Analog SFF, October 2007 Read online

  I thought about all this as Penelope talked, quickly, excitedly, and too herself.

  "Aiee, I don't have time for this. The ball is in three hours. Matilda doesn't have my dress ready. I still have to do my hair. And I still haven't taken a good look at this thing,” she said in Spanish—a lilting, singsong Spanish that spilled quickly from her lips. I wondered if she were Cuban. They speak a dialect of Spanish there that is so fast that even they don't know what they're saying. “Where is the on switch for this thing?"

  She poked at my kit, trying to get at the controls.

  "I don't have an on switch. Or an off switch."

  She jumped back. “Ay mama!"

  "I'm really grateful for all that you've done,” I said. “And I don't mean to be rude, but could you tell me where we are?"

  "In my office,” she said in Spanish. “In my house,” she added in her sweetly accented English. “Ahh, in Ciudad de Cielo. Sky City."

  Sky City? Not a place I recognized by name. Not one of the places I knew were safe—places where I had rights protected by law. But not one of the places I knew weren't safe.

  "Thank you,” I said. “I was nervous for a while. I didn't know—"

  "Aiee, look at the time. I have a formal ball tonight and Victor will be here early because I've been gone for a week."

  She rushed over to a desk and flipped on a datascreen. “Too many messages. Too many calls. They'll all have to wait until tomorrow. Oh, here's one from Victor."

  A round face appeared on the screen, dark hair, dark skin, a thick moustache. “My darling, my sweetheart, the days without you leave my heart empty and cold. Hurry back to me, precious one."

  Social norms and cultural memes shift quickly and often, and it had been many, many years since I'd been on Earth. So I couldn't tell if Victor was serious in his exaggerated sappiness or it was just a charade between intimates. And the message ended abruptly before I got a clue, though it seemed there was something false, something hidden.

  "How romantic,” Penelope said as she flipped through the rest of the queue.

  "Boyfriend?” I asked.

  "He is courting me,” she said absently, then she smiled. “Big-time family business."

  "Congratulations,” I said. “Listen, there's something I need to talk to you—"

  "Oh no, look at the time,” she cried, repeating her list of needs and demands once more.

  I tried again. “Could we discuss..."

  "I just wanted to make sure you were working right after all that we went through,” Penelope said. “You probably saved my life up there. So you're organic. Do you need something? Electricity? Food? Water?"

  "I'm mostly self-contained,” I said. “I need sugar and salt from time to time. And fresh water periodically wouldn't hurt. I'm not due for a battery change for another decade or two. Phobos Dynamics treats its property well."

  "Ohhh! Phobos Dynamics! I have to ask you about them. What do they have to do with you?"

  "They kept me occupied for some time,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

  "Some time? How many years?"

  "Thirty-seven."

  "Aiee,” she cried. “What did you do for so long?"

  I waited before answering. I would have drawn a breath and held it if I could still do that kind of thing. There was a lot I didn't want to tell her. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  "Quality control, to start with. Teleoperating equipment at remote sites for a while. They liked my fine sense of control while moving—comes from years of commuting on the L.A. freeways."

  "Do they still have a claim on you?"

  "Not a legal one,” I said. “But that's what I need to talk to you about—"

  "Good,” Penelope said as she stood up and closed her messages from the screen. “We'll talk about it later. Tonight. Or tomorrow. It's going to be a very late night. I hope..."

  She rushed for the door, her auburn hair flying away behind her. She paused, then said, “And you can tell me all about the twentieth century."

  "Wait,” I said. “We have to talk now."

  But I was too late. She was long gone. And I would have sighed if I could still do that kind of thing.

  Because I realized that this wasn't going to be so easy after all. Of course she thought I was just another interesting interface on another complicated machine. And of course I couldn't just tell her that I wasn't. Not until she had figured that out for herself.

  She couldn't be much older than twenty-one—and all her life, boxes that sat on a shelf and talked to you weren't people. They were fakes. Clever impersonations. It made it easy to leap to the wrong conclusion and hard to make the switch to the right one.

  Why would this new one be any different? So what if it's organic. It's just another kind of machine to these kids.

  Instead of a living human being who was so incredibly happy that he was among other human beings and no longer the plaything of the mad machines that ruled the planets.

  * * * *

  Having failed completely at getting Penelope's true attention, I turned to my second task—finding out where I was and what that meant.

  Back when I was still with Phobos Dynamics, I'd talked to a lawyer about this. His name was Moynihan, and he'd been a high-powered corporate litigator. On Phobos, he was just another can of spam. But I made a practice of tracking down as many of PD's cans as I could and scrutinizing the contents, and Moynihan was one of the most surprising characters I ran across.

  One of the problems of losing your voice is recreating it with the kit that comes with the containment. It took a long time to master the fine controls of a wave generator. No hardwiring or software could take the place of acquiring control of your own nervous system in new ways. A lot of us never make the transfer. And if you don't keep in practice, you can lose the art of social intimacy entirely. So for all their flaws, people like Moynihan were a godsend.

