Expiration Day (7 page)

 

 

I found myself telling John. At least, some of it. Not about the check box, but about the population data, and …

“Did you use a safe proxy?” he asked.

“A what?”

“Something that masks your origin. So the monitors don't spot you peeking at restricted data, and send armed police around to break down your front door.”

“They didn't break down my front door; they just rang the bell.… Oh!”

“You didn't use a proxy.” His voice was flat.

“I've never heard of them before, John. Oh, I wish I'd known.”

And so, patiently, John skimmed over all the things I'd need to know to burrow into the forbidden recesses of the TeraNet, without getting caught. How to find proxies—they're illegal of course, and have to masquerade as legal nodes, while the real nodes are down for maintenance. How to fuzz your backtrail from the proxy, and scubbie your ID (I think that's the word he used), so you look like somebody else but information still gets back to you. I didn't understand it, but I could learn to use it. And then he said something that sent a chill right through me.

“Next time you get caught, it'll be youth custody. Just be glad you're human. Robot kids get deactivated.”

“Deactivated?” Why was it me asking all the questions, I wondered.

“Scrapped. Broken up. Why would you bother putting a robot in jail?”

“But w— they're valuable. Very expensive. You wouldn't just destroy one, would you?”

“One that broke the law has gone outside its programming. How could you trust it ever again? It's not safe. That's what they say. Oxted, I mean.”

“Oh…”

I changed the subject.

“Look, John. Where did you learn about proxies and fuzzing your ID?”

“Fuzzing your backtrail, Tania. Here and there. Some of the kids at school know some things. I listen. I learn.”

“Well, I never heard of such things at my school. What's your school like?”

“Rough.”

“How do you mean, rough?”

“It's just bullying. Gangs. Typical Yellow Zone stuff. It's not good for your average kid, but I learned that hackers have special respect, so that's what I am now. The gangs need hackers so the monitors can't trace them. I'm teaching myself. I'm pretty good.”

And I wasn't.

“John. Teach me. Teach me everything you know about the TeraNet. And when I know as much as you, we'll go on learning together.”

“Why, Tania? I mean, you're already in trouble with the police. You shouldn't go messing around on the TeraNet.”

“The answers are out there, John. All the questions inside me, crying out for answers…”

“What questions?”

And so I told him. The questions I'd been keeping inside me. At least, the ones that weren't about my fate as a robot.

“Those are good questions, Tania. I'd like to know some of the answers, too, if you find them. I'll help.”

“Okay, but let's start with the monitors. You've mentioned them twice, but I've never heard of them.”

“There's nothing written about them, officially, but there's a whole surveillance infrastructure in place on the TeraNet. The monitors detect keywords that might indicate subversive, illegal, or protected traffic, and alert the police to the perp. I don't know what the technology is, but it's hard to fool.”

“So they're watching everything I send or receive? Ugh!”

“Very ugh! The days of liberal government and a free press ended with the Troubles. Stick to safe subjects, and you're fine. Do anything to threaten the status quo, and you'll have cops crawling out of your a—”

Really, John! I like you very much, but sometimes you have such a potty-mouth.

Sunday, January 2, 2050

John has been a really good friend these last few weeks. He taught me all about proxies and fuzzing my backtrail, and all that stuff. I'm using the words as though I know what they mean, and maybe by now I even do.

Actually, John is becoming more than a good friend. He is definitely special. He's interested in the same things—my list of questions—but we talk about loads of other stuff, too. Music is a favorite. We liked some of the same bands already, but he knows much more about some new acts than I do. I'm starting to realize that Mum and Dad's A/V collection is a bit … tired.

But the last few days, as we've argued the merits of his favorites over mine, we've realized something. There aren't any new bands.

Don't be ridiculous. There have always been kids singing harmony on street corners, or practicing guitar in their bedroom. They come together by chance, and they gel, or they clash, they split and they form anew, but however they do it, they explode with new creativity.

But John's “new acts” are actually five or ten years old now. There aren't any acts newer than that, unless you counted tribute bands. In which case there were hundreds and hundreds.

It's the same in literature. There are still plenty of new books on the shelves, but no new authors, just fiction factories turning out clones and sequels.

You can argue that there have been slumps in the past, like the prepunk years, but not many. John and I can't convince each other that this is just another slump.

Art is dying. Why?

I'm adding the question to my list.

 

 

John is special—he's the only one I've trusted with my questions—but he's also different from me. He loves the stars. He knows their names. How far away they are. Astronomy, physics, astro-engineering. Me, I'm more interested in people. How they think, how they behave. History, sociology, psychology.

John wants to go to university. Cambridge, he says.

“But my parents won't talk about it. ‘Stay home,' they say. ‘It's a good business your father has built, and when we're old, it'll be yours, and you can look after us.'”

And what do I want? Other than to be Pinocchio?

“Do they do psychology at Cambridge?”

He laughs gently.

“Of course they do. And their doors are wide open.”

To humans. Of course, they would be. Any human would be welcome.

But … robots?

I have to find out. How much time do I have? And what happens after that?

Wednesday, January 5, 2050

In the end, it was simple enough to find out. I created an Eicon, helped by John. A kind of ghostly “second me” that lived on the TeraNet, existing on stolen cycles and spoofed addresses. It could be me if I wanted it to be, but it was usually more useful for it to be someone else.

I skinned it to be Jeryl Banner, twenty-nine, recently remarried and childless. Jeryl had a proper TeraNet ID—there were kids who specialized in faking them up, some for profit, others just to show off—so Jeryl was able to apply to Oxted online. For a baby, a little robot baby.

It was there in the FAQ.

Eighteen.

