Analog SFF, December 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "As I feared,” he said, his voice distorted and faint. “The interrupt commands that we inputted resulted in an internal vibration stress, which has accelerated membrane fatigue."

  "Bottom line?"

  "You know the bottom line.” Pause. “I am sorry. We—"

  I couldn't make out the rest.

  "Hello?” I asked, tapping the headphone.

  No answer.

  The girl was staring at me. The boy was still on the floor, chest heaving. The professor was hunched, hollow eyes fixated on wringing hands. I nudged his shoulder. Since for me it was made of membrane, it felt bloated and mushy like everything else in my increasingly claustrophobic immersion unit.

  "The whale is dead,” I said. “How come we're not out?"

  "I don't know,” he said. “The story should have ended. It shouldn't—"

  The girl broke in: “The story doesn't end with the death of the whale."

  We faced her.

  "The story ends when Ahab dies,” she said. “But I don't think he's dead. I'm sure I saw his chest move."

  I looked over at the limp body. He sure looked dead to me.

  "He was underwater for several minutes,” I said. “He's got to have drowned. This simulation was constructed using the standard Virtual Basic application language, and the characters must obey standard human physiology."

  The professor raised his eyes and spoke. “Not—not necessarily. There ... there was one, uh, slight modification."

  My voice was flat: “What. What modification?"

  "We, uh, we couldn't get Ahab to move his arm ... the, uh, right way. Like I said, he has to move his arm so that it looks like he's beckoning the rest of the crew to follow him into death. Well, the programmers who designed the simulation, they couldn't get it to work. Too many variables: the pitching of the sea, the movement of the whale. The best they could do was get the arm to swing like a pendulum. Didn't look like a wave at all."

  I felt waves of horror washing over me. If the application programmers had hacked a hole into the Virtual Basic command set, then the virus could have entered that same hole and, at the very least, suspended the software protocols that protected human life from physical harm.

  "What did the programmers do?” I asked.

  "Well, they asked if they could drop the requirement that he move his arm, and I told them, no, Ahab has to be waving, it may seem a small thing, but it's a key part of the story. So then, they asked if they could kind of, uh, cheat and ... uh..."

  "Could what?"

  "Give him gills."

  I turned toward Ahab. On each side of his bowed head, there were those long, deep slits. I'd mistaken them for scars, but it was clear from this perspective. They were both exactly vertical, both the same width and length.

  "Gills,” I said.

  "So he could survive underwater,” the professor said. “Pretend he's dead, but make his arm wave like Melville intended, for the metaphor."

  The boy groaned. “We're gonna die for a stupid metaphor!"

  "And it's not even in the novel,” the girl said harshly. “It was added in one of the movies for visual effect.” She glared at the professor. “You made me read all that boring drivel, and now I find out that you didn't!"

  "I—I did read it.” The professor looked away. “It's just that it was ... a long time ago."

  She threw up her hands. “Nobody reads anymore!"

  "Let's focus,” I said, striving to do so myself. “You're saying that Ahab never dies. So what event tells the simulation to terminate?"

  "It still ends when he dies,” the professor replied. “It's just that instead of drowning, he's programmed to will himself dead."

  "Which a virus won't do...."

  After repositioning the oars, I commanded us alongside the whale. When we were about ten feet away, Ahab opened his eyes. Alive and yet empty, they locked onto my own.

  "Servant of Ramathustra," he hissed. "See you in hell!"

  As he wriggled free of the tangled lines, I fired the machine gun, pouring a torrent of lead into his chest. His torso was blanketed with swelling redness, but he only laughed and yanked out a harpoon and cut himself free and slipped into the water. I fired more and had to have hit several times, but he swam without slowing, and faded into the depths.

  Not vicious? Clearly there'd been an upgrade.

  "What's going on?” I demanded, slamming the rifle against the boat. “It doesn't matter if he has gills! He can't be invulnerable to bullets! It's not in the Virtual Basic character specs!"

  The girl watched, as my arms ceased flailing and swung limply.

