by David Brin
“Used to be, we’d get lots of fuzzy glimpses on spotty film, a few hundred meters from a road or town. Today, encounters only seem to happen in the deep desert, or midocean. Or it’s amateur astronomers, reporting strange lights near the Moon and Mars. Wherever the panopticon still has gaps, allowing tantalizing…”
Hamish meant to go on, milking a riff that he hadn’t used in a while. But the stocky woman interrupted.
“Mr. Brookeman, do you mind? Most of us know your views on UFOs, from The Elf. One of your sillier movies, by the way. But can we please stay on topic? You seem to be an hour or two out of touch!
“In fact…,” she continued, while slowing down, tapping the edges of her specs and waggling the fingers of her other hand in open space. “As a matter … of fact … even as we speak…”
She slowed to a stop, going slack-jawed, staring at images projected on the inner surface of her web-spectacles, and finally breathed a single word.
“Wow!”
The islands of distraction now became a babbling archipelago, as individuals hurried to follow her attention trail. Clusters of people flashed tags to each other. Some of them gasped in their own turn, pointing and commenting to each other with low whispers. Facing a sea of flickering lenses and waving hands, Hamish cleared his throat.
“Um, did something just happen? Will someone please explain—”
Another audience member stood up, this time from the very front row. She was svelte and tall, wearing clear specs that carried plenty of gear—like a floating gel-lens—while also revealing her sharp, pale-brown eyes.
“Tor Povlov, of MediaCorp’s show, The Povlovian Response.” Wriggles identified the woman. “Call her Miss Tor.”
Hamish cursed his slow thought process. He could have subvocalized a command to Wriggles and got a summary of whatever news everyone was tizzying about. Too late now. He nodded toward the newcomer. “Yes, Miss Tor?”
The conference center’s live acoustic walls responded by shifting priority to the reporter, bathing her in light and amplifying her voice.
“Since you aren’t linked-in, Mr. Brookeman, let me explain what’s going on, then ask your reaction. Apparently, someone—moments ago—issued more than a terab of purloined data from the NASA Marti Space Center. Images showing highlights of their effort to communicate and translate with the Object.”
No one could mistake the capitalization of that final word.
“Really?” Hamish raised his voice to be heard over a rising murmur from the crowd. Even the dampers were getting strained. “Well, I shouldn’t have to tell you that leaks can’t be trusted. Almost anything can be faked and viral-released, even through an official site. I wouldn’t go molten over uncredentialed vids.”
By now, a clear majority had dived into full-immersion. It irked Hamish to have so few actually looking his way. Of those left in the here-and-now, most seemed more interested in the reporter than him. Except for Roger Betsby, that is. The bearded poisoner kept his gaze firmly on Hamish.
Tor Povlov shook her head.
“Then I guess you haven’t heard the rest, Mr. Brookeman. NASA and the Department of Foresight have already issued a nondenial. No more calm-downs or distractions. Nor any outright disavowals of the leak. Only a promise to find the persons responsible and hit them with a prematurity fine.”
The phrase provoked chuckles and derisive smirks. That slap on the wrist never stopped anybody. At least, no one who had Guild protection and a plausible claim of public interest.
Hamish blinked, abruptly wishing he could be somewhere else. In contact with his own people. Or the Prophet’s.
While I stood here, blathering to extropians about their silly fantasies, the real-world situation has spun out of control.
Tor Povlov continued in a friendly tone. “All morning, MediaCorp has been tracking a sharp spike in diplomatic encrypt traffic, between various national alliances, cartels, and WCNs. Clearly, they were being given advance warning and consultation about something big. But a wave of perplexes and distracts kept us from zeroing in on which rumored event it was all about.”
That would have been the Prophet’s doing. At least it worked for a few hours.