Jeryl could have her baby, on payment of one hundred and fifty thousand Basics—I whistled, it was several years' salary for Dad—which sum included up to eight standard upgrades, at two-year intervals (there were more options if you had the money). And then, at age eighteen, back to Oxted it would go. I looked around for the contract and sure enough, it was a lease, not a purchase. Title stayed with Oxted.

And that was me.

Leased for a fixed term. Serviced, upgraded, and replaced as scheduled, just like Dad's office copier.

You have no idea how small that made me feel, Mister Zog.

D—.

Swearing didn't help, but I did it anyway. Psychology degree at Cambridge? Hah! It was all futile. Totally, utterly pointless, because at age eighteen, Oxted was going to reclaim me, and then what? Scrap me? If not, what else?

 

 

There was nothing in the FAQ. Nothing a prospective parent would stumble upon and get upset about. But then, tucked away on the Corporate Social Responsibility pages, next to an impressively long list of supported charities, I found the Oxted Environmental Impact Statement. Naturally, Oxted is a green company, committed to minimizing waste and ecological damage. A top-class corporate citizen:

“Oxted recognizes its responsibility to the planet and to humanity.”
Blah, blah …
“Less than 2 percent goes to landfill.”
Blah, blah …

So I was too valuable to just scrap, but dotted here and there were the words:

Refurbish.

Recycle.

Re-use.

Reclaim.

I'd always thought those were good words. Such eco-friendly words … until I realized they might be applied to me. And there was one more I could think of, conspicuous by its absence:

Reprogram.

Yes. What else can you do with a complex, expensive robot brain? Wipe it. Reprogram it. Re-use it. As … Soames.

Oh, no! That would be awful. Given a new, but clunky body, with glowing red eyes, to come back as a domestic robot. Had Soames once been a little boy, playing happily in a garden, going to school? At eighteen, had he climbed docilely into an Oxted van while his parents held back the tears?

Had he wept too at the separation, or had he embraced the oblivion of reprogramming? Or …

There was another possibility. Rebirth. To come back as a baby, for some other loving couple to raise. That made sense, too, in the same, horrible way. Starting again, endlessly. Immortality, I thought, but it was a mockery.

Something nagged at me, something I'd learned in my Latin. The Elysian Fields, that was it. In classical mythology. You died, and you went to Hades. The fields of the blessed waited for you, but there was a catch. You had to drink the waters of forgetfulness, from the river Lethe. I'd wondered why you'd do such a thing, to throw away your memories of life. After all, life was good, wasn't it?

So why was I crying?

For a moment, a bitter moment, I'd have drunk from the Lethe. If someone had given me a cup of its waters right then, I'd have drained every drop.

And then came a knock on the door. Dad. Come to check why I was up so late, I guess. I tried to send him away, but he must have heard the catch in my voice, and before I knew it, he was sitting on the end of my bed and I was pouring out my heart to him.

“No, Tania, I don't know exactly what happens beyond your eighteenth birthday. Yes, you do go back to Oxted. It's always been looming. Nettie and I, we … we don't know how people cope with it. As a vicar, I have to deal with the consequences. People do silly things, like running away, but they're always caught. They stop upgrading their child, hoping that Oxted will just forget about them. When the child is taken away, it's pretty ghastly. I've seen suicides, divorces, violence, depression. Even murder.”

“So why do people do it, Dad? Why do they get robot kids in the first place?”

He looked at me strangely.

“We're just made that way, Tania. With my vicar's hat on, I'd say God made us that way. We need each other, husbands, wives, children. We marry, we start families, because it's our nature to live in the present and let the future take care of itself. If we worried about loss and death, we'd never marry. What rational being would willingly enter a relationship that's guaranteed to end in sorrow? Grieving husband buries wife, or vice versa. Or they divorce. But we marry anyway. Because even death and divorce is better than loneliness.”

“And me?”

“You, Tania, are the same. To have you and lose you—that's still far better than never to have had you at all. We have eighteen precious years together, the three of us, that we would not otherwise have had.”

We were both crying now, but he was right. However awful we felt, it was better than being alone.

INTERVAL 3

We are an old and long-lived people, Tania. Our name for ourselves is simply the People, reflecting the lack of any other race in the galaxy to compare ourselves to by name. We know of just two other races, both long dead, of which Homo sapiens is one. The other we know only through a handful of artifacts—ancient pyramids—beacons marking a forgotten and disrupted path through the galaxy.

I have seen one of the Pyramid Planets. I was a member of the first follow-up expedition, in the early days of our exploration of the galaxy. The Pyramids were signaling machines, driven by a technology it took us millennia to comprehend. Sadly, by the time we saw the beacon, the pyramid builders had vanished. I say “I have seen” though I remember nothing of it. That went, as part of my first Erasure. But it is in my record.

The rest of the galaxy, as far as we have been able to map it, is empty and lifeless. We have found places where, in time, we believe life may emerge. These nurseries we protect and—carefully—study.

Other galaxies? I have no idea, Tania. They are too far away, even for my own people.

The universe is cruel, Tania. More cruel than you know, because it mocks us, the People, with utter loneliness. We hunger to find another living race to talk to. Failing such, Tania, we talk, through the archives of this place, to the long-dead.

You.

 

Saturday, February 5, 2050

I got sick last Tuesday. A sort of weakness all over my body. I couldn't concentrate, and Mum had to drive me to the main surgery in town. The doctor took some samples of my, ah, body wastes, ran some tests, and said that my digestive nanozymes had become inactivated. So I was eating, but not getting any energy. Starving. He prescribed some foul-tasting gunk for me to swallow that he said would reactivate the nanozyme substrate, and flush out whatever it was that had bonded on to it. Some unspecified protein was all he said.

“Wait till you get home before taking this,” he advised. “And do it somewhere you can sluice clean afterward, like a bath or shower.”