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Ten meters above the desert floor, tethered to the top of a utility pole, Damien has an unparalleled view of the surrounding landscape. Distant mesas brood over bare, rocky terrain, while meandering arroyos attest to the memory of torrential rain. But Damien's attention is not on the scenery, magnificent as it is in its lonely desolation. Instead, through Spex data goggles and a mesh glove on his right hand, Damien is in the realm of the microscopic. A micro-probe, no larger than a gnat, clings to the utility pole. Its stereoscopic cameras are Damien's eyes, its jointed manipulator boom his arm and hand. To the probe, the wooden surface of the pole is a landscape every bit as vast and desolate as the one that surrounds Damien, a landscape pitted and furrowed with huge jagged fissures and great crevices. A large black shape looms over the horizon. Damien lowers his little finger, moves his hand forward. In response, the probe drifts in the same direction. The black shape becomes an enormous pipeline, a tunnel, large enough in Damien's eyes to carry half a dozen cars driving abreast. With a quick gesture, he locks the probe at a constant distance from the pipeline, then scurries to the right. Soon enough, white-stencilled letters and numbers appear. He looks past his Spex to read a datapad strapped to his left wrist; the numbers check out. Finally, after three hours under the burning sun, he has located the correct data cable, no thicker than one of his hairs. Following the cable along its length, Damien's probe soon comes to a junction box sitting atop the cable like Dorothy's house atop the Wicked Witch. He circles it, and spots a smaller cable emerging from the back: on the probe's scale, this one is the size of a garden hose. Quite invisible to the unaided eye. "I've got you now," Damien mutters. He reaches gingerly forward; the probe's manipulator arm touches the delicate fiber. He closes his hand, and the probe's claw contracts until it has the fiber in a firm grip. Data flows, fiber to probe to computer to Damien's Spex. He reads, then gives a grim nod. As his crew suspected. "Habari gani. What's up?" He looks away from the micro-world and sees Penylle, a half-transparent ghost, hovering behind him. If floating ten meters high disturbs her, she gives no sign. "Not much," he answers automatically. "Hey, that's a pretty nice effect. What are you using to project the holo?" She shrugs. "What makes you think I'm a holo? Maybe I'm really here, this time." "Right." He removes his Spex; her image vanishes. Damien spends the next few moments playing, moving the Spex this way and that, observing how her image moves and distorts. Finally, he gives an appreciative whistle and a smile. "Very nice. A smooth routine. Who does your programming?" "I do." "Congratulations. What's it like on your end? How much can you see?" "A lot more than you'd think." His brow furrows. There are various video pickups around that she can tap into, most obviously the ones in his Spexbut probably a few on the pole itself, and the instruments in the dirty orange, borrowed pickup that he drove here. Penylle leans forward, cupping her chin in her hands. "So what are you up to? I was monitoring your microprobe -- what was that flash of data?" "Oh. There are two AIs in Dinétah; we couldn't interdict them." He gestures at the cables which trail from pole to pole across the desert. "This is the only active data line across the border, and it goes straight to the AIs." "And?" "The Navajo have attached a bit-tap. They've shielded it pretty well, but my people were able to echo packets off it and deduce its approximate location. I've been looking for the exact spot all morning. That flash you saw was confirmation. I'm into their network now." "So now you shut them down?" Damien shakes his head. "First we watch them for a while and find out what sort of equipment they're using. Then we shut them down." "I can see why they're so angry with you." "Hey, I'm just doing my job." "I'm glad you're on our side." The flow of data continues, confined within a tiny window that floats off to the right. Analyzer programs crowd around it like beasts at a water hole, each drinking its fill. After a few seconds an analyzer unfolds, flowerlike, into a multi-petaled display; Damien studies it, frowning. Around him, the results of other analyzers blossom; he gathers a bouquet and briefly examines each bloom before closing them all with a wave. "What's the verdict?" Penylle asks. "They're using our AI link to access the Net." He summons a virtual keyboard and types one-handed. Penylle's ghost slides up next to him. "What are you going to do?" "Really confuse them." The Navajo techs are inserting their own data packets into the stream, packets whose header information mimics legitimate system diagnostic packets. Once they have cleared Nexus routers, these chameleon packets discard their counterfeit headers and