The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  The stranger—Michael?—stared with equal astonishment, first at one Ellen and then the other. The Ellens made inarticulate noises just loud enough to interrupt each other and make them even more upset.

  Finally Michael said, “I take it you don’t have a twin sister, Ellen?”

  “No!” said both.

  “So one of you is an impostor. But you’ve spun around so often now that I can’t tell who is the original. Ha.” He pointed at one of the Ellens. “Another good reason for having security badges.”

  But Ellen and Ellen were ignoring everyone except themselves. Except for their chorus of “No!”, their words were just mutual interruptions, unintelligible. Finally, they hesitated and gave each other a nasty smile. Each reached into her pocket. One came out with a dollar coin, and the other came out empty.

  “Ha! I’ve got the token. Deadlock broken.” The other grinned and nodded. Dollar-coin Ellen turned to Michael. “Look, we’re both real. And we’re both only-children.”

  Michael looked from one to the other. “You’re certainly not clones, either.”

  “Obviously,” said the token holder. She looked at the other Ellen and asked, “Fridge-rot?”

  The other nodded and said, “In April I made that worse.” And both of them laughed.

  Token holder: “Gerry’s exam in Olson Hall?”

  “Yup.”

  Token holder: “Michael?”

  “After that,” the other replied, and then she blushed. After a second the token holder blushed, too.

  Michael said dryly, “And you’re not perfectly identical.”

  Token holder Ellen gave him a crooked smile. “True. I’ve never seen you before In my life.” She turned and tossed the dollar coin to the other Ellen, left hand to left hand.

  And now that Ellen had the floor. She was also the version wearing a security badge. Call her NSA Ellen. “As far as I—we—can tell, we had the same stream of consciousness up through the day we took Gerry Reich’s recruitment exam. Since then, we’ve had our own lives. We’ve even got our own new friends.” She was looking in the direction of Dixie Mae’s camera.

  Grader Ellen turned to follow her gaze. “Come on out, guys. We can see your camera lens.”

  Victor and Dixie Mae stood and walked out of the security cell.

  “A right invasion you are,” said Michael, and he did not seem to be joking.

  NSA Ellen put her hand on his arm. “Michael, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

  “Indeed! I’m simply dreaming.”

  “Probably. But if not—” she exchanged glances with grader Ellen “—maybe we should find out what’s been done to us. Is the meeting room clear?”

  “Last I looked. Yes, we’re not likely to be bothered in there.” He led them down a hallway toward what was simply a janitor’s closet back in Building 0994.

  MICHAEL LEE AND NSA Ellen were working on still another of Professor Reich’s projects. “Y’see,” said Michael, “Professor Reich has a contract with my colleagues to compare our surveillance software with what intense human analysis might accomplish.”

  “Yes,” said NSA Ellen, “the big problem with surveillance has always been the enormous amount of stuff there is to look at. The spook agencies use lots of automation and have lots of great specialists—people like Michael here—but they’re just overwhelmed. Anyway, Gerry had the idea that even though that problem can’t be solved, maybe a team of spooks and graduate students could at least estimate how much the NSA programs are missing.”

  Michael Lee nodded. “We’re spending the entire summer looking at 1300 to 1400UTC 10 June 2012, backwards and forwards and up and down, but on just three narrow topic areas.”

  Grader Ellen interrupted him. “And this is your first day on the job, right?”

  “Oh, no. We’ve been at this for almost a month now.” He gave a little smile. “My whole career has been the study of contemporary China. Yet this is the first assignment where I’ve had enough time to look at the data I’m supposed to pontificate upon. It would be a real pleasure if we didn’t have to enforce security on these rambunctious graduate students.”

  NSA Ellen patted him on the shoulder. “But if it weren’t for Michael here, I’d be as frazzled as poor Graham. One month down and two months to go.”

  “You think it’s August?” said Dixie Mae.

  “Yes, indeed.” He glanced at his watch. “The 10 August it is.”

  Grader Ellen smiled and told him the various dates the rest of them thought today was.

