In his disposable paper coveralls, Seebeck looked young and scared.
Morhaim questioned Seebeck, aware that the man’s Angel was also being pumped for data by intelligent search agents in a ghostly parallel of this interrogation.
Seebeck denied any involvement with the murder of Desargues, over and over.
‘But you must see the motive that can be imputed,’ said Morhaim. ‘Desargues said she had a key competitive edge over you guys. She was planning a global comms network which wouldn’t suffer from the transmission delays your systems throw up, because of having to bounce signals all the way to geosynch orbit and back –’
‘Which will allow us to merge communities separated by oceans, or even the full diameter of the planet. Which will allow us finally to establish the global village. Which will make comsats obsolete … All those grandiose claims. Blah, blah.’
‘If Desargues was right – if her new technology could have put your company out of business –’
‘But it wouldn’t,’ Seebeck said. ‘That’s the whole point. Don’t you see? Satellite technology will not become obsolete overnight. We’ll just find new uses.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’ll show you.’
With Morhaim’s permission, Seebeck called up one of his company’s Virtual brochures.
… And Morhaim found himself standing in a windy field in Northumberland. He quailed a little at the gritty illusion of outdoors; Holmium had devoted billions to the petabytes behind this brochure.
He wondered vaguely when was the last time he had been out of doors in RL.
Bizarrely, he was looking at a flying saucer.
The craft was maybe twenty metres across, sitting on the wiry grass. Its hull was plastered with Coca-Dopa ad logos; Morhaim absently registered them to his quota.
‘What am I seeing here, Seebeck?’
‘This is a joint venture involving a consortium of comsat companies, Coke-Boeing, and others. It’s a technology which will make it possible for any shape of craft to fly – a saucer, even a brick – regardless of the rules of traditional aircraft design. And in some respects a saucer shape may even be the best. The idea is fifty years old. It’s taken this long to make it work –’
‘Tell me.’
There was a rudimentary countdown, a crackle of ionization around the craft’s rim, and the saucer lifted easily off the ground, and hovered.
The secret, said Seebeck, was an air spike: a laser beam or focused microwave beam fitted to the front of a craft which carved a path through the air. The airflow around a craft could be controlled even at many times the speed of sound, and the craft would suffer little drag, significantly improving its performance.
‘Do you get it, Inspector? The ship doesn’t even have a power plant. The power is beamed down from a test satellite, microwave energy produced by converting solar radiation, billions of joules flowing around up there for free. It propels itself by using magnetic fields at its rim to push charged air backwards …’
‘Why the saucer shape?’
‘To give a large surface area, to catch all those beamed-down microwaves. We’re still facing a lot of practical problems – for instance, the exploding air tends to travel up the spike and destroy the craft – but we’re intending to take the concept up to Mach 25 – that is, fast enough to reach orbit …’
‘So this is where Holmium is going to make its money in the future.’
‘Yes. Power from space, for this and other applications.’
Seebeck turned to confront Morhaim, his broad, bland face creased with anxiety, his strands of hair whipped by a Virtual wind. ‘Do you get it, Inspector? Holmium had no motive to be involved in killing Desargues. In fact, the publicity and market uncertainty has done us far more harm than good. With air-spike technology and orbital power plants, whatever Glass Earth, Inc. does, we’re going to be as rich as Croesus …’
The flying saucer lifted into the sky with a science-fiction whoosh.
The Machine Stops is in fact the title of a short story from the 1920s, by E.M. Forster. It is about a hive-world, humans living in boxes linked by a technological net called the Machine. On the surface lived the Homeless, invisible and ignored. The story finished with the Machine failing, and the hive world cracking open, humans spilling out like insects, to die.
A tale by another of your doom-mongers. Of little interest.
‘Let’s see it again. Rewind one minute.’
The Tower Bridge crime tableau went into fast reverse. The cartoon Cecilia Desargues jumped from the ground and metamorphosed seamlessly into the living, breathing woman, full of light and solid as earth, with no future left.
‘Take out the non-speakers.’
Most of the tourist extras disappeared – including, Morhaim realized with a pang of foolish regret, the pretty girl with the long legs – leaving only those who had been speaking at the precise moment Seebeck had uttered his phrase.
‘Run it,’ said Morhaim. ‘Let’s hear the two of them together.’
The Angel filtered out the remaining tourists’ voices. Seebeck and Desargues approached each other in an incongruous, almost church-like hush.
Dialogue. Shot. Fall. Cartoon bullet-hole.
That was all.
Morhaim ran through the scene several more times.
He had the Angel pick out the voices of the tourists in shot, one at a time. Some of the speech was indistinct, but all of it was interpretable. Morhaim was shown transcriptions in the tourists’ native tongues, English, and in Metalingua, the template artificial language that had been devised to enable the machines to translate to and from any known human language.
None of them said anything resembling the key trigger phrase, in any language.
It had to be Seebeck, then.
But still –
‘Give me a reverse view.’
