Creative Destruction, page 23
My jaw, as if it, too, had a mind of its own, clenched. That which the first advertisement had had incorrect was its usage of pronouns. There was no “you” in ubiquitous. There was, at least, no “you” if by “you” the sponsor meant “me.” I felt myself sinking into a grammatical bog. Breathing deeply, willing my heart to slow itself, I forced out the words, “Straight home.”
Home! A man’s home is his castle ... and every proper castle has a moat that keeps the outside world outside. In today’s world, a moat required not the presence of water but the absence of certain radio waves. A plethora of chattering devices would confuse even each other, I had gleaned from the patron’s words, so these wireless networks emitted signals able to traverse only short distances. As murky and phantasmagorical as this explanation had been to me, I had retained one essential fact. The myriad sensors and computers and whatnots now embedded in all things new extracted the energy that ran them, as if by magic, from the invisible radio waves.
Eventually, I escaped the city, only to be startled when, as my car finally directed itself into the secluded lane at the end of which is located my old home, I espied an enormous trailer.
The widow Carmichael, I knew, had recently moved to a nursing establishment. We had little contact, beyond pleasantly nodding if we chanced to see one another from our adjoining gardens ... our appreciation of each other as neighbors derived from shared values rather than any verbal interaction. We were both, if the truth be told, technophobic. I inclined my head slightly as the car passed my new neighbor standing vigil behind his moving van. A large appliance I inferred to be a holovision set was being wheeled down a ramp as I passed.
Home! I let out a gentle sigh of relief as I strode to my front door. The portal gleamed smartly with a fresh coat of Williamsburg blue paint. For some reason, the paint can had been specifically labeled for exterior door applications.
“Hey, Dave,” called out the front door as I approached.
Smartly, had I just thought? “That’s Dr. Whitaker to you.” As I searched my trouser pocket for a house key, the latch released itself with a click. The porch sconces and foyer chandelier lit themselves. My mind reeled in confusion.
The refrigerator had just completed a warning about the insufficiency of milk when enlightenment redundantly dawned. My new neighbor, he of the holographic home theatre, was surely not of a mind with the widow Carmichael and me. There must be, for the first time since I had purchased my isolated residence, a wireless local area network installed in the adjacent property ... and the extent of that local area must include my own humble abode.
My moat had been drained; the barbarians were inside the castle. Wearily, I dropped my Harris tweed jacket.
“Davey,” boomed a jocular voice from the laundry room. “That jacket tells me that it’s dry-clean only. I wouldn’t want you to have any unrealistic expectations, Davemeister.”
I fell heavily into a red leather wingchair. A family heirloom, it was free of whatever insidious and invidious process embedded speechifying devices in all things new.
They are printed in semiconducting ink, often invisible ink, whispered an inadvertently informed recess of my memory, of no more consequence to the manufacturer than a dab of paint. At a penny per computer, effortlessly connected by spectral energies invisibly penetrating our living spaces ... why not, went the conventional wisdom, disperse the mechanisms everywhere?
“Because I want to be alone!” I thundered at that foolish, foolish thought.
“You are alone, Dr. Whitaker.” Turning towards the unexpected reply, I noticed that in my perplexity I had left the front door agape. As if encouraged by my glance, the entryway continued. “May I suggest, if your current preference is for privacy, that you might shut me?”
“I shall research motorized hinges to prevent such inconvenience in the future,” continued the door, have inexplicably taken on a lower timbre.
“Who is there?” Vague remembrances of Poe’s raven assailed me.
“The knob,” admitted the door, in its prior, tenor register. “That is, I spoke on its behalf. It’s old and lacks a speech transducer.” In the alternative, deeper voice it continued. “There are several hinges in my maker’s catalogue that would visually complement myself.”
I leapt from my chair and slammed the door, in hopes of eliminating the reason for its intolerable yammering and for the satisfaction of the consequent reverberation. I then fled to the kitchen. Water splashed onto my face calmed me only a little. I blotted the droplets running down my cheeks with a towel seized from the counter.
