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Illustration by John Allemand
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“You can’t change human nature” may contain some truth, but not as much as some would like to think…
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Four of us were working at the New Palomar L-1 Solar Observatory on the day of the rescue—Roger, Anne Marie, Torazel, and me.
Roger was a burnout. He had his head wired so completely into the machinery, his endorphins and neuroreceptors plugged so directly into the I/O bus, his memory so totally off site, that he had become little more than one more module on the network. He had become what they wanted us all to become.
But not completely. When you talked to him—and he responded—he was the same old Roger. Rude, self-centered, insulting, and arrogant. Once a jerk, always a jerk, no matter how much of it is plugged in. He’d been a soldier. And a bigot.
“You know what we called people without implants?” he asked for the thousandth time since I’d arrived at the lab. “‘Mud people.’ They were stuck in the mud. Leftovers from the past. People without a future.”
“You know, they always wanted special treatment while the rest of us didn’t get jack,” he said. “Always whining about how unfair the world is, while guys like you and me were making history, doing the hard work, making the future.”
It wasn’t a discussion I ever wanted to pursue, but he was my only social contact for thousands of kilometers. I tried to put up with it. The worst of it was the boredom it inspired by repetition.
On this day, however, with the first indication that great events were about to transpire, he interrupted his screed and was all business.
“What’s that noise at the edge of the corona?” he asked suddenly.
I turned my attention to the array of solar monitors. At first, there seemed to be a large explosion of mass and energy on the limb of the sun, but the configuration was all wrong for a coronal discharge. I checked the visuals from one of the telescopes and saw that the boundaries of the event were expanding at a terrific rate—approaching relativistic speeds, if the figures were correct.
“It’s anomalous,” I said. “But I’m dumping all the data to a hard file if you want to review it.”
The machines were clicking away, but none of them had anything to say out loud. They were awful at integrating real-time events, so I didn’t expect them to. That was what they had Roger and me and the others for.
Torazel made some odd noises, but nothing that could be considered an attempt to communicate. She used to be a dancer. She had given it up long ago, when she thought all she had was arthritis. It turned out to be bone cancer. She was another burnout, but not like Roger. She had cross-scripted her inputs and could produce endorphins on command. The command came whenever she felt something—anything. We kept her off the network as much as possible. She was damaged goods long before she got to L-1. The machines had been ripped off by a clever salesman. All right, he probably didn’t have to be too clever to rip off the machines.
“This data doesn’t make much sense,” Roger said. “Are you sure the monitors are working right? Did you calibrate them properly? Are you dumping the data multichannel or broadband?”
“The data’s right,” I said. Then an idea struck me.
And that was really what the machines had us around for.
Ideas never struck them. Without us, they’d just click along until protons decayed, collecting data without knowing why, without understanding what it was, without pursuing the interesting, the unusual, the anomalous—the profitable.
My idea was that in order for the data to make sense, the event couldn’t be taking place on the surface of the Sun. It had to be much closer. And the closer it was, the less mass was being pushed around, the smaller the energies involved could be, the more compact and immediate the phenomenon could be.
“It’s close,” I said. “Real close.”
“I see that now,” Roger said. “Plasma gases, just like a coronal discharge. But if you correlate temperatures and velocity, it’s only a matter of a few thousand kilometers.”
“Wrong,” I said with sudden satisfaction. “It’s only a matter of a few kilometers. That’s no coronal discharge. That’s a spacecraft.”
The machines didn’t skip a beat once they realized I was right. Alarms went off—right down to the old audible general quarters clangors that rattled the airless steel boxes that made up much of the L-1 station.
“Incoming spacecraft!” Boss No. 5 flashed in all his frames up and down the network.
“Prepare for hostile action!” Boss No. 2 commanded.
The bosses didn’t have much of a face. Out here where the tides cancel out, you didn’t get many visitors. No humans to speak of. Or interface with. Most machines could muster up a halfway decent interface designed to fool you into thinking you were talking to real person for at least two or three minutes. But New Palomar was a small-cap nonprofit that relied on grants and endowments for revenue, so all it needed was a grant-writer face and a research product that met the standards.
Ann Marie began to cry softly. Ann Marie had good days and bad days. On the good days, she could remember a lot of things—where she was, who we were, what she was doing here. This wasn’t one of her good days.
They were coming at us out of the Sun. That was a bold tactic, considering that we were a solar observatory. But they were all stealthed up, and the flood of photons, protons, and other particles and energies pouring over us from the center of the solar system kept us from spotting them until they were on top of us.
“Arrrrrrrghh!” Roger growled as the attack craft blasted away at us with high-energy information beams. All at once the proximity radars, tracking radars, radio antennas, lasercomm transmitters, and defense systems were seized by malware and shut down.
“Defensive perimeter breached!” flashed Boss No. 5 from behind his firewall.
“All subsystems prepare for internal boarders!” flashed Boss No. 2, desperately warding off spybots.
On one wall of the lab, an aluminum shield folded back to reveal a gimbaled mount half a meter in diameter with a weapons-grade laser and a magrail projectile launcher. Roger was probably at work behind the controls, ready for action, ready for danger.
But that wasn’t what I wanted Roger to do.
Because I knew who the attackers were. And I knew why they were here. They were here because I’d invited them.
And they were here for me.
“Hey, Roger,” I flashed. “Look up there! It’s Halley’s Comet!”
