Proof of Concept Page 4

  “And there’s her codirector,” countered Kir, bristling up at the criticism. “Dan Orsted is Margrethe’s exact contemporary.”

  “Yeah, but Dan’s hale and hearty. Check it out, he posts his stats. None of the scientists do that. Hey, the guys are wondering, and I thought I should share, don’t stress! It’s not just about nonpremature death for the oldsters. What if we get overwhelmed by a devastating virus?”

  A herd of zebras thundered across his torso, streaming with an affliction of starlings in flight, and on collision course with the gleaming blue hammerheads that raced over the chief engineer patch on his upper arm. Swarms of bees whizzed furiously around his thighs. Kir shook her head, wincing. Thankfully, sound effects were banned in the canteen. How many extinct species can one LDM hold?

  “What if you had a critical health problem on a normal VLDMT program?”

  “It doesn’t happen, or if it does it’s staged, not real. Tell no one! But if it did, we’re not out of all contact with the real world!”

  Kir sighed. “No. You’re just pretending. It’s the way it is, Bill. Our senior scientists are here because the Giewont experiment is important to us, and the hard quarantine was Dan’s idea, I seem to remember. If there was a real emergency, we’d abort. But there isn’t.”

  “Here’s hoping. Ten months and three weeks to go.”

  * * *

  The LDMs quickly recovered their bounce. They weren’t inclined to worry too much about the prepared death of an old sick person, or to stress over hypothetical disasters. The Needlers mourned. The IS analysts were distraught, until Sergey’s paybot reappeared in the lab, curled up in its usual place. Nobody would admit to having kidnapped Gromit from Sergey’s sealed berth, but everyone was comforted.

  Kir hadn’t forgotten that Altair wanted to tell her something, but she didn’t hear the voice in her head, and her mind was on other things. Two weeks after the memorial service there was a night when she couldn’t sleep. As restless as if her brain were itching, she decided to check the hatch. It was still soft, still easy to finesse. She met nobody on her way to the secret exit: lights out was strict on the Needle Voyager, for health reasons. Usually they were pretending to adapt to the alien cycles of a target planet—but the rule had not been relaxed, they just kept to the hours of light and darkness far above, on the Giewont. Once she was out in the void she decided to head north, and then started walking in a spiral, after half a kilometer without incident. For a while longer nothing entered her moving envelope of light. Then a ghost appeared, a black oval, spookily alive, swimming in midair! As she approached the illusion shifted, becoming a spreading blot on the rocky floor. Circular depression, said her watch. Remarkably regular, mean diameter of six meters, mean depth of ten centimeters. A momentous find! A wild animal of the Abyss! Kir groped for a pebble, but there were no pebbles, not a grain of grit. I’d better just jump, she decided, and took a flying leap—

  An instant of absolute nothingness.

  The floor of the depression hit the soles of her bare feet with a smack that made her stagger and land on her bum.

  What did you do that for? You could have snapped your ankles!

  Adrenaline surged in her blood. I knew it was just a puddle. . . . So you’re back?

  Never been away. I’m sorry about Sergey.

  I’m sorry too. Did you know? I mean, that he was dying?

  It’s not something I’d understand. Kir, remember I wanted you to do something?

  I hadn’t forgotten. What is it?

  I need you to go to Margrethe’s berth and review some references.

  Kir wrapped her arms around her knees. She wondered for a moment if she was asleep and dreaming. I don’t get it. If Margrethe wants me to go delving in her antique paper mountains, why doesn’t she ask me?

  I don’t know.

  I’ll have to think about it. I’m going back indoors now. Leave it with me.

  Thoroughly intrigued, Kir studied the problem she’d been set. What should she do? If Altair was a real person (and Sergey hadn’t left much room for doubt!), then maybe he was bored. Maybe getting Kir to look at offline documents was the quaai’s idea of excitement. Naughty fun. But what if the voice she heard wasn’t “Altair”? What if Kir was having delusions? Or what if Margrethe had chosen this roundabout way to find out what was going on between the quaai and his host? But this last seemed unlikely, and if she was honest, Kir shrank from asking her mentor. There was too much love and guilt involved: too many years of silence. They never talked about Kir being Altair’s host. It was like a family secret: never mentioned, always there.

