Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 169

by Neil Clarke

  “Could he be working on a farm right now?”

  “I suppose so. But I don’t know why he wouldn’t have told us.”

  Leong hesitated. Rufus said, “You can ask me anything, I won’t get angry.”

  “Does he share your skills? Yours and your brothers’?”

  “Up to a point. I’m sure he could teach my classes, and he probably understands most of the research the others are doing. But if you’re wondering about employment, since he has no formal qualifications he couldn’t just walk into a teaching job, let alone a PhD.”

  “What are your brothers studying?”

  “Mathematics. Different subfields, but . . . not wildly different.”

  “Wasn’t the original idea that you’d all have complementary talents?”

  Rufus said, “You’re giving the cult a bit too much credit. The original idea was that we’d form the first layer of building blocks in the construction of a vast, transcendental hive mind.” He couldn’t quite believe he’d just said that, in a mundane office in suburban Lane Cove. “My parents were gullible idiots, caught up in a group delusion with some unscrupulous, mildly tech-savvy nutjobs. The plan wasn’t about giving us a head start getting into Harvard; they thought they were on the verge of conquering the galaxy.”

  Leong persisted. “So it gave you no advantages at all?”

  “Well, we might have been prodigies early on,” Rufus conceded. “We learned very quickly, if not quite four times as fast, or four times as broadly. We could all speak five languages by the time we were six, but there were a lot of nationalities on the boat, so I’m not sure we would have needed the link for that. In the real world, we were thrown off-balance by the dislocation for the first few years, but we did all get straight As in high school by sharing everything we learned. So we were more like members of a moderately efficient study group than potential cogs in a global superintelligence.”

  Leong smiled warily. “You haven’t switched it off, though? After sixteen years?”

  “It’s who we are,” Rufus said. “When they tried to wean us off it after the raids we went ballistic, and the psychologists decided to leave it in our hands.”

  “I get the sense that you don’t tell many people about it.”

  “No.” Rufus knew what she was driving at and decided to spare her any need for delicacy. “We’ve all had relationships with women who had no idea that three other people would remember everything that happened. If that sounds unethical, maybe it is, but full disclosure is a lot to expect of someone if they know it’s either going to ruin their chances or turn them into some kind of . . . novelty.”

  Leong nodded slightly, suggesting that none of this even registered on the scale of improprieties she was inured to. “You’d probably know if Linus had commenced a new relationship,” she said. “But what about someone from his past? Could someone have turned up, with enough of a prior connection to persuade him to make a sudden change like this?”

  “It’s possible,” Rufus admitted. By Linus’s own assessment every breakup had been final, but it didn’t necessarily follow that he would have turned down a second chance.

  “If you could send me a list, that would be helpful.” Leong caught the flicker of unease on his face, and added, “All I’ll tell them is that Linus’s family is concerned for him, and want to know that he’s safe.”

  “Sure.”

  “What about other people from his past?” Leong wondered. “Your parents . . . ?”

  Rufus said, “They won’t get out of prison for at least four more years, and none of us have been in touch with them since the trial.”

  “Can you give me a list of his school friends? And anyone else with enough of a history that he might hear them out if they showed up on his doorstep.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have a recent photo?”

  “This is four years old, sorry.” He showed her a picture on his phone of Linus standing in a mango orchard, visibly wilting at the end of his first day laboring in the tropical heat. Rufus still felt a secondhand ache in half the muscles of his body every time he smelled the fruit.

  Leong accepted a copy via airdrop, then leaned back in her chair. “Those names will be a start, and I can talk to his neighbors as well. But before we move ahead . . . you will have seen the rates on our website. There’s a six-hour minimum, payable in advance, and then each extension will require the same payment. Are you ready to sign up for that?”

  Rufus said, “I’ll need to confer with my brothers first.”

  For a second, Leong betrayed a hint of discomfort, as if she was afraid that his eyes were about to roll back into his skull while he muttered to himself in three different voices.

  Rufus rose from his seat and held up his phone as he headed for the waiting room. “Can you give me two minutes?” he asked. “It’s pretty late in Bonn and London, but I messaged them earlier, so I know they’re waiting for my call.”

  4

  Rufus dreamed that he was Caius, contemplating a lattice of spheres in a space of some unspecified higher dimension, trying to decide if a certain kind of hyperplane lay entirely within the gaps between the spheres, or if it would be forced to intersect some of them. He swung the hyperplane back and forth, agitated, hunting for a solution. But the problem was not purely mathematical; Caius was sure that the answer would determine whether or not the police would be able to prove that he had murdered Linus.

  As Silus, Rufus dreamed that he was back on the boat, half-watching their favorite cartoon, half-living inside it. The plucky meerkat Lano had tracked down the villainous hyena, Raggler, to a desolate canyon, where he was holding a litter of baby meerkats hostage.

  “Let them go!” Lano demanded angrily. As he approached the cave where his foe lay in wait, his voice echoed from the rock face, but it faded with each reverberation, ending in a plaintive whisper. And though his shadow stretched for ten times his height along the dried riverbed, it remained so slender that it was lost in the vastness of the canyon.

