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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT
Vol. CXXVI No. 10, October 2006
Cover design by Victoria Green
Cover Art by John Allemand
SERIAL
ROLLBACK, Part I of IV, Robert J. Sawyer
NOVELETTES
TAKES TWO TO TANGLE, Ben Bova
FROM WAYFIELD, FROM MALAGASY, Robert J. Howe
SHORT STORIES
RIVAL OF MARS, David Walton
NIGERIAN SCAM, Richard A. Lovett
SCIENCE FACT
THE GREAT SUMATRAN EARTHQUAKES OF 2004-5, Richard A. Lovett
PROBABILITY ZERO
SETI TRIUMPHANT, Richard Thieme & Aaron Ximm
READER'S DEPARTMENTS
THE EDITOR'S PAGE
IN TIMES TO COME
THE ALTERNATE VIEW, John G. Cramer
BIOLOG: ROBERT J. HOWE
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY, Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS, Anthony Lewis
Stanley Schmidt Editor
Trevor Quachri Associate Editor
Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITORIAL: NEEDLE WITH A NAMETAG by Stanley Schmidt
ROLLBACK by Robert J. Sawyer
THE GREAT SUMATRAN EARTHQUAKES OF 2004-5 by Richard A. Lovett
TAKES TWO TO TANGLE by Ben Bova
RIVAL OF MARS by David Walton
THE ALTERNATE VIEW: BACK IN TIME THROUGH OTHER DIMENSIONS by John G. Cramer
IN TIMES TO COME
PROBABILITY ZERO: SETI TRIUMPHANT by Richard Thieme and Aaron Ximm
NIGERIAN SCAM by Richard A. Lovett
FROM WAYFIELD, FROM MALAGASY by Robert J. Howe
BIOLOG: ROBERT J. HOWE by Richard A. Lovett
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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EDITORIAL: NEEDLE WITH A NAMETAG by Stanley Schmidt
Anyone who has used English for more than a few years has surely encountered the phrase “like a needle in a haystack.” It refers, of course, to the difficulty of finding a specific small object in the midst of large numbers of very similar objects. For a literal needle (whether a pine needle or a sewing needle) in a literal haystack, the difficulty is obvious: finding it will involve a large amount of tedious manual picking through lots of stuff that looks alike. Even if it's right in front of you, you may not notice it because it doesn't stand out from its surroundings.[1]
[1. Okay, if it's a sewing needle made of ferromagnetic metal, the job is a little easier, but not a lot.]
Wouldn't it be nice, when confronted with such a task, to have a magic wand that you could simply wave at the haystack, in response to which an embedded needle would call out, “Here I am!"? While we're dreaming, why not fix it so that if there are multiple needles in the haystack, each and every one of them will not only tell you where it is, but which one it is and what its characteristics are?
Well, for better and/or worse, we now have something that acts very much like that—not necessarily for literal needles and haystacks, but for a great many similar situations. It's called a radio-frequency ID tag, or “RFID” for short, and its original purpose was quite practical and innocuous: to make store checkouts and inventory control easier and more accurate. Inconspicuously attached to a piece of merchandise—an umbrella, a bunch of broccoli, or a boot, for example—it stores information such as the item's exact identity and its current price. And it can spit that information out instantly in response to a “ping” (an omnidirectional coded microwave pulse), for processing by a computer associated with the reader (or scanner) that provides the ping.
Unlike the laser barcode readers we've all gotten used to (though our grandparents could hardly have imagined them), RFIDs don't depend on a clerk's holding the barcode for each item, one at a time, directly in a narrow sensing beam. Since the microwaves with which they communicate are omnidirectional, pass easily through many kinds of matter, and have considerable range, a single “ping” directed at a full shopping cart can elicit self-identification from every item in the cart. That's enough to let the checkout computer generate a complete itemized bill. If the customer also has one of those “loyalty” cards increasingly used by stores in lieu of coupons, the RFID scanner can read that and automatically figure in several discounts offered to users of those cards—and compare this week's purchases to previous ones to print out, along with the receipt, customized special offers likely to entice that customer back into the same store next time.
Sounds like a win-win situation for everybody, right? The merchant gets a fast, accurate checkout, with few if any bookkeeping errors, and needs fewer clerks to process a given number of customers. The customer gets through the line faster, is unlikely to be overcharged, and gets several chances to save money.
