The Shockwave Rider

by John Brunner

  He could even imagine the style of type it was printed in. And it ran:

  Distinguish between (a) the smelting of ore which could have become a tool in order to make a weapon and (b) the modification of germ plasm which might have been a person in order to make a tool. Do not continue your answer below the thick black line.

  And the answer, the hateful horrible answer, boiled down to this.

  No difference. No distinction. Both are wicked.

  He didn’t want to believe that conclusion. Taking it at face value implied giving up all that had been most precious in his short life. Tarnover had become his home in a more total sense than he had previously imagined possible.

  But he felt insulted, clear down to the marrow of his bones.

  I thought I was here to become myself with maximum perfection. I’m no longer sure that I was right. Suppose, just suppose, I’m here to become the person who’s regarded as most usable. …

  Miranda died; her life supports were less than perfect. But she was reincarnated in numerous successors, and even when there was none of them around, her image continued to haunt Nickie Haflinger.

  Privately, because he was afraid he would fail to explain himself if he talked about this to his friends, he wrestled with the ramifying tentacles of the problem.

  The word wicked had sprung to his mind unbidden; it had been learned in infancy, most likely from his mother whom he dimly remembered as having been devout, a Pentecostalist or Baptist or the like. His later temporary parents had all been too enlightened to use such loaded terms around a child. Their homes contained computer remotes giving access to all the newest data concerning kids.

  So what did the word mean? What in the modern world could be identified as evil, an abomination, wrong? He groped his way toward a definition, and found the final clue in his recollection of what Bosch had said. Having discovered that Miranda was a conscious being with an average IQ, they had not given her merciful release. They had not even kept her ignorant of the world, so that she could have had no standard of comparison between her existence and that of mobile, active, free individuals. Instead, they brought her out in public to “get used to being stared at.” As though their conception of personality began and ended with what could be measured in the labs. As though, capable themselves of suffering, they granted no reality to the suffering of others. “The subjest exhibited a pain response.”

  But not, under any circumstances, we hurt her.

  Outwardly his conduct during his second five years at Tarnover was compatible with how he had previously behaved. He took tranquilizers, but they were prescribed for him as for most of his age group. He was sometimes called for counseling sessions after arguing with his instructors, but so were at least half of his peers. Having been jilted by a girl, he teetered on the verge of turning skew, but the typical emotional tempests of adolescence were magnified in this closed environment. All quite within the parameters laid down.

  Once—literally once—he found he could stand the pressure no longer, and did something which, had he been found out, would have ensured his expulsion and very likely an operation to blank his memory. (It was rumored … One could never pin the rumor down.)

  From a public veephone at the railcar terminal linking Tarnover to the nearest town he called Hearing Aid, for the first time in years, and for one dark lonely hour poured out the secrets of his heart. It was a catharsis, a purgation. But long before he had regained his room he was shaking, haunted by the fear that Hearing Aid’s famous promise (“Only I heard that!”) might not be true. How could it be? It was absurd! From Canaveral the tendril-ears of federal computers wove through his society like mycelia. No place could possibly be immune. All night he lay awake in fear, expecting his door to be flung open and stern silent men to take him under arrest. By dawn he was half-minded to kill himself.

  Miraculously, there followed no disaster, and a week later that awful impulse had receded in memory, growing vague as a dream. What he recalled all too vividly, though, was his terror.

  He resolved it was the last time he’d be such a fool.

  Shortly thereafter he began to concentrate on data processing techniques at the expense of his other study subjects, but about one in four of his contemporaries had by then also evinced a preference for some specialty, and this was a valuable talent. (It had been explained to him that in terms of n-value mean-path theory administering the three hundred million people of North America was a determinate problem; however, as with chess or fencing, it was no good to be told that there must be a perfect game if the universe wouldn’t last long enough for it to be found by trial and error.)

  He had been reserved and self-contained when he arrived. It was not inconsistent that after a gesture in the direction of greater openness he should revert to his old solitary habits. Neither his teachers nor his friends guessed that he had revised himself for a purpose. He wanted out, and there was not supposed to be an out.

  The point was never labored, but there were constant reminders that to support one student at Tarnover cost the federal budget approximately three million dollars per year. What had been spent in the last century on missiles, submarines, the maintenance of forward bases overseas, was now lavished on these secret establishments. And it was known in the subtle way such things can be known that a condition of being here was that ultimately one must offer the government a return on its investment. All the graduates who came back to visit were doing so.

  But the conviction had gradually grown in Nickie’s mind that something was amiss. Were these people dedicated … or insensitive? Were they patriotic … or power-hungry? Were they single-minded … or purblind?

  He was determined that somehow, sooner or later, before committing himself to the lifetime repayment they were bound to demand of him, he must break loose long enough to take a detached view and make his mind up about the rights and wrongs of the brain race.

  That was what set him on the trail of what he later found to be a 4GH code.

