by Vernor Vinge
Norman zigzagged around several crates, scampered up an incline. Behind him he could hear the infantrymen, shed of their flying gear, scrambling through the trap door.
They would never believe his honesty now that he had been seen consorting with the communists. Things did indeed look dark—he complimented himself on this pun delivered in the midst of danger—but he still had some slim chance of escaping capture and the terrible punishment that would be sure to follow. He had one undetonated PAX cartridge. Apparently its relatively gentle impact with his flesh had kept it from popping. Perhaps not all the soldiers were wearing the antiPAX nose filters—in which case he might be able to commandeer a helicopter, It was a wild idea, but the time for cautious plans was past.
The pier seemed to extend forever. Norman kept moving. He had to get away; and he was beginning to feel very sick. Maybe it was some effect of the gas. He ran faster, but even so he felt a growing terror. His mind seemed to be dissolving, disintegrating. Could this be the effect of PAX? He groped mentally for some explanation, but somehow he was having trouble remembering the most obvious things, while at the same time extraneous memories were swamping him more completely than they had for weeks. He should know what the source of the danger was, but somehow…I’m not all here! That was the answer! But he couldn’t understand what its significance was anymore. He no longer could form rational plans. Only one goal remained—to get away from the things that were stalking him. The dim gray glow far ahead now seemed to offer some kind of safety. If he could only reach it. Intelligence was deserting him, and chaos was creeping in.
Faster!
3,456,628 more shopping days until Christmas…Latitude 40.9234°N, Longitude 12l.30l8°W: Semi-hardened Isis missile warehouse; 102 megatons total…Latitude 59.00160°N, Longitude 87.4763°W: Cluster of three Vega class Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles; 35 megatons total…depth 105.4 fathoms…All-serv IFF codes as follows: I. 398547…436344…51…“Hey, let me out!”…Master of jungle poised, knife ready as…the nature of this rock formation was not realized until the plutonist theory of Bender’s…New Zealand Harbor Defense of Wellington follows: Three antisubmarine detection rings at 10.98 miles from…REO factory depot Boise, Idaho contains 242,925 million-hp consumer fusion packs; inventory follows. Cold gray light shining in the eyes. And I must escape or…“die with a stake driven through his heart,” the professor laughed. STOP or you’ll fall; MOVE or you’ll die; escape escape escape seascape orescape 3scape5scape2pecape4ea 1a00p30 6891350101121310100010101100001010101000011111010101—
The chimpanzee crouched frozen and glared madly at the soft gray light coming through the window.
THE TINY BLACK FACE looked up from the starched white of the pillow and stared dazedly at the ceiling. Around the bed hung the glittering instruments of the SOmatic Support unit. Short of brain tissue damage, the SOS could sustain life in the most terribly mangled bodies. At the moment it was fighting pneumonia, TB, and polio in the patient on the bed.
Dunbar sniffed. The medical ward of the Labyrinth used all the latest procedures—gone was the antiseptic stink of earlier years. The germicidals used were a very subtle sort—and only a shade different from antipersonnel gases developed in the ’60’s and ’70’s. William Dunbar turned to Pederson, the only other human in the room. “According to the doctors, he’ll make it.” Dunbar gestured to the unconscious chimp. “And his reactions to those questions you asked him under truth drug indicate that no great damage has been done to his ‘amplified personality.’”
“Yeah,” Pederson replied, “but we won’t know whether he responded truthfully until I have these coordinates for his computer checked out.” He tapped the sheet of paper on which he had scrawled the numbers Norman had called off. “For all we know, he may be immune to truth drug in the same way he is to PAX.”
“No, I think he probably told the truth, General. He is, after all, in a very confused state.
“Now that we know the location of his computer, it should be an easy matter to remove the critical information from it. When we try the invention on a man we can be much more careful with the information initially presented.”
Pederson stared at him for a long moment. “I suppose you know that I’ve always opposed your project.”
“Uh, yes,” said Dunbar, startled, “though I can’t understand why you do.”
Pederson continued, apparently without noticing the other’s answer, “I’ve never quite been able to convince my superiors of the dangers inherent in the things you want to do. I think I can convince them now and I intend to do everything in my power to see that your techniques are never tried on a human, or for that matter, on any creature.”
Dunbar’s jaw dropped. “But why? We need this invention! Nowadays there is so much knowledge in so many different areas that it is impossible for a man to become skilled in more than two or three of them. If we don’t use this invention, most of that knowledge will sit in electronic warehouses waiting for insights and correlations that will never occur. The human-computer symbiosis can give man the jump on evolution and nature. Man’s intellect can be ex—”
Pederson swore. “You and Bender make a pair, Dunbar; both of you see the effects of your inventions with narrow utopian blinders. But yours is by far the more dangerous of the two. Look what this one chimpanzee has done in under six hours—escaped from the most secure post in America, eluded a large armed force, and deduced the existence of an espionage net that we had completely overlooked. Catching him was more an accident than anything else. If he had had time to think about it, he probably would have deduced that distance limit and found some way to escape us that really would have worked. And this is what happens with an experimental animal! His intelligence has increased steadily as he developed a firmer command of his information banks. We captured him more or less by chance, and unless we act fast while he’s drugged, we won’t be able to hold him.
