by Greg Egan
I could still smell the day’s heat wafting up from Victoria Road, but there was a faint hint of a breeze from the east. The gaudy advertizing holograms never looked quite as tacky at dusk as they did at dawn, although the colours were just as washed-out; maybe it was really all down to the mood on the streets. A few sweat-stained commuters were still on their way home, radiating palpable relief―and a few freshly laundered revellers were already arriving, full of hopeful energy. Somehow, dawn in Kings Cross never looked hopeful.
I passed a gaggle of saffron-robed monks from the Darlinghurst Temple, out hunting for alms, on the other side of the street. James didn’t seem to be among them―though it was hard to tell: they all looked interchangeable to me, and my strongest memories of him didn’t encompass the terminal, shaven-headed stage. Even when I recalled the night he announced that he was leaving me and Mick for a life devoted to selfless contemplation―“There’s no point arguing, Kath,” he’d explained, with an expression of transcendent smugness, “I’m not enslaved by the illusions of language anymore.”―even then, strangely enough, I pictured him as he’d looked ten years before. Buddhism had been growing ever more fashionable throughout the country for most of my lifetime―taking the place of retreating Christianity, as if the “vacuum” left behind needed to be filled by something equally absurd―but in the last ten years the Federal government had started supporting the monasteries in a big way, with a program of “community spiritual development” grants. Maybe they were hoping to save on social security payments.
I hesitated outside the station, thinking: A single TAP word could capture this moment―perfectly encoding my entire sensorium, and everything I’m thinking and feeling. A word I could speak, write, recall. Study at a distance―scan―or play, relive completely. Inflect and modify. Quote exactly (or not) to the closest friend or the most distant stranger.
I had to admit that it was a deeply unsettling notion: a language which could encompass, if not the universe itself, then everything we could possibly experience of it. At any given moment, there were “only” ten to the power three thousand subjectively distinguishable states of the human brain. A mere ten thousand bits of information: quite a mouthful, encoded as syllables―but only a millisecond flash in infrared. A TAP user could effectively narrate his or her entire inner life, with one hundred percent fidelity, in real time. Leopold Bloom, eat your heart out.
I boarded the southbound train, the skin on the back of my neck still tingling. The carriage was packed, so I stood strap-hanging with my eyes closed, letting the question spin in the darkness of my skull: Who, or what, killed Grace Sharp? Work was never something I could switch on and off―and unless I reached the stage where part of me was thinking about the case every waking moment, the chances were I’d make no progress at all.
Helen Sharp believed in some faceless conspiracy against TAP as a first language, driven by sheer linguistic xenophobia―though the real opposition might also be motivated, in part, by perfectly valid concerns about the unknown developmental consequences for a child growing up with TAP.
The serious media favoured a simple failure of technology; several worthy editorials had rewritten the Sharp case as a cautionary tale about the need for improved quality control in biomedical engineering. Meanwhile, the tabloids had gleefully embraced the idea of the <
And it was still possible that Grace Sharp had simply had a heart attack, all by herself. No assassins, no fatal poetry, no glitch.
So far, I could only agree with the coroner: I wasn’t prepared to rule anything out.
By the time I arrived home, Mick had already eaten and retreated to his room to play Austro-Hungarian Political Intrigues in Space. He’d been running the scenario for almost six months, along with a dozen friends―some in Sydney, some in Beijing, some in Sao Paulo. They’d graciously let me join in once, as a minor character with an unpronounceable name, but I’d become terminally bored after ten minutes and engineered my own death as swiftly as possible. I had nothing against role-playing games, per se … but this was the most ludicrous one I’d encountered since Postmodernism Ate My Love Child. Still, every twelve-year-old needed something truly appalling to grow out of―something to look back on in a year’s time with unconditional embarrassment. The books I’d read, myself (and adored, at the time) had been no better.
I knocked on his door, and entered. He was lying on his bed with the headset on and his hands above his head, making minimalist gestures with both control gloves: driving a software puppet body which had no sense of touch, or balance, or proprioception. He was moving its limbs with actions which had nothing to do with moving his own … but he was seeing and hearing everything through the puppet’s eyes and ears.
Most of the studies I’d read had suggested that the earlier a child took up VR (headset-and-glove, of course, not implant-based), the fewer side-effects it had on real-life coordination and body image. The skills of moving real and virtual bodies didn’t seem to compete for limited neural resources; they could be learnt in parallel, as easily as two languages. Only adults got confused between the two (and did better with VR implants, which let them pretend they were using their physical bodies). The research suggested that an hour a day in VR was no more harmful than an hour a day of any other equally unnatural activity: violin practice, ballet, karate.
I still worried, though.
The room monitor flagged my presence. At a convenient break in the action, Mick slipped off the headset to greet me, doing his best to hide his impatience.
I said, “School?”
He shrugged. “Bland-out. Work?”
“I’ve got a murder case.”
His face lit up. “Resonant! What class weapon?”
“Unkind words.”
“¿Que?”
“It’s a joke.” I almost started to explain, but it didn’t seem fair to hold up the other players. “You’ll quit at nine, okay? I don’t want to have to check on you.”
