Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  Fraction beamed at the unit. “This baby can even reproduce itself, by building its own components. The whole design is open source.”

  Miranda was obviously puzzled. “Rivet Couture has no need for something like this,” she said.

  Fraction nodded. “But Oversatch—now that’s another matter entirely.” He sauntered back in the direction of the restaurant and they followed, frowning.

  “Did you know,” Fraction said suddenly, “that when Roman provinces wanted to rebel, the first thing they did was print their own money?” Gennady raised an eyebrow; after a moment Fraction grinned and went on. “Oversatch has its own money, but more importantly it has its own agriculture and its own industries. Rivet Couture is one of its trading partners, of course—it makes clothes and trinkets for the game players, who supply expensive feedstock for the printers and labor for the farms. For the players, it’s all part of the adventure.”

  Miranda shook her head. “But I still don’t understand why. Why does Oversatch exist in the first place? Are you saying it’s a rebellion of some kind?”

  They left the restaurant and began to make their way back to the hotel. Fraction was silent for a long while. Normally he affected one pose or another, jamming his hands in his pockets or swinging his arms as he walked. His walk just now was robotically stiff, and it came to Gennady that Danail Gavrilov’s rider was missing at the moment, or at least, wasn’t paying attention to his driving.

  After a few minutes the cyranoid’s head came up again and he said, “Imagine if there was only one language. You’d think only in it, and so you’d think that the names for things were the only possible names for them. You’d think there was only one way to organize the world—only one kind of ‘it.’ Or . . . take a city.” He swept his arm in a broad gesture to encompass the cool evening, the patterns of lit windows on the black building facades. “In the Internet, we have these huge, dynamic webs of relationships that are always shifting. Meta-corporations are formed and dissolved in a day; people become stars overnight and fade away in a week. But within all that chaos, there’s whirlpools and eddies where stability forms. These are called attractors. They’re nodes of power, but our language doesn’t have a word to point to them. We need a new word, a new kind of ‘that’ or ‘it.’

  “If you shot a time-lapse movie of a whole city at, say, a year-per-second, you’d see it evolving the same way. A city is a whirlpool of relationships but it changes so slowly that we humans have no control over how its currents and eddies funnel us through it.

  “And if a city is like this, how much more so a country? A civilization? Cities and countries are frozen sets of relationships, as if the connection maps in a social networking site were drawn in steel and stone. These maps look so huge and immovable from our point of view that they channel our lives; we’re carried along by them like motes in a hurricane. But they don’t have to be that way.”

  Gennady was a bit lost, but Miranda was nodding. “Internet nations break down traditional barriers,” she said. “You can live in Outer Mongolia but your nearest net-neighbor might live in Los Angeles. The old geographic constraints don’t apply anymore.”

  “Just like Cascadia is its own city,” said Fraction, “even though it’s supposedly Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, and they supposedly exist in two countries.”

  “Okay,” said Gennady irritably, “so Oversatch is another online nation. So why?”

  Fraction pointed above the skyline. In reality, there was only black sky there; but in Rivet Couture, the vast upthrusting spires of a cathedral split the clouds. “The existing on-line nations copy the slowness of the real world,” he said. “They create new maps, true, but those maps are as static as the old ones. That cathedral’s been there since the game began. Nobody’s going to move it, that would violate the rules of the alternate world.

  “The buildings and avenues of Oversatch are built and move second by second. They’re not a new, hand-drawn map of the world. They’re a dynamically updated map of the internet. They reflect the way the world really is, moment-by-moment. They leave these,” he slapped the side of the skyscraper they were passing, “in the dust.”

  They had arrived at the mouth of another alleyway, this one dark in all worlds. Fraction stopped. “So we come to it,” he said. “Hitchens and his boys couldn’t get past this point. They got lost in the maze. I know you’re ready,” he said to Miranda. “You have been for quite a while. As to you, Gennady . . .” He rubbed his chin, another creepy affectation that had nothing of Danail Gavrilov in it. “All I can tell you is, you have to enter Oversatch together. One of you alone cannot do it.”

