He straightened up. "Then take some time off. Your target is stuck in that plane until it lands, or crashes, and the WormCam can happily track him by itself. And be- sides he's asleep."
"But he's with Popov. If he wakes up—"
"Then the recording systems will pick up whatever he says and does. Come on. Give yourself a break. And me."
. . . But I don't want to be -with you, Bobby, she thought. Because there are things I'd rather not discuss.
And yet. ..
And yet, she was still drawn to him, despite what she now knew about him.
You're getting too complicated, Kate. Too introverted. A break from this cold, lifeless place will indeed do you good.
Making an effort to smile, she took his hand.
It was a fine, still day, a welcome interval between the storm systems that now habitually battered the Pacific coast.
Cradling beakers of latte, they walked through the gar- den areas Hiram had built around his Wormworks. There were low earthworks, ponds, bridges over streams, and unfeasibly large and old trees, all of it imported and installed in typical Hiram fashion, thought Kate, at great expense and with little discrimination or taste. But the sky was a clear, brilliant blue, the winter sun actually delivered a little heat to her face, and the two of them were leaving a trail of dark footsteps in the thick silver layer of lingering dew.
They found a bench. It was temperature-smart and had heated itself sufficiently to dry off the dew. They sat down, sipping coffee.
"I still think you've been hiding from me," Bobby said mildly. She saw that his retinal implants had polar- ized in the sunlight, turning silvery, insectile. "It's the WormCam, isn't it? All the ethical implications you find so disturbing."
With an eagerness that shamed her, she jumped on that lead- "Of course it's disturbing. A technology of such power—" '•
"But you were there when we came to our agreement with the FBI. An agreement that put the WormCam in the hands of the people."
"Oh, Bobby ... The people don't even know the damn thing exists, let alone that government agencies are using it against them. Look at all the tax defaulters that sud- denly got caught, the parents cheating on child support, the Brady Law checks on gun buyers, the serial sex of- fenders."
"But that's all for the good. Isn't it? What are you saying—that you don't trust the government? This isn't the twentieth century."
She grunted. "Remember what Jefferson said: 'Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.' ... And what about the Repub- lican burglary? How can that be in the people's inter- est?"
"You can't know for sure that the White House used the WormCam for that."
"How else?" Kate shook her head. "I wanted Hiram to let me dig into that- He threw me off the case im- mediately. We've made a Faustian bargain, Bobby. Those guys in the Administration and the government agencies aren't necessarily crooks, but they're only hu- man. And by giving them such a powerful and secret weapon—Bobby, I wouldn't trust myself with such power. The Republican spying incident is just the start of the Orwellian nightmare we're about to endure.
"And as for Hiram—have you any idea how Hiram treats his employees, here at OurWorld? Job applicants go through screening all the way to a DNA sequence. He profiles all his employees by searching credit data- bases, police records, even federal records. He already had a hundred ways to measure productivity and perfor- mance, and check up on his people. Now he has the WormCam, Hiram can keep us under surveillance twenty-four hours a day if he chooses. And there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it. There have been a whole string of court cases that establish that employ- ees don't have constitutional protection against intrusive surveillance by their bosses."
"But he needs all that to keep the people working," Bobby said dryly. "Since you broke the Wormwood, ab- senteeism has rocketed, and the use of alcohol and other drugs at work, and—"
'This has nothing to do with the Wormwood," she said severely. "This is a question of basic rights. Bobby, don't you get it? OurWorld is a vision of the future for all of us—if monsters like Hiram get to keep the WormCam. And that's why it's important the technol- ogy is disseminated, as far and as fast as possible. Rec- iprocity: at least we'd be able to watch them watching us. ..." She searched his insectile, silvery gaze.
He said evenly, "Thanks for the lecture. And is that why you're dumping me?"
She looked away.
"It's nothing to do with the WormCam, is it?" He leaned forward, challenging her. "There's something you don't want to tell me. You've been this way for days. Weeks, even. What is it, Kate? Don't be afraid of hurting me. You won't."
Probably not, she thought. And that, poor, dear Bobby, is the whole trouble.
She turned to face him. "Bobby, the stud. The implant Hiram put in your head when you were a boy—"
"Yes?"
"I found out what it's for. What it's really for."
The moment stretched, and she felt the sunlight prickle on her face, laden with UV even so early in the i vear- I 'Tell me," he said quietly.
The Search Engine's specialist (putines had explained it all to her succinctly. It was a classic piece of early twenty-first-century neurobiological mind-tinkering.
And it had nothing to do with any dyslexia or hyperactivity, as Hiram had claimed.
First, Hiram had suppressed the neural stimulation of areas in the temporal lobe of Bobby's brain that were related to feelings of spiritual transcendence and mysti- cal presence. And his doctors tinkered with parts of the caudate region, trying to ensure that Bobby did not suffer from symptoms relating to obsessive-compulsive disor- der which led some people to a need for excessive se- curity, order, predictability and ritual—a need in some circumstances satisfied by the membership of religious communities.