  He was completely without a conscience, but he was completely frank about things that lawyers usually danced around. “Obviously the only function of the machines in a company like Phobos Dynamics is to maximize profits. And for them—like me—the end justifies the means. Which is how we managed to assemble this, what shall we call it, this ownership society. The only flaw in the system is that, here on Phobos, the machines are owners and we are the ownees."

  Slavery. It's not just for people of color anymore.

  "Does the ACLU know about all this?” I'd asked him.

  "The ACLU? How long have you been here? Longer than me, that's obvious. There is no more ACLU. They're history."

  "How about the Feds? Isn't there some treaty or something?"

  "The Feds? Not anymore. No more Feds. No more United States of America. It's all history."

  That was the exact moment I decided I had to escape from Phobos. The moment that I realized what I'd lost.

  Astronomers measure time a lot of different ways. From the quantum tick of virtual particles too ephemeral in their existence to measure, to the cosmic tock of Big Bangs and trillion-year-long heat deaths. The spinning planets are clocks and the long orbits of the planets are calendars more tyrannical than any time clock or amortization schedule—they make exceptions for no one.

  But ordinary humans measure time by minutes and hours and days and years. By the steady deviation from daily repetition. Each day marked by its differences. Each year by the progress of life.

  And when every day is the same, every hour like the last, every moment suspended in an endless mist of identical moments, without movement or process or change, time can slip through your fingers like buckets of sand.

  It was not one of the pitfalls that the docs had warned me about. Problems with sensory input, both real and imaginary, with speech, with electronic implants, socialization, depression, self-esteem, all that had been in the tutorial.

  But no one ever said, “And by the way, don't get captured by a powerful machine and forced to work at the same repetitive task for several decades."

 
So it came as a shock that the old U.S. of A. had gone away. I had broken some kind of historical time barrier. A world that I'd always assumed would always be the same was not.

  Moynihan had few details. It was happening about the time he was being acquired, and once he was on Phobos, he lost his newsfeeds. The company didn't maintain any kind of network connections for its sapient assets. No news. No histories. No outside contact of any kind. And Moynihan was one of the last relics that the company acquired—he said we'd been “fished out"—so news stopped coming in.

  It had happened quickly. The U.S. government was collapsing under the weight of its debt. Foreign banks stopped financing it. The president declared a state of emergency. An overzealous general took political control of the country—then launched an ill-advised military adventure into Asia. I guess he thought that if he killed enough foreigners, they would like us more—or at least lend us some more money. When the shooting was over, the nation was bankrupt, in receivership, with its assets and territories being broken up.

  And that was thirty years ago.

  In the brief time that I knew Moynihan, we spent many hours speculating about what had happened to the country we both grew up in. We knew it wasn't like Carthage and salted earth—the people must still be there, the cities, the states, the Internet. But while America might still be there, the United States was not.

  On the other hand, there would be no more imperial dreams paid for with the blood of bright young kids. No more energy hegemony. No more thugs in high places pushing the world around—at least not U.S. thugs. No more massive corporate state screwing ordinary people.

  We never could agree if, all things considered, it was a good thing or a bad thing.

  Worst of all, we couldn't decide if the successor states to the federal government would continue to hold to their predecessor's view of human rights. Under federal law, I was still a citizen, with full civil rights, entitled to due process under the Constitution. Now that there was no more Constitution—the last thing that Moynihan remembered before he was acquired was the World Court vote to dissolve it—people like us were hostages to fortune.

  The way things were going when Moynihan became a Phobo Dynamics asset, the world was turning away from political superstates and reasserting local sovereignty. China was on the rocks—the war broke out because they had nothing to lose. India had never really gotten its act together as a subcontinental power. Japan was an economic powerhouse, but still had a cultural barrier left over from the twentieth century against imposing its will on other nations. And Europe was what Europe always was—a herd of cats inside a three-piece suit pretending to be a statesman.

  Without access to the Earthside nets—or any other information database—we had no way of knowing where a disembodied relic of the twentieth century could find refuge. And without that, escape was pretty pointless.

  The biggest problem was that over the course of three decades, given the rapid and accelerating pace of social, political, and economic change, there was no way of being sure if anyplace we knew of would still protect us.

  My solution was to simply get as far away from Phobos as possible and hope that it might have a link to an up-to-date database. A high-risk proposition, but an improvement over current conditions. And it had the advantage that I had already devised a way to escape from Phobos.

  Moynihan's solution was to create an AI agent that could interrogate the political entities it found and identify the ones that we could use for sanctuary. Less risk, but it required my solution in order to release the agent into a network.

  And so, a year later, after I arranged my sale and shipment to the L-1 Solar Observatory, I put it to the test. The agent was written so that when it found a suitable venue, it would put out the solicitation that would bring someone to my rescue.