“Mmmm.” Deliberately noncommittal.
I said calmly, “I can program it, or you can stick to the rules voluntarily. It’s your choice.”
He scowled. “It’s no choice, if it makes no difference.”
“Very profound. But I happen to disagree.” I walked over to him and brushed the hair from his eyes; he gave me his I-wish-you-wouldn’t-but-you’re-forgiven-this-time look.
Mick said suddenly, “Unkind words? You mean Grace Sharp?”
I nodded, surprised.
“Some guru last week was prating about her TAPping herself to death.” He seemed greatly amused―and it struck me that “guru” was several orders of magnitude more insulting than anything I would have dared to say in front of my mother, at his age. At least put-downs were getting more elegant; my generation’s equivalents had relied almost exclusively on references to excrement or genitalia. Mick and his contemporaries weren’t at all prudish―they just found the old scatological forms embarrassingly childish.
I said, “You don’t believe in the <
“Not some banana skin land mine you make yourself, by accident.”
I pondered that. “But if it exists at all, don’t you think it’d be easier to fight if it came from outside, than if you stumbled on it in your own thoughts?”
He shook his head knowingly. “TAP’s not like that. You can’t invent random words in your head―you can’t try out random bit-patterns. You can imagine things, you can free-associate, but … not all the way to death, without seeing it coming.”
I laughed. “So when did you read up on this?”
“Last week. The story sounded flash, so I went context mining.” He glanced at his terminal and made some slight hand movements; a cluster of icons for Universal Resource Locators poured into an envelope with my name
on it, which darted into the outgoing mail box. “References.”
“Thanks. I wasted the whole afternoon―I should have come home early and picked your brains instead.” I was only half joking.
I sat on the edge of the bed. “If she didn’t stumble on the word herself, though … I don’t see how anyone could have spoken it to her: as far as the police could tell, she’d had no visitors―or communications―for hours. And if someone broke into the apartment, they left no trace.”
“How about … ?” Mick gestured with one gloved thumb at the shelf above his bed.
“What?” I parsed the clutter of objects slowly. “Ah.”
He’d set up an IR link with his friend Vito, who lived in an apartment block across the park; they could exchange data twenty-four hours a day without either family paying a cent to the fibre barons. The collimated beam of the five-dollar transceiver passed effortlessly through both their bedroom windows.
“You think someone outside the apartment … shot her in the palm with a <
“Maybe. Split the fee, if I’m right?”
“Sure. Minus rent, food, clothes, communications―”
Mick mimed violin playing. I feigned a swipe at his head. He glanced at the terminal; his friends were losing patience.
I said, “I’d better leave you to it.”
He smiled, held up his hand in a farewell gesture like a diver about to submerge, then slipped the headset back on. I lingered in the room for a few seconds, feeling profoundly strange.
Not because I felt that I was losing touch with my son. I wasn’t. But the fact that we could comprehend each other at all suddenly seemed like the most precarious voodoo. Natural language had endured, fundamentally unchanged, through a thousand social and technological revolutions … but TAP made it look like some Stone Age tool, a flake of crudely shaped obsidian in an era when individual atoms could be picked up and rearranged at whim.
And maybe in the long run, all the trial-and-error and misunderstandings, all the folk remedies of smiles and gestures, all the clumsy imperfect well-meaning attempts to bridge the gap, would be swept away by the dazzling torrent of communication without bounds.
I closed the door quietly on my way out.
The next morning I started going through the transcripts of the inquest―which included a 3D image of Sharp’s study. The body had been found around 8:20 AM by a domestic aid who came three times a week―Sharp, although generally fit, had suffered from severe arthritis in her hands. Paramedics had removed the body before the police became involved, but they’d snapped the scene first as a routine procedure.
The apartment was on the 25th floor, and the study had a large window facing west. The curtains were shown fully open―although there was nothing in the transcripts, one way or the other, about the possibility that the man who’d found the body, or even the paramedics, might have opened them to let in some light. I grafted the image into the local council’s plan of the suburb, and did some crude ray-tracing from where the forensic software suggested Sharp had been standing before she fell. A bullet would have left directional information―but a burst of IR could have come from any location with a clear line of sight. Given the uncertainty in her position, and the size of the window, the possibilities encompassed the windows and balconies of sixty-three apartments. Most were beyond the range of cheap hobbyists’ IR equipment―but I looked up skin-transceiver sensitivity, attenuation in the atmosphere, and beam spread parameters, then started checking product catalogues. There were several models of communications lasers which would have done the job―and the cheapest was only three hundred dollars. Not the kind of thing you could buy from an electronics retailer, but there were no formal restrictions on purchase or ownership. It wasn’t a weapon, after all.
