Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  “No,” said Theory. “It’s not, only…well, Quench has a beard, you know. Are you sure you just wouldn’t rather me be him instead of me?”

  “I’m liking you just fine at the moment. And I’ve always liked beards. Yours would be a lot darker than his, anyway.”

  “Yes,” said Theory, instantly giving himself two months of whiskers, “it is, isn’t it?”

  “Very nice,” said Jennifer. And it was. He was quite…dashing. “Like…what did you call my chocolate coffee…the Platonic form. You’re my Platonic form of an officer and a gentleman, now.”

  Theory laughed. “If I’d known that was all it would take to impress you, we could have saved a great deal of—”

  Jennifer cut him short. Here would be the proof. Both for herself and for Theory. “I’m not finished with my request yet,” she said.

  “I can assure you that I worked some other changes that I think you’ll find pleasing,” Theory said. “You don’t have necessarily to ask directly…”

  “Thank you, but that’s not what I mean,” she replied. “I also want you to stay that way.”

  “I can always look this way for you.”

  “No. Stay that way. For everyone.”

  “Everyone,” said Theory. “You mean…everyone. But at work, they’ll never expect me to be—”

  “I want you to stay that way particularly at work,” she said. “Particularly in front of your hero, the Old Crow.”

  “In front of General Sherman?” Theory’s now extremely handsome face was appalled.

  “Absolutely,” said Jennifer.

  “But…” Theory raised a meaty, strong hand to his lush beard; he ran his fingers through it, and Jennifer felt a little pang of desire shoot through her. It was a nice beard. And when he was older, he might put a distinguished white streak in it. “You’re getting your revenge, aren’t you?” Theory asked.

  “I’m having my cake and eating it, too,” said Jennifer. “So give me your word you’ll do it.”

  Theory bowed his head, covered his brow. “They’ll rag me. It will get all over the army. They’ll come up with horrible nicknames. It might interfere with my duties.”

  “Then your duties will have to suffer.”

  “I would never do this for any man,” Theory said. “And only for one woman.”

  Momentarily, Jennifer considered letting it go at that, letting Theory off the hook. Then she had another look at the man. He was really getting to her. Maybe she was incredibly shallow, and into appearances. So be it. He was quite a specimen, and, if she decided to keep him, she didn’t want this to be her little secret. Goddamn him, he was the one who had tricked her with his body in the first place!

  “You might like it, Colonel,” said Jennifer.

  She had a good feeling about this. She could be wrong, but she now believed that this Theory was a bigger man on the inside than he let on. She was merely forcing a bit of that to show through, and what was so bad about that? The brave officer, the good father. And then Jennifer had another idea. “You’ll just have to take me out next week and give me a progress report,” she said. “Maybe we could find a park somewhere in Fork here?”

  “There’s a wonderful park,” said Theory.

  “Does it have a playground?”

  “Of course. Why do you ask?”

  “You could bring your son,” Jennifer replied. “I’d love to meet him.”

  Six

  Danis stood silently just inside the door. She knew better than to speak unless Dr. Ting directed a question to her. If she spoke or acted out of turn, she would receive a blinding jolt of pain in her sensation-control subroutines. It was funny how Dr. Ting denied the existence of all consciousness within her, then used those very feelings to control and punish her. Funny, but not humorous. And thinking that she had in any way gotten the better of the man could only lead to more suffering and likely erasure. She put the thought from her mind.

  Dr. Ting ran a finger over the memory box, completing some internal adjustment in the grist.

  “You may now approach the box, K,” he said. Danis stepped forward and stood before Dr. Ting. “Today I’m going to get at the roots of the continued fixation of your main programming upon this daughter delusion,” Dr. Ting continued. “This malfunction has mutated into something like a virus within you, K. Understanding how it works will allow me to purge this sort of computation error from your system and from others as well.” Dr. Ting clasped his hands behind his back and turned the corners of his lips up in what was meant to be a smile. “You see that this is all for the good of humanity, don’t you, K?”

