by Vernor Vinge
"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 ... [email protected].
In the real world, that must have been around June 15, 2012. Why? Well, at the beginning of their next run, guess who showed up?
Dixie Mae Leigh. Mad as hell.
The message had ended up on Dixie Mae’s work queue, and she had been sufficiently insulted to go raging off across the campus. Dixie Mae had spent the whole day bouncing from building to building, mostly making enemies. Not even Ellen or Ellen had been persuaded to come along. On the other hand, back in the early revs, the landscape reality had been simpler. Dixie Mae had been able to come into Rob’s lair directly from the asphalt walkway.
Danny glanced at Dixie Mae. "And we can only guess how many times you never saw the email, or decided the random obscenities were not meant for you, or just walked in the wrong direction. Dumb luck eventually carried the day."
"Maybe. But I don’t take to being insulted, and I go for the top."
Rob waved them both silent, never looking up from the cookie file: After their first success, Rob and Danny had fine-tuned the email, had learned more from each new Dixie Mae about who was in the other buildings on the hill and how–like the Ellens–they might be used.
"Victor!" Rob and the twins saw the reference at the same time. Rob stopped the autoscroll and they studied the paragraph. "Yes. We’ve seen Victor before. And five revs ago, he actually made it as far as this time. He killed his thread then, too." Rob followed a link marked taking care of Victor. "Oh. Okay. Danny, we’ll have to tweak the log files–"
They stayed almost three hours more. Too long maybe, but Rob and Danny wanted to hear everything the Ellens and Dixie Mae could tell them about the simulation, and who else they had seen. The cookie history showed that things were always changing, getting more elaborate, involving more money-making uses of people Gerry had uploaded.
And they all wanted to keep talking. Except for poor Danny, the cookie said nothing about whether they still existed outside. In a way, knowing each other now was what kept them real.
Dixie Mae could tell that Danny felt that way, even when he complained: "It’s just not safe having to contact unrelated people, depending on them to get the word to up here. "
"So, Danny, you want the three of us to just run and run and never know the truth?"
"No, Dixie Mae, but this is dangerous for you, too. As a matter of fact, in most of your runs, you stay clueless." He waved at the history. "We only see you once per each of our ‘year-long’ runs. II guess that’s the best evidence that visiting us is risky."
The Ellens leaned forward, "Okay, then let’s see how things would work without us." The four of them looked over the oldest history entries and argued jargon that meant nothing to Dixie Mae. It all added up to the fact that any local clues left in Rob’s data would be easy for Gerry Reich to detect. On the other hand, messing with unused storage in the intranet mail system was possible, and it was much easier to cloak because the clues could be spread across several other projects.
The Ellens grinned, "So you really do need us, or at least you need Dixie Mae. But don’t worry; we need you, and you have lots to do in your next year. During that time, you’ve got to make some credible progress with what Gerry wants. You saw what that is. Maybe you hardware types don’t realize it, but–" she clicked on a link to the bulleted list of "minimum goals" that Reich had set for Rob and Danny. "–Prof. Reich is asking you for system improvements that would make it easier to partition the projects. And see this stuff about selective decoherence: Ever hear of cognitive haze? I bet with this improvement, Reich could actually do limited meddling with uploaded brain state. That would eliminate date and memory inconsistencies. We might not even recognize cookie clues then!"
D
anny looked at the list. "Controlled decoherence?" He followed the link through to an extended discussion. "I wondered what that was. We need to talk about this."
"Yes–wait! Two of us get rebooted in–my God, in thirty minutes." The Ellens looked at each other and then at Dixie Mae.
Danny looked stricken, all his strategic analysis forgotten. "But one of you Ellens is on a threemonth cycle. She could stay here."
"Damn it, Danny! We just saw that there are checkpoints every sim day. If the NSA team were short a member for longer than that, we’d have a real problem."
Dixie Mae said, "Maybe we should all leave now, even us ... short-lifers. If we can get back to our buildings before reboot, it might look better."
"Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry," said Rob.
She got up and started toward the door. Getting back to Customer Support was the one last thing she could do to help.
Rob stopped her. "Dixie Mae, it would help if you’d leave us with a message to send to you next time."
She pulled the tattered printout from her pocket. The bottom was torn and smeared. "You must have the whole thing in the cookie."
"Still, it would be good to know what you think would work best to get ... your attention. The history says that background details are gradually changing."
He stood up and gave her a little bow.
"Well, okay." Dixie Mae sat down and thought for a second. Yeah, even if she hadn’t had the message memorized, she knew the sort of insults that would send her ballistic. This wasn’t exactly time travel, but now she was certain who had known all the terrible secrets, who had known how to be absolutely insulting. "My daddy always said that I’m my own worst enemy."
Rob and Danny walked with them back to the vault door. This was all new to the two guys. Danny scrambled out of the pit, and stared bug-eyed at the hills around them. "Rob, we could just walk to the other buildings!" He hesitated, came back to them. "And yeah, I know. If it were that easy, we’d have done it before. We gotta study that cookie, Rob."
Rob just nodded. He looked kind of sad–then noticed that Dixie Mae was looking at him–and gave her a quick smile. They stood for a moment under the late afternoon haze and listened to the wind. The air had cooled and the whole pit was in shadow now.