  He stood aside, like a sideshow barker waving a group of yokels into a tent. “This way, then, to Oversatch,” he said.

  There was nothing but darkness down the alley. Gennady and Miranda glanced at one another. Then, not exactly hand in hand but close beside one another, they stepped forward.

  Gennady lay with his eyes closed, feeling the slow rise and fall of the ship around him. Distant engine noise rumbled through the decking, a sound so constant that he rarely noticed it now. He wasn’t sleeping, but trying, with some desperation, to remind himself of where he was—and what he was supposed to be doing.

  It had taken him quite a while to figure out that only six weeks had passed since he’d taken the Interpol contract. All his normal reference points were gone, even the usual ticking of his financial clocks which normally drove him from paycheck to paycheck, bill to bill. He hadn’t thought about money at all in weeks, because here in Oversatch, he didn’t need it.

  Here in Oversatch . . . Even the “here” part of things was getting hard to pin down. That should have been clear from the first night, when he and Miranda walked down a blacked-out alleyway and gradually began to make out a faint, virtual road leading on. They could both see the road so they followed it. Fraction had remained behind, so they talked about him as they walked. And then, when the road finally emerged into Stockholm’s lit streets, Gennady had found that Miranda was not beside him. Or rather, virtually she was, but not physically. The path they had followed had really been two paths, leading in separate directions.

  When he realized what had happened Gennady whirled, meaning to retrace his steps, but it was too late. The virtual pathway was a pale translucent blue stripe on the sidewalk ahead of him—but it vanished to the rear.

  “We have to keep going forward,” Miranda had said. “I have to, for my son.”

  All Gennady had to do was take off the glasses and he would be back in normal reality, so why did he feel so afraid, suddenly? “Your son,” he said with some resentment. “You only bring him up at times like this, you know. You never talk about him as if you were his mother.”

  She was silent for a long time, then finally said, “I don’t know him very well. It’s terrible, but . . . he was raised by his father. Gennady, I’ve tried to have a relationship with him. It’s mostly been by email. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care for him . . .”

  “All right,” he said with a sigh. “I’m sorry. So what do we do? Keep walking, I suppose.”

  They did, and after half an hour Gennady found himself in an area of old warehouses and run-down, walled houses. The blue line led up to the door of a stout, windowless brick building, and then just stopped.

  “Gennady,” said Miranda, “my line just ended at a brick wall.”

  Gennady pulled on the handle but the metal door didn’t budge. Above the handle was a number pad, but there was no doorbell button. He pounded on the door, but nobody answered.

  “What do you see?” he asked her. “Anything?” They both cast about for some clue and after a while, reluctantly, she said, “Well, there is some graffiti . . .”

  “What kind?” He felt foolish and exposed standing here.

  “Numbers,” she said. “Sprayed on the wall.”

  “Tell them to me,” he said. She relayed the numbers, and he punched them into the keypad on the door.

  There wa
s a click, and the door to Oversatch opened.

  When the door opened a new path had appeared for Miranda. She took it, and it had been over a week before he again met her face to face. In that time they both met dozens of Oversatch’s citizens—from a former high school teacher to a whole crew of stubbled and profane fishermen, to disenchanted computer programmers and university drop-outs—and had toured the farms and factories of a parallel reality as far removed from Rivet Couture as that ARG had been from Stockholm.

  The citizens of Oversatch had opted out. They hadn’t just left their putative nationalities behind, as Miranda Veen had when she married a mechanical engineer from Cascadia. Her husband had built wind farms along the city’s ridges and mountaintops, helping wean the city off any reliance it had once had on the national grid. Miranda worked at one of the vertical farms at the edge of the city. A single block-wide skyscraper given over to intense hydroponic production could feed 50,000 people, and Cascadia had dozens of the vast towers. Cascadia had opted out of any dependence on the North American economy, and Miranda had opted out of American citizenship. All very logical, in its own way—but nothing compared to Oversatch.