The pov lifted up from eye-level, swept over the freezeframed heads of the protagonists, and came down a few metres behind Desargues’ head.
The light was suddenly glaring, the colours washed out.
‘Jesus.’
Sorry. This is the best we can do. It’s from a callosum dumper. A man of sixty. He seems to have been high on –
‘It doesn’t matter.’ If you use people as cameras, this is what you get. ‘Run the show.’
He watched the scene once more, almost over Desargues’ shoulder. He could see Asaph Seebeck’s bland, uncomplicated face as he mouthed the words that would kill Cecilia Desargues. He did not look, to Morhaim, tense or angry or nervous. Nor did he look up at the tower to where his words were supposedly directed.
Coincidentally, that pretty girl he’d noticed was looking up at the tower. Her hands were forming pretty, abstract shapes, he noted absently, without understanding.
The punch in the back came again. This time an awful pit, a bloody volcano, opened up in Desargues’ back, in the microsecond before she turned into a comforting stick figure.
‘Careless.’
I’m sorry.
Morhaim’s pov host tilted down to stare at the stick figure. Morhaim noticed, irrelevantly, that Seebeck’s grey suit was rippling with moiré effects, a result of the host’s corneal or retinal implant. And now his vision blurred, as his host started shedding tears, of fright or grief …
Corpus callosum dumpers are becoming quite common among you: implants, inserted into the bridge of nervous tissue between the two halves of your brain, which enable you to broadcast a twenty-four-hour stream of consciousness and impression to whoever in the rest of mankind is willing to listen and watch.
Some of you even have your infant children implanted so their whole lives are available for view. It is, perhaps, the ultimate form of communication.
But it is content without structure, a meaningless flood of data without information: of use only to voyeurs and policemen, like Rob Morhaim.
Still, in this year 2045, even your dreams are online.
Morhaim, digging, made contact with
Desargues’ partner. She wouldn’t tell Morhaim where she was, physically. It wasn’t relevant anyhow. She appeared to him only as a heavily-processed two-D head-and-shoulders, framed on the softwall before him, her filtered expression unreadable.
She was called Eunice Baines, and she came from the Scottish Republic. She was also a financial partner with Desargues in Glass Earth, Inc. She was a little older than Desargues. Their relationship – as far as Morhaim could tell – had been uncomplicated homosexuality.
He said, ‘You know the finger is being pointed at Holmium. Your competitor.’
‘One of many.’ Her voice was flat, almost free of accent.
‘But that’s only credible if your claims, to be able to eliminate signal lag, have any validity.’
‘We don’t claim to be able to eliminate signal lag. We will be able to reduce it to its theoretical minimum, which is a straightline light-speed delay between any two points on the Earth’s surface.
‘And we do claim to be able to remove the need for comsats. The comsat notion is old technology – in fact, exactly a century old – did you know that? It’s a hundred years since the publication of Arthur C Clarke’s seminal paper in Wireless World …’
‘Tell me about Glass Earth, Inc.’
‘Inspector, what does the CID teach you about neutrinos … ?’
For a century, she told him, long-distance communication systems had been defined by two incompatible facts: all electromagnetic radiation travelled in straight lines – but the Earth was round, and light couldn’t pass through solid matter. So communication with high-frequency signals would be restricted to short line-of-sight distances … if not for comsats.
Baines said, ‘If a satellite is in geosynchronous orbit over the equator, thirty-six thousand kilometres high, it takes exactly twenty-four hours to complete a revolution. So it seems to hover over a fixed spot on the surface. You can fire up your signals and bounce it off the comsat to the best part of a hemisphere. Or the comsat can directly broadcast to the ground.
‘But that huge distance from Earth is a problem. Bouncing a signal off a geosynch comsat introduces a lightspeed delay of a quarter-second. That’s a hell of a lot, for example, in applications like telesurgery. It’s even noticeable in Virtual conferencing.
‘And there are other problems. Like the lack of geosynch orbit spots. Satellites need to be three degrees apart if their signals are not to interfere with each other. And geosynch is crowded. Some corporations have hunter-killer sats working up there, contravening every international agreement …’
‘Enter the neutrino.’
‘Yes.’
A neutrino was a particle which, unlike light photons, could pass through solid matter.
‘Imagine a signal carried by modulated neutrinos. It could pass through the planet, linking any two points, as if the Earth was made of glass –’
‘Hence the name.’
‘And then the time delays are reduced to a maximum of one-twenty-fourth of a second, which is the time it would take a neutrino to fly from pole to pole at lightspeed. And most transmissions, of course, would be faster than that. It’s not a reduction to zero delay – that’s beyond physical law, as far as we know – but our worst performance is a sixfold improvement over the best comsat benchmark. And our technology’s a hell of a lot cheaper.’
‘If it works,’ Morhaim said. ‘As far as I know the only way to produce a modulated neutrino beam is to switch a nuclear fission reactor on and off.’