  He deduced from first principles that there must be a way of allowing authorized persons to drop an old identity and assume a new one, no questions asked. The nation was tightly webbed in a net of interlocking data-channels, and a time-traveler from a century ago would have been horrified by the degree to which confidential information had been rendered accessible to total strangers capable of adding two plus two. (“The machines that make it more difficult to cheat on income tax can also ensure that blood of the right group is in the ambulance which picks you up from a car crash. Well?”)

  Yet it was known that not merely police informers, FBI agents and counterspies continued to go about their secret business, but also commercial spies—party agents shepherding million-dollar bribes—procurers serving the carnal purposes of the hypercorps. It was still true that if you were rich enough or had the ear of the proper person, you could avoid and evade. Most people were resigned to living wholly on the public level. He was not. He found his code.

  A 4GH contained a replicating phage: a group which automatically and consistently deleted all record of a previous persona whenever a replacement was keyed in. Possessed of one, an individual could rewrite him- or herself via any terminal connected to the federal data banks. That meant, since 2005, any veephone including a public one.

  This was the most precious of all freedoms, the plug-in life-style raised to the nth power: freedom to become the person you chose to be instead of the person remembered by the computers. That was what Nickie Haflinger desired so keenly that he spent five years pretending he was still himself. It was the enchanted sword, the invulnerable shield, the winged boots, the cloak of invisibility. It was the ultimate defense.

  Or so it seemed.

  Therefore, one sunny Saturday morning, he left Tarnover, and on Monday he was a life-style counselor in Little Rock, ostensibly aged thirty-five and—as the data-net certified—licensed to practice anywhere in North America.

  THE TANGLED WEB

  “Your first career wen
t well for a while,” Freeman said. “But it came to an abrupt and violent end.”

  “Yes.” A harsh chuckle. “I was nearly shot by a woman I advised to go screw someone of a different color. The massed computers of half a continent were in agreement with me, but she wasn’t. I concluded I’d been overoptimistic and rethought myself.”

  “Which was when you became an instructor with a three-vee cassette college. I note that for your new post you dropped down to twenty-five, much nearer your real age, even though the bulk of the clientele was forty or over. I wonder why.”

  “The answer’s simple. Think what lured most of those clients on to the college’s reels. It was a sense of losing touch with the world. They were hungry for data supplied by people fifteen or twenty years younger, usually because they’d done what they thought best for their children and been repaid with rejection and insults. They were pathetic. What they wanted was not what they claimed to want. They wanted to be told yes, the world really is pretty much as it was when you were young, there aren’t any objective differences, there’s some magic charm you can recite and instantly the crazy moiling framework of the modern world will jell into fixed familiar patterns. … The third time a complaint was filed about my tapes I was surpled despite my rigorous proof that I was right. Being right was at a discount in that context, too.”

  “So you tried your skill as a full-time Delphi gambler.”

  “And made a fortune in next to no time and grew unspeakably bored. I did nothing that anybody else couldn’t do, once he realized the government manipulates Delphi odds to keep the social-mollification index high.”

  “Provided he had access to as much computer capacity as you did.”

  “But in theory everybody does, given a dollar to drop into a pay phone.”

  There was a pause. Freeman resumed in a brittle tone, “Did you have a clearly defined goal in mind which guided you in your choice of roles?”

  “You didn’t already dig that out of me?”

  “Yes, but when you were regressed. I want your contemporary conscious opinion.”

  “It’s still the same; I never hit on a better way of phrasing it. I was searching for a place to stand so that I could move the Earth.”

  “Did you ever consider going overseas?”

  “No. The one thing I suspected a 4GH might not be good for was a passport, so if I found the right spot it would have to be in North America.”

  “I see. That puts your next career into much clearer perspective. You spent a full year with a utopia-design consultancy.”

  “Yes. I was naïve. It took me that long to realize that only the very rich and the very stupid imagine happiness can be bought tailor-made. What’s more, I should have discovered right away that it was company policy to maximize variety from one project to the next. I designed three very interesting closed communities, and in fact the last I heard all were still operating. But trying to include in the next utopia what seemed to be most promising in the previous one was what got me redunded again. You know, I sometimes wonder what became of last century’s hypothetical life-style labs, where a serious effort was to be made to determine how best human beings can live together.”

  “Well, there are the simulation cities, not to mention the paid-avoidance zones.”

  “Sure, and there are the places like Trianon where you get a foretaste of tomorrow. But don’t bleat me. Trianon couldn’t exist if G2S didn’t subsidize it with a billion dollars a year. Simulation cities are only for the children of the rich—it costs nearly as much to send the kids back to the past for a year as it does to keep them at Amherst or Bennington. And the paid-avoidance areas were created as a way of economizing on public expenditure after the Great Bay Quake. It was cheaper to pay the refugees to go without up-to-the-minute equipment. Which they couldn’t have afforded anyhow.”

  “Maybe mankind is more adaptable than they used to believe. Maybe we’re coping well enough without such props.”

  “In a day and age when they’ve quit covering individual murders on three-vee, where they just say bluntly, ‘Today there were so many hundred killings,’ and change the subject? That’s not what I call coping!”