“Only now…” She paused for a moment of artfully divided attention, then gracefully resumed. “… it appears the White House has scheduled a plenum press conference for three o’clock eastern time. Just under an hour from now. And MediaCorp’s forcaister gives a ninety-two percent confidence projection that it will be a public confirmation of the Havana leak, followed by full disclosure.”
In what must be a dramatic concession, for someone of her generation, Tor Povlov reached up and flipped the lenses of her vir-spectacles, in order to give Hamish the courtesy of her full attention, here-and-now. Of course that tiny gel-lens kept transmitting to her point-of-view audience, around the world.
“Hence, my question for you, Mr. Brookeman. You’ve just spent an hour scolding these would-be godmakers,” she said the word with a lilt that conveyed her own level of skepticism. “Hectoring them with a stark litany of worries about a dangerously disrupted future.
“And lo, the future has arrived! This disruption—or disturber, to use your own term—is likely to be a doozy. Perhaps even like in your stories.
“Only, human foolishness seems to have had little to do with it, this time. And, unlike what always happens in your novels, this cat isn’t likely to get hushed and stuffed back in the bag, before the denouement.
“So, what I’d like to know, Mr. Brookeman, is how do you suggest we deal with this new thing?
“A bottle appears to have washed onto our shore, from far away. It contains a message.
“And it talks.”
RENUNCIATORS
Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.
Only this time, things are different! It isn’t just one part of the world, deciding whether to rise or fall. Whether to seize confidence or forsake it. Whatever separates our tribes, today, it’s not geography. Rapid connections can spread trouble, as quickly as commerce and hope, as we learned during the Cybersneeze, the Big Heist, and the Sumatran Flu. Already, the EU and GEACS and at least twenty American states have set up commissions to supervise scientists and inventors, aiming to “advise and guide” them toward responsible progress.
Or none at all? To avoid collapse, scholars from the Diamond Futurological Institute prescribe one hope—to imitate the few human societies that learned to live sustainably within their means—like the Tokugawa Shogunate and Polynesian Tikopia. Ecologically stable, they savagely protected forests and limited the spread of farmland. Those “ideal societies” also banned the wheel. Or take the Kaczynskyites, who don’t bother persuading. If it’s new, or technological, they’ll try to blow it up.
Finally, we have the Movement. Calm and reasonable, it helped ease our world past the last great crisis, a decade ago, midwifing the trade-offs restoring balance among the ten estates, bringing about the Big Deal. Only now they’re urging humanity to “take a pause.” To reflect on the pitfalls and opportunities, before resuming our forward march. Letting wisdom catch up with technology. But don’t we need to get new solutions faster, not slower?
—from The Movement Revealed by Thormace Anubis-Fejel
20.
PURSUIT
Despite his hurry to get home, Peng Xiang Bin avoided the main gate through the massive seawall. For one thing, the giant doors were closed right now, for high tide. Even when they opened, that place would throng with fishermen, hawking their catch, and city dwellers visiting the last remaining beach of imported sand. So m
any eyes—and ais—and who knew how many were already sifting every passing face, searching for his unique biosignature?
I should never have posted queries about an egglike stone that glows mysteriously, after sitting in sunlight.
I should have left it in that hole under the sea.
His fear—ever since glimpsing the famous alien “Artifact” on TV—was that somebody high and mighty wanted desperately to have whatever Bin discovered in a hidden basement cache, underneath a drowned mansion—and wanted it in secret. The former owner had been powerful and well connected, yet he wound up being hauled away and—according to legend—tortured, then brain-sifted, and finally silenced forever. Bin suspected now that it was because of an oval stone, very much like the one causing such fuss across the world. Governments and megorps and reff-consortia would all seek one of their own.
If so, what would they do with the likes of me? When an object is merely valuable, a poor man who recovers it may demand a finder’s fee. But if it is a thing that might shake civilization?
In that case, all I could expect is death, just for knowing about it!
Yet, as some of the initial panic ebbed, Bin felt another part of his inner self rise up. The portion of his character that once dared ask Mei Ling to join him at the wild frontier, shoresteading a place of their own.