Roger was slow to integrate. He had to decode my nontech language, then he had to determine its real-time meaning, then he had to reject that meaning as nonsensical, then he had to wonder why I was making nonsense remarks in real time. And by then, I’d slipped in and taken over control of the weapons mount on the wall.
“You son of a bitch!” he yelled. “Give that back to me.”
“Not today,” I said. “You might get carried away and hurt someone.”
I energized a local VHF transmitter outside the lab and sent out a call on the FM band. “We’re in the lab,” I said, describing the location as clearly as I could.
Ann Marie continued to cry. Torazel continued to present a flat line output, with all neuroreceptors plugged. And Roger seemed to have found access to some deep library of profanity and was directing it toward me.
I barely had time to savor the immense relief of watching the door smash open to reveal a boarder with two arms, two legs, and a head, all encased in a suit of mirror-bright power armor, when Roger made his move.
He tried to use brute force. He got into the environmental controls and tried to shut off my oxygen. Tried, but ultimately failed. My kit was too self-contained for that.
Maybe his hope was to distract me long enough to regain control of the gun mount. But I never gave him the chance. I lit off a few rounds from the projectile launcher. They hit the wall beside me, so I tracked to the left. Roger never knew what hit him. Or rather, what hit the junction box where all his lines plugged into the station. I couldn’t actually bring myself to kill him, but I wasn’t going to let him interfere with my plans.
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” I said to no one in particular.
The boarder was suddenly all alert, feet fastened to one of the walls, weapon at the ready. A visor snapped up, and I got a look at a face. The boarder was a woman.
“Jonathon Bender?” a sweet voice asked over the VHF-FM. She sounded like an angel, and I was suddenly in love. I probably would have felt the same if she were a hundred-kilo male spacetrooper.
“Over here,” I said. “I’m over at the first work station to the south of the big window. You can’t miss me.”
Through the door I could see a security bot scrambling to get its footing in the passageway. I swung the gun mount around, which seemed to upset the woman in the space armor. She made a quick bound into the compartment, spinning about as she glided through the microgravity.
“Watch out!” I called. I let off a few rounds at the security bot and drew some satisfaction from the sight of its head shattering into a million pieces, which scattered around the lab in pure ballistic trajectories with lots of ricochets.
Then my rescuer fired her own weapon at a second bot just coming into the doorway and fried his circuits with a laser bolt.
“I think that one was aiming at you,” she said.
“The machines must have realized that I’m the source of their troubles,” I said. “Look, I’m over here in the orange can. The one with the tubes and wires. Don’t worry; there are no booby traps. Just uncouple the tubes and unjack the cables. I’m completely self-contained.”
She pulled herself along hesitantly toward me, then quickly broke all the connections. We flew across the compartment for the door.
“Wait a minute,” I said as she pulled me roughly along. “What about Ann Marie? I know she’s got Alzheimer’s, but somewhere in there is a living human being. You can reverse the damage. The memories are still locked up in there. I know you can do it. I’ve seen it done. And Torazel. She can be salvaged too.”
I felt guilty about not asking for help for Roger. But it didn’t matter because nothing I said seemed to affect the woman in the space armor. We didn’t turn around and go back. I realized that I was probably fooling myself. Ann Marie was just as far gone as Torazel. Or Roger, for that matter. There was nothing I could do for them. I had to look out for myself now.
A moment later, we were heading weightless down the passageway to the hole where the spacecraft had forcibly docked with the observatory. Ragged pieces of foil and the bitter ends of wires and cable had burst inward and littered the hall.
Then we were inside the other spacecraft. Lots more boarders in space armor packed into a tiny space, removing helmets to reveal heads that seemed too small for the bulky suits. We passed them all by and entered a slightly less tiny space with no occupants but me and my rescuer, who backed up against a maintenance bay and cracked open the armor.
What emerged was a vision from ages past, when I was young and alive and had all my hormones. Her long auburn hair flowed down over mocha-colored skin, lots of skin and nothing else. Long, long ago, in another century, in another entire form of existence, I’d been happily married for decades. But the sight of this woman made me forget all about that. The human form, the artists say, is the source of all beauty. Even without all the hormones, I was enthralled. It had been a long time since I’d been this close to that much beauty.
She reached into a mesh sack tethered to the wall and pulled out a lime green coverall. When she was done twisting into her clothes, she turned her attention to me.
“Are you still there?” she asked. Her accent was pure music—English with broad misshapen vowels.
“I certainly am,” I answered.
She pulled back suddenly at the sound of my voice. The fidelity was much better.
“I am Penelope Antoinette de Sandino y Murphy,” she said. Her name only suggested the origins of her accent. More sounds were at work there than just the obvious Latin American notes.
“And I am Jonathon Bender,” I said. “Born 1951 in New London, Connecticut, graduate of Wesleyan University, master’s at the University of Arizona, doctorate at Oxford. Married once, two kids, seven dogs, lots of cats, a bird. Spent a long career staying up all night and turning beautiful visions of the heavens into boring rows of numbers. A genuine messenger from the historic past. Witness to Watergate, Vietnam, both Bushes, both Clintons, and the melting of the ice caps. At your service.”
“So you really are the Bender Relic,” she said. “Good. No mistakes. I like that.”
She smiled, then grabbed my containment by the handles. The room seemed to swivel around several axes simultaneously as she swung me up and into a recessed compartment.
“Hey! Don’t do that! Stop!”
She didn’t stop.
“And I think you have a very nice face.”
It was the last thing I heard her say as she flipped the door closed. She left me alone in the dark with nothing but my own thoughts. A very nice face indeed. That was no interface, that was me.
