The 13th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®: 26 Great SF Stories!

by Lake, Jay

  “And since we’ll post our message to the Web, everyone who cares gets a sneak preview of our order. That’s at least sixteen years to figure out ET’s technology or to decide to exit a business that could be made obsolete.”

  “Your attention, everyone,” called the amplified voice of Kim Chun Ku. A wave of shushes broke out. “Please be seated.”

  On stage, large-screen TVs showed the great parabolic antenna at the Jodrell Bank radio observatory (now also an interstellar transmission station), the nearby control room, and a slaved copy of the main console display bearing only a decrementing counter.

  The antenna was prepositioned, its motion as it tracked Lalande 21185 too slow to be visible. The control room had been vacated by all but a few technicians, the USG, and Sherman Xu. As the counter reached sixty seconds, Kim whispered something to the man who had started it all. The crowd cheered as Xu took his seat at the console.

  At zero, Xu tapped the enter key. To thunderous applause, the text of Earth’s response began scrolling down a monitor in the auditorium. Dean and Bridget embraced, and were far from the only people exchanging hugs, kisses, and backslaps.

  The more important version of the message took the first step of its journey: an uplink to a geosat over the Atlantic for relay to Jodrell Bank in the UK. Jodrell Bank would start Earth’s beamcast: responsibility would be handed off from transmitter to transmitter as the world turned. The eighteen-hour message would repeat continuously for the thirty days ET had said he’d be listening.

  The USG entered the auditorium to thank everyone for their contributions. He kept his remarks brief, knowing them to be anticlimactic. The room emptied slowly, everyone too wound up to leave but for the first time in months lacking a clear purpose. Party noises from down the hall were subdued.

  * * * *

  Dean and Bridget found themselves alone in an otherwise empty auditorium. “Yes, I envy ET,” repeated Bridget. “He has only eight years to wait. We’ve got to endure twice that.”

  “We actually have plenty to keep us busy.”

  Perhaps eyes actually could twinkle—he was emitting some good vibe.

  “Okay, Dean. What haven’t you told me?”

  “Remember ET going off-line a while back?”

  “Sure. Didn’t we decide his planet was going behind his sun? Too much interference?”

  “That ‘explanation’ was purely speculative, since we can’t see his planet.”

  She tipped her head in puzzlement. “What are you saying?”

  “There’s a small matter I’ve kept to myself since we cracked ET’s transmitter design. Remember the beam-steering and Doppler-correction logic? That circuitry is implicitly a model of his planet’s movement and ours. I took the liberty of programming the model onto my laptop.”

  “So is our speculation plausible? Might ET have stopped sending because his orbit meant his sun would be in the way?”

  “Not even close. ET had another reason for stopping his transmission. My guess is that he had another use for his big transmitter.” The smile Dean had been hiding burst forth, an ear-to-ear grin.

  “Now that we’ve built ourselves a phone, it appears we might have other neighbors to introduce ourselves to.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Expanded and updated, “Dangling Conversations” is the opening segment of the novel InterstellarNet: Origins.

  GUARDSMEN, FED TO TIGERS, by A.R. Morlan

  Originally published in LC-39 #3 (2000).

  1

  There are waters blown by

  changing winds to laughter

  And lit by rich skies, all day...

  Rupert Brooke, 1914

  “The Dead”

  Long before ubiquity dulled the impact of her creation, I think that the genius of her art was in the intimacy of the work. The way the carbonaceous specks and rough-edged fragments could only form an unmistakable whole when held close in the hand, until the palm’s warmth created a radiant energy within the piece—allowing the surrounding fluid to move more freely within the prescribed configuration of the image within, even as the inevitable addition of light surrounding one’s raised hand infused the piece with a myriad of sparkling motes, so much like the wavering, darting dots of translucence that fill one’s very eyeballs.