Hiram had evidently intended to shield Bobby from the religious impulses that had so distracted his brother. Bobby's world was to be mundane, earthy, bereft of the transcendent and the numinous. And he wouldn't even know what he was missing. It was, Kate thought sourly, a Godectomy.
Hiram's implant also tinkered with the elaborate in- terplay of hormones, neurotransmitters and brain regions which were stimulated when Bobby made love. For ex- ample, the implant suppressed the opiate-like hormone oxytocin, produced by me hypothalamus, which flooded the brain during orgasm, producing the warm, floating, bonding feelings that followed such acts.
Thanks to a series of high-profile liaisons—which Hiram had discreetly set up and encouraged and even publicized—Bobby had become something of a sexual athlete, and he derived great physical pleasure from the act itself. But his father had made him incapable of love—and so, Hiram seemed to have planned, free of loyalties to anyone but his father.
There was more. For instance, a link to the deep por- tion of Bobby's brain called the amygdala may have been an attempt to control his propensity for anger. A mysterious manipulation of Bobby's orbito-frontal cor- tex might even have been a bid to reduce his free Will. And so on.
Hiram had reacted to his disappointment with David by making Bobby a perfect son: that is, perfectly suited to Hiram's goals. But by doing this Hiram had robbed his son of much that made him human.
Until Kate Manzoni found the switch in his head- She took Bobby back to the small apartment she'd rented in downtown Seattle. There they made love, for the first time in weeks.
Afterward, Bobby lay in her arms, hot, his skin moist under hers where they touched: as close as he could be, yet still remote. It was like trying to love a stranger. But at least, now, she understood why. She reached up and touched the back of his head, the hard edges of the implant under his skin. "You're sure you want to do this?"
He hesitated. "What troubles me is that I don't know how I'll be feeling afterwards . .. Will I still be me?"
She whispered in his ear. "You'll feel alive. You'll feel human."
He held his breath, then said, s
o quietly she could barely make it out: "Do it."
She turned her head. "Search Engine."
"Yes, Kate."
"Turn it off."
... and for Bobby, still warm with the afterglow of or- gasm, it was as if the woman in his arms had suddenly turned three-dimensional, solid and whole, had come to life. Everything he could see, feel, smell—the warm ash scent of her hair, the exquisite line of her cheek where the low light caught it, the seamless smoothness of her belly—it was all just as it had been before. But it was as if he had reached through that surface texture into the warmth of Kate herself. He saw her eyes, watchful, full of concern—concern for him, ,he realized with a fresh jolt. He wasn't alone anymore. And, before now, he hadn't even known he had been.
He wanted to immerse himself in her oceanic warmth. She touched his cheek. He could see that her fingers came away wet.
And now he could feel the great shuddering sobs that racked his body, an uncontrollable storm of weeping. Love and pain coursed through him, exquisite, hot, un- bearable.
SPACETIME
The inner chaos didn't subside.
He tried to distract himself. He resumed activities he had relished before. But even the most extravagant virtual adventure seemed shallow, obviously artificial, predictable, unengaging.
He seemed to need people, even though he shied away from those close to him—he was a moth fearing the candle flame, he thought, unable to bear the brightness of the emotions involved. So he accepted invitations he wouldn't otherwise have considered, talked to people he had never needed before.
Work helped, with its constant and routine demands for his attention, its relentless logic of meetings and schedules and resource allocation.
And it was a busy time. The new Mind'sEye VR headbands were moving out of the testing labs and ap- proaching production status. His teams of technicians had, suddenly, resolved a last technical glitch: a ten- dency for the headbands to cause synaesthesia in their users, a muddling of the sensory inputs caused by cross talk between the brain's centers. It was a cause for long celebration. They knew that IBM's renowned Watson research lab had been working on exactly the same prob- lem; whoever cracked the synaesthesia issue first would be the first to reach the market, and would have a clear competitive edge for a long time to come. It now looked as if OurWorld had won that particular race.
So work was absorbing. But he couldn't work twenty- four hours a day, and he couldn't sleep the rest of the time away. And when he was awake, his mind, un- leashed for the first time, was rampaging out of control.
As his car's SmartDrove him to the Wormworks, he cowered in fear from the high-speed traffic. An unre- markable tabloid news item—about vicious killings and rapes in the burgeoning Aral Sea water war—moved him to harsh tears. A Puget Sound sunset, glimpsed through a broken layer of fluffy black clouds, filled him with awe simply at being alive.
When he met his father, fear, loathing, love, admira- tion tore at him—all overlying a deeper, unbreakable bond.
But he could face Hiram. Kate was different. The surging need he felt—to cherish her, possess her, some- how consume her—was completely overwhelming. In her company he became inarticulate, as out of control of his mind as much as his body.