appear to the Net like ordinary packets. To the systems involved, these packets are simply counted as missing and automatically resent; the result of a particularly noisy data line. It is a remarkably inefficient method: the total amount of noise, both legitimate and phony, must stay below a threshold that would trigger an alert. Damien doubts that they can manage throughput any higher than a few megabits per second. Soon, even that will do them no good. Penylle looks over Damien's shoulder and watches the code taking shape beneath his hands. "I don't get it." "It's simple," he answers. "I'm teaching our system to recognize their chameleon packets. They'll be re-headered and diverted to an alternate data path, which is hardwired to this server." He types the hexadecimal digits of a Net address. Penylle snorts. "Oh, that's too good. You're diverting their data through AresNet." Damien, grinning, nods. "The current delay to Mars is almost fourteen minutes one-way. Nearly half an hour transmission lag, total. That should keep their system confused, at the very least." "You're cruel. I like that in a man." "Thanks." Damien finishes his code and tells the system to execute it. He watches for a few moments, and everything works fine. "Well, that's done." He strips off his data-glove and sets it atop a transformer box. He flexes sweaty fingers, relieved to have the thing off. Penylle's ghost floats half a meter away as Damien gathers his few tools. "Nunn," he mutters. "I forgot to recall the probe." Not really paying attention, he reaches for the gloveand bumps it instead. Like an injured bird, it falls from its perch and plummets downward. "I've got it." Penylle's hand snakes out, snatches the glove in mid-air, and lifts it back to the transformer. For an instant, Damien reaches for the glove as if nothing unusual has happened, then his brain catches up with his eyes and he stops, the pit of his stomach numb. Penyllecaughtthe glove. But she is only a hologram, an image in his Spex. Damien raises his gaze from the limp data-glove, lying there as if it had never fallen, and meets Penylle's deep, brown eyes. She forces a wan smile. "Oops," she says. "I guess I shouldn't have done that." She insists that Damien climb down from the pole, and he is just as happy to comply. Witnessing a bona-fide miracle, he has found, makes one wish for solid ground. Hands on hips, he faces her ghost. "All right, how did you do that?" Penylle seems to stand a meter away, no longer translucent. Her face and body are appropriately lit by the high-riding sun, but she casts no shadow on the ground. "I guess you've never seen psychokinesis in action." "I've never even seen it in print. Or heard of it." She tosses her head. "Mind-over-matter." "Not outside the virties, that's for sure." Damien leans against the side of his borrowed truck. "You're telling me that you can move things just by thinking about them? Use-the-force-Luke, for real?" "Small things, yes. And it isn't effortless, the way most virties would have you believe." She looks down; at Damien's feet, sand suddenly dances in a fountain about ten centimeters high, sparkling in the sun. After a moment, it subsides. Damien whistles in admiration. "Siajabu. And you can do that all the way from Kampala?" "It doesn't work that way. Virtually, I'm there with you." Damien nods. Remote operations are familiar to him from his work in the Net. "So yourabilityworks from wherever you perceive yourself to be. Do you have to see something, or?" he stops, confused. She raises her hands. "Ah, well, that's the other part. You see, I'm also clairvoyant." Damien cannot stifle a laugh. "Shall I get your crystal ball? Or do you use the entrails of a snake? I'm sure we could find one somewhere around here." "Don't dis me, brother." Penylle is every centimeter a modern Umojan woman, offended, and Damien feels like a misbehaving child. "Sorry. I've never met a clairvoyant before. Educate me. How do you do it?" "Tell me how you see." "Uhwith my eyes?" "Same with clairvoyance. Except I behold in all directions at once. And I can look past the surface, behold things inside." Without lowering her eyes, she continues, "Like what you have in your pockets." Damien cannot stop himself from shifting his leg into a more concealing position. "You're telling me that you can read minds?" She stamps her foot. "No! Clairvoyance isn't telepathy. I can behold physical objects. I can't behold people's thoughts and feelings any more than you can see them. But I can behold through barriers. Right now, for instance I can watch your heart beat or your lungs move." "Sounds confusing." Penylle shrugs. "I decide what I want to concentrate on, same as you do. Everything else isout of focus." "Soyou're telling me that you can sit in Africa and sense what's going on here in Arizona?" "I told you, it all depends on where I perceive myself to be. I can behold you, and the truck, and the area around you -- that doesn't mean I