If there were a way to offer the stone up for bidding … a way to keep us safe … True, the former owner must have tried, and failed, to make a deal. But no one knew about this kind of “artifact” then … at least not the public. Everything has changed, now that the Americans are showing theirs to the world.…
None of which would matter, if he failed to make it home in time to hide the thing and do some basic preparations. Above all, sending Mei Ling and Xiao En somewhere safe. Then post an open call for bidders to meet him in a public place…?
Hurrying through crowded streets, Bin carefully kept his pace short of a run. It wouldn’t do to draw attention. Beyond the public-order cams on every ledge and lamppost, the state could tap into the lenses and private-ais worn by any pedestrian nearby. His long hair, now falling over his face, might stymie a routine or casual face-search, but not if the system really took an interest.
It’s rumored that they have learned to detect the faint vibrations that emerge from each human ear. That each of us has a vibration—as personal as a fingerprint—that can be detected with instruments. Our bodies give off so many signals, so many ways to betray us to the modern state. Just in case, Bin grabbed a piece of paper out of a trash receptacle and chewed it soft, then crammed a small chunk in each ear.
Veering away from the main gate, he sped through a shabbier section of town, where multistory residence blocs had gone through ramshackle evolution, ignoring every zoning ordinance. Laundry-laden clotheslines jostled solar collectors that shoved against semi-illegal rectennas, siphoning Mesh-access and a little beamed power from the shiny towers of nearby Pudong.
Facing a dense crowd ahead, Bin tried pushing his way through for a while, then took a stab at a shortcut. Worming past a delivery cart that wedged open a pair of giant doors, he found himself inside a vast cavity, where the lower floors had been gutted in order to host a great maze of glassy pipes and stainless steel reactor vessels, all linked in twisty patterns, frothing with multicolored concoctions. He chose a direction by dead reckoning, where there ought to be an exit on the other side. Bin meant to bluff his way clear, if anyone stopped him.
That didn’t seem likely, amid the hubbub. At least a hundred laborers—many of them dressed little better than he was—patrolled creaky catwalks or clambered over lattice struts, meticulously cleaning and replacing tubes by hand. At ground level, inspectors wearing bulky, enhanced aiware checked a continuous shower of some product—objects roughly the size and shape of a human thumb—waving laser pincers to grab a few of them before they fell into a waiting bin.
It’s a nanofactory, Bin realized, after he passed halfway through. It was his first time seeing one up close, but he and Mei Ling once saw a virtshow tour of a vast workshop like this one (though far cleaner) where basic ingredients were piped in and sophisticated parts shipped out—electroptic components, neuraugments, and organoplaques, whatever those were. And shape-to-order diamonds, as big as his fist. All produced by stacking atoms and molecules, one at a time, under programmed control.
People still played a part, of course. No robot could scramble or crawl about like humonkeys, or clean up after the machines with such dexterity. Or so cheaply.
Weren’t they supposed to shrink these factories to the size of a toaster and sell them to everyone? Magic boxes that would let even poor folk make anything they wanted from raw materials. From seawater, even. No more work. No more want.
He felt like snorting, but instead Bin mostly held his breath the rest of the way, hurrying toward a loading dock, where sweltering workers filled maglev lorries at the other end. One heard rumors of nano-machines that got loose, that embedded in the lungs and then got busy trying to make copies of themselves.… Probably just tall tales. But Bin still had plans for his lungs. They mattered a lot, to a shoresteader.
He spilled out of gritty industry into a world of street-level commerce. Gaily decorated shops crowded this avenue. Sucking air, his nostrils filled with food aromas, wafting around innumerable grills, woks and steam cookers, preparing everything from delicate skewered scorpions to vat-grown chicken meat, stretched and streaked to look like the real thing. Bin’s stomach growled, but he pushed ahead, then turned a corner and headed straight for the nearest section of massive wall separating Shanghai East from the rising ocean.