  “Let them go!” Lano bellowed. “Don’t make me come and get them!”

  Raggler laughed derisively. “Come and get them, will you? You and whose army?”

  Silus knew exactly what that line foretold; every time a hapless wrongdoer invoked it, it summoned the same kind of triumphant finale. But as he looked back toward the top of the canyon, there was no meerkat cavalry, no swarm of brotherly solidarity to transform the villain’s taunt into an unwitting prophecy.

  And then Rufus dreamed that he was Linus, swimming across the ocean, away from the boat toward the invisible shore. But after a certain number of strokes, anticipating by sheer force of habit the wall at the end of the swimming pool, he curled up, tumbled over in the water, and reversed, back toward the Physalia.

  When the alarm went off, Rufus was sure of it: Linus was back. Why else would he have dreamed through his eyes? But as he searched his memories, there was nothing new. The dreams had left a hazy penumbra around the border, but everything still ended on the same Thursday.

  With the room still in darkness he cast the blankets aside, then he saw a pale light shine briefly from the skin of his forefinger. He touched it again with his thumbnail, which had dug into it a moment before. The glow returned, then died away as he increased the pressure. The genes that made some of his neurons glow for the benefit of the link weren’t meant to be expressed in his peripheral nervous system, but it happened now and then. He remembered trying to convince a confused bedmate that the fluorescent dye from a nightclub stamp could glow without being bathed in ultraviolet—but he wasn’t sure now if he’d been the one making the argument.

  It was his first day back at work after his trip. He’d only been away for a week, but every class was a struggle; the substitute teacher had followed his lesson plans, but as he reviewed the material his students seemed to seize upon any opportunity to disrupt the flow, as if he was a student teacher again and they all smelled blood in the water. Rufus hunted for the ease an
d self-confidence he’d had in front of the same audience just days before, but he kept finding himself saying something clumsy or misjudged every time he tried to restore the status quo.

  In the staff room at lunchtime, Dianne Unger caught him staring at her copy of The Brothers Karamazov.

  “Any good?” he asked.

  “Wait until I’ve finished it,” she said. “Then I can loan it to you if you like.”

  “Thanks.”

  In the evening, when he’d finished his usual routine in the gym, he tried swimming a few laps in the pool. But it was a quarter the length of the one Linus was used to, fracturing his rhythm, throwing him off-balance over and over, even when he thought he’d prepared himself for the too-frequent turns.

  In the changing room, he checked his phone and saw a message from Catherine Leong: Can you confirm that this is Linus?

  The picture below came with metadata stating that it was taken six days ago, in the international terminal at Sydney airport—about an hour before Rufus’s own domestic flight had touched down. Linus was wheeling a suitcase across the carpet, caught in the background of another traveler’s social media snap. He wasn’t facing the camera, but in profile he seemed no more anxious than anyone with a boarding time to meet and a gate to find. Rufus could see no obvious companion, no woman or man who was looking toward Linus with even a trace of interest. If he was eloping, his beloved was off queuing for the toilets. If he was being kidnapped, his abductors had him on a very long leash.

  Rufus phoned Leong. “It’s him,” he said. “Do you know what flight he caught?”

  “Sorry, no. That’s the only image I could find. From the time stamp it’s most likely he was going to Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, but, well . . . ”

  “Yeah.” That ruled out the Americas and the Pacific, but left the entire remainder of the planet. “There’s no way that Linus could afford a ticket himself, though. When he checked his bank balance a fortnight ago, he had thirty-six dollars.”

  “You can’t access his current records?” Leong asked, clearly as frustrated by Rufus’s truncated omniscience on all things Linus as he was himself. “Not that I’d encourage you to break the law.”

  “All our online security is iris and fingerprint,” Rufus explained. He didn’t have the heart to tell Leong that no one under thirty had ever used a password, whether or not they were a neurally linked quadruplet.

  “He doesn’t look as if he’s under duress,” Leong said reluctantly.

  “No. But who decides to skip the country like that, without telling any of the people who’ll be worried?”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Leong replied. “Maybe he had some simmering resentment you never picked up on. Maybe he bumped into someone who offered him a chance for a fresh start, and he was afraid you’d try to talk him out of it. His life was going nowhere; he didn’t need to blame you for that to decide that the ties to his family were part of what was holding him back.”

  Rufus couldn’t dismiss any of this, but he didn’t believe it. “What now?” he asked.

  “I talked to everyone on the lists you gave me,” she said. “None of them admitted to any recent contact with Linus, and none of them were out of the country.”

  “Okay. So . . . ?”

  Leong hesitated. “Is it fair to say that growing up on the Physalia was the most formative experience in your brother’s life?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So as a driving force, it would be off the charts compared to some old girlfriend showing up?”

  “Sure, but . . . ” Rufus was about to object that Linus hadn’t been brooding about the past in the run up to his flight, but that wasn’t what Leong was suggesting. “You think someone from the boat got in touch with him?”

  “You don’t believe that’s possible?”

  “All the adults are in prison. I suppose there’s a chance one of the other kids could have tracked him down somehow—but I wouldn’t know where to begin finding any of them myself.”

