Fugue, page 40
Hang on. It’s not only the official scrutiny when we (inevitably) draw attention. The passage of time counts. The longer we live under fake ID’s, the more likely a random cross-check is going to flag a discrepancy. Most of those will be ignored or purged as errors, but sooner or later, someone will ask questions. Since no single hack will cover all the bases, I’d need to keep BitRate or his equivalent on the payroll, constantly checking for cracks in our façade.
This leads, of course, to questions from my hypothetical hacker. If his job is to keep me off the legal radar, he’s going to notice everything I don’t want noticed at all. He’ll be the one to put it all together. If he stays bought, fine. If he has moral issues, not so fine. But if he hasn’t any morals, how are his ethics? Will he stay bought?
People are paradoxes.
I miss Diogenes. With a micro-gate or two and a couple of roving wi-fi drones, he could easily keep pace with the gradual decay of a fake identity. He could even be far out in front of any official action, providing plenty of warning before a government agency bashed in my door—tried to bash in my door; my door will be reinforced—to arrest me.
It’s going to be a long while before I get Diogenes back, but maybe I can make… not a replacement, no, but an expert system to help me out with my high-tech information problems.
How much tech is high tech? How advanced does it need to be? There are alternate Earths I sometimes wonder about. The technology is alien enough to my own experience so I almost question if the laws of physics are the same. Is there a pattern, I wonder? If one goes back far enough, does the timeline tree fork into a few major branches? Some with different physical laws, for example, in the early formation of the universe? Or would those be so alien to me as to be undefinable?
I really need to get with my altar ego again—Phoebe’s Uncle Dusty!—and do more serious work on timeline identification. I also need to get busy on experiments for entering Earthlines without causing branches. The “firmament” around them is different from the ones I quasi-understand, but if I can get a better grip on how any of them work, it should help with all the rest.
Back to the problem at hand. How high tech does Phoebe want to go? Space travel? Star travel? Matter replicators? Laser guns? Of the various Stars, are we talking about Battle, Gate, Wars, or Trek? None of these are actualities—at least, as far as I know—but they give me mental handholds for thinking about.
As for what Phoebe wants to do, I probably need to ask. Right now, she’s brooding. I can tell by the music coming from her room. “Endless Sleep,” by Jody Reynolds, just at the moment. Teenagers. What can you do?
Still, if I don’t trust a hacker, I’ll need some sort of heuristic system to do what I want. I’m not going to be able to do it myself. If I’m going to have a computer hacking expert system on the equivalent of my smartphone, I probably need a higher-tech smartphone than they have wherever we’re going. The objective is to have an advantage over the technology of the place she’s living.
On second thought, Phoebe might need one on her phone. This might be a good time to let her have a place of her own for a while. She can still bail out and visit her dear old Papa whenever she feels like it, but this can be like… like… like going off to college. She hasn’t moved out, exactly, but she is living on her own. Sort of.
I’m not sure I like this idea. I’ll have to give it more thought.
Wednesday, July 1st, 1959
I spent last night in Zombie World, doing gate searches, hunting for moderately-high technology. I’ve seen a lot of new and interesting things in my travels, so I can target things like some types of quantum computer cores, now. Yes, I can find a laser pistol, too. I’ve handled more than one. I don’t particularly like them, though. They feel flimsy to me, and their power packs make me edgy. Anything with a high enough power density to make gunpowder obsolete has an alternate use as an explosive. I’m attached to my hands and I’d like to keep it that way.
For finding things I haven’t run across, I have a technique. It’s not a great technique, but it’s better than randomly casting worms into the Void and hoping they find a fish. It’s more like looking for the Bill of Rights—word for word!—and selecting only those worlds having one.
Look at it like this. Suppose I lived in, say, 1970. I would be familiar with eight-track tapes and cassettes. However, the idea of a laser inscribing digital coding for music was pure fantasy at the time. Nevertheless, if I did a search for a cassette tape, I could find worlds that had both cassettes and CDs.
But what if I narrow it down further? Say I want a cassette tape on some sort of pedestal or stand? A cassette tape on display. Sure, there are a dozen different reasons why such a thing might occur, but somewhere there’s one on display in a museum. I want a world where a cassette tape isn’t just obsolete, but so out of date it’s considered an antique.
What does that world use for music? Or for some other bit of technology? Do they have a technology display with the evolution of the cell phone? Starting with the vehicle-mounted things, moving up to the personal phone-brick, then the flip phone, smartphones, skinphones, earphones, ocular and auditory implants… and what else?
I scry on the place for a while and eventually go there to look around and get a feel for how the world works. I pick up the latest and greatest version of… something. Almost anything, really. And now that I have a new, modern gizmo, can I find it on display in a museum? Can I find another world where this device isn’t merely obsolete, but an full-on antique? What does that world have for technological terrors? Death Stars? Lightsabers? Phasers?
