Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (35 page)

Bobby's stubborn, but Tina held her own against him and it ended in the stalemate of "maybe."

Which is pretty much all the business we managed to get done that evening, because there really was more wine than I'm used to—enough that switching the autodrive back on for the ride home seemed like a good idea, even if it wasn't hack-proof.

If I have one glass of wine, I sleep soundly. With more than that, my sleep can be fitful. I've never been tempted to pursue it far enough to discover whatever stupor it was that my father always drank himself into.

That night, I had a jumbled dream in which somebody I couldn't see chased Tina with a bag of tiny purple berries, throwing them at her in handfuls that turned into winged Dad-faces and flew away. Tina got tired and quit running, and Jill and Bobby and I tried to guard her from the berries by swatting them away. But they no longer flew, and instead fell around her in Dad-faces and Jill-faces and everybody-else's faces, where they piled higher and higher until nobody could find her. Then Tina laughed like tinkling bells in a marble hallway and said it's okay, she was still there, and there weren't any other Tinas, so she just needed us to quit swatting and open a berry mine—

—and then Hal, who I'd meant to replace with a wind-up alarm clock, was blaring in my ear with a huge hash of spam and his programmed routine. "Good . . . berry . . . Dave . . . mortgage . . . slept well . . . bust size . . . hiding from you . . . consolidate your . . . traffic report . . ." The gibberish mounted, then degenerated into white noise as spammer after spammer joined the chorus—

—and then it no longer mattered because suddenly I had the answer, and Tina was more right than she'd ever have believed, because it really didn't involve running away.

I called Tina first, then Bobby. Tina was excited, Bobby more dubious—which wasn't surprising, because this was more her field than his—although she was later to admit that she had the easy job of brainstorming ideas for Bobby, then burying herself in her Ph.D. work while he struggled to execute them.

But within days, Pipsqueak Systems, with Tina as a very part-time consultant, set to work on two products. The first, marketed through a well-known spamware provider, was a temporary patch against the berry folks' innovations. Bobby didn't think it would last more than three months, but by this time berry ads were popping up everywhere, and the spamware provider was thrilled to be the first to be able even to slow the onslaught.

The second product was the one that was my own brainstorm. Jill set up a puppet firm to handle the licensing because if it worked, it would be so revolutionary that for once, she wanted full control. Our goal was nothing less than giving people back their lives, and none of us wanted the price jacked through the roof.

The program is based on Tina's data-mining routines, run in reverse. Bobby has a fancy name for it, but I prefer to think of it as surrendering to the tigers.

In traditional data mining, you're looking for order amid chaos, with an implicit presumption that the order is the good stuff. Conventional spamware tries to preserve the order by blocking out as much of the chaos as possible. But suppose you open the floodgates and let the spam flow, unimpeded. It's counterintuitive because we all know you'd be instantly buried in junk—as indeed you are. But those buy, buy, buy messages are a form of order, and my idea was to let them all in so that Tina's data-miners could see the order and discard
it
to find the residual chaos—that single message from Sis among the deluge of ads.

Our first real test was with Hal. Bobby said it was because he's a simple system, but Bobby can be sentimental and we both liked the idea of returning to where it had all begun. While Bobby was writing and rewriting code, I became increasingly nervous—what if my brainstorm proved a dud?—but Bobby was his usual chipper self. "It'll either work or it won't," he said. Other than that, the only things you could drag out of him were variants on the word "interesting." But late one afternoon, when even Bobby was beginning to look haggard, I took the clock to his office.

It was hard not to think of Hal as being surprised when I programmed him for 6 p.m., but, well, he's a clock, and surprise isn't in his repertoire. Neither, in a minor lapse on the part of his designers, was "Good evening, Dave." Still, he clicked to life at the appointed hour, instantly producing white noise from what Bobby's monitor counted as 1,393 separate spams the moment he tried to log onto the weather and traffic websites.

Then the white noise segued to chop as the data-mining algorithm kicked in, until a few seconds later, Hal's dulcet tones were giving us the tail end of a perfectly coherent traffic report.

I was frowning, but Bobby was ecstatic. "It's a learning program," he said. "It'll get better—and for the moment we can just throw in a short delay before it starts speaking. Not the most elegant approach, but good enough for a clock." He busied himself in his laptop, connected to a spaghetti-bowl of wires hanging off Hal's backside.

