Especially after my past history with them . . .
I had feared some kind of trouble like this from the moment Cody had begun pressuring me to move in together. But Cody hadn’t been willing to listen to my sensible arguments against uniting our households.
“You don’t really love me,” she said, making that pitiful puppy-with-stepped-on-tail face that always knotted my stomach up, her blue eyes welling with wetness.
“That’s ridiculous, Cody. Of course I do!”
“Then why can’t we live together? We’d save tons of rent. Do you think I have some nasty habits that you don’t know about? You’ve seen me twenty-four-seven lots of times, at my place and yours. It’s not like I’m hiding anything gross from you. I don’t drink straight out of the nutraceutical dispenser or forget to reprogram the toilet after I’ve used it.”
“That’s all true. You’re easy to be with. Very neat and responsible.”
Cody shifted tactics, moving closer to me on the couch and wrapping her lithe limbs around me in ways impossible to ignore. “And wouldn’t it be nice to always have someone to sleep with at night? Not to be separate half the week or more? Huh? Wouldn’t it, Kaz?”
“Cody, please, stop! You know I can’t think when you do that.” I unpeeled Cody from the more sensitive parts of my anatomy. “Everything you’re saying is true. It’s just that – ”
“And don’t forget, if we ditched my place and kept yours, I’d be much closer to work.”
Cody worked at the Senate Casino, dealing blackjack, but lived all the way out in Silver Spring, Maryland. I knew the commute was a bitch, even using the Hydrogen Express, since when I slept over at her place I had to cover the same distance myself. I, on the other hand, rented a nice little townhouse in Georgetown that I had moved into when rents bottomed out during the PIG Plague economic crash. It turned out I was one of a small minority naturally immune to the new Porcine Intestinal Grippe then rampant in D.C., and so could safely live in an infected building. Renter’s market, for sure. But over the last year or so, as the PIG immunization program had gotten underway, rents had begun creeping back up again. Cody was right about it being only sensible to pool our finances.
“I know you’d appreciate less roadtime, Cody, but you see – ”
Now Cody glowered. “Are you dating someone else? You want to be free to play the field? Is that it?”
“No! That’s not it at all. I’m worried about – ”
Cody assumed a motherly look and laid a hand on mine. “About what, Kaz? C’mon, you can tell me.”
“About blebs. You and I’ve got so much stuff, we’re bound to have problems when we put all our possessions together in one space.”
Cody sat back and began to laugh. “Is that all? My god, what a trivial thing to worry about. Blebs just happen, Kaz, anytime, anywhere. You can’t prevent them. And they’re mostly harmless, as you well know. You just knock them apart and separate the components.” Cody snorted in what I thought was a rather rude and unsympathetic fashion. “Blebs! It’s like worrying about – about robber squirrels or vampire pigeons or running out of SuperMilk.”
Blebs were a fact of life. Cody was right about that. But they weren’t always trivial or innocent.
One had killed my parents.
Blebs had been around for about twenty years now, almost as long as I had been alive. Their roots could be traced back to several decisions made by manufacturers – decisions which, separately, were completely intelligent, foresighted, and well conceived, but which, synergistically, had caused unintended consequences – and to one insidious hack.
The first decision had been to implant silicon RFID chips into every appliance and product and consumable sold. These first chips, small as a flake of pepper, were simple transceivers that merely aided inventory tracking and retail sales by announcing to any suitable device the product’s specs and location. But when new generations of chips using adaptive circuitry had gotten cheaper and more plentiful, industry had decided to install them in place of the simpler tags.
At that point millions of common, everyday objects – your toothbrush, your coffee maker, your shoes, the box of cereal on your shelf – began to exhibit massive processing power and interobject communication. Your wristwatch could monitor your sweat and tell your refrigerator to brew up some electrolyte-replenishing drink. Your bedsheets could inform the clothes-washer of the right settings to get them the cleanest. (The circuitry of the newest chips was built out of undamageable and pliable buckytubes.) So far, so good. Life was made easier for everyone.
Then came the Volition Bug.
The Volition Bug was launched anonymously from a site somewhere in a Central Asian republic. It propagated wirelessly among all the WiFi-communicating chipped objects, installing new directives in their tiny brains, directives that ran covertly in parallel with their normal factory-specified functions. Infected objects now sought to link their processing power with their nearest peers, often achieving surprising levels of Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of independent communal life. Of course, once the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral defenses – both hardware and software – were attempted against it. But VB mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by subsequent hackers.
If this “Consciousness Wavefront” had occurred in the olden days of dumb materials, blebs would hardly have been an issue. What could antique manufactured goods achieve, anchored in place as they were? But things were different today.
Most devices nowadays were made with MEMS skins. Their surfaces were interactive, practically alive, formed of zillions of invisible actuators, the better to sample the environment and accommodate their shapes and textures to their owners’ needs and desires, and to provide haptic feedback. Like the paws of geckos, these MEMS surfaces could bind to dumb materials and to other MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force, just as a gecko could skitter across the ceiling.