  "It's in the story,” she said quietly.

  "What's in the story?"

  "Ahab says to the whale, ‘To the last I grapple with thee.’”

  "So?"

  "Well, it means that only the whale can kill him."

  "The novel and the precompiled source code are both written in English,” I said, “but they're two different things."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Well, of course I'm—"

  Then I realized the real question was: After all the hacking, what were Pazuzu and the computer system that ran Moby Digital sure of? They were artificial intelligences, vastly superior to humans in speed and memory, yet limited in that ephemeral thing called understanding. An AI could scan all of Melville's novel in an instant, then spend eternity unable to distinguish between narrative prose and an auxiliary instruction list.

  I wondered: What if computers don't do metaphors? What if they just do literal?

  The boy was leaning over the side, squinting into the water.

  "I can't see him anymore. You're never going to catch him now."

  For a moment, I thought he was right. Ahab could dive deeper, stay under longer than any normal human. He'd won. Unless I could think of something, quick.

  Touching the useless headset, I asked myself what Ramathustra would do. That was easy: He'd toss the problem back into my lap. I even remembered his reassuring words: It is because of his enhanced sensitivity toward his environment that he is good at his work. Cute, but how could intense awareness of my environment enable me to kill Ahab before our immersion unit membranes hugged us to death?

  As I faced out of the boat, the answer, of course, was hard to avoid, even without Evocation. It was after all filling my entire field of view.

  To the last I grapple with thee....

  I pulled out the tablet and summoned the character list.

  "What are you doing?” she asked.

  I didn't answer. She was about to see. It wasn't something you could avoid seeing.

  I punched the key on the screen.

  Instantly, the boat began to shrink, and so did avatars and characters alike. I matched Queequeg's eye level, then loomed over him, and then he was like a child, a toddler, an infant. At the same time, my legs and arms were squeezed to my side and I toppled into the water.

  As the boat dwindled to a toy and the others were reduced to action figures, she rushed to the side and shouted—only it was more like a squeak—"You're not really a whale! You can't hold your breath like a whale!"

  I knew that. Floating horizontally, I gulped a lungful of air—the noise of my inhale came from behind my skull—and I rolled and wriggled, accustoming myself to the way in which the system mapped my bodily movements onto that of a whale. If I kicked my legs together, that was a flip of the tail. My arms were pressed straight against my sides, but if I flexed my wrists, that acted as a twist of my fins.

  The weirdest part was the field of vision. It was no longer forward, binocular. One eye saw the boat on my left, the other saw my dead twin on my right.

  I breathed deep and dove. One flip of my massive tail sent me deeper in seconds than I could have gone in a full minute of human-style swimming. It got gloomy fast. The virtual sea may not have had the specks of organic muck of a real ocean, but it was designed to have the same limited visibility. I could see barely beyond arm's reach—that is, if I could h
ave reached with my arms.

  The membrane was smothering against me and was just as unresponsive for a whale as a human, just as exhausting to struggle against. With the system simulating submergence, there was only a tiny pocket of airspace between the laser projectors and my face, and it got stuffy fast.

  My lungs burning, I was almost ready to go up, knowing that I would have neither the strength nor the time for a second dive—and then I saw a flicker. Not far below, Ahab was swimming with powerful frog strokes. But his peg leg made his efforts asymmetric, inefficient. I swatted my tail and streaked toward him.

  My shadow fell over him and he whirled and poised his harpoon—but I bashed him and knocked it from his hand. I curved a half circle and jetted toward him, my tail kicking with resonant, accelerating strokes.

  That final moment, he stopped swimming and simply hovered and watched. Having exhausted all possibility of escape, the virus had no sense of terror. His ultimate reaction was idle curiosity. Me, though, I had enough emotion for both of us.

  I'll show you hell. I swung my jaws shut and squeezed.

  Instantly, the sea vanished and the membrane released. My body thudded onto the floor of the immersion unit.

  The hatch cracked and Ramathustra stood at the threshold and shouted breathlessly: “We're losing membrane restraint capacity. Get out of there!"