Somehow she knew how he was feeling; and, quietly, she left him alone. He knew she would be there for him when he was ready to face her, ahd resume their rela- tionship.
But at least with Hiram and Kate he could figure out why he felt the way he did, trace a causal relationship, put tentative labels to the violent emotions that rocked him. The worst of all were the mood swings he seemed to suffer without discernible cause.
He would wake up crying without reason. Or, in the middle of a mundane day, he would find himself filled with an indescribable joy, as if everything suddenly made sense.
His life before seemed remote, textureless, like a flat, colorless pencil sketch. Now he was immersed in a new world of color and texture and light and feeling, where the simplest things—the curl of an early spring leaf, the glimmer of sunlight on water, the smooth curve of
Kate's cheek—could be suffused by a beauty he had never known existed.
And Bobby—the fragile ego that rode on the surface of this dark inner ocean—would have to leam to live with the new, complex, baffling person he had suddenly become.
That was why he had come to seek out his brother. He took great comfort from David's stolid, patient presence: this bearlike figure with his bushy blond hair, hunched over his SoftScreens, immersed in his work, satisfied with its logic and internal consistency, scrib- bling notes with a surprising delicacy. David's person- ality was as massive and solid as his body; beside him Bobby felt evanescent, a wisp, yet subtly calmed.
One unseasonably cold afternoon they sat cradling cof- fees, waiting for the results of another routine trial run: a new wormhote plucked out of the quantum foam, ex- tending further than any had before.
"I can understand a theorist wanting to study the limits of the wormhole technology," Bobby said. "Pushing the envelope as far as you can. But we made the big break- through already. Surely what's important now is the ap- plication."
"Of course," David said mildly. "In fact the applica- tion is everything- Hiram has a goal of turning wormhole generation from a high-energy physics stunt, affordable only by governments and large corporations, into some- thing much smaller, easily manufactured, miniaturized."
"Like computers," Bobby said.
"Exactly. It wasn't until miniaturization and the de- velopment of the PC that computers were able to saturate the world: finding new applications, creating new mar- kets—transforming our lives, in fact.
"Hiram knows we won't keep our monopoly forever. Sooner or later somebody else is going to come up with an independent WormCam design. Maybe a better one.
And miniaturization and cost reduction are sure to fol- low."
"And the future for OurWorld," said Bobby, "is surely to be the market leader, all those little wormhole gen- erators."
"That's Hiram's strategy," David said. "He has a vi- sion of the WormCam replacing every other data- gathering instrument: cameras, microphones, science sensors, even medical probes. Although I can't say I'm looking forward to a wormhole endoscopy....
"But I told you I studied a little business myself, Bobby. Mass-produced WormCams will be a commod- ity, and we will be able to compete only on price. But I believe that with our technical lead Hiram can open up much greater opportunities for himself with differentia- tion: by coming up with applications which nobody else in the market can offer. And that's what I'm interested in exploring." He grinned. "At least, that's what I tell Hiram his money is being spent on down here."
Bobby studied him, trying to focus on his brother, on Hiram, the WormCam, trying'lo understand. "You just want to know, don't you? That's the bottom line for you."
David nodded. "I suppose so. Most science is just grunt work. Repetitive slog; endless testing and check- ing. And because false hypotheses have to be pruned away, much of the work is actually more destructive than constructive. But, occasionally—only a few times, prob- ably, in the luckiest life—there is a moment of tran- scendence."
"Transcendence ?"
"Not everybody will put it like that. But it's how it feels to me."
"And it doesn't matter that there might be nobody to read your papers in five hundred years' time?"
"I'd rather that wasn't true. Perhaps it won't be. But the revelation itself is the thing, Bobby. It always was."
On the 'Screen behind him there was a starburst of pixels, and a low bell-like tone sounded.
David sighed. "But nol today, it seems."
Bobby peered over his brother's shoulder at the 'Screen, across which numbers were scrolling- "Another instability? It's like the early days of the wormholes."
David tapped at a keyboard, setting up another trial. "Well, we are being a little more ambitious. Our WormCams can already reach every part of the Earth, crossing distan
ces of a few thousand kilometers. What I'm attempting now is to extract and stabilize wormholes which span significant intervals in Minkowski space- time—in fact, tens of light-minutes."
Bobby held up his hands. "You already lost me. A light-minute is the distance light travels in a minute ... right?"
"Yes. For example, the planet Saturn is around a bil- lion and a half kilometers away- And that is about eighty light-minutes."
"And we want to see Satum."
"Of course we do. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a WormCam that could explore deep space? No more ailing probes, no more missions lasting years ... But the difficulty is that wormholes spanning such large intervals are extremely rare in the quantum foam's probabilistic froth. And stabilizing them presents challenges an order of magnitude more difficult than before. But it's not im- possible."
Arthur C Clarke - Light Of Other Days Page 12