can behold the town, or Washington, D.C. without a virtual presence there." She sighs. "For instance, I behold from your expression that you still doubt me. But with those Spex you're wearing, you can see just about anywhere on Earth." "It's a little different. There are cameras, and computers, and electrical signals travelling between here and there." Penylle spreads her arms. "Electrical signals travel between you and me. I'm reading them right now." "I don't even want to ask what kind of system you're using." "ErI'm sort of using an Amiga 7500." "Never heard of it." "No one has. It came out in 2004." Damien pointedly turns his back on her -- which doesn't help, since her image stays in the center of his visual field. "Now who's dissing whom?" he asks. "No, I'm not. I can't help it if you don't believe me." "You're telling me that you're accessing full voice and video, as well as running the best full-body simulation I've ever seen, on a system that's forty years old? Oh, yeah, plus whatever signals it takes to carry your clairvoyance?" He folds his arms over his chest. "You might be able to fool me into believing in psycho-whatever and clairvoyance, but I know the Nets, and that's impossible." "Are you done?" "Maybe." "First of all, I'm not trying to fool you about anything. My case and my life history are on file in medical and psychological journals, which you can check out if you think I'd have any reason to lie to you." She makes the word an insult. "Second, I never said I was just using the Amiga for Net access. I said 'sort of.' But you didn't wait for me to explain." She's right, at least, that a hoax of this nature would be impossible to perpetrate. A few minutes with any Net index will prove the truth of her story. But Damien, although feeling chastened, is not quite ready to admit defeat. "All right, explain." She gestures, and once again sand pirouettes at his feet. "PK. Clairvoyance. I told you I was good with small things." She pauses. "Like electrical signals and patterns of light.." "What?!" "I can behold the patterns of Net traffic. I've learned how to read them without any physical system. I can alsoreach in and change how the patterns flow." Her image shimmers. "See?" "I think this is too much for me. Slow down. You canbeholdNet traffic? The way I see a stream flowing by?" "It's more the way your ear senses tiny pressure waves in the air." "And with yourpsychokinesis?you can do your own data processing?" "More or less." "Then why do you need any system at all?" She sighs. "Think about all the data that's going past you right now. Not just the traffic in those cables above you, but all the wireless traffic, radio, microwaves, laser." She stands still for a moment, and Damien has the mental image of a suddenly-alert guard dog sniffing the night air. "From where you're standing, I can count at least two dozen separate data streams. And you're in the absolute middle of nowhere." "So the system?" "Helps to sort out all that data. Gives me something to concentrate on." She grins. "Of course, most of my processing is done on remote systems. The Amiga's there to give me a focus." He shakes his head. "Incredible." "What's a computer? Just a box that turns raw current into highly organized electromagnetic signals. Well, I can do the same thing. But I need something to act on. Any box will do, as long as it has raw current coming in and outgoing connections to the Net." "Where did you get your certification? You are certified, aren't you?" Hands on hips, she puffs a wayward strand of hair away from her face. "I shouldn't dignify that with an answer. Of course I'm certified: Sysop Level Four, Pagemaster Two, Data Retrieval Specialist Six. I have seals in code-building, hardware, and network integration." "I believe you. All I wanted to know was where you studied. Casual conversation." "I took my Qualifyings through Yokosuka University. Classesall over the map. Whoever was offering what I needed at the time." Her eyes narrow; watching the effect, Damien is amazed at the subtlety and power of her technique. "What about you, smarty? Where were you certified? If you were." "M.I.T.-Yale for my software certs, Motorola for hardware. With the things you can do, you deserve a higher Pagemaster rating than two." She shrugs, and the kinte cloth of her dress stretches and moves in complex patterns with the movement of her shoulders. "I haven't gone on. I just wanted to take the tests and get my basic certification. My boss insisted." He nods. "I guess you didn't have too much trouble with the testsnot with your abilities." "You know what the masters say: if you have difficulty with the tests, then you were not ready to take them." She cocks her head and raises an eyebrow. "I still have the feeling you're humoring me. Look, I'm not going to short out on you and go peculiar. I have psionic abilities; not mental problems." Damien rubs his eyes. "Look, Penylle, I got to sleep too late last night, and up way too early this morning. I've spent three hours driving around and climbing utility poles in the hot sun. