The Best of Gregory Benford

by David G. Hartwell

  “Afraid so.” He managed a rueful smile. “Maybe I’ll even get more space in National Enquirer than Andy did.”

  She laughed, a tinkling sound he liked so much.

  But then the weight of it all descended on him. So much to do… “I’ll have to look at your idea, that they were headed here. At least we can maybe backtrack, find where they came from.”

  “And look at the earlier maps, data?” she ventured, her lip trembling. “From before…”

  “They cracked up. All that life, gone.” Then he understood her pale, tenuous look. Things living, then not. She nodded, said nothing.

  He reached out and took her hand. A long moment passed and he had no way to end it but went on anyway. “The SETI people could jump on this. Backtrack this ship. They can listen to the home star’s emissions…”

  Irene smiled without humor. “And we can send them a message. Condolences.”

  “Yeah.” The room had stopped whirling and she reached out to take his hand.

  “Come on.”

  As he got up wearily, Ralph saw that he was going to have to fight for this version of events. There would always be Andys who would triangulate their way to advantage. And the chairman, Gossian…

  Trying for tenure—supposedly a cool, analytic process—in the shouting match of a heated, public dispute, a howling media firestorm—that was almost a contradiction in terms. But this, too, was what science was about. His career might survive all that was to come, and it might not—but did that matter, standing here on the shores of the titanic ocean he had peered across?

  Reasons not to Publish

  (2007)

  Roger made the greatest discovery in scientific history by noticing a jitter in his left eye.

  He was hiking in the high Sierras on a crisp fall day, alone in the Glass Creek valley. The jitter was not a fluttering bird, but an entire tree jumping in and out of focus, light playing on it in eerie, slanted shafts. He watched it for a while, then walked under the pine. The bark felt smooth but looked fissured. It flavored the air like a real pine. The creamy bark stuttered beneath his fingers. The whole tree and all around it ratcheted, went grainy, sometimes vanished.

  Roger was a mathematical physicist and had seen something like this before. A bad simulation, jumpy and scattered, just like this pine. His face paled, his breath caught, but the conclusion was clear. This backcountry he loved to hike through off-season was…a simulation.

  Probably, he judged, because usually there was nobody around in late autumn. No need to spend computation time to keep pines needles waving before no audience. Just distribute motion between the harmonics of limbs, branches and clusters, to save computing time. He knew that a cheap simulation of light scattering replaced a detailed calculation with plausible rules of thumb, much quicker than the real thing, but realistic—as long as nobody looked too closely.

  So Roger looked around, closely.

  Seen from here, Mammoth Mountain jumped around, shifting colors. Background clouds lost their cottony look and sometimes vanished.

  An eerie prickling climbed his spine. The logic was clear. So…he was a simulation.

  It took a day and night of hard drinking to do some hard thinking about the implications. From his condo in Mammoth he watched the looming mountain and it was fine, not jumpy. He went for a splashy swim in the pool, savoring the flavors of the air and water, the sigh of pines singing in a fragrant, dry wind.

  But back in the Glass Creek valley again, the same ratcheting blinked in and out. A cost-smart sim, stretched to its limits. Someone was being thrifty.

  What did the Programmer God want? To watch a universe evolve, or just a simmed Earth? To rerun human history? Was the software even written by humans at all? He glanced around, uneasy.

  Hiking back to his car, Roger sucked in the clean dry air that now seemed like perfume. Life, even fake life, was more precious than ever.

  He could not stop his mind from working the problem, though.

  Why was the simulation getting stressed now? Maybe the computation cost of running a world of 6 billion people had stretched resources? At least some of those 6 billion, wonderful folk like Roger, felt complex internal states. That, he knew. Descartes, after all.

  But 6 billion people like him, with his complex inner states? His sharp, darting mind, his sensual layers, his robust singing hunger for life? (Okay, he admitted, maybe that was laying it on a bit thick. But still.)