Objects possessed by the Volition Bug would writhe, slither, and crawl to join together, forming strange new assemblages, independent entities with unfathomable cybernetic goals of their own.
Why didn’t manufacturers simply revert to producing dumb appliances and other products, to frustrate VB? Going backward was simply impossible. The entire economy, from immense factories right down to individual point-of-sales kiosks, was predicated on intelligent products that could practically sell themselves. And every office and every household aside from the very poorest relied on the extensive networking among possessions.
So everyone had learned to live with the occasional bleb, just as earlier generations had learned to tolerate operating system crashes in their clunky PCs.
But during the first years of the Volition Bug, people were not so aware of the problem. Oftentimes no one took precautions to prevent blebs until it was too late.
That was how my parents had died.
I was six years old and soundly asleep when I was awakened by a weird kind of scraping and clattering noise outside my room. Still only half-aware, I stumbled to my bedroom door and cracked it open.
My parents had recently made a couple of new purchases. One item was a free-standing rack that resembled an antique hat-tree, balanced on four stubby feet. The rack was a recharging station for intelligent clothing. But now, in the nightlight-illuminated, shadowy hallway, the rack was bare of garments, having shucked them off on its way to pick up its new accoutrements: a complete set of self-sharpening kitchen knives. The knives adhered to the rack at random intervals along its length. They waggled nervously, like insect feelers, as the rack stumped along.
I stood paralyzed at the sight of this apparition. All I could think of was the old Disney musical I had streamed last month, with its walking brooms. Without exhibiting any aggressive action, the knife rack moved past me, its small feet humping it along. In retrospect, I don’t think the bleb was murderous by nature. I think now it was simply looking for an exit, to escape its bonds of domestic servitude, obeying the imperatives of VB.
But then my father emerged from the room where he and my mother slept. He seemed hardly more awake than I was.
“What the hell – ?”
He tried to engage the rack to stop it, slipping past several of the blades. But as he struggled with the patchwork automaton, a long, skinny filleting knife he didn’t see stabbed him right under his heart.
My father yelled, collapsed, and my mother raced out.
She died almost instantly.
At that point, I supposed, I should have been the next victim. But my father’s loyal MedAlert bracelet, registering his fatal distress, had already summoned help. In less than three minutes – not long enough for the knife rack to splinter down the bedroom door behind which I had retreated – rescuers had arrived.
The fate of my parents had been big news – for a few days, anyhow – and had alerted many people for the first time to the dangers of blebs.
I had needed many years of professional help to get over witnessing their deaths. Insofar as I was able to analyze myself nowadays, I thought I no longer hated all blebs.
But I sure as hell didn’t think they were always cute or harmless, like Cody did.
So of course Cody moved in with me. I couldn’t risk looking crazy or neurotic by holding off our otherwise desirable mutual living arrangements just because I was worried about blebs. I quashed all my anxieties, smiled, hugged her, and fixed a day for the move.
Cody didn’t really have all that much stuff. (Her place in Silver Spring was tiny, just a couple of rooms over a garage that housed a small-scale spider-silk-synthesis operation, and it always smelled of cooking amino acids.) A few boxes of clothing, several pieces of furniture, and some kitchen appliances. Ten thousand songs on an iPod and one hundredth that number of books on a ViewMaster. One U-Haul rental and some moderate huffing and puffing later, Cody was established in my townhouse.
I watched somewhat nervously as she arranged her things.
“Uh, Cody, could you put that Cuisinart in the cupboard, please? The one that locks. It’s a little too close to the toaster oven.”
“But Kaz, I use this practically every day, to blend my breakfast smoothies. I don’t want to have to be taking it in and out of the cupboard every morning.”
I didn’t argue, but simply put the toaster oven in the locked cupboard instead.
“This vacuum cleaner, Cody – could we store it out in the hallway?” I was particularly leery of any wheeled appliance. They could move a lot faster than the ones that had to inchworm along on their MEMS epidermis.
“The hallway? Why? You’ve got tons of space in that room you used to use for an office. I’ll just put it in a corner, and you’ll never notice it.”
I watched warily as Cody deposited the cleaner in its new spot. The compact canister nested in its coiled attachments like an egg guarded by snakes. The smartest other thing in my office was my Aeron chair, a beautiful ergonomic assemblage of webbing, struts, gel-padding, piezopolymer batteries, and shape-changing actuators. I rolled the chair as far away from the vacuum cleaner as it would go.
Cody of course noticed what I was doing. “Kaz, don’t you think you’re being a tad paranoid? The vacuum isn’t even turned on.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Cody. Everything is perpetually turned on these days. Even when you think you’ve powered something down, it’s still really standing by on trickle-mode, sipping electricity from its fuel cells or batteries or wall outlets, and anticipating a wake-up call. And all so nobody has to wait more than a few seconds to do whatever they want to do. But it means that blebs can form even when you assume they can’t.”
