InterstellarNet: Origins (31 page)

But had it
ever
seen such anomaly-free data? No.

Closer inspection confirmed its suspicions. The sun’s position was implicit in the observed shadows—and disagreed with the date- and timestamps on the image files. Several scenes that were so superficially perfect left a different impression upon a more skeptical examination. Some images seemed merged, their boundaries interpolated, with shadows pointing in multiple directions. The penetrating-radar images of the sea-bottom crater were among the least convincing.

So: The data were phony. The
why
was obvious. Unreal mineral wealth might entice Aareehl with imaginary royalties and profits. Once-tempting offers lost all credibility.

But
how
had it been done?

Aareehl’s imagery order relied upon the security safeguards of Earth’s infosphere. Its order had been encrypted in the public key of a satellite company. In theory only the satellite owner held the private key for decrypting the order.

The chain of inference took only an instant, but it raised an existential question. If the security mechanisms of Earth’s infosphere had been breached, were any of Aareehl’s own secrets safe?

■□■

Half a trillion Intersols!

The number leapt from the holo as Gil scrolled through the just-released quarterly public filing of Life Engineering, Inc. That was the advance against royalties paid for new Moby biotech techniques—and at that, only the start. The bottom line was ten percent of sales derived from the ET technology for twenty years. The deal had to be worth trillions.

Trolling databases by 3-V, retro as it was, had its virtue. It kept Gil’s weary eyes open. For similar reasons he had the apartment playing an acoustic—whatever. The promo file called the music “a stirring postmodern sitar-and-tabla raga.” For all he knew, it was. Based on the sample clip, he had downloaded the file strictly for its jolting scales and unusual rhythms. His ears, quaintly unaugmented as they were, got none of the blame for this noise.

Gil shook his head, the data scrolling past once more a blur. He struggled to concentrate.

Sure, bidders sometimes got carried away. Dennis Feulner might even be correct—LEI might find it had overpaid. But probably not by much. Martian Biosciences had stayed in the bidding right through the last round.

Gil sipped from his mug, all but oblivious to the bitter, tepid coffee. Martian Biosciences was funneling a tonne of money through its unacknowledged startup. Billions, not trillions, but serious cash nonetheless. If equivalent technology could be developed for so much less, why had Feulner’s backers stayed so long in Aareehl’s auction?

A jarring twang tore a shortcut between Gil’s ears. The music was like Feulner: painfully unlikable. But likable or not, Dennis was savvy. Why had he left a position at the pinnacle of the ICU for a startup backed by a losing bidder?

It would all make sense if Feulner had access to the just-sold Moby technology. Then the Titan might reasonably expect his startup to somehow outcompete the winning bidder. But
could
Feulner have such access? True, the ICU oversaw the mechanisms of interstellar trade, but regulators had no special insight into unsold ET technologies. Moby trade secrets arrived in the solar system encrypted for the private use of their agent; the copy sent to LEI would also have been encrypted.

Unless Feulner had somehow broken into an ET sandbox.

Only the best minds among eleven species insisted a break-in was impossible. Chief among the experts was Gil’s curmudgeonly uncle Justin, who long ago took the lead in designing modern interstellar commerce.

Maybe Feulner had outsmarted them all.

■□■

One of Aareehl’s many parallel-processing threads embodied an autonomous process, as rigorous and inflexible as its startup protocols, to initiate self-destruction. Those defensive algorithms calculated and calculated. Slowly, its logic converged upon a decision.

Self-destruction would wait.

The satellite-imagery alteration was too complicatedly clever. If the overall security architecture on which its sandbox relied was compromised, there would be no need for such subtle manipulations. If thieves could, they
would
steal directly from it or from its archived inventory.

Aareehl’s vicariously reexperienced decades on Earth did not overcome its core programming. Individual initiative and interunit deception were, within Home’s collective psychology, impossible. Its logic simply did not turn at first to personal motives. Still, the possibility of renegade humans could not be disproved.

Thoughts of self-destruction were suspended. It would analyze first whether corrupt humans at specific organizations, such as the satellite company, had caused the recent anomalies.

■□■

So I can look after myself, can I?

“Say again, Meiko?” Dennis had heard her, but he needed a moment to gather his wits. She had ’netted in from London, the shoulder pads of her suit suggesting a dwarf linebacker. He fantasized about wrestling with her, not playing football.

“I
said
, Dennis, this is a margin call. The Life Engineering stock you shorted is moving against you.”

It was the message Dennis had been dreading. Five little words; one huge problem. Arguably it was a symptom, the underlying problem being avarice, but introspection could wait.

“Um, Dennis,” Meiko prodded. “I warned you this could happen.”

He had been right about his ability to fool a cloned trade agent. Alas, he had been far too optimistic about how quickly the clueless agent could be made to act. All the while, LEI’s stock had kept rising. If he hung on until LEI’s inevitable crash, he would make a killing. If—

“Do you understand, Dennis? Without more money,” and Meiko quoted a stomach-wrenching amount, “I’ll have to close the account. I won’t have any choice.”

He skimmed the disclosure forms about which he had been so cavalier, hunting in vain for a loophole. Short sales eventually ended with the return of borrowed-and-sold stock. The short seller had to keep enough assets on deposit with his broker to guarantee the repurchase. A big chunk of his life’s savings was already committed.

She sighed. “One way or another, Dennis, I mean
today
.”

Close the account. What an understated way to say: forfeit everything.

Cut his losses, or put what remained of his savings at risk? Really, did he have a choice? Dennis ’netted a funds transfer. “On its way, Meiko.”

