Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  At 6:18, while he was wrapping up the nanotech briefing, Skaka Gupta called. “Allan, I’m sorry to interrupt your day, but could you fly back here tonight?

  There’s something you should see.”

  Her voice sang with excitement. Allan felt it leap over the netlink, electrifying his own nerves. And it would avoid another empty evening in a hotel room. But he said with cool professionalism, “My schedule is rather full, Skaka. Are you sure that flying back to Boston will be worth my time?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, and at the tone in her voice, he called Jon to rearrange the schedule.

  The robots in Prime-Eight One still struggled to find and retrieve chips. Chefboy-R&D lay on its cylindrical side like an overturned beetle, spindly legs waving desperately to right itself. Skaka, practically running toward Prime-Eight Two, didn’t even glance through the plastic fence.

  “Look,” she said, outside the second enclosure. “Watch.”

  But there was nothing to see. The eight robots stood motionless around the uneven terrain. A minute passed, then another. Allan started to feel impatient. After all, his time was valuable. He could be checking in with Jon, receiving information updates, finding help for Charlie, even playing Battle Chess All of a sudden, the robots began to move. They lumbered to roughly equidistant positions within the enclosure. A brief pause, and then the chips rained down from the ceiling. Immediately the robots swung into action. Within minutes, the chips had all been gathered. Unsweetened Intelsauce deposited them through the slit.

  “Six minutes, fourteen seconds,” Skaka breathed. “The physical limitations will eventually limit any more gains in efficiency. But that’s not the point anymore. Allan, they’ve learned to anticipate when chips will fall, before they do. They anticipate tasks that haven’t yet been signaled!”

  “On a regular schedule, you mean. The chips fall, say, every two hours—”

  “No! That’s what’s so amazing! The chips don’t fall at completely random times, there’s a schedule, the same one we’ve used since the beginning, although I admit we interrupted it yesterday for your visit. The usual schedule has built-in variations around human factors like work shifts, staff meeting, lunch breaks. The bots have apparently learned it over time and are now anticipating with one hundred percent accuracy when chips will be released. They’re also anticipating the most probable places for the rolling and ricocheting chips to come to rest, given that the terrain changes daily but the chip-release points are fixed in the ceiling. Ever since last night, they’ve moved into max-effish gathering positions a few minutes before the chips fall!”

  Allan stared at the tin-can robots, with their garish logos and silly names. Anticipatory task management, based on self-learning of a varied-interval schedule. In biochips. It could have tremendous potential applications in manufacturing, for maintenance machinery, in speeding up forecast software . . . His brain spun.

  “Don’t you think,” Skaka said softly, “that this was well worth the trip back here?”

  Allan kept his tone cool, although it took effort. “Possibly. But of course I have a number of reservations and questions. For instance, have you-” His phone rang, two beeps, a priority call. “Dad? Charlie. Did you know our neighbors in Aspen have been arrested?”

  “Charlie, I’m pretty busy right now, I’m with a—”

  “They’ve been arrested for terrorism. There are cops all over the place.”

  Terrorism. Cops. Bombs, guns. What neighbors? Allan couldn’t remember meeting anyone in Aspen.

  “Where’s Mrs. Canning? Let me talk to her. Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right,” Charlie said scornfully. “Mrs. Canning took Suzette to the ice rink.”

  “Then here’s what I want you to do. just a minute. . .” Belatedly, Allan remembered Skaka, who was trying to look as if she hadn’t overheard. “Excuse me, Skaka, it’s my son. . ..”

  “Of course,” Skaka said, turning to gaze away, into the robot enclosure. The backs of her shoulders, just a little too rigid, said, Why haven’t you got your personal life well enough arranged so it doesn’t interfere with what may well be the most important investment opportunity of the decade?

  “Charlie, first call your mother and tell her what you just told me. Also Mrs. Canning. Then call a car and driver, and pack your things and Suzette’s and Mrs. Canning’s. Have the driver take you to the Denver apartment. I’ll have Jon or Patti okay the car bill and cancel the Aspen house.”

  “But, Dad—”

  “Charlie, just do it. I don’t want you in any danger!”

