21st Century Science Fiction

by D B Hartwell

  “Miranda’s our cultural anthropologist,” said Hitchens. “You’re going to be working with her more than the rest of us. She actually came to us a few weeks ago with a problem of her own—”

  “And got no help at all,” said Veen, “until this other thing came up.”

  “A possible connection with the plutonium,” said Hitchens, nodding significantly at Fraction. “Tell Gennady where you’re from,” he said to the young man.

  Fraction nodded and suddenly smiled. “I hie,” he said, “from far Cilenia.”

  Gennady squinted at him. His accent had sounded American. “Silesia?” asked Gennady. “Are you Czech?”

  Miranda Veen shook her head. She was wearing little round earrings, he noticed. “Cilenia, not Silesia,” she said. “Cilenia’s also a woman’s name, but in this case it’s a place. A nation.”

  Gennady frowned. “It is? Where is it?”

  “That,” said Lane Hitchens, “is one of the things we want you to find out.” The van headed east to Stockholm. All sorts of obvious questions occurred to Gennady, such as, “If you want to know where Cilenia is, why don’t you just ask Fraction, here?”—but Lane Hitchens seemed uninterested in answering them. “Miranda will explain,” was all he said. Instead, Hitchens began to talk about the plutonium, which had apparently been stolen many years ago. “It kept being sold,” Hitchens said with an ironic grimace. “And so it kept being smuggled from one place to another. But after the Americans took their hit everybody started getting better and better detection devices on ports and borders. The plutonium was originally in four big slugs, but the buyers and sellers started dividing it up and moving the pieces separately. They kept selling it as one unit, which is the only reason we can still track it. But it got sliced into smaller and smaller chunks, staying just ahead of the detection technology of the day. We caught Fraction here moving one of them; but he’s just a mule, and has agreed to cooperate.

  “Now there’s well over a hundred pieces, and a new buyer who wants to collect them all in one place. They’re on the move, but we can now detect a gram hidden in a tonne of lead. It’s gotten very difficult for the couriers.”

  Gennady nodded, thinking about it. They only had to successfully track one of the packets, of course, to find the buyer. He glanced at Fraction again. The meaning of the man’s odd name was obvious now. “So, buyers are from this mythical Cilenia?” he said.

  Hitchens shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Then I ask again, why does Fraction here not tell us where that is, if he is so cooperative? Or, why have those American men who are not supposed to exist, not dragged him away to be questioned somewhere?”

  Hitchens laughed drily. “That would not be so easy,” he said. “Fraction, could you lean forward a bit?” The young man obliged. “Turn your head?” asked Hitchens. Now Gennady could see the earbuds in Fraction’s ears.

  “The man sitting across from you is a low-functioning autistic named Danail Gavrilov,” said Hitchens. “He doesn’t speak English. He is, however, extremely good at parroting what he hears, and somebody’s trained him to interpret a language of visual and aural cues so he can parrot gestures and motions, even complex ones.”

  “Fraction,” said Fraction, “is not in this van.”

  Gennady’s hackles rose. He found himself suddenly reluctant to look into the faintly glowing lenses of Danail Gavrilov’s glasses. “Cameras in the glasses,” he stammered, “of course, yes; and they’re miked . . . Can’t you trace the signal?” he asked Hitchens. The IAEA man shook his head.

  “It goes two or three steps through the normal networks then jumps into a maze of anonymized botnets.” Gennady nodded thoughtfully; he’d seen that kind of thing before and knew how hard it would be to follow the packet streams in and out of Fraction’s head. Whoever was riding Danail Gavrilov was, at least for the moment, invulnerable.

  While they’d been driving, the rainclouds had cleared away and visible through the van’s back windows was a pale sky still, near midnight, touched with amber and pink.

  “Do you have any immediate commitments?” asked Hitchens. Gennady eyed him.

  “This is likely to be a long job, I guess?”

  “I hope not. We need to find that plutonium. But we don’t know how long Fraction will be willing to help us. He could disappear at any moment . . . so if you could start tonight . . . ?”

  Gennady shrugged. “I have no cat to feed, or . . . other people. I’m used to fieldwork, but—” he cast about for some disarming joke he could make, “I’ve never before had an anthropologist watching me work.”

