The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  “Huh,” he said, looking over her shoulder, “you really do have a basement.” It wasn’t what Juan really wanted to say; he’d get to that in a minute.

  “Oh, yeah. All the newer homes in West Fallbrook do.”

  Juan noticed that this fact didn’t show up in the county building permits.

  There was a brightly lit room at the bottom of the stairs. The enhanced view was of warm redwood paneling with an impossibly high ceiling. Unenhanced, the walls and ceiling were gray plastic sheeting. Either way, the room was crowded with cardboard boxes filled with old children’s games, sports equipment, and unidentifiable junk. This might be one of the few basements in Southern California, but it was clearly being used the way Juan’s family used the garage.

  “It’s great we can take the surplus sensor gear. The only problem will be the stale emrebs—” Miri was already rummaging around in the boxes.

  Juan hung back at the doorway. He stood with his arms crossed and glared at the girl.

  She looked at him and some of the animation left her face. “What?”

  “I’ll tell you ‘what’!” The words popped out, sarcastic and loud. He bit down on his anger, and messaged her point-to-point. “I’ll tell you what. I came over here tonight because you were going to propose a local team project.”

  Miri shrugged. “Sure.” She replied out loud, speaking in a normal voice. “But if we hustle, we can nail the whole project tonight! It will be one less background task—”

  Still talking silently, directly: “Hey! This is supposed to be a team project! You’re just pushing me around.”

  Now Miri was frowning. She jabbed a finger in his direction and continued speaking out loud, “Look. I’ve got a great idea for the local exam. You’re ideal for the second seat on it. You and me are about as far apart in background and outlook as anybody in eighth grade. They like that in a team. But that’s all I need you for, just to hold down the second seat. You won’t have to do anything but tag along.”

  Juan didn’t reply for a second. “I’m not your doormat.”

  “Why not? You’re Bertie Todd’s doormat.”

  “I’m gone.” Juan turned for the stairs. But now the stairwell was dark. He stumbled on the first step, but then Miri Gu caught up with him, and the lights came on. “Just a minute. I shouldn’t have said that. But one way or another, we both gotta get through finals week.”

  Yeah. And by now, most of the local teams were probably already formed. Even more, they probably were into project planning. If he couldn’t make this work, Juan might have to kiss off the local test entirely. Doormat! “Okay,” Juan said, walking back into the basement room. “But I want to know all about your ‘proposed project,’ and I want some say in it.”

  “Yes. Of course.” She took a deep breath, and he got ready for still more random noise. “Let’s sit down…Okay. You already know I want to go down on the ground to Torrey Pines Park.”

  “Yeah.” In fact, he had been reading up on the park ever since she mentioned it to her parents. “I’ve also noticed that there are no recent rumorings hanging over the place…If you know something’s going on there, I guess you’d have an edge.”

  She smiled in a way that seemed more pleased than smug. “That’s what I figure, too. By the way, it’s okay to talk out loud, Juan, even to argue. As long as we keep our voices down, Bill and Alice are not going to hear. Sort of a family honor thing.” She saw his skeptical look, and her voice sharpened a little bit. “Hey, if they wanted to snoop, your point-to-point comm wouldn’t be any protection at all. They’ve never said so, but I bet that inside the house, my parents could even eavesdrop on a handshake.”

  “Okay,” Juan resumed speaking out loud. “I just want some straight answers. What is it that you’ve noticed at Torrey Pines?”

  “Little things, but they add up. Here’s the days the park rangers kept it closed this spring. Here’s the weather for the same period. They’ve got no convincing explanation for all those closures. And see how during the closure in January, they still admitted certain tourists from Cold Spring Harbor.”

  Juan watched the stats and pictures play across the space between them. “Yes, yes,…yes. But the tourists were mainly vips attending a physicality conference at UCSD.”

  “But the conference itself was scheduled with less than eighteen hours lead time.”

  “So? ‘Scientists must be adaptable in these modern times.’”

