Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Anna smiled at Torsten as if to say, “You're starting to enjoy this, aren't you?” “Well, we're stuck five percent behind. We need to switch two percent to you and another two percent of the expansionist leaners to undecided. Simulations show that a scandal on the Black Hole Project could do that, if it stinks enough."

  Lars nodded. “Even the appearance of scandal, of stonewalling, or of something not entirely right could do it. Our side is the safe side."

  Torsten sighed. “Okay. It's dueling experts and people-like-us can't decide. So, where there's smoke, there's fire. That will certainly bring in magazine hits; but..."

  Lars cut him off with a wave of the hand. “This is the kind of gut-worry issue that binds voters together. Make them fear."

  “As I said, it will be more effective closer to the election."

  “Perhaps.” Lars sighed. “We'll go with your judgment on that, for now. But make no mistake: this is a good cause to fight for. I believe in it. I'm told by some of the most brilliant scientists we have that existence itself is at stake here.” Lars stopped for another dramatic pause, convincing enough that Torsten wondered if he might be sincere.

  Lars continued quietly, “This is big stuff. So big I'm pulling in the whole family on this one. I need you. Everything might depend on a few good breaks."

  “I understand fully, Lars, and I'm on it. I just have to be a little subtle, or it could backfire before the election.” He didn't add that it was certain to backfire sometime after the election; that was irrelevant. If Lars won, he'd be in power and he knew how to use it.

  Anna touched him on the shoulder. “We may need to do something to this Kremer woman before she does something to us."

  “Journalistically, of course,” Lars added.

  “Of course,” Torsten answered. “But, if I'm going to gain Kremer's confidence, I can't irritate her too much now."

  Lars raised an eyebrow, then nodded slowly.

  * * * *

  The day of the speech, Torsten watched Kremer walk into the Mark Hopkins Hotel. Her costume was pedestrian, a black tunic and slacks—indistinguishable from what she'd been wearing at the news conference. A typical geek, he thought. She walked closer to the inner walls, looking up, and she wasn't the only one. The bomb at the institute had left its mark on everyone's thoughts—even at a Lars Ried rally. Anna's friends had meant to scare people about the BHP but the immediate result was a kind of generalized fear that affected any potentially controversial gathering.

  It was as if they'd let a genie out of the bottle, one that had supposedly been capped centuries ago. People were screaming for a review of antisurveillance laws and robotic restrictions. If Lars won, he'd probably get enough government policing power to prevent anyone from doing to him what his people had done to create the current mood. The irony of it made Torsten smile, however uncomfortably.

  Kremer stopped and looked across the outer hallway through the transparent walls, a distinctive feature added in reconstruction after the 2221 quake. The view of the bay was one of Torsten's favorite sights, too. The only visible security was signs at the entrances that said “By invitation only,” but the party's AI's would discreetly check everyone entering with multispectral cameras and microwave scans from overhead. Plainclothes operatives near the doors would be cued to offer gentle reminders to anyone who wandered in without reading the sign. Anna's work; she'd artfully arranged the appearance of openness and Kremer walked into the room unaware of the checks. Torsten went down to meet her.

  She sat in the back of the room, running her hands through her short blond hair, clearly feeling uncomfortable. What would she know about Lars going in? He asked the net for a quick-look data scan to see what an outsider like Kremer might get. Noted consolidationist within the Conservative Union Party—Geology degree—apolitical through grad school—gregarious—desire for order—politician since age of 42—drive for power came early—What did he want to be when he grew up? ‘"n charge,” quoted from an undergraduate friend. Family home lies outside Leipzig...” Nothing particularly scary there. He went up to introduce himself.

  “Hello, Torsten. I've been reading reviews of your brother's political life. Some aren't very flattering—'unsophisticated,’ ‘a will to impose order,’ and so on."

  Torsten shrugged. “He's got a consolidationist constituency to play to. But beyond that, I think he's a pretty good leader."

