Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 169

by Neil Clarke

  “I trust you,” Silus assured him. “But what if it wasn’t your decision? What if there was a gun to your head? You need to trust the three of us as well.”

  The doppelgänger fell silent. Silus strode across the grass, trying to clear his head.

  In the weekly meeting with his thesis adviser, he was meant to describe any progress he’d made and any obstacles he’d encountered. But the truth was, he’d barely given his work any thought since Linus had gone missing. So he sat beside Dr. Tamura and bluffed his way through forty excruciating minutes, pretending that an idea that had come to Caius out of the blue while he flossed his teeth a few nights ago was the product of his own tortured efforts over the last seven days.

  “Will you name me as a coauthor?” Caius’s doppelgänger enquired as Silus finally escaped from the room.

  “Fuck off. Next week I’ll tell her the whole thing was a dead end.”

  “I think it’s exactly what you’ve been looking for,” the doppelgänger taunted him.

  “I don’t care. I’ll find a better method myself.”

  Silus sat down at the edge of the quadrangle. He steeled himself and switched on his phone. The app had been accepted into five of the stores; the sixth had raised a long list of trivial issues because the automated checker didn’t understand its own company’s policies. Silus fixed them all, resubmitted the app, received five new objections, and went through the cycle again. By the time he was done, the aggregated download count for the other five stores had already passed a hundred thousand.

  A few minutes later, hits started coming through . . . showing himself, Rufus, and Caius. Silus had been expecting that, and though he’d set up a filter to screen out any of their previously known cameos in the lives of actual friends, the only way to find any of the cases when they’d been snapped in the background by a total stranger was the process now underway.

  Rufus, who was seeing the same results, sent a message: At least we know everything’s working.

  The download count kept rising, but the new matches slowed to a trickle. Silus had an ache in his gut; if he’d screwed this up, it might have cost them their only chance to find their brother before he covered his tracks. “Would you have guessed we’d do this, and taken countermeasures?” he asked Linus’s doppelgänger.

  “I didn’t manage that in the airport, did I?”

  “But once you’d reached your destination, would you have started walking around in a hoodie? Covering your face every time you saw someone raise their phone?”

  The doppelgänger considered this. “Now that I know what you’re doing, it seems obvious in retrospect. But I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to think of it myself.”

  “None of us are just ourselves,” Silus retorted.

  “True. But I would have had as much trouble anticipating what you’d do as you’re having now anticipating what I’d do.”

  Silus’s phone pinged. He glanced at the latest picture, and scrolled down to see the metadata, but it had been stripped out by a user intent on preserving their privacy.

  He looked at the picture again. His first thought had been that the figure caught striding past behind the smiling couple was Caius, but now he was almost certain that it wasn’t. The backdrop was dominated by a wrought iron fence, in front of a courtyard with weeds growing through the cracks between paving stones. Neither he nor any of the doppelgängers could recall seeing the place before—though there were probably thousands of houses that they’d walked past dozens of times but would never have recognized out of context.

  A few seconds later, Rufus initiated a group call. “That’s definitely Linus,” he said. “And it must be recent.”

  “Why?”

  “He never owned a jacket like that in Sydney.”

  “Have you tried a Street View match?” Caius asked impatiently.

  Silus laughed. “That’s ten thousand US dollars!”

  “Globally. We’ve ruled out the Americas.”

  Silus opened the app and got a quote. “Without the Americas, it’s still six thousand.”

  “What about the jacket?” Linus’s doppelgänger suggested. “I’d only buy something like that if I didn’t have time to hunt down something I liked.”

  “Give me a minute,” Silus told the others. There were more than seven hundred free apps that offered to find a product matching a photo; the first six that he tried returned links to items with only a superficial resemblance.

  The seventh produced an exact match. Though the jacket was made in China, and a couple of online stores would ship it anywhere, the only bricks-and-mortar outlets that stocked it were in France.

  Silus rejoined the chat and showed them what he’d found. “A Street View search of France is still a thousand,” he grumbled.

  “And what would it tell us?” Rufus wondered. “Wherever this was taken, he might not be that close anymore.”

  Silus’s phone pinged again. In this image, Linus was walking past a café, distracted, frowning slightly. The photo had been taken from inside, and the name of the establishment wasn’t visible, but the user had left the metadata intact. “Jouy-en-Josas,” Silus read. “Four days ago.”

  Rufus beat him to the search. “Best known for HEC Paris: École des hautes études commerciales.”

  Caius started laughing in disbelief, and Linus’s doppelgänger joined in.

  Rufus said, “You know the joke: if I ever call you to say how much I enjoyed a Wagner opera, it means I’ve been kidnapped and they’re listening in. But even if you really want to ram the message home . . . how do you talk the kidnappers into buying you tickets to the Bayreuth Festival?”

  Silus didn’t want to rush to any conclusion, but whichever way he read it seemed equally bizarre. Unless Linus had chosen this particular Parisian suburb for some other, even more obscure reason, it looked as if he’d packed his bags, fled the country, and cut off all ties with his family, in order to enroll in a French business school.

  7

  Caius said, “Leave it with me. I can ask around; if he really is there, it shouldn’t take long to find out.”