  Veen drummed her fingers on the narrow tabletop. “I don’t mean to be impolite,” she said, “but you have to understand: I’m not here for your plutonium. I admit its importance,” she added quickly, holding up one hand. “I just think you should know I’m after something else.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. What?”

  “My son.”

  Gennady stared at her and, at a loss for what to say, finally just shrugged and smiled. Veen started to talk but at that point the van rolled to a stop outside one of the better hotels in Stockholm.

  The rest of the night consisted of a lot of running around and arrangement-making, as Gennady was run across town to collect his bags from his own modest lodgings. They put him up on the same floor as Veen and Hitchens, though where Fraction stayed, or whether he even slept, Gennady didn’t know.

  Gennady was too agitated to sleep, so he spent a long time surfing the net, trying to find references to his reindeer and the incident on the road that evening. So far, there was nothing, and eventually he grew truly tired and slept.

  Hitchens knocked on Gennady’s door at eight o’clock. He, Veen and Fraction were tucking into a fine breakfast in the suite across the hall. Fraction looked up as Gennady entered.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I trust you slept well.”

  The American term ‘creeped out’ came to Gennady’s mind as he mumbled some platitude in reply. Fraction smiled—except of course, it was Danail Gavrilov doing the actual smiling. Gennady wondered whether he took any notice at all of the social interactions going on around him, or whether he’d merely discovered that following his rider’s commands was the easiest way to navigate the bewildering complexities of human society.

  Before going to sleep last night Gennady had looked up Fraction’s arrangement with Gavrilov. Gavrilov was something Stanley Milgram had dubbed a ‘cyranoid’—after Cyrano de Bergerac. He was much more than a puppet, and much less than an actor. Whatever he was, he was clearly enjoying his eggs Benedict.

  “What are we doing today?” Gennady asked Hitchens.

  “We’re going to start as soon as you’ve eaten and freshened up.”

  Gennady frowned at Veen. “Start? Where is it that we start?”

  Veen and Hitchens exchanged a look. Fraction smiled; had somebody in some other time zone just commanded him to do that?

  Gennady wasn’t in the best of moods, since he kept expecting to remember some detail from last night that made sense of everything. Though the coffee was kicking in, nothing was coming to him. Plus, he was itching to check the news in case they were talking about his reindeer.

  Miranda suddenly said, “Hitchens has told you about his problem. Maybe it’s time I told you about mine.” She reached into a bag at her feet and dropped an ebook on the table. This was of the quarto type, with three hundred pages of flexible e-paper that could all take the impressions of whatever pages you wanted. As she flipped through it Gennady could see that she had filled its pages with hand-written notes, photos and web pages, all of which bled off the edges of the e-paper. At any readable scale, the virtual pages were much bigger than the physical window you looked at them through, a fact she demonstrated as she flipped to one page and, dragging her fingers across it, shoved its news articles off into limbo. Words and pictures rolled by until she planted her finger again to stop the motion. “Here.” She held out the book to Gennady.

  Cent
ered in the page was the familiar format of an email. “Mom,” it said:

  “I know you warned me against leaving the protection of Cascadia, but Europe’s so amazing! Everywhere I’ve been, they’ve respected our citizenship. And you know I love the countryside. I’ve met a lot of people who’re fascinated with how I grew up.”

  Gennady looked up. “You’re from the Cities?”

  She nodded. Whatever Miranda Veen’s original nationality, she had adopted citizenship in a pan-global urban network whose cities were, taken together, more powerful than the nations where they were situated. Her son might have been born somewhere in the Vancouver-Portland-Seattle corridor—now known simply as Cascadia—or in Shanghai. It didn’t matter; he’d grown up with the right to walk and live in either megacity—and in many others—with equal ease. But the email suggested that his mother had neglected to register his birth in any of the nations that the cities were supposedly a part of.

  Gennady read a little further. “Anyway,” it said, “I met this guy yesterday, a backpacker, calls himself Dodger. He said he had no citizenship other than the A.R.G. he’s part of. I went sure, yeah, whatever, so he mailed me a path link. I’ve been following it around Rome and, well, it’s amazing so far. Here’s some shots.” Following were a number of fairly mundane images of old Roman streets.