  “Is that your job, to balance the news?"

  Torsten smiled and shook his head. For all her naïveté, this lady was quick—a lot quicker than he was, and he'd have to keep that in mind. He would have to work at his own pace and avoid getting into a contest of wits with her.

  “I like to think I'm fair-minded about him, though. You know I don't know him as well as I should. He's more like a grandparent than a brother. Now keep in mind that he's preaching to the choir here. His job is to pump these people up and motivate them to go out and work for the election."

  Lars Ried strode into the room and waved to the crowd amid applause and cheers. Dressed in a high-fashion single-piece navy-blue suit in the loose-cut Scandinavian fashion over a powder blue turtleneck set off by a red-jeweled medallion on a gold chain, he exuded urbane executive authority. Political posters rose up as if on queue as he took the podium. Lars nodded in appreciation and finally held his hand up to quiet the room.

  “Tonight I would like to talk to you frankly about an issue that confronts each of us in this room and those I seek to represent. It is the undeniable and palpable suspicion, even fear, which divides the people of our planet today.

  “Issues of pure scientific research that don't even have an economic value are dividing our world.

  “Too often, those of us who believe in letting humanity adjust to the changes that technology has already made before embarking on new and questionable endeavors may, find ourselves caricatured and stereotyped as a danger to tolerance. Some have suggested that the Conservative Union Party is motivated by political opportunism with the ultimate goal of denying freedom to researchers, many of whom are doing the enriching and rewarding work of consolidating, understanding, and applying the huge mass of data accumulated over the last two centuries.

  “My friends, the Conservative Union seeks merely to point out that the social and cultural implications of research can no longer be ignored. We say, let the people decide if they are ready for yet another new technology to complicate their lives. We say, let the people decide if they want to take the risk of playing around with the basic fabric of the universe when there is no pressing need for it."

  Kremer squirmed in her seat at the applause. Torsten patted her hand. Lars was in good form, Torsten thought, as the elder Ried's rhetoric flowed over its spellbound audience.

  Kremer leaned over to Torsten and whispered. “I fear the beginnings of an inquisition."

  Torsten put a hand on hers. “Not an inquisition; a regaining of control. This isn't the Middle Ages. The AI infrastructure can't be the instrument of an inquisition and it will defend individuals who resist it. An inquisition is impossible. Lars just wants efforts refocused. Politics is perception, Hilda. Yours are different from most of these people's. Hear him out for me. Then we can talk, okay?"

  Hilda rolled her eyes and returned her attention to the platform.

  Lars Ried continued. “I come before this audience tonight with the explicit purpose of reconciliation with the scientific community.

  “Let us bridge together the gap of misunderstanding. Let us help the scientific community understand that humanity is in danger of losing itself and cannot afford the disruption that the Black Hole Project might bring. Enough is enough."

  “You call that reconciliation?” Kremer whispered to Torsten who winked back at her.

  “History has much to teach us about scientific research run amok,” Lars continued.

  “Friends, just as we have citizen oversight committees guiding our legislation, we need citizen oversight committees watching over scientific researc
h projects. Even if they may be right, we have to hold back until at least a majority understands what they are doing! It's our necks on the line.

  “My first priority if elected will be to put at least a temporary hold on any other experiments that may have societal implications, including, on the face of it, the Black Hole Project. My second priority will be to put in place a citizen watchdog committee to curtail aberrant research earlier. The expansionist coalition is on record opposing both initiatives. The choice of responsible people should be clear.

  “Thank you for your support!"

  The resulting ovation rang in Torsten's his ears. Kremer sat shaking her head and looking distinctly unhappy.

  “It's all about power, isn't it?” she said. “Who is the alpha male? Who gets to beat on whom? Your brother reduces the work of the entire scientific community, never mind the Black Hole Project, to a political beauty contest, with him and a bunch of politically correct toadies as the judges."