  “Not like this. I’ve read the meeting proceedings. It’s very weak stuff. In fact, that’s what got me interested.” She leaned forward, “Digging around, I discovered that the meeting was just a prop—paid for by Foxwarner and gameHappenings.”

  Juan looked at the abstracts. It would be really nice to talk to Bertie about this; he always had opinions or knew who to ask. Juan had to suppress the urge to call-out to him. “Well, I guess. I, um, I thought the UCSD people were more professional than this.” He was just puffing vapor. “You figure this is all a publicity conspiracy?”

  “Yup. And just in time for the summer movie season. Think how quiet the major studios have been this spring. No mysteries. No scandals. Nothing obvious started on April First. They’ve fully faked out the second-tier studios, but they’re also driving the small players nuts, because we know that Foxwarner, Spielberg/Rowling, Sony—all the majors—must be going after each other even harder than last year. About a week ago, I figured out that Foxwarner has cinema fellowship agreements with Marco Feretti and Charles Voss.” Who? Oh. World-class biotech guys at Cold Spring Harbor. Both had been at the UCSD conference. “I’ve been tracking them hard ever since. Once you guess what to look for, it’s hard for a secret to hide.”

  And movie teasers were secrets that wanted to be found out.

  “Anyway,” Miri continued, “I think Foxwarner is pinning their summer season on some bioscience fantasy. And last year, gameHappenings turned most of Brazil inside out.”

  “Yeah, the Dinosauria sites.” For almost two months, the world had haunted Brazilian towns and Brazil-oriented websites, building up the evidence for their “Invasion from the Cretaceous.” The echoes of that were still floating around, a secondary reality that absorbed the creative attention of millions. Over the last twenty years, the worldwide net had come to be a midden of bogus sites and recursive fraudulence. Until the copyrights ran out, and often for years afterwards, a movie’s on-line presence would grow and grow, becoming more elaborate and consistent than serious databases. Telling truth from fantasy was often the hardest thing about using the web. The standard joke was that if real “space monsters” should ever visit Earth, they would take one look at the nightmares documented on the worldwide net and flee screaming back to their home planet.

  Juan looked at Miri’s evidence and followed some of the major links. “You make a good case that this summer is going to be interesting, but the movie people have all cislunar space to play with. What’s to think a Summer Movie will break out in San Diego County, much less at Torrey Pines Park?”

  “They’ve actually started the initial sequence. You know, what will attract hardcore early participants. The last few weeks there have been little environment changes in the park, unusual animal movements.”

  The evidence was very frail. Torrey Pines Park was unimproved land. There was no local networking. But maybe that was the point. Miri had rented time on tourist viewpoints in Del Mar Heights, and then she had done a lot of analysis. So maybe she had that most unlikely and precious commodity, early warning. Or maybe she was puffing vapor. “Okay, something is going on in Torrey Pines, and you have an inside track on it. There’s still only the vaguest connection with the movie people.”

  “There’s more. Last night my theory moved from ‘tenuous’ to ‘plausible,’ maybe even ‘compelling.’ I learned that Foxwarner has brought an advance team to San Diego.”

  “But that’s way out at Borrego Springs, in the desert.”

  “How did you know? I really had to dig for that.”


  “My mother, she’s doing 411 work for them.” Oops. Come to think of it, what he had seen of Ma’s work this afternoon was probably privileged.

  Miri was watching him with genuine interest. “She’s working with them? That’s great! Knowing the connection would put us way ahead. If you could ask your mother…?”

  “I dunno.” Juan leaned back and looked at the schedule his mother had posted at home. All her desert work was under a ten-day embargo. Even that much information would not have been visible to outsiders. He checked out the privilege certificates. Juan knew his mother pretty well. He could probably guess how she had encrypted the details. And maybe get some solid corroboration. He really wanted to pass this exam, but…Juan hunched forward a little. “I’m sorry. It’s under seal.”

  “Oh.” Miri watched him speculatively. Being the first to discover a Foxwarner movie setup, a Summer Movie, would give Fairmont the inside track on story participation. It would be a sure-fire A in the exam; the size of such a win wouldn’t be clear until well into the movie season, but there would be some income for at least the five years of the movie’s copyright.

