InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  The doorman was too distracted by this celebrity arrival to notice Joshua approaching from behind. “It’s all right, Alan. Ms. Elman is with me.”

  Corinne beamed when she saw Joshua. Not even a drenching could diminish her aura of energetic chaos.

  Heads turned as he escorted her into the vestibule. He asked, “Downstairs by the fire or upstairs for dry clothes?”

  “Definitely up.” She left a soggy trail across the carpet and a small puddle in the elevator.

  He shut her in his closet to find something to wear. “It’s tough to catch a cab in the rain.”

  “To tell the truth, Joshua, I didn’t look for a cab.” The door opened a crack. A hand emerged dangling a terrycloth robe by its hanger. “Mind if I wear this?”

  “Whatever you want.” He scratched his head. The nearest maglev station was a good klick away. “Why did you walk through this?”

  Corinne came out, lost in his robe. She rubbed her hair vigorously with the towel he offered. The sea-anemone look worked surprisingly well for her.

  “There’s no record of the cab that dropped you here that night,” she said. “Odd, don’t you think?”

  “I remember paying for the ride,” Joshua protested. “Well, I remember leaning up to the backseat chip reader and the door unlatching.”

  “Trust me.” She blotted a trickle running down her neck. “There’s no record of any payment. When I bugged them, the police checked.”

  Joshua accessed his bank account. Sure enough: he had never been debited for that ride. “I remember leaving the party. The waiter at the Ritz Trump put me into the cab.”

  “The waiter. Didn’t that strike you as odd? Hell, didn’t it strike you as odd that there was a waiter? I don’t recall anyone named Gates or Rockefeller hosting your soiree.”

  He had been surprised, too. “In fact, I did ask. The waiter told my friends”—that night, in any event, Danny and Frank were still his friends—“his services had been arranged through the caterer by some high muck-a-muck at my employer. Chipping in, in honor of my promotion.”

  “Per my police source, the ICU did no such thing.” Corinne raised a hand, cutting Joshua off before he could find the words to argue. “Which, I’m told, only means the waiter was an off-the-books moonlighter. The caterers, for their part, deny there even was a waiter. Of course admitting to having used one temp would only open them up to questions about how many more workers they’ve paid in cash.”

  He asked, bitterly, “So why didn’t the police find any of this?”

  “Till you reappeared, they had no reason to suppose you’d left the party in a cab. And once you were back”—she paused, looking embarrassed on his behalf—“well, you know.”

  All too well. “They had more pressing things to spend time on than a drunk with the ludicrous story of a lost month.”

  “Afraid so,” she said.

  With a sour look on his face, he changed the subject. “What’s any of this have to do with you swimming here from the station?”

  “Patience. Getting back to your mysterious reappearance, here are your choices. Option one: someone put you into the cab and prepaid the fare. It sounds benign. The problem is, we know the cab company from the famous vid clip. They have no record of a drop-off here at the right time. I know.

  “Option two: someone arranged your return off the books. Maybe the vehicle only looked like a cab. That’s more sinister sounding, don’t you think?”

  He did. “Can the cab company identify the AI who drove that cab?”

  “As it happens, no.” She handed Joshua her very wet towel. “Check the vid. Mud or something obscures the ID.”

  “It was raining hard that night,” Joshua remembered. Like today. “Why wouldn’t mud wash off?”

  “Mud would. Paint, on the other hand …” She studied him, her eyes narrowed. “Now do you see why I was leery about coming here in a cab?

  • • • •

  Corinne figured she looked like a drowned rat. Joshua’s robe hung on her. Still, the condo was cozy. He was a nice enough guy. She had been in far worse fixes.

  He was giving her a quick tour of his unit. “My brother designed that,” and he pointed to the fireplace. Flames danced. Logs crackled and hissed. Smoke curled, never straying far from the blaze. After the soaking she had had, the fire’s warmth felt wonderful. Only the lack of odor convinced Corinne the fire was virtual. Clever: the digital wallpaper masked electrical heating elements.

