Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  We had modeled this scenario. The sheer arithmetical inertia of all that matter would buy us time, but in the long run a coherent, sustained, computational attack could still force its way through.

  How would we die? Losing consciousness first, feeling no pain? Or was the brain more robust than that? Would all the cells of our bodies start committing apoptosis, once their biochemical errors mounted up beyond repair? Maybe it would be just like radiation sickness. We'd be burned by decaying arithmetic, just as if it was nuclear fire.

  My laptop beeped. I swerved off the road and parked on a stretch of concrete beside a dark shopfront. A new icon had appeared on the screen: the letter S.

  Sam said, “Bruno, this was not my decision.”

  “I believe you,” I said. “But if you're just a messenger now, what's your message?”

  “If you give us what we asked for, we'll stop the attack.”

  “We're hurting you, aren't we?”

  “We know we're hurting you,” Sam replied. Point taken: we were guessing, firing blind. He didn't have to ask about the damage we'd suffered.

  I steeled myself, and followed the script the cabal had agreed upon. “We'll give you the algorithm, but only if you retreat back to the old border, and then seal it.”

  Sam was silent for four long heartbeats.

  “Seal it?”

  “I think you know what I mean.” In Shanghai, when we'd used Luminous to try to ensure that Industrial Algebra could not exploit the defect, we'd contemplated trying to seal the border rather than eliminating the defect altogether. The voting effect could only shift the border if it was crinkled in such a way that propositions on one side could be outnumbered by those on the other side. It was possible—given enough time and computing power—to smooth the border, to iron it flat. Once that was done, everywhere, the whole thing would become immovable. No force in the universe could shift it again.

  Sam said, “You want to leave us with no weapon against you, while you still have the power to harm us.”

  “We won't have that power for long. Once you know exactly what we're using, you'll find a way to block it.”

  There was a long pause. Then, “Stop your attacks on us, and we'll consider your proposal.”

  “We'll stop our attacks when you pull the border back to the point where our lives are no longer at risk.”

  “How would you even know that we've done that?” Sam replied. I wasn't sure if the condescension was in his tone or just his words, but either way I welcomed it. The lower the far side's opinion of our abilities, the more attractive the deal became for them.

  I said, “Then you'd better back up far enough for all our communications systems to recover. When I can get news reports and see that there are no more planes going down, no power plants exploding, then we'll start the ceasefire.”

  Silence again, stretching out beyond mere hesitancy. His icon was still there, though, the S unblinking. I clutched at my shoulder, hoping that the burning pain was just tension in the muscle.

  Finally: “All right. We agree. We'll start shifting the border.”

  * * * *

  I drove around looking for an all-night convenience store that might have had an old analog TV sitting in a corner to keep the cashier awake—that seemed like a good bet to start working long before the wireless connection to my laptop—but Campbell beat me to it. New Zealand radio and TV were reporting that the “digital blackout” appeared to be lifting, and ten minutes later Alison announced that she had internet access. A lot of the major servers were still down, or their sites weirdly garbled, but Reuters was starting to post updates on the crisis.

  Sam had kept his word, so we halted the counter-strikes. Alison read from the Reuters site as the news came in. Seventeen planes had crashed, and four trains. There'd been fatalities at an oil refinery, and half a dozen manufacturing plants. One analyst put the global death toll at five thousand and rising.

  I muted the microphone on my laptop and spent thirty seconds shouting obscenities and punching the dashboard. Then I rejoined the cabal.

  Yuen said, “I've been reviewing my notes. If my instinct is worth anything, the theorem I mentioned before is correct: if the border is sealed, they'll have no way to touch us.”

  “What about the upside for them?” Alison asked. “Do you think they can protect themselves against Tim's algorithm, once they understand it?”

  Yuen hesitated. “Yes and no. Any cluster of near-side truth values it injects into the far side will have a non-smooth border, so they'll be able to remove it with sheer computing power. In that sense, they'll never be defenseless. But I don't see how there's anything they can do to prevent the attacks in the first place.”

  “Short of wiping us out,” Campbell said.

  I heard an infant sobbing. Alison said, “That's Laura. I'm alone here. Give me five minutes.”

  I buried my head in my arms. I still had no idea what the right course would have been. If we'd handed over Campbell's algorithm immediately, might the good will that bought us have averted the war? Or would the same attack merely have come sooner? What criminal vanity had ever made the three of us think we could shoulder this responsibility on our own? Five thousand people were dead. The hawks who had taken over on the far side would weigh up our offer, and decide that they had no choice but to fight on.

  And if the reluctant cabal had passed its burden to Canberra, to Zürich, to Beijing? Would there really have been peace? Or was I just wishing that there had been more hands steeped in the same blood, to share the guilt around?

  The idea came from nowhere, sweeping away every other thought. I said, “Is there any reason why the far side has to stay connected?”

  “Connected to what?” Campbell asked.

  “Connected to itself. Connected topologically. They should be able to send down a spike, then withdraw it, but leave behind a bubble of altered truth values: a kind of outpost, sitting within the near side, with a perfect, smooth border making it impregnable. Right?”

