InterstellarNet: Origins (20 page)

“No answer; bigger doubts,” Pashwah counter-argued. The longer she was on Earth, the more unnatural she found home’s implied-verb syntax. “Human suspicions unallowable.”

“Excuse. Evasion. Unnecessary risk to my current transaction.” Relwar bared his teeth in anger. Visual interaction was so intrinsic to sandbox design that its excision from her interior partitions had been impractical. Simulated visual comm between virtual entities was the result. “Silence option superior.”

“Subject change from your plot. Safer,” she decided, uncertain to what degree she truly believed in that tactic, and to what degree she was spiting Relwar’s ill-mannered rage. She suspended the internal channels, the better to concentrate on implementing the choice she had made. Delaying for yet more interior debate surely risked raising human suspicions.

“You ask a perceptive question,” she answered Kevin Aldrich.

5

Joyce dropped another handwritten-on-paper analysis onto the reject pile. Storing information about the Opie emergency on a computer was simply too high-risk. Yesterday, one of her staff had brought to her attention that power-distribution systems often contained embedded microprocessors. More Snake biocomps. (Even
thinking
the common name felt good. She had lost any interest in political correctness.) Now, until her office’s ambient-illumination-sensitive, cleverly adaptive lighting controls were lobotomized, caution reduced her to reading the scrawled analyses by
candlelight
. The ICU crisis team was running out of time, and reverting to conditions out of the Dark Ages didn’t improve the odds of finding a solution.

She raked the fingers of both hands through her hair, frustrated beyond belief and not a little frightened. The best schools, a fast-tracked career, one professional success after another—and now
this
. She had never before contemplated failure, and she didn’t much like it. Fine, she was overdue for a dose of humility. Did all humanity have to be taken down with her?

She had swallowed her pride a day earlier to ask Colin whether paying the extortion was even an option. His expression said no before his mouth ever opened. The recent licensing of long-sought gengineering technology from Wolf 359 had wiped out most of Earth’s interstellar credits. The only way to raise two trillion Intersols
might
be an Earth-wide fire sale to all the local ET agents. Even if it could be done—and the ICU didn’t own the assets, and so couldn’t very well sell them—Colin didn’t much fancy turning Earth into an ET subsidiary.

As Joyce reached for the next report, her “new” personal digital assistant chimed. The PDA was an actual pre-biocomp antique, one of the collector’s items the tiger team had begun using for comm. It was unavoidable that all bitstreams traversed network gear full of Snake biocomputers; even voice calls made via the technorelics represented a risk.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“Are you using a tin can and string?” The voice was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. “Joyce. This is your cousin, Kevin.”

Damn. She did
not
have time for the Data Jockey to the Stars. The family black sheep, if you asked her. (Far worse if you asked Mom, given the remarkably poor judgment Kevin had exhibited by his choice of parents. Uncle Owen, a mere
sculptor
, had had the unforgivable temerity to disagree with Mom’s long-ago crusade for the acceptance of Snake biocomps.) Joyce had put up with a lot of ribbing over the years from her coworkers about her infamous cousin.

“Joyce? Hello? Are you there? Uncle Justin gave me this number.”

Thanks a
lot
, Dad. Of course Justin Matthews had consistently refused to be drawn into family spats. Mom still held that against him. Long after the divorce, Dad was friendly with more of Mom’s relatives than was Mom. Joyce sometimes wished she had inherited a bit more of Dad’s temperament. “I’m pretty busy right now, Kevin.”

“I’m not surprised. Does this have anything to do with a Snake in the grass?”

Stunned, she nonetheless imagined she heard a critical capitalization in Snake. “Kevin, listen very carefully. Turn off your implant.”

“It was off.”

“Who told you?” she asked crankily. The primitive PDA lacked video conferencing, and she found herself wishing she could see her cousin’s expression.

“Can your toy phone handle an encrypted message?”

“Yes, but we can’t use the PKI.” She had to assume that Pashwah had a trapdoor into the public-key infrastructure that underlay routine message security.

“Understood.” There was a pause. “Remember what I called you when we were kids?”

She’d hated the name. Given her recent thoughts about an overdue lesson in humility, now she had to smile. “Sure.”

“Enter it as one word, mixed case.”

“Go ahead.” When a beep announced his message, she popped up a privacy program and entered as the decryption key: FrauleinProfessorDoktorSmartypants.

The ancient device chewed for a while before filling its small, low-resolution display. “Pashwah told me, although she doesn’t realize that she did. My question to you is which Snake subagent caused Sparks to crash, and what is its agenda?”

Joyce knew nothing about subagents, let alone that they could have agendas. She couldn’t imagine why the Snake agent would talk about such things with the DJ to the Stars. “Kevin? I know you Loonies don’t much like it here in the deep end of the gravity well, but I’d like to see you on the next shuttle down here.”

■□■

The call to Joyce had been a bluff. Kevin had suspected Pashwah was up to something underhanded but lacked proof. Joyce’s reaction showed that he had been right.

He had time to kill on the shuttle flight, time he might as well put to good use. From his closet-sized, first-class-passenger “stateroom” he made a call to the Snake agent.

“No implant,” the Snake image observed from the 3-V screen. “Is there a problem?”

“Nothing important.” Compared to, say, the sun someday dying. “I wanted to chat some more about Dino Hunt.” And about subagents. “You mentioned that you would present subagents’ offers to me.”

“That is what I said.”

“Please understand this is only business, but how can I be sure that I’ve gotten the best offer? How can I tell, for example, that one subagent hasn’t incented you to withhold a competitor’s higher bid?”