  If this issue had come up with Bertie Todd, there’d now be intense pleadings for him to think of his future and the team and do what his ma would certainly want him to do if she only knew, namely break into her data space. But after a moment, the girl just nodded. “That’s okay, Juan. It’s good to have respect.”

  She moved back to the boxes and began rummaging again. “Let’s go with what I’ve already got, namely that Foxwarner is running an operation in San Diego, and some of their Cinema Fellows have been fooling around in Torrey Pines Park.” She pulled out a rack of…they looked like milk cartons, and set them on top of another box. “Emrebs,” she explained opaquely. She reached deeper into the open box and retrieved a pair of massive plastic goggles. For a moment he thought this was scuba gear, but they wouldn’t cover the nose or mouth. They didn’t respond to info pings; he searched on their physical appearance.

  “In any case,” she continued, even as she pulled out two more pairs of goggles, “the background research will fit with my unlimited team’s work. We’re trying to scope out the movie season’s big secrets. So far, we’re not focusing on San Diego, but Annette reached some of the same conclusions about Foxwarner that I did. You wanna be on my unlimited, too? If this works tonight, we can combine the results.”

  Oh. That was really quite a generous offer. Juan didn’t answer immediately. He pretended to be fully distracted by all the strange equipment. In fact, he recognized the gadgets now; there was a good match in the 2005 Jane’s Sensors. But he couldn’t find a user’s manual. He picked up the first pair of goggles and turned it this way and that. The surface of the plastic was a passive optical lacquer, like cheap grocery wrap in reverse; instead of reflecting bright rainbow colors, the colors flowed as he turned it, always blending with the true color of the gray plastic walls behind it. It amounted to crude camo-color, pretty useless in an environment this smart. Finally, he replied, kind of incidentally, “I can’t be on your unlimited team. I’m already on Bertie’s. Maybe it doesn’t matter. You know Annette’s working with Bertie on the side.”

  “Oh really?” Her stare locked on him for a moment. Then, “I should have guessed; Annette is just not that bright by herself. So Bertie has been jerking all of us around.”

  Yeah, Juan shrugged and lowered his head. “So how do these goggles work, anyway?”

  Miri seemed to stew over Annette for a few seconds more. Then she shrugged too. “Remember, this equipment is old.” She held up her pair of goggles and showed him some slide controls in the headstrap. “There’s even a physical ‘on’ button, right here.”

  “Okay.” Juan slipped the goggles over his head and pulled the strap tight. The headset must have weighed two or three ounces. It was an awkward lump compared to contact lenses. Watching himself from the outside, he looked fully bizarre. The whole top of his face was a bulbous, gray-brown tumor. He could see Miriam was trying not to laugh. “Okay, let’s see what it can do.” He pressed the “on” button.

  Nothing. His enhanced view was the same as before. But when he cleared his contact lenses and looked out with his naked eyes—“It’s pitch dark from inside, can’t see a thing.”

  “Oh!” Miri sounded a little embarrassed. “Sorry. Take off your goggles for a minute. We need an emreb.” She picked up one of the heavy-looking “milk cartons.”

  “Meaning?”

  “MRE/B.” She spelled the word.

  “Oh.” Meal Ready to Eat, with Battery.

  “Yes, one of the little pluses of military life.” She twisted it in the middle, and the carton split in two. “The top half is food for the Marine, and the bottom half is power for the Marine’s equipment.” There were letters physically stenciled on the food container: something about chicken with gravy, and dehydrated ice cream. “I tried eating one of these once.” She made a face. “Fortunately, that won’t be necessary tonight.”

  She picked up the bottom half of the emreb, and drew out a fine wire. “This is a weak point in my planning. These batteries are way stale.”

  “The goggles may be dead anyway.” Juan’s own clothes often wore out before he outgrew them. Sometimes a few launderings was enough to zap them.

