Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Rudra shook his head, said something in Tibetan.

  Drepung said, “By home, he means Khembalung. We are planning a short trip there, and the rimpoche thinks you should join us. He thinks it would be a big instruction for you.”

  “I’m sure it would,” Frank said, looking startled. “And I’d like to see it. I appreciate him thinking of me. But I don’t know how it could work. I’m afraid I don’t have much time to spare these days.”

  Drepung nodded. “True for all. The upcoming trip is planned to be short for this very reason. That is what makes it possible for the Quibler family also to join us.”

  Again Frank looked surprised.

  Drepung said, “Yes, they are all coming. We plan two days to fly there, four days on Khembalung, two days to get back. Eight days away. But a very interesting week, I assure you.”

  “Isn’t this monsoon season there?”

  The Khembalis nodded solemnly. “But no monsoon, this year or two previous. Big drought. Another reason to see.”

  Frank nodded, looked at Anna and Charlie: “So you’re really going?”

  Anna said, “I thought it would be good for the boys. But I can’t be away from work for long.”

  “Or else her head will explode,” Charlie said, raising a hand to deflect Anna’s elbow from his ribs. “Just joking! Anyway,” addressing her, “you can work on the plane and I’ll watch Joe. I’ll watch him the whole way.”

  “Deal,” Anna said swiftly.

  “Charlie very funny,” Rudra said again.

  Frank said, “Well, I’ll think it over. It sounds interesting. And I appreciate the invitation,” nodding to Rudra.

  “Thank you,” Rudra said.

  Sucandra raised his glass. “To Khembalung!”

  “No!” Joe cried.

  III

  BACK TO KHEMBALUNG

  One Saturday Charlie was out on his own, Joe at home with Anna, Nick out with Frank tracking animals. After running some errands he browsed for a bit in Second Story Books, and he was replacing a volume on its shelf when a woman approached him and said, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find William Blake?”

  Surprised to be taken for an employee (they were all twenty-five and wore black), Charlie stared blankly at her.

  “He’s a poet,” the woman explained.

  Now Charlie was shocked; not only taken for a Second Story clerk, but for the kind who did not know who William Blake was?

  “Poetry’s back there,” he finally got out, gesturing weakly toward the rear of the store.

  The woman slipped past him, shaking her head.

  Fire fire burning bright! Charlie didn’t say.

  Don’t forget to check the oversized art books for facsimiles of his engravings! he didn’t exclaim.

  In fact he’s a lot better artist than poet I think you’ll find! Most of his poetry is trippy gibberish! He didn’t shout.

  His cell phone rang and he snatched it out of his pocket. “William Blake was out of his mind!”

  “Hello, Charlie? Charlie is that you?”

  “Oh hi Phil. Listen, do I look to you like a person who doesn’t know who William Blake was?”

  “I don’t know, do you?”

  “Shit. You know, great arias are lost to the world because we do not speak our minds. Most of our best lines we never say.”

  “I don’t have that problem.”

  “No, I guess you don’t. So what’s up?”

  “I’m following up on our conversation at the Lincoln Memorial.”

  “Oh yeah, good! Are you going to go for it?”

  “I think I will, yeah.”

  “Great! You’ve checked with your money people?”

  “Yes, that looks like it will be okay. There are an awful lot of people who want a change.”

  “That’s for sure. But, you know . . . do you really think you can win?”

  “Yes, I think so. The feedback I’ve been getting has been positive. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  Phil sighed. “I’m worried about what effect it might have on me. I mean—power corrupts, right?”

  “Yes, but you’re already powerful.”

  “So it’s already happened, yes, thank you for that. But it’s supposed to get worse, right? Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Was it William Blake who said that?”

  “That was Lord Acton.”

  “Oh yeah. But he left out the corollary. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and a little bit of power corrupts a little bit.”

  “I suppose that must be so.”

  “And everyone has a little bit of power.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “So we’re all a little bit corrupt.”

  “Hmm—”

  “Come on, how does that not parse? It does parse. Power corrupts, and we all have power, so we’re all corrupt. A perfect syllogism, if I’m not mistaken. And in fact the only people we think of as not being corrupt are usually powerless. Prisoners of conscience, the feeble-minded, some of the elderly, saints, children—”

  “My children have power.”

  “Yes, but are they perfectly pure and innocent?”

  Charlie thought of Joe, faking huge distress when Anna came home from work. “No, they’re a little corrupt.”

  “Well there you go.”

  “I guess you’re right. And saints have power but aren’t corrupt, which is why we call them saints. But where does that leave us? That in this world of universal corruption, you might as well be president?”

  “Yes. That’s what I was thinking.”

  “So then it’s okay.”

  “Yes. But the sad part is that the corruption doesn’t just happen to the people with power. It spreads from them. They spread it around. I know this is true because I see it. Every day people come to me because I’ve got some power, and I watch them debase themselves or go silly in some way. I see them go corrupt right before my eyes. It’s depressing. It’s like having the Midas touch in reverse, where everything you touch turns to shit.”

  “The solution is to become saintlike. Do like Lincoln. He had power, but he kept his integrity.”

