Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  I waved a hand at the tanks. 'Firstly, how can you really look back like this? The Earth is spinning, it's orbiting round the sun, the sun orbits round the centre of the galaxy, the galaxy is moving at ten miles per second from its nearest neighbours. An event that occurred only a few seconds ago happened hundreds of miles away. To be able to show things from as far in the past as some of your broadcasts have done you'd have to travel billions of miles in space as well as going back in time.'

  Verity nodded. 'I shouldn't have made any reference to Einstein when Keneally asked me about that. I just confused the situation. We're not accessing the space-time block itself. In fact, this is all just a recording and the things that do the recording move through space and time with the Earth.'

  'But then if you record everything...every person on the Earth and even... ' I swallowed as I remembered the pilot,' ...what's happening inside them...?'

  She smiled for the first time, her overbite making her look positively goofy. Although not joy, it was a start. There was something vulnerable about her.

  'You can forget teraflop stores for a start. This is literally out of this world.'

  As she began to speak I noticed the jet was flying backwards across the Hudson towards the Jersey City skyline.

  'The resolution of the recording devices, both spatially and temporally, seems incredible. I've tried zooming each image, taken it down to about the size of a blood cell. When I get down that far the image does begin to blur. I lose detail but I still don't see the individual image elements, like you would if you magnified a computer image. It's the same with time. I can slow it down as much as I like and still not see the individual frames.'

  'So what's actually recorded?'

  She smiled dreamily. 'Just about everything. I've never found anything missing that I really needed. When I take the viewpoint upwards it usually blanks out about twenty feet above the Earth's surface. But the scanning systems, and I reckon there must be at least a couple of thousand of them, are pretty smart. They follow any planes, and even birds, whenever they go higher. Like this.'

  The contents of the tank to her left seemed to balloon out until it filled with a cute child's model of a plane carrying a dinky little parasol.

  'An AWAC,' I said dully. Airborne Warning and Control.

  'Yes.' More tanks filled with the interiors of the fighter and the AWAC. The communication between the two was played forward.

  I began to feel afraid again. The damned AWAC was supposed to be there to warn us of approaching hostile aircraft, not to guide them in.

  I cleared my throat, spread my hands and tried to look honest. 'This is all news to me, really!'

  'We'll just make absolutely sure of that.' The fighter resumed its travel back through time.

  'Back to your original question. Let's assume a spatial resolution of one hundredth of a millimetre, and a temporal resolution of a thousandth of a second, in a six metre shell round the Earth, that would generate about ten to the power of thirty two bits of information every second. Which is about the equivalent of a billion billion Libraries of Congress.'

  She stopped like she expected me to say something intelligent. I was unable to oblige.

  'I guess using binary electronics to describe this is probably like using an abacus to model a rainbow. Digital technology is no doubt just a phase technological civilisations go through. Like printing by carving letters in a wooden block. Storage isn't by any solid means, silicon chips or even biomolecules, but by astronomical numbers of atom-sized energy matrices. A large section of one of the universes stacked kata, that's 'below' in the superspace sense, has been set aside to contain the necessary standing wave matrices.'

  She waited again but all I could do was gawp. I suppose I'd been imagining some kind of little black box, or magic wand, something neat and tidy that let her do all this. Instead she was giving me a glimpse of the vast but hidden machineries that sustained her. It was crazy stuff but I believed her.

  My easy acceptance should've warned me. The Cloud was already manipulating me, massaging my biochemistry in its own inimitable fashion. But I didn't know that, not then.

  While we'd been talking Verity had speeded up the film so that the plane was near the beginning of its flight. The pilot must have taken off at quite a rate of climb because the fighter seemed to be tail-diving straight into the runway. At the last minute it bottomed out to land backwards on the airstrip.

  'Why go to these lengths? Why are these aliens so interested in us?'

  'They're not. Think of the owner of a large mid-west wheat farm. How interested would he be in one particular grain of wheat?'

  'Then why bother?'

