by Barnes, John
That’s why it’s called a closed timelike curve. It’s “closed” because it only runs through one part of time, eventually bending back to its origin (where our universe is open — it keeps moving forward in time). That bending back is the “curve.” And since you can follow it and exist in it just as you can in regular time, it’s “timelike.” If I got that right.
Anyway, the transfer ships had set off the bomb to make a giant singularity out at 100 AU, way out where the comets come from, and then scattered out to settle five solar systems. A thousand years or more in the future, they would send ships back from those colonies, a whole huge fleet and army, either to retake Earth from Resuna, or at least to seal up Resuna on Earth forever.
We’d had one message from that fleet already — they had informed us they’d be arriving in just about 300 years, and would need permanent accommodations for one hundred million people. That was why everything seemed so urgent here; the whole population of Mars was currently that of a city the size LA had been when I was a kid, and somehow in just 300 years they had to get ready to move in the whole population of Japan. They could do it, no doubt — but it was going to be a push.
And that probably percolated down from planners to politicians to managers to bosses to foremen … so that everyone got in the habit of running around like they were part of a kicked-over anthill. Hence all these people rocketing by me, or scrambling around out there outside the enclosure, and the occasional dirty look I was getting from people who were walking fast and looking worried.
When I lived at Gwenny’s, she used to have a cartoon on the wall, one of those things that migrated from fax machine to fax machine, of a bum on a bench saying “Work is fascinating, I can watch it for hours.” Well, it’s true.
I sit through the long afternoon, watch the sun go down, and catch the elevator down to the Radisson Red Sands, which is about like every other pricey hotel in the last 150 years, right down to the same room service menu. I order a pizza, watch the news, and go to bed early without setting the clock.
The next morning there’s no reason to check out so I don’t. I grab a shower, change clothes, toss the dirty ones into the bag to be freshed, send the pressure suit in for routine maintenance, and I’m out the door, just me and my werp, to take a long stroll around the city. I can walk down every street in this town today, if I want to. There are worse ways to kill time.
CHECKQUOTES!!! I eat a long breakfast at a place doing its best to look like a European streetcorner café. As I’m having the third cup of coffee, the werp beeps. An answer to my ad.
It could be something I don’t want just anybody to hear, so I take it on the screen rather than putting it up on voice. The message comes up. I HAVEN’T SEEN WEATHER LIKE THIS SINCE I WAS A KID IN OHIO.
My heart jumps up. Has to be —
IF YOU’D STAYED PUT I’D HAVE COME OUT FOR YOU.
I grin. Glad I managed to make it a little tough. I’d hate to have him think I’m getting soft.
LOOK BEHIND YOU.
Oh god. Oldest werp trick there is, sneaking up on someone and then contacting him via his werp. Kids do that all the time. I turn, ready to say “Sadi.”
It’s not.
She’s wearing a plain black dress, a little out of place on Mars where coveralls are more usual. Her hair, amazingly enough, is still blonde. I can’t see her eyes behind the dark glasses —
It can’t possibly be Katrina. She was at least ten years older than I was, couldn’t look more than five years younger than me now, at best. This woman doesn’t look thirty.
“It’s been a long time, Josh,” she says.
It’s definitely, really her. I close up my werp case, stand, extend my hand; she gets up, takes it, shakes firmly once, then pushes her dark glasses back off her face. She’s smooth, unlined — maybe twenty-five in appearance. “We need to talk,” she says. “Your hotel room.”
She must know where I’m staying. She heads straight for it though I say nothing.
When we get to my door, she presses her thumb to the doorplate and it opens. For some reason the hotel thinks she’s staying with me, I guess. Maybe she is.
I follow her into the room. The maid’s already been there. My bag and the returned, tuned-up pressure suit sit neatly in the corner, but the rest is anonymous like any hotel room.
She turns and smiles. “You must be hopelessly confused.”
“It’s been pretty baffling,” I admit. “Are you really Katrina?”
“I have been. Look closer. Study my face … “
Like I have no will of my own, I walk toward her, mind blank. My eyes follow the curve of a high cheekbone, the thin lips that seem to be about to make faces at everything, the big, wide eyes. You’d think if she’s really 160 or so, and especially if she’s been with the Organization all that time, it would show somewhere, around her eyes, in her expression, somehow. But even around the eyes she looks like a twenty-five-year-old.
“You’ve known me under another name,” she says.
I look more closely. Did I read or do I remember that something like this has happened before? Yes. More than once. Not recorded in my werp, but it did.
Shit, I think, looking at her, never wondered what a rejuve job would do on top of that anti-aging stuff. Genaltering and surfacting has gotten so far along that if you’re willing to spend six months dreaming in a tank, doped up on painkillers and drifting in a deep virtual reality hallucination, you can come out looking like anyone they can recode you to, but I thought your age caught up with you within a year or two. God, she looks good.
Something in her voice, too. She knows me. Her voice touches me like a hand gloved in soft leather, and holds my heart like —
Then I feel my right hand begin to turn, ever so slightly, the fingers begin to work, and I know that if I held my white knight in my hand, it would be appearing and vanishing between my fingers, neatly, quickly, never where you would expect it.