  Gennady looked up, puzzled. Alternate Reality Games—A.R.G.’s—were as common as mud; millions of kids around the world put virtual overlays and geographical positioning information over the real planet, and made up complicated games involving travel and the specific features of locale. Internet citizenship wasn’t new either. A growing subset of the population considered themselves dual citizens of some real nation, plus an on-line virtual world. Since the economies of virtual nations could be bigger than many real-world countries, such citizenship wasn’t just an affectation. It could be more economically important than your official nationality.

  It wasn’t a big step to imagining an ARG-based nationality. So Gennady said, “I don’t see what’s significant here.”

  “Read the next message,” said Veen. She sat back, chewing a fingernail, and watched him as he read the next in what looked like a string of emails pasted into the page.

  “Mom, weren’t those remappings amazing? Oversatch is so incredibly vibrant compared to the real world. Even Hong Kong’s overlays don’t cut it next to that. And the participatory stuff is really intense. I walked away from it today with over ten thousand satchmos in my wallet. Sure, it’s only convertible through this one anonymous portal based out of Bulgaria—but it is convertible. Worth something like five hundred dollars, I think, if I was stupid enough to cash it in that way. It’s worth a lot more if I keep in the ARG.”

  Veen leaned over to scroll the paragraphs past. “This one,” she said, “two weeks later.”

  Gennady read. “It 2.0 is this overlay that remaps everything in real-time into Oversatch terms. It’s pretty amazing when you learn what’s really happening in the world! How the sanotica is causing all these pressures on Europe. Sanotica manifests in all sorts of ways—just imagine what a self-organizing catastrophe would look like! And Oversatch turns out to be just a gateway into the remappings that oppose sanotica. There’s others: Trapton, Allegor, and Cilenia.”

  “Cilenia,” said Gennady.

  Fraction sat up to look at the book. He nodded and said, “Oversatch is a gateway to Cilenia.”

  “And you?” Gennady asked him. “You’ve been there?”

  Fraction smiled. “I live there.”

  Gennady was bewildered. Some of the words were familiar. He was vaguely familiar with the concept of geographical overlays, for instance. But the rest of it made no sense at all. “What’s sanotica?” he asked Fraction.

  Fraction’s smile was maddeningly smug. “You have no language for it,” he said. “You’d have to speak it 2.0. But Sanotica is what’s really going on here.”

  Gennady sent an appealing look to Lane Hitchens. Hitchens grunted. “Sanotica may be the organization behind the plutonium thefts,” he said.

  “Sanotica is not an organization,” said Fraction, “anymore than it 2.0 is just a word.”

  “Whatever,” said Lane. “Gennady, you need to find them. Miranda will help, because she wants to find her son.”

  Gennady struggled to keep up. “And sanotica,” he said, “is in . . . far Cilenia?”

  Fraction laughed contemptuously. Veen darted him an annoyed look, and said to Gennady, “It’s not that simple. Here, read the last message.” She dragged it up from the bottom of the page.

  “Mom: Cilenia is a new kind of ‘it.’ But so is sanotica; a terrifying thought. Without that it, without the word and the act of pointing that it represents, you cannot speak of these things, you can’t even see them! I watch them now, day by day—the walking cities, the countries that appear like cicadas to walk their one day in the sun, only to vanish again at dusk . . . I can’t be an observer anymore. I can’t be me anymore, or sanotica will win. I’m sorry, Mom, I have to become something that can be pointed at by 2.0. Cilenia needs me, or as many me’s as I can spare.

  “I’ll call you.”

  Gennady read the message again, then once more. “It makes no sense,” he said. “It’s a jumble, but . . .” He looked to Hitchens. “It two-point-oh. It’s not a code, is it?”

  Hitchens shook his head. He handed Gennady a pair of heavy-framed glasses like Veen’s. Gennady recognized the brand name on the arms: Ariadne AR, the Swiss augmented reality firm that had recently bought out Google. Veen also wore Ariadnes, but there was no logo at all on Fraction’s glasses.

