Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

by David Brin

  He almost turned away, but whatever he told himself, these people were not just clients. He wanted to be able to look them in the eyes after all this was done. “I won’t bring it up,” he said. “But others will, and they’ll want to know what I’m doing about the situation.”

  “Which is?”

  He opened his mouth, throat dry, and couldn’t say it. He just pushed on past her, into the hall.

  A folk ensemble was playing. There were tables around the sides of the hall and people roved, chatting. Nobody was dancing but the atmosphere was upbeat. And it should be; here were the inheritors of stubborn cultures that, after five hundred years of often-systematic oppression, were still here.

  And were they ever. For the next hour Nathan passed from table to table, saying hi to people he barely knew and, through them, meeting other focused and determined citizens of Canada’s youngest and fastest growing demographic. These were kids in their late twenties and early thirties who’d made great money in the oil sands and northern mines, and were now here starting families and pouring their wealth into the Maa-Nalth Treaty Association, the St’at’imc Chiefs Council or the Carrier Sekani Services. Several of these organizations were rapidly mutating into shadow governments in central B.C. There were so many historical groups, so many unpronounceable names and treaty claims that you’d think it was all chaos. There was an emergent order to it all, though. Gwaiicoin and the blockchain were supposed to be helping with that.

  He could see it in their eyes; everybody knew about the Sybil attack. They knew what it meant, but nobody confronted him. Somehow, that hurt more than if they’d beaten him and thrown him into the parking lot.

  After a while, exhausted, he found himself sitting across from Jeff. Casting about for something—anything—other than Gwaiicoin to talk about, Nathan asked, “How did Grace get you out so quickly today? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  Jeff pried the material of his shirt forward to show his bodycam. “I told the cops myself, but they wouldn’t listen. This thing has been uploading a low-frame‒rate video stream constantly for the past month. Every frame is signed with a hash and GPS coordinate and timestamped in the GPB. That’s the, uh, Global Positioning Blockchain. The GPB can verify where I was every second of every day and prove I didn’t break into anybody’s house. When I told them that, they wanted to see the video, but I told them to fuck off. They didn’t have the right. So we were…” He seemed to choose his next words delicately. “At an impasse.”

  “Grace knew something about it I didn’t, though.”

  Nathan had heard of the GPB—in that passing way he’d heard of about a million other applications of blockchain technology. GPB was an attestation system, providing the spatial equivalent to a timestamp. It provided a secure, decentralized, autonomous way for people all over the world to identify and track specific objects or people. Nathan had shied away from it because to him it had always seemed like the backdoor to some creepy surveillance society.

  “What did Grace know that you didn’t?”

  Jeff shook his head ruefully. “The whole lifelog’s encrypted with something called FHE. Fully homo-something encryption. Every frame of the lifelog is encrypted in the camera, before it’s uploaded, using a key that needs at least three people to unlock it. One of them being me, I guess.” He shrugged. “Anyway, because of FHE, the GPB can query that encrypted frame for the answer to specific questions—like, was I in somebody’s house by the ravine—without decrypting the data.”

  Fully homomorphic encryption. It was all the rage in some circles, the way Bitcoin had been around 2010. It really did let untrusted third parties analyze your data without decrypting it. You could trust them because they couldn’t even in principle have seen what those results were, even though they’d done the work to generate them. Only you could open the returned file.

  Nathan was happy for this mathematical distraction. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Because the GPB’s a transparent blockchain, we can prove the encrypted frames haven’t been tampered with or replaced once they’re uploaded. And we can analyze each frame to find out whether any of them show you straying off the path.… But how do we know you didn’t switch bodycams with somebody else?”

  “Because the frame rate’s high enough that if I swapped it, that would have been visible. The GPB can attest to the whole path I took through the day”—Jeff swooped his hand over the tabletop—“without us having to show any of the frames to the cops. Which alibis me out while securing my privacy.”

