Analog SFF, October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And packed as tight as colonists on a shuttle, shoulder to shoulder, with barely enough room between them for a driveway or two.

  When I was a grad student I sat in on a presentation by an urban planner who was having a great deal of fun with a scathing critique of the kind of suburb that I grew up in. The kind with huge front lawns, wide streets, and cul-de-sacs.

  "Can anyone tell me why a front yard has to be sixty feet deep? Is it part of the movement for the preservation of plastic flamingos and plaster lawn jockeys?” he asked. “Or why a residential street has to be wide enough to accommodate two school buses passing one another—and two parked cars—in the same place at the same time?"

  He contrasted those sprawling subdivisions with the more natural, more human neighborhoods of a bygone age. Front yards and streets were small, so that neighbors could talk to one another from their porches. The houses were big enough to provide all the privacy you needed once you went inside.

  Humanitas Universalis had chosen this neighborhood for good reason. In scale and scope, it was a truly human space.

  It reminded me of Florence, whose copy stood close by across the broad avenue. The Italians speak of the “Florence disease” in which tourists become overwhelmed by the art, the architecture, the sheer beauty that wraps so much of that city. So overwhelmed that they become confused and disoriented. Florentines are quick to come to their aid, offering them coffee and directions back to their hotel.

  So it was with Penelope's American neighborhood.

  It was rich with style and imagination. The great homes were monuments to habitation, domestic institutions. You could get lost trying to get from the front door to the back in some of them. Their designs were all fresh and individual. Even where they were cut from the same mold, they were dressed to their own tastes. Stucco, clapboard, and shingles. Columns ionian, doric, and federal. Picket fences, chain link, cast iron. Awnings of every shade, stripe, and hue. With hedges of arborvitae, hemlock, and sunflowers.

  I skated up and down the close-packed streets, losing myself in the all-American façades, drifting back through time to all that had been lost to me. Children played in pocket parks where crisscrossing streets intersected and in playgrounds beside high brick-walled schools. Old men sat on their porches while women inside cooked supper. Trolleys rolled down the main thoroughfares, riders hopping off as they slowed briefly at corner stops. Coffee shops and diners filled up with late-day trade.

  And then, with the suddenness of any equatorial site, the sun dropped below the horizon and plunged the city not into darkness, but into the opulent sparkle of artificial lights—porch lights, storefronts, antique neon, otherworldly sodium vapor streetlights, halogen streetlights on goosenecked poles, holographic gaslights along pedestrian malls.

  And it all vanished in an instant.

  I was called suddenly back to my perch on the shelf in Penelope's den when she arrived home in the company of seven athletic young men with the sly dangerous look of soldiers or martial arts students.

  They burst noisily into the house, filling the rooms downstairs as I watched on the house's security cameras, invading the kitchen and attacking the pantry, arming themselves with knives and spatulas and pots and pans, bringing to surrender an assortment of vegetables, pastas, sausages, and disjointed fowl.

  Penelope sat at the kitchen table in the center of them, giving instructions and warnings as needed, serene and in command.

  I sampled the air with the few organic receptors I have left and detected garlic and basil and olive oil and boiling pasta, which brought a rush of ancient memories, more than I could sort through without long reflection.

  The boys kept up a long series of mixed conversations in several languages—maybe different dialects—that suggested they were workers in the shipyards below the city proper. And that they belonged to a military club that included Penelope as a member.

  It didn't take too long for my thick wits to realize that this was the rest of the crew that had rescued me from the observatory at L-1.

  What was Penelope up to, I wondered once again, that she would need the services of her own private army. Or did everyone in Ciudad de Cielo's Twenty-Seven Families have retainers like these?

  They were done with dinner, washing it down with cups of thick black coffee, when the doorbell rang. I watched over Penelope's shoulder as she answered it, opening the door on a narrow-framed, sallow-faced man with close-cropped gray hair.

  "Senhorita Sandino?” he asked. She nodded, and he continued: “I am Captain Rivard of the Securitate. May I come in?"

  I saw Penelope stiffen suddenly, and her seven deadly bodyguards come to instant attention at Rivard's announcement.

  "I don't wish to alarm you,” he said. “This is a small matter. A slight mystery, but one we must investigate."

  "Yes, I'm sure. How may I help?” Penelope said as she stepped back into the foyer and directed the Securitate captain into the living room with a wave of her arm. He shook his head and stood his ground.

  "Occasionally, youngsters who are exploring the city's computer networks will find their curiosity leading them into places they should not go. Usually it is something simple, like hacking into the servicebot network and hijacking a lawnmower or a hedge trimmer for a joy ride. When that happens, we try to identify who has done this. So that we can discourage such abuse of the equipment—and so we can begin to direct their not inconsiderable talents to more productive ends."

  "Yes, I'm aware of that,” Penelope said.

  "Well, today, not more than an hour or so ago, someone using your household network did such a thing. No damage done, senhorita, of course. But we are puzzled. Puzzled because no one at this address fits the profile of the precocious child who ordinarily does this. And because you are..."

  "A Family member,” she finished.

