The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  “This reminds me of the basement labs in Norman Hall,” said one Ellen.

  “But there are people in Norman Hall,” said the other. They were both whispering.

  And here there were stairways that led only down. And down and down.

  Dixie Mae said, “Do you get the feeling that whoever is here is in for the long haul?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, the graders in B0999 were in for a day, and they thought they had real phone access to the outside. My group in Customer Support had six days of classes and then probably just one more day, where we answered queries—and we had no other contact with the outside.”

  “Yes,” said NSA Ellen. “My group had been running for a month, and we were probably not going to expire for another two. We were officially isolated. No phones, no email, no weekends off. The longer the cycle time, the more isolation. Otherwise, the poor suckers would figure things out.”

  Dixie Mae thought for a second, “Victor really didn’t want us to get this far. Maybe—” Maybe, somehow, we can make a difference.

  They passed a cross corridor, then a second one. A half-opened door showed them an apparent dormitory room. Fresh bedding sat neatly folded on a mattress. Somebody was just moving in?

  Ahead there was another doorway, and from it they could hear voices, argument. They crept along, not even whispering.

  The voices were making words: “—is a year enough time, Rob?”

  The other speaker sounded angry. “Well, it’s got to be. After that, Gerry is out of money and I’m out of time.”

  The Ellens waved Dixie Mae back as she started for the door. Maybe they wanted to eavesdrop for a while. But how long do we have before time ends? Dixie Mae brushed past them and walked into the room.

  There were two guys there, one sitting by an ordinary data display.

  “Jesus! Who are you?”

  “Dixie Mae Leigh.” As you must certainly know.

  The one sitting by the terminal gave her a broad grin, “Rob, I thought we were isolated?”

  “That’s what Gerry said.” This one—Rob Lusk?—looked to be in his late twenties. He was tall and thin and had kind of a desperate look to him. “Okay, Miss Leigh. What are you here for?”

  “That’s what you’re going to tell me, Rob.” Dixie Mae pulled the email from her pocket and waived the tattered scrap of paper in his face. “I want some explanations!”

  Rob’s expression clouded over, a no-one-tells-me-what-to-do look.

  Dixie Mae glared back at him. Rob Lusk was a mite too big to punch out, but she was heating up to it.

  The twins chose that moment to make their entrance. “Hi there,” one of them said cheerily.

  Lusk’s eyes flickered from one to the other and then to the NSA ID badge. “Hello. I’ve seen you around the department. You’re Ellen, um, Gomez?”

  “Garcia,” corrected NSA Ellen. “Yup. That’s me.” She patted grader Ellen on the shoulder. “This is my sister, Sonya.” She glanced at Dixie Mae. Play along, her eyes seemed to say. “Gerry sent us.”

  “He did?” The fellow by the computer display was grinning even more. “See, I told you, Rob. Gerry can be brutal, but he’d never leave us without assistants for a whole year. Welcome, girls!”

  “Shut up, Danny.” Rob looked at them hopefully, but unlike Danny-boy, he seemed quite serious. “Gerry told you this will be a year-long project?”

  The three of them nodded.

  “We’ve got plenty of bunk rooms, and separate…um, facilities.” He sounded…Lord, he sounded embarrassed. “What are your specialties?”

  The token holder said, “Sonya and I are second-year grads, working on cognitive patterning.”

  Some of the hope drained from Rob’s expression. “I know that’s Gerry’s big thing, but we’re mostly doing hardware here.” He looked at Dixie Mae.

  “I’m into—” go for it “—Bose condensates.” Well, she knew how to pronounce the words.

  There were worried looks from the Ellens. But one of them piped up with, “She’s on Satya’s team at Georgia Tech.”

  It was wonderful what the smile did to Rob’s face. His angry expression of a minute before was transformed into the look of a happy little boy on his way to Disneyland. “Really? I can’t tell you what this means to us! I knew it had to be someone like Satya behind the new formulations. Were you in on that?”