  “Wow.” The video feed was effectively also a blockchain, the truth of each new frame attested to by the ones that preceded it. Still … “You could hack it,” Nathan decided. “The camera’s the vulnerable point. If you mess with that…”

  Jeff was shaking his head. “You forget the mesh network. It was uploading data about me the whole time. The trees were watching. And the security cameras on the telephone poles—you know this near Musqueam land—they feed the same frames to our security company that owns them and to the GPB at the same time. So it’s like having multiple witnesses who can say they saw you somewhere. Difference is we don’t have to show that proof to a cop or a judge to make it official. Once you’ve got enough independent witnesses, it’s just effectively impossible for all of them to have been compromised.” He grinned. “The cops at the station didn’t get that, but they phoned somebody else who did. And that’s how it went down.”

  Nathan shook his head. “Cool.” With the GPB, FHE, and enough independent cameras, you could turn supposedly ephemeral Internet images into proof of position for any object on Earth, while guaranteeing anonymity for that object. You could do it for people, for trees, briefcases full of cash, cars …

  Too bad, he mused, you couldn’t also do it for something virtual, like a game character.

  Or a piece of software …

  Nathan stood up so suddenly he nearly knocked over the bench. “Shit!”

  Jeff looked up, eyebrows raised. “What?”

  “I gotta go.” Nathan turned, and practically ran from the hall.

  * * *

  Nathan realized Alicia was talking to him, and had been for some time. He glanced over; she was standing there in a bathrobe, hair tangled, looking at him with a really worried expression on her face.

  “One sec,” he said. He laid his hands on the keyboard and entered COMMIT. Then he hit RETURN, leaned back, and sighed.

  “You’ve been crazy typing for three hours,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  He looked at the clock in the corner of his monitor screen. It was 2:00 a.m. He was wide awake, practically jumping out of his skin with energy, though he knew how that went: the mental crash, when it came, would have him sleeping most of tomorrow.

  “Fixed it,” he said. “Now I gotta…” He turned from her to text the rest of the team.

  Her hand on his shoulder pulled him back to the moment. “Fixed what? Nathan, what the fuck are you doing? You’re scaring me.”

  “The, the Sybil attack. I found a fix.” Fix hardly summed up what he’d just done, but just now he was having a bit of trouble with natural languages, like English. Nathan’s head was full of the object code he’d been putting together, and that he’d just committed to a new fork of the Gwaiicoin wallet system.

  He rubbed his eyes. “Just one sec, and I’ll tell you all about it.” He texted the team; they’d mostly be asleep, but the buzz of their phones would wake a few, and if nobody got back to him in the next few minutes he’d start phoning them.

  The sell-off of Gwaiicoin was in full swing, and he’d been keeping an eye on it while he worked. Luckily, it hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared, for the simple reason that transactions above a certain size were taxed by the currency itself. When Alicia had moved her money from Gwaiicoin to dollars, some of those funds had been transferred to thin Gwaiicoin wallets. Until the poorest wallets divested, a goodly chunk of the money was going to stay in the system.

  Still, once the rich had diveste
d the poor would follow, and then the system really would collapse.

  He hit SEND, then turned to Alicia. “What if you could prove that each Gwaiicoin user was a human being and had one unique wallet?”

  “Oh, God.” She rummaged through her hair, then leaned back against the office wall. “No Sybil attack. Is that it?” She stopped, blinked at him. “I thought you couldn’t do that. You need a trusted third party and that was supposed to be the Social Insurance System. And they crapped out. They got hacked.”

  “What if you didn’t need that third party? If you identified each person as a unique position in spacetime, and that person’s one and only wallet is at that same position? Each wallet has a position and it has to correspond to a person’s position. Only one wallet is allowed for any position. So: unique person, unique wallet. Sybil attack solved.”

  She shook her head. “Just make up fake people.”

  Nathan laughed and jumped up. “But you can’t! That’s what’s so great about it!” The more bodycams, cop-cams, security cams, GPS-sensing sports and health trackers that uploaded their data to the Global Positioning Blockchain, the more witnesses there were to attest to peoples’ existence and location. FHE encryption meant you could hide the data from prying eyes, but still prove your identity in full public view.