  True, her work has not only endured, become as intrinsic to artistic mass perception as the smile of the Mona Lisa, or the angled “O” of the Indiana “LOVE” sculpture (or, more aptly, the soundless scream of Munch’s hollow-eyed figure), it has also transcended mere art per se, becoming a symbol of its creator, even as it mimics her state of earthly being.

  But, with familiarity comes complacence; that which is seen often becomes too comfortable, too accessible—less likely to invite the synergy of intimate inspection, the thrill of using personal action to participate in the miraculous.

  And I do not use the word “miraculous” lightly. Not only is the work itself a thing of suspended beauty, of the viewer’s mind merging with the suggestion of an image to create something more than a representation of another’s imagination...it can be so much, much more. Especially when one looks beyond the obvious, to that which may or may not have been actually intended, especially in the midst of her own free-floating pain and confusion—

  —as well as the unspeakable clarity of her “cure”...

  * * * *

  “Wake up already, it’s me.”

  I uncoiled from a fetal position on my futon slowly, reluctantly, as my.boss continued to pound and shout through the small pane of rectangular plexiglas set into the center of my double-bolted and chained front door. I saw the top of his head through the smudged inset as I half-crawled, halfshambled to the door, moaning, “You know what time it is? Half-past I should still be in REM sleep. Couldn’t you leave a message on my machine?”

  As I fumbled open the locks and unchained the door with clumsy swipes of my fingers (which were still tingly numb despite sleeping with a bowling brace on my right wrist), he kept thumping something against the bottom of the door—a foot or knee judging by the lowness of the sound: a steady, muffled whump-whump-whump.

  A bracingly cool slice of night air and distant city-shine bit me when I swung open the door; framed in the center of that rectangle of evening was my boss, CyberMaster himself, standing with one foot resting on top of a duct-taped and shrink-wrapped fiberboard box, his wiry arms crossed mummy-style over his chest, protecting a well-stuffed Tyvek envelope whose stapled-shut top rested just under his slightly pointy, stubble-covered chin.

  “A house-call? This late...and delivered personally? Either I’m privileged or you’re getting paid a whole lot more than the usual half-K an hour to retrieve this one,” I said as I helped him pull the heavy box over my threshold and into my living-cum-work room. The job was made more difficult by virtue of Cyber refusing to uncross his arms as we worked, so I was doing the pulling while he soccer-kicked the back of the box until it rested in the center of my uncarpeted room.

  Cyber didn’t speak until the box stopped moving; even then, his words were more inarticulate than usual: “No time to call. Rush job. Like last week. Fire damage, bank-surplus polydrive. . .infected Vapor prank-micro, but salvageworthy. Relational database, according to client. One program to retrieve, matryoshki-filed—”

  “What-filed?” Up to that point, I’d been able to decipher his scrambled syntax. I was familiar with the Vapor benign virus (a prank-micro yarned for an English synth-rock group of the late 1980s, whose lone U.S. hit was called “Turning Japanese”—as in random words and phrases of Japanese popping up on-screen, a nonsense intrusive muddle that never evolved into anything destructive, just cluttered up a file worse than old-time image-bum on a monitor). And while I’d yet to work on a polymer drive, I’d seen enough data about them on the Net to (roughly) understand how they ope
rated. So either this matryoshki thing-ding was new-new, as in just invented, or I’d entirely missed hearing about it.

  Cyber stared at me for a couple of seconds, then blinked his dark greenish-blue eyes tightly, still hugging the envelope to his narrow chest.

  I sat back down on my futon, fumbled around on my coffee table with my good left hand for that bowl of hard candies I always keep filled, and watched Cyber get back into drive. A few blinks later, he said, “Mat-ryo-shki. Old Russian. For those dolls...the ones inside each other. Program barely made it past Beta...too prone to viral infection. This one’s prank-micro, maybe more. Have to break the first layer before retrieving what follows. Only...on a poly-drive, it locks tighter. Because of the higher density, and the configurations of the polymer itself.”