  Such detail must cost a bundle in bit rate. With population rising, computation costs climbed. Maybe the system had hit the wall, strained to its limit. That could explain why nobody had noticed this before. Or had they?

  The people he saw ambling in the Mammoth streets might be simple programs. To test that, Roger walked up to a few at random and they acted just like real people—except nothing was real, he reminded himself. Maybe they were as deep as he was.

  How could God the Programmer handle the data rate for such complex people? Could He (or She, or It) run some complex people like him, with full interior states, and just use rubrics for the mob?

  Probably, since the Programmer was running short on bit rate. Plus, it would explain a lot of what was on TV. Maybe the mindless people on talk shows really were mindless.

  In a way, he felt liberated. He certainly couldn’t care about fake people.

  He stopped walking, looked around at the eggshell blue sky, sucked in the sharp aroma of late fall. The logic was clear. All the goals he had were nothing compared with this knowledge.

  All else being equal, then, he shouldn’t care as much about how he affected the world. Only the Programmer God mattered, because She could erase you.

  Could he be the first to see the world as it really was? Or rather, wasn’t?

  How many “people” had noticed that the flaws of Nature told us that the laws of Nature were from software, running on some machine?

  Population was still rising. Some people might need to be pruned to lower costs. How to stay alive, then? Or rather, “alive”?

  Be interesting to the Programmer. Be famous. Or original. Or maybe funny.

  Roger was none of these, really. Smart, sure. Observant, yes. That was about it. Maybe he was in mortal danger of being erased.

  But he did know that this sim-Earth was fake. It seemed pretty unlikely that its purpose was to see how many figured out that they lived in a simulation. Perhaps just the opposite—if many did, maybe the world got erased, its original purpose corrupted.

  So…he should prevent others from finding out. By not drawing attention to the ratcheting pine, to Glass Creek, to Mammoth Mountain at all. Not to himself, most of all.

  Yes, and be interesting to the Programmer. Do things! Live in the moment. Enjoy life! It was a lot like Zen Buddhism.

  Walking home, he watched Mammoth Mountain. It loomed large, gleaming firm and true in a sky as clear as logic. It felt solid, the air snapping with the rub and reek of reality. Where real people like him were, with complex inner thoughts—because the Programmer spent the computational time to make the world work.

  Elsewhere, not. God had a budget.

  But…how many other people had made this discovery, and kept quiet? All of them, apparently.

  Or if they did try to shout the startling truth from the rooftops… Well then, something unpleasant happened.

  The biggest discovery in history, throwing both religion and science into a cocked hat…and nobody dared speak its name. Nobody who survived, anyway.

  Roger had to join them, the silents, for his own safety. Give up his Nobel.

  He stopped at a wine shop and bought the best bottle they had.

  The Champagne Award

  (2008)

  The first case of the morning was typical.

  Roger scanned the cyberforms of a woman in her forties, applying for a child using her entire KidCred. No father to be named, no mention of how she would get pregnant. A clinic, he guessed, but maybe she had a donor. Not the Reproduction Office’s business,
no. He offered her the government Champagne Award, good for a reasonable bottle, but she didn’t take it.

  Next came a rather different case. Roger eyed the late-twenties woman and two obviously gay men in his office. He made the usual ritual greeting, outlined the documents they needed, and they produced them, all filled out in her crisp hand. She would be the surrogate for the two men, who were each putting up half their KidCred. What they paid her was a private matter. She would have no claim on the child. She took the Champagne Award, though.

  That job went quickly and then came something awful. A fretful couple came in, breathing too quickly and nervous. “Our child died the second day in the hospital,” the husband explained. His wife blurted, “A blood disorder, they’re still trying to figure it out.” Before Roger could say a word the husband turned furious. “But they say there’s nothing they can do! It’s their fault!”

  Roger knew enough to study the hospital readouts first. The child had lasted 36.7 hours and then died of some sort of hemorrhage. The couple were in their forties and had been warned of the risks, some of them genetic.