“Sadi,” I say. “Jesus.”
“Right on title first guess,” she says, and steps into my arms. My cock gets so hard it hurts. Her tits are soft, heavy, warm against my chest. The muscles of her back are hard and strong. She’s undoing my belt even before I sit back, pulling her onto the bed beside me, our mouths still locked.
2.
Scuttlebutt in Murphy’s outfit was that the ice dam across the St. Lawrence wasn’t going to breach this year at all. We had been wandering uselessly around Syracuse Ruin since May, supposedly waiting to make an attack on a major node across Oneida Bay as soon as the lake drained back and the land was exposed again. But now it looked like what everyone had been saying — that the St. Lawrence was due to stop flowing for good sooner or later, because every summer the time it flowed got shorter — had been true.
This year we were fighting for One True, because it had offered us more money than any other meme had. We were contracted to destroy the Carthage Ruin node — an Unreconstructed Catholic meme running on it was re-infecting millions of AI’s and thousands of people. Supposedly if you got infected you’d start hearing PJP’s voice telling you that Ecucatholicism was all a mistake and you had to kill everyone who wasn’t a strict Catholic, plus you’d suddenly have all these false memories of growing up in a very uptight old-fashioned Catholic school and of being the star student there.
Anyway, if the ice dam wasn’t going to break, we’d have to walk around the bay instead of across it. So in little groups of twos and threes, passing word to each other when we met, we had begun to drift south out of Syracuse, up into the hills, then north toward Carthage Ruin. Moving slowly and carefully, doing our best to look like scattered and isolated travelers, Murphy’s Comsat Avengers might be able to assemble near the node by late September. Months late and some of us wouldn’t get there.
That night in our tent, Sadi was talking. As usual. I was working some passes from the Boy’s Big Book of Magic. Found it in the storage vaults for a public library, and that white knight I always carried in my poc
ket was exactly the right size for doing all the little palm-and-finger tricks, which I was getting good at.
After all those years and lives together, Sadi and I didn’t really converse. Sadi talked and I listened. I liked it that way. The knight gave me something to do with my hands while I listened to him.
“Trouble is,” he said, “we’re still losing people. No question about it.”
I made the knight slip into my sleeve on the thumb side, out on the little finger, brought him through the middle, popped him into my palm. Years before I might have said, “How do you figure?” or “I don’t see how you can know that,” but nowadays Sadi could just assume I wanted him to go on.
“Figure our last twelve rendezvous, right?” He totted them up on his fingers. “Four times we met with a party and fought. Twice they snapped out of it — must’ve been a weak meme. Once we killed them. And once we all had a meme and we attacked each other. Good thing we had a pistol shot that time to jar us out of it. And a real good thing it wasn’t you or me getting shot. You saw how tough it was for the guy’s partner.”
I knew that as well as he did. He liked to tell stories. I liked to hear them. Mama would have called it division of labor. I kept the knight moving.
“So figure one in three times we make contact a meme activates, right? And what, maybe one in four is a strong meme then? So in twelve contacts, about six months, out of a total of, let me think, I guess thirty-one guys counting you and me, three died. That’s ten percent per six months. Toss in no new recruits anymore. Not figuring what happens at headquarters, ten per cent dead per six months, figure it’s twenty percent or so per year. Used to be if an army had ten percent killed it stopped functioning.”
“They’re not like old armies,” I pointed out, letting the knight slip around and into my other hand, covering the drop by bending my fingers. “The memes just contract us to do a job, and they hire the size unit they need for the size of job. Besides, we’re not organized in fire teams or anything; really we all fight on our own. An outfit could die till nothing was left but the headquarters company, and that could keep fighting.”
“Yeah, but unless they know how many men they have left — “
“They know,” I said. “That’s why Murphy’s sitting behind a wall of bodyguards that are never allowed net access and a bunch of AIs that run on continuously re-encrypted operating systems. So he can use his werp all the time. Sure, we stay offnet for safety’s sake, but when we check in or when we make our contacts, the count gets relayed to him. He knows.”
Sadi sighed. “Right as always, partner. Want me to read you anything?”
I shrugged. “Go ahead and read if you like, but you don’t have to read aloud. I’ll just sack out.”
“Yeah.” The way he said it made me think he would go on, but then he didn’t. Any time Sadi stopped being talkative something was wrong. I looked up at him.
In the light of the little flickeret, he glowed sort of flame-color. His brown hair was streaked and spotted with gray, now, as if he’d been painting a ceiling not too carefully, and his thin face and high cheekbones made him look like one of those elf-warrior guys on the covers of the books I used to read when I was squatting on my ass in the desert during the First Oil War.
He looked good. Three years till his next transit, five years since my last, we both looked like we were in our mid-forties, though I was almost a hundred and he might have been a bit over.
Sadi stared off into space, started to speak, thought again, stared. Usually when he did that I’d catch him watching me from the corner of his eye, seeing if it was working, if I was about to start saying “What? What?” Though a lot of times he just talked, Sadi liked to have my complete attention for something important. So he’d stare off into space to make me ask him.