  “It’ll take a while for the fix to work,” he admitted. “Weeks, months maybe, until everyone using the coin is accounted for. Once they all are, though, Sybil attacks will be impossible. Meanwhile…” He frowned at the growing divestment numbers.

  Alicia was wide awake now. “It won’t matter if it all goes south tonight.” She had put on her glasses and was staring out the window—probably watching in AR as the gold lines of Gwaiicoin pulled back from house after darkened house, like candle flames going out. “Though I suppose if the team reinvests it’ll send a strong signal.…” She turned to him and raised her glasses. “That what you’re going to do now?”

  Nathan sat there, gazing at the jumble of windows in the monitor. “No.” Giddiness battled with horror.

  He hadn’t told Grace what he’d done, though she’d find out soon enough. He couldn’t avoid Alicia, though.

  “I didn’t divest,” he said, still staring at the screen. “I could have. Should have, I guess. Maybe I panicked, I dunno, I—”

  “Nathan.” She came to lean on the table next to him. “What did you do?”

  “I gave it away.” A half-hysterical laugh rose out of him. “All of it. Straight into the potlatch account—swoosh!” He zoomed his hand over the keyboard.

  The look of horror on Alicia’s face was perfect. The rest of the laugh burst its way out of Nathan, battling tears.

  He’d given away all his savings.

  “I gave it to the people, and now all I have…” He clicked over to his Gwaiicoin wallet. “… is a hell of a lot of eminence.”

  “So you didn’t divest. You—”

  “Invested. And if this crash turns around…”

  “Oh, Nathan, what have you done?”

  He slumped back, shaking his head, but smiling.

  “I don’t know. But just maybe…”

  He turned to look at the city skyline, picturing the fountaining flow of currencies: money, power, influence, and, joining them, a quality that those other media had never been able to carry: trust.

  “Maybe,” he murmured, half to himself, “I’ve found a new way to be rich.”

  The future will demand more than new ways to see.

  There will be new ways to think.

  SPORT

  KATHLEEN ANN GOONAN

  “Yes; yes,” says mother, lying like summer-slumped butter on the couch after her night’s work, eyes closed, having shed scrubs and donned a linen shift smooth-gray as a rainy day. Irritated as an itch by me, I know, but I keep picking at her.

  “Nanya did come to D.C., once.” Lines between closed eyes deepen. “Then she left.”

  She turns face-against the couch back, long spine curved, dreads waterfalling to the small, dissonant African rug. When I was a baby, I feared its weird cacophony and screamed whenever mother set me on it.

  Nanya never did.

  “She was a crazy woman. She needed medication. She wouldn’t take it. I was in medical school. You were little. I couldn’t take care of both of you.”

  A deep sigh, like she’s swatting away a fly so she can sleep. “Yes. She’s still alive. I think she lives with your great-uncle. He promised to take care of her. No, we can’t go see her. We’re way too busy. We can’t afford it. And it’s bad there.” She pretends to fall asleep.

  “Did she have a parrot? A gray parrot?”

  Shoulder-shrug shimmy into true sleep.

  That was before they took me—sorry, invited me, to serve my country in Yodaville.

  * * *

  Lucy clings to dream through rough shaking, but then it is a brilliant scarf-shredded grainy awakening.

  “Wake up.” Her mother.

  “Mmmm.” She rolls over.

  “They’re waiting for you in the living room.” Click of wall switch: dissonant white-light trumpets blare. A light thump on her hip. “Here’s some sweats.”

  “What time is it?” Eyes squeezed tight seeking lost color. She’s not usually this tired at six.

  “Two. Hop in the shower. I told them this isn’t in the contract and you have rights, but they said they’ll give you a pill. You don’t take them, do you?”

  “Mmmm.”