  “Oh, okay.” Charlie sounded disgusted. Twelve-year-old bravado.

  Quickly, Allan called Jon. Skaka’s shoulders were still stiff. Allan resented having lost the advantage. As in-control as he could manage, he said to Skaka, “My son. There’s been terrorist activity in what should have been a safe neighborhood. I had to get him out.”

  Her eyes widened. “Of course. What kind of terrorist activity?”

  It occurred to Allan that he hadn’t asked. He didn’t know the charges, the situation, the neighbors, themselves. They were only local; he spent so much time global.

  “The under-control kind,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t pick up on the evasion. “And we can be out of there in half an hour. Charlie’s a good packer.”

  Skaka smiled. “So is my daughter. We, too, have no fixed residence. I don’t know how scientists managed before disposable leases.”

  “Neither do I.” Allan warmed to her again; she was making his lapse into civilian more forgivable. “What plan do you use?”

  “Live America. Their Code Nine Plan: three-bedroom leases, no more than ten minutes from an airport, warm blue decor, level three luxury. They even include our choice of pet at each house. It suits my husband, daughter, and nanny just fine.”

  “We’re a Code Eleven. Four bedrooms. We have two kids.”

  Allan and Skaka smiled at each other, then looked away. That was the problem with talking about personal life: it interfered with the strategy. Reconnaissance scouts had to stay detached, keep moving, remain tense and alert. The information frontier was an unpredictable place.

  Skaka said briskly, “My staff will be watching very closely whatever the bots incorporate next into their learning, if anything. Should another breakthrough occur, they’ll notify me and I’ll notify you.”

  “Good,” Allan said. “Meantime, let’s talk about the breakthrough we already have. I’ve got some questions.”

  “Shoot,” Skaka said, and her shoulders visibly loosened.

  Allan spent the night on a sleeper plane to Singapore. Mrs. Canning settled the kids in the Denver apartment, although Suzette complained the ice-rink there wasn’t as good as at Aspen. She wanted to lease in Chicago, which “Coach Palmer said has a tenth-mega rink!” Allan said he’d think about it. Cathy called to postpone their romantic rendezvous until Sunday; her case was dragging on. Patti identified two more companies for Allan to check out, both on the far edge, both potential coups. One was in Sydney, the other in Brasilia. The Charlie icon on Allan’s PID sat motionless.

  The Singapore company had developed what it called a “graciously serious approaching” to that perennial coming attraction, the smart road that would direct cars, freeing the driver to do other things besides drive. Allan had expected that his visit would result in hiring one of the independent consultants Haller Ventures used to evaluate automotive technology, but it didn’t even need that. Singapore wasn’t doing anything Allan hadn’t seen before. Not worth a skirmish. On to Sydney.

  From the plane he called Charlie. “Son? Not much action in your PID icon.”

  Totally vibrationless, for five straight hours, and not a time when Charlie could be expected to be asleep.

  “No,” Charlie said neutrally.

  Allan tried to keep his tone light. “So what ya doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Charlie—”

  “Did you know that when Robert Ful
ton invented the steamship, at least three other guys were making the same thing at the same time?”

  “Charlie—”

  “Gotta go, Dad. Love you.”

  “Three minutes till landing,” said his wristwatch. “MGPS coordinates for your car are displayed.”

  “Allan!” Patti said. “Action in Tunis. Looks like a genuine outpost. Company is called Sahara Sun, and they manufacture solar panels. Stats follow. Also rerouting on tomorrow’s schedule.”

  “Two minutes till landing.”

  Allan closed his eyes. But when the plane stopped, he was the first one to spring up, grab his carry-on, deplane from the front row. In Jakarta.

  No-Sydney. Jakarta was tomorrow.

  Or the next day?

  Sydney was fiber-optics with increased carrying capacity due to smaller-grain alloys.

  Jakarta was medical technology, an improved electrocardiograph that could predict fibrillation by incorporating elements of chaos theory into the computer analysis of data. Eighty-one-point-three success rate.

  So far.

  Bombay was no good. Supposedly an important advance in holographic videoconferencing, but actually old, old, old stuff. Jon had slipped up.