“And you want to try this thing on a man!
“Tell me, Doctor, who are you going to give godhood to first, hm-m-m? If your choice is wrong, the product will be more satanic than divine. It will be a devil that we cannot possibly beat except with the aid of some fortuitous accident, for we can’t outthink that which, by definition, is smarter than we. The slightest instability on the part of the person you choose would mean the death or domestication of the entire human race.”
Pederson relaxed, his voice becoming calmer. “There’s an old saw, Doctor, that the only truly dangerous weapon is a man. By that standard, you have made the only advance in weaponry in the last one hundred thousand years!” He smiled tightly. “It may seem strange to you, but I oppose arms races and I intend to see that you don’t start one.”
William Dunbar stared, pale-faced, entertaining a dream and a nightmare at the same time. Pederson noted the scientist’s expression with some satisfaction.
This tableau was interrupted by the buzzing of the comm. Pederson accepted the call. “Yes,” he said, recognizing Smith’s features on the screen.
“Sir, we just finished with those two fellows we picked up on the auto pier,” the aide spoke somewhat nervously. “One is Boris Kuchenko, the yuk we’ve had spotted all along. The other is Ivan Sliv, who’s been working for the last nine months as a code man at Sawyer under the name of Ian Sloane. We didn’t suspect him at all before. Anyway, we gave both of them a deep-probe treatment, and then erased their memories of what’s happened today, so we could release them and use them as tracers.”
“Fine,” replied Pederson.
“They’ve been doing the darndest things, those spies.” Smith swallowed. “But that isn’t what this call is about.”
“Oh?”
“Can I talk? Are you alone?”
“Spit it out, Smith.”
“Sir, this Sliv is really a top man. Some of his memories are under blocks th
at I’m sure the Russkies’ never thought we could break. Sir—he knows of a project the Sovs are running in an artificial cave system under the Urals. They’ve taken a dog and wired it—wired it into a computer. Sliv has heard the dog talk, just like Dunbar’s chimp. Apparently this is the big project they’re pouring their resources into to the exclusion of all others. In fact, one of Sliv’s main duties was to detect and obstruct any similar project here. When all the bugs have been worked out, Stark, or one of the other Red chiefs is going to use it on himself and—”
Pederson turned away from the screen, stopped listening. He half noticed Dunbar’s face, even paler than before. He felt the same sinking, empty sensation he had four years before when he had heard of Bender’s fusion pack. Always it was the same pattern. The invention, the analysis of the dangers, the attempt at suppression, and then the crushing knowledge that no invention can really be suppressed and that the present case is no exception. Invention came after invention, each with greater changes. Bender’s pack would ultimately mean the dissolution of central collections of power, of cities—but Dunbar’s invention meant an increased capability for invention.
Somewhere under the Urals slept a very smart son of a bitch indeed…
And so he must choose between the certain disaster of having a Russian dictator with superhuman intelligence, and the probable disaster involved in beating the enemy to the punch.
He knew what the decision must be; as a practical man he must adapt to changes beyond his control, must plan for the safest possible handling of the unavoidable.
…For better or worse, the world would soon be unimaginably different.
Of course, I never wrote the “important” story, the sequel about the first amplified human. Once I tried something similar. John Campbell’s letter of rejection began: “Sorry—you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.” The moral: Keep your supermen offstage, or deal with them when they are children (Wilmar Shiras’s Children of the Atom), or when they are in disguise (Campbell’s own story “The Idealists”). (There is another possibility, one that John never mentioned to me: You can deal with the superman when s/he’s senile. This option was used to very amusing effect in one episode of the Quark television series.)
“Bookworm, Run!” and its lesson were important to me. Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem writers face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity—a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied—and the world will pass beyond our understanding. In one form or another, this Technological Singularity haunts many science-fiction writers: A bright fellow like Mark Twain could predict television, but such extrapolation is forever beyond, say, a dog. The best we writers can do is creep up on the Singularity, and hang ten at its edge.
(My extended song-and-dance about this idea is at http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html. In that 1993 essay, I try to track the history of this idea in the twentieth century. Since then I have come to realize even more how my 1960s orientation was simply a product of ideas that others—such as Licklider, Ashby, and Good—had put into the air.)
THE ACCOMPLICE
Warning: There are spoilers in this introduction.