  With reluctance, she followed Joshua from the living room. “Here’s my rare-book room.” He laughed. “That phrase alone labels me an historian. For anyone else, ‘book room’ would suffice. By normal standards, what paper book isn’t rare?”

  Corinne turned, taking it all in. “You have a Gutenberg Bible in here?”

  He made a show of scanning the shelves. “I must have lent it out.”

  Ah, the boyish charm. Have that, and once the world turned on you, it was all anyone thought you brought to the table. “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Sit.” He took one leather wingchair, leaving the other for her. The chair, like his robe, was too big for her. “I assumed as much when you mentioned stopping in. Charleston isn’t exactly down the block from Central Park.”

  Keeping a straight face on one’s avatar was, for the most part, a matter of programming—and, for the most part, that was some expert’s programming. Controlling one’s physical face required personal skill. “I kept poking around while you were away.”

  “And?”

  “No matter where I look, there’s no sign of you for those four weeks. It’s frustrating.”

  He grimaced. “You think it’s frustrating? Try being me.”

  “So, Joshua, I looked at the problem a different way. No financial trace of you during those weeks means one of two things—kind of like the cab payment. One, you hid money so well no one can find it, and that’s what you spent. Two, someone else supported you.”

  Some red, leather-bound tome sat on a walnut end table beside him. He began leafing through the pages. “No one ever called me a financial genius. I wouldn’t know where to begin hiding money untraceably.”

  All he would have needed was a cash stash, easily accumulated by withdrawing more money than needed for routine purposes. He honestly looked baffled. Good.

  Corinne chose her next words with care. “The obvious question is: why would someone pay your way for all that time? Did their reasons relate to your invisibility? To your inexplicable and very public return?”

  He shrugged.

  People do nothing without a reason, Joshua. “Who benefited from your absence?”

  “Who?” Joshua frowned. “No one. Maybe supporting me was an act of random kindness.”

  Kindness would have been bringing him home, or to a hospital, or to the police. And mere random behavior would not keep anyone below the radar for four weeks. “I don’t know who, Joshua. I suspect I know why.”

  “Why would someone benefit?” he asked, perplexed.

  “The incident has had only one real consequence. You lost the historian post at the ICU. So who benefited from that? Someone opposed to your appointment.”

  His brow furrowed. “You mean another historian? Someone who might get the post if I became discredited?” Joshua shook his head. “You don’t know historians. We’re hardly cloak-and-daggerish.”

  Either Joshua was one hell of an actor, or this angle had never occurred to him.

  “Have you spoken with my successor?” The question clearly pained him.

  “Here’s what’s so interesting, Joshua. You have no successor.” She watched him closely. Eyes don’t lie. “It’s too embarrassing to be seen as runner-up to you.”

  Wince. “I didn’t know.”

  She believed him. “Maybe that’s what your disappearing act is about. Suppose someone didn’t want you compiling an anniversary history for the ICU. That begs a question, Joshua.

  “Exactly what is the Matthews conundrum?”
r />   • • • •

  Fermi Paradox: the famous riddle posed by twentieth-century physicist and Nobelist Enrico Fermi, rebutting speculation that—despite the lack of evidence—technologically capable, intelligent alien life must exist. Responding to popular conjecture that the immensity and great age of the universe made the alternative inconceivable, Fermi is said to have asked, simply, “Where are they?”

  Radio contact with several intelligent species, commencing within a half century of Fermi’s death, definitively answered his question: they are all around. The InterstellarNet community (see related entry) presently includes species from eleven solar systems.

  This once unanswerable question became emblematic of a naïve bygone era.

  —Internetopedia

  • • • •

  Joshua flinched. “So you’ve been in touch with my coworkers. Ex-coworkers. And the skeptics among them, at that. For whatever it’s worth, I’m not so immodest. I call it the InterstellarNet enigma.”

  What’s in a name? Corinne wondered. “Either way, what is it?”

  “Are you familiar with the Fermi Paradox?”

  He had to be kidding. “Doesn’t chatting with the folks around ten other stars discredit the paradox rather dramatically? Not to mention aliens paying us a visit?”