And it doesn't stop there. While the merchant has an RFID scanner identifying each item sold to calculate the bill, it might as well feed that information to another program that deducts the item from inventory and keeps track of how many are left. By doing that for every item in the store, it can monitor the entire inventory on a continuous basis and let the storekeeper know whenever something needs to be reordered. It can keep track of what sells how well and therefore how much of each thing should be ordered. It can keep track of what individual customers buy a lot of, and therefore which personalized special offers are likely to be effective in bringing them back—without one person having to ask another prying questions about such things.
What “extras” does the customer get? Well, not much in the store—but things begin to get a little less clear-cut and utopian-sounding after the merchandise leaves the store. RFIDs are typically built right into the wares—sewn into clothing labels, for instance—so that customers are likely to be unaware of their presence, and unable to easily remove them even if they know they're there. So they remain, and can still be read by any scanner they pass. That opens up all kinds of possibilities. A great deal of a person's history can be traced, if only in terms of where he or she was at particular times, by stored records of the presence of objects in their possession—not only at the moment of purchase, but at any time thereafter. Your credit cards and subway pass, the wallet in which you carry them, your underwear, a book you bought, the E-ZPass and tires on your car—all can serve as tattletales, giving anyone with the inclination and know-how to seek them out a wealth of data points to map much of your life and draw conclusions about it. Most of that information will never be accessed or used; there's just too much of it and most of it is of little interest to anyone. But the fact that it can be accessed and used should give us pause, because some of its uses can ruin lives for no good reason.
Mary Rosenblum gave a disturbing taste of the possibilities in her story “Search Engine,” which appeared here in September 2005. Edward M. Lerner, another writer well known to Analog readers, chillingly suggests some others in his story “The Day of the RFIDs,” which you didn't read here, but would do well to seek out anyway. It appears in his collection Creative Destruction, published by Wildside Press in 2006. Many of the s
tories in the book did appear first in Analog, but a couple are new and eminently worth reading. “The Day of the RFIDs,” in particular, points out some of the possible ramifications of this modern convenience that everybody needs to think about before embracing it with unmitigated enthusiasm.
There are those, for example, who will complain that what I have said so far dwells too much on the possible negative uses of RFIDs while neglecting their power to help prevent terrorism. Some will say that the more information we have that can be used in tracking potential terrorists, both for prevention and for establishing guilt after the fact, the better off we all are. The innocent, these people will say, have nothing to fear.
How charmingly naïve.
If you are one of those who can comfortably believe that, please read Lerner's story, which among other things includes an all too plausible scenario for the diligent pursuit of terrorists leading instead to the deaths of numerous innocent people, massive destruction of property, and the placing of a man who never hurt anyone or anything on a “most wanted” list. It can happen that way, and if we're going to use the things that make it possible, we need to figure out safeguards to make sure it doesn't.
If you're not one who can be so trusting, but think instead that you can protect yourself by such means as avoiding the use of E-ZPass, credit cards, and loyalty cards, and paying for everything with cash, think again. Some countries have already begun incorporating RFIDs into their currency, so that even “unmarked” bills leave plenty of tracks and can no longer be considered anonymous. Some countries have begun incorporating them into their passports, and others (including this one) have definite plans to do so. Many urban transit systems now require that fares be paid with scannable cards, and some toll road systems are moving in that direction.
All of these things have been created and adopted with good intentions, and all of them can do good and worthwhile things for us. But any tool can also be used as a weapon, and the more powerful it is in one kind of application, the more powerful it can be in the other, too. We as a people have to decide which of these aspects matters more to us, and how we can get as many as possible of the benefits of a particular technology while protecting ourselves from as many as possible of the dangers. These new information technologies are very powerful indeed, and we dare not assume that those who control them have only our best interests at heart, or that the guiltless have nothing to worry about. Information gathered in these ways can make shopping easier and help thwart genuine, malevolent terrorists. It can also be used to persecute almost anybody for almost any reason, such as a personal grudge, a political or business rivalry, or just a malicious prank. Or to establish a kind of government quite alien to the kind we have long taken care to maintain: the equipment and methods now available to would-be “Big Brothers” far exceed anything in George Orwell's writings. We can and should use these new tools, just as we use fire and electricity—but we can and must use them with no less respect and care.
A few years ago I myself wrote a novel (Argonaut, Tor Books, 2002), which, at first glance and even in my own original thinking, seems to have little to do with these matters. Certainly the direct inspiration for it, at least at the conscious level, was quite different. After reading one too many manuscripts in which explorers got to a new planet and in a few days learned more about it than all our scientist have learned about Earth in all of human history, I found myself thinking, “Could they really do that?” and then, “Well, maybe...” I thought of a way they might, in the not too distant future, using a combination of then-nascent technologies to carry out unprecedentedly widespread surveillance, data collection, and analysis. And I realized that the ability to do that would be addictively exhilarating if you were the one using it, and thoroughly terrifying if you were the one(s) being studied by entities you had no reason to trust. The result was what Michael Flynn called “the oddest alien invasion yet."