  Where before Gennady and Miranda had couriered packages to and fro for the grand dukes of Rivet Couture, now they played far more intricate games of international finance for nations and with currencies that had no existence in the “real” world. Oversatch had its own economy, its own organizations and internal rules; but the world they operated in was an ephemeral place, where nodes of importance could appear overnight. Organizations, companies, cities and nations: Oversatch called these things “attractors.” The complex network of human activities tended to relax back into them, but at any given moment, the elastic action of seven billion people acting semi-independently deformed many of the network’s nodes all out of recognition. At the end of a day IBM might exist as a single corporate entity, but during the day, its global boundaries blurred; the same was true for nearly every other political and economic actor.

  The difference between Oversatch and everybody else was, everybody else’s map of the world showed only the attractors. Oversatch used the instantaneous map, provided by internet work analysis, that showed what the actual actors in the world were at this very moment. They called this map “it 2.0.” Gennady got used to reviewing a list of new nations in the morning, all given unique and memorable names like “Donald-duckia” and “Brilbinty.” As the morning rolled on Oversatch players stepped in to move massive quantities of money and resources between these temporary actors. As the day ended in one part of the world it began somewhere else, so the process never really ended, but locally, the temporary deformation of the network would subside at some point. Great Britain would reappear. So would Google, and the EU.

  “It is like a game of Diplomacy,” Miranda commented one day, “but one where the map itself is always changing.”

  When they weren’t focused outward, Gennady and Miranda scanned objects and printed them from Oversatch’s 3-D printers; or they tended rooftop gardens or drove vans containing produce from location to secret location. Everything they needed for basic survival was produced outside of the formal economy and took no resources from it. Even the electricity that ran the vans came from rooftop windmills built from Oversatch printers, which were themselves printed by other printers. Oversatch mined landfill sites and refined their metals and rare earths itself; it had its own microwave dishes on rooftops to beam its own data internally, not using the official data networks at all. These autonomous systems extended far past Stockholm—were, in fact, worldwide.

  After a week or so it proved easier and cheaper to check out of the hotel and live in Oversatch’s apartments, which, like everything else about the polity, were located in odd and unexpected places. Gennady and Miranda moved to Gothenburg on the West coast, and were given palatial accommodation in a set of renovated shipping containers down by the docks—very cozy, fully powered and heated, with satellite uplinks and sixty-inch TVs (all made by Oversatch, of course).

  One bright morning Gennady sauntered up to the cafe where Hitchens had asked to meet him, and tried to describe his new life to the Interpol man.

  Hitchens was thrilled. “This is fantastic, Gennady, just fantastic.” He began talking about doing raids, about catching the whole network red-handed and shutting the damned thing down.

  Gennady blinked at him owlishly. “Perhaps I am not yet awake,” he said in the thickest Slavic accent he could manage, “but seems to me these people do nothing wrong, yes?”

  Hitchens sputtered, so Gennady curbed his sarcasm and gently explained that Oversatch’s citizens weren’t doing anything that was illegal by Swedish law—that, in fact, they scrupulously adhered to the letter of local law everywhere. It was national and regional economics that they had left behind, and with it, consumer society itself. When they needed to pay for a service in the so-called “real world,” they had plenty of money to do it with—from investments, real estate, and a thousand other legitimate ventures. It was just that they depended on none of these things for their survival. They paid off the traditional economy only so that it would leave them alone.

  “Besides,” he added, “Oversatch is even more distributed than your average multinational corporation. Miranda and I usually work as a pair, but we’re geographically separated . . . and most of their operations are like that. There’s really no ‘place’ to raid.”

  “If they just want to be left alone,” asked Hitchens smugly, “why do they need the plutonium?”