  I nodded as I unwrapped my second candy and popped it into my mouth next to the first one. Polymer drives were as close as you could realistically get to the myth of the DNA computer, that hypothetical jug of DNA harnessed for number-crunching in some equally theoretical lab. Coat a disk with a new polymer that exists in distinct, near-organic configurations (much like right- or left-handed sugars), then throw in a laser to record tiny spots where the handedness of the polymer is changed. Add a second laser to read the information by hitting a specific spot; a detector head (like phonograph needles of old) above the spot reads its polarization. Only these spots of information were tiny, almost as small as an actual thought in a brain. And once they were able to replace the old magneto-optical drives to stabilize the former diffusion of ultra-fine magnetic “spots”.. .well, mankind finally figured out how to (almost) put a brain in a box and plug it in.

  Adding Cyber’s matryoshki to an already highly selective, highly information-dense hard drive was like expanding the conscious to include the subconscious.

  Swallowing down my candies, I asked, “How rush is ‘rush’ with this thing?” while nudging the unyielding box with my outstretched. Only then did lie uncross his arms and fling the envelope onto the futon next to me.

  “Like last week, or before. Stuff you’ll need is in there. If it’ll help—didn’t for me.” Cyber was almost over my threshold before I yelled at his retreating back, “You mean you couldn’t get in? After how long trying?”

  Cyber leaned against the frame of my open door, arms again crossed defensively over his T-shirted chest, only now they clasped nothing but emptiness. His lips pursed, then twitched before he spat out, “Two, three days...no encryption program, didn’t need a public key.. .just couldn’t get past the first file. Doesn’t mean it can’t be opened. I...wasn’t the right person for it.” His eyes were focused on the bowl of candy on my table as he went on, “PC belonged to a woman. Her private file. And since you—” this time his eyes shifted to me, and I instinctively drew my knees up close to my chest, as if by doing so I could erase the roll of flesh inner-tubing my middle “—are likewise a...I thought you could do it.” He was looking at the floor now.

  “You already get the drive out?” I crossed my arms in front of my knees, shielding the rest of my body, even though he was no longer looking my way. As if I could somehow erase his memory of having already seen me...

  “Didn’t need to take it out. Just replaced the fan, clock, and battery. It’s sealed back up.. .didn’t even need to replace the cord. The thing was torched,” he added quickly, eyes rolling up to meet mine. “Don’t know who did it, but it was selective. Mainly the housing. Probably wetted it down with flammable, wiped off the excess, then lit it. And smothered it right away.”

  “But...” I paused to unwrap another candy, slipped it under my tongue, and went on, “Why do something like that? Insurance? Privacy? Nutcase?”

  At the last, Cyber’s mouth jerked into a lopsided, lips-closed grin. “Does a blend-head count as a ‘nutcase’?”

  “So, a blender torched the client’s PC? Or is the client the blender?” I noticed the box bore black-on-yellow fragments of cop-shop warning tape, torn ends of it stuck under the new tape Cyber had applied.

  “Read what’s in the envelope...and good luck with the file. I’ll be in touch.” Before I could speak, he was out the door, stepping lightly down the sidewalk leading away from my apartment.

  Glancing over at the envelope, I noticed that it had also been sealed with some evidence tape. But I first got up and closed the door; Cyber’s car was already midway down the block by the time I reached the door.

  “Just ’cause you’re a geek doesn’t mean you can’t learn to say goodnight,” I mumbled before walking back to the box.

  Cyber had been generous with the tape and the shrink-wrap, so much so that I figured the envelope would be the more logical thing to open.. .but yet, I didn’t feel comfortable with flat, static information, the kind I had to hold in hand, the kind that wouldn’t change no matter what I did to it. I didn’t become a PC geek just to pour over pages of hard copy. The printed word was dead, stable...not something almost alive, like flashing neurons in a brain of silicon and circuitry. And this particular brain before me had a subconscious—the layers of memory encased within each other, like those bright-painted nesting dolls Cyber spoke of. The thought of reaching that last doll, the smallest yet most durable (for wasn’t the smallest always solid, carved from a single piece of wood?), was too tantalizing to pass up in favor of slogging through some envelope of papers (and I could see that the envelope did contain only papers; the rolling curve of the soft Tyvek against my futon was unmistakable, and no floppy on Earth ever was truly floppy)...