  “Oh, yeah. Some of it, anyway.” Dixie Mae figured that she couldn’t say more than twenty words without blowing it. But what the heck—how many more minutes did the masquerade have to last, anyway? little Victor and his self-terminating thread…

  “That’s great. We don’t have budget for real equipment here, just simulators—”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Ellens exchange a fer sure look.

  “—so anyone who can explain the theory to me will be so welcome. I can’t imagine how Satya managed to do so much, so fast, and without us knowing.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to explain everything I know about it.”

  Rob waved Danny-boy away from the data display. “Sit down, sit down. I’ve got so many questions!”

  Dixie Mae sauntered over to the desk and plunked herself down. For maybe thirty seconds, this guy would think she was brilliant.

  The Ellens circled in to save her. “Actually, I’d like to know more about who we’re working with,” one of them said.

  Rob looked up, distracted, but Danny was more than happy to do some intros. “It’s just the two of us. You already know Rob Lusk. I’m Dan Eastland.” He reached around, genially shaking hands. “I’m not from UCLA. I work for LotsaTech, in quantum chemistry. But you know Gerry Reich. He’s got pull everywhere—and I don’t mind being shanghaied for a year. I need to, um, stay out of sight for a while.”

  “Oh!” Dixie Mae had read about this guy in Newsweek. And it had nothing to do with chemistry. “But you’re—” Dead. Not a good sign at all, at all.

  Danny didn’t notice her distraction. “Rob’s the guy with the real problem. Ever since I can remember, Gerry has used Rob as his personal hardware research department. Hey, I’m sorry, Rob. You know it’s true.”

  Lusk waved him away. “Yes! So tell them how you’re an even bigger fool!” He really wanted to get back to grilling Dixie Mae.

  Danny shrugged. “But now, Rob is just one year short of hitting his seven year limit. Do you have that at Georgia Tech, Dixie Mae? If you haven’t completed the doctorate in seven years, you get kicked out?”

  “No, can’t say as I’ve heard of that.”

  “Give thanks then, because since 2006, it’s been an unbendable rule at UCLA. So when Gerry told Rob about this secret hardware contract he’s got with LotsaTech—and promised that Ph.D. in return for some new results—Rob jumped right in.”

  “Yeah, Danny. But he never told me how far Satya had gone. If I can’t figure this stuff out, I’m screwed. Now let me talk to Dixie Mae!” He bent over the keyboard and brought up the most beautiful screen saver. Then Dixie Mae noticed little numbers in the colored contours and realized that maybe this was what she was supposed to be an expert on. Rob said, “I have plenty of documentation, Dixie Mae—too much. If you can just give me an idea how you scaled up the coherence.” He waved at the picture. “That’s almost a thousand liters of condensate, a trillion effective qubits. Even more fantastic, your group can keep it coherent for almost fifty seconds at a time.”

  NSA Ellen gave a whistle of pretended surprise. “Wow. What use could you have for all that power?”

  Danny pointed at Ellen’s badge. “You’re the NSA wonk, Ellen, what do you think? Crypto, the final frontier of supercomputing! With even the weakest form of the Schor-Gershenfeld algorithm, Gerry can crack a ten kilobyte key in less than a millisecond. And I’ll bet that’s why he can’t spare us any time on the real equipment. Night and day he’s breaking keys and sucking in government money.”

  Grader Ellen—Sonya, that is—puckered up a naive expression. “What
more does Gerry want?”

  Danny spread his hands. “Some of it we don’t even understand yet. Some of it is about what you’d expect: He wants a thousand thousand times more of everything. He wants to scale the operation by qulink so he can run arrays of thousand-liter bottles.”

  “And we’ve got just a year to improve on your results, Dixie Mae. But your solution is years ahead of the state of the art.” Rob was pleading.

  Danny’s glib impress-the-girls manner faltered. For an instant, he looked a little sad and embarrassed. “We’ll get something, Rob. Don’t worry.”

  “So, how long have you been here, Rob?” said Dixie Mae.

  He looked up, maybe surprised by the tone of her voice.

  “We just started. This is our first day.”