  He winced at “toadies” and the hostility it implied. “I'll ignore the moral issue for the moment, but at least consider that it is simply impossible for a democratic politician to pander only to elitists and stay in office."

  “Elitist? Look, I don't know the first thing about, say, hypnoactive kinetic art. Does that make the artists ‘elitist?’ It's just different areas of interest. Leave cobblers to their lasts."

  Damn, she was bullheaded! “When the last is creation itself? I think not."

  “But...” She seemed confused, and a bit angry. “You journalists can affect so many things yourselves. Are you really objective, or is that just a power trip, too? Excuse me a moment."

  She whirled and walked off toward the toilets.

  Torsten waited by the hotel foyer. He wondered once more if she was angry enough to duck out of their dinner date. But Kremer returned, noticeably more composed than when she left.

  “I hope this doesn't mean we have to postpone dinner...” he began.

  She shook her head and smiled fleetingly. “I'm fine."

  They wandered downhill in silence and ended up, not so accidentally, at a small Thai restaurant Torsten knew. An elegant little hideaway on the third floor, it had leanings towards the exotic spices of Pattaya—served, of course, by elegantly painted young men dressed in stunning silk dresses. He'd taken dates there before, often with good effect.

  Kun Srichard, who knew the Ried men well, provided Torsten with a table in a quiet corner of the petite room with a secluded view of the ancient Golden Gate Bridge sinking into the fog, now rolling in from the ocean.

  A message from Anna announced itself as they finished a dessert of candied rice and fruit. He touched the net for the playback.

  Good news—they've got problems with the experiment. Your sweetie doesn't know it yet, but she's going on a space voyage. So are we.

  We? Space? he replied.

  I'll tell you all about it when you get here.

  His heart beat a little faster than could be explained by the curry.

  * * * *

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Hilda Kremer's office, BHP Headquarters, 15 April 2257

  * * * *

  Brad's image on Hilda's wall screen pointed to a section of the array imaged on the wall screen of his office. Hilda thought briefly of the nesting of images of ever-decreasing size and resolution collapsing to a precisely located point with no information content.

  “If those radiation levels are isotropic,” he said, “the experiment is putting out more energy in gamma radiation alone than we are putting in with kinetic energy.” He turned to her. “I don't buy that, but I don't see how the results could be strongly directional. We've only collided milligrams; not nearly enough for any shielding effect."

  Hilda shook her head, feeling frustrated; the results made no sense and screamed of bad data or bad instrumentation. But, she reminded herself, much great physics had come from results that were contrary to all expectations, at first. “Brad, even in these precursor collisions, we're into new territory; quagmas a million times denser than have ever been produced before. We ought to expect something new."

  “I know,” Brad said. “If we only didn't have the whole bloody world breathing down our necks expecting everything to be perfect and just like predicted or else. I look at the political sims and wonder if there will ever be another chance.” He scratched his right temple.

  “I know how you feel,” Hilda said. “Bombs, grandstanding politicians, idiot journalists ... I didn't think it would be such a fight,” she said. A pang of guilt joined her frustration. Dating Torsten Ried and getting a worms-eye view of ultra-suspicious populism and its panderers had given Hilda lots of insight into the political problems they faced. In the last two weeks she'd seen political networking that put even academic kingdom-builders to shame. On her own part, she'd offered her services to the project's outreach group, talking to high schools, futurist groups, and even a journalist's convention.

  Torsten, to his credit, had introduced her to several journalists who at least had an inkling of how the scientific community worked and encouraged her to reach out to them, while cautioning her not to voice too many technical words. But, outreach sucked away her time and energy. She hadn't touched her toroidal spin web transformations in two weeks and felt a growing void within her.

  Brad snorted. “It's a bloody law of nature; the bigger the advance, the more you have to fight for it. But we have to stay with it. You'll be able to concentrate a lot better when you get out to the test site, away from these distractions."

  “Is that why Tse Wen is sending Sarah and me out?"

  Brad shook his head in frustration. “I'm not sure what you two can do to the experiment on-site that you both can't do here. But she'll be a right place to think."