There were smugglers’ routes. One used a building that formerly offered appealing panoramas overlooking the Huangpu Estuary—till such views became unfashionable. Now, a lower class of urbanites occupied the tower in question.
The lobby’s former coating of travertine and marble had been stripped and sold off years ago, replaced by spray-on corrugations that lay covered with long beards of damp algae. A good use of space—the three-story atrium probably grew enough protein to feed half the occupants a basic, gene-crafted diet. But the dank smell made Bin miss his little tent-home amid the waves.
We can’t go back to living like this, he thought, glancing at spindly bamboo scaffolding that crisscrossed the vast foyer, while bony, sweat-stained workers tended the crop, doing work unfit for robots. I swore I would not raise our son on algae paste.
The creaky elevator was staffed by a crone who flicked switches on a makeshift circuit board to set it in motion. The building must never have had its electronics repaired since the Crash. It’s been what, fifteen, sixteen years? Yes, people are cheap and people need work. But even I could fix this pile of junk.
The car jerked and rattled while the operator glared at Bin. Clearly, she knew he did not work or live here. In turn, he gave the old lady a smile and ingratiating bow—no sense in antagonizing someone who might call up a face-query. But within, Bin muttered to himself about sour-minded “little emperors”—a generation raised as chubby only children, doted on by two parents, four grandparents, and a nation that seemed filled with limitless potential. Boundless dreams and an ambition to rise infinitely high—until the Crash. Till the twenty-first century didn’t turn out quite as promised.
Disappointment didn’t sit well with little emperors—half a billion of them—so many that even the mysterious oligarchs in the Palace of Terrestrial Harmony had to cater to the vast population bulge. And they could be grouchy. Pinning blame on Bin’s outnumbered generation had become a national pastime.
The eleventh floor once boasted a ledge-top restaurant, overlooking a marina filled with luxury boats, bordering a beach of brilliant, whitened sand. Not far away, just up the Huangpu a ways, the Shanghai Links Golf & Country Club used to glitter with opulence—now a swampy fen, sacrificed to rising waters.
Stepping past rusty tables and chairs, Bin gazed beyond the nearby seawall and down upon the yacht basin—stubby rem
nants and broken masts, protruding from a brownish carpet of seaweed and sewage.
I remember it was right about here.…
Leaning over, he groped over the balcony railing and along the building’s fluted side, till he found a hidden pulley, attached to a slender rope leading downward. Near the bottom, it draped idly over the seawall and into the old marina, appearing to be nothing more than a pair of fallen wires.
Bin had never done anything like this before, trusting a slender line with his weight and his life. Though, on one occasion he had helped Quang Lu ferry mysterious cargo to the bottom end, holding Quang’s boat steady while the smuggler attached dark bags, then hauled away. High overhead, shadowy figures claimed the load of contraband, and that was that. Bin never knew if it was drugs, or tech, or untaxed luxuries, nor did he care, so long as he was paid.
Quang Lu would not be happy if he ruined this route. But right now Bin had other worries. He shaded his eyes to peer along the coast, toward a row of surfline ruins—the former beachfront mansions where his simple shorestead lay. Glare off the water stung his eye, but there seemed to be nothing unusual going on. He was pretty sure he could see the good luck banner from Mei Ling’s home county, fluttering in a vague breeze. She was supposed to take it down, in the event of trouble.
His heart pounded as he tore strips off an awning to wrap around his hands. Clambering over the guardrail, Bin tried not to look as he slid down the other side, until he could support himself with one arm on the gravel deck, while the other hand groped and fumbled with the twin lines.
It was awkward, because holding on to just one strand wouldn’t do. The pulley would let him plummet like a stone. So he wound up wrapping both slender ropes around his hand. Before swinging out, Bin closed his eyes for several seconds, breathing steadily and seeking serenity, or at least some calm. All right, let’s go.