  'The knowledge base wasn't for their benefit, it should've been for ours. It still could be.'

  The pilot was now in civilian clothes and retreating rapidly backwards through his life. Day became night then day again. I saw a bar then a house. Everywhere, whenever he talked to people, he went through a pecking manoeuvre, bobbing in and out like a woodpecker. I wondered if it mirrored his feelings, perhaps he could only rid himself of the knowledge of his death for brief seconds at a time.

  It was only when darkness descended again that I caught on. The replay was way too fast. Any one of the score of people he had talked to could've been the one who instructed him to kill Verity.

  'You already know who's behind this, don't you? This is just for my benefit.'

  She nodded. 'I reviewed the man's full time sequence within a few seconds of the explosion. I thought I'd show you it all, in case you suspected I was fabricating it.'

  But I trusted her. I thought at the time it was her schoolmarm manner, or what she'd done for Lola. I just didn't understand why she was going to all this trouble for my benefit. What had I to offer? I was still too scared to ask.

  Night and day reversed several more times and I felt a new unease. 'You reviewed days of this guy's life in seconds?'

  'Yes.'

  I swallowed, not wanting to push the questioning further, but unable to resist. 'Are you really human, Verity?'

  'I was,' she said and my stomach did a flip-flop.

  I remembered the changes in the display tanks. The zooming in, the speeding up, the slowing down. She'd worked no controls or even voiced her wishes.

  'You're interfaced directly with the knowledge base, aren't you?' My voice sounded croaky and dry.

  'Right. Well, since you're so willing to believe me I'll go back to the interesting bits.'

  Then the pilot's life was going forward at a normal speed. Lolling in a chair, in a small, harshly lit office, he was laughing hard and humourlessly. Another man dressed in the uniform of an Air Force Colonel was sitting on the side of a desk. He was flushed with anger.

  'You have got to be fucking joking,' the pilot laughed again but his eyes were hard with fury.

  The Colonel, one hand clenching into a fist closed his eyes like he was counting to ten. 'Logan, if you weren't...'

  'If I wasn't dying you'd kill me. Right?' Logan's bitter laugh made my flesh crawl.

  The Colonel took a deep breath. A well-tailored uniform showed the spareness of his tight, hard body to good effect. 'There's nothing I can do about your...problem. But I can help your family by making sure they are very well off. Life wouldn't be so easy for them. Not on an Air Force pension.' The Colonel hesitated, then added: 'You'd also be doing your country a great service.'

  The pilot snorted. Leaning back in his chair, he put his hands behind his head, wincing slightly as he did so.

  'I never saw myself as a kamikaze. What would I have to fly? A Zero crammed to the gunnels with high explosive?'

  'An F-15B, with full bomb load.'

  Despite himself, the pilot was unable to hide his surprise. 'Down a city street? Christ, do you know how windy New York is, how narrow the streets are? I'd be cleaning the windows before I'd gone a hundred yards.'

  'Not at Mach 1.5 you wouldn't.'

  Logan's laughter sounded genuine now. 'You're crazy.
I'd never...'

  'Right,' now it was the Colonel's turn with the bitter smile, 'We'll take that as read. You definitely will not 'make it'.'

  He picked up a folder and threw it onto Logan's lap. 'I've had some aerodynamicists check this out. They say if you were going fast enough it wouldn't matter about crosswinds or updrafts. Momentum would keep the ordnance going for the last few hundred metres. You will be knocked off course and there's no way you could correct for it in time. The plane will hit, spin and start to break up, but with ordnance correctly fused that won't matter. The trick will be in making sure you enter the street on the right trajectory. It'll have to be plum centre or you'll take out the wrong part of Manhattan. But we can use enhanced bomb run markers for that. They'll be steadier and more accurate than usual because we can base the lasers on firm ground, not on a moving plane.'

  'Why don't you attack from above? Get a B-52 to drop a gutful of bombs?'