  “Well, we're sure not getting anywhere here,” Hilda said. “So maybe being there will work—just seeing the stuff with our own eyes and touching the equipment with our own fingers."

  She recognized Tse Wen's wisdom in sending them to the experiment site. They needed focus, focus away from this political mess. But frustration crowded into her thoughts. She turned to her long-time friend. “Thirty years of work and things feel like they're coming completely unglued—bombs, Lars Ried's political pandering, crazy experiment results...” She sighed. “It's getting late. Talk to you later. I'm going to sleep.” Hilda often stayed overnight and slept on a fold-out cot. She pulled it vigorously from her closet.

  Brad smiled. “Oh, she'll be right in the end, you'll see. G'night."

  The screen went blank.

  Chaos, I just hope I can sleep, she thought as she threw her clothes into the closet.

  * * * *

  Morning was bright in her window when she realized she hadn't thought about black holes, quantum gravity, or protesters for at least eight hours.

  She took that thought back—she hadn't thought of it consciously. But from somewhere in her deep sleep at least three plausible explanations for what had happened had formed in her head. Smiling, she sat down at her terminal, grabbed her sketch pad, and started setting up the simulations.

  Her stomach growled. She was, she noted, still stark naked, and ravenously hungry. Time for a break. But plausibility started to change to possibility before her eyes, and she kept on. One of the possible explanations might mean that the darker side of Lars Ried's political constituency had penetrated into the project far deeper and with much more sophistication than any of them realized.

  She sent a note to Tse Wen and grabbed her long shirt in case he called back.

  He did.

  “I was wondering if we might have lunch. There are things I'd like to talk to you about—in person."

  “I am available,” he said with a smile.

  Tse Wen stroked the slight goatee he affected which, along with his bald head and thinness, gave him the aura of an ageless oriental sage. He'd been about forty when the antiaging retrovirus was spread—it was all for effect, which he'd cheerfully admit if called on it.


  “Now what is all this being mysterious about?” he asked.

  Hilda's hamburger was too good to believe. Grill smoke leaking into the dining room of the cafe added to the taste of the food without being overly noticeable. She swallowed her last bite and had a sip of lemonade to clear her throat.

  “I see three possibilities for what's happening at the experiment site. One, of course, is that it's new physics—perhaps a virtual quantum black hole did form and there was a kind of leak-through of energy from another universe, or another part of our universe."

  * * * *

  Tse Wen nodded politely. He didn't think so either, she could tell, but completeness required mentioning the possibility.

  “The second is that the anisotropy is caused by advanced wave Mota crystallization."

  He frowned. “General relativity permits such a solution, but I think that is only because it is incomplete. Even at the Planck level, the causality implications are disturbing."

  “Aren't they? I can't say that there aren't any other possibilities for anisotropism, but that was the only one I could find that made even that much sense. Which brings me to my third idea.” Her face sobered. “Maybe we aren't getting the real data."

  Now Tse Wen really frowned. “The last thing a theorist should do is to claim that data is bad which does not fit previous theory."

  Hilda nodded. “That's why I mentioned it last. But the falsification of data does fit within the existing theoretical structure, perhaps better and more simply than time travel or multidimensional teleportation."

  Tse Wen shook his head, then grinned. “I would not put out press releases. But you have convinced me some caution is warranted. I shall have conversations. Do you still see the reporter, Torsten Ried?"

  “Occasionally."

  “Do you think that wise?"

  Hilda ran a hand through her hair. “Torsten's a nice guy. Lovely smile, and he thinks and listens. I'm making progress; he's not certain that the Black Hole Project is such an evil thing, he just doesn't know and he's got a lot of family pressure. And you know, I'm not sure Lars sees it as anything more than a political issue that he can use to play his political game. If it became a non-issue, or even worked for him in some way, I don't think he'd bother to oppose it. I think we just have to do a better job of educating people."