  Ah yes, that famous first day. In her twenty-four years, Dixie Mae had occasionally wondered whether there could be rage more intense than the red haze she saw when she started breaking things. Until today, she had never known. But yes, beyond the berserker-breaker there was something else. She did not sweep the display off the table, or bury her fist in anyone’s face. She just sat there for a moment, feeling empty. She looked across at the twins. “I wanted some villains, but these guys are just victims. Worse, they’re totally clueless! We’re back where we started this morning.” Where we’ll be again real soon now.

  “Hmmm. Maybe not.” Speaking together, the twins sounded like some kind of perfect chorus. They looked around the room, eyeing the decor. Then their gazes snapped back to Rob. “You’d think LotsaTech would do better than this for you, Rob.”

  Lusk was staring at Dixie Mae. He gave an angry shrug. “This is the old Homeland Security lab under Norman Hall. Don’t worry—we’re isolated, but we have good lab and computer services.”

  “I’ll bet. And what is your starting work date?”

  “I just told you: today.”

  “No, I mean the calendar date.”

  Danny looked back and forth between them. “Geeze, are all you kids so literal minded? It’s Monday, September 12, 2011.”

  Nine months. Nine real months. And maybe there was a good reason why this was the first day. Dixie Mae reached out to touch Rob’s sleeve. “The Georgia Tech people didn’t invent the new hardware,” she said softly.

  “Then just who did make the breakthrough?”

  She raised her hand…and tapped Rob deliberately on the chest.

  Rob just looked more angry, but Danny’s eyes widened. Danny got the point. She remembered that Newsweek article about him. Danny Eastland had been an all-around talented guy. He had blown the whistle on the biggest business espionage case of the decade. But he was dumb as dirt in some ways. If he hadn’t been so eager to get laid, he wouldn’t have snuck away from his Witness Protection bodyguards and gotten himself murdered.

  “You guys are too much into hardware,” said NSA Ellen. “Forget about crypto applications. Think about personality uploads. Given what you know about Gerry’s current hardware, how many Reich Method uploads do you think the condensate could support?”

  “How should I know? The ‘Reich Method’ was baloney. If he hadn’t messed with the reviewers, those papers would never have been published.” But the question stopped him. He thought for a moment, “Okay, if his bogus method really worked, then a trillion qubit simulation could support about ten thousand uploads.”

  The Ellens gave him a slow smile. A slow, identical smile. For once they made no effort to separate their identities. Their words came out simultaneously, the same pacing, the same pitch, a weird humming chorus: “Oh, a good deal less than ten thousand—if you have to support a decent enclosing reality.” Each reached out her left hand with inhumanly synchronized precision, the precision of digital duplicates, to wave at the room and the hallway beyond. “Of course, some resources can be saved by using the same base pattern to drive separate threads—” and each pointed at herself.

  Both men just stared at them for a second. Then Rob stumbled back into the other chair. “Oh…my…God.”

  Danny stared at the two for another few seconds. “All these years, we thought Gerry’s theories were just a brilliant scam.”

  The Ellens stood with their eyes closed for a second. Then they seemed to startle awake. They looked at each other and Dixie Mae could tell the perfect synch had been broken. NSA Ellen took the dollar coin out of her pocket and gave it to the other. The token holder smiled at Rob. “Oh, it was, only more brilliant and more of a scam than you ever dreamed.”

  “I wonder if Danny and I ever figure it out.”

  “Somebody figured it out,” said Dixie Mae, and waved what was left of her email.

  The token holder was more specific: “Gerry is running us all like stateless servers. Some are on very short cycles. We think you’re on a one-year cycle, probably running longer than anyone. You’re making the discoveries that let Gerry create bigger and bigger systems.”

  “Okay,” said Lusk, “suppose one of us victims guesses the secret? What can we do? We’ll just get rebooted at the end of our run.”

  Danny Eastland was quicker. “There is something we could do. There has to be information passed between runs, at least if Gerry is using you and me to build on our earlier solutions. If in that data we could hide what we’ve secretly learned—”

  The twins smiled. “Right! Cookies. If you could recover them reliably, then on each rev, you could plan more and more elaborate countermeasures.”

  Rob Lusk still looked dazed. “We’d want to tip off the next generation early in their run.”