  'Because we figure we wouldn't stand a chance. The technology this thing is using is just too high for words. The beam-weapon that made that rainbow was many orders more powerful than any we have. It could vaporise anything in mid-air. We figure our only hope is a surprise attack. Attack from inside the city. You wouldn't be picked out in all the radar clutter from the buildings, if your run was low enough.'

  'Suppose it's got something better than radar?'

  'That's a chance we've got to take. Look,' the Colonel paused as though trying to marshal his thoughts, his tense little body bunching up with the intensity of his feelings. 'It stole our whole nuclear arsenal. Every single warhead we had. It's killed thousands of people, many of them friends of this country. We can't just roll over and play dead. We've got to fight back, do whatever we can to try and stop it, or at least make it think again.'

  Logan seemed to have forgotten his own predicament. He looked interested but bemused.

  'Yeah, but suppose there's more than one of them? Suppose they go out for revenge. They could cauterise the Earth with that beam weapon!'

  'It said different on the broadcast. It said it was alone; it even claimed it was human, and perhaps it is. But alien or alien stooge, it doesn't matter. We've got to assume it's alone, and if we're lucky and we do wipe it out, then it'll take them years to send reinforcements. We don't know where it came from but the nearest star is light years away. We'll have time to prepare our defences.'

  'Maybe they've got some kind of faster-than-light drive.'

  'This isn't Star Trek.'

  When Logan said nothing the Colonel leaned forward. 'Try to imagine it: The whole world working together, united against a common foe. We'd be ready for them when they eventually returned.'

  Logan waved this last thought away. Whatever happened, he wouldn't be around to see it.

  'What about all the people in the UN? Thousands, maybe. They'll die too.'

  'It's war. The most important we've ever fought. There will be casualties, but not thousands. The session will be suspended, for security reasons. There'll probably be less than a hundred people in the building.'

  'Couldn't you just plant a bomb or something?'

  'No. This 'Verity' has surveillance capabilities you wouldn't believe.'

  'Then maybe she's bugging us now.'

  The Colonel shook his head firmly. 'No way. We've taken precautions.'

  'And they had,' said Verity sadly. 'These people are crazy but smart. I won't take you through the rest. It takes about another hour for Rouse, that's the Colonel, to convince Logan but he succeeds in the end.'

  'They were right about the radar clutter?'

  'I didn't use radar at all. Just had The Cloud check the East River and the airspace above. Plus Roosevelt Drive, of course. I never expected anyone would be crazy enough to fly a fighter through a city street. And they were right about planting a bomb. I ran a time scan on the whole UN site from the day it was built. There were a couple of bombs, believe it or not. Kept in reserve, I suppose, by intelligence and terrorist organisations. I got rid of them of course.'

  She sighed. 'If I'd been more careful this carnage would never have happened.'

  I didn't feel inclined to contradict her. It occurred to me that this wasn't her first screw-up.

  'That's what de Meer and St. Louis were all about,' she continued, 'I had her place the advertisements in all the major papers. Each time I made sure she left some clue leading to St. Louis. Nothing too easy, though: only people who really suspected something would've gone to all that trouble to identify her. I did it so's I could pre-empt violence like this. I failed. Rouse wasn't a maverick. Let me show you.'

  Rouse's life spun crazily backwards. A busy man, he seemed to attend meeting after meeting. 'He heads the covert operations side of Air Force intelligence. He fixes everything from politically embarrassing air intercepts to the news suppression of broken arrows. Remember that H-bomb that fell out of a B-52? The one that broke open and scattered the plutonium trigger all over the airstrip at Fort Sumner in Maryland?'

  'No.'

  'Good, isn't he?'

  Rouse was pushing an almost empty trolley through a supermarket. He stopped and intently scanned a counter stacked high with nappies.

  A man passing by muttered something. His forward progress froze then reversed, the viewpoint swinging round until his face was visible. The man stepped forward and this time the sound was amplified.

  'Verity.' Then he was moving off.