  He put down his phone and thought for a moment. Before he started imposing on his French colleagues, there was a chance he could resolve the whole question himself. He opened the HEC website and looked through the section on international scholarships. Was there really a route by which a penniless foreigner who’d done no more than finish high school could win a coveted place in one of the most prestigious grandes écoles?

  Incredibly, there was. A decade ago, a wealthy benefactor had endowed a program that allowed applicants from across the globe to take an online admission test, with the ten highest scoring entrants flown to Paris for interviews. The last day to apply for the current round had been the day Linus had fallen silent.

  No recipients of the scholarship were listed on the site, let alone current finalists, but that was probably just due to a cautious reading of EU privacy rules. Caius didn’t doubt that Linus could have mastered anything he’d put his mind to, given time. And a certain portion of the test might well have required no more than the level of purely mathematical aptitude that all four of them possessed. But there was nothing Linus could have drawn on, from any of their histories, that would have elevated him—within a few hours of making the decision to apply—into the top ten candidates when it came to economics, management theory, or business law.

  Could he be wrong about that? Caius closed his eyes and pictured the memory palace he’d built from everything Linus had shared. He passed through the grand foyer with its swimming pool, the library with its shelves full of Balzac and Flaubert, the study lined with blackboards packed with mathematical exposition. Linus had pondered concrete examples to illustrate many of the abstract theorems on display, but his choices were geometrical: sculptural rather than mercantile. It was only after rummaging through a dozen increasingly small and dingy side-rooms that Caius finally found the word “Finance”—on a squashed cardboard box that looke
d like it might once have held washing powder, at the bottom of a pile of junk sitting in the corner of a disused garage.

  And yet, there Linus was, in just the right place at just the right time to be interviewed for a scholarship he couldn’t possibly covet, let alone win.

  Caius emailed a recent coauthor, Sophie Allard, who worked in a complex-systems modeling group at the University of Lyon that had links to the econometric world. He tried to keep his dishonesty to a minimum, writing, “I heard a rumor that my brother Linus was short listed for this year’s Guinard scholarship at the HEC! He’s too modest to tell me something like that, but I wonder if there’s any way to check if it’s true? If it is, I want to surprise him there and offer congrats/support!”

  As soon as he’d sent the message, the whole idea seemed ten times more absurd than before. Maybe Linus had won a few thousand dollars in a lottery and decided to spend some time in the city where so many of his favorite novels were set. He might have passed through Jouy-en-Josas on his way to see the Palace of Versailles. And he’d pulled the plug on his brothers out of some misguided notion that they’d begrudge him not sharing the windfall. And though Linus had never actually bought a lottery ticket in his entire life, as far as anyone knew, if he’d acquired the money by some shadier route that would only make it more explicable that he’d decided to keep it to himself.

  Caius pushed these speculations aside. There was no point trying to conjure all the answers out of thin air; he needed to be patient and wait for the facts. He picked up his notebook and started reviewing the calculations he’d been trying to finish for the past ten days. While Linus hovered at the edge of his thoughts, crisscrossing Paris in some kind of furtive homage to Jean Valjean, Caius turned his attention back to the lattice he was trying to characterize. Finding the shortest distance between neighbors by a brute force search would be an intractable computation, but he had a set of inequalities that he still hoped could be used to pin down the distance indirectly.

  Three hours later, he’d made enough progress to think about taking a break, and the smell of cooking from the apartment below was making him salivate. He opened his laptop and checked his email; Sophie had replied more than an hour before. She’d pasted in a chain of replies from other correspondents on the matter, but her conclusion was right at the top.

  “Hi Caius, yeah your brother’s at HEC! And not just short listed anymore, he got the place! Congratulations! I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you!”

  8

  “I’ve been looking into Marcel Guinard,” Rufus said. “He made his first billion in a micro-payments start-up at the turn of the millennium, then played the stock market well enough to keep getting richer, even while he blew half the profits on vaporware. He’s endowed a few chairs and funded a few institutes for tech bro bullshit around the world: Simulation Cosmology in Berkley, Superintelligent AI in London, Singularitarian Theology in Rome. I can’t link him to the Physalia directly, but even if he didn’t play some covert role in funding it, I don’t believe for one second that he wouldn’t know about Linus’s past.”

  Caius had assembled the same sketch of the man for himself, but it still made no sense to him. “What’s the deal, though? He’s gathering up children from the boat to have another crack at the whole hive mind fantasy?”

  Silus said, “As bribes for human experimentation go, offering an MBA to a Dostoyevsky fan . . . ?”

  Caius laughed wearily. It was after midnight, and he had to catch the train to Paris at six a.m., but he couldn’t tell his brothers to be patient and wait for him to report back. None of them were going to sleep until they knew exactly what Linus had got himself into.

  Rufus said, “So the scholarship’s just a pretext for him to be in Paris. The real bribe will be in cash, and I’m sure they’ll let him skip as many classes as he wants.”

  “Why does he have to be in Paris?” Caius protested. “If Guinard has persuaded him to unplug us and link up with a different group, the participants could be anywhere.”