  Berne was briefing and inspection tour of an ongoing investment, currently in beta-testing phase. A Haller Ventures accountant and quality assurance expert met Allan there.

  Milan was fascinating. The benchmark for parallel-systems processing was one trillion operations per second. The Italian techies had achieved it with half the hardware previously required. There was much noisy gesturing and an earthy Tuscany wine.

  Tunis was robots in the desert. The entrepreneurs drove Allan onto the rim of the Sahara, jouncing in Rovers over miles of rocky sand to a sundrenched site where solar panels were being assembled by simple robots. The bots also assembled more of themselves. They separated ores from the desert sand for raw material, using solar power to create the high temperatures to do it: a selfperpetuating mechanical kingdom slowly spreading over the empty desert floor. The excess solar power was converted into electricity to sell, once cables were in place. A solid, conservative strategy. Allan ordered a tech-consultant evaluation immediately, including a climate projection for thirty years. Desert wars had been lost before to climate.

  He caught a transatlantic flight home. The Brazilian engagement had been postponed. Cathy had gone to Los Angeles-the Tunis trip had once more scuttled their rendezvous-with Suzette, who had a major skating competition. Charlie was on a nature hike in Yosemite with the commercial edu-group Mrs. Canning subscribed him to. The leased apartment in Aspermo, Aspen had been canceled, and anyway it was Oakland this month because of Suzette’s competition schedule-would be empty.

  The little Tunisian robots had looked like rectangular suitcases, not cylindrical tin cans. Nonetheless, Allan called Skaka Gupta from the transatlantic flight. She was in Berne. Allan rerouted himself to Boston anyway. He didn’t like coming home to a new leased place with no one else there.

  At Novation he was met by a flustered young man, no more than twenty-three, in jeans, leather sweater, and the ubiquitous sneakers set with tiny flashing mirrors. Allan recognized the type: a software expert. Awkward, bright as hell, and secretly scornful of “bean counters.” No, that wasn’t the term anymore: “cashware clods.” Allan smiled icily and looked slightly bored.

  “Paul Sanderson? Allan Haller. You’re going to give me Skaka’s pitch, right?”

  Skaka had left no data for a new pitch, as far as Allan knew.

  Paul Sanderson looked confused. “Yes . . . no, I mean, she didn’t . . . I was just going to show you what the bots can do now.”

  “Fine, fine. But keep the jargon to a minimum.” A preemptive strike, with the force of an order. Sanderson would get either hurry or meek, unsure how his boss would want Allan treated.

  He got meek. “Sure. Well, uh, this way.”

  The robots in Prime-Eight One seemed to Allan slightly less uncoordinated, although they still wandered hopelessly. Campbell’s Tomorrow Soup lunged at a chip but missed it. Sanderson dawdled past the enclosure, peering through the plastic, fidgeting. Why? To cover his own edginess, Allan flipped over his tie and checked his PID.

  The icons all vibrated so fast he could barely see they were there.

  “You’ve created a superstrength data field here!” he exclaimed, and as Sanderson turned toward him with a grin of embarrassment, Allan understood. “You have, haven’t you? You’ve made the whole facility into a microwave field that lets the Prime-Eight Two bots interface directly with the Net. You retrofitted them with the communications software to do that.”

  Sanderson nodded sheepishly. “I know regs say I should have warned you before you stepped into the field, but it’s not dangerous in such short exposure, really it’s not. And your own corn devices will return to normal functioning just as soon as we “I’m not concerned about either my devices or my health!” Allan snapped. “But Skaka promised to keep me abreast of any major changes in the research!”

  “Well, there haven’t really been any,” Sanderson said. “Although we’d hoped . . . but so far, nothing has changed. The bots just go on anticipating the chip-release schedule and—”

  “Is Prime-Eight One wired to the Net, too? Or aren’t you going to tell me that, either?”

  Sanderson looked shocked. “No, of course it’s not wired. If we don’t do it at exactly the same point as we did this group, we’d compromise the research design!”

  “As opposed to compromising your investors’ confidence,” Allan snapped. “Fine. Tell Ms. Gupta to call me when she returns. And please be advised that I retain the right to bring in my own evaluators here, since I’m obviously not being told everything voluntarily.”