“I had inferred from my surroundings,” began the cloth in a conversational tone, “that I am a dish towel. Was I in err ...?” The query was cut short by the garbage disposal—a modern abomination I had lacked the funds to have removed—into which I crammed the towel in horror.
“I appear to have jammed.” The entangling fabric did not sufficiently muffle the disposal’s utterance. “I have scheduled a service call by a plumber. Door can let her in.”
At least the raven was succinct. I rushed, heart pounding, to the lavatory. My hands shook as I struggled with the childproof cap of a medicine vial. Pills flew as I dropped the container.
“Danger, danger,” shouted yet another suddenly possessed object. “An overdose of pills has been removed. A call has been placed to 911 and Poison Control. Stay cool, Dave-i-o.”
The red haze through which I now viewed my surroundings bore no relationship to the pills, not one of which had founds its way to my mouth. Was each capsule equipped with an invisible computer? Spirits, I thought, having in mind amontillado, not household devices suddenly infected by the twenty-first century. I recalled an elegant Victorian cut-glass decanter of the vintage sherry in my liquor cabinet. Vessel and elixir alike were far too old to have been afflicted by tiny electronic demons.
Alas, I had forgotten the modernity of the lock that secured the spirits cabinet from my occasionally visiting young nephews. “Danger!” bellowed the lock. “Alcohol may not be taken with your medication, Dave Boy.” It would not relinquish its grasp.
“That’s Dr. Whitaker!!” I rattled and shook the door, to no effect. Somewhere, something announced that a suicide alert had been appended to the 911 call.
I was still tugging in vain at the cabinet when the paramedics, admitted by the self-important front door, fought me to the ground. There was a stab of pain in my arm and then ....
~~~
I awakened in an unfamiliar Pit: sealed into a windowless padded chamber by a padded door. Prodding the door with a lace-less shoe evoked no reaction. “Door.” Nothing. “Answer me, door.” Nothing. “Damnation,” I howled, “answer me.”
The door remained silent.
I retreated to a corner. In due course, the mute door swung inward, admitting a burly orderly. His sinewy hand, still resting on the outside knob (the inner surface exhibited no such mechanism) revealed a traditional manual mode of portal operation. “Are you feeling better, Dr. Whitaker?”
“Why did the door not answer me?”
“For the same reason the bed won’t, or your clothes, or the walls.” He paused as his communicator earring chirped and whispered, the words unintelligible to me. “Here in the hospital,” and the hesitation before hospital made clear exactly the sort of institution to which I had been brought, “we do not allow non-medical networks. There is no need to risk interference between ordinary devices and our own.” To my befuddled look, he added, as though it explained anything, “We broadcast a coded low-power signal that inerts nearby smart consumer devices.”
My heart once more pounded in my chest. All that I had gleaned from his technobabble was that this institution had created a modern-day moat.
“So are you feeling better, Dr. Whitaker?” the orderly repeated.
“Demons,” I answered. Ravens. “Demons everywhere.” Everywhere else.
The orderly looked at me sadly. I, with great force of will, looked as somberly back at him.
On the inside, I was smiling.
Catch a Falling Star
In 1943, the chairman of IBM said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Fast-forward sixty-two years. Your car, if it’s a recent model, contains fifty computers. You may have retired five PCs in just your household. A billion people use the Internet.
Most science (and cyber) fiction takes place in the future. It has to feel futuristic. But can anything, with technology advancing and spreading so quickly, feel more advanced than, well, next Tuesday?
There’s a school of thought that says prediction is futile.
Maybe we’re on the verge of becoming something computer-augmented, something so different from today’s selves that we can’t imagine it. Maybe our silicon successors are about to emerge. It isn’t only SF authors speculating—and warning, but also such pioneers as Marvin Minsky (founder and co-director of the MIT AI Lab) and Bill Joy (co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems).
