Finity

by John Barnes

  Iphwin nodded, and said, “And that brings me to who or what I am. As systems grow, as you know we have to decentralize control more and more to keep them functioning. That ends up implying, among other things, that instead of a central administration governing everything, you get by with roving pieces of software that just look for whatever isn’t working as it should. That is, the system administration stops looking like a police and court system, and starts to look more and more like an immune system. Systems administration becomes a matter of operating a population of cyberphages—benign viruses that keep users from doing things that damage the system. It’s easier and cheaper than keeping everything tied to a central program that has to know everything.

  “A few years ago, one cyberphage began to notice that there was a common problem in every one of the parallel universes, all at once. And that problem was the disappearance of the billions of nodes found in the United States, American Reich, Purified Christian Commonwealth—whatever you called that piece of land between San Diego and the St. Lawrence or Puget Sound and the Everglades. Once it noticed that there was no traffic at all, for several seconds, it began to track this—only to discover no traffic for periods of months or years, across all the event sequences to which it had any access—that is, across an enormous number of worlds.

  “It looked very much to the cyberphage as if some large number of people and machines had either been cut off from the net, or left voluntarily, or something—but whatever it was, it wasn’t good for the network. The cyberphage thought about this for a very long time, the way an entity that lives on the net between all the universes can think—quickly and thoroughly—and decided that since no information seemed to be emanating from that country—not a transaction record, a phone call, a bill, or a bit of mail of any kind—the only solution would be to go have a look for itself.

  “That took some effort,” Iphwin said. “About twenty-five years, but of course a cyberphage is immortal, and there’s the advantage of being able to operate across billions of event sequences all at once. The hard part was the need to get a physical body in which to walk around, if I was going to go and take a look myself.”

  There was a long pause as we all digested that, and then, very tentatively, Jesús said, “Sir, am I to take it that you want us to believe that you are that cyberphage?”

  “Well, perhaps a better term would be that I am its avatar. The cyberphage not only still exists, it runs ConTech; one reason you heard the sort of rumors you did about the company was that its only real purpose was to accumulate money and power, as a means to the more important end of getting an embodied form of myself into a physical world, with an appropriate team of people so that we could go and have a look at what’s become of America. That required a million man-years of bioengineering, as you might guess, and a great deal of tinkering with the brain-body interface, but... here I stand. If you were to lift up the flap in the back of my head, you’d find a billion-nanopin interface for reporting back to Iphwin Prime—that’s what I call my progenitor—and I was in a tank till I was physically adult, but other than that, I guess you’d have to say I’m as human as you. And just as bewildered.”

  Helen had been sitting with her arms folded, sometimes glaring at Iphwin and sometimes glaring at me. Now, finally, she spoke. “And all the manipulations?”

  “I didn’t have any way,” Iphwin explained, “to control who or what went to which world. Nobody has that ability—the very thing that lets you shift worlds is the uncertainty with which it happens. But while I can’t control the shuffle, I can control how fast it’s dealt, and I can look at every hand. What I did was that I recruited teams of people that I thought might be able to solve the problem, and then I kept shifting them between event sequences till I had some version of all of the critical people together in one event sequence, or to be more precise about it, until I knew it was very likely that I had all of you together.

  “Then to join you, I made that voice phone call, and did it in a system that hung up and reconnected at terahertz frequencies. It kept checking against other stuff you were doing, till I got it narrowed down as much as could be managed; then in the last few seconds I just oscillated until the system found you. There was an uncertainty trade-off, as always—I have some big gaps in my memory and neither I nor the cyberphage knows exactly which Iphwin I am. Millions of Iphwins must have shuffled right out of reality to get me here.”

  “But you didn’t feel them go,” Helen said.

  “Does that matter?” Iphwin asked, puzzled.

  “You bet it does,” she said. “I’m just wondering if by any chance you’ve noticed that most of us gave up our old lives to be here, and you never asked us if we wanted to.”

  Iphwin nodded. “That’s true. And if you really insist, you can leave now. I’m hoping you’ll stay for a variety of reasons— that is, both, I have a variety of reasons to hope you will stay, and there are a variety of reasons why any one of you might. I hope you will at least hear me out.”

  “I’ll do that much,” Helen said. “But right now I’m not very inclined to believe you. You’re a ghost personality, one created by a machine to embody itself. You didn’t give up relatives, friends, lovers, any of that. You were created mostly to be thrown away—”

  “All human beings, ultimately, are thrown away,” Iphwin pointed out. “Most for no reason, since the universe has none, and they simply go away, used up, never to return. You were picked because, first of all, you were a likely bunch of people to care about what had happened to America. Most people don’t or wouldn’t, you know. Why should they? Whatever its importance in the world might once have been, it doesn’t have it any longer. The cultural role has been taken over by the expat culture, the physical economy of the world seems to have disconnected without anyone noticing, and in most of the event sequences there’s no active military balance-of-power problem. America seems to have faded everywhere, long before it disappeared completely. Fortunately for this project, there still are a very few people who are still concerned about it, and you all are among them.