  He was no doctor, but he knew the rules. “It’s beyond 24 hours,” he said calmly, voice gray and dead. “Carried to full term, no intervening circumstances. You can get no reversed credit.”

  It took an hour to get them out of the office. Roger nearly called the guards. The couple wouldn’t talk to the counselors because they knew that was just a bureaucratic dodge. But there was really nothing he could do. Rules were rules.

  His longterm girlfriend Lucy called but he was too busy to talk; paperwork.

  After his coffee break there was a lesbian couple, duly married, each using her last half KidCred. Nothing unusual, documents in order, and they took the Champagne Award, too.

  The next couple was a man and wife bubbling over with joy. Roger liked to see that. The couple already had the max, two healthy children, but wanted a third; they were Catholic. They proudly presented a Lottery Credential. It looked standard. The winning number was in the right code. Roger shared in their celebration while he ran it through the verifier—which went bing.

  Everybody froze. They didn’t know what it meant, but Roger did. He had to explain to them that it was a very well made fake. The original, authentic number had been used two weeks before. That was how the counterfeiters had gotten the publicly posted number; the rest was technology.

  This time he had to call the guards. The husband kept shouting, “I paid three hundred thousand in tickets!” over and over, but the tickets he had were fake, too.

  Pretty depressing, but there were rules. Every game did. To win the game you had to play.

  Lucy called; he was busy filing reports. Tough day; he took an early lunch. In the basement cafeteria he sat with Henry from Document Authentication and Mary from Statistics. They were partners, not married but had lived together for two decades. And today they were quitting, they announced happily.

  “We played it just right,” Henry said, though he didn’t seem all that elated. “Waited for the market peak.”

  Mary was joyous. “I got nearly a million! Think what we can do with that.”

  “Who from?” Roger asked.

  “A couple that wanted a third.” Mary rolled her eyes. “Filthy rich.”

  Roger blinked. “The fines for illegal birth are nearly that much anyway.”

  Henry said, “Plus no education for the no-KidCred child, no social benefits—”

  Mary said firmly, “I predict no-cred parents will get prison time in a few more years.”

  Henry looked down at his plate. “If we invest this the right way, we can retire and manage our stock.

  “You might get paid even more later,” Roger said. “There are rumors that the KidCred standards may get tougher.”

  “Those rumors are why the market has run up. We’re just cashing in, like the gays.” Mary merrily toasted with her water glass. “Here’s to cap and trade!”

  Henry nodded, though he looked sad. “Roger, I can’t see them taking away the one person, one child rule, though.” He looked down.

  Every game had its winners and losers, Roger thought. Gay guys had little interest in children, so they won big. With 11.6 billion souls in the world, what else could humanity do? Prison for unlicensed childbearing didn’t seem implausible to him at all.

  But to win the game, you had to play.

  So when his telephone rang, back at his desk, he was delighted to hear from Lucy. Somehow the day crystallized for him. Without thinking, he said suddenly, “How would you like a bottle of champagne?”

  Penumbra

  (2010)

  Mary turned to look at the shriveled woman carried on a bare plank, followed by a little crowd of mourners who fruitlessly batted away the flies. “Was she—?”

  “Outside? Guess so. Looks like her hair caught on fire,” I said.

  “We were so lucky, taking a nap.”

  I hoisted my piña colada. “A day later and we’d have been in California.” The ice was cool but not at all reassuring. “And maybe dead.”

  “You’re…sure?” Mary’s eyes jittered. “I know, you’re an astrophysicist, but really?—is everybody we know—”

  “The flash, I saw it from the window. In the distance—bright blue at first, then so brilliant I couldn’t see.”

  “But not right here.”

  “Right, that’s what doesn’t make sense. We got glare, small fires, but not that—” I pointed to the greasy pall building on the offshore horizon, beyond the warm waves. “That’s been building for hours.”