  “Okay.” Leong didn’t push him. “Maybe take some time to think about it, and let me know if it’s a line you want me to pursue.”

  As Rufus walked home, he tried to decide exactly what position he should take when he broke the news to the others. None of Leong’s suggestions made much sense to him, but he had no better hypothesis of his own.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and did his best to set his own preconceptions aside and defer to the expert. But all that the Linus inside him wished to dwell on was the Dostoyevsky novel he’d been promised, and the chances of finding a better place to swim. Maybe the power of whatever had lured him out of the country lay in their shared past—but the actual trigger must have fallen from the sky, as much of a shock to Linus as it would have been to any of them.

  5

  As Silus listened to his brothers arguing, he stepped back from the conversation and let their doppelgängers follow along in his stead, nodding in all the right places while he thought through a plan of his own.

  Leong must have requested a targeted search from a face recognition service, limited to Sydney’s transport hubs; any wider scan would have been too expensive. But now that Linus had left the country, the possibilities had exploded exponentially. They couldn’t afford to hunt through half the planet’s social media posts, hoping to get lucky again. Not at commercial rates.

  So they really had no choice but to crowdsource it. The official missing persons apps only matched against official lists; they would need something of their own. And they’d need a rapid take-up, since they were starting from a base of zero. Their app would need to go viral, even if it was a joke a few days later, and entirely forgotten a week after that.

  When the chance finally came to get a word in, he said, “Which Noah do you know?”

  Caius scowled. “What are you gibbering about?”

  But Rufus got it. “Noah Tribedi,” he explained to Caius. “He was in Idiot Empire, about four years ago. You must remember me watching that. But the point is, Tribedi’s had a wildly different look in every show he’s ever been in; people joke that it’s only a matter of time until he plays a character who resembles your favorite food.”

  Caius’s face was already crumpled in resignation, and his doppelgänger was thinking: these fools are going to do this whatever I say, so there’s no point arguing about it.

  Silus took up the thread, touting the idea with exaggerated enthusiasm just to annoy Caius. “So we put out a free app called ‘Which Noah do you know?’ that scans your social media feed and tells you the closest matches between your friends and each of Noah’s characters. It even offers you some side-by-side comparisons to post: ‘Here’s Diego at Vera’s party last week, the spitting image of Noah in All the Pretty Murderers!’”

  Caius said, “Just pretend I’m not here.”

  Silus talked over the logistics with Rufus. The code itself would be trivial, invoking standard toolkits in any of the phones it ran on. The permissions it needed from the user would be precisely those that the advertised purpose required. And though the pictures of Noah were subject to copyright, and couldn’t be embedded in the app if it was to pass the vetting process, they could embed URLs for the officially published versions that the app then worked from—and at the end of the process, they could outsource the merging and captioning of the images to one of the meme-building sites that the studios already tolerated, or positively encouraged.

  “How do we smuggle a picture of Linus into the app without giving the game away?” Rufus wondered. “I mean, we can obfuscate the image itself, but whatever encoding we use . . . last I heard, Apple wanted ten-page explanations for every chunk of data that goes into the bundle.”

  Silus was stumped for a moment, but then he had it. “I’ll change my profile picture on GitHub to a picture of Linus, and then we’ll disguise the comparison with Linus as a calibration run. We don’t even need to embed the image; we just have the app use the developer’s own, publicly available picture of hims
elf as test data. What could be more innocuous than that?”

  Caius said, “If anyone decompiles this and inspects it properly—”

  Rufus laughed. “Why would they bother?”

  “Some people have a lot of time on their hands.”

  Silus said, “There are a thousand times more phone apps than there are people in the world. If ours ever gets so popular that it starts to draw enough attention for any human being to care exactly what it’s doing behind the scenes, we will already have completed a few hundred grands’ worth of Linus-hunting for free.”

  6

  When Silus tested the app on his own feed, it turned out that nobody he knew looked like any Noah at all. Rufus and Caius had no better luck.

  “Keep the name,” Rufus suggested. “But add a few more chameleonic celebrities.”

  Silus dredged through the swoon accounts of his target demographic, scooping up dozens of actors and singers he’d never even heard of. What he really needed was a list so complete that no customer would walk away unsatisfied.

  “‘Sorry, you know no Noahs,’” Rufus read from his results, “‘but here are your best three Lydias, your top two Simons, and your number one Ga-yoon.’”

  “I think we’re at a sweet spot,” Silus decided. “If we loosen the resemblance criteria, or go further down the B-list, people will just groan.”

  Caius opened his mouth, but then thought better of it. Rufus said, “Time to launch.”

  Silus had a meeting with his adviser in ten minutes. He drained his mug of hot chocolate, submitted the app to the six stores they were aiming to reach, then switched his phone off and set off across the campus.

  As he was leaving the café, Linus’s doppelgänger said, “This is all very touching, but what if I don’t want you to find me?”

  “Do you know for a fact that you don’t?” Silus countered.

  “No,” the doppelgänger admitted.

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” Silus pressed him. “If we find you, when you’d rather we didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever made me leave without a word, I know it must have been important. Don’t you trust me on that?”