  “Oh, no. They built this milspec junk to be tough.” Miri set down the battery pack and bent Juan’s goggles into a single handful. “Watch this.” She wound up like a softball pitcher and threw the goggles into the wall.

  The gear smashed upwards into the wall and caromed loudly off the ceiling.

  Miriam ran across the room to pick up what was left.

  Col. Gu’s voice wafted down the stairwell. “Hey! What are you kids doing down there?”

  Miri stood up and giggled behind her hand. Suddenly she looked about ten years old. “It’s okay, Alice!” She shouted back. “I just, um, dropped something.”

  “On the ceiling?”

  “Sorry! I’ll be more careful.”

  She walked back to Juan and handed him the goggles. “See,” she said. “Hardly a scratch. Now we supply power”—she plugged the wire from the battery into the goggles’ headband—“and you try them again.”

  He slid the goggles over his eyes and pressed “on.” Monochrome reds wavered for a moment, and then he was looking at a strange, grainy scene. The view was not wraparound, just slightly fisheye. In it, Miri’s face loomed large, peering in at him. Her skin was the color of a hot oven, and her eyes and mouth glowed bluish-white.

  “This looks like thermal infrared,” except that the color scheme wasn’t standard.

  “Yup. That’s the default startup. Notice how the optics are built right into the gear? It’s kind of like camping clothes: you don’t have to depend on a local network. That’s going to be a win when we get to Torrey Pines. Try some other sensors; you can get help by sliding the ‘on’ button.”

  “Hey, yes!”

  BAT:LOW

  SENSORS

  BAT2:NA

  PASSIVE

  ACTIVE

  VIS AMP

  OK

  GPR

  NA

  NIR

  OK

  SONO

  NA

  >

  TIR

  OK

  XECHO

  NA

  SNIFF

  NA

  GATED VIS

  NA

  AUDIO

  NA

  GATED NIR

  NA

  SIG

  NA

  The tiny menu floated in the corner of his right eye’s view. The battery warning was blinking. He fiddled with his headband and found a pointing device. “Okay, now I’m seeing in full color, normal light. Boogers resolution, though.” Juan turned around and then back to Miri. He laughed. “The menu window is fully bizarre, you know. It just hangs there at the edge of my view. How can I tag it to the wall or a fixed object?”

  “You can’t. I told you this gear i
s old. It can’t orient worth zip. And even if it could, its little pea-brain isn’t fast enough to do image slews.”

  “Huh.” Juan knew about obsolete systems, but he didn’t use them much. With equipment like this, there could be no faerie overlays. Even ordinary things like interior decoration would all have to be real.

  There were lots of boxes, but no inventory data. Some of them must have belonged to the Goofus; they had handwritten labels, like “Prof. and Mrs. William Gu, Dept of English, UC Davis” and “William Gu Sr., Rainbow’s End, Irvine, CA.” Miri carefully moved these out of the way. “Someday William will know what do to with all this. Or maybe Grandmother will change her mind, and come visit us again.”

  They opened more of the USMC boxes and poked around. There were wild equipment vests, more pockets than you ever saw around school. The vests weren’t documented anywhere. The pockets were for ammunition, Juan speculated. For emrebs, Miri claimed; and they might need a lot of the batteries tonight, since even the best of them tested “WARNING: LOW CHARGE.” They dismembered the emrebs and loaded batteries onto two of the smallest vests. There were also belt-mount keypads for the equipment. “Hah. Before this is over, we’ll be wiggling our fingers like grown-ups.”

  They were down to the last few boxes. Miri tore open the first. It was filled with dozens of camo-colored egg shapes. Each of them sprouted a triple of short antenna spikes. “Feh. Network nodes. A million times worse than what we have, and just as illegal to use in Torrey Pines Park.”

  Miri pushed aside several boxes that were stenciled with the same product code as the network nodes. Behind them was one last box, bigger than the others. Miri opened it…and stood back with exaggerated satisfaction. “Ah so. I was hoping Bill hadn’t thrown these out.” She pulled out something with a stubby barrel and a pistol grip.