  “Mr. Haller, please don’t think that because—”

  “That’s all,” Allan snapped, turned, and left.

  Back in his car, he asked himself why he was so angry. He owned a piece of Novation, yes, but he owned pieces of a lot of outposts where the front shifted abruptly and unpredictably. That was the nature of fronts. So why was he so upset?

  He didn’t know. And there was o time to think about it. His next flight left in forty-two minutes.

  Just enough time to study the information for tomorrow’s 6:30 breakfast meeting.

  Cathy and Allan finally connected in New York; she had an unexpected re-route in her schedule. As he entered the elevator, Allan felt his chest tighten. Ten days since he’d last seen his wife! And oh, bow he’d missed her . . . and how he loved the giddy excitement of their reunions. Surely couples who were together all the time couldn’t get this excited.

  Nor was he disappointed. Afterward, lying together on the big hotel bed, dreamily watching the wall program shade from hectic red to cool soft blues (it must be keyed to their breathing), Allan felt utterly content.

  Cathy, however, didn’t let him drift for long. “Honey, there’s something we need to talk about. It’s Charlie.”

  Immediately Allan’s mood changed. He hiked himself up against the pillows. “How did he seem in Los Angeles?”

  “Strange.” Cathy hesitated. “I know he’s on the edge of adolescence, trying his wings, some hostility to be expected blah blah blah . . . but he wasn’t hostile. He was just as nice to Suzette as ever, really thrilled for her when she won. And he wasn’t at all secretive with me. It’s just that he’s gone off in such strange directions in his personal interests. For instance, he talked a lot about the Age of Reason and its social implications.”

  “Just a sec,” Allan said. He reached for the meshnet, crumpled with the rest of his clothes on the floor by his bed, and did a Quik-Chek. Age of Reason: an eighteenth-century period of great intellectual awareness and activity, characterized by questioning of authority, emphasis on the experimental method in science, and creative self-determination in arts, culture, and politics.

  “I could have told you what it was,” Cathy said, nettled.

  “I know.” Cathy was a
lawyer; she would have gone into far more well organized particulars than Allan wanted. “But it’s just history, right? An interest in history doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, Charlie said something or other to me about Robert Fulton and the steamship. Maybe Mrs. Canning started a new school unit.”

  “No, I checked. They’re still concentrating on earth sciences. But that’s not all. I accessed Charlie’s Twenty-Two-the personal-notes tablet, but only the unencrypted part, of course-and he—”

  “He’s still using a Twenty-Two? Good Lord, that computer’s been obsolete for at least three months! I’ll send him a new one-there’s something much better coming out now.”

  Cathy said acidly, “There’s always something much better coming out. But that’s not the point, Allan. What I found on Charlie’s tablet were lists of ‘ages.’ All the lists were subtly different, but there were dozens of them.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ages’ ?”

  “Stone Age. Iron Age. Age of Heroes. Age of Faith. Dark Ages. Age of Reason. Industrial Age. Space Age. Itiformatio Age. That one’s always last oil every list, presumably because we’re in it now. Dozens of different list’s!”

  “Odd,” Allan said, because it was clear she expected him to say something. But, frankly, Cath, it doesn’t sound dangerous. So he’s wondering about history. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Exhibit Three: When I asked him about the lists, he didn’t get angry that I’d been snooping in his tablet. Instead, he looked at me in that intense way he has, not moving a single facial muscle-you know how he is-and said, “Mom, how do we know that our family is really information-front warriors, and not really just homeless people?’ ”

  Allan considered. That did sound serious. “Did you ask him if he’s feeling that you and I travel too much? That we should make an effort to be all together more often as a family?” He and Cathy had worried this before.

  “Yes. But he said no, that wasn’t it at all, his friends’ parents were just the same. So I asked him what was it, and he only said, “When it’s steamship time, it’s steamship time,’ and sank into one of those motionless trances of his. Allan, I couldn’t get him to even answer me for half an hour, no matter what I did. It’s like he was someplace else, sitting right there in front of me!”