The young junipers stand ghostly gray in the night. The air smells fragrant with pinon. In the thin, clear starlight Roz can see wildflowers blooming beneath the trees—columbine, pennyroyal, groundsel. She sits on the slope and pulls Carey’s ring from her pocket. The ring is fashioned into the image of two vines that twine around each other, each with no beginning and no end, each eternally separate from the other.
Roz holds the ring in the middle of her palm, wondering if she should get rid of it at last, knowing that she can never give it back and keep her father’s secret.
ANTIBODIES
Charles Stross
Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead, with a sudden burst in the last couple of years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “A Colder War”, “Bear Trap”, “Dechlorinating the Moderator”, and “Toast: A Con Report” in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Osyssey, Strange Plasma, and New Worlds. In the fast-paced and innovative story that follows, he demonstrates that although you can carefully set a warning alarm, by the time it goes off, it may be almost too late to do anything about it.
Charles Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. Coming up is his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. Gandhi, the Pope, Thatcher—if you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the ticker-tape of history etched across your senses. You can kill a politician but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians ?
I was elbow-deep in an eviscerated PC, performing open heart surgery on a diseased network card, when the news about the travelling salesman theorem came in. Over on the other side of the office John’s terminal beeped, notification of incoming mail. A moment later my own workstation bonged.
“Hey, Geoff! Get a load of this!”
I carried on screwing the card back into its chassis. John is not a priority interrupt.
“Someone’s come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P! There’s a posting in comp.risks saying they’ve used it to find an O*(n 2) solution to the travelling salesman problem, and it scales! Looks like April First has come early this year, doesn’t it?”
I dropped the PC’s lid on the floor hastily and sat down at my workstation. Another cubed-sphere hypothesis, another flame war in the math newsgroups—or something more serious? “When did it arrive?” I called over the partition. Soroya, passing my cubicle entrance with a cup of coffee, cast me a dirty look; loud voices aren’t welcome in open-plan offices.
“This just in,” John replied. I opened up the mailtool and hit on the top of the list, which turned out to be a memo from HR about diversity awareness training. No, next… they want to close the smoking room and make us a 100 per cent tobacco-free workplace. Hmm. Next.
Forwarded e-mail: headers bearing the spoor of a thousand mail servers, from Addis-Ababa to Ulan Bator. Before it had entered our internal mail network it had travelled from Taiwan to Rochester nj, then to UCB in the Bay Area, then via a mailing list to all points; once in-company it had been bounced to everyone in engineering and management by the first recipient, Eric the Canary. (Eric is the departmental plant. Spends all the day web-dozing for juicy nuggets of new information if you let him. A one-man wire service: which is why I always ended up finishing his jobs.)
I skimmed the message, then read it again. Blinked. This kind of stuff is heavy on the surreal number theory: about as digestible as an Egyptian mummy soaked in tabasco sauce for three thousand years. Then I poked at the web page the theorem was on.
No response — server timed out.
Someone or something was hitting on the web server with the proof: I figured it had to be all the geeks who’d caught wind of the chain letter so far. My interest was up, so I hit the “reload” button, and something else came up on screen.
Lots of theorems—looked like the same stuff as the e-mail, only this time with some fun graphics. Something tickled my hindbrain then, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Next thing, I hit the print button and the inkjet next to my desk began to mutter and click. There was a link near the bottom of the page to the author’s bibliography, so I clicked on that and the server threw another “go away, I’m busy” error. I tugged my beard thoughtfully, and instead of pressing “back” I pressed “reload”.
The browser thought to itself for a bit—then a page began to appear on my screen. The wrong page. I glanced at the document title at the top and froze:
THE PAGE AT THIS LOCATION HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN.
Please enter your e-mail address if you require further information.
Hmm.
As soon as the printout was finished, I wandered around to the photocopier next door to the QA labs and ran off a copy. Faxed it to a certain number, along with an eyes up note on a yellow Post-it. Then I poked my head around into the QA lab itself. It was dingy in there, as usual, and half the cubicles were empty of human life. Nobody here but us computers; workstations humming away, sucking juice and meditating on who-knew-what questions. (Actually, I did know: they were mostly running test harnesses, repetitively pounding simulated input data into the programs we’d so carefully built, in the hope of making them fall over or start singing “God Save the King”.) The efficiency of code was frequently a bone of contention between our departments, but the war between software engineering and quality assurance is a long-drawn-out affair: each side needs the other to justify its survival.
I was looking for Amin. Amin with the doctorate in discrete number theory, now slumming it in this company of engineers: my other canary in a number-crunching coal mine. I found him: feet propped up on the lidless hulk of a big Compaq server, mousing away like mad at a big monitor. I squinted; it looked vaguely familiar… “Quake? Or Golgotha?” I asked.
“Golgotha. We’ve got Marketing bottled up on the second floor.”
“How’s the network looking?”
He shrugged, then punched the hold button. “No crashes, no dropped packets—this cut looks pretty solid. We’ve been playing for three days now. What can I do for you?”
I shoved the printout under his nose. “This seem feasible to you?”