  'Stallard!' I couldn't believe it.

  'I'm afraid so.'

  'But you must have known about him after St. Louis. Why didn't you know about this?'

  'Because there are limits to what I can do. Sure, I was able to follow your time-line back to Stallard and Niedermeyer and the rest. I could then follow them all forward, listening to what they said to other people.'

  A thought occurred to me and I had blurted: 'How can you hear like that?' before I realised there were more important things to talk about. But Verity, like any good schoolmarm, humoured me.

  'You've got to understand that everything in 3-space is illuminated by light from all the stacked galaxies ana and kata in superspace.'

  'Superspace is the same as what I call 4-space, right?'

  ‘It’s more than that. I suppose there may be higher spatial dimensions than just the four, but four's all I can access. Anyway— sound is reconstructed from Doppler examinations of the light reflected off surfaces in 3-space. The surfaces vibrate with the sound waves, minutely altering the frequency of the reflected light. If I want to find out exactly what someone heard I just examine the doppler reflections from their eardrums.

  ‘But why didn't I know what Stallard was up to? He's clever. Very clever, and very imaginative. He was smart enough to recognise the truth of what you were telling him, and imaginative enough to work out the corollaries. He must've guessed he'd soon be under close surveillance and that from that point on his chances of doing anything effective would be severely curtailed. He had to construct an attack mechanism as early as possible, one that was capable of being easily and surreptitiously activated if the need arose.

  ‘You need to know more about the augmentation that I've gone through to understand. Painless but profound, it allows me to access the database the scanners have laid down.

  ‘Modern medical scanners are pretty good at looking at the brain but the resolution is coarse. 4-space gives you immediate access to all the parts of the brain, lets you see exactly how it's configured. You can trace out all the individual neurones and their interconnections and determine the 'on' or 'off' status of each. You can use these as a blueprint to set up an exact model of the brain's processes in a computer.

  'Similarly, a perfect replica of my brain can be set up in one or more computers. They can be activated when needed to multiply the tasks I need to do.'

  'But when you don't need them and you turn them off aren't you killing yourself?'

  'No. The models are only partial. Self-awareness is like a feedback loop in the brain. It’s a surv
ival trait—a behaviour modifier. The loop monitors the brain working, but as the feedback loop is also part of the brain it monitors itself. Cut out the loop and the model remains just a mechanism because it loses all sense of its 'I'ness.'

  That sounded way too glib. I swallowed. 'How do you cut out the self-awareness loop?'

  Verity smiled. 'Nothing messy. All I have to do is one task, for example track a person's timeline through the database and recognise when he does something significant. The computer checks all the changes in neuronal state in my brain as I compare the visual and auditory stimuli. If I can do it just once without at any stage being 'aware' of myself doing the operations, then a model can be built which will repeat the process without a new 'me' being created.'

  I was gaping. 'But just perceiving the stimuli will itself change the neuronal states. Each stimulus will have a different effect. How can the computer tell which is pure 'analysis' and which is just the brain recording the event?'

  'The computers that construct the analogues are extremely sophisticated. The beings who provide all this technology regard the study of self-awareness as a whole science in itself, as complicated and profound as physics or mathematics. What makes anybody an 'I' has to be, when you think about it. So they can handle most of the problems but they're far from perfect. For example, I might set one analogue to check a time-line and it'll get hung up on an unusual chair the subject has sat on. And other things which might have escaped my sometimes rather naive viewpoint are not picked up at all.'

  'Is that what happened here?'

  'Sort of. But there are other limitations. I have to review the results of the analogue's deliberations. That takes time, though I've had my brain souped up.'

  I must have looked as horrified as I felt. She smiled again.

  'It’s OK, really. Think of my neurones as being hot-wired through 4-space with optical cables. Impulses are transmitted at light speeds. I must admit that living life at breakneck speed can get a little boring. This conversation, for example, seems to me to be taking an eternity. The only way I can handle it is to ramp down my neuronal signal speeds.