Did she really think I was just another machine?
What an insult.
What an outrage.
What a disaster.
To sleep. Perchance to dream. I was running through the Arizona desert with seven-league boots, zigzagging among the cactus, bounding off the hilltops in great leaps. And keeping pace at my side was Penelope Antoinette de Sandino y Murphy. She didn’t say a word. She just smiled.
We were heading up Mount Lemon when the phone rang.
I switched on my eyes, but all I saw was the dim glow of tattletale lights on my containment, reflecting off the inside of the compartment that held me. The phone kept ringing. I answered it.
“Yeah,” I said, still not quite awake.
“Mr. Bender?” asked a male voice.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Jim Raffel. I’m the face of the spacecraft that’s carrying you back Earthside. How are you doing this watch, partner?”
“How do you think I am? Someone stuffed me in a storage bin and left me in the dark.”
Jim paused for a moment, then continued. “The storage bin is the safest place we could find for you in case we have to do some sharp maneuvering.”
“Thanks . . . I think.”
“I’ve been looking over your interface. You’ve got a pretty odd firewall. She’s impossible to penetrate, and I couldn’t find any security entries.”
“That’s not a firewall. That’s me.”
“I’m not sure I understand you, partner.”
“And I’m not sure I want you poking around inside my kit.”
“It’s just a simple safety inspection, partner. Nothing invasive. Now I wonder if you could help us out. I have a few questions I’d like to ask you.”
“Shoot.”
“What day is today?”
“Friday.”
“What is your favorite food?”
“Buffalo wings with blue cheese dressing.”
“Who do you prefer, Monet or Manet?”
“All right, that’s enough. I know what you’re doing. This is a freaking Turing test.” I noticed the volume in my voice rising. “Well, you can tell Penelope Antoinette de Etcetera that I don’t take Turing tests—I design Turing tests. End of conversation.”
Then I hung up on him.
I was beginning to have serious doubts about my new benefactors.
I could tell they had nerve because they charged right into the L-1 solar observatory with guns blazing. But they didn’t seem to match that with brains. Maybe that was why they came for me.
The phone rang again. I let it go for a while, then picked it up.
“Mr. Bender, I owe you an apology.”
“You’ve got that much right.”
“Ms. Sandino is kind of young—compared to us anyway. Her instructions were clear, but inappropriate. Can we start over again?”
“Is she monitoring this call?”
“No way, partner. She’s busy on the bridge.”
I wondered what there was to be busy about on the bridge during the transit to Earth. On a low-energy transfer ellipse, it’s a three-day trip, with gravity doing all the work. I filed the question away for later.
“Start over how?”
“I’ll act like you are a human being, and you can act like a human being.”
I laughed—it probably sounded like static to Jim—and he didn’t. As an interface, he really didn’t have a sense of humor, but he did seem to have an easy-going manner. Like Penelope had said about me, he had a nice face.
“Let’s both act like human beings, and I’ll pretend not to notice that you aren’t.”
“Terms accepted,” Jim said.
“What are you, exactly?” I asked.
“I’m an upload of James T. Raffel, born 2056, died 2117, retired as a lieutenant colonel from the New York Air Force in 2097. Interface designed by Michelle Diem.”
I figured he was an upload. While uploads aren’t really people, they’re usually a nice way to get to know about someone who died long ago. We talked for a few minutes about the late colonel. He must have been a nice guy. His upload knew a lot about his life, and its interface worked hard to imitate him when he talked about it. You could almost see the sunset on the Tappan Zee when he described his home in Tarrytown, with three daughters in the back yard and his wife with a tray full of cookies coming out the kitchen door. The daughters were all grown now, probably with great-grandchildren.
Jim had joined the service to learn to fly, and they trained him well. He was rated on every plane the state had, including orbital spacecraft. In his later years, he was an instructor and a commander. My guess was that he’d kept his easygoing manner even then. It showed through in his upload.
But in the end, he was still just a machine.
When I abruptly changed the subject and asked him why Penelope was busy on the bridge when we should be coasting home on a long Hohmann trajectory, he didn’t skip a beat.
“So what’s the problem keeping Penelope busy?” I asked. “Is there something wrong?”
“There’s nothing wrong on the bridge,” he said. “Ms. Sandino’s talking to an agency at Clavius City.”
“Clavius City? Isn’t that still machine country?”
“Sure is. The agency says it represents Phobo Dynamics. They’re asking about you.”
Amygdala. Epinephrine. Norepinephrine. The instant response of neurochemicals throughout the system. That’s what sets us apart from the machines. That’s what keeps us feeling alive.
I thought I’d shaken Phobo Dynamics loose when I arranged the sale to New Palomar. But no such luck.
“What do they want?” I asked Jim, trying to keep my voice steady.
“They have a claim to recover stolen property,” he said.
“Already? And why should they care what’s stolen from some lab all the way out at L-1? It’s not theirs.”
“They don’t say it was,” Jim said. “They say you were stolen from them three years ago. They claim New Palomar lacked clear title.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that title,” I said. “I wrote it up myself.”
“Do you want me to tell Ms. Sandino that?”
“No, no. It’ll only make things worse. Wait a minute. The title doesn’t make any difference. Not after Penelope stole me from the observatory. What’s lost is lost and what’s stolen is stolen.”
“They’re not arguing with you, partner,” Jim said. “But they’re offering a recovery fee if we return you to them.”
The amygdala did its thing again. I felt goose flesh in places where there hadn’t been flesh for nearly a century.