“Hold on a mo.” He hit the pause key them scanned it rapidly. Did a double-take. “You’re not shitting?”
“Came out about two hours ago.”
“Jesus Homeboy Christ riding into town at the head of a convoy of Hell’s Angels with a police escort… “ he shook his head. Amin always swears by Jesus, a weird side-effect of a westernized Islamic upbringing: take somebody else’s prophet’s name in vain. “If it’s true, I can think of at least three different ways we can make money at it, and at least two more to end up in prison. You don’t use PGP, do you?”
“Why bother?” I asked, my heart pounding. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“If this is true—” he tapped the papers “— then every encryption algorithm except the onetime pad has just fallen over. Take a while to be sure, but… that crunch you heard in the distance was the sound of every secure commerce server on the internet succumbing to a brute-force attack. The script kiddies will be creaming themselves. Jesus Christ.” He rubbed his moustache thoughtfully.
“Does it make sense to you?” I persisted.
“Come back in five minutes and I’ll tell you.”
“OK.”
I wandered over to the coffee station, thinking very hard. People hung around and generally behaved as if it was just another day; maybe it was. But then again, if that paper was true, quite a lot of stones had just been turned over and if you were one of the pale guys who lived underneath it was time to scurry for cover. And it had looked good to me: by the prickling
in my palms and the gibbering cackle in the back of my skull, something very deep had recognized it. Amin’s confirmation would be just the icing on the cake confirmation that it was a workable proof.
Cryptography—the science of encoding messages — relies on certain findings in mathematics: that certain operations are inherently more difficult than others. For example, finding the common prime factors of a long number which is a product of those primes is far harder than taking two primes and multiplying them together.
Some processes are not simply made difficult, but impossible because of this asymmetry; it’s not feasible to come up with a deterministic answer to certain puzzles in finite time. Take the travelling salesman problem, for example. A salesman has to visit a whole slew of cities which are connected to their neighbours by a road network. Is there a way for the salesman to figure out a best-possible route that visits each city without wasting time by returning to a previously visited site, for all possible networks of cities? The conventional answer is no — and this has big implications for a huge set of computing applications. Network topology, expert systems—the traditional tool of the Al community—financial systems, and…
Me and my people.
Back in the QA lab, Amin was looking decidedly thoughtful.
“What do you know?” I asked.
He shook the photocopy at me. “Looks good,” he said. “I don’t understand it all, but it’s at least credible.”
“How does it work?”
He shrugged. “It’s a topological transform. You know how most np-incomplete problems, like the travelling salesman problem, are basically equivalent? And they’re all graph-traversal issues. How to figure out the correct order to carry out a sequence of operations, or how to visit each node in a graph in the correct order. Anyway, this paper’s about a method of reducing such problems to a much simpler form. He’s using a new theorem in graph theory that I sort of heard about last year but didn’t pay much attention to, so I’m not totally clear on all the details. But if this is for real… “
“Pretty heavy?”
He grinned. “You’re going to have to re-write the route discovery code. Never mind, it’ll run a bit faster… “
I rose out of cubicle hell in a daze, blinking in the cloud-filtered daylight. Eight years lay in ruins behind me, tattered and bleeding bodies scattered in the wreckage. I walked to the landscaped car park: on the other side of the world, urban renewal police with M16s beat the crap out of dissident organizers, finally necklacing them in the damp, humid night.
War raged on three fronts, spaced out around a burning planet. Even so, this was by no means the worst of all possible worlds. It had problems, sure, but nothing serious — until now. Now it had just acquired a sucking chest wound; none of those wars were more than a stubbed toe in comparison to the nightmare future that lay ahead.
Insert key in lock, open door. Drive away, secrets open to the wind, everything blown to hell and gone.
I’d have to call Eve. We’d have to evacuate everybody.
I had a bank account, a savings account and two credit cards. In the next fifteen minutes I did a grand tour of the available ATMS and drained every asset I could get my hands on into a fat wodge of banknotes. Fungible and anonymous cash. It didn’t come to a huge amount—the usual exigencies of urban living had seen to that—but it only had to last me a few days.
By the time I headed home to my flat, I felt slightly sheepish. Nothing there seemed to have changed: I turned on the TV but CNN and the BBC weren’t running any coverage of the end of the world. With deep unease I sat in the living room in front of my ancient PC: turned it on and pulled up my net link.
More mail… a second bulletin from comp.risks, full of earnest comments about the paper. One caught my eye, at the bottom: a message from one of No Such Agency’s tame stoolpigeon academics, pointing out that the theorem hadn’t yet been publicly disclosed and might turn out to be deficient. (Subtext: trust the Government. The Government is your friend.) It wouldn’t be the first time such a major discovery had been announced and subsequently withdrawn. But then again, they couldn’t actually produce a refutation, so the letter was basically valueless disinformation. I prodded at the web site again, and this time didn’t even get the ACCESS FORBIDDEN message. The paper had disappeared from the internet, and only the printout in my pocket told me that I hadn’t imagined it.