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and now you're asking me to accept psychic powers without a quiver. I'm sorry, but it's going to take me a while to get accustomed to this." "Tell you what. If you're not busy for a while, come see my homeroom and I'll show you what I can really do." Damien scans the deserted landscape, the few puffballs of cloud scuttling across an otherwise-empty sky. "What, here?" "I thought we'd established that location doesn't matter." Her chuckle is like sunlight dancing across a rippled pond. "All right, I'm game. Now that I've taken care of that tap, I'm free for the rest of the afternoon." He hops into the pickup truck's bed, spreads a Navajo-patterned blanket out on sun-warmed metal. Penylle's image stays on the ground, partly hidden by the truck's side. There is no evidence of artifacting at the dividing line; more evidence of her skill. "I wish I'd brought my bitsuit." He chuckles. "I'm afraid I'm going to miss half the experience." She hands him a pair of aural plugs, which he takes without comment and seats in his ears. All sound from the real world fades almost to nothing, but Penylle's voice is unchanged. "You're not going to need a bitsuit. I assume you can generate a standard pacha?" "Of course." Damien reclines, stretching languidly and pulling on the data glove. With practiced commands, he launches an agent that links with his home system and wakes his cyberspace double. The pacha, invisible and featureless, moves through virtual space like a marionette on Damien's electronic strings. Its movements are crude and spasmic compared to the elegant doppleganger that his bitsuit software animates -- but the pacha at least provides host systems a way to keep track of Damien's position and movements. Without it, he would be represented in cyberspace as a simple, static icon. "Good," Penylle mutters. Damien's pacha appears in his Spex, occupying virtual space that corresponds to his own body; he sees his cyber-self as indistinct, liquid metal, a vaguely-human form, a body in potential only. "Brace yourself," Penylle says. "I'm taking you in." Damien blinks, and the real world is gone. Replaced byglory. Damien feels as if he has stepped into a Maxfield Parrish painting. His pacha's stark, unadorned surface is now warm and alive, the rich dark chocolate of his own skin, the electric blue and creamy white of velvet and ruffles that clothe him. He turns, and his pacha's movements are fluid, graceful, vital. Penylle stands next to him, clad in diaphanous, ethereal silks of amber and mahogany. An unfelt breeze stirs her garments and hair. She looks at Damien and smiles, watching him absorb the wonder of this place. They stand at a meter-high ivory railing, at the edge of a balcony. The sky is purple so deep it is almost black, with a few stars visible. Far below, the earth curves away to a hazy horizon alight with the afterglow of the departed sun. The ground is easily dozens of kilometers below; Damien realizes that they are halfway to orbit. But they are motionless; only the clouds and the shadows are moving, the first slowly and the second almost imperceptibly as twilight deepens. He turns to regard the edifice to which this balcony is attached, and his chin drops. Curving structures of translucent ivory and sparkling crystal ascend, studded with other balconies and pavilions and platforms like an enormous neo-Victorian treehouse -- all turning upon themselves, glittering in vanished sunlight, until lost in the violet distance. Below: the same, descending to the distant surface like a thin and graceful stalk of wheat rooted in fine, dark soil. The pattern of this structure tugs at Damien's memory; it seems somehow familiar, yet out of place, like the face of a friend seen in unaccustomed surroundings -- "DNA," he blurts. "It's like DNA." With that, Damien grasps the shape of the landscape beneath him, and whistles in appreciation of Penylle's joke. They are five dozen kilometers above the timeless Serengeti, perched upon a single strand of DNA that is, undoubtedly, rooted in the grasslands of Olduvai. "I take it you're not disappointed?" Penylle walks away from the balcony, moving up broad stairs to another level. Damien follows, wondering at how her system translates his jerky commands into a smooth, flawless walk. "You're incredible." He holds out his hands, turns them over. The lines and creases of his palms are perfectly reproduced. "Do you mean to tell me that you have a detailed model of me in storage, and your system is animating it now based on input from my pacha? How long did it take you to do this?" She emerges onto a circular platform where various consoles and displays float, unsupported, at waist-height. "I have to confess that I retrieved your bitsuit's model for a template. But my programs added a lot of detail, based on my observations