  "Indeed,” Captain Rivard said. “I'm not suggesting for a moment that you would do such a frivolous thing as this. But I have come to inquire if you have a visitor—a young nephew or niece, perhaps—who has come to visit and has indulged their curiosity."

  "I must disappoint you, Captain,” Penelope said. “I have no guests and I have been out all day. I cannot help you with your inquiry."

  Rivard showed no emotion. I, on the other hand, was bouncing off the virtual walls inside my containment. For the first time, I was glad that Penelope still didn't think of me as anything more than an ancient eight-track tape player.

  "Then my task has become more complicated,” Rivard said. “It would appear that someone has taken advantage of your household network. I would suggest that you run a security check to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. And I will try to find who has been intruding upon your privacy."

  With a nod of his head, he stepped back through the doorway and slipped away like a ghost.

  Penelope closed the door slowly but firmly, then turned around to face the boys, raising both hands and stifling a silent scream.

  "They know!” cried one of the warrior pack.

  "They can't know,” said another, more calmly. “If they knew, we would not still be here."

  "Then what is going on?” asked the first.

  Penelope frowned, then wrinkled her brow, then shuddered. “You heard Captain Rivard. Someone has used my household account to go joyriding on a weedwacker. It has nothing to do with what we're about. It is only a coincidence. As Anton said, if it were anything more, they would have taken us away."

  And with that, they filed upstairs to the office where I sat on a shelf to discuss their plans.

  * * * *

  Sedition—that was their exercise for the evening.

  They were going to have a go at toppling the urbamastro of Ciudad de Cielo himself, Don Alexandro Espinosa de Madrid.

  It was an ambitious plan, to be sure. And someone had given it considerable thought. They went over the details in Penelope's upstairs office while I sat on the shelf and listened in. I kept my thoughts to myself. This was hardly
the occasion to try once again to explain myself to Penelope and her crew.

  In broad form, it was to be regime change by riot. They were assembling a mass of unhappy citizens who would march on the urbamastro's residence and toss him out on his ear.

  "Do you think they'll get a thousand?” asked one of Penelope's boys.

  "If we're lucky, five hundred,” Anton said.

  "Five hundred is sufficient,” Penelope said.

  I wondered about that, but it probably made sense. I thought about the fall of the Communist governments of Eastern European at the end of the twentieth century. It appeared at the time that if you could get one hundred thousand people to defy the law and assemble in the capital city, the government would collapse.

  Those were much bigger cities than Ciudad de Cielo, but it scaled up. Here, five hundred would be five percent. In fact, I began to wonder if they could get that many people assembled. I had no doubt that so many malcontents were available, but I was skeptical about being able to get so many of them to agree to a single cause of action at a single moment in time.

  I was more concerned about Captain Rivard. I was sure he had more important duties than chasing down adolescent hackers and recruiting them for the Securitate. But Penelope didn't share my concern.

  "And the Securitate won't be there to stop us?” asked one of the warriors. “You really don't think they're listening in right now?"

  "Everyone knows the answer to that,” said another.

  "I know they say they don't use electronic monitoring,” said the first. “But are they really telling the truth?"

  "It doesn't matter if they are or not,” Anton said. “The reason they don't use it isn't because they think ‘machines bad, humans good.’ It's because electronic monitoring isn't reliable. If the Securitate were listening in right now on the house security net, all they'd hear is a discussion of soccer technique and betting strategies—because that's what the housebot has been told to run through the network."

  From what I'd read on my trip through the blogs and chat rooms, the miniature police state that ran behind the scenes of Ciudad de Cielo took the tenets of Humanitas Universalis to heart. They really did not rely on machines. What Anton didn't say was that they relied instead on careful interrogations of the city's very human citizens to learn what they needed.

  And good old Victor had a role to play in it all, I learned.

  "We'll meet him at the entrance to the park,” Penelope said. “Once we are all assembled, we will go in and he will join the other leaders. And then we will march on the residence."

  When the time came to move, Penelope's retainers left one and two at a time to avoid a conspicuous march to the park. After a few minutes, it was down to Penelope and Anton. They left together, switching off the lights and leaving me in the dark.

  But I wasn't going to sit at home and wait for them to return—or not. I was out the door before they were, watching them from the webcam on the street corner a few doors away. Rivard had never said anything about hacking into that. And I doubted if it was any of his concern—webcams were meant to be free.

  A slight breeze blew out of the southwest, something to do with the ice wall there. I had a moment of nostalgia at the memory of a cool wind blowing across my face, then switched cams as Penelope and Anton made their way down the broad avenue to the park.

  It was a half a mile, less than ten minutes’ walk, to the entrance. I raced ahead of them to see what was going on there. The park was a shadowy cloak across the northern floor of the city, embroidered with the streetlights that marked its roadways. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary at the great stone-and-iron gate at the entrance. Except that Victor was nowhere in sight.

  I raced along the park's network, looking for trouble—looking for the Securitate. I found nothing. Nothing anywhere. No Securitate.

  And no five hundred rioters assembling in a seditious mass.

  Just a handful of basketball players on one of the courts and a few tennis players beyond them.

  That wasn't what I'd expected. None of it. I shook my virtual head in amazement and shifted focus.