  “It’s some kind of drug hallucination thing,” said Victor. “Before we thought it was just Gerry Reich’s doing. Now I think it’s the government torquing our brains.”

  Both Ellens look at him; you could tell they both knew Victor from way back. But they seemed to take what he was saying seriously. “Could be,” they both said.

  “Sorry,” grader Ellen said to NSA Ellen. “You’ve got the dollar.”

  “You could be right, Victor. But cognition is my—our—specialty. We two are something way beyond normal dreaming or hallucinations.”

  “Except that could be illusion, too,” said Victor.

  “Stuff it, Victor,” said Dixie Mae. “If it’s all a dream, we might as well give up.” She looked at Michael Lee. “What is the government up to?”

  Michael shrugged. “The details are classified, but it’s just a post hoc survey. The isolation rules seem to be something that Professor Reich has worked out with my agency.”

  NSA Ellen flicked a glance at her double. The two had a brief and strange conversation, mostly half-completed words and phrases. Then NSA Ellen continued, “Mr. Renaissance Man Gerry Reich seems to be at the center of everything. He used some standard personality tests to pick out articulate, motivated people for the customer support job. I bet they do a very good job on their first day.”

  Yeah. Dixie Mae thought of Ulysse. And of herself.

  NSA Ellen continued, “Gerry filtered out another group—graduate students in just the specialty for grading all his various exams and projects.”

  “We only worked on one exam,” said grader Ellen. But she wasn’t objecting. There was an odd smile on her face, the look of someone who has cleverly figured out some very bad news.

  “And then he got a bunch of government spooks and CS grads for this surveillance project that Michael and I are on.”

  Michael looked mystified. Victor looked vaguely sullen, his own theories lying trampled somewhere in the dust. “But,” said Dixie Mac, “your surveillance group has been going for a month you say…”

  Victor: “And the graders do have phone contact with the outside!”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said grader Ellen. “I made three phone calls today. The third was after you and Dixie Mae showed up. That was voicemail to a friend of mine at MIT. I was cryptic, but I tried to say enough that my friend would raise hell if I disappeared. The others calls were—”

  “Voicemail, too?” asked NSA Ellen.

  “One was voicemail. The other call was to Bill Richardson. We had a nice chat about the party he’s having Saturday. But Bill—”

  “Bill took Reich’s ‘job test’ along with the rest of us!”

  “Right.”

  Where this was heading was worse than Victor’s dream theory. “S-so what has been done to us?” said Dixie Mae.

  Michael’s eyes were wide, though he managed a tone of dry understatement: “Pardon a backward Han language specialist. You’re thinking we’re just personality uploads? I thought that was science fiction.”

  Both Ellens laughed. One said, “Oh, it is science fiction, and not just the latest Kywrack episode. The genre goes back almost a century.”

  The other: “There’s Sturgeon’s ‘Microcosmic God’.”

  The first: “That would be rich; Gerry beware then! But there’s also Pohl’s ‘Tunnel Under the World’.”

  “Cripes. We’re toast if that’s the scenario.”

  “Okay, but h
ow about Varley’s ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’?”

  “How about Wilson’s Darwinia?”

  “Or Moravec’s ‘Pigs in Cyberspace’?”

  “Or Galouye’s Simulacron-3?”

  “Or Vinge’s deathcubes?”

  Now that the ‘twins’ were not in perfect synch, their words were a building, rapid-fire chorus, climaxing with:

  “Brin’s ‘Stones of Significance’!”

  “Or Kiln People!”

  “No, it couldn’t be that.” Abruptly they stopped, and nodded at each other. A little bit grimly, Dixie Mae thought. In all, the conversation was just as inscrutable as their earlier self-interrupted spasms.

  Fortunately, Victor was there to rescue pedestrian minds. “It doesn’t matter. The fact is, uploading is only sci-fi. It’s worse that faster-than-light travel. There’s not even a theoretical basis for uploads.”

  Each Ellen raised her left hand and made a faffling gesture. “Not exactly, Victor.”