and memories. I hope you don't mind." "Mind?" Damien thinks of his own homeroom, the desk and chair of which he is so proud. Her model of him is an accomplishment a thousand times greater. This whole region of Cyberbia -- her homeroom, he supposes -- is detailed and dynamic in a way that his own creations have never approached. "You were holding out on me. No little turn-of-the-century home system can run a simulation this good." "Well, I admit that I borrow a lot of processing capacity from bigger systems." "'Borrow?'" "You know what I mean." She checks a console, moves on to the next. "If this is what clairvoyance and psychokinesis can do, then I'm all for it." He touches one of the consoles, and distinctly feels cool, unyielding metal beneath his fingers. He stops, stares at her. "How are you doing that?" Penylle chuckles. "I told you that you wouldn't need a bitsuit. Psychokinesis. Remember, while I'm here with you, both of us are still back in Arizona." "And you're really in Africa." He frowns. "How many tracks can you handle at once?" "This is about my limit. Unless I take drugs. But mybossdoesn't let me do that very often." "Who's your boss?" The question is out before he can stop it. "Damien! That's hardly a polite thing for one Nexus operative to ask another." "I know. I'm sorry." Sometimes Damien gets impatient with the Nexus insistence on secrecy and security. But he would feel differently, he supposes, if he were Indonesian or Manchurianor, for that matter, Navajo. Penylle stands before him, runs her fingertips down his arm. The touch is uncannily real, more real than any bitsuit could manage. "You're forgiven. I doubt you'd know him, anyway." She turns her head away. "Damien, do you ever wonder about what we're doing? The Nexus?" "You mean the moral aspects? Like, is it right for us to disrupt so many lives and cause so much turmoil? Do we really have the popular mandate we pretend, or are we just self-appointed masters of the world? That sort of thing?" "In a nutshell, yes." He grins. "No, I never give it a moment's thought." "Oh, thank you. That makes me feel so much better." Damien opens his mouth, closes it, looks away. "I'd be afraid of myself if I never questioned what we do, or the way we operate." He takes a breath, trying to organize his thoughts. Damien shakes his head. "I've thought about it too much, maybe. The other day I walked through houses where whole families were dead on the floor, and I kept asking myself, am I responsible? If it weren't for the interdict, would they have been able to get help before it was too late?" He gestures vaguely, in the unknown direction of Arizona and the utility pole. "What about that bit-tap I just neutralized? What if it was carrying news of another outbreak, or some other cry for help? How much responsibility is mine? How much blood is on my hands?" Penylle puts her arms around him, and he lowers his head to her shoulder. It feels good, comforting, to be embraced like this -- he's missed this, without knowing it. "I guess we've both been asking ourselves the same questions," she says. "What answer do you give yourself?" He snorts, and whether it is a chuckle he swallows, or a sob, he cannot say. "I try to tell myself what my boss would say. That we're all human, and we all have blood on our hands. It's just that some of us are trying to keep the stain from spreading." Damien sighs. "I'm luckier than others, I guess. I grew up in the Nexus. My father and mother were both operatives. When they passed away, I came to live in another Nexus household. I don't know, maybe I've just been thoroughly indoctrinated." "Haven't we all?" "What about you? What do you think?" "When I look at historywhat the world was like before the Nexus came alongall I see is tribal wars. Genocide in progress. Rwanda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Singapore, Quebec, Finland, Queens, Madagascar, Irkutskhow many millions of people died because they had the wrong names, or hair, or language, or ancestors? How many Presidents and Prime Ministers and Ambassadors went around weeping and wailing because it was all so tragic, but didn't lift a finger to stop it all?" Damien hugs her tighter, and she returns the pressure. "You'd think we'd have made some progress in thirty years. But it all continues. More conflicts this year than last. Maybe all we're doing is driving tribalism underground, where we can't see it." "Damiendo you ever think that maybe it's too late? This planet has a lot of problems, with deep, deep roots. Maybe even the Nexus can't keep them from destroying one another. Maybe we shouldn't waste our energy trying." For just an instant, Damien has the impulse to agree with her, to thank the gods that someone, finally, has come right out and said it, brought into the open what everyone must have been thinking for a generation. But he forces the impulse down, and chuckles instead. "We don't have much of a choice, do we?" She looks upward. "There's