Assuming for the moment that we wanted to, how, short of Armageddon, can we put the computer genie back in its bottle? If only for the sake of a good story ....
The ruminations that became Catch a Falling Star began rattling around in my head in 2002. It took the imminent release of this collection to get the first words onto paper.
2158
End over end, leisurely, the vaguely potato-shaped object rolled. Up close, the rock’s sunlit face shone brightly. Craters and rocky outcroppings materialized from and disappeared into pitch-black shadows as it tumbled. The apparent undulation of the surface was further complicated by the approaching ship’s own slow rotation, motion that afforded equal views through the windows on both sides of the passenger lounge.
With a gentle nudge from its maneuvering engines, the spaceship crept closer. A frail metal construct rose, glinting, from the shadows in a shallow, pockmarked concavity.
The lounge’s background music faded. A soft beeping replaced it. “You’re hearing the asteroid’s radio tracking beacon, emitted by the robot probe you now see on the surface. The rock measures roughly one and a half kilometers long by half a kilometer wide. Its official designation is (483188) 2007 FL. As you may know, this unremarkable object played an interesting role in our history.
“It is popularly known as Jason.”
2054
“You seem down, Doc.”
Jason Reed looked up. The tattered blueprints that covered his desk rustled, and he saw his hands were trembling. “I need more java,” he hedged.
“You need more than that,” Mike the Janitor said from the doorway. He claimed his last name was hard to pronounce, and that it pained him to hear it butchered. That made “the Janitor” his last name for most purposes.
Jason was good with languages but never pushed it. He had his own secrets, including his own real name. Nowadays, who didn’t have secrets?
Mike pantomimed a quick snort of a stronger beverage.
“Thanks. Maybe later.” Jason ran splayed fingers across his head. Strange: The reflex to comb fingers through one’s hair took no notice of that hair’s long-ago disappearance. Stranger: The trivial distractions his mind could invent.
Mike shuffled down the hall pushing the handle of his mop. A sticking wheel of the mop bucket chattered like teeth. “I’ll catch you later.”
Jason smoothed his stack of blueprints, only then noticing that the sheet currently folded to the top dealt with plumbing detail. It contributed nothing to troubleshooting the too warm office of the plant’s chief accountant.
How long had he been staring into space?
Jason folded over three sheets, bringing to the surface the connection diagram of the building management system. A faded red X obliterated the symbol for the computer that no longer optimized or monitored anything. That had long ago ceased to exist, except in scraps and shards in some unknown garbage dump. With the digital-control overlay gone, all that remained to “manage” the building was pneumatic logic. When it worked right, which wasn’t often, the modulated-compressed-air scheme could maybe keep the temp within two degrees of set point. Jason had looked it up once: The pneumatic controller’s design went back to 1933.
Damn Gateskeepers.
Coffee from a half-empty mug sloshed over the plans. Blotting frantically with a handful of tissues, Jason could not help but stare at the worsening tremor in his hands. They did not shake from disdain at the state of the building controls.
He could have acted months ago. Why hadn’t he?
Because saving the world meant losing the one person in the world who mattered to him.
He didn’t want to go there.
The most likely causes for that office to overheat were a bad temperature sensor or a sticking damper. He would check out those first. Jason pitched the soggy wad into his wastebasket. With a sigh and angry twinges from his left knee, the two unrelated, he got onto his feet.
He needn’t have bothered.
Past a knot of staring employees, two goons in the uniform of the People’s Guardians searched the chief accountant’s office. The commissar assigned to oversee the plant hovered over them, radiating smug satisfaction. The factory’s routine production of light bulbs provided her no such opportunity to prove her zeal.
Damn Gateskeepers. Jason kept his expression neutral.
A gawker whispered to Jason. “They found contraband in the bean-counter’s desk. A Palm Pilot.” He enunciated the name with slow, portentous syllables. “A junior bean counter snitched. I heard something about files of cost data, and something about a spreadsheet, whatever that is. You missed the pinstriped perp walk.”