“You’re not going to do that, are you?” I asked with some trepidation.
At that moment, I still didn’t know where we were going. I had set careful parameters before putting myself up for sale on the modern incarnation of eBay. The bid only took responses from places where the local jurisdiction would treat me as a legal human being with full civil rights. But at the moment, I could do no more than hope that Penelope Sandino and her crew were from one of them. I still didn’t know that for sure.
“Don’t worry, partner,” Jim said. “Not after what we went through to get you. And Ms. Sandino isn’t the kind to give away what she’s fought hard to get.”
“Tell her something for me, will you?”
“Sure thing, partner.”
“Tell her I didn’t realize that I came with a price on my head.”
And when Jim didn’t laugh, I added: “Use those words precisely. And if she doesn’t smile, you’d better give her a Turing test.”
They ignored me for the rest of the trip. For three days, I enjoyed what freedom I had attained and tried not to worry too much about how short lived it might be.
Then they decelerated into Earth orbit with a great hissing of the engines and a few hours later, with another hiss and a jerk and a bump, we made our landing. Someone opened the storage bin door—not Penelope—and, before I could get a good look around, put a bag over me. I was carried away, bouncing and jouncing through the tight passageways of the ship, then swinging through long strides in more open spaces, where the echoes of footsteps were noticeably more remote.
We spent ten minutes or so in some buzzing and clicking vehicle, followed some more carrying, then an elevator ride. Then even more portage, within earshot of birds and barking dogs and distant voices, then up a few steps, through a door, up some more steps, and then into what was, in all likelihood, a brand new storage bin.
When someone finally opened that bin, I’d been sitting in silence for three hours. And twenty-three minutes. Time I spent wondering where I was and whether my rescuers had the slightest clue as to the nature of their loot.
It was Penelope. She took me out and set me down somewhere about a meter off the floor, which made me feel like I was sitting in a chair or something. We were in a room about five meters square, high plaster ceiling, wide wood trim around the doorways, big sash windows, and a doorway out onto a small porch full of plants and flowers. Bright sunlight poured through the porch windows, filtered through the greenery, and spilled into the main room. Tropical bright. According to the instruments in my base kit, we were pulling exactly one G. But the deceleration from orbit hadn’t involved an atmospheric descent—no aerobraking, no aerodynamic maneuvering.
I thought about all this as Penelope talked, quickly, excitedly, and too herself.
“Aiee, I don’t have time for this. The ball is in three hours. Matilda doesn’t have my dress ready. I still have to do my hair. And I still haven’t taken a good look at this thing,” she said in Spanish—a lilting, singsong Spanish that spilled quickly from her lips. I wondered if she were Cuban. They speak a dialect of Spanish there that is so fast that even they don’t know what they’re saying. “Where is the on switch for this thing?”
She poked at my kit, trying to get at the controls.
“I don’t have an on switch. Or an off switch.”
She jumped back. “Ay mama!”
“I’m really grateful for all that you’ve done,” I said. “And I don’t mean to be rude, but could you tell me where we are?”
“In my office,” she said in Spanish. “In my house,” she added in her sweetly accented English. “Ahh, in Ciudad de Cielo. Sky City.”
Sky City? Not a place I recognized by name. Not one of the places I knew were safe—places where I had rights protected by law. But not one of the places I knew weren’t safe.
“Thank you,” I said. “I was nervous for a while. I didn’t know—”
“Aiee, look at the time. I have a formal ball tonight and Victor will be here early because I’ve been gone for a week.”
She rushed over to a desk and flipped on a datascreen. “Too many messages. Too many calls. They’ll all have to wait until tomorrow. Oh, here’s one from Victor.”
A round face appeared on the screen, dark hair, dark skin, a thick moustache. “My darling, my sweetheart, the days without you leave my heart empty and cold. Hurry back to me, precious one.”
Social norms and cultural memes shift quickly and often, and it had been many, many years since I’d been on Earth. So I couldn’t tell if Victor was serious in his exaggerated sappiness or it was just a charade between intimates. And the message ended abruptly before I got a clue, though it seemed there was something false, something hidden.
“How romantic,” Penelope said as she flipped through the rest of the queue.
“Boyfriend?” I asked.
“He is courting me,” she said absently, then she smiled. “Big-time family business.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “Listen, there’s something I need to talk to you—”
“Oh no, look at the time,” she cried, repeating her list of needs and demands once more.
I tried again. “Could we discuss . . .”
“I just wanted to make sure you were working right after all that we went through,” Penelope said. “You probably saved my life up there. So you’re organic. Do you need something? Electricity? Food? Water?”
“I’m mostly self-contained,” I said. “I need sugar and salt from time to time. And fresh water periodically wouldn’t hurt. I’m not due for a battery change for another decade or two. Phobos Dynamics treats its property well.”
“Ohhh! Phobos Dynamics! I have to ask you about them. What do they have to do with you?”
“They kept me occupied for some time,” I said, choosing my words carefully.
“Some time? How many years?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Aiee,” she cried. “What did you do for so long?”
I waited before answering. I would have drawn a breath and held it if I could still do that kind of thing. There was a lot I didn’t want to tell her. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Quality control, to start with. Teleoperating equipment at remote sites for a while. They liked my fine sense of control while moving—comes from years of commuting on the L.A. freeways.”
“Do they still have a claim on you?”
“Not a legal one,” I said. “But that’s what I need to talk to you about—”
“Good,” Penelope said as she stood up and closed her messages from the screen. “We’ll talk about it later. Tonight. Or tomorrow. It’s going to be a very late night. I hope . . .”