Fred Pohl published my short story “The Accomplice” in the April 1967 issue of If. It was only my third story to appear in print. Wolgang Jeschke included a German translation of the story in his collection, Science Fiction Story-Reader 16. Its only other appearances were in two program books. So “The Accomplice” is among my least-reprinted stories. Why is that?
The quality of the writing is about average for what I could manage in the 1960s. The hero’s background is probably more intriguing than in my earlier stories. And the ideas? Ah, there’s the problem. To date, “The Accomplice” is the most irritating combination of embarrassing gaffes and neat insights that I have ever created. More than once, I have held it back from reprint collections.
Darrell Schweitzer wrote a marvelously kind and generous piece about the things I got right in “The Accomplice” (The New York Review of Science Fiction, April 1996, pp. 14-15). As with a lot of SF stories, if you are allowed to pick the good calls, it can look deeply prophetic. “The Accomplice” takes place in 1993. I wrote the story in mid-1966. Either I’m smarter than I think, or I must have been exposed to Moore’s Law. (In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that certain aspects of computer power appeared to be doubling every year or two. In fact, this progress has continued into the early twenty-first century.) In any case, it looks like I have estimated the power of a 1993-era supercomputer fairly well. A major point of the story was that in just a few more years this computer power would be available on the consumer market. And yet…and yet, damn it, I still missed the impact that home computers would have on our world.
My central inspiration for writing the story was a computer application that has turned out to be spectacularly important: I had always been in love with Disney’s Fantasia. In 1963, just out of high school, during my first visit to Disneyland, it occurred to me that computers could be used to automate cartoon creation, putting—I thought—large-scale dramatic productions within the reach of individual artists. (Most of this has come to pass, though our largest projects still involve enormous teams of bright people.) The idea of computer animation was probably an independent insight, though I know now that people like Ivan Sutherland were already hard at work with real implementations! Years would pass before computers would be powerful enough to do high-quality motion imagery. That I got right!
And this illustrates a subtle deficiency in the vision of this story (well, it’s subtle compared to the other deficiencies!). For years before the first computer-animated short features, people were talking about the possibilities. Before Fantasia-class computer-animated features were possible, computer animation had become an industry. And yet, in my story, computer animation comes as a big surprise, suddenly emerging when computers are powerful enough to do significant figure animation in a major movie release. The generic form of this problem is widespread in SF, and very hard to avoid. With rare exceptions, if a story gimmick is something that could plausibly grow out of the present, then it and its consequences can’t reasonably be presented as a surprise in the story.
Some of the story’s failures don’t bother me: the aircars and the extremely successful space program of my 1993 era. Maybe that’s because such misforecasts have been so common in SF. (Besides, aircars may finally turn up now that they have become a joke. :-)
So what are the truly wretched things about “The Accomplice”? They’re mainly things like missing personal computers, failing to draw the inevitable conclusions from the things that I did get right. There’s the apparent sexism. There’s the “TV tape cartridge” that must be manually threaded into the video tape recorder. There’s…arghh, it’s too embarrassing to go on. But you can read the story and see for yourself.
And yet, I have a soft spot in my heart for “The Accomplice.” Nineteen-sixty-six seems a strange and alien time to me now; I can see myself peering out of it and wondering. I am very pleased the story has a chance to see daylight again.
(I did a little searching about the history of computer animation. Here is what I came up with in June 2001. I would be interested to learn of other references.
http://www.sun.com/960710/feature3/alice.html graphics
http://www.sun.com/960710/feature3/cg.html)
____________________
There was a thief on my staff. Hell. It was someone I trusted, too; it had to be.
Arnold Su grinned enthusiastically as he laid the proof on my desk. “Computer time is expensive, Mr. Royce,” he pontificated. Now that was a discovery. “And someone has embezzled more than seventy hours on our 4D5 during the last year.”
I raised my eyes prayerfully to the mural that covered three wal
ls of my office. The holograph gave the three-dimensional illusion that we were perched among tall conifers somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. You’d never guess that my office is buried under the Royce building in Greater San Diego.
“God preserve me from your efficiency, Arnold. Seventy hours on the 4D5 computer is worth four million dollars. You’re an extraordinary security officer; it only took you a year to discover that someone is robbing us blind.”
Su was pained by my unjustified criticism. “It’s someone with a private computer readout.”
“You’re pretty good at the obvious.” Most computers, especially the really big ones like our 4D5, can be programmed by remote consoles in the offices of favored company researchers. Such use is automatically recorded for later review.
“So it must be someone highly placed in the company. Someone smart. Chief, he actually programmed the computer to cover up for him. The 4D5 has been keeping two sets of books to conceal the embezzlement from our weekly checks.”
Of course there have been cases of computer-camouflaged embezzlement (usually of money) in the past—that’s one reason why CPA’s are computer technicians. However it takes a real expert to thoroughly cover his tracks. Evidently we were up against an expert. “How did you discover the theft, then, Arnie?”