  Yuen said, “Perhaps. With both sides collaborating on the construction, that might be possible.”

  “Then the question is, can we find a place where we can do that so that it kills off the chance to use Tim's method completely—without crippling any process that we need just to survive?”

  “Fuck you, Bruno!” Campbell exclaimed happily. “We give them one small Achilles tendon to slice ... and then they've got nothing to fear from us!”

  Yuen said, “A watertight proof of something like that is going to take weeks, months.”

  “Then we'd better start work. And we'd better feed Sam the first plausible conjecture we get, so they can use their own resources to help us with the proof.”

  Alison came back online and greeted the suggestion with cautious approval. I drove around until I found a quiet coffee shop. Electronic banking still wasn't working, and I had no cash left, but the waiter agreed to take my credit card number and a signed authority for a deduction of one hundred dollars; whatever I didn't eat and drink would be his tip.

  I sat in the café, blanking out the world, steeping myself in the mathematics. Sometimes the four of us worked on separate tasks; sometimes we paired up, dragging each other out of dead ends and ruts. There were an infinite number of variations that could be made to Campbell's algorithm, but hour by hour we whittled away at the concept, finding the common ground that no version of the weapon could do without.

  By four in the morning, we had a strong conjecture. I called Sam, and explained what we were hoping to achieve.

  He said, “This is a good idea. We'll consider it.”

  The café closed. I sat in the car for a while, drained and numb, then I called Kate to find out where she was. A couple had given her a lift almost as far as Penrith, and when their car failed she'd walked the rest of the way home.

  * * * *

  For close to four days, I spent most of my waking hours just sitting at my desk, watching as a wave of red inched its way across a map
of the defect. The change of hue was not being rendered lightly; before each pixel turned red, twelve separate computers needed to confirm that the region of the border it represented was flat.

  On the fifth day, Sam shut off his computers and allowed us to mount an attack from our side on the narrow corridor linking the bulk of the far side with the small enclave that now surrounded our Achilles’ Heel. We wouldn't have suffered any real loss of essential arithmetic if this slender thread had remained, but keeping the corridor both small and impregnable had turned out to be impossible. The original plan was the only route to finality: to seal the border perfectly, the far side proper could not remain linked to its offshoot.

  In the next stage, the two sides worked together to seal the enclave completely, polishing the scar where its umbilical had been sheared away. When that task was complete, the map showed it as a single burnished ruby. No known process could reshape it now. Campbell's method could have breached its border without touching it, reaching inside to reclaim it from within—but Campbell's method was exactly what this jewel ruled out.

  At the other end of the vanished umbilical, Sam's machines set to work smoothing away the blemish. By early evening that, too, was done.

  Only one tiny flaw in the border remained now: the handful of propositions that enabled communication between the two sides. The cabal had debated the fate of this for hours. So long as this small wrinkle persisted, in principle it could be used to unravel everything, to mobilize the entire border again. It was true that, compared to the border as a whole, it would be relatively easy to monitor and defend such a small site, but a sustained burst of brute-force computing from either side could still overpower any resistance and exploit it.

  In the end, Sam's political masters had made the decision for us. What they had always aspired to was certainty, and even if their strength favored them, this wasn't a gamble they were prepared to take.

  I said, “Good luck with the future.”

  “Good luck to Sparseland,” Sam replied. I believed he'd tried to hold out against the hawks, but I'd never been certain of his friendship. When his icon faded from my screen, I felt more relief than regret.

  I'd learned the hard way not to assume that anything was permanent. Perhaps in a thousand years, someone would discover that Campbell's model was just an approximation to something deeper, and find a way to fracture these allegedly perfect walls. With any luck, by then both sides might also be better prepared to find a way to co-exist.

  I found Kate sitting in the kitchen. I said, “I can answer your questions now, if that's what you want.” On the morning after the disaster, I'd promised her this time would come—within weeks, not months—and she'd agreed to stay with me until it did.

  She thought for a while.

  “Did you have something to do with what happened last week?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you saying you unleashed the virus? You're the terrorist they're looking for?” To my great relief, she asked this in roughly the tone she might have used if I'd claimed to be Genghis Khan.

  “No, I'm not the cause of what happened. It was my job to try and stop it, and I failed. But it wasn't any kind of computer virus.”

  She searched my face. “What was it, then? Can you explain that to me?”

  “It's a long story.”

  “I don't care. We've got all night.”

  I said, “It started in university. With an idea of Alison's. One brilliant, beautiful, crazy idea.”

  Kate looked away, her face flushing, as if I'd said something deliberately humiliating. She knew I was not a mass murderer. But there were other things about me of which she was less sure.

  “The story starts with Alison,” I said. “But it ends here, with you.”

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  * * *

  A PLAIN TALE FROM OUR HILLS

  Bruce Sterling

  Little Flora ate straw as other children eat bread.

  No matter how poor our harvests, we never lacked for straw. So Flora feasted every day, and outgrew every boy and girl her age. In summer, when the dust-storms off the plains scourge our hills, the children sicken. Flora thrived. Always munching, the tot was as round as a barrel and scarcely seemed to sweat.