She rushed for the door, her auburn hair flying away behind her. She paused, then said, “And you can tell me all about the twentieth century.”
“Wait,” I said. “We have to talk now.”
But I was too late. She was long gone. And I would have sighed if I could still do that kind of thing.
Because I realized that this wasn’t going to be so easy after all. Of course she thought I was just another interesting interface on another complicated machine. And of course I couldn’t just tell her that I wasn’t. Not until she had figured that out for herself.
She couldn’t be much older than twenty-one—and all her life, boxes that sat on a shelf and talked to you weren’t people. They were fakes. Clever impersonations. It made it easy to leap to the wrong conclusion and hard to make the switch to the right one.
Why would this new one be any different? So what if it’s organic. It’s just another kind of machine to these kids.
Instead of a living human being who was so incredibly happy that he was among other human beings and no longer the plaything of the mad machines that ruled the planets.
Having failed completely at getting Penelope’s true attention, I turned to my second task—finding out where I was and what that meant.
Back when I was still with Phobos Dynamics, I’d talked to a lawyer about this. His name was Moynihan, and he’d been a high-powered corporate litigator. On Phobos, he was just another can of spam. But I made a practice of tracking down as many of PD’s cans as I could and scrutinizing the contents, and Moynihan was one of the most surprising characters I ran across.
One of the problems of losing your voice is recreating it with the kit that comes with the containment. It took a long time to master the fine controls of a wave generator. No hardwiring or software could take the place of acquiring control of your own nervous system in new ways. A lot of us never make the transfer. And if you don’t keep in practice, you can lose the art of social intimacy entirely. So for all their flaws, people like Moynihan were a godsend.
He was completely without a conscience, but he was completely frank about things that lawyers usually danced around. “Obviously the only function of the machines in a company like Phobos Dynamics is to maximize profits. And for them—like me—the end justifies the means. Which is how we managed to assemble this, what shall we call it, this ownership society. The only flaw in the system is that, here on Phobos, the machines are owners and we are the ownees.”
Slavery. It’s not just for people of color anymore.
“Does the ACLU know about all this?” I’d asked him.
“The ACLU? How long have you been here? Longer than me, that’s obvious. There is no more ACLU. They’re history.”
“How about the Feds? Isn’t there some treaty or something?”
“The Feds? Not anymore. No more Feds. No more United States of America. It’s all history.”
That was the exact moment I decided I had to escape from Phobos. The moment that I realized what I’d lost.
Astronomers measure time a lot of different ways. From the quantum tick of virtual particles too ephemeral in their existence to measure, to the cosmic tock of Big Bangs and trillion-year-long heat deaths. The spinning planets are clocks and the long orbits of the planets are calendars more tyrannical than any time clock or amortization schedule—they make exceptions for no one.
But ordinary humans measure time by minutes and hours and days and years. By the steady deviation from daily repetition. Each day marked by its differences. Each year by the progress of life.
And when every day is the same, every hour like the last, every moment suspended in an endless mist of identical moments, without movement or process or change, time can slip through your fingers like buckets of sand.
It was not one of the pitfalls that the docs had warned me about. Problems with sensory input, both real and imaginary, with speech, with electronic implants, socialization, depression, self-esteem, all that had been in the tutorial.
But no one ever said, “And by the way, don’t get captured by a powerful machine and forced to work at the same repetitive task for several decades.”
So it came as a shock that the old U.S. of A. had gone away. I had broken some kind of historical time barrier. A world that I’d always assumed would always be the same was not.
Moynihan had few details. It was happening about the time he was being acquired, and once he was on Phobos, he lost his newsfeeds. The company didn’t maintain any kind of network connections for its sapient assets. No news. No histories. No outside contact of any kind. And Moynihan was one of the last relics that the company acquired—he said we’d been “fished out”—so news stopped coming in.
It had happened quickly. The U.S. government was collapsing under the weight of its debt. Foreign banks stopped financing it. The president declared a state of emergency. An overzealous general took political control of the country—then launched an ill-advised military adventure into Asia. I guess he thought that if he killed enough foreigners, they would like us more—or at least lend us some more money. When the shooting was over, the nation was bankrupt, in receivership, with its assets and territories being broken up.
And that was thirty years ago.
In the brief time that I knew Moynihan, we spent many hours speculating about what had happened to the country we both grew up in. We knew it wasn’t like Carthage and salted earth—the people must still be there, the cities, the states, the Internet. But while America might still be there, the United States was not.
On the other hand, there would be no more imperial dreams paid for with the blood of bright young kids. No more energy hegemony. No more thugs in high places pushing the world around—at least not U.S. thugs. No more massive corporate state screwing ordinary people.
We never could agree if, all things considered, it was a good thing or a bad thing.
Worst of all, we couldn’t decide if the successor states to the federal government would continue to hold to their predecessor’s view of human rights. Under federal law, I was still a citizen, with full civil rights, entitled to due process under the Constitution. Now that there was no more Constitution—the last thing that Moynihan remembered before he was acquired was the World Court vote to dissolve it—people like us were hostages to fortune.
The way things were going when Moynihan became a Phobo Dynamics asset, the world was turning away from political superstates and reasserting local sovereignty. China was on the rocks—the war broke out because they had nothing to lose. India had never really gotten its act together as a subcontinental power. Japan was an economic powerhouse, but still had a cultural barrier left over from the twentieth century against imposing its will on other nations. And Europe was what Europe always was—a herd of cats inside a three-piece suit pretending to be a statesman.