  Gennady shrugged. “I’ve seen no evidence that Oversatch is behind the smuggling. They don’t seal the packages they send—I snoop so I know—and I’ve been carrying my Geiger counter everywhere. Whoever is moving the plutonium is probably using Rivet Couture. They do seal their packages.”

  Hitchens drummed his fingers on the yellow tablecloth. “Then what the hell is Fraction playing at?”

  The implication that this idea might not have been preying on Hitchens’ mind all along—as it had been on Gennady’s—made Gennady profoundly uneasy. What kind of people was he working for if they hadn’t mistrusted their captured double agent from the start?

  He said to Hitchens, “I just don’t think Oversatch is the ultimate destination Fraction had in mind. Remember, he said he came from some place called ‘far Cilenia.’ I think he’s trying to get us there.”

  Hitchens ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t understand why he can’t just tell us where it is.”

  “Because it’s not a place,” said Gennady, a bit impatiently. “It’s a protocol.”

  He spent some time trying to explain this to Hitchens, and as he walked back to the docks, Gennady realized that he himself got it. He really did understand Oversatch, and a few weeks ago he wouldn’t have. At the same time, the stultified and mindless exchanges of the so-called “real world” seemed more and more surreal to him. Why did people still show up at the same workplace every day, when the amount of friction needed to market their skills had dropped effectively to zero? Most people’s abilities could be allocated with perfect efficiency now, but they got locked into contracts and “jobs”—relationships that, like Fraction’s physical cities and nations, were relics of a barbaric past.

  He was nearly at the Oversatch settlement in the port when his glasses chimed. Phone call from Lane Hitchens, said a little sign in his heads-up display. Gennady put a finger to his ear and said, “Yes?”

  “Gennady, it’s Lane. New development. We’ve traced some plutonium packets through Rivet Couture and we think they’ve all been brought together for a big shipment overseas.”

  Gennady stopped walking. “That doesn’t make any sense. The whole point of splitting them up was to slip them past the sensors at the airports and docks. If the strategy was working, why risk it all now?”

  “Maybe they’re on to us and they’re trying to move it to its final destination before we catch them,” said Hitchens. “We know where the plutonium is now—it�
��s sitting on a container ship called the Akira about a kilometer from your bizarre little village. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?”

  So this was what people meant when they said “reality came crashing back,” thought Gennady. “No,” he said, “it’s unlikely. So now what? A raid?”

  “No, we want to find the buyers and they’re on the other end of the pipeline. It’ll be enough if we can track the container. The Akira is bound for Vancouver; the Canadian Mounties will be watching to see who picks it up when it arrives.”

  “Do they still have jurisdiction there?” Gennady asked. “Vancouver’s part of Cascadia, remember?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Gennady. Anyway, it seems we won’t need to go chasing this ‘far Cilenia’ thing anymore. You can come back in and we’ll put you on the office team until the investigation closes. It’s good money, and they’re a great bunch of guys.”

  “Thanks.” Euros, he mused. He supposed he could do something with those.

  Hitchens rang off. Gennady could have turned around at that moment and simply left the port lands. He could have thrown away the augmented reality glasses and collected his fee from the Interpol. Instead he kept walking.

  As he reached the maze of stacked shipping containers, he told himself that he just wanted to tell Miranda the news in person. Then they could leave Oversatch together. Except . . . she wouldn’t be leaving, he realized. She was still after her estranged son, who had spoken to her mostly through emails and now wasn’t speaking at all.

  If Gennady abandoned her now, he would be putting a hole in Oversatch’s buddy system. Would Miranda even be able to stay in Oversatch without her partner? He wasn’t sure.

  He opened the big door to a particular shipping container—one that looked exactly like all its neighbors but was nothing like them—and walked through the dry, well-lighted corridor inside it, then out the door that had been cut in the far end. This put him in one of a number of halls and stairways that were dug into the immense square block of containers. He passed a couple of his co-workers and waved hello, went up one flight of portable carbon-fiber steps and entered the long sitting room (actually another shipping container) that he shared with Miranda.