  Rufus sighed at his obtuseness. “Whoever’s running this needs to have physical control over the guinea pigs, in case they start having second thoughts.”

  “If this billionaire wants to stuff money into Linus’s bank account while he catches up with some old friends from the boat, he might have been tempted into humoring the fucker,” Silus conceded. “Taking in memories from a whole new set of people might even be fun for a while, and when they fail to evolve godlike powers—because they’re basically just swapping stories about their foster homes—they can all walk away a little richer, while Guinard walks away a little crazier.”

  Rufus wasn’t so sanguine. “And what if he wants them there in person so he can open up their skulls for an upgrade?”

  “If Guinard was going to take the risk of installing new hardware in his subjects’ heads,” Silus said, “why drag the Physalia kids into it at all? The only value someone like Linus has is that he comes with the link preinstalled, and the crime of putting it there has already been paid for.”

  “And his neurons are already tweaked for optical channels,” Rufus added. “It takes time to raise an engineered child to the age they need to reach before they’re any use to you.”

  Caius shared his anger, even as he observed it with a kind of detachment. They’d thought they’d put the Physalia behind them; for anyone to drag them back into that deranged world was unforgivable—and trying to pick off the most vulnerable of the survivors only made it worse. “What did Guinard think we’d do?” he wondered. “Just stop searching for Linus? Or swallow the whole ridiculous cover story?”

  Silus said, “More to the point, what did Linus think we’d do? He must have had a plan when he pulled the plug on us. He must have had his reasons.”

  “Yeah.” Caius ran a hand over his face. “But I’m sure he’ll make it all clear when I ask him.”

  9

  Caius didn’t actually doze on the train, so much as lapse into a sleep-deprived state in which his thoughts succumbed to a kind of dream logic. The journey from Bonn to Cologne was secretly taking him back to Adelaide, to the apartment he’d shared with Rufus and Silus when the three of them were undergraduates, and Linus had traipsed around the countryside looking for work. Silus had called it Schrödinger’s gap year: education and adventure at the same time, with none of them really missing out on anything.

  When he stood on the platform in Cologne, waiting for his connection, the clock measured out the time for one of Linus’s high school swimming competitions. Caius could recall watching him powering through the water ahead of his rivals, but later he’d felt Linus’s own proprioceptive joy, which didn’t depend at all on beating the competition, but only on creating something entirely his own and sharing it with the rest of them.

  The next train carried him back to the Coopers. Caius couldn’t blame them for their clumsy attempts to carve separate identities out of the strange, conjoined creature they’d agreed to take into their home. They’d had no one to advise them on the right way to deal with four traumatized children who’d just discovered that their parents had created them as a kind of technological asset to be deployed in a global war between different forms of superintelligence. The one blessing was that they’d been taken off the boat before anyone had considered them ready to be indoctrinated into that fantasy; they hadn’t needed to be deprogrammed from the cult, because the cult had merely brainwashed them into thinking they were perfectly normal.

  In a restroom in Brussels, Caius splashed water on his face and slapped his cheeks until they stung. He grabbed some hot chocolate from a vending machine, then caught the train to Paris with the warmth still suffusing out from his esophagus. He took out his notebook and reread his calculations from the day before; he couldn’t move past the last stumbling block he’d hit, but the mechanical process of checking and rechecking what he had almost kept his mind occupied.

  From Gare du Nord, he took the B line south to Massy-Palaiseau, then he changed for Jouy
-en-Josas. This was still suburban Paris, but as the train approached the station the patches of woodland beside the tracks were lush green. There was a bus he could have taken all the way to the campus, but he needed a walk to clear his head, and as he made his way along Rue de la Libération birdsong rose up over the traffic noise.

  The map of HEC showed ten different dorms, and Caius couldn’t parse the system by which the students in different courses were allocated between them. But the sixth place he checked had Linus’s name scribbled in on a directory in the foyer. Caius walked down to the room, but was unsurprised to find the door locked and no one answering. He sent Linus an email, telling him where he was and asking if they could meet; there was no point playing hard to get now that the two of them were a few hundred meters apart. Then he went and sat outside the dorm in the sunshine.

  His eyes had fallen shut when he heard a voice close by. “You want to grab some lunch?”

  Caius looked up; he hadn’t been dreaming.

  “Sure,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

  10

  In the self-serve cafeteria, the first thing Linus put on his tray was a pot of tea. Caius was bemused, but he said nothing; a change in taste they might have joked about a month ago no longer really rated in the greater scheme of things.

  When they were seated, Linus took a sip of tea, then started eating. He didn’t seem angry that he’d been hunted down, but he showed no sign of being on the verge of volunteering any explanations.

  “Hogy vagy?” Caius asked.

  Linus smiled. “I’m fine, but my Hungarian’s pretty rusty. Can we stick with English or French?”

  “I thought it might be worth it, just to give us some privacy.”

  Linus glanced around. “No one’s going to be listening to us. We’re not that interesting. If we start speaking Hungarian, any Hungarians in the room will tune in straight away.”

  Caius said, “I’m sure the odds of a Hungarian within earshot are less than a thousand to one.”