  Gennady gingerly put them on and pressed the frames to activate them. Instantly, a cool blue, transparent sphere appeared in the air about two feet in front of him. The glasses were projecting the globe straight onto his retinas, of course; orbiting around it were various icons and command words that only he could see. Gennady was familiar with this sort of interface. All he had to do was focus his gaze on a particular command and it would change color. Then he could blink to activate it, or dismiss it by looking somewhere else.

  “Standard software,” he mumbled as he scanned through the icons. “Geographical services, Wikis, social nets . . . What’s this?”

  Hitchens and Veen had put on their own glasses, so Gennady made the unfamiliar icon visible to all of them, and picked it out of the air with his fingers. He couldn’t feel it, of course, but was able to set the little stylized R in the center of the table where they could all look at it.

  Danail Gavrilov nodded, mimicking a satisfied smile for whoever was riding him. “That’s your first stop,” he said. “A little place called Rivet Couture.” Hitchens excused himself and left. Gennady barely noticed; he’d activated the icon for Rivet Couture and was listening to a lecture given by a bodacious young woman who didn’t really exist. He’d moved her so she appeared to be standing in the middle of the room, but Miranda Veen kept walking through her.

  The pretty woman was known as a serling—she was a kind of narrator, and right now she was bringing Gennady up to speed on the details of an Alternate Reality Game called Rivet Couture.

  While she talked, the cameras and positional sensors in Gennady’s classes had been working overtime to figure out where he was and what objects were around him. So while the serling explained that Rivet Couture was set in a faux gaslight era—an 1880 that never existed—all the stuff in the room mutated. The walls adopted a translucent, glowing layer of floral wallpaper; the lamp sconces faded behind ghostly brass gas fixtures.

  Miranda Veen walked through the serling again and, for a second, Gennady thought the game had done an overlay on her as well. In fact, her high-necked blouse and long skirt suddenly seemed appropriate. With a start he saw that her earrings were actually little gears.

  “Steampunk’s out of style, isn’t it?” he said. Veen turned, reaching up to touch her earlobes. She smiled at him, and it was the first genuine smile he’d seen from her.

&nb
sp; “My parents were into New Age stuff,” she said. “I rebelled by joining a steam gang. We wore crinoline and tight waistcoats, and I used to do my hair up in an elaborate bun with long pins. The boys wore pince-nez and paisley vests, that sort of thing. I drifted away from the culture a long time ago, but I still love the style.”

  Gennady found himself grinning at her. He understood that—the urge to step just slightly out from the rest of society. The pocket-watch Veen wore like a necklace was a talisman of sorts, a constant reminder of who she was, and how she was unique.

  But while Miranda Veen’s talisman might be a thing of gears and armatures, Gennady’s were places: instead of an icon of brass and gears, he wore memories of dripping concrete halls and the shadowed calandria of ruined reactors, of blue-glowing pools packed with spent fuel rods . . . of an unlit commercial freezer where an entire herd of irradiated reindeer lay jumbled like toys.

  Rivet Couture was not so strange. Many women wore lingerie under their conservative work clothes to achieve the same effect. For those people without such an outlet, overlays like Rivet Couture gave them much the same sense of owning a secret uniqueness. Kids walked alone in the ordinary streets of Berlin or Minneapolis, yet at the same moment they walked side by side through the misty cobblestoned streets of a Victorian Atlantis. Many of them spent their spare time filling in the details of the places, designing the clothes and working out the history of Rivet Couture. It was much more than a game; and it was worldwide.

  Miranda Veen rolled her bags to the door and Fraction opened it for her. They turned to Gennady who was still sitting at the devastation of the breakfast table. “Are you ready?” asked Miranda.

  “I’m coming,” he said; he stood up, and stepped from Stockholm into Atlantis.

  • • • •

  Rivet Couture had a charmingly light hand: it usually added just a touch or two to what you were seeing or hearing, enough to provide a whiff of strangeness to otherwise normal places. In the elevator, Gennady’s glasses filtered the glare of the fluorescents until it resembled candle-light. At the front desk an ornate scroll-worked cash register wavered into visibility, over the terminal the clerk was using. Outside in the street, Gennady heard the nicker of nearby horses and saw black-maned heads toss somewhere out in the fast-moving stream of electric cars.