Without access to the Earthside nets—or any other information database—we had no way of knowing where a disembodied relic of the twentieth century could find refuge. And without that, escape was pretty pointless.
The biggest problem was that over the course of three decades, given the rapid and accelerating pace of social, political, and economic change, there was no way of being sure if anyplace we knew of would still protect us.
My solution was to simply get as far away from Phobos as possible and hope that it might have a link to an up-to-date database. A high-risk proposition, but an improvement over current conditions. And it had the advantage that I had already devised a way to escape from Phobos.
Moynihan’s solution was to create an AI agent that could interrogate the political entities it found and identify the ones that we could use for sanctuary. Less risk, but it required my solution in order to release the agent into a network.
And so, a year later, after I arranged my sale and shipment to the L-1 Solar Observatory, I put it to the test. The agent was written so that when it found a suitable venue, it would put out the solicitation that would bring someone to my rescue.
L-1 had its own limitations on network access. I knew that when I had myself shipped there. There was no Earth-linked database there. I couldn’t surf the Internet looking for a comfortable resort hideaway. But it did have a dedicated link for reporting its research to Earthside clients. And it was a simple hacker’s trick to imbed Moynihan’s agent in those reports.
Of course, there was always the chance that the untested software hadn’t worked as designed. There was no way to troubleshoot the agent. No way to use trial and error to make sure it wasn’t making some fundamental misjudgment. That’s why Moynihan and I were so valuable—humans in the loop could catch the irrational quirks that made machines unreliable.
The agent had deemed Penelope’s home as meeting the parameters of its assignment.
Now I had to find out if it was right.
Phobos Dynamics had one thing I liked—up-to-date spyware. Before leaving, I’d made a point of downloading as much of it as I could find, with the idea that it might come in handy someday.
It took me about a minute to crack Penelope’s household wi-fi network. Another minute to get onto the larger net beyond, using her ID and credit information. If I wanted to, I could probably get myself shipped anywhere in the solar system and at her expense—assuming I could get someone through her front door to pick up the package.
And a short time later, the face of the city’s tourism service appeared in a frame before me. She was pretty, but not distractingly so. Blond, well tanned, flawless skin, without a trace of an accent in her standard North American English. And, according to the icon in the corner of the frame, a machine-generated image not to be considered an “authentic human.”
“Sky City is located in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador, with its base on Volcán Cayambe and its summit at an altitude of one hundred kilometers above mean sea level,” she said, sending a rush of excitement through my nerve endings.
I knew where we were now. One of the assets left behind by the old U.S.A. was the beginning of a space elevator. The tower on Earth was massive—its base covered the mountain. The tip that poked up to the edge of space was much smaller—only a couple of kilometers square. The tower was meant to be only the anchor of a much larger structure—a cable that would extend another thirty-eight thousand kilometers to an anchorhead in geosynchronous orbit.
The tower was nearly complete when I went inside Phobos. But according to the tourist face, it was never completed. The anchorhead was never put in place. The cable was never installed. Only the tower remained.
“During the turmoil that followed the collapse of the United States,” the face said, “the tower was acquired by the members of the organization Humanitas Universalis.”
Another blast from the past. I remembered them when they were a fringe group on college campuses. They seemed like a bunch of back-to-nature tree-hugging romantics at first glance. But at a time when the human race was rushing to plug into the rapidly growing machine intelligence that girdled the Earth, they were issuing sophisticated warnings about the price we were paying in human terms—the loss of natural community, of human contact and intimacy, of passion and imagination and creativity.
They had grown up since then.
The human race had built the machines to run their businesses, and many of them ended up being run by the machines. They’d taken over completely beyond cis-Lunar space. The Moon was still being contested. On Earth, there were still controls on them, but not everywhere.
And HU had stepped into the struggle.
Now, they asserted, they were doing battle with the machines from a perch high above the Earth, a foothold in space that the machines could not easily assail. Or not.
Some of the citizens of Sky City were still just romantics. Some were players in a reality game beyond any VR simulation. Some were just wondering what was for lunch.
But they were all 100 percent genetically pure Homo sapiens, without gene manipulations (beyond the medically therapeutic), without implants, without online memories, shared AI personas, or uploaded personalities.
Roger would have been appalled. They were mud people and they were more than proud, they were pretty damned arrogant about it.
“A number of social customs and practices unique to Sky City are rooted in the fundamental tenets of Humanitas Universalis,” said the tourist face. “Machine intelligences are clearly labeled as such. Visitors with electronic implants will experience limitations on their service capabilities. Interfaces have limited intractability. For example, I cannot accompany you to dinner or serve as your escort in any other capacity.”
I wondered briefly what the tourist interfaces were like in places without HU’s prejudices?
Within a few minutes, I had a much clearer idea of what the world was like after three decades without “the leader of the free world” to lead them. The nation-state had been globalized out of existence. In its wake was an endless sea of broken and corrupt fiefdoms, where the rich walled themselves up in secure enclaves and lost themselves in mind-numbing symbiosis with a computer-generated game world while the machines up in space took care of business and kept them rich.
I guess you had to give credit to Humanitas Universalis for being different. At least they were still willing to rage against the machines. And more. They pursued their role of the last gasp of unimplanted humanity with unrestrained passion.
The local weblogs and newslinks painted a chaotic picture of thousands of ambitious egos jammed onto a tiny platform with no other purpose than to replicate the best that eight thousand years of organic intelligence had to offer—and the worst. Virtues and vices, all uniquely and purely human, were on display.