  “Yes and no.” Joshua gestured expansively, but his hands didn’t help him get his point across. “Meet me online.”

  His proffered consensual space was blackness. Where was this going?

  Speckles emerged from the dark. Scattered dots brightened one by one, as Joshua recited, “The Sun, Alpha Centauri, Barnard’s Star, Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani ….”

  Brighter lights among dim ones. Was contrast the no part of his answer? “We’re encircled by intelligent aliens, Joshua. What’s your point?”

  “That is my point. Humans are surrounded by intelligent aliens. Now consider our neighbors’ perspectives. A few are likewise surrounded. Most are on the periphery of the community. Why aren’t they surrounded by intelligent neighbors?”

  Corinne permitted her avatar to shrug. “Subpar comm gear?”

  “Comm technology is always among the first things traded. It’s hard to trade other stuff unless everyone can communicate. Hence InterstellarNet members all have equivalent comm capability.”

  She dealt with ambiguity all the time—but not like this. Interstellar puzzles made her head hurt. “I guess you’re questioning why, say, the Dragons can’t talk with a sphere of their near neighbors. That’s the ‘no’ part of your answer about the discrediting of the Fermi Paradox?”

  One star brightened still further. “The Sun. We’re near the center of this set of privileged stars. Look outward twenty light-years in any direction and, as far as I can tell, Fermi’s paradox starts taking hold again.”

  “The Matthews conundrum,” Corinne supplied.

  “So my colleagues—former colleagues—refer to it. I just call it ‘the puzzle.’ Or, when the situation calls for formality, ‘the InterstellarNet enigma.’

  “Not that long ago, we believed Earth was the center of everything. Then we believed the same of the Sun. That was just as mistaken. For a while, it looked like humans might be alone. Wrong again. Time after time, humanity’s circumstances have proven to be unremarkable. The reminder to be cosmologically modest has its own label: the Mediocrity Principle.”

  Paradox. Conundrum. Principle. Corinne’s headache throbbed. “Then your puzzle is: if Earth, the Sun, and humans aren’t special, why are they at the center of a small region of communicating intelligent species?”

  “Exactly.” Joshua let her absorb it all for a while. “Now please answer my question. What can the puzzle possibly have to do with my disappearance?”

  Maybe nothing, Corinne thought. If so, she was out of ideas. “Here’s the snag, Joshua. You vanished just long enough for it to cost you your job. And your former colleagues are pretty snide about ‘the Matthews conundrum.’ ”

  He sighed. “Yes, the puzzle would surely have featured in whatever history I compiled. Regardless, I’m not going to stop talking about it.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Corinne said. “But someone has gone to a great deal of effort to ensure that no one will take you seriously.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Being three was wonderful.

  The twins, Joshua’s six-year-old sisters, had just gotten their implants. That put Joshua, years too young for his own implant—what one would do for him remained quite mysterious—mostly beneath their notice. Aaron, on the other hand, was an infant. He needed constant parental supervision. Joshua had the run of the house, often with only Worthington, the house AI, watching him through residence sensors.

  All too soon Aaron became mobile enough to wander, still eager to cram everything he found into his mouth. Mom or Dad followed Aaron. The golden age ended.

  The year between explained much about Joshua as an adult.

  He remembered roaming the house and the fenced backyard. Worthington seldom cared what Joshua touched unless it could be dangerous. The AI even covered up Joshua’s frequent slip-ups, synthing a replacement knickknack whenever Joshua handled and broke one. “They were synthed in the first place,” Worthington explained. “I see no difference.”

  But the hobby room remained off limits unless Dad was there. Dad’s model train setup couldn’t compare to Grandpa’s, but Grandpa had worked on his forever. Dad had the train bug, too—and he had passed it along to his son.

  Joshua knew he could run the train. There wasn’t much to it, really, and he had watched Dad closely. An engineer’s cap. The throttle to make the train go fast or slow (though Joshua had no use for slow). Levers that made the train change tracks. The button to toot the locomotive’s horn—only not while unsupervised, if he didn’t want to get caught.