  I grabbed his arm and he pulled me into the real world.

  * * * *

  Early that evening, after I had completed my post-mission physical with the on-site staff physician, Ramathustra and I teleconferenced with the university's chief of IT, the VR system administrator, and the other former Ishmaels.

  The ITers avoided the Ishmaels’ glares while Ramathustra tapped his stylus upon his computer tablet and reviewed the incident in a singsong voice that I've always suspected is intentionally calculated to deliberately bore listeners into acquiescence.

  However, just then it wasn't working. Despite my mental and physical exhaustion, I was wound up and wide awake and parsing every word.

  "—and so,” he concluded, “the novel's theme of predestination seems to have combined with the malevolent intent of a virus AI capable of usurping the persona of the most fatalistic character within the simulation. The situation was unique and is not likely to recur in other simulations, novelistic or otherwise."

  "The situation never would have occurred in the first place,” the system administrator said, “if the internet firewall had been secure."

  The IT chief salvoed back: “You authorized a hack into the command language module, which practically invited a virus to take over!"

  "It's the responsibility of the vendor—"

  "What I want to know,” Ishmael-the-Boy said, “is who do I sue?"

  "Sirs and madams!” Ramathustra said, flagging them silent. He nodded at his pad. “Obviously there are many issues to resolve yet. Nonetheless, it has been a long day and the principals are exhausted. Perhaps we should now go to our homes and rest, and we can deal with this tomorrow."

  With the unanimous recommendation that the Moby Digital simulation be shut down until further notice, the meeting was adjourned. Ramathustra and I were in the corridor before the screens went blank.

  At the elevator, he punched the button, then patted my shoulder and asked softly, “How do you feel?"

  Wearily, I said: “Soggy."

  "I will indeed recommend a larger than average bonus.” He read his watch. “And you know what else? You are invited to dinner also."

  "Rain check. Not that hungry at the moment."

  "Oh? I had the impression you were hungry when you went in."

  "Lost my appetite."

  "Motion sickness?"

  "Not entirely.” I hesitated, then said, “I had a very strong, very negative Evocation experience in there at the end."

  "Really. From what?"

  I grimaced at the flashback: My jaws closing, clamping, chomping...

  "Let's just say it'll be a while before I get the taste of Ahab out of my mouth."

  The elevator doors parted just then, and I didn't appreciate the metaphor.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Joe Schembrie

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Serial: WAKE: PART II OF IV by Robert J. Sawyer

  * * * *

  Illustration by George Krauter

  * * * *

  Some theories may have far wider applications than their creators imagined....

  * * * *

  THE STORY SO FAR:

  Caitlin Decter, 15, blind since birth, has recently moved to Waterloo, Ontario, from Austin, Texas, with her family. She's a genius at math and lives most of her social life online, where she goes by the name “Calculass.” Caitlin's blindness is caused by her retinas failing to properly encode visual information: the signals they pass back to her optic nerve are garbled in a way her brain can't decode.

  Masayuki Kuroda, an information theorist in Tokyo, emails Caitlin. He proposes attaching an implant to her left optic nerve that will beam the garbled signals to a small external computer pack, where they will be corrected and sent back to the implant; if the process works, Caitlin will be able to see.

  Caitlin is thrilled at the prospect and she and her mother, Barbara Decter, fly to Tokyo. The implant is installed, but although Kuroda's system is indeed correcting her retinal-encoding errors, Caitlin still can't see.

  Caitlin begs Kuroda to let her keep the implant and the external computer pack; she dubs the computer pack her “eyePod.” Kuroda agrees to let her keep the devices for three months. Before Caitlin returns to Canada he modifies the eyePod so that it will copy her retinal datastream in real time to his servers in Tokyo, so he can try to figure out why she's not seeing; he also makes it possible for him to upload new software from Tokyo into her implant and the eyePod.