  “Lincoln could see how limited his power was. Events were out of his control.”

  “That’s true for us too.”

  “Right. Good thought. I’ll try not to worry. But, you know. I’m going to need you guys. I’ll need friends who will tell me the truth.”

  “We’ll be there. We’ll call you on everything.”

  “Good. I appreciate that. Because it’s kind of a bizarre thing to be contemplating.”

  “I’m sure it is. But you might as well go for it. In for a penny in for a pound. And we need you.”

  “You’ll help me with the environmental issues?”

  “As always. I mean, I’ve got to take care of Joe, as you know. But I can always talk on the phone. I’m on call any time—oh for God’s sake here she comes again. Look Phil, I’d better get out of here before that lady comes to tell me that Abraham Lincoln was a president.”

  “Tell her he was a saint.”

  “Make him your patron saint and you’ll be fine bye!”

  “That’s bye Mr. President.”

  UNDER SURVEILLANCE.

  After he had come down from the euphoria of seeing Caroline, talking to her, kissing her, planning to meet again—Frank was faced with the unsettling reality of her news. Some group in Homeland Security had him under surveillance.

  A creepy thought. Not that he had done anything he needed to hide—except that he had. He had tried to sink a young colleague’s grant proposal, in order to secure that work for a private company he had relations with; and the first part of the plan had worked. Not that that was likely to be what they were surveiling him for—but on the other hand, maybe it was. The connection to Pierzinski was apparently why they were interested in him in the first place. Evidence of what he had tried to do—would there be any in the records? Part of the point of him p
roceeding had been that nothing in what he had done was in contradiction to NSF panel protocols. However, among other actions he was now reviewing, he had made many calls to Derek Gaspar, CEO of Torrey Pines Generique. In some of these he had perhaps been indiscreet.

  Well, nothing to be done about that now. He could only focus on the present, and the future.

  Thinking about this in his office, Frank stared at his computer. It was connected to the internet, of course. It had virus protections, firewalls, encryption codes; but for all he knew, there were programs more powerful still, capable of finessing all that and probing directly into his files. At the very least, all his e-mail. And then phone conversations, sure. Credit rating, sure, bank records, all other financial activity—all now data for analysis by participants in some kind of virtual futures market, a market trading in newly emerging ideas, technologies, researchers. All speculated on, as with any other commodity. People as commodities—well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  He went out to a local cyber-café and paid cash to get on one of the house machines. Seating himself before it with a triple espresso, he looked around to see what he could find.

  The first sites that came up told the story of the case of the Policy Analysis Market proposal, which had blown up in the face of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, some time before. John Poindexter, of Iran-Contra fame, had set up a futures market in which participants could bet on potential events in the Middle East, including possibilities like terrorist attacks and assassinations. Within a week of announcing the project Poindexter had been forced to resign, and DARPA had cut off all funds not just for the PAM project, but for all research into markets as predictive tools. There were protests about this at the time, from various parties convinced that markets could be powerful predictors, distilling as they did the collective information and wisdom of many people, all putting their money where their mouths were. Different people brought different expertise to the table, it was claimed, and the aggregated information was thought to be better able to predict future performance of the given commodity than any individual or single group could.

  This struck Frank as bullshit, but that was neither here nor there. Certainly the market fetishists who dominated their culture would not give up on such an ideologically correct idea just because of a single public relations gaffe. And indeed, Frank quickly came on news of a program called ARDA, Advanced Research and Development Activity, which had become home to both the Total Information Awareness program and the idea futures market. ARDA had been funded as part of the “National Foreign Intelligence Program,” which was part of an intelligence agency that had not been publicly identified. “Evidence Extraction,” “Link Discovery,” “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data”; all kinds of data-mining projects had disappeared with the futures market idea down this particular rabbit hole.

  Before it left public view along with the rest of this kind of thing, the idea futures market concept had already been fine-tuned to deal with first iteration problems. “Conditional bidding” allowed participants to nuance their wagers by making them conditional on intermediary events. And—this jumped out at Frank as he read—”market makers” were added to the system, meaning automated bidders that were always available to trade, so that the market would stay liquid even when there were few participants. The first market-maker programs had lost tremendous amounts of money, so their programmers had refined them to a point where they were able to compete successfully with live traders.

  Bingo. Frank’s investors.

  The whole futures market concept had then gone black, along with ARDA itself. Wherever it was now, it undoubtedly included these programs that could trade in the futures of researchers and their ideas, predicting which would prosper by using the collective pooling of information envisioned in the Total Information Awareness concept, which had dreamed of collating all the information everywhere in the datasphere.

  So: virtual markets, with virtual participants, creating virtual results, tracked by real people in real security agencies. All part of the newly secure environment as envisioned in the Homeland Security acts. That these people had chosen a Nazi title for their enterprise was presumably more a tribute to their ignorance and stupidity than to any evil intent. Nevertheless it was not reassuring.