  In the end she decided to do what Altair asked. It couldn’t be dangerous. Altair was a person, fine: but there must be limits. He couldn’t be fully independent, and he surely couldn’t decide to do harm. If the voice in her head started telling her to falsify data, dump noxious substances in those stupid salad bowls, or run around slashing tasteless LDM jumpsuits, that would be the time to report herself sick.

  She invaded Margrethe’s berth the next morning, when the codirector was in a physical meeting with Dan Orsted and the other seniors. She had no trouble getting in; she’d always had the run of Margrethe’s quarters. The berth was a double, with a cot and a capsule bathroom squeezed into one corner. The rest of the space looked the way Margrethe’s cluttered office had always looked, wherever it found itself. The antique framed photographs on the desk, the shabby life-souvenirs scattered about: nothing of value, but hallowed by time. And then the books, the papers, the boxes. Shelves and shelves of printed books. Stacks and stacks of overflow, piled in tottering towers—

  “Why,” muttered Kir. “Why, why, why does she do it?” In the Hives an offline archive was seriously illegal: everything had to be open to inspection. Margrethe’s chaotic library was protected by her chief scientist status, but it was still a grumbling intervention risk, and she just didn’t care. Kir shook her head, breathing the air of home, the home she’d shared for so long. Margrethe was lawless too—she had the pointless defiance gene—or they could never have been such good friends.

  Altair? Here we are. What do you need?

  I’ll direct you. You locate the data, I’ll do the reading. It will go straight to my workspace. This will seem strange—

  This already seems strange. I warn you, if Margrethe turns up and asks me what I’m doing, I’m going to tell her it was your idea.

  The quaai made no response to this quip.

  Maybe the secret of Margrethe’s immunity was that most of her treasured junk wasn’t really offline. It was freely available somewhere. But there were exceptions, and hunting them down was a game Kir loved. She’d been Margrethe’s human paybot for years: happy to spend hours exploring the rats’ nest. Tracking down a chapter in a printed book with tatter-edged pages; combing fragile printouts for a single crucial result. Altair’s search presented no challenges, and only brief glimpses of past feats of discovery (the lost Toroid Project Asteroid Cloak Proposal. That controversial hyperspace experiment, never published, surviving in a bizarre smart-plastique permaformat. An early Needle data analysis, in its uncensored, offline form . . .). She got through the list as quickly as possible, constantly peeking over her shoulder, sure that Margrethe was about to appear. Find a book, track down a specified chapter. See nothing. Locate an article in one of the floor stacks, run eyes over it. See nothing. It was a strange, irritating feeling. A selective, brief, but total blindness.

  We’re done, said Altair at last. You won’t have access to the data, sorry. You’d have to finesse the firewalls to see anything in my workspace. I know that wouldn’t stop you, technically: but I’m sure you won’t! Let’s go.

  It’s got to be okay, thought Kir, bemused. I’ll ask Margrethe. Why shouldn’t I? She’ll know all about this, and she’ll explain—

  * * *

  Kir had no intention of tampering with the firewalls in her head: but there were other ways. She had title pages, abstracts, chapter headings, and dates;
and of course she was curious. She made the reasonable assumption that this was somehow to do with the Needle, invented some filters, and set her watch’s modest, conventional computing power to work, just to see what happened. To her great surprise, something popped out of the data at once. An association, clear as daylight, between the metadata for Altair’s list and Karim’s working record on the day before Sergey died . . . Mystified, and intrigued, Kir studied Karim’s record. She soon found her own false positive: noted in the traditional form, an ancient scrap of nonfunctional code: Wow. Karim had made nothing of it. False positives aren’t dangerous, they’re just false. But Kir now had other evidence, and she began to get excited—

  Long ago, in Standard Model days, scientists had assigned quirky names—up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom—to the particles known as quarks, regarded as the building blocks of all matter. The equivalent terms for information space, the four vectors (c, d, m, d), had been named in the same way, almost purely for nostalgia’s sake. They were called cruelty, drama, meaning, and dissension. Kir took all the cruelty, drama, meaning, and dissension that her watch could handle from the work of the three labs. She refined her filters and ran the probe again, and the result just got stronger. She’d found a hint, and more than a hint, of something truly thrilling.

