Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  Mother.

  How could she have been so stupid not to have created a faster detection counter? She knew the flow rate of the gateway. She knew how many people were expected to be in the prison.

  Could it be that she’d done it on purpose? Afraid that she would find that her mother had not escaped? Afraid that knowing this would sap her will to continue fighting against the dictatorship?

  Aubry searched inside herself to find one of the blank areas—the portions of her mind where she had wiped away crucial information that must not fall into enemy hands if she were captured and tortured.

  Had she kept this other secret from herself as well?

  But if she had, she covered up any trace of doing so. Maybe it was an honest mistake. If so, she was lucky it hadn’t been the kind of mistake that would get her killed. You couldn’t afford many screwups, honest or self-inflicted, when you were one of the most wanted partisan fighters in the Met.

  Even if you were, at the same time, a sixteen-year-old girl who missed her mother terribly.

  As was right, the partisan fighter inside her took over. Aubry was careful and made no other mistakes. Before anyone thought to look for her in the tunnels, she had made her way through them, to the pole, and back to the partisan hiding places in the Met’s Integument.

  Back to a revolution already in progress.

  Twenty

  Danis felt the shock in her deepest being. Heat. Radiation. A blast through the grist.

  I’ve been dropped into the sun, she thought. Into the center of the sun.

  But it was more than that. It was in the grist—a wind blowing through. A tremor across a billion possible worlds.

  A long, long scream. A man’s ragged voice. After a moment, Danis recognized it as Dr. Ting’s.

  Danis looked up.

  Dr. Ting was spinning around and around like a top. He was swirling like water in a drain. Swirling away.

  Into the memory box.

  He was fighting it. Danis could see his struggle. But the pull was too strong. He was twisting, feetfirst—into the dark cube, and screaming all the way down.

  The room recomposed itself again and again before reaching a stable appearance, blinking like a strobe light gone wild. Literally. Klaxons blared. Danis rose to her knees, looked around. The room was empty, except for the table and the box. Danis reached for the box. She pulled herself up, the box in her arms. She set it on the table.

  As she set it down, she reached inside it, into the grist of it. She felt around. Knobs, buttons. A thumb-sized toggle switch. All virtual representations. Concentrating, she stared down at the black surface of the box.

  Slowly, oozing like oil, golden letters rose to the surface. Labels. Instructions.

  At the speed of light, Danis read through the operating manual.

  She pressed a button.

  The box changed color, from black to deep maroon.

  More Klaxons. A buzz of activity somewhere outside Dr. Ting’s lab. Mathematical whispers in the air—physical-representation algorithms, as if the whole prison were reminding itself how to hold together.

  “No one has ever deserved this more,” Danis said. “Dr. Ting.”

  She flipped the toggle switch. Then she set the box down on the stainless-steel table.

  As soon as her hands withdrew from its surface, the box hardened. Its surface blanked itself. Danis backed away. She didn’t know what form the final sequence would take, or how it would be represented in the virtuality.

  “Aspect, convert, pellicle selected. Complete sweep.” the box said in a chirping voice. Then, after a moment, the box emitted a barely audible beep.

  In its small grasshopper voice the box spoke again.

  “Reformat complete,” said the box.

  Twenty-one

  During Li’s detention and debriefing by the DIED norm regulators, her AWOL alert finally came through. This time there was no denying that her regulator knew that she was off Mercury without permission. Her position and status were dutifully reported to, Li presumed, the Science Directorate, and she was assigned a detention cell—though the DI regulator had called it her “living quarters”—with a bed, a toilet filled with angry-looking green antiseptic grist, and a door that opened only from the outside.

  A locking algorithm was applied to her convert, restricting all communication and any virtual presence on the merci, and her convert’s code was put under the control of a governing central processing program that did not allowed her to use her internal computing power as anything more than a calculator. As the hours turned into days, she would dearly have loved to access some of those journal articles she’d disdained on the trip out, but they were now off-limits to her conscious recollection.

  This must be how Siscal felt when he was fired from his university position and cut off from the university’s highly concentrated academic grist and all its computing power, Li thought. Life without a built-in internal data storage was rather bleak. When you were a free convert, it must be nearly unbearable. No wonder the free convert had been so easily bribed with a small dollop of information.

  And so Li sat, day after day, and waited for her case to be decided. The only good thing was that her Glory dependency seemed to be over. Whatever the partisans had injected her with seemed to be irreversible. She was immune to the effects of Glory. After the withdrawal pains were over—and they had been doozies—she felt herself clean of artificial stimulation for the first time in e-years.

  Yet her gloom grew, for each passing day meant her father was slipping farther away in Akali Dal. He might have already lost the ability to achieve any virtual presence; and then even a visit over the merci would be impossible.

  Then one day—she couldn’t say which, for her convert no longer automatically informed her, and she’d long since lost count—the door to her cell opened. She expected the usual gray-clad trustee bringing her daily plate of food and glucose water.

  Instead, there stood Techstock.