  Briefly Frank wondered if he could learn enough to do some reverse transcription, and use this system against itself. Google-bombing was one method that had successfully distorted the datasphere, placing information in ways that caused it to radiate out through the system inaccurately. That particular method had been countered by blockers, but other methods remained out there, using the cascading recombinant math that was part of the algorithm family that both Frank and Yann Pierzinski studied. Pierzinski was the young hotshot, blazing out into new territory; but it was Frank who had recognized what his newly powerful algorithm might do in the real world. Now maybe he had identified another potential application. Yann never would; he was one of those mathematicians who just didn’t care about other stuff. There were theorists and there were engineers, and then there were the few who straddled the two realms, identifying the theories that were most likely to bear fruit in real-world accomplishment, and could suggest to engineering types how they might go about implementing things. That was Frank’s ability as he saw it, and now he wondered how one might formulate the problem for a mathematician, and then an engineering team. . . .

  Frank almost called Edgardo, as a fellow realm-straddler, to ask him what he knew; because among other factors, Edgardo had come to NSF from DARPA. DARPA was like NSF, in that it staffed itself mostly with visiting scientists, although DARPA stints were usually three to four years rather than one or two. Edgardo, however, had only lasted there a year. He had never said much about why, only once remarking that his attitude had not been appreciated. Certainly his views on this surveillance matter would be extremely interesting—

  But of course Frank couldn’t call him. Even his cell phone might be bugged; and Edgardo’s too. Suddenly he recalled that workman in his new office, installing a power strip. Could a power strip include a splitter that would direct all data flowing through it in more than one direction? And a mike and so on?

  Probably so. He would have to talk to Edgardo in person, and in a private venue. Running with the lunchtime runners would give him a chance at that; the group often strung out along the paths.

  He needed to know more. Already he wished Caroline would call again. He wanted to talk to everyone implicated in this: Yann Pierzinski—meaning Marta too, which would be hard, terrible in fact, but Marta had moved to Atlanta with Yann and they lived together there, so there would be no avoiding her. And then Francesca Taolini, who had arranged for Yann’s hire by a company she consulted for, in the same way Frank had hoped to. Did she suspect that Frank had been after Yann? Did she know how powerful Yann’s algorithm might be?

  He googled her. Turned out, among many interesting things, that she was helping to chair a conference at MIT coming soon, on bioinformatics and the environment. Just the kind of event Frank might attend. NSF even had a group going already, he saw, to talk about the new federal institutes.

  Meet with her first, then go to Atlanta to meet with Yann—would that make his stock in the virtual market rise, triggering more intense surveillance? An unpleasant thought; he grimaced.

  He couldn’t evade most of this surveillance. He had to continue to behave as if it wasn’t happening. Or rather, treat his actions as also being experiments in the sensitivity of the surveillance. Visit Taolini and Pierzinski, sure, and see if that gave his stock a bump. Though he would need detailed information from Caroline to find out anything about that.

  He e-mailed the NSF travel office and had them book him flights to Boston and back. A day trip ought to do it.

  Some mornings he woke to the sound of rain ticking onto his roof and the leaves. Dawn light, muted and wet; he lay in his sleeping bag watching grays turn silver. His roof extended far beyond the
edges of his plywood floor. When he had all the lines and bungee cords right, the clear plastic quivered tautly in the wind, shedding its myriad deltas of water. Looking up at it, Frank lay comfortably, entirely dry except for that ambient damp that came with rain no matter what one did. Same with all camping, really. But mostly dry; and there he was, high in the forest in the rain, in a rainforest canopy, encased in the splashing of a million drips, and the wet whoosh of the wind in the branches, remaining dry and warm watching it all. Yes, he was an arboreal primate, lying on his foam pad half in his sleeping bag, looking through an irregular bead curtain of water falling from the edge of his roof. A silvery green morning.

  Often he heard the other arboreal primates, greeting the day. These days they seemed to be sleeping on the steep slope across the creek from him. The first cry of the morning would fill the gorge, low and liquid at first, a strange cross between siren and voice. It never failed to send a shiver down his spine. That was something hardwired. No doubt the hominid brain included a musical capacity that was not the same as its language capacity. These days people tended to use their musical brains only for listening, thus missing the somatic experience of making it. With that gone the full potential of the experience was lost. “Oooooop!” Singing, howling; it all felt so good. “Ooooh-oooooooooooo-da.”

  Something else to consider writing about. Music as primate precursor to language. He would add it to his list of possible papers, already scores if not hundreds of titles long. He knew he would never get to them, but they ought to be written.

  He had extended his roof to cover the cut in the railing and floor through which he dropped onto his rope ladder, and so he was able to descend to the ground without getting very wet. Onto the forest floor, not yet squishy, out to his van, around D.C. on the Beltway, making the first calls of the day over his headset. Stop in at Optimodal, singing under his breath, “I’m optimodal, today—optimodal, today!” Into the weight room, where, it being six A.M., Diane was working on one of the leg machines. Familiar hellos, a bit of chat about the rain and her morning calls, often to Europe to make use of the time difference. It was turning out to be a very cool summer in Europe, and rainstorms were being welcomed as signs of salvation; but the environmental offices there were full of foreboding.