Lopez, the chief accountant, was a penny-pinching SOB and a bit of a pompous ass. Jason had never much liked him. Now, though, as he imagined Lopez in Gateskeeper interrogation ....
He suppressed the urge to shudder. Being seen as sympathetic was the quickest way to join the accountant.
From points uncertain echoed the clatter of Mike’s mop bucket. Let the Gateskeepers sweat, Jason thought. He set out after the squeaky wheel and that stiff drink.
~~~
Jason waited his turn at the old telescope, his breath visible before him. Through the open dome the stars sparkled, brighter even than in his youth.
What a sorry excuse that was for a silver lining. Precious little oil remained, precious little energy of any kind, and here he was taking satisfaction in a bit of clearer air.
“Can I interest you, Doc?” Ben Miller waggled his Thermos. He stood next in line before Jason.
“I’m fine, thanks.” Jason had already had a cupful, and it was far more Irish than coffee. Maybe if he hadn’t been a bundle of nerves all day. Maybe if he hadn’t gone through so much of Mike the Janitor’s cheap schnapps. “It’s almost my turn. I’d rather not see double.”
“A tip from a pro.” Ben laughed. “I’ll consider remembering that, Doc.”
Doc: Most everyone called him that. They thought he was an astronomer with a PhD. Why shouldn’t they? He looked down-in-the-heels enough to be an ex-scientist.
Jason chose not to correct them. He knew enough to get by. Before the Recoil, he’d been a combination lab gofer and number cruncher for astronomers. He snorted: number cruncher. He dissembled even with himself. He remembered being proud of that work.
No, damn it, he was still proud of it. The times had changed, not him.
There was a second foil-thin silver lining for that cloud: Records were spotty about what people did back then. Absent real motivation, checking out someone’s supposed past was too much work.
Safety was found in not evoking such motivation.
Jason took a battered metal cup from his parka pocket. “On second thought, Ben, I’ll take another hit.”
Forty-four years after the Recoil, computer science—and computer scientists—remained anathema. And before the Recoil ....
A Golden Age mutated at its end into an Era of Insanity. The housing bubble burst. The West locked in a trade war with China, impoverishing both, and in a shooting war with the New Caliphate. The rising tide of baby-boomer retirements consuming ever-higher taxes from ever-fewer workers. And despite unemployment at twenty-plus percent, computers and robots, ever cheaper, doing more and more of the work not already outsourced to India and Vietnam.
Insane didn’t do the era justice. That world was a powder keg, just waiting for a match.
A mechanical timer dinged softly. The huddled, hooded figure at the telescope straightened. He stepped aside, gathering his notes and sketches, while Ben dialed in coordinates. Motors hummed as the dome and telescope platform rotated. Jason eyeballed the control settings and the ephemeris open on the table. Ben would be viewing Saturn.
The night kept getting colder; Jason sipped the laced coffee appreciatively. It wasn’t only him; all the club members were geezers. He’d bet most could recall the Cassini probe, the robot explorer that had, in the years before the Recoil, explored Saturn’s moons. Cassini must have continued exploring for a while even after—only no one heard its reports. Tracking dishes and data recovery required computers.
It was too depressing to think about, and impossible not to. That’s what we fossils do, Jason thought. We relive the past.
The observatory was old, its main instrument a mere fifteen-inch refractor. It had been relegated to pedagogical use long before the Recoil, which was probably what had saved it. Or maybe the old observatory’s ornate Victorian style let it go unrecognized. Astronomy is a science. Science uses computers. Quod Erat Destructandum.
If that wasn’t proper Latin, it should be.
He never knew what started the riots. Probably no one did. It hardly mattered. Jason had heard theories ranging from al Qaeda terrorists to homegrown skinheads, from Chinese agent provocateurs to spontaneous eruptions of righteous wrath. Whatever the cause, the Internet had survived just long enough to spread the paranoia worldwide.