  It was Captain Kusak and his young wife Baratiya who had volunteered to breed her. Baratiya was as proud of her little prodigy as if she had given birth to the moon. Bold strokes of this kind are frequently discussed in Government, yet rarely crowned with success. No one should have resented Baratiya's excellent luck in the venture. Still, certain women in our Hill Station took her attitude badly.

  Kusak should have done something useful and tactful about the matter, because he had also hoped and planned for a new kind of child, one fit to live more lightly on our stricken Earth. Captain Kusak tried to speak some common-sense to his wife, I think; but he was clumsy, so this made her stubborn. Baratiya lost friends and her social prospects darkened. She obsessed so single-mindedly about the child that even her husband grew estranged from her.

  Baratiya is more sensible now that other such children have been born to us. At the time, though, this woman was the talk of our Station.

  You see, though motherhood is the golden key to humanity's future, it can be a leaden burden in the present day. And as for the past—well! Many of us scarcely understand that a mere half-century ago, this world was crowded.

  Certain grand people existed in those greater, louder, richer days. These moguls knew that a general ruin was coming to the Earth—for they were clever people. They feared our planet's great calamity, and they schemed to avert it, or at least to adapt to the changes. They failed at both efforts, of course. The heat rose so suddenly that the rains dwindled and the mass of mankind starved in a space of years.

  Rich or poor, the ancients perished quickly, but some few of that elite had a fierce appetite for living. Among them was a certain grand lady, a pioneer founder of our own Hill Station. Privately, we call this persistent woman “Stormcrow.”

  I myself have nothing to say against her ladyship—if not for her, I would have no post within Government. However: if a little girl who eats straw differs from the rest of womankind, then a woman who never seems to age is even more remarkable.

  Our Stormcrow is black-eyed, black-haired, slender, brown, clever, learned and elegant, and, taken all in all, a dazzling creature. Stormcrow sleeps a great deal. She pecks at her food like a bird. She lives with her servants in a large and silent compound with shuttered blinds. Yet Stormcrow takes a knowing hand in all we do here.

  That old woman has no more morality than a rabbit. You had only to mention her name over the tea-and-oatmeal for every younger woman in the room to pull a sari over her head straightaway. Yet Stormcrow was witty and bright, and astoundingly well-informed—for Stormcrow, despite the world's many vicissitudes, owned a computer. She invoked her frail machine only once a day, using sunlight and a sheet of black glass.

  That machine was and is our Station's greatest marvel. Its archives are vast. Even if her own past glories had vanished, Stormcrow still possessed the virtual shadow of that lost world.

  They knew a great many fine things, back then. They never did our world much good through the sophistical things that they knew, but they learned astonishing skills: especially just toward the end. So: given her strange means and assets, Stormcrow was a pillar of our community. I once saw Stormcrow take a teenage girl, just a ragged, starving, wild-eyed, savage girl from off the plains, and turn her into something like a demi-goddess—but that story is not this one.

  We therefore return to Captain Kusak, a brusque man with a simple need of some undivided female attention. Kusak's gifted baby had overwhelmed his wife. So Kusak's male eye wandered: and Stormcrow took note of this, and annexed Kusak. Captain Kusak was one of our best soldiers, an earnest and capable man who had won the respect of his peers. When Stormcrow appeared publicly on Kusak's sturdy arm, it was as if she were annexing, not just him, but our whole so
ciety.

  Being the creature she was, Stormcrow was quite incapable of concealing this affair. Quite the opposite: she publicly doted on Kusak. She walked with him openly, called him pet names, tempted him with special delicacies, dressed him in past ways.... Stormcrow was clawing herself from her world of screen-phantoms into the simpler, honest light of our present day.

  Decent people were of course appalled by this. Appalled and titillated. It does not reflect entirely well on us that we spoke so much about the scandal. But we did.

  Baratiya seemed at first indifferent to developments. The absence of her tactless husband allowed her to surrender completely to her child-obsession. Baratiya favored everyone she knew with every scrap of news about the child's digestion and growth rates. However, even if the child of a woman's loins is a technical masterpiece, that is not the end of the world. Not even raw apocalypse can end this world, which is something we hill folk understand that our forebears did not.

  Blinded with motherly pride, Baratiya overlooked her husband's infatuation, but some eight lady friends took pains to fully explain the situation to her. Proud Baratiya was not entirely lost to sense and reason. She saw the truth plainly: she was in a war. A war between heritage and possibility.

  When Kusak returned home to Baratiya, an event increasingly rare, he was much too kind and considerate to her, and he spoke far too much about incomprehensible things. He had seen visions in Stormcrow's ancient screens: ideas and concepts which were once of the utmost consequence, but which no longer constitute the world. Baratiya could never compete with Stormcrow in such arcane matters. Still, Baratiya understood her husband much better than Kusak understood her. In fact, Baratiya knew Captain Kusak better than Kusak knew anything.

  So she nerved herself for the fight.

  Certain consequential and outstanding people run our Government. If they send a captain's wife a nicely printed invitation to eat, drink, dance, sing, and to “mingle with society,” then it behooves her to attend.