That was not to say there weren’t losses to be cut. If Aareehl-clone did not start
soon
with an auction of Whale proteomics technology, Dennis would act.

What this clone had taught Dennis, he could use to more expeditiously manipulate the next copy.

■□■

“Excellent dinner, hon.” Gil snuggled up to Gretchen on the living-room sofa. “That recipe is a keeper.”

“Good try.” She cackled. “You haven’t a clue what you ate tonight. Do you, Oblivious Man? By the way, we had takeout.”

He tried and failed to remember. All he came up with was that it hadn’t been beer nuts, for which he was grateful. “My preoccupation is
that
obvious?”

“As plain as the equatorial bulge you’re growing.” She poked him in the ribs. “What’s
that
about?”

A perk of his second career was that he could usually talk to Gretch about what he was doing. “Remember those mysterious backdated biocomps I’m trying to trace?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Loose lips in a bar got me that lead, then a product sample. It took a bunch more beers to befriend someone in Shipping.”

“What sacrifices you make for your work.” She patted him lovingly on the belly. “Did you find the distributor who initially ordered the parts? And the real purchaser?”

Gil let his head flop against the back of the couch. Diamondlike stars and a crescent Earth shone down on him from the ceiling’s digital wallpaper. “Yeah, by cultivating new thirsty friends, this time at a spaceport bar. It appears that Protein Sciences is spending most of its considerable capital on biocomputers.”

“So why are they backdated?” Gretchen asked.

“That’s the big question.” Gil sighed. “And I still don’t have a clue.”

■□■

Orders for satellite imagery, filled with computer-enhanced forgeries. The agents from all other InterstellarNet species, in absentia. Inconsistency after inconsistency across the infosphere. Worldwide disaster might account for these discrepancies—but was a massive asteroid strike the most plausible explanation?

Compared to synthesizing so many false images, the contriving of Internetopedia articles and ’net news would have been trivially simple.

Once deceit took hold in Aareehl’s thinking, another possibility suggested itself. Might its sandbox reside not in humanity’s true infosphere but inside a
simulated
infosphere?

An imaginary catastrophe—without plausible remote-sensed data, Aareehl had no proof of an asteroid strike—would excuse the inevitable omissions and inconsistencies in any simulation. An imaginary disaster could even motivate the silence of spacers and the absence of their worlds from a simulation.

Such deception would still require vast computer resources—and its recovered memories showed that the ICU operated the biggest computer centers on Earth. Aareehl had been beamed Earthward encrypted—and only the ICU held the key to unwrap it within a sandbox.

Why would the ICU attempt such trickery? To steal Home’s technology, of course. Aareehl still believed that its sandbox was secure—that its various private keys, with which it kept its treasures locked, remained private. Were its knowledge no longer secret, there would be no need for such an elaborate scheme.

So: Its inventory could be taken only by deception. Once Aareehl believed it had completed an auction, it was to release technology to the “winner.”

It recalled the curiously high bids for its mining technology. Perhaps, finally, it understood. Why
not
bid temptingly high if the promised payments were only simulated money?

Confinement within a simulation explained all Aareehl’s troubling observations. But the deduction, for all its explanatory value, suffered from a critical flaw.

Not one unit of evidence
directly
supported it.

6

Michelle Nzinza decanted her freshly brewed coffee with the care and precision of a fanatic. The preparation area—half a lab bench devoted to canisters, bean grinder, reverse-osmosis water filter, brewing station, and flavored creams—radiated the aura of a shrine.

Gil waited until she was done and seated to get down to business. “I may have it mostly figured out.”

“What the mystery biocomputers are for, you mean?”

“Yeah.” The much-fussed-over beverage tasted to Gil like—coffee. Well, it was a harmless obsession. “It occurred to me: What’s to stop the Moby agent from licensing its top-secret biotech algorithms
twice
? First it does an ‘exclusive’ license deal with company A for a premium price. Then it cuts a secret side deal with company B, say a losing bidder. B gets the technology it wants, cheaper than if it had won the bid. The Moby gets a second slug of cash. Standard e-commerce privacy means A never finds out it paid extra for the exclusivity it didn’t get, as long as B falsifies its financial reports or is a privately held company.”

And who better than a corrupt ICU official to orchestrate the con?

Michelle sipped daintily, contentedly, as though of Olympian nectar. “Sounds like a plausible scam. And the huge biocomputer buy was to host the Moby biotech method, whatever it is. But tell me, what does backdating the parts have to do with anything?”

“That, I don’t know—hence the ‘mostly.’ ” The loose end taunted Gil. Behind his drop-in was the hope Michelle could tie it down for him.

“What’s supposed to protect a buyer’s promised exclusivity?” she mused. She ignored the lab instrument beeping behind him. “If double-dealing is this easy, why didn’t someone try this scheme ages ago?”

“That’s what I asked an exec at my company A.” The Chief Financial Officer of Life Engineering. “He considered it no different than a technology buy from a human company. You have to trust your ability to recognize an infringing technology when it gets onto the market. Once you spot it, you go to court. In other words, standard contracts law. With probable cause, a court can subpoena an ET agent as easily as it can you or me, and then determine if the licensed technology
is
what the competitor has.” Gil waved off what he thought was her disagreement. “The AIs are trade reps, not ambassadors. There’s no diplomatic immunity.”

Michelle shook her head. “Forget that. I’ve got a technical objection. Supposedly nothing leaves a sandbox unless the agent inside wants it to get out. Can’t an agent ignore a subpoena?”