  “Then there’s the matter of skill at abduction. The cyber-phage of which I am an avatar, being a machine, may have overrated the importance of abduction, since so far no one has found a good way to provide machines with the skill. But I’m as human as you are—”

  “So you say,” Helen said, making her contempt clear.

  “I have a personality physically embodied in flesh made according to human DNA, and that’s good enough,” Iphwin said, firmly. His face got red as he said it, and I could hear the stress and anger in his voice.

  There was a very long, awkward pause, before Iphwin finally resumed. “To summarize, Lyle Peripart is an authority on the mathematics of abduction. Helen Perdita’s discipline involves solving practical problems in abductive reasoning, plus many versions of her are skilled in operations in dangerous areas, plus of course she’s personally loyal to Lyle, which may be valuable in a tight spot. Then I needed someone who could handle command and who was closely linked to Lyle, hence your presence, Colonel. I got you your two old executive officers, with a bonus that I needed a couple of investigating detectives—which is why I got not only Esmé Sanderson, but also Jesús Picardin.”

  After a minute, Kelly said, “You haven’t explained why Terri and I were brought into this, and you went to some extra effort to get us.”

  Iphwin nodded. “I had no creative artists, and that’s a whole other style of abduction. And I needed someone who practiced the harder creative arts, the ones where you accommodate to the world around you rather than the ones where you just dump out whatever you’re feeling inside and then shape it for others. That kind of talent for making the piece that fits with the other pieces, that ability to fit in, the thing actors call rapport or chemistry, was a kind of creativity I wanted to make sure of, and that’s the kind that actors are good at. And then, for Terri...” he sighed. “Ethically I’m on shaky ground here, but, well, she was the only member of
that VR chat room that I didn’t already have coming, and somehow that felt like a mistake. She’s physically healthy and bright, and I would guess quite adaptable.”

  “And she’s right here listening to you, so you can stop talking about her in the third person,” Terri said, flushing with rage.

  Iphwin went right on. “Also, Terri, like most smart teenagers, you don’t have an excessive respect for authority. My feeling is that whatever we find when we get north of the border, it’s not going to be so much finding it that’s a problem—it’s going to be understanding whatever it is we’ve found. The erasure is so complete—and so perfectly confined to the old 48 contiguous states—that it just doesn’t seem like it could be any kind of natural phenomenon. Nor does it seem like anything anyone could do on purpose. Which seems to cover all the reasonable and comprehensible possibilities, and so chances are that what we are looking for is unreasonable and incomprehensible. Hence my urge to throw a few wild cards in—purely a hunch.”

  “You’re telling me that I’ve left my entire world behind because you had a hunch?” Terri demanded. Her bony shoulders were high up, and her arms were folded tightly.

  “It would appear so, yes.”

  “And you just decided to use all our lives?”

  Iphwin seemed mildly exasperated. He was at least human enough so that he was bothered to be confronted with something he had not thought of before; few human beings really like the unexpected. “What I am doing is no different from what a president or king does when he starts a war, or from what a corporation president does when he orders a new product into production. I am changing billions or trillions of people’s lives drastically without their consent. The only difference here is that ten of you are having the opportunity to confront me about it. If the confrontation makes you feel better, I suppose that’s all right. But it doesn’t make any other difference, and I wish we could concentrate on more basic issues.”

  “Not having our lives torn up is about as basic an issue as there is,” Helen said, “and Terri is absolutely right to be upset. If you want our assent, you’re going to have to offer us something better than just making us rich, or give us a reason better than just because you happened to need it and thought we would make a good team. Why should we conduct your investigation for you? Show us why we shouldn’t all walk out of here and start dialing the phone at random, until we manage to find somewhere close enough to home so that we’ll want to stay.”

  Iphwin sighed and spread his hands. “I suppose in some sense that my inability to anticipate this does demonstrate the difference between human and machine. But I had thought that since in fact you have been bouncing from one world to another every time you use the phone, or the net, or ride in a guided vehicle, that you would realize that you aren’t being ripped from your homes—that in fact you’ve never been home for many years, and you were never going home.”

  Helen folded her arms and stood her ground in a way very like the Helen I remembered. “Well, we only just found out we’ve been crossing from world to world a few minutes ago, you idiot. We’re still getting used to that idea. And now we learn that you’ve been deliberately causing part of it. How do you expect us to feel?”

