign the operating system — well, the boot-loader and the operating system and the drivers and stuff — so now you’ve got a bunch of cryptographic signatures that reflect the software and hardware configuration of your box. When you want to download Police Academy n, your computer sends all these keys to Hollywood central, attesting to the operating environment of your computer. Hollywood decides on the fly if it wants to trust that config, and if it does, it encrypts the movie, using the keys you’ve sent. That means that you can only unscramble the movie when you�
�re running that Fritz chip, on that CPU, with that version of the OS and that video driver and so on.”

  “Got it: so if the OS and the CPU and so on are all ‘Honorable’” — Liam described quote-marks with his index fingers — “then you can be sure that the execution environment is what the software expects it to be, that it’s not a brain in a vat. Hollywood movies are safe from Napsterization.”

  They bottomed out on the shore of the reservoir and Murray pulled over. “You’ve got it.”

  “So basically, whatever Hollywood says, goes. You can’t fake an interface, you can’t make any uses that they don’t authorize. You know that these guys sued to make the VCR illegal, right? You can’t wrap up an old app in a compatibility layer and make it work with a new app. You say Microsoft loves this? No fucking wonder, dude — they can write software that won’t run on a computer running Oracle software. It’s your basic Bond-villain –”

  “– world-domination horseshit. Yeah, I know.”

  Liam got out of the car and lit up another butt, kicked loose stones into the reservoir. Murray joined him, looking out over the still water.

  “Ring Minus One,” Liam said, and skipped a rock over the oily-black surface of the water, getting four long bounces out of it.

  “Yeah.” Murray said. Ring Zero, the first registers in the processor, was where your computer checked to figure out how to start itself up. (Registers are storage locations internal the the processor. CPU instructions operate on these values directly. On RISC processors, all data must be moved into a register before it can be operated. On CISC (Intel) chips, there are a few operations that can load data from RAM, process it, and save the result back out, but the fastest operations work directly with registers. Also, there are registers that are set aside for certain tasks, these generally include a program counter, stack, and flags. Each register also has a size that determines the maximum amount of data that can be processed at a time. The registers on Pentium chips, for example, are 32 bits. ) Compromise Ring Zero and you can make the computer do anything — load an alternate operating system, turn the whole box into a brain-in-a-jar, executing in an unknown environment. Ring Minus One, well, that was like God-code, space on another, virtual processor that was unalterable, owned by some remote party, by LoCal and its entertainment giants. Software was released without any copy-prevention tech because everyone knew that copy-prevention tech didn’t work. Nevertheless, Hollywood was always chewing the scenery and hollering, they just didn’t believe that the hairfaces and ponytails didn’t have some seekrit tech that would keep their movies safe from copying until the heat death of the universe or the expiry of copyright, whichever came last.