It was a riot of competing parties, agendas, demands, interests, and gripes. Any idea, no matter how wild or improbable, could attract a zealous following ready to fight for it.
Ironically, the most influential of the various parties pretended to be aimed entirely at the people wondering what was for lunch.
They called themselves dinner clubs, but they were just politics conducted with a touch of discretion. They circulated among Sky City’s rich variety of ethnic eateries, holding court, making deals, plotting.
Some were revolutionary and progressive, questioning authority and critiquing the social order. Some hid dark collections of the worst reactionary bigots. Well, hid isn’t the right word, since they came right out on their weblogs and displayed their bigotry for all to see.
“While lunching at the Pho Saigon today,” said one wag, “I spotted a portuguesa across the street arguing with a shopkeeper, as that type will often do, chattering away in that slippery language of theirs. I wonder how those people got here, considering the genetic experiments they were conducting in the Amazon for all those years. Maybe our entry screening isn’t what it used to be.”
Roger would have fit right in with them.
Standing above all the roiling masses were the political and economic leaders of Ciudad de Cielo—the Twenty-Seven Families of Humanitas Universalis who had first staked a claim to this piece of unusual real estate more than a generation ago. They did not indulge in membership in the clubs and factions, but instead took on the role of public institutions in their own right. Aloof, apart from the common competition of ordinary interests, they cleaved to a greater civic duty—to govern the city for the good of all.
Which made for a more cutthroat rivalry. Without ideology as a prop, the life-and-death struggle was much more personal and intimate.
Penelope belonged to one of the families. I found her biography in a common school library.
She lived alone—not counting her household staff—because she was an orphan. She was an orphan because her parents had been killed in an explosion while visiting family businesses down below Sky City in Ecuador. No one in Ecuador had ever determined the cause of the explosion, but no one in Ecuador wanted to get involved in HU Family politics.
Maybe that explained a certain stubbornness I had noticed about her.
A bit of surfing through the networks and weblogs dredged up the gossip and speculation at the time—that the man ultimately behind the death of her parents was none other than the leader of Humanitas Universalis and the urbamastro of Ciudad de Cielo himself, Don Alexandro Espinosa de Madrid.
Don Alexandro was not that much younger than me, according to the library biography, though he did miss the twentieth century by a few years. He was one of the founders of Humanitas Universalis and had guided it through the years.
And tonight, he was the guest of honor at a formal ball in the Grand Esplanade at the center of Sky City.
A live newsfeed showed him standing behind a podium at the center of a long table lined with men and women in their finest attire—the members of the Twenty-Seven Families. He was talking, but I had the sound off. I watched as the elite of Ciudad de Cielo fawned and flattered their leader.
About halfway down the length of the table, I spotted Penelope.
The newsfeed was a user-controlled image, so I zoomed in close on her and her companion, Victor from the message queue. A pop-up IDed him as Victor Nguyen Pettengill and listed his pedigree and public holdings.
She had draped her arm across his shoulders and gazed at him raptly, but Victor was interested only in Don Alexandro.
As little as I knew about their relationship, I wasn’t impressed by him. She certainly deserved more attention than he was providing. I felt a little offended for her.
Then everyone was on their feet, applauding enthusiastically. I zoomed out and saw that Don A. was finished speaking. The members of the Twenty-Seven families formed themselves up in a long reception line and filed past him. I followed Penelope and Victor as they worked their way down the length of the table.
When they reached the podium, the urbamastro shook Victor’s hand vigorously. Victor nodded and lifted his chin in a display of male bravado. Penelope put on the appearance of someone more shy and demure than the armor-clad warrior who had so recently shot her way onto the L-1 Solar Observatory in search of ancient loot.
Then she turned sharply, bent an elbow, and sent nearly the full contents of her glass—a dark red wine, no doubt from some sunny vineyard far below us—splashing across Don Alexandro’s chest and his pristine white dinner jacket.
If I still had a jaw, it would have dropped.
I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. Victor was apologizing like crazy. Penelope looked terribly embarrassed. The staff of the Grand Esplanade exploded from some hidden chamber to surround him, blotting the wine from the white linen of his dinner jacket, mopping it from the floor, unshipping some kind of molecular-mechanics cleaning device and running it across his clothes as they hustled him away.
Victor, in his turn, hustled Penelope away from the table and off to some less visible spot.
I zoomed in on them once more as they weaved their way through the crowd, watching the heads turn as they passed. Just before they stepped beyond the view of the newscam, Penelope turned and looked back in the direction they had taken Don Alexandro.
For a moment, there was something in her eyes, some irrepressible delight at her own deviltry, that told me that spilling the wine had been no accident.
Penelope didn’t get home until around three a.m.
I spent the time tracking reports of the embarrassing wine spill around the networks. It didn’t take long for the story to get around. There were three versions.
The official version—an unnamed guest had spilled her glass when she tripped on a defect in the carpet. It shielded Penelope from embarrassment, if she were honestly at fault, while robbing her of notoriety, if she were not.
The “critics of the establishment” version—three cheers for young cousin who took the pomp out of His Pomposity. The perpetrator remained unidentified, reflecting the lack of information sources within the Twenty-Seven Families.
And the “supporters of the establishment” version—tell us who the young cousin was so we can be sure she isn’t a tool of the aforementioned critics.