But this time he really was staring off into space, which I hadn’t seen him do much. Finally he spoke again. “Do you suppose that we’re going to know when to bail? I mean, get real. The War of the Memes is winding down, bud, has to be. Nobody new joining the armies, memes merging and consuming each other, someday there will be one meme and no soldiers.”
“Uh, it’s a small world after all,” I said.
For years after that I tried to remember whether he had blinked, winced, flickered, had a twitch in his face, anything. I still don’t think so. He just smiled as he usually would and said, “Better luck next time.”
“It’s a small world after all” was our trigger phrase. We’d used some of Murphy’s memeware and built a binary chaser for each of us. When one of us said “It’s a small world after all,” normally it activated an old Disney meme that both of us were carrying, followed by a simple chaser to turn it back off. The whole process of calling it up and getting rid of it took a tenth of a second at most. But if there were a new meme in either of our heads — if somehow we’d been penetrated by something we saw, read, or heard — the meme-and-chaser cycle would trigger something that looked like an epileptic seizure. That would give the uninfected person time to get us tied up and treated. The most common memes out there nowadays were ones to make you attack the-person you were with. If you didn’t catch it in time, your best friend could kill you.
Sadi had passed the test, and I sat back. “Okay, I admit, when I thought you’d been memed, I wasn’t paying any attention to what you were saying, so what were you saying?”
He shrugged. “Oh, a leading question, I guess — whether we’ll have any idea when to get out of the war and go do something else, because pretty soon either One True, or maybe one of its competitors or a mutation, will take over the whole show. The armies aren’t getting anybody new and they’ve attritted like crazy. And think about the way a meme works — basically it’s a set of ideas with a compulsion attached, right, that ties into the deep structures, all those places where the brain and mind overlap?”
“Thank you, Doctor Science.”
“I’m saying this out loud because I’m trying to think it through. Really, honest to god, Josh, I know I lecture too much but I’m just trying to get this to make sense to me so we can think straight about it. Now, look, the way they work is they attach to existing beliefs. And it’s easier to attach to an existing meme, but by now everyone has at least some small memes. Right? And as the number of different kinds of memes goes down — because they combine with each other and take each other over — it gets easier and easier for one meme to sweep the whole system. Right?”
“Makes sense,” I admitted, because it did and because I was tired of him lecturing me. I worked a tough faked pass to cover a simple real one. The knight slid around in my fingers like a trusted old friend, always everywhere you want him.
“So the armies are shrinking and there’s just a few kinds of memes left. In a pretty short time, there will be just one and it won’t need armies - it’ll need cops. And the cops will have one job — make sure everyone has the master meme. Right? You know I’m right. It’s coming, Josh, I told you this war was going to start, back in Kansas, and now I’m telling you it’s about to end and once it does there will be no place for us to hide, whether we’re on the winning or the losing side.”
“So what’s your point?”
“We’ve got to get out past radio delay,” he said.
I didn’t know what the hell he meant. But non sequiturs were like the biggest red flag of all. “It’s a small world after all,” I said, and triggered the backup as well, “To sit in solemn silence in a dull dark dock.”
He shook his head as if he’d had a neck crick. Was that the sign? If I had been a little more clever …
The trouble was, people were only as clever as they had been during the Paleolithic. Perfectly good brain for mating and whacking animals and running away from tigers. All gravy beyond that.
But memes were getting more and more clever. In the middle of war they evolved as fast as weapons or generals. Of course in a way they were both.
The war had been raging ever since some bright guy had figured out h
ow to write a program that could analyze any operating system it talked to, figure out how to penetrate, and get in and take over AIs. Whoever it was, he’d probably never realized that to a program like that, a mind’s just one more operating system on a slow-running massively parallel processor — probably he only meant, as a loyal cybertaoists in the chaos of religious violence sweeping Earth, to make all the banks, autopilots, navigation software, and medical robots go cybertao.
Whether he intended it or not — and for that matter I had no idea whether or not it was a “he” — he’d about conquered the world for cybertao before Ecucatholic memes had turned up to fight back, quickly joined by Sunni and Shiite memes and the mad-dog guerrilla memes called Freecybers. Now the whole First Generation — cybertao, Ecucatholicism, RPs, Newcommies, Freecybers, Slammers, every meme that had begun the battle — was long extinct, except copies in museums.
It had to go that way; the most effective thing for a meme to do was to take over, copy, or digest another meme. Competition was fierce and fast; nothing lasted long.
Mercenaries like Sadi and me, and everyone in Murphy’s Comsat Avengers, worked for memes but didn’t talk to them. We did what they told us to do and they paid us.
Probably three quarters of the world’s human population was now running One True or one of the other memes. They weren’t exactly not themselves but they weren’t exactly themselves either. Like after a religious conversion, kind of.
I stared at how Sadi rolled his neck after I triggered our chaser and our backup chaser. Strange move for him, but it really looked like just a crick. No use asking him. Memes could lie better than people. “Well,” I said, “what is it you’d like to do?”