  She remembered that Sergey had told her she might see the promised land.

  She had dinner with Bill in the canteen and returned to Margrethe’s berth for their “evening chat”—the quiet hour Margrethe had saved for Kir, whenever they could both make it, for all their years together. It wasn’t always fun. There’d been times when Kir had approached a “chat” with dread—even if Margrethe was in holopresence, or looking out of a screen, the safe distance of an orbital away. But she’d never faced her mentor with such a complex burst of feelings in her heart as on this evening under the Giewont. If she’d been younger she might have blurted out her discovery, straightaway. Grown up, and not quite certain of her ground, she waited for an opening. It didn’t come.

  Margrethe sat beside her desk, elegant, mellow, and smiling, her trademark pure-white shift and trousers gleaming under the natural-light lamps, the habitual high-collared black jacket slung around her shoulders. She reported that the excruciating live-feed overalls had been discussed at her morning meeting, but Dan couldn’t grasp the offense that the Needlers felt.

  “He said his LDMs like to celebrate the natural world. He asked us, wasn’t that a positive thing.” Margrethe laughed, shaking her head wryly, the lines at the corners of her beautiful dark eyes crinkling.

  “They could celebrate the wildlife of the Giewont Abyss,” growled Kir. “Our local nature reserve. That would be acceptable.”

  “Well, you can tell people we’re working on it. But what about you, Kir, and your gorgeous beau? Has he asked you out yet?”

  Kir grinned. “Not so far. I don’t even know if they date. They might be saving themselves for the aliens.”

  “You should make the first move. And what about Lilija? Can’t you find her an LDM sweetheart? She works too hard, that young woman—”

  Lilija was fifty, and didn’t appreciate being called “young.” She and Margrethe had a lot of respect for each other, but they were sparring partners, always trying each other’s boundaries. Maybe they were rival powers.

  Kir had once plotted to dress exactly like Margrethe, when she was older. To move like Margrethe, to laugh like that, to inherit Margrethe’s elegance and constancy. She’d outgrown the impulse. Her own no-nonsense dress code—drab trousers and tunic, a colored inner peeking at wrist and throat—was not homage; it was her own taste. Never did get used to having a choice of clothes. But you are still my maker, she thought. My father and my mother. So I won’t say a word. If I’m right, you’ll be making an announcement soon. I’ll wait for that.

  She could think of good reasons why Margrethe was keeping quiet.

  In her berth (illicitly working after lights-out), she went over it all again. The watch was a limited tool, and things that looked brilliantly right turned out to be wrong all the time: but everything seemed to stand up. There was a vital milestone, known as “Proof of Concept,” that hadn’t been reached when they were setting up the Giewont deal: a fact that had been rather riskily obscured from their backers. Kir’s results were telling her there was no longer a problem. . . . Even better, there’d never really been a problem. From what she could see, the clinching results must have been achieved, waiting to be found in unanalyzed data, before the deal was signed. So there was no harm done, just a potential embarrassment avoided. Typical Margrethe, daring and reliable! Certain before anybody else: always right when it mattered.

  But Proof of Concept was an incredible boost for the live test! And at last Kir knew why the LDM stunt was worthwhile! A year’s funding, courtesy of the insufferable Dan Orsted, was all they needed. After a successful live test, first time of trying, the Needle would be beating off MegaCorps funding bodies with sticks! She lay awake the rest of the night, dazzled by joy.

  Wow, she whispered, not aloud. Wow indeed.

  Altair made no response.

  3

  Moving into the third month, the human resources side of the mission was also going well. The Needlers had come to terms with the loss of Sergey. Thrilled and soothed by the prospect of the live test (still too far off to be stressful), they were much more relaxed. The LDMs, supreme leaders of the Frame’s domestic side, and freed from the tyranny of the global audience, had become less boisterous. Mutual respect and cordial association broke out like a rash. Needlers investigated the craft workshops, helped in the gardens, even worked out in the gym. The games rooms were busy—and nobody was making much war in there, as one witty LDM put it.