  The token holder continued, “I’d say there is a theoretical basis for saying that uploads are theoretically possible.” They gave a lopsided smile. “And guess who is responsible for that? Gerry Reich. Back in 2005, way before he was famous as a multi-threat genius, he had a couple of papers about upload mechanisms. The theory was borderline kookiness and even the simplest demo would take far more processing power than any supercomputer of the time.”

  “Just for a one-personality upload.”

  “So Gerry and his Reich Method were something of a laughingstock.”

  “After that, Gerry dropped the idea—just what you’d expect, considering the showman he is. But now he’s suddenly world-famous, successful in half a dozen different fields. I think something happened. Somebody solved his hardware problem for him.”

  Dixie Mae stared at her email. “Rob Lusk,” she said, quietly.

  “Yup,” said grader Ellen. She explained about the mail.

  Michael was unconvinced. “I don’t know, E-Ellen. Granted, we have an extraordinary miracle here—” gesturing at both of them, “—but speculating about cause seems to me a bit like a sparrow understanding the 405 Freeway.”

  “No,” said Dixie Mae, and they all looked back her way. She felt so frightened and so angry—but of the two, angry was better: “Somebody has set us up! It started in those superclean restrooms in Olson Hall—”

  “Olson Hall,” said Michael. “You were there too? The lavs smelled like a hospital! I remember thinking that just as I went in, but—hey, the next thing I remember is being on the bus, coming up here.”

  Like a hospital. Dixie Mae felt rising panic. “M-maybe we’re all that’s left.” She looked at the twins. “This uploading thing, does it kill the originals?”

  It was kind of a showstopper question; for a moment everyone was silent. Then the token holder said, “I—don’t think so, but Gerry’s papers were mostly theoretical.”

  Dixie Mae beat down the panic; rage did have its uses. What can we know from here on the inside? “So far we know more than thirty of us who took the Olson Hall exams and ended up here. If we were all murdered, that’d be hard to cover up. Let’s suppose we still have a life.” Inspiration: “And maybe there are things we can figure! We have three of Reich’s experiments to compare. There are differences, and they tell us things.” She looked at the twins. “You’ve already figured this out, haven’t you? The Ellen we met first is grading papers—just a one-day job, she’s told. But I’ll bet that every night, when they think they’re going home—Lusk or Reich or whoever is doing this just turns them off, and cycles them back to do some other ‘one-day’ job.”

  “Same with our customer support,” said Victor, a grudging agreement.

  “Almost. We had six days of product familiarization, and then our first day on the job. We were all so enthusiastic. You’re right, Ellen, on our first day we are great!” Poor Ulysse, poor me; we thought we were going somewhere with our lives. “I’ll bet we disappear tonight, too.”

  Grader Ellen was nodding. “Customer-support-in-a-box, restarted and restarted, so it’s always fresh.”

  “But there are still problems,” said the other one. “Eventually, the lag in dates would tip you off.”

  “Maybe, or maybe the mail headers are automatically forged.”

  “But internal context could contradict—”

  “Or maybe Gerry has solved the cognitive haze problem—” The two were off into their semi-private language.

  Michael interrupted them. “Not everybody is recycled. The point of our net-tracking project is that we spend the entire summer studying just one hour of network traffic.”

  The twins smiled. “So you think,” said the token holder. “Yes, in this building we’re not rebooted after every imaginary day. Instead, they run us the whole ‘summer’—minutes of computer time instead of seconds?—to analyze one hour of network traffic. And then they run us again, on a different hour. And so on and on.”

  Michael said, “I can’t imagine technology that powerful.”

  The token holder said, “Neither can I really, but—”

  Victor interrupted with, “Maybe this is the Darwinia scenario. You know: we’re just the toys of some superadvanced intelligence.”

  “No!” said Dixie Mae. “Not superadvanced. Customer support and net surveillance are valuable things in our own real world. Whoever’s doing this is just getting slave labor, run really, really fast.”