  * * * *

  It took me almost half an hour of slicing, tearing, and finally hacking with a large bread knife to unseal the PC. And once I’d pared away the last of the fiberboard, bubble-wrap, and wrinkled Tyvek lining, I immediately agreed with Cyber about the torching. The thing had been deliberately set on fire, not to actually damage it, but just enough to form free-flowing charcoal swirls and scorch marks all over the plastic housing (which seemed to have been some shade of blue originally) and keyboard (Cyber had replaced part of that, too; the newer keypads were a different color,and the font of the letters on them didn’t match). But the cord was virtually untouched (only bandaged with a few twists of electrical tape), and the plates covering the ports in the rear were only lightly swirled with seared color.

  Still, for over five hundred an hour, I felt obligated to open it up, just to see if Cyber missed some singed chip or melted cable...

  I’d seen data about polymer drives on the Net, but this was the first one I’d had the chance to see up close. Most of Cyber’s customers (which he’d then farm out to whichever of his operatives was free at the moment) used more standard PCs with more traditional drives. Which the owner usually managed to screw up somehow, losing a file or crashing the system. Each of Cyber’s operatives has a specialty; mine is software rescue. If something is input, I can output it. I might need to go through several bowls of candy plus most of my fridge’s contents before the job is through, but, then again, no customer is looking for a waif-like beauty if his or her precious software is seemingly lost somewhere in the guts of a PC.

  As I unscrewed the screws that held the external cover onto the base of the unit, I remembered what Cyber had said about the owner of the PC being a blend-head...but hadn’t he also said that the PC “belonged” to a woman? As in past tense. That wasn’t surprising; anyone who took blend was playing Russian roulette without need of a gun or the bullet. Which probably accounted for the desire of the woman’s people to find out what was on her file—some recipes for blend were virtual Kevorkians, bad enough to kill on ingestion. And if she got that recipe off some web page, it would be worth whatever it cost to find that recipe to try and back-track it to whatever server it was downloaded from.

  “Probably where she picked up the Vapor virus,” I muttered as the last of the screws spiraled out of its corresponding hole in the external cover. Once that was gone, I
finally got my first look at a polymer drive...in all its iridescent, near-holographic beauty.

  While a traditional hard drive resembles an ancient LP record, down to the central hub of contrasting metal, a polymer drive is akin to a CD: all finely layered wavering bands of shimmering color, with a liquid sheen thatsnonetheless looks more hard than aqueous, yet saying it looks icy wouldn’t be right, either (too static)....although the way sunlight plays over an icy windowpane might be fairly close, or the oleaginous ripple of color on an oil slick.

  Just not...organic enough.

  I wished that I could’ve left off the housing that covered the drive itself, to better watch the ruby sliver of laser light play over that auroral disk, but in addition to being heat sensitive, it was a rather dangerous type of drive—according to one web page I’d scanned, the reflection of the laser hitting the polymer was death to corneas.

  So, instead consoling myself with a mental picture of the disk drive in operation, I gave the rest of the interior a look-see: the RAM, math co-processor, transformer, various circuit boards, fax/modem board, floppy drives, back up drives, every last chip and connector cable—it all was near-mint. No melting, no singed parts. Not even a flake of soot, although I assumed Cyber had already vacuumed the thing out. It had been torched, all right.. .albeit timidly.

  Once I screwed it back together, I could start having fun—after I restocked my candy dish and hauled out some extra connector cables...

  As I padded past my futon, and the envelope Cyber had tossed there, I knew that I should’ve taken the extra minute or two to open it, shake out whatever was inside, but I’d heard enough about blenders to be reasonably sure that whatever information was in there, it probably wouldn’t make much—if any—sense at all.