  She blinked. “But there’s no land west of here.”

  “Those dirty brown clouds must’ve blown in. Big fires further away.”

  Mary’s eyes danced. Her hands clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed.

  “But…how widespread can this be?”

  “Didn’t burn us here much, so it’s not worldwide. Not a supernova, or we’d see it in the sky.” I pointed up. The mottled blue high above was thickening with smoke.

  “Then…what?”

  “I’d say, must’ve been a gamma ray burster. Why we didn’t get it full on, I don’t know.”

  “A…burster?”

  I peered at the sky, looking for some clue. I was more a theorist, not an observer. “We think it’s a narrow beam of intense radiation, coming out when a rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a black hole.”

  The gamma ray satellites had seen hundreds at safe cosmological distances, but none in our galaxy. Maybe this was the first. I went through a quick description of what happened when gammas hit the top of our atmosphere. Particle cascades, ultraviolet flares, blaring hard light, ozone depletion, mesons lacing down.

  “How did we survive it, then?”

  “Dunno.” The flies came buzzing back. I waved them off our steaming chicken molé. “Eat,” I said. “Then we go to the market and buy whatever we can.”

  But there was no market. Crowds had picked the stalls clean.

  “We have to live here for a while,” I said as we walked back to our hotel. After I’d finished my observing run at the Las Campanas Observatory, Mary joined me for diving in the Galápagos. Guayaquil was a sightseeing stopover before heading home. We’d seen the cathedral yesterday, echoing and nearly deserted then, but now a huge crowd surrounded it, listening to a priest blaring out his message with a hand-held mike.

  Mary struggled with her high school Spanish. “He says this shows God’s favor on them,” she reported. “Preservation for them and their families, and liberation from the…North Americans. And, uh, Europeans.”

  “How’s he know that?” I looked up at the sky again, learning nothing—but saw an antenna on the church roof.

  I pointed. Mary was an electronics tech type and she said immediately, “They have a satellite link. Non commercial. Private.”

  It took an hour to talk our way through, first with the priest and then a Bishop, no less. But their connection was live and took me to the aca
demic satellite links. The downlook cameras showed blazes everywhere north and south of us, Europe, west Africa—a hemisphere burning. Except in a spot several thousand kilometers wide, an ellipse right at the equator. Where we were.

  No link worked to the gamma ray working group, where a burster signature would show up. But I didn’t need one now.

  Then the satellite link failed. I didn’t try to pursue it. I got up with Mary and walked out into the rosy sunset and acrid air.

  Some mestizos by the church, dressed in the somber black of mourning, turned and looked at us, eyes narrowing. Mary noticed and said, “I wonder if they blame us, somehow.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “We run their universe, don’t we?”

  “So they may think, how can something like this possibly be natural?”

  “Hasn’t happened before, so maybe it’s somebody’s fault. Gringos are the traditional candidates.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. We strolled away, deliberately casual, but as we approached the hotel, everyone on the cobblestone streets seemed to be looking at us.

  “Go up and pack,” I said, and went to the travel agent. I was amazed that he was still at his desk. Our tickets to Los Angeles were obviously not going to work, so I tried to rebook to an Asian airport. Any Asian airport. But his connection was dead. The blazing cone of light had come in late morning. That meant it got most of Europe and the Americas, except for within that blessed oval, where we had been following local custom and taking siesta in the hushed, indoor cool of a thick-walled hotel. Asia had been in darkness.

  We stumbled out into the night air and then I saw it. The crescent moon hung there to our west. “Got it,” I said.

  She saw it too. “You mean—? The gamma ray burster was just behind our view of the moon.”

  “That’s why the trees weren’t burning here. That woman’s hair was like tinder—it caught fire, maybe drove her into some accident. We were in the moon’s penumbra, the twilight zone that caught just some of the burst. Anybody on this side of the planet not shielded by the moon is dead. Or soon will be.”