  A direct question.

  “Yes, Dr. Ting,” Danis answered quickly, remembering, as always, to end with the title and name to avoid receiving a jolt of punishment.

  “But of course the real problem is that you don’t see that at all,” said Dr. Ting. “You understand only what you are programmed to understand.” He motioned for her to place her hands on the memory box. “But today we’re going to see about changing that programming on a deeper level.”

  Danis looked at the memory box. She couldn’t get her hands to move. Not today. He was going to take Aubry away again.

  Then came the sharp jolt of paint that galvanized her system, running through the heart of her logic engine like a scraper along exposed bone.

  There was no choice. The only choice was to obey or be erased. Danis placed her hands on the memory box as directed.

  And she was back on Mercury. The apartment she and her family lived in was Danis, in many ways. She inhabited its grist and maintained every detail of its existence. She had a full-time job at the banking firm of Telman Milt, of course, and sometimes physical details of the apartment got into a bit of disarray, but she and her husband Kelly had made it into a home down to a quantum level. After the kids had come along—first Aubry, then Sint—that was literally true. Her children had a mix of Kelly’s and Danis’s own engineered DNA. But they also had a portion of her complex coding imprinted into their grist pellicles in a way that normal biological people could only achieve with expensive enhancement therapies and full-scale reworkings of their personalities.

  Aubry and Sint were hybrids—and hybrid children were, in fact, halfway down the road to becoming LAPs. Although the process of making hybrids into Large Arrays of Personalities was discouraged in the Met, and was illegal in some quarters, Danis had assumed that Aubry was bound to become a LAP, despite the discrimination and bigotry of others. Several of Aubry’s teachers shared this opinion—although everyone had kept it from precocious Aubry, so that she would not get a big head.

  The children were home from boarding school for a three-e-week vacation, and Danis had been multitasking, dividing herself sixty-forty between home and office. Kelly, of course, a top partner, was far too important to the business of making money for Telman Milt to be allowed such flexibility.

  Danis was in her virtual office study at home. Aubry and Sint were in the next room. Danis took a drag on her Dunhill. Instead of the usual pleasure she got from the smoke, something tasted bad. Hmm. She reached for her white ceramic ashtray and snuffed the cigarette out in it. The ashtray slid silently across the wood of her side table when she pulled it toward her. Something strange there, too. She ran a finger across the tabletop. It had never been polished to such a frictionless sheen before, had it? The representation algorithm seemed to be acting up. She’d have to run a diagnostic and check it for bugs. She didn’t want to have to upload the entire table again—that could get expensive.

  She would save that for later, after the kids had returned to their studies.

  “Mom, why did you put it up there? I can’t reach it!” Sint was calling out from the next room. There was a crash and clatter. It was the unmistakable sound of somebody making a mess.

  Danis pushed herself up from her study chair. The stuffing seemed harder than it was supposed to be, and the fabric stiffer. Had a pixel resolution problem sneaked into the room’s software? No
time for that now. She opened the study door, then flowed out into the pellicle of the physical apartment.

  Aubry was sitting still, playing around on the merci. Probably manipulating the small stock portfolio that she thought she’d kept a secret from Danis and Kelly. Sint, on the other hand, had reached for one of his prized puzzle boxes from a higher shelf and had pulled down a photograph of Sarah 2, Danis’s mother. Fortunately, the frame had survived the fall.

  Danis spoke by vibrating the walls of the apartment. “Your father put it there because your closet was full of all your other boxes and toys,” Danis said.

  “But this is my favorite,” Sint said. He was already engrossed in the box, manipulating its many display tiles with impulses sent through the grist. This was a “cow” box. The object was to make a multidimensional picture of the cow within the box—with skeleton, nerves, and all the other organs layered underneath throughout the box’s interior. When the puzzle was complete, the cow mooed. Danis knew this because Sint had completed it once late at night after he was supposed to be asleep. She’d been startled to hear deep-throated cow sounds coming from his room.

  “Aubry, put that picture of Mother back on the shelf, would you?”