  Back up the avenue, I found Penelope and Anton. I followed them from lamppost to lamppost and felt Penelope's disappointment when she reached the entrance and Victor wasn't waiting for her. She looked around anxiously, paced up and down the avenue along the park's frontage, and kept looking at her watch.

  She stopped and talked to Anton. I couldn't hear what she said—but I could imagine.

  Then she sighed, shook her head, and began hiking the long driveway into the depths of the park's dark forest.

  She was only a hundred meters down the road when she vanished from my sight.

  * * * *

  If I were more trusting of machines, I might have been more bothered. But her disappearance made sense out of everything else I'd seen in the park tonight. Or hadn't seen.

  I switched to a cam across the street and down the block and caught a brief glimpse of Penelope as she continued into the shadowy depths of tall pines. Anton followed a few steps behind. I opened frames from several other webcams and watched as Anton disappeared from the cams inside the park.

  Someone had hacked them. The park cams showed that all was calm and peaceful behind its iron fence. Peaceful, but not quiet.

  I could still tune into the web mics around the park. After running them through some parsing algorithms in my kit, I managed to filter out the sounds from the city side, the sighing of the wind in the trees, the splashing of the water over dikes and dams on its way through the chain of duck and lily ponds in the nether regions, and the chirping of insects and birds.

  I was left with the muffled thud of footsteps, hundreds of footsteps, the murmur of distant crowds, and the random cry of a peacock from the nearby zoo.

  Crowds? The instant I put it on stereo, I could tell that there were two sources of sound. One on the athletic field, in front of the grandstand, a few hundred meters from the entrance. And another farther inside, toward the west end.

  I hacked up a quick virtual of the park and stepped into it. I was situated in the center of the first sound source, with the grandstand seats rising up before me. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds around me. At first they were muffled and distorted, but the algorithms in my kit kept smoothing and refining them. I could hear the agitated growl of an angry mob, voices punctuating the rumble with excited shouts, quickly stifled. A handful of voices behind me began a low chant, slogans that I couldn't quite make out.

  I hopped over to the other source of sound—at the foot of a natural amphitheater across from the lily ponds.

  I wasn't sure what I expected—an advance guard or early arrivals. They were closer to the urbamastro's residence, a rambling antique house from that American Springfield that overlooked the west end of the park. And they were different. There was less movement. Fewer footsteps. More hushing and stifled shouts. Not at all like the bellicose throng at the grandstand.

  Then I heard the rhythmic beat of a couple of dozen heavily shod feet running down the hill in lockstep from the urbamastro's residence. A hushed command ended the run, and I could hear the heavy breathing of the squad. A murmur of recognition seemed to meet them as they took their place in the larger band.

  With a sudden spike of adrenaline, I realized what was going on. I crashed the virtual immediately, and found myself back on the shelf at Penelope's house staring out into the silence of her darkened office.

  This wasn't good. The second group in the park did not seem to be acting like an adjunct to Penelope's mob. Not if reinforcements were quickmarching down from Don Alexandro's house.

  And where was Victor?

  I plunged back into the webcam net, flying down the avenue from cam to cam, scanning the faces as I passed. Nothing. No one. I stopped for a long time at the park entrance, but still nothing.

  The avenue continued on, past a tall stone church with a wide front lawn and dark slate roofs, larger and more elaborate
Arts and Crafts mansions, a pair of low twentieth century modern synagogues, and several tall blocks of apartments. At the far end, the avenue reached the perimeter road and the base of the dome.

  The road on the left led to Don Alexandro's official residence, and it was blocked by several cars with discretely flashing blue lights and men in uniform. I wasn't familiar with the insignia and uniforms, but from their armament—billy clubs, handcuffs, personal radiocoms, and a holstered firearm—they looked like city cops.

  Mixed in with them were several men in ordinary work coveralls. They bore no insignia, but they carried long wooden clubs. A couple of them stood off by themselves, carrying on conversations with people who weren't there.

  And toward the rear were several older men in suits, surrounded surreptitiously by younger men in suits. In the middle, talking quickly but calmly, was our old friend Victor.

  Then I was back in the office, the virtual images fading fromsight.

  Even with all my doubts and suspicions about him, I never thought Victor was capable of this. Of betrayal on this kind of level. Of deliberate humiliation and dishonor.

  There was nothing left to do now but call Penelope. She was not the only one who had been betrayed. All of her comrades had been too. The sooner they learned of it, the better.

  The only problem was that I was the one who had to make the call.

  And I had no reason to think she would believe me. No reason to think she would ever believe I was more than a machine. And when she got tired of me, she would put me back up for sale on eBay and ship me off to the far side of the moon.

  A sudden wave of vertigo swept over me as I saw, as if for the first time, how precarious my perch on the shelf really was. The floor was a long way down. And I was as powerless as you could get. Absolutely immobile. Dependent on the kindness of strangers, to make a twentieth-century reference.

  But never before quite so helpless. I had a vision of being inventoried by the Securitate after they seized Penelope's house and all its contents. I tried to tell myself that I had no way of knowing whether the Securitate ever did such a thing to anyone, but the argument was unconvincing.