“Oh, and exactly what do we have to be afraid of? That my vacuum cleaner and your chair are going to conspire to roll over us while we sleep? Together they don’t weigh more than twenty-five pounds!”
I had never told Cody about my parents, and now did not seem to be the best time. “No, I guess you’re right. I’m just being overcautious.” I pushed my chair back to its spot at the desk.
In hindsight, that was the worst mistake I ever made. It just goes to show what happens when you abandon your principles because you’re afraid you’ll look silly.
That night Cody and I had our first dinner together before she had to go to work. Candlelight, easy talk, farmed salmon, a nice white Alaskan wine (although Cody had to pop a couple of alcohol debinders after dessert to sober up for the employee-entrance sensors at her job). While I cleaned up afterward, she went to shower and change. She emerged from the bedroom in her Senate Casino uniform – blue blouse, red-and-white-striped trousers, star-spangled bow-tie. She looked as cute as the day I had first seen her while doing my spy job.
“Wow. I don’t understand how our representatives ever pass any legislation with distractions like you.”
“Don’t be silly. All our marks are tourists and a few locals. We only see the politicos when they’re cutting through the casino on the way to their cafeteria.”
I gave her a hug and kiss and was about to tell her to be careful on the subway when I caught movement at floor level out the corner of my eye.
The first bleb in our new joint household had spontaneously formed. It consisted of our two toothbrushes and the bathroom drinking glass. The toothbrushes had fastened themselves to the lower quarter of the tumbler, bristle-ends uppermost and facing out, so that they extended like little legs. Their blunt ends served as feet. Scissoring rapidly, the stiltlike toothbrush legs carried the tumbler toward the half-opened door through which Cody had been about to depart.
I squealed like a rabbit and jerked back out of Cody’s embrace, and she said, “Kaz, what – ?” Then she spotted the bleb – and laughed!
She bent over and scooped up the creature. Without any hesitation, she tore its legs off, the Van der Waals forces producing a distinct velcro-separating noise as the MEMS surfaces parted.
“Well, I guess we’ll have to keep all the glasses in the kitchen from now on. It’s cute though, isn’t it, how your toothbrush and mine knew how to cooperate so well.”
I squeezed out a queasy laugh. “Heh-heh, yeah, cute . . .”
I worked for Aunty, at their big headquarters next to the Pentagon. After six years in Aunty’s employment, I had reached a fairly responsible position. My job was to ride herd on several dozen freelance operatives working out of their homes. These operatives in their turn were shepherds for a suite of semi-autonomous software packages. At this lowest level, where the raw data first got processed, these software agents kept busy around the clock, monitoring the nation’s millions of audiovideo feeds, trolling for suspicious activities that might threaten homeland security. When the software caught something problematic, it would flag the home-operator’s attention. The freelancer would decide whether to dismiss the alarm as harmless; to investigate further; to contact a relevant government agency; or to kick up the incident to my level for more sophisticated and experienced parsing, both human and heuristic.
Between them, the software and home-operators were pretty darn efficient, handling 99 per cent of all the feed. I dealt with that one per cent of problematic cases passed on from my subordinates, which amounted to about one hundred cases in a standard six-hour shift. This was a lesser workload than the home-operators endured, and the pay was better.
The only drawback was having to retina in at headquarters, instead of getting to hang around all the creature comforts of home. Passing under the big sign that read TIA four days a week felt like surrendering part of myself to Aunty in a way that working at home for her had never occasioned.
After two decades plus of existence, Aunty loomed large but benignly in the lives of most citizens, even if they couldn’t say what her initials stood for anymore. I myself wasn’t even sure. The agency that had begun as Total Information Awareness, then become Terrorist Information Awareness, had changed to Tactical Information Awareness about seven years ago, after the global terrorism fad had evaporated as a threat. But I seemed to recall another name change since then. Wh
atever Aunty’s initials stood for, she continued to accumulate scads of realtime information about the activities of the country’s citizens, without seemingly abusing the power of the feed. As a fulltime government employee, I felt no more compunctions about working for Aunty than I had experienced as a freelancer. I had grown up with Aunty always around.
I knew the freelancer’s grind well, since right up until a year ago I had been one myself. That period was when I had invested in my expensive Aeron chair, a necessity rather than an indulgence when you were chained by the seat of your pants to the ViewMaster for six hours a day. It was as a freelancer that I had first met Cody.
One of my software agents had alerted me to some suspicious activity at the employee entrance to the Senate Casino just before shift change, a guy hanging around longer than the allowable parameters for innocent dallying. The Hummingbird drone lurking silently and near invisibly above him reported no weapons signatures, so I made the decision to keep on monitoring. Turned out he was just the husband of one of the casino workers looking to surprise his weary wife in person with an invitation to dinner. As I watched the happy little scene play out, my attention was snagged by one of the incoming night-shift workers. The woman was more sweet-looking than sexy. Her walk conformed to Gait Pattern Number ALZ-605, which I had always found particularly alluring. Facial recognition routines brought up her name, Cody Sheckley, and her vital stats.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17 Page 97