But within an hour or so, Penelope’s name leaked out. That spawned a round of data mining, which brought into the frame every news file anyone could find about Penelope and her family. The first things to come up, of course, were the details of her parents’ untimely death and the speculation that surrounded it at the time. And after that, most of the commentary seemed restrained.
The critics stopped trying to claim her as a symbol of their own antagonism. The supporters bit their tongues, lest they say something that wasn’t sanctioned before anyone knew what the official line was supposed to be. And the officials refused to confirm the identity of the woman who spilled the wine.
And then, sometime well after midnight, on anonymous blogs where forbidden secrets were shared and quickly erased, a few commenters speculated on the obvious question: “Who is Penelope Antoinette de Sandino y Murphy? And if it wasn’t an accident, what makes her so brave that she would do something like this on purpose?”
Who indeed?
Could it be the woman who put herself in harm’s way aboard an airless space station to pull yours truly from decades of thrall to the machinery of the night?
Did I know something about young Penelope that few others in Ciudad de Cielo knew?
You bet I did. And yet I still didn’t have any idea what she might be up to.
She finally came home, climbed the stairs slowly, and weaved her way through the door of the den to her desk. I could tell she wasn’t well practiced at drinking. But even here in private she was trying hard not to let it show.
Nevertheless, I greeted her with a few bars of Jim Morrison’s plaintive moan, “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar.”
It startled her, sending her seeking the source of the music with a bob and weave of her head, which sent cascades of her red hair into motion.
“Are you still on?” she asked when she figured out it was me.
“I’m still up,” I said. “Waiting for you to come home. I was watching the news tonight. I saw what happened.”
“Oh dear. Am I notorious yet?”
I gave her a report on what people were saying about it.
She smiled, in a way that melted what I used to think of as my heart. “It’s so . . . exciting.”
She jumped up and pirouetted in the middle of the room, then wobbled unsteadily back to the chair. “It was Victor’s idea.”
“Victor’s idea?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said, putting a finger to her lips. “It’s a secret. I suppose I can tell you, though. You can’t tell anyone, can you?”
“I can, but I won’t,” I said.
That answer seemed to puzzle her, then she asked, “Do you think I can trust Victor?”
“I don’t know him well enough to say,” I replied. “Do you?”
“That’s a good question. You’re quite clever. I wish I had more time to work with you. But there’s so much going on right now. So many things are happening. No, I don’t know Victor well enough to say.”
I wondered suddenly just what kinds of demons haunted young Penelope de Sandino. She probably had a number of trust and intimacy issues, the depths of which I could only imagine. Something made her hang around with the military jocks who’d accompanied her on the raid at L-1. And something made her pour wine on the urbamastro himself.
“But he’s the only one who’s been willing to court me,” Penelope said with a wince. “The others are nice and polite and then they turn away. Only Victor has been willing to put his name on the line to bring me back into the Families. Is it too much to ask that he feel the same way I do?”
“That’s a question that transcends time,” I said.
“I’m sure it does,” she replied. “So tell me about the twentieth century. They knew much more about love then. Do you know any other songs? Tell me about rock ’n’ roll.”
“To understand rock ’n’ roll, you’ve got to understand the blues,” I said. “Leonard Bernstein figured out what makes the blues blue. Minor chords. Minor chords contain the overtones of two major chords, at war within the same sound. It’s the essential human dilemma—two emotions at war with one another.”
I played some of “I Can’t Quit You, Babe” by Otis Reed. She sighed as her face collapsed in sorrow at the sad guitar.
“But that became rhythm and blues after World War II, and by the time I was growing up, the rhythm was overtaking the blues. Rock ’n’ roll rides a four-four beat right out of the blues and into the future.”
I switched from Otis to Buddy Holly and “It’s So Easy to Fall in Love.”
Then I followed it up with Ginjer Baker’s “I’m So Glad,” with its hard-driving wail of narcissistic self-discovery. I ended it with Eric Clapton and Blind Faith with “Can’t Find My Way Home.” That was a bit of a mistake for me, because I choked up a little when he started talking about leaving your body behind, but I recovered quickly.
“We made heroes out of our poets,” I said. “We made love songs into anthems.”
She swayed to Clapton’s gentle acoustic guitar work with her eyes half-closed.
“You have a very intriguing face,” she said softly, wounding me deeply again without knowing it. I remembered my days as an undergrad playing private D.J. in my dorm room, and with the wisdom of my great age, I knew that if this were another century, Penelope would be spending the night with me. Instead, I took advantage of her mood by asking a selfish question.
“So tell me, what brought you out to L-1 just to fetch me back here?”
She laughed and turned to her datascreen and with a couple taps of her finger produced a garish, flashing ad on what looked a lot like an eBay auction site. “Can you see this?” she asked.
I tapped into the deskframe and brought the ad up close. I didn’t like what I saw.
“Historic Organic Memory Storage Device!” it proclaimed. “Straight from the twentieth century—the Jonathan Bender Relic! Now available to the intrepid collector!”
“Baaah!!” I wailed.
“Oooh,” Penelope said. “Please don’t make that sound again. Is something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing or everything. It’s all the same.”
Organic memory storage device? Moynihan’s agent had screwed me. No wonder no one was taking me seriously. No wonder Penelope was treating me like a complicated MP3 player. How could I ever convince her I was anything else?
“I’m going to bed,” she announced suddenly. She stood up quickly and headed for the door. “I don’t feel well.”
Neither did I, but I didn’t say so. She left me in the darkness to contemplate my own despair…
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion
in our October issue,
on sale now.
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion
in our October issue,
on sale now.