  “You don’t seem to have coped too well yourself. Each of your personae led to failure, or at any rate it didn’t lead to fulfillment of your ambition.”

  “Partly true, but only partly. In the enclosed environment of Tarnover I didn’t realize how apathetic most people have become, how cut off they feel from the central process of decision-making, how utterly helpless and resigned. But remember: I was doing in my middle twenties what some people have to wait another decade, even two decades, to achieve. You people were hunting for me with all the resources at your command. You still didn’t spot me, not even when I changed roles, which was my most vulnerable moment.”

  “So you’re blaming others for your failure and seeking consolation in your few and shallow successes.”

  “I think you’re human after all. At any rate that sounded as though you’re trying to needle me. But save your breath. I admit my worst mistake.”

  “Which was—?”

  “To assume that things couldn’t possibly be as bad as they were painted. To imagine that I could undertake constructive action on my own. I’ll give you an example. A dozen times at least I’d heard the story of how a computer purchased by one of the hyper-corps exclusively—on their own admission—to find means whereby they could make tax-immune payments to government officials for favors received, had been held an allowable business expense. I was convinced it must be folklore. And then I found there really was such a case on record.” A sour chuckle. “Faced with things like that, I came to accept that I couldn’t get anywhere without supporters, sympathizers, colleagues.”

  “Which you were hoping to obtain via your church?”

  “Two more personae intervened before I hit on that idea. But, broadly speaking, yes.”

  “Wasn’t it galling to have to rethink yourself so often because of outside circumstances?”

  There was another pause, this time a long one.

  “Well, to be candid, I sometimes regarded myself as having escaped into the biggest prison on the planet.”

  DEAN INGE HE SAY

  “There are two kinds of fool. One says, ‘This is old, and therefore good.’ And one says, ‘This is new, and therefore better.’ ”

  RECEPTION TODAY IS OF AVERAGE QUALITY

  “This is Seymour Schultz, who’s one of our orbital troubleshooters.”

  A lean dark man wearing blue, smiling and proffering, according to custom, a card bearing his name and code. Projected image: man of action, no-nonsense type.

  “Ah, I saw one of your colleagues taking off just now.”

  “Yes, that would have been Harry Leaver.”

  “And this is Vivienne Ingle, head-of-dept for mental welf.”

  Fat in gray and green, never pretty. Projecting: got here on merit, I know more than you do about yourself.

  “And Pedro Lopez, and Charlie Verrano, and …”

  Plug-in people as predicted, which meant he could switch off half his attention and still be sure he’d do and say the right conformist things.

  “… Rico Posta, veep i/c long-term planning—”

  Snap back. Vice-presidents count, often stay put instead of bouncing around. So for this tall bearded man in black and yellow a specially warm handshake and:

  “Great to meet you, Rico. Guess you and I will be in circuit quite a lot over this diversification you have in mind.”

  “And—oh, yes, my daughter Kate, and over there is Dolores van Bright, asshead of contract law dept, whom you absolutely must meet right away because …”

  But somehow he wasn’t at Ina’s side any more as she crossed the room to make the introduction. He was smiling at Kate, and that was ridiculous. Because on top of not even being pretty she was bony—damn it, scrawny! Moreover, her face was too sharp: eyes, nose, chin. And her hair: tousled, of no special color, mousy-brown. />
  But looking at him with a degree of speculative interest he found dreadfully disturbing.

  This is crazy. I don’t like thin women. I like them cuddly. Ina, for example. And that’s true in all versions of myself.

  “So you’re Sandy Locke.” With a curious husky intonation.

  “Mm-hm. Large as life and twice as.”

  There was an appraising pause. He was vaguely aware of Ina, who was on the far side of the floor now—and this was a big room, of course—as she glanced around in surprise to relocate him.

  “No. Larger, and half,” Kate said unaccountably, and pulled an amusing face that made her nose woffle like a rabbit’s. “Ina’s making wild signals at you. Better catch up. I’m not supposed to be here—I just have nothing else to do this evening. But suddenly I’m glad I came. Talk to you later.”

  “Hey, Sandy!” Loud over the omnipresent soothing music, bland as the decor warranted to offend nobody. “This way!”

  What the hell happened just now?

  The question kept leaping back into his mind even when “just now” was an hour old, distracting him constantly without warning from the prescribed display of interest in the affairs of these new colleagues of his. It cost him much effort to maintain a veneer of politeness.

  “Say, I hear your kid had to go be straightened, poor thing. How’s she doing?”

  “We collect her Saturday. Good as new or better, so they say.”

  “Should have signed her with Anti-Trauma Inc. like us. Don’t you agree, Sandy?”

  “Hmm? Oh! It’s no use asking me. I’m strictly swingle, so for me you’re into a no-go zone.”

  “Yeah? Shame. Was going to ask your view on fifty-fifty schools—know, where pupils pick half, staff the other half of the curriculum? Fair compromise on the face; in the guts I wonder …”