  “I have great difficulty expecting anyone to feel anything,” Iphwin pointed out. “And I am forced to admit that even in this body I don’t feel things very much myself—I suppose that’s a matter of the body not having received any emotional conditioning when it was younger. I suppose you might say I feel more like I’m wearing it than as if I am it. But I do notice that the glandular systems have a great deal of lag time—that emotions often persist long after their cause is removed. Is that the sort of problem you’re talking about?”

  “It might be, but it’s a very lengthy and not-human way of expressing it,” Helen said, grudgingly. “The point is, you have to allow us some time for emotional adjustment. We’re all new to what’s going on, it’s frightening, and you are at that core of what is frightening about it. And if I may add without offending you, Terri—Terri’s godawful young to discover that you’ve separated her from her parents, possibly forever, and I don’t think your mission, however important you may think it is, is going to justify that sort of thing in any of our minds.

  “I suppose what you are asking for might be logical, or reasonable, or whatever, but it isn’t even remotely sensible in emotional terms. Now, if you really want our trust, you’re going to have to give us at least some evidence that there is a good reason for us to give it to you, rather than just walk out of here. And don’t try to make it sound like a geometry proof while you’re doing it.”

  Iphwin sat down at the edge of the low stage, balling his hands into tight fists, clearly frustrated. “I don’t have a good answer for you,” he said, finally. “There is something strange about the disappearance of a whole nation from the earth, from history, from everything, and the unknown forces that prevent our knowing anything about what happened. And maybe we don’t see it because we are too close, but I think there is also something strange about the way that very few people have noticed or are reacting to it.

  “What I want to do is to resolve that question. The part of me that is a product of so many years as a machine intelligence really has no motivations other than curiosity, given that sex and death are beyond it. And the part of my mind that has grown into this body is just a few years old and has had no childhood, no imprinted memories to speak of, no distinctiveness from any other human body. In the circumstances, I made my best guess. I looked for people who had the knack of abduction, and who I thought might still have enough love for the idea of America. And I did what was necessary to get them together into a single event sequence so that we can work. That was the best solution I could think of. If it has not worked, then either you, with your abductive gifts, must think of a better way to solve it, or it will have to be left unsolved.”

  There was a very long, awkward silence, before Roger Sykes stretched, fluffed out his white hair, and stood up, propping himself with his cane. He said, “Uh, well. You know, I’m bored stiff. And I was born into the regiment; my dad told me about being a boy in the States but I never went there myself. And I’m an old guy, if I die, you know, no big deal, I was planning to do that sooner or later anyway. So ... I guess I’ll go and take a look.”

  Iphwin looked up with hope in his eyes. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Long as I’m here, and so forth. But you really do need to develop your skills at asking people instead of manipulating them.”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  After a moment, Esmé got up and moved next to Sykes. She was even bigger than my first impression had said she was—she absolutely towered over the older man. “Colonel, I’d be pleased to go with you. There’s just not that much going on in my life and I don’t have anything I’d rather do. And it would be kind of interesting to find out what’s happened to America.”

  “And if Esmé is going, I better go too,” Paula said, “to keep you two out of trouble.”

  Jesús Picardin spoke next and said, “You know, I have been very bored with my work, and I would have to say that there could hardly be a more interesting kind of case for a detective than having an entire nation go missing. And probably I’d never get back home anyway, and frankly this just sounds much more interesting than anything else I could be doing.”

  “This is starting to seem like a lot of peer pressure,” Kelly complained. “All right, you want to go, so go. There’s not necessarily a good reason for the rest of us to go, is there?”

  “Not necessarily, but let’s see what the options are,” Helen said grudgingly. “I don’t like to admit it but I think Iphwin here has us over a barrel. If I understand all this Schrödinger stuff, we can wander around for the rest of our lives picking up phones and then hanging up, and going for rides in robot vehicles, and logging on and off the net—but the odds of getting back to a world that we recognize are pretty small. And anyway, all we’d be doing is d
isplacing some other version of ourselves, bumping someone else into our mess. For the time being I suppose we’re pretty much stuck in this world—and what world is this, anyway?”

  “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it,” Iphwin said. “Because if you try to check by net or phone you’ll be leaving suddenly. But this is one of a relatively small family of event sequences where there was a coup in the United States in 1972, over the withdrawal from a war in Vietnam—Indochina to some of you. Military junta took over to restore order and honor, which basically meant to suppress political expression at home and use nuclear weapons to win in Vietnam. They got into an arms race with Communist Germany, which was the other big power in that event sequence, and eventually bankrupted the Germans. Then they stayed in power indefinitely, getting less and less repressive with time; they enforced a huge, complicated array of rules governing every aspect of daily behavior to make the country look as much as possible like it had in the 1950s of that event sequence, which was pretty dull and conformist. Not the best of worlds, not the worst. The rest of the world is mostly in small nations; devolution went pretty far. There are hundreds of prosperous small states—imagine a world full of Switzerlands. You could live here pretty nicely.”