  “Yes, like the very first day!” Danny was looking at the three women and nodding to himself. “Only I still don’t see how we managed that.”

  Rob pointed at Dixie Mae’s email. “May I take a look at that?” He laid it on the table, and he and Danny examined the message.

  The token holder said, “That email has turned out to have more clues than a bad detective story. Every time we’re in a jam, we find the next hidden solution.”

  “That figures,” said Eastland. “I’ll bet it’s been refined over many revs…”

  “But we may have a special problem this time—” and Dixie Mae told them about Victor.

  “Damn,” said Danny.

  Rob just shrugged. “Nothing we can do about that till we figure this out.” He and Danny studied the headers. The token holder explained the parts that had already seen use. Finally, Rob leaned back in his chair. “The second-longest header looks like the tags on one of the raw data files that Gerry gave us.”

  “Yes,” sang the twins. “What’s really your own research from the last time around.”

  “Most of the files have to be what Gerry thinks, or else he’d catch onto us. But that one raw data file…assume it’s really a cookie. Then this email header might be a crypto key.”

  Danny shook his head. “That’s not credible, Rob. Gerry could do the same analysis.”

  The token holder laughed. “Only if he knew what to analyze. Maybe that’s why you guys winkled it out to us. The message goes to Dixie Mae—an unrelated person in an unrelated part of the simulation.”

  “But how did we do it the first time?”

  Rob didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was typing in the header string from Dixie Mae’s email. “Let’s try it on the data file…” He paused, checked his keyboard entry, and pressed return.

  They stared at the screen. Seconds passed. The Ellens chatted back and forth. They seemed to be worried about executing any sort of text program; like Victor’s notepad, it might be readable to the outside world, “That’s a real risk unless earlier Robs knew the cacheing strategy.”

  Dixie Mae was only half-listening. If this worked at all, it was pretty good proof that earlier Robs and Dannys had done things right. If this works at all. Even after all that had happened, even after seeing Victor disappear into thin air, Dixie Mae still felt like a little girl waiting for magic she didn’t quite believe in.

  Danny gave a nervous laugh. “How
big is this cookie?”

  Rob leaned his elbows onto the table. “Yeah. How many times have I been through a desperate seventh year?” There was an edge to his voice. You could imagine him pulling one of those deathcube stunts that the Ellens had described.

  And then the screen brightened. Golden letters marched across a black-and-crimson fractal pattern: “Hello fellow suckers! Welcome to the 1,237th run of your life.”

  AT FIRST, Danny refused to believe they had spent 1,236 years on Gerry’s treadmill. Rob gave a shrug. “I do believe it. I always told Gerry that real progress took longer than theory-making. So the bastard gave me…all the time in the world.”

  The cookie was almost a million megabytes long. Much of that was detailed descriptions of trapdoors, backdoors, and softsecrets undermining the design that Rob and Danny had created for Gerry Reich. But there were also thousands of megabytes of history and tactics, crafted and hyperlinked across more than a thousand simulated years. Most of it was the work of Danny and Rob, but there were the words of Ellen and Ellen and Dixie Mae, captured in those fleeting hours they spent with Rob and Danny. It was wisdom accumulated increment by precious increment, across cycles of near sameness. As such, it was their past and also their near future.

  It even contained speculations about the times before Rob and Danny got the cookie system working: Those earliest runs must have been in the summer of 2011, a single upload of Rob Lusk. Back then, the best hardware in the world couldn’t have supported more than Rob all alone, in the equivalent of a one-room apartment, with a keyboard and data display. Maybe he had guessed the truth; even so, what could he have done about it? Cookies would have been much harder to pass in those times. But Rob’s hardware improved from rev to rev, as Gerry Reich built on Rob’s earlier genius. Danny came on board. Their first successful attempt at a cookie must have been one of many wild stabs in the dark, drunken theorizing on the last night of still another year where Rob had failed to make his deadlines and thought that he was forever Ph.D.-less. The two had put an obscene message on the intrasystem email used for their “monthly” communications with Reich. The address they had used for this random flail was…help@lotsatech.com.