We reset Hal for 6:30. This time, he woke up at 6:29, and again registered something better than 1,000 hits the moment he logged on. Nothing else happened for what felt like an eternity, until, at precisely 6:30, something ticked over in Bobby's modified software and Hal calmly asked if I'd had a good night's sleep.

Tina had been standing next to me through the entire experiment. "Way to go, Bobby!" she cheered, but it was me she hugged. "Pretty good concept, too," she added to me,
sotto voce
. "Not bad for a tech writer who claims not to know much about computers."

It was merely the first step, but Bobby was already confident he could adapt his program for e-mail. Voice mail would be a tougher nut, but in both cases, the key lies in developing hardware modules that scroll through the mail queues, looking for the "noise" behind the spam's counterfeit order. Just to be on the safe side, these programs won't erase suspect spam; they'll just rank-order the mail so you can start with the most important stuff and read as far as you want. Ironically, the more spam you get, the more accurate the rankings should be. That smartest advertisers might still get through with limited, well-focused mailings, but that's not the wholesale junk we're trying to get rid of, anyway.

Since it was again a Tuesday, we found ourselves back at the art museum for another concert. In the intervening weeks, I'd seen Tina often, but always at Bobby's office, always in settings where I could bury myself in the spam project and not have to think much about the rest of my life—other than to realize that someday, I really should ask for that raise.

Again, Bobby and Jill were among the first couples to take to the dance floor, and again, Jill's gaze met mine. Only this time, I'd swear she
winked
.

Beside me, Tina—the enchanting presence from which I just might be ready to quit fleeing—was waiting for me to ask her to dance. I really don't like putting myself on display that way, and probably never will, but at least I was able to do it this time without the strong nudge from her. And when we finally joined the other dancers, I realized that Tina had been wrong about something all those weeks ago. All eyes weren't on Bobby and Jill.

One set had no interest in anyone but her.

Robert J. Sawyer

"I'm sorry," said Mr. Shiozaki, as he leaned back in his swivel chair and looked at the middle-aged white man with the graying temples, "but there's nothing I can do for you."

"But I've changed my mind," said the man. He was getting red in the face as the conversation went on. "I want out of this deal."

"You can't change your mind," said Shiozaki. "You've
moved
your mind."

The man's voice had taken on a plaintive tone, although he was clearly trying to suppress it. "I didn't think it would be like this."

Shiozaki sighed. "Our psychological counselors and our lawyers went over the entire procedure and all the ramifications with Mr. Rathburn beforehand. It's what he wanted."

"But I don't want it anymore."

"You don't have any say in the matter."

The white man placed a hand on the table. The hand was flat, the fingers splayed, but it was nonetheless full of tension. "Look," he said, "I demand to see—to see the other me. I'll explain it to him. He'll understand. He'll agree that we should rescind the deal."

Shiozaki shook his head. "We can't do that. You know we can't. That's part of the agreement."

"But—"

"No buts," said Shiozaki. "That's the way it has to be. No successor has ever come back here. They can't. Your successor has to do everything possible to shut your existence out of his mind, so he can get on with
his
existence, and not worry about yours. Even if he wanted to come see you, we wouldn't allow the visit."

"You can't treat me like this. It's inhuman."

"Get this through your skull," said Shiozaki. "
You
are not human."

"Yes, I am, damn it. If you—"

"If I prick you, do you not bleed?" said Shiozaki.

"Exactly! I'm the one who is flesh and blood. I'm the one who grew in my mother's womb. I'm the one who is a descendant of thousands of generations of
Homo sapiens
and thousands of generations of
Homo erectus
and
Homo habilis
before that. This—this other me is just a machine, a robot, an android."

"No, it's not. It is George Rathburn. The one and only George Rathburn."

"Then why do you call him ‘it'?"

"I'm not going to play semantic games with you," said Shiozaki. "He is George Rathburn. You aren't—not anymore."

The man lifted his hand from the table and clenched his fist. "Yes, I am. I
am
George Rathburn."

"No, you're not. You're just a skin. Just a shed skin."

George Rathburn was