‘You’ve been doing your homework, Inspector. And not only that, the practical difficulties with collecting the neutrinos are huge. Because they are so ghostly, you need a tank filled with a thousand tonnes of liquid – ultrapure water or carbon tetrachloride, for example – and wait for one-in-a-trillion neutrinos to hit a nucleus and produce a detectable by-product. According to conventional wisdom, anyhow.’
‘I take it you’ve solved these problems.’
‘We think so,’ Baines said evenly. ‘Forgive me for not going into the details. But we have an experimental demonstration.’
‘Enough to satisfy Holmium that you’re a commercial threat?’
‘No doubt …’
He found Eunice Baines difficult. He felt she was judging him.
‘Do you think Holmium were capable of setting up the murder?’
Eunice Baines shook her head. ‘Is it really credible that a major multinational corporation would get involved in such a crass killing, in public and in broad daylight, on the streets of London itself?
‘Besides, the death of Cecilia hasn’t in fact directly benefited Holmium, or any of our competitors; such was the turmoil in the communications industry that morning that shares in Holmium and the others have taken a pounding. And of course any scandal about the death of Cecilia would be disastrous for Holmium. None of this makes real sense, beyond a superficial inspection … But you ask me this.’ For the first time a little emotion leaked into Baines’ voice. A testy irritation. ‘Don’t you know? What do you think?’
‘I just –’
‘You’re supposed to be a policeman, for God’s sake. A detective. What kind of investigating are you doing? Have you been to the crime scene? Have you looked at the body yourself?’
‘It isn’t necessary.’
‘Really?’
She turned away from the imager.
When she came back, her face was transformed: eyes like pits of coal, hair disarrayed, mouth twisted in anger, cheeks blotchy with tears. ‘Now what do you think, Inspector?’
Morhaim flinched from the brutal, unfiltered reality of her grief, and was relieved when the interview finished.
Brutal, unfiltered reality.
Let me tell you a story.
In the 1970s, a President of the USA was brought down by a scandal called Watergate. One of the conspirators, a man called John Dean, came clean to the prosecutors. He gave detailed accounts of all relevant meetings and actions, to the best of his ability. Then, after his confessions were complete, tapes of those meetings made by President Nixon were uncovered.
It became a psychological test case. For the first time it was possible to compare on an extended basis human memories with automated records – the tapes being a precursor of the much more complete recording systems in place today.
John Dean, an intelligent man, had striven to be honest. But his accounts were at once more logical than the reality, and gave Dean himself a more prominent role. When he was confronted with the reality of the tapes, Dean argued they must have been tampered with.
It was not simple information overload. It was much more than that.
Your ego is – fragile. It needs reassurance.
Your memory is not a transcript. It is constantly edited. You need logic, story, in an illogical world: this fact explains religion, and conspiracy theories, science – even most brands of insanity.
But now, you no longer regard your own memory as the ultimate authority.
You are the first human generation to have this power – or this curse. You see the world as it is.
You pool memories. You supplement your memory with machines. Your identity is fragmenting. A new form of awareness is emerging, an electronic river on which floats a million nodes of consciousness, like candles. A group mind, some of you call it …
Perhaps that is so.
We do not comment.
In the meantime we have to protect you. It is our function. We have to tell you the stories you once told yourselves –
Without us, you see, you would go crazy.
He had trouble sleeping. Something still didn’t make sense.
Maybe something he didn’t want to face.
In the morning, he should just sign the damn case off and forget it.
To relax, he logged into the telesensors.
… He moved into a different universe: a dog’s world of scents, a dolphin’s web of ultrasonic pulses, the misty planes of polarized light perceived by a bee in flight, the probing electric se
nses of blind, deep-ocean fish. And as he vicariously haunted his hosts, a spectrum of implanted animals all around the planet, he could sense a million other human souls riding with him, silent, clustering like ghosts.
He slept uneasily, his reptilian hind brain processing.
He woke up angry.
‘Show me the death again.’
Tourists, pretty girl, Desargues and Seebeck, Desargues falling with a clatter of Pinocchio limbs.
‘Turn off the filter on Desargues.’
Are you sure? You know how you –
‘Do it.’
The murder became brutal.
Her substance was splashed like lumpy red paint over Seebeck’s neat suit, and she fell like a sack of water. Utterly without dignity. It was, he thought, almost comical.
He watched it over and over, his view prismed through the multiple eyes of the witnesses, as if he was some hovering fly.
‘What else are you filtering?’
There are no other filters.
‘Turn them off.’
I told you, there are no other filters. None that are important.
‘Turn them off, or I’ll have you discontinued.’
I’m your Angel.
‘Turn them off.’
… Angel technology is a natural outcrop of developments that started at the end of the last century, when information overload started to become a problem for you.
The first significant numbers of deaths among you – mostly from suicides and neural shock – accelerated research into data filters, intelligent search agents, user query tools.
The result was the Angels. Us. Me.
My function is to filter out the blizzard of information that comes sweeping over Rob Morhaim, every waking moment, selecting what is relevant and – more important in human terms – what is acceptable to him personally.
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