the Moon. And Mars." He laughs for real, this time. "Oh, sure. Now you sound like that fool, Marc Hoister. If people move to Mars, all the world's problems will be solved." He shakes his head. "As if people aren't going to take their history and their existing feuds to Mars with them." "But we've set ourselves such an enormous task -- to change the way people think. Can the Nexus do it?" "We're not going to change the way people think -- and no one ever claimed we could. We just have to keep them from killing one another until they change themselves." "If they let us." For a long time, Damien and Penylle are still. He listens to her breathing (breathing! in a cyberspace pacha, which has no more need to breathe than the computer that animates it!), feels the rhythmic ebb and flow of her back, shoulders, chest. He hears, in mental echo, her last words, and imagines different words he could have spoken in reply. But there is no urgency, no need to speak. She pulls back slightly, enough to look into his eyes. Hers, mottled brown and surrounded by delicate lashes, are like vast uncharted seas before him. He cocks his head. "What?" "Iwish there were a way to let them knowwhat we're really all about. They're afraid of the Nexus. Afraid of the interdict." She lowers her eyes. "They don't see -- or won't let themselves see -- that we do so much more." Damien nods. "I spent last month running unauthorized connections across the mountains into Tajikistan to carry Nexus Freenet. And dodging bullets from both governments, I might add. Before that, it was distributing Nexus datapads in Suriname. All to keep information flowing outside government control. But does anyone ever mention those things, when they talk about us?" "Of course not. They -- " Penylle stops abruptly, frozen in place. Damien signals his pacha to move, and it responds jerkily, like stuttering film come adrift from a projector. Then, as quickly as the strange spell came upon them, it is gone. Penylle frowns. "I'm sorry about that. Damien, there's big news coming. I'd better let you go back to your body. If this is what I think it is, you'll want to be there." "What is it?" Penylle disentangles herself from his embrace, then leads him by the hand to balcony's edge. "There's no time. Come with me." Together, they step off the lip, but they do not fall. Penylle continues to walk, each step a hundred kilometers. Behind him, Damien sees the double-helix of her palace coil in upon itself, then loop around in ever-tightening supercoils like real DNA tucked into a nucleus. The dark sky, the landscape below, all recede with unreal velocity and dream-intense clarityuntil a door closes upon the scene, and Damien stands with Penylle in an ordinary hallway in a ubiquitous building, one of many in the imaginary construct that humans call Cyberbiaand then, that too is gone, and Damien wakes up, alone, in the back of a pickup truck in the warmth of the Arizona afternoon sun. He wastes no time punching into the newsnets, and so catches the first announcement from ancient Zimbabwe, of a Umoja-brokered treaty between the Navajo and the Hopi . . . followed almost at once by word from Geneva that U.N. Resolution 6502 will be lifted at midnight, Greenwich time. Damien sends his news agent to find out more, then gathers all his equipment and jumps into the cab, racing southward as fast as the truck's groaning electric engine will carry him. It is only a few hours until Greenwich midnight, and he's about to be busier than he ever has before -- but for now, there is only room in his fevered mind for one question. How did she know? August 28 - September 2, 2042 Clarke Centre, Columbo, Sri Lanka <membagent@creativcon.con> This year's CreativCon will be held in the tropical paradise of Sri Lanka, a land older than time and yet more modern than the future itself. The main facility is the incomparable Clarke Centre, the scientific and technological jewel of the East. Symposium topics range from the aesthetics of space travel to interdisciplinary virtual world design, with all disciplines represented. Whether you're a poet, painter, dancer, fashion maven, video artist, or Net designer, there's a place for you at the CreativCon. This is the year's biggest celebration of artistic creativityyou dare not miss it! This year's Special Challenge Topics are:
So come to Columbo, bring your imagination, and become a part of the future! NOTE: New Special Challenge Topic just added:
Date: Mon, 28 July 2042 03:14:54 (GMT) A REMINDER that the 15th Terran Council will be held in conjunction with the World Creativity Conference this year. All Nexus members are permitted to attend, in vivo or in virtuo, whether members of the CreativCon or not. Nexus Regional Coordinators should attend or send their authorized delegates. The Terran Council will convene at 0800 GMT on Saturday, August 30, 2042. ---------------------------------------- |
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