High-energy ray guns, yes—often man-portable, like the thing Mary used in the Darkwood. No lightsabers, though. Dammit. Duplicating a lightsaber is not something one does casually. I suppose, in the absence of Jedi, there’s really not a lot of call for the things. I find this frustrating. Admittedly, I have Firebrand and my Saber of Sharpness, so I don’t need a lightsaber. I just kinda want one. I think they’re cool. I’m a nerd. Sue me.
Anyway, finding high technology isn’t hard, merely time-consuming. This is how I found the Birmingham, doing its slow tumble toward a gas giant. Bronze tried it on for size while Phoebe enjoyed bouncing around in an actual starship. It was a good exercise for all of us.
Bronze isn’t thrilled with starships. To have a sensation of speed, you need to be near something, and at starship speeds, you don’t want to be near anything.
Another thing bothers me. I note an uncomfortably high incidence of Nobody Left Alive worlds in my searches for higher technology. Humanity may be an apex predator, but sometimes the apex predators feed on each other. Once humans have the capacity to destroy themselves, it’s apparent they occasionally—often—do so.
Nobody said humanity was wise. Intelligent, yes. Wise, no.
In addition to doing more searching, I dropped in on likely worlds. One of them was especially promising when I scried on it. As far as I could tell, it was populated entirely by robots.
I surmise the people turned over more and more of their civilization’s infrastructure to automation and, eventually, handed over more and more of their day-to-day activities. Whether there was a mass die-off or simply a lotus-eaters’ apathy, I don’t know. Was it a gradual thing? Or was there some reason to build vast, underground shelters with life-support pods while the robots tried to maintain the world? Radiation from space? Self-made pollution? A plague? An asteroid hit? Or is it less sinister? Could the humans all be perfectly fine, living comfortably in holographic environments and dioramas, engaging in whatever fantasy they please, each according to their individual whim? All while the robots run the world, providing everything they need and anything they might want?
Whatever the reason, it’s not readily apparent, and I don’t really care enough to do a real investigation. The last thing I want to do is hit some sort of contingency programming and find myself being treated for anti-social behavior!
On a more positive note, the world is in remarkable shape. Nobody’s polluting it, for one thing. The planet is a park. There doesn’t seem to be any wilderness at all. Did they have such a high population they didn’t have room for wilderness? Or did the robots’ programming not include contingencies for a complete lack of human oversight? Did they keep building more and spreading out until they could build farms, landscapes, and rock gardens across the whole face of the world? What do they do with the food produced by farms, anyway? Feed fish? Come to that, are they also farming the sea bed?
I’m a little afraid to look.
If they’re on an unterminated loop of self-replication and expansion, what happens when they run out of room for the robots? Do they stop building more because they reach a program limit? Or do they start working on space travel? I don’t know their core directives, but it’s easy to have serious shortcomings when unforeseen, “impossible” circumstances crop up—like a complete lack of human oversight.
Is this what could happen with Diogenes? No, surely not. He’s smarter than that. His core directives are keyed to do what I want and, to a limited extent, attempt to anticipate my desires. If, in the future, I vanish and all the humans on the planet vanish with me, he won’t mindlessly continue carrying out my last instructions. He has judgment, although I’m not sure if it comes from his advanced programming, my encouragement to think for himself, multiple processor types, his gestalt of multiple programming languages, or the vitality animating his primary processor.
Anyway. Robot World. Even a simple transport pod projects a digital face on its surface for human interaction. They were extremely helpful and friendly robots, within the limits of robots, of course. Robot World was a post-scarcity society, so anything I would have tried to buy elsewhere, I simply asked for.
It took four tries and one example before they built a laptop that could blend in elsewhere. They never complained nor gave any hint they wanted anything in exchange. They were unfailingly polite and overwhelmingly cheerful.
I found it more than a little creepy.
The collective intelligence of the planet’s robots was on board to help me set up and customize my new computer. I declined politely. They didn’t exactly insist, but they were extremely eager to be helpful. I don’t know why I felt uncomfortable around them. Maybe it’s the “uncanny valley” of the not-quite-human digital faces, or maybe it’s the too-cheerful demeanor, or maybe it’s the sneaking suspicion the robots “helped” a whole world of humans to death. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to stay there any longer than I had to.
Now I have a computer, fresh from the factory, and I’m working slowly through the onboard user manual. I’ve turned off the advanced interface features until I understand them better.
The digital manual defaults to a simplistic emojis-and-icons instruction set. This tells me a lot about the level of technical understanding in the average user, among other things. The robots had to be told how to build a portable computer, so I assume the previous users didn’t need or want them. Because they didn’t travel, or because there was always a robot around to act as a personal computer? And the primitive nature of the default setup wizard told me people didn’t understand their computers—not even the basic concepts. I know the manual does contain more detailed information than the default interface gives. Getting to it is the problem. It is not an intuitive interface in any sense. Its default is a weak AI for optimizing the machine through conversation. I’m not sure I trust the AI unreservedly.