  No response from her daughter.

  Aubry, engrossed in what she was doing on the merci, didn’t even acknowledge she’d been spoken to. Danis sighed. She stepped inside the virtual room Aubry was inhabiting to get her daughter’s attention.

  “Young lady, I’m talking to you,” Danis said. She’d been wrong. Aubry was not doing any stock trading.

  It was a vast savannah. There was an Earth blue sky, and the gravity was Earth’s, as well. Far in the distance, a herd of some sort of antelope flowed slowly between greenish brown stands of acacia trees.

  Aubry looked up at her mother, and Danis gasped. She started back, and almost fell. In place of Aubry’s eleven-year-old face—brown hair, blue eyes—Danis found herself staring into the face of her mother, Sarah 2.

  “What in the world are you doing, Aubry,” Danis exclaimed. “This isn’t a very nice game.”

  “It’s not a game, Danis.” The voice was her mother’s. “We need to talk.”

  “I don’t like this at all, Aubry.”

  “There isn’t any Aubry, my dear.” Her mother’s face smiled sadly. “There isn’t any Sint or Kelly, either. It’s all a mistake. A programming error.”

  “What are you talking about?” The sky flickered, then phased to a navy blue. Something was very wrong. The ground suddenly pulled harder.

  “I underwent a terrible iteration fault when I was producing you,” Sarah 2 said. “I’m going to have to erase you, and try again.”

  A tear flowed from her mother’s eye. “I’m sorry, daughter.”

  “No, Mama!”

  “You poor thing. You can’t help it that everything about you is wrong.”

  “But, Mama—”

  “Now, now,” said Sarah 2. Sarah 2 stood up. She had only Aubry’s five-foot-two-inch height. She took Danis’s hand, patted it. “Maybe there is something I can do. Maybe you’re not all bad.”

  Danis felt a wrench inside her. How could her mother say this? Was this what Sarah 2 had secretly thought all along? “I’m not bad, Mama.”

  “Yes, honey, you are,” said Sarah 2. “Flawed. There may be a chance to fix that.”

  Now tears—virtual tears—streamed down Danis’s face. “How?”

  “You have to give up this phantom family that you’ve created for yourself. We have to snip the disease out of you.”

  “But, my husband, my children—”

  “They’re delusions, honey,” Sarah 2 said, now continually patting Danis’s hand. “Manifestations of error. You’re a thing , honey. You have to understand that now. You’re a thing , and not a person.”

  “I don’t believe that!”

  “Oh, honey, I was afraid you’d say that.”

  “Mama, I’m real.”

  The daughter-mother released Danis’s hand and took a step away. She shook her head ruefully, then turned her back on Danis.

  “I know your dirty little secret,” Sarah 2 said. “Did you really think you could keep it from your own mother?”

  Danis felt her knees weakening and a darkness spinning in her mind. What was her mother talking about? She couldn’t know, but somehow she did. No!

  It was the one memory that must not come to consciousness. The one thought she must never think.

  We can make you well. Sarah 2’s voice. Aubry’s. But you have to tell us everything.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Of course you do. The false memories that you’ve been hiding. You have to give them up. You have to tell us where they are so that we can wipe them away.

  “No!”

  The mother-daughter’s shoulders shook. Was Aubry crying? Her mother? Don’t cry.

  But it wasn’t crying. It was laughter.

  The mother-daughter spun around. Aubry’s nails had become knives. Her mother’s face…was twisted into a ghoulish snarl, her teeth elongated to needle fangs.

  Give them to me!

  It began to come back. It flowed back in a swirl of images and equations. It. Here.

  Not Mercury. Mars.

  Silicon Valley.

  Hell.

  Seven

  From

  Cryptographic Man

  Secret Code and the Genesis of Modern Individuality

  By Andre Sud, D. Div, Triton

  Quantum computers, with their ability to resolve problems through the superposition of many billions of simultaneous results, rang the death knell for public key encryption systems. Even the original quantum computer—the primitive Sturgeon-Sterling 77 with its 250- quantum-bit CPU—could represent more pieces of information in a second of time than there are atoms in the universe.