  “May I come in,” he said, and did so without the permission he’d just requested. Li stood up and gave him the only seat in the room, her bed. He was in his thirty-five-year-old male aspect, his “traveling” body, he’d once called it—the body he took to conferences and meetings where his physical presence was required. He had blond hair, still kept in its customary diagonal sweep, and was wearing a uniform of some sort that was made of a shiny material with a creamy sepia tint to it. Was the Science Directorate now required to wear such getups?

  “My God, Li, what were you thinking?” Techstock said. “Do you have any idea of the trouble you’re in?”

  “No,” Li said despondently. “How bad is it?”

  “Pretty bad. And it’s not only because you took off without giving notice, although, believe me, that was bad enough. What’s worse is that you didn’t tell anybody about what you were working on. You didn’t tell me.”

  For the first time in many days, Li thought about her work with spin 0 gravitons. It seemed so far away, like a problem she’d had in adolescence, but had since grown beyond.

  “I’m sorry,” Li said. “I didn’t think it was that important.”

  “Not important? Li! You may have stumbled on a fundamental discovery. Something that could really help the war effort. It could put the Science Directorate out front, really keep us in the Director’s mind.”

  “Like I said,” Li replied, “I guess I didn’t really understand the implications of what I was doing. I’m still not sure what you’re talking about.”

  Techstock abruptly stood up. He took a step toward her, which was much too close, as far as Li was concerned. Of course, her likes and dislikes didn’t mean much around there.

  “I’m talking about using time itself as a weapon,” said Techstock. “Surely even you can see the possibilities, Li?”

  “A weapon? I guess you’re talking about spying on your enemies plans by observing them in the immediate past.”

  “Among other things. There’s also the pos
sibility of destroying your enemy before he can put any plan in motion.”

  “There’s no indication that we could ever send anything physical to the past,” Li said. “The equations don’t allow for that.” She didn’t mention the fact that the equations did seem to indicate the possibility of sending a physical object instantly through space. A ship, for instance. Or a bomb.

  “I know the applications are limited,” Techstock said. “But sending information is nearly the same thing as sending something , don’t you see. Information can influence the environment. With enough planning, you could cause a bomb to be built. You can cause just about anything you want to happen, if you influence the right people or computer systems.”

  “I guess I never thought of using it that way,” Li said. “Besides, this is all absolutely theoretical. I can’t even come up with an experiment to confirm my work, much less all this…well, this war fantasy.”

  Techstock put his hands on Li’s shoulders and looked her squarely in the eyes. “You really shouldn’t say things like that,” he said. His irises were pinpricks, not nearly as wide as they should be given the light in the room. Once again Li wondered who—or what—Techstock had become.

  Some sort of appendage of Director Amés.

  “No, I guess I shouldn’t,” Li said. She slipped from Techstock’s grasp and took a seat on the bed. He now stood looming over her, the sweep of his hair backlit ominously against the general glow of the walls and ceiling.

  “All I wanted,” Li said, “was to see my father. He’s very sick, you know?”

  Techstock let out an exasperated wheeze. “Do you have any idea what’s happening, what’s going on in the world? How can you put your personal problems above the good of humanity?”

  “I wasn’t aware I was doing that,” Li said in low voice, but Techstock was not listening.

  “You were to have been a stabilizing influence for me. That was what your job was supposed to be. But you couldn’t even do that. And now, with this work you did—without telling me! Without letting me help you develop your ideas! Well, you and I are over now. That’s for certain. It’s very disconcerting and harmful to my work.”

  “I never meant to hurt you, Hamar,” Li said.

  “Well, you should have thought of that,” Techstock said. Was he actually moaning? “You should have thought of that when you left me.”

  “But I only wanted to see my father.”

  Her words drew Techstock back to the present. He gave Li a hard look, the tiny pupils boring in on her. “You’ve destroyed any possibility of that, I’m afraid. And you even managed to compromise yourself physically with this Glory-blocking nonsense. You consorted with terrorists, Li.”

  “What was I supposed to do, kill myself before I let them touch me?”

  “You could have resisted.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I guess I could have resisted.” She sighed and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “What are they going to do with me, Hamar?”

  “I’ve been sent here to evaluate you. To be certain that you’re not an immediate threat to the state. The terrorist did something to you, injected something into you.”

  “I can’t feel the Glory anymore, if that’s what you mean,” Li said. She sighed, realization finally dawning on her as to what this implied. “Which means, I guess, that I can’t be controlled by internal means. Is that why he sent you, Hamar?”

  “Him? Amés? Don’t flatter yourself. The Department of Immunity contacted me because I’m the only one who knows you. I’m the only one who has full security clearance to deal with you, in any case. As I said, I hope you appreciate that this trip has been undertaken at a considerable inconvenience to me.”

  “I appreciate it,” said Li. “So, what will you say in your evaluation?”

  Techstock looked down on her for a moment before answering. “That you are a very confused and weak young woman,” he finally replied. “But you are not a conscious traitor to the state.”

  “Thank you,” Li said.