I’m tempted to give the machine a little vitality and tell it what I want, but I would rather have it set up and programmed correctly as “my” machine before doing so. I don’t know if it matters or not, but I’m about to unleash a few billion yottaflops of computer power on a several unsuspecting Internets. Assuming, of course, the computational techniques in this technological terror can even be rated in flops. I haven’t got that far in the manual. I’m not even sure how fast the wireless connections can go, though I have discovered it has more than one mode of communication. I think they’re mostly radio, but from what I’ve read, I’m certain it can communicate on multiple wavelengths. Short-range via infrared, medium-range via microwave, long-range via FM? Ask me in a year, after I’ve had a chance to delve deep into the thing.
Does it already have an emulator for communicating with older protocols? I may have to go back and order an auxiliary module. I’m not looking forward to it.
This morning, Phoebe and I went through our usual routine and had breakfast.
“Pop?”
“What’s on your mind, Punkin?”
“I’ve been thinking about moving.”
“Say the word.”
“No, not like that. Well, sort of like that. It’s about all the people here.”
“It usually is.”
“No! No, I mean… I’m not explaining this well.”
“Take a minute. Finish a flapjack. I’ll scramble some eggs.”
She took a few minutes to figure out what she wanted to say while I cooked. I slid a spatula of eggs onto her plate and poured a mound of them onto mine. She splashed hot sauce on hers. I took mine plain and tried not to let my eyes water.
“Got it?” I asked.
“I think so. It’s about the people here I like. Every time we’ve moved before, I had to leave friends. I didn’t have to leave people who hated me.”
“Best kind of people to leave,” I observed.
“Maybe. This time is different.”
“How so?”
“I really like Cameron. Not as a friend. Not only as a friend.”
“Sounds serious.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, fiddling with a piece of toast. “It could be, and I want to find out. What I don’t want is to be forced to abandon my finding out. I don’t like the idea of being run off by a bunch of… of…”
“Never mind. I know more profanity than you do and I still can’t describe them adequately.”
“Then you understand.”
“I think so. What’s the solution?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Maybe we should start with defining the problem.”
“The problem is I want to spend more time with Cameron.”
“That’s not a problem. That’s a goal. What’s keeping you from your goal? That’s the problem.”
“People.”
“Perhaps a tad more specific?” I suggested.
“Living here lets me be near Cameron,” she began. “It also means I’m near a group of people who suspect me—no, that’s passive. They accuse me of being a witch?”
“Persecute. They persecute you for being a witch. If they accused you, they would be appealing to others to take action. Persecution is actively subjecting the target to hostility.”
“But how would they know? What if I’m not?”
“You can be persecuted falsely just as you can be accused falsely. Someone can accuse you falsely and someone then can persecute you on that basis.”
“Oh. Anyway, they’re loud, rude, and some of them throw things. They make me feel unwelcome.”
“How many people are we talking about?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A dozen? Two dozen, tops.”
“How much of the population? What percentage?”
“I’m not sure. One percent? Probably less.”
“So, a tiny fraction. An extremely vocal tiny fraction, granted, but if they yell loud enough, the rest start to wonder if they’re right. Go on. Pros and cons?”
“There aren’t many of them from a percentage standpoint,” she agreed, “but on a personal scale, there are a lot more of them than me. Staying here means going anywhere in public with Cameron will get him shouted at, things thrown at him, and maybe shunned for consorting with a witch.”
“Every time?” I asked. I noticed she didn’t include any consequences to herself. She was concerned for Cameron.
“Uh… no, I guess not. There will always be a significant chance of it, though. If one of them sees me, he or she could call more of them.”
“Fair point. It’s a problem. What options do you see?”
“I guess I could give up on Cameron and we could move. I don’t want to, though. I still want to spend time with Cameron, and I hate the notion of being run off.” She stabbed the ham on her plate. “It’s never sat well with me, Pop. Ever.”
“I know, and I’m sorry I made us move. In my defense, you were a lot smaller, then.”
“So I was. Don’t worry about it, Pop. I’m over it. You did what you thought was right, and maybe it was. It probably was. Doesn’t mean I had to like it. And I didn’t. And I don’t. Here and now, I’d rather not back down from these self-righteous morons.”
“Fine by me. What are our options?”
“I could fight back.”
“In what way?”
“I could hit people. There aren’t that many of them. If they don’t stick together, I can take any two of them at a time.”
I estimated fair odds to be closer to six to one, but I didn’t correct her. Then again, she wouldn’t deliberately use lethal force. Maybe she was right.
“Direct, but not exactly a good way to change hearts and minds. It tends to make them angry and encourage them to do even more unpleasant things. From farther away. You can’t wear your bracers all the time. And you can’t block bullets with them, anyway.”
“Yet,” she replied, munching on her breakfast. I didn’t ask what she meant by that. “I could tell them I’m not a witch,” she went on.
“How do you prove it to them? No, more general: How do you prove a negative?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a reason the courts assume you’re innocent until proven guilty. Ideally, if there isn’t enough evidence to convict you, you’re assumed innocent. This is different from public opinion where you’re automatically guilty of whatever scandal is popular. Even if you prove you aren’t, there will always be those who remember you were accused. It doesn’t matter if you’re acquitted of all charges. The scandal will follow you forever.”