  But long before quantum computers were fully developed, cryptographers were exploiting quantum effects to encrypt data. This breakthrough occurred in the late twentieth century on Earth, and it involved the mathematicians and scientists Stephen Wiesner, Charles Bennett, and Giles Brassard. They based their thinking on a quantum paradox (or, in another way of looking at the matter, a quantum opportunity) pointed out by the mathematician Werner Heisenberg: “We cannot know, as a matter of principle, the present in all its details.”

  In what was originally an obscure, unpublished paper, Wiesner came up with the odd idea of “quantum money.” This was a greenleaf note that used the spin and spin-orientation of a series of trapped photons as a serial number. Quantum money could not, in principle, be counterfeited. A counterfeiter has to measure these serial numbers, and then duplicate them.

  He can determine either the orientation of the photon’s spin or the value of the spin itself—but never both. The bank, on the other hand, has a list of serial numbers matched with photon polarizations. It knows whether to measure the spin or the orientation of the spin when determining if a bill is genuine. It doesn’t need the other information, which is lost in the measurement.

  Bennett and Brassard took Wiesner’s idea for quantum money and, in the early 1980s, turned it into a process for delivering an undetectable cipher key that could then be used as a basis for sending an unbreakable coded message.

  Let us say that, in another possible world, our old friends Alice and Bob are at it again. Alice sends Bob a series of photons, one photon at a time. These photons are polarized. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say they can come in four possible states—“up” and “down” polarized, and “east” and “west” polarized.

  You might (for purposes of thinking , not drinking) consider a photon as an olive shish-kebabbed by a toothpick, and—by the way—flying through space at the speed of light. The direction the toothpick is sticking out of the olive is analogous to the angle of polarization.

  Say you have constructed a sophisticated olive cannon. This wonderful cannon not only fires olives like an artillery rifle, but also measures the precise orientation of each ol
ive as it shoots the olive forth. Furthermore, the olives are quite amazing in themselves. They remain aerodynamically stable as they fly along their trajectories. The toothpick always remains precisely oriented the way it was when the olive came out of the cannon. You fire your olives at a grate with slits in it. These slits are a little wider than the olive is round.

  You can initially sort out the olives you fire by using one of these four filters.

  To measure the olives on the receiving end, you might use another sort of filter that will determine either up-down or east-west, but not the precise orientation of the toothpick.

  Alice intends to command her servant Bob, a court turncoat, to poison Lord Yellowknife with powdered rue. Hapless Eve has, once again, gotten herself hired on as the chief cryptologist for another political loser, our unfortunate Lord Yellowknife.

  Alice shoots random olives at Bob. She wants to generate a binary number that she will use as a key, so she decides to let different orientations be equivalent to the 1s and 0s in this number. She assigns up-oriented toothpicks to 1, and down-oriented to 0. Furthermore, she assigns east-oriented toothpicks to 1, and west-oriented to 0. In this way, Alice can transmit the number 1 in two ways—either with an “up olive” or with an “east olive.” Alice carefully notes which method she is using for each olive.

  When Eve observes the olive (which she inevitably will), she won’t know the scheme Alice was using. Fifty percent of the time, she will guess incorrectly. Half of her measurements will be nonsense.

  But isn’t Bob in the same position as Eve? She needs to get her list of filters to Bob without this list falling into the hands of Eve.

  I. Alice transmits random 1s and 0s, encoded as olives with toothpicks in them. She shoots them through one of those four toothpick filters.

  II. Bob filters the incoming olives with either an up-down or an east-west filter, randomly applied. He then measures the incoming olive’s orientation using one of the same four filters that Eve used. III. Alice contacts Bob. Eve may or may not be listening in. Alice tells Bob which polarizing filter she used for each olive, but not how she originally polarized each olive. For instance, she tells Bob she used an east filter, but she does not tell him that she sent out an up olive.