I wrote it simply because I thought it could be an enjoyable, thought-provoking story. But I now suspect that part of the reason I was drawn to the idea was its parallels to the dilemmas beginning even then to be apparent in our own burgeoning abilities to gather and use information. Large-scale, intimate spying is no less a problem whether it's done by “them” from Out There, or by some of us right here. The result, and the danger, is the same either way.
Copyright © 2006 Stanley Schmidt
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ROLLBACK by Robert J. Sawyer
How do you carry on a very long, very slow conversation?
Not the way people usually assume....
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No wise man ever wished to be younger.—Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?—Leroy “Satchel” Paige (1906-1982)
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Chapter 1
Sunday, February 2, 2048
It had been a good life.
Donald Halifax looked around the living room of the modest house that he and his wife Sarah had shared for sixty years now, and that thought kept coming back to him. Oh, there had been ups and downs, and the downs had seemed excursions into the flames of hell at the time—the lingering death of his mother, Sarah's battle with breast cancer, the rough periods their marriage had gone through—but, on balance, when all was said and done, it had been a good life.
When all was said and done.
Don shook his head, but it wasn't in sadness. He'd always been a realist, a pragmatist, and he knew there was nothing left now but summing up and looking back. At the age of eighty-seven, that's all anyone had.
The living room was narrow. A fireplace was built into the middle of one of the long walls, flanked by autopolarizing windows, but he couldn't remember the last time they'd actually had a fire. It was too much work getting one going and then cleaning up afterward.
The mantel held framed photos, including one of Sarah and Don on their wedding day, back in 1988. She was wearing white, and he was in a tuxedo that had been black in reality but looked gray here, having faded, along with the rest of the photograph. Other photos showed their son Carl as a toddler and again graduating with his M.B.A. from McGill, and there were two pictures of their daughter Emily, one when she was in her twenties, and another, holographic one, from her early forties. And there were several holos of their two grandchildren.
There were also a few trophies: a pair of small ones that Don had won in Scrabble tournaments, and the big one Sarah had been given by the International Astronomical Union. He couldn't remember the wording on that one, so he walked over, taking small steps, and had a look:
* * * *
For Sarah Halifax
Who Figured It Out
1 March 2010
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He nodded, remembering how proud he'd been that day, even if her fame had briefly turned their lives upside down.
A magphotic flatscreen was mounted above the mant
el, and when they weren't watching anything it displayed the time in boxy red numerals a foot high, big enough that Sarah could see them from across the room; as she'd often quipped, it was a good thing that she hadn't been an optical astronomer. It was now 3:17 in the afternoon. As Don watched, the remaining segments in the rightmost digit lit up; 3:18. The party was supposed to have begun at 3:00, but no one was here yet, and Sarah was still upstairs getting ready.
Don made a mental vow to try to not be short with the grandchildren. He never meant to snap at them, but somehow, he always did; there was a constant background level of pain at his age, and it frayed his temper.
He heard the front door opening. The house knew the kids’ biometrics, and they always let themselves in without ringing the bell. The living room had a short staircase at one end that led down to the entryway and a taller one at the other going up to the bedrooms. Don walked over to the base of the one going up. “Sarah!” he called. “They're here!"
He then made his way to the other end of the room, each footfall punctuated by a tiny jab of pain. No one had come up yet—this was Toronto in February, and, global warming be damned, there were still boots and jackets to be removed. Before he reached the top of the stairs, he'd sorted out the mêlée of voices; it was Carl's crew.
He looked at them from his elevated vantage point and felt himself smiling. His son, his daughter-in-law, his grandson, and his granddaughter—part of his immortality. Carl was bent over in a way Don would have found excruciating, pulling off one of his boots. From this angle, Don could clearly see his son's considerable bald spot—trivial to correct, had Carl been vain, but neither Don nor his son, who was now fifty-four, could ever be accused of that.
Angela, Carl's blond wife, was ten years younger than her husband. She was working to get the boots off little Cassie, who was seated on the one chair in the entryway. Cassie, who took no active role in this, looked up and saw Don, and a huge grin spread across her little round face. “Grampa!"
Analog SFF, October 2005 Page 1