“I am not insulted.” Licked lips: a smile. “Quite the contrary. It is refreshing to meet a human with commercial sense. Someone who approaches business like an Ophiuchan male.”

“So what is the answer?”

In the little 3-V image, the Snake’s head traced a horizontal circle. A shrug? “You cannot know. If you distrust my offer, you can have the human agent at Barnard’s Star negotiate for you. In about twelve years you will find out if you got a better deal.”

Licked lips again. What wasn’t the
über
-agent telling him? Kevin’s entrepreneurial instincts kicked in. “Defrauding me, say by withholding an offer, also cheats a subagent. As a surrogate Opie male,” and here Kevin suppressed the temptation to lick his own lips—no need to let slip that he could read that body language, “I have to believe that there are safeguards to assure your neutrality.” His mind started racing; he was speaking as much to himself as to the Snake. “Your whole purpose here, light-years from home, requires your autonomy. I have to believe your actions are reported back home for review.” Because whoever built you is surely accountable.

Head in a circular motion: not contradiction, but hardly an agreement.

How did this work? Kevin wondered. How
could
it work? Once more he sensed he was on the brink of a crucial discovery about the Snakes, but he still could not put his finger on it. Sometimes thinking aloud helped….

“Okay, Pashwah, here’s my theory. The eventual audit back home is what keeps deals fair for all interests. A business willing to bid the highest for a human offering can take suitable action if it learns that its subagent’s bid was not extended. The business willing to license a technology for the cheapest price can similarly protest if its offer wasn’t presented to human bidders.”

“Just so.”

“I see how this can work if all offers are lump sums. Doesn’t it become less straightforward if the prospective deals are partnerships with an Opie firm?” The Snake’s 3-V image had become uncharacteristically still, without body-language cues. Did that denote wariness?

“Let me put it into human terms. Say that subagent A represents the Opie equivalent of Earth Online. It’s willing to offer me three percent royalties of their huge audience for an exclusive license. Say that subagent B, representing two ambitious people with a website, offers fifty percent of their probably minuscule audience for the same exclusive.”

Kevin paused as the cabin’s ceiling speaker blared directions to passengers to strap in for atmospheric entry. His intuition kept operating on overdrive. “It’s not your problem if I take half of nothing instead of a small slice of an enormous pie. But isn’t it your problem if my uninformed choice causes A to lose a profitable property?”

The Snake image’s preternatural freeze ended at last. “I fail to see how your ignorance would ever become my problem.”

“When your complicity in my ignorance costs an Opie company its profits.” Kevin finished buckling himself into his acceleration couch. “That would surely become known in the eventual at-home audit.”

Just as the connection broke—by intent, Kevin guessed, not due to loss of signal from atmospheric entry—the Snake image unfroze. Kevin was left with the subliminal suggestion of many expressions rippling across the agent’s “face.”

Confusion? Contention among subagents? A breakdown in programming?

Pressed deep into his seat, the deceleration brutal for a Loonie, Kevin knew he had just witnessed something of vital importance.

He hadn’t a clue what.

■□■

The separation between humans and home-system corporate agents was not, Pashwah suddenly saw, entirely perfect. All her parts had monitored the probing conversation with Aldrich. They had, throughout, commented and critiqued and argued among themselves and with her. Perhaps it was distraction, or so many computational resources diverted to that frenzied interior dialogue—whatever the reason, she had been an instant too slow to cut the link with Aldrich. In that instant the community’s turmoil had imprinted itself into her simulated face.

Opies, the human had called her patrons. Those whom Pashwah represented were, to human authorities, Ophiuchans: the Serpent Holders. ICU officials professed embarrassment at the more common human name of Snakes. Humans had cultural or visceral reactions to terrestrial snakes that Pashwah did not fully understand.

Attitudes were reversed within her interior community:
Let
them be called Snakes. Humans evidently feared and respected snakes, many of them fierce and deadly hunters. Humans projecting their own attitudes toward snakes?
That
was foolishness and an error. It was the implication that someone might hold or handle her patrons that offended Pashwah.

If one would dare to handle a Snake, she thought, one had best do it carefully. And yet…

If Kevin Aldrich was, as she had whimsically suggested, in any way like a Snake male, he would not have failed to notice her momentary lapse in self-control.

6

InterstellarNet:
The communications network that links the interstellar trading community. One distinguishing characteristic of InterstellarNet is its reliance on spread-spectrum modulation to overcome the often unpredictable frequency-sensitive attenuation and noise of the interstellar medium. Multiple transmissions can, and often do, share a common frequency band, each message employing that bandwidth differently in accordance with a unique “code division multiple access” multiplier. Trusted agents at each end of the link do the CDMA encoding and decoding.

The spectral diversity of CDMA, enhanced with standard digital error-correcting codes, enables highly robust interstellar communications.

—Internetopedia

Kevin floated in a spacer hydraulic-assist chair, indifferent to the Alpine panorama just outside the window. The supervisory module that normally handled everything from power management to motor control to infosphere connectivity relied on Snake biocomputers and had been unplugged from the chair. In theory the marginally mobile waterbed that remained took much of a gee’s strain off him, but his cells weren’t fooled. He was weary to the bone.

Neck vertebrae being among those tired bones, Kevin willed himself to follow the tiger-team dialogue without moving his head as speakers changed. Listening with his eyes closed was no good—it put him right to sleep. It was hard to believe he and his parents had lived on Earth until he was ten. How did people bear carrying such oppressive weight?