  L-1 had its own limitations on network access. I knew that when I had myself shipped there. There was no Earth-linked database there. I couldn't surf the Internet looking for a comfortable resort hideaway. But it did have a dedicated link for reporting its research to Earthside clients. And it was a simple hacker's trick to imbed Moynihan's agent in those reports.

  Of course, there was always the chance that the untested software hadn't worked as designed. There was no way to troubleshoot the agent. No way to use trial and error to make sure it wasn't making some fundamental misjudgment. That's why Moynihan and I were so valuable—humans in the loop could catch the irrational quirks that made machines unreliable.

  The agent had deemed Penelope's home as meeting the parameters of its assignment.

  Now I had to find out if it was right.

  * * * *

  Phobos Dynamics had one thing I liked—up-to-date spyware. Before leaving, I'd made a point of downloading as much of it as I could find, with the idea that it might come in handy someday.

  It took me about a minute to crack Penelope's household wi-fi network. Another minute to get onto the larger net beyond, using her ID and credit information. If I wanted to, I could probably get myself shipped anywhere in the solar system and at her expense—assuming I could get someone through her front door to pick up the package.

  And a short time later, the face of the city's tourism service appeared in a frame before me. She was pretty, but not distractingly so. Blond, well tanned, flawless skin, without a trace of an accent in her standard North American English. And, according to the icon in the corner of the frame, a machine-generated image not to be considered an “authentic human."

  "Sky City is located in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, with its base on Volcán Cayambe and its summit at an altitude of one hundred kilometers above mean sea level,” she said, sending a rush of excitement through my nerve endings.

  I knew where we were now. One of the assets left behind by the old U.S.A. was the beginning of a space elevator. The tower on Earth was massive—its base covered the mountain. The tip that poked up to the edge of space was much smaller—only a couple of kilometers square. The tower was meant to be only the anchor of a much larger structure—a cable that would extend another thirty-eight thousand kilometers to an anchorhead in geosynchronous orbit.

  The tower was nearly complete when I went inside Phobos. But according to the tourist face, it was never completed. The anchorhead was never put in place. The cable was never installed. Only the tower remained.

  "During the turmoil that followed the collapse of the United States,” the face said, “the tower was acquired by the members of the organization Humanitas Universalis."

  Another blast from the past. I remembered them when they were a fringe group on college campuses. They seemed like a bunch of back-to-nature tree-hugging romantics at first glance. But at a time when the human race was rushing to plug into the rapidly growing machine intelligence that girdled the Earth, they were issuing sophisticated warnings about the price we were paying in human terms—the loss of natural community, of human contact and intimacy, of passion and imagination and creativity.

  They had grown up since then.

  The human race had built the machines to run their businesses, and many of them ended up being run by the machines. They'd taken over completely beyond cis-Lunar space. The Moon was still being contested. On Earth, there were still controls on them, but not everywhere.

  And HU had stepped into the struggle.

  Now, they asserted, they were doing battle with the machines from a perch high above the Earth, a foothold in space that the machines could not easily assail. Or not.

  Some of the citizens of Sky City were still just romantics. Some were players in a reality game beyond any VR simulation. Some were just wondering what was for lunch.

  But they were all 100 percent genetically pure Homo sapiens, without gene manipulations (beyond the medically therapeutic), without implants, without online memories, shared AI personas, or uploaded personalities.

  Roger would have been appalled. They were mud people and they were more than proud, they were pretty damned arrogant about it.


  "A number of social customs and practices unique to Sky City are rooted in the fundamental tenets of Humanitas Universalis,” said the tourist face. “Machine intelligences are clearly labeled as such. Visitors with electronic implants will experience limitations on their service capabilities. Interfaces have limited intractability. For example, I cannot accompany you to dinner or serve as your escort in any other capacity."

  I wondered briefly what the tourist interfaces were like in places without HU's prejudices?

  Within a few minutes, I had a much clearer idea of what the world was like after three decades without “the leader of the free world” to lead them. The nation-state had been globalized out of existence. In its wake was an endless sea of broken and corrupt fiefdoms, where the rich walled themselves up in secure enclaves and lost themselves in mind-numbing symbiosis with a computer-generated game world while the machines up in space took care of business and kept them rich.

  I guess you had to give credit to Humanitas Universalis for being different. At least they were still willing to rage against the machines. And more. They pursued their role of the last gasp of unimplanted humanity with unrestrained passion.

  The local weblogs and newslinks painted a chaotic picture of thousands of ambitious egos jammed onto a tiny platform with no other purpose than to replicate the best that eight thousand years of organic intelligence had to offer—and the worst. Virtues and vices, all uniquely and purely human, were on display.

  It was a riot of competing parties, agendas, demands, interests, and gripes. Any idea, no matter how wild or improbable, could attract a zealous following ready to fight for it.

  Ironically, the most influential of the various parties pretended to be aimed entirely at the people wondering what was for lunch.