  Grader Ellen glowered. “And grading his exams for him! That’s the sort of thing that shows me it’s really Gerry behind this. He’s making chumps of all of us, and rerunning us before we catch on or get seriously bored.”

  NSA Ellen had the same expression, but a different complaint: “We have been seriously bored here.”

  Michael nodded. “Those from the government side are a patient lot; we’ve kept the graduate students in line. We can last three months. But it does…rankle…to learn that the reward for our patience is that we get to do it all over again. Damn. I’m sorry, Ellen.”

  “But now we know!” said Dixie Mae. “And what good does it do you?” Victor laughed. “So you guessed this time. But at the end of the microsecond day, poof, it’s reboot time and everything you’ve learned is gone.”

  “Not this time.” Dixie Mae looked away from him, down at her email. The cheap paper was crumpled and stained. A digital fake, but so are we. “I don’t think we’re the only people who’ve figured things out.” She slid the printout across the table, toward grader Ellen. “You thought it meant Rob Lusk was in this building.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Who’s Rob Lusk?” said Michael.

  “A weirdo,” NSA Ellen said absently. “Gerry’s best grad student.” Both Ellens were staring at the email.

  “The 0999 reference led Dixie Mae to my grading team. Then I pointed out the source address.”

  “lusting925@freemail.sg?”

  “Yes. And that got us here.”

  “But there’s no Rob Lusk here,” said NSA Ellen. “Huh! I like these fake mail headers.”

  “Yeah. They’re longer than the whole message body!”

  Michael had stood to look over the Ellens’ shoulders. Now he reached between them to tap the message. “See there, in the middle of the second header? That looks like Pinyin with the tone marks written in-line.”

  “So what does it say?”

  “Well, if it’s Mandarin, it would be the number ‘nine hundred and seventeen’.”

  Victor was leaning forward on his elbows. “That has to be coincidence. How could Lusting know just who we’d encounter?”

  “Anybody know of a Building 0917?” said Dixie Mae.

  “I don’t,” said Michael. “We don’t go out of our building except to the pool and tennis courts.”

  The twins shook their heads. “I haven’t seen it…and right now I don’t want to risk an intranet query.”

  Dixie Mae thought back to the LotsaTech map that had been in the welcome-aboard broc
hures. “If there is such a place, it would be farther up the hill, maybe right at the top. I say we go up there.”

  “But—” said Victor.

  “Don’t give me that garbage about waiting for the police, Victor, or about not being idiots. This isn’t Kansas anymore, and this email is the only clue we have.”

  “What should we tell the people here?” said Michael.

  “Don’t tell them anything! We just sneak off. We want the operation here to go on normally, so Gerry or whoever doesn’t suspect.”

  The two Ellens looked at each other, a strange, sad expression on their faces. Suddenly they both started singing “Home on the Range,” but with weird lyrics:

  “Oh, give me a clone

  Of my own flesh and bone

  With—”

  They paused and simultaneously blushed. “What a dirty mind that man Garrett had.”

  “Dirty but deep.” NSA Ellen turned to Michael, and she seemed to blush even more. “Never mind, Michael. I think…you and I should stay here.”

  “No, wait,” said Dixie Mae. “Where we’re going we may have to convince someone that this crazy story is true. You Ellens are the best evidence we have.”

  The argument went round and round. At one point, Dixie Mae noticed with wonder that the two Ellens actually seemed to be arguing against each other.

  “We don’t know enough to decide,” Victor kept whining.

  “We have to do something, Victor. We know what happens to you and me if we sit things out till closing time this afternoon.”

  In the end Michael did stay behind. He was more likely to be believed by his government teammates. If the Ellens and Dixie Mae and Victor could bring back some real information, maybe the NSA group could do some good.

  “We’ll be a network of people trying to break this wheel of time.” Michael was trying to sound wryly amused, but once he said the words he was silent, and none of the others could think of anything better to say.

  UP NEAR THE HILLTOP, there were not nearly as many buildings, and the ones that Dixie Mae saw were single story, as though they were just entrances to something under the hills. The trees were stunted and the grass yellower.