The world’s greatest TAP poet, shot by a word? It was a seductive idea―and I was surprised that the tabloids hadn’t seized on it, weeks ago―but in the cold light of morning, I was finding it increasingly difficult to believe that Grace Sharp had died from anything but natural causes. The building had excellent security; the forensic team had found no sign of an intruder. The testimony of the black box wasn’t watertight, but on balance it probably did exonerate the implant. And Helen Sharp herself had been convinced that the <
I spent the morning slogging through the rest of the transcripts, but there was nothing very illuminating. The experts had washed their hands of Grace Sharp’s death. I didn’t blame them: if the evidence supported no clear verdict, the honest thing to do was to say so. At most inquests, though, someone managed to slip a speculation or two into the proceedings: a pathologist’s gut-level hunch, an engineer’s unprovable intuition. A few lines I could wave accusingly in their face when I cornered them in their office―prompting them to spill the whole elaborate, unofficial hypothesis they’d been nurturing in their head for months. But there wasn’t a single foothold here, a single indiscretion I could pursue; every witness had been cautious to a fault.
So I had nowhere else to go: I steeled myself and went trawling through the archives for the enemies of TAP.
Media releases (mainly from politicians and religious figures), letters and essays in edited publications, and postings to net forums gave me about seventeen thousand individuals who’d had something disparaging to say to the world about TAP. The search algorithm was multilingual, but I didn’t trust it to pick up irony reliably, so even this crude first grab had to be taken with a mountain of salt. Twelve percent of the forum postings were anonymous―and the random sample I inspected made it clear that they came from the most vehement opponents―but I put them aside; textual analysis of a few gigabytes of invective could wait for barrel-scraping time.
Clustering software picked up some fairly predictable connections. Two-thirds of the people I’d found were officially speaking on behalf of―or explicitly mentioned their membership or approval of―one of ninety-six organizations: political, religious, or cultural.
The software drew ninety-six star-diagrams. The biggest cluster was for Natural Wisdom: a quasi-green lobby group set up for the sole purpose of opposing the use of neural hardware. Most members were European, but there was a significant Australian presence. Second largest was The Fountain of Righteousness, a U.S.-based fundamentalist Christian coalition; they had half a dozen local affiliate churches. Cluster size didn’t necessarily measure the strength of opposition, though; the Roman Catholic church ranked a mere thirtieth―but only because it was so rigidly hierarchical, with a relatively small list of appointed spokesmen. Most Islamic authorities weren’t keen on neural hardware, either―but many predominantly Islamic countries had simply outlawed the technology, largely defusing it as an issue. Islam’s best showing was for a UK group, and that was ranked fifty-seventh.
I cut the data set down to Australia only. Nineteen organizations remained―and the top six rankings stayed the same, for what that was worth. There was something of the flavour of a witch-hunt to this whole analysis; I wasn’t publicly accusing anyone of anything―I wasn’t libelling Natural Wisdom as murderous thugs for daring to speak out against the implant―but this kind of crude fishing expedition always made me feel distinctly uneasy.
Still, if these were the people who’d feel most threatened by the prospect of children growing up with TAP … who among them could have known about the impending High Court challenge?
I scanned the membership databases of legal and paralegal associations, and the mailing lists of relevant journals, scooping up anyone who gave an address care of Huntingdale and Partners―the firm who were preparing the “infant implant” brief.
There was zero overlap with the anti-TAP set―which was no great surprise. I imagined the police would have gone at least this far, and they’d had better resources: they could have pulled the whole Huntingdale workforce from taxation records, w
ith no chance of so much as a clerical assistant falling through the cracks.
I gazed at the screen, dispirited. All I had to show for a day’s work were sixty-three apartments with a view of Grace Sharp’s study, and seventeen thousand people who’d done nothing more incriminating than put themselves on the record as opponents of TAP.
The only thing left to try was intersecting the two.
Finding apartment numbers to match the physical locations in the building plans was the hardest part; architects and developers didn’t have to file anything so petty when they had their projects approved. I was actually beginning to contemplate doing the necessary legwork myself, when I discovered that someone had done it for me: an ad hoc consortium of sellers of insurance, fire-alarms, security equipment and climate control had commissioned a database for the entire metropolitan area, to help them target their junk mail. The suburb I needed only cost fifty bucks―complete with email tags.
I cross-matched with the anti-TAP set.
A single name appeared.
John Dallaporta belonged to none of my organisational clusters, and I had only one piece of data on his attitude to TAP: a short essay he’d written, seven years before, decrying the implant’s potential to “erode the richness of our ancient and beautiful tongues” and “invade the still, mysterious spaces of our minds”. The essay had appeared in a secondary English teachers’ netzine; I summoned up the whole issue, and flipped through its innocuous contents. The majority of the articles dealt with working conditions, and concerns arising out of new technology; there was also an earnest―almost painfully respectful―discussion of strategies for coping with parents who forbade their children contact with the filthy/sexist/atheistic/elitist/ superstitious/obsolete works of Shakespeare, et al. Not the kind of venue you’d seriously expect to lead you to a man who slaughtered his ideological enemies.
I reread Dallaporta’s essay carefully. It was passionate, but hardly inflammatory; he sounded very much like just one more plaintive, insecure technophobe letting off steam, to a no doubt largely sympathetic audience. I was inclined to be sympathetic, myself―in all honesty, the implant made my skin crawl―but there was a self-serving undercurrent which detracted from the force of his arguments. Certainly, portraying English as an endangered language was ridiculous, when more people were speaking it than at any other time in history.