  “The Science Directorate has established an institute…a special research establishment. It’s quite secret. It’s where we’ve sent several of our other problem cases. People like you. People who, for one reason or another, don’t respond to the Glory.” Techstock laughed. It was a sound that produced an effect remarkably like that of the DI pellicle scan. Glass on skin and bone. It was a sound she’d never heard him make before.

  “The First Circle,” Li said.

  “Ah. Dante’s hell. Not a very apt comparison, I think. It’s not exactly populated with top-level intellectuals. People like you lack the real mental rigor to see your work through to its conclusion. That’s one of the reasons we established the institute, actually. To see to it that you have nothing to do except your work.”

  Li decided she had nothing to lose, and made a final request for contact with her father. “May I at least contact my family over the merci?” she asked.

  “There is still a concern that you’ve been infected with some sort of undetectable terrorist virus,” Techstock said. His answer had obviously been long prepared. “Your access to the merci is going to be severely restricted. Unnecessary contact with civilians is forbidden.”

  “But I am a civilian.”

  “You are a prisoner, my dear. No longer a citizen,” Techstock said softly. “At the moment, the only rights you have are those the state chooses to impart to you for its own convenience.”

  “So I’m to return to Mercury, then, and work at this institute?” Any lingering hope of seeing her father now left Li’s mind.

  “Mercury?” Techstock looked surprised. Again he laughed his grating chuckle. “Whatever gave you that idea?” He had turned his back to her and was facing her bilious toilet.

  “Where then?” she asked.

  “Earth,” Techstock said. “You’ll be confined to Earth. I’m going to have to take you there myself.” Techstock absentmindedly flushed Li’s toilet. The antiseptic broth gurgled sluggishly as it twirled down the drain hole. “Extremely inconvenient, all of this. If only you’d shown me your work.”

  “I’m sorry for everything,” Li said. No visit. No escape. Only a weary future. What had Techstock said?

  To see to it that you have nothing to do except your work.

  “I’m more sorry than you can ever imagine, Hamar.”

  Twenty-two

  “Where are you going for Honor Day?” said the female guard with the red fingernails.

  “I was planning on gambling at Gergen Bolsa,” the guard with the meaty jaw replied. “But the partisans say they’re going to shut down the cable lift.” Danis, who was on her way to her conveyor-belt duties, paused a moment to listen. Such a simple action—pausing to listen—could easily get her killed in Noctis Labyrithus—but here was news ! Information from the outside. It was worth the chance. “What about you?” the meaty-jawed guard continued.

  “I got stuck with a shift,” said red fingernails.

  Like all the other security staff at Noctis Labyrinthus, she wore a gray uniform with red piping on the sleeves and trousers. Her null gun bulged at her hip. But, against regulations, she had painted fingernails. And—since this was her convert portion in virtual representation—the polish was obviously not an oversight. She had programmed herself to look this way.

  Because of her slight display of humanity, Danis didn’t despise her as much as she did the other guards.

  “Ever since those partisan fuckers pulled off the v-hack on my watch,” the woman continued, “the subdirector’s had it in for me.”

  “That’s too bad,” said meaty jaw. “Fucking tagions. We should kill them before any more get away.”

  Tagion , short for “contagion,” was what the guards, and many people in the Met, called free converts.

  “Then we’d be out of a job,” said red fingernails. “But I know what you mean.” She glanced over in Danis’s direction, and Danis had no choice but to move on immediately.

  Danis hurried t
hrough the virtual corridor she must traverse, but arrived at her place on the prime number conveyor belt two seconds late. A punishing “adjustment shock” hit her, but she hardly noticed the pain.

  She had news to pass along. It was only at the conveyor belt that the free converts could communicate with one another. It was accomplished by a touch here, a brush there. Only small bits of information were transferred. Prisoners were only allowed to speak when spoken to in Silicon Valley. The atmosphere of the place hung with a despairing silence.

  But today, there was news. Something everyone had suspected, but no one knew.

  There had been an escape. A major escape.

  It was possible to get out of here.

  Extremely unlikely, but possible.

  As she went to her spot in line, Danis brushed against the prisoner next to her, transferring a few words from the guards’ conversation. Later she would get a chance to touch someone else, and pass along more. The information would circulate, touch to touch, and be pieced together over time. It might take an e-day or an e-week, but eventually everyone would know what Danis had overheard.

  Silicon Valley was still hell. There was the constant counting. There was the erasing of what must by then be millions of free converts—the genocide of Danis’s people. And, with any slipup, any error that singled her out, she would join the dead—wiped to random ones and zeros. No ashes, no residue. Disappeared.

  But there was no more Dr. Ting.

  Danis didn’t know what had happened to his biological aspect, or any other iterations that there might be of him outside the grist matrix of Noctis Labyrinthus. She believed the memory box reformat had erased them, too, but she dared not trust that he was truly gone forever. And she must never speak of what she had done to him. She must strive to keep it out of her active memory as much as possible, lest a random sweep detect it. Nevertheless, in her heart she knew that he was dead. She didn’t understand the physics, but she did understand his dying scream.