It takes a while for the magnitude of a catastrophe to sink in. The mathematician who had posted the original finding would be listed in his university’s directory, wouldn’t he? I pointed my web browser at their administrative pages, then picked up my phone. Dialled a couple of very obscure numbers, waited while the line quality dropped considerably and the charges began racking up at an enormous—but untraceably anonymized—rate, and dialled the university switchboard.
“Hello, John Durant’s office. Who is that?”
“Hi, I’ve read the paper about his new theorem,” I said, too fast. “Is John Durant available?”
“Who are you?” asked the voice at the other end of the phone. Female voice, twangy mid-western accent.
“A researcher. Can I talk to Dr Durant, please?
“I’m afraid he won’t be in today,” said the voice on the phone. “He’s on vacation at present. Stress due to overwork.”
“I see,” I said.
“Who did you say you were?” she repeated.
I put the phone down.
From: [email protected] (none of your business)
To: cypherpunks
Subject: John Durant’s whereabouts
Date:…
You might be interested to learn that Dr John Durant, whose theorem caused such a fuss here earlier, is not at his office. I went there a couple of hours ago in person and the area was sealed off by our friends from the Puzzle Palace. He’s not at home either. I suspect the worst…
By the way, guys, you might want to keep an eye on each other for the next couple of days. Just in case.
Signed, Yrfrndly spk
“Eve?”
“Bob?”
“Green fields.”
“You phoned me to say you know someone with hayfever?”
“We both have hayfever. It may be terminal.”
“I know where you can find some medicine for that.”
“Medicine won’t work this time. It’s like the emperor’s new suit.”
“It’s like what? Please repeat.”
“The emperor’s new suit: it’s naked, it’s public, and it can’t be covered up. Do you understand? Please tell me.”
“Yes, I understand exactly what you mean… I’m just a bit shocked; I thought everything was still on track. This is all very sudden. What do you want to do?”
(I checked my watch.)
“I think you’d better meet me at the pharmacy in fifteen minutes.”
“At six-thirty? They’ll be shut.”
“Not to worry: the main Boots in town is open out of hours. Maybe they can help you.”
“I hope so.”
“I know it. Goodbye.”
On my way out of the house I paused for a moment. It was a small house, and it had seen better days. I’m not a home-maker by nature: in my line of work you can’t afford to get too attached to anything, any language, place or culture. Still, it had been mine. A small, neat residence, a protective shell I could withdraw into like a snail, sheltering from the hostile theorems outside. Goodbye, little house. I’ll try not to miss you too much. I hefted my overnight bag onto the back seat and headed into town.
I found Eve sitting on a bench outside the central branch of Boots, running a degaussing coil over her credit cards. She looked up. “You’re late.”
“Come on.” I waggled the car keys at her. “You have the tickets?”
She stood up: a petite woman, conservatively dressed. You could mistake her for a lawyer’s secretary or a personnel manager; in point of fact she was a university research council administrator, one of the unnoticed body o
f bureaucrats who shape the course of scientific research. Nondescript brown hair, shoulder-length, forgettable. We made a slightly odd pair: if I’d known she’d have come straight from work I might have put on a suit. Chinos and a lumberjack shirt and a front pocket full of pens that screamed engineer: I suppose I was nondescript, in the right company, but right now we had to put as much phase space as possible between us and our previous identities. It had been good protective camouflage for the past decade, but a bush won’t shield you against infrared scopes, and merely living the part wouldn’t shield us against the surveillance that would soon be turned in our direction.
“Let’s go.”
I drove into town and we dropped the car off in the long-stay park. It was nine o’clock and the train was already waiting. She’d bought business-class tickets: go to sleep in Euston, wake up in Edinburgh. I had a room all to myself. “Meet me in the dining car, once we’re rolling,” she told me, face serious, and I nodded. “Here’s your new SIMM. Give me the old one.”
I passed her the electronic heart of my cellphone and she ran it through the degausser then carefully cut it in half with a pair of nail-clippers. “Here’s your new one,” she said, passing a card over. I raised an eyebrow. “Tesco’s, pay-as-you-go, paid for in cash. Here’s the dialback dead-letter box number.” She pulled it up on her phone’s display and showed it to me.
“Got that.” I inserted the new SIMM then punched the number into my phone. Later, I’d ring the number: a pabx there would identify my voiceprint then call my phone back, downloading a new set of numbers into its memory. Contact numbers for the rest of my OPS cell, accessible via cellphone and erasable in a moment. The less you knew, the less you could betray.
The London to Scotland sleeper train was a relic of an earlier age, a rolling hotel characterized by a strange down-at-heel ’70s charm. More importantly, they took cash and didn’t require ID, and there were no security checks: nothing but the usual onstation cameras monitoring people wandering up and down the platforms. Nothing on the train itself. We were booked through to Aberdeen but getting off in Edinburgh—first step on the precarious path to anonymizing ourselves. If the camera spool-off was being archived to some kind of digital medium we might be in trouble later, once the coming AI burn passed the hard takeoff point, but by then we should be good and gone.
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