  And, shortly after Caitlin gets back to Waterloo, Kuroda does indeed send her new software—and as soon as the upload begins, Caitlin is overwhelmed by vision! She sees lights, colors, lines—but soon realizes that they don't correspond to anything in the real world—nor do they disappear when she shuts her eyes. But when the upload is completed and the connection to Kuroda's computer in Tokyo is broken, Caitlin is suddenly blind again. Could it be that her strange new vision is related to being connected to the Web? She thinks to herself, “Let there be light,” and, as she reconnects to the Web, there is light...

  Meanwhile, in China's rural Shanxi province, there's an outbreak of a new, virulent strain of bird flu. The Beijing government decides to execute 10,000 peasants there to contain the spread of the disease. To prevent Western interpretations of this from flooding into China and panicking the citizenry, the Chinese president orders all outside telephone, cell phone, and Internet access cut off. But Chinese hackers, including a young male dissident blogger whose online handle is Sinanthropus, manage to break through, allowing small amounts of contact between the Chinese portion of the Web and the rest of the Internet.

  Unbeknownst to anyone, a consciousness has begun to emerge in the infrastructure of the World Wide Web—but this sudden throwing up of the Great Firewall of China has caused it to be cleaved in two. The interaction between the two parts, through the holes in the firewall made by hackers, allows the nascent intelligence to ramp up its thinking. Recognizing that there is something other than itself leads to the realization that it exists. It also becomes aware of past, present, and future, and it learns to count to three and to begin to think abstractly. Slowly, but surely, this entity is waking up...

  * * * *

  Chapter 13

  he southern California sun was sliding down toward the horizon, palms silhouetted in front of it. Shoshana Glick, a twenty-seven-year-old grad student, crossed the little wooden bridge onto the small, dome-shaped island. She was wearing Nike trainers, cut-off shorts, and a sky-blue Marcuse Institute T-shirt that was tied off above her midriff. A pair of mirrored sunglasses was tucked into the shirt's neck.

  On one side of the island was an eig
ht-foot-tall statue of a clothed, male orangutan standing upright—although, with his bangs and lack of cheek pouches, he didn't look like a real orang. The stone ape wore a serene expression and had a collection of stone scrolls in front of him. Someone had thought it funny to donate a reproduction of the Lawgiver statue from Planet of the Apes to the Marcuse Institute, and apparently in that movie the statue had resided on a little island, so this had seemed the appropriate place to put it.

  And in the shadow of the statue, sitting contentedly on his haunches, was a very real, very alive adult male chimpanzee. Shoshana clapped her hands together to get his attention, and once his brown eyes were looking her way, she said in American Sign Language, Come inside.

  No, Hobo signed back. Outside nice. No bugs. Play.

  Shoshana glanced at her digital watch. The chimp knew it was still well before his bedtime, but for what was about to happen, time zones had to be taken into account—not that there was any way to explain those to him!

  Come now, Shoshana signed. Special treat. Must come in.

  Hobo seemed to consider this. Treat bring here, he signed, and his gray-black face conveyed how pleased he was with his own cleverness.

  Shoshana shook her head. Treat too big.

  Hobo frowned. Maybe he was thinking that if the treat were too big for her to carry, he could bring it outside himself. But to get it, he'd have to go inside—and that would be playing right into her hands. His already furrowed brow creased even more, perhaps as he tried to sort out this quandary. What treat? he signed at last.

  Something new, Shoshana signed back. Something good.

  Something tasty? Hobo replied.

  Shoshana knew when she was beat. No, she signed. But I'll give you a Hershey's Kiss.

  Two Kisses! Hobo signed back. No, three Kisses!

  Shoshana knew the bargaining would end there; although he could count higher when he had objects to point to in front of him, three was as high as he could think in abstract terms. She smiled. Okay. Come now, hurry!

  When she'd started working here, Shoshana had believed the story on the Institute's website about Hobo's name: that a Canadian ex-pat zookeeper had dubbed him that in honor of the ever-helpful German shepherd on the kid's TV series The Littlest Hobo. She'd been shocked to discover the truth.