  Kir and Bill, the pioneers of this movement, were now lagging behind. Their friendship stayed in the canteen. Arms folded, almost touching, day after day they faced each other across a narrow table, forgetting to eat as they talked and talked. “What’s it like?” said Bill. “You never say a word about it; I’ve noticed. But it’s got to be the most important thing—”

  Kir didn’t know where to start. Should she try to explain why scientists were so keen on sticking boxes of nothing-special at the bottom of extremely deep holes? (None of the LDMs seemed to have heard GAM’s isolation chamber lecture.) Nonscientists tended to prefer dead scientists, and legends rather than details. Maybe she should tell him how Peter Higgs, the Higgs boson man, accidentally invented refraction modeling, long ago? Or about David Bohm, the double-slit experiment, and how Bohmian mechanics were the reason why the Needle idea was possible? Something happening in a distant galaxy is affecting you, Bill, in this canteen right now. Everything is connected. There are no empty spaces and time does not pass. That’s why we’re all down here—

  “Being born out there. Living in a Dead Zone?”

  “It’s not what people think,” said Kir, disappointed and relieved. “Dead Zones aren’t dead, not where scavs live, obviously, or we couldn’t survive. It’s just very, very polluted. There’s plants, but they’re not fit to eat, except a few things, if you’re desperate; and there’s wildlife—”

  “Wow.”

  “Plenty. Crows, gulls, jackals, rats, bugs, feral dogs and pigs. And leopards, now and then.”

  “Leopards are extinct.”

  “Not while there are scavs to eat. But you usually only get one at a time hanging around. And there’s the sky. It’s not always smogged. I’ve seen stars, sometimes.”

  “Fantastic!”

  “There was a stream running through our ground with fish in it. Nobody drank the water; it was toxic and full of parasites, and we all had plenty of those already. You couldn’t eat the fish either—they were radioactive—but some people did. What’s radioactive going to do to you? Might give you cancer that might be a bit fatal, when you’re thirty and probably dead anyway? But Linda wouldn’t let us.”

  “Who’s Linda?”

  “I think she was my mother. Or my bi
g sister, or probably both, and there was Vel, my little brother. But they were gone before; I don’t know, I didn’t count, but before I was eight or nine.”

  “Your sister was your mother? Ouch, Kir—!”

  Bill had recoiled, his mouth a comical turndown of distress. Yeah, we have child abuse in the Dead Zones, she thought. Don’t tell me you don’t have those issues. I think she also killed the bastard, but I’d better not say that, or you’ll just get even more horrified—

  “You know what I can’t get used to down here?” said Bill abruptly.

  “Go on?”

  “There’s no mediation tracking! Really none. Not fake-none, like on a normal mission. We’ve begun to talk about it; we couldn’t believe it at first. All contact with the world above severed. We heard the words; we didn’t get the message. There’s no Thought Crime. Your every little eye kick, choice, and contact isn’t being monetized, or racked up against you. Nothing’s following your emo responses; nobody monitoring what you do in playtime. GAM has left the building! We’ve left the building! It’s crazy!”

  Bill grinned from ear to ear and waved his hands on either side of his head. The exuberant gesture didn’t make her wince, not this time.

  “My friends are hivizens, when they’re not working,” said Kir. “Except the seniors. I’ve wondered why they were smiling so much.”

  Eye to eye, Bill and Kir were both smiling now: warmly, broadly, uncontrollably.

  “My family name is Murdoch,” said Bill. “I’m Bill Murdoch8N45star921. You?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have one. Why would I have a UI? I’m a scav, no legal status.”

  “Come on, you just told me you had family. A pretty good mom, and a little brother.” He rolled his eyes, mugging dreadful hurt and humiliation. “You don’t want to. Sorry, I jumped the gun, forget it—”

  In the absence of constant tracking, two people sharing their Unique Identities didn’t mean much. But to Bill this was obviously important. Kir thought of Lilija, who didn’t use a father’s name. She liked Lilija.