  Joshua explained it all patiently to Worthington—at least as patiently as an almost-four-year-old could. That didn’t work. Joshua tried fussing. He working himself up until great tears ran down his cheeks. Worthington said something silly about crocodile tears. “Why won’t you let me in?” Joshua had finally cried, stomping his foot. “I won’t break anything. And if I do, you can fix it.”

  “Maybe I could,” Worthington had said. “That’s not the point. Whatever I synthed would not be a proper replacement for something your dad made himself, by hand. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Joshua had lied. High up, in Dad’s arms, the little models were wonderful: an entire village nestled in a forest. But up close, standing on his own feet, Joshua’s eyes weren’t far above tabletop level. Up close, the models were all toothpicks and colored cotton balls and papier-mâché boxes with brush marks. All fake. What he really understood was that Worthington would tattle on him if he went alone into the hobby room.

  So he built a fort of family-room sofa cushions, inside which Worthington could not see him. The cushion-fort became a spaceship, a submarine, and then the cab of an old steam locomotive. He laughed when Worthington asked anxiously, “Are you all right in there? What are you doing?” If Worthington was so intelligent, why couldn’t he recognize a train?

  Making chug-a-chug noises to himself, having forgotten he was mad at the world, Joshua sensed he had learned something important about AIs and parents and how the world really worked.

  • • • •

  “Fortunately for you,” Tacitus netted, “I am of the patient sort.”

  “Fortunately for you,” Joshua answered, “I’m of the paying sort.”

  Maybe money would change hands, in a manner of speaking. Maybe not. Tacitus was an AI and didn’t need patience, not with the whole infosphere to amuse himself. Nor did he need money, the trickle of power that kept him going insignificantly cheap. Joshua sometimes wondered what the AI did with his consulting income.

  Once upon a time, theirs had been a strictly business relationship. They had long since become fast friends. Joshua had had too few of those, even before the recent debacle. It was disturbing how notor
iety turned supposedly close friends very distant.

  Tacitus shared Joshua’s fascination with history. People had long looked to the past for an understanding of the present. AIs were no different—and their roots lay in humanity’s past. Many AIs showed their respect through their choice of names. Those who had shaped human institutions, technology, and literature lived again, in a manner of speaking, in humanity’s descendants.

  Tacitus 352, as was his wont, had manifested a tunic, toga, and sandals. One hairy arm clutched a bunch of fat papyrus scrolls. Many AIs with an interest in history registered as Herodotus; when Joshua last checked, the rolls listed more than ten thousand. Tacitus, when asked about his election, had said, “Herodotus? It’s been done to death.”

  The Roman persona had once amused Joshua. Nothing amused him any more—not after weeks of disapproving looks and muffled titters.

  Laughter or pity? Joshua couldn’t decide which he hated more.

  Corinne’s theorizing had not helped. It seemed bizarre that anyone could want to suppress Joshua’s speculations. More than bizarre. Fantastical. Ludicrous. No other explanation presented itself, and still he couldn’t bring himself to believe. If there were the slightest chance Corinne was correct, though—he would be damned if he’d drop it. “Okay, Tacitus,” he finally responded. “What have you got for me today?”

  “Less than I would like,” Tacitus netted. “Someone got around to revoking my access to ICU archives.”

  That saddened Joshua further, but it didn’t surprise him. He had gotten Tacitus access in the first place. “Then what’s in all your scrolls?”

  “Diversion.” Tacitus snapped open a scroll. “Some thoughts. Why after millions of years hunting and gathering did farming suddenly begin? Why did the Native Americans never domesticate bison? Why, among all the writing systems in the world, was the alphabet invented only once?”

  Joshua didn’t want diversion, whether offered by way of friendship or commerce. He still couldn’t help asking, “One alphabet? Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic—”

  “That could be a very long list,” Tacitus interrupted. “Of course there are many alphabets. They all trace back, though, whether by explicit adaptation or conceptual influence, to a primitive Semitic alphabet. One original alphabet. Unlike, say, syllabaries or pictographic systems, which have been invented several times.”