  A very clear sigh. “I hate that you’re doing this. You can stop, you know. You’re only fifteen. This is child abuse. They can’t keep us here, damn national emergencies. I found us a lawyer in…”

  Her mother’s voice purple wind roaring as Lucy sleepwalks to the bathroom.

  Pelting cacophony; hot/cold wake.

  The thing is, she likes what she does.

  * * *

  They gave her meds for it not knowing what it was when she was ten, practically over her mother’s dead body, but the school insisted; her mother after much research agreed to give them a try. Lucy was a big nuisance in the classroom. And at home. So much so that she got Wrong-Man Arthur, her mother’s boyfriend, ejected after a year, good riddance. She and her mother later laughed about him as they sat at their little table for two next to an open window in spring, curtains fluttering, as they ate poached eggs and drank hot chocolate, African kora springing on the CD player.

  Meds helped. Color calmed; shapes stopped shouting; time stopped stuttering. She could see how normal acted. She studied their ways, an alien in a world of intent. She observed, a scientist, that which most take for granted: faces, situations, reactions. She learned how to hide in plain sight.

  Pills taught her how to pass. She had friends, kind of. She went to birthday parties and kids smiled at her in the hall. She smiled back. In school, she did everything slowly. Sometimes she even made Cs. She thought she was being clever. It wasn’t fun to be laughed at. It wasn’t fun to have other kids think you were smart.

  She discovered that the mean girls were all unhappy, and that somehow it made them feel better to belittle others.

  She’d always known that humans were strange. She was strange too.

  But different.

  * * *

  Wet black curls chill her neck as the matched pair of blacksuits rush her outside. Front door to black Suburban-tank a frozen, distant tinge of pianolike notes: green, blue, red, yellow stars. Patsy, her usual driver minus her usual blues music, yawns in a cocoon of smooth black silence.

  “Who are you?” Lucy asks the two men who hustled her to the tank, one in the front seat, one next to her in the back. To give them a poke; she knows they will say nothing. Like rocks.

  Still half-asleep, her head fills with composition to her Someone, the Interlocutor. She knows she should not talk to him/her/it, not in any traceable way, and yet she has, she does, she will, because the Interlocutor’s questions have the flavor of caring: hot pepper, tamarind, ginger. The questioner’s brai
ntouch, like those distant piano-note stars, actually makes her mouth tingle; reminds her of some childhood comfort. She rearranges and remembers every word on the screen in her head, and when she has time she will send it to the place she is almost sure only she knows about, a specific nub/flavor/place on the swirling tangle of spaghetti-like international communications that will swirl through her once she is Inside.

  Yes: addictive. Which is why mother is angry: she can’t control Lucy. Not only is Lucy Saving The World, but it is fun.

  * * *

  ?

  Time is different for me. I think it is full of more of everything than it is for most people, so it lasts longer, but that’s probably not a good way to put it. Colors are sound for me, and sound is sometimes objects, and objects are sound.

  ?

  The pills did help me pass. I told you. But I couldn’t shut off my brain. I couldn’t shut off my DNA.

  ?

  I am a sport. Genetically strange.

  ?

  From what I know now, this happened: Big Yoda searched a gazillion records and found me. They took me to the study facility; there were a lot of specials there, and they certified and specialed me and sorted me into narrow amazements of various sorts and stamped me and microchipped me and said “Well done” to each other, drinking from champagne flutes. I had ginger ale in mine. It appears that I am many kinds of special, a serious conflagration of specials.

  ?

  Yeah. I got one tweet after I left, from my best friend, Biyach. “Where did they take you?” That was the last. Yeah, I know they cut me off. I don’t care.

  ?

  Yoda? Slang for a yottabyte: a quadrillion gigabytes: the storage and sorting power they have here. Yoda: my alien friend, for whom I am a human interface, an interpreter who speaks English. Kind of. Is Yoda alive? Sometimes … I feel it so. I sometimes even think Yoda will have offspring, gray monoliths like the Easter Island moai, even though Yoda is just underground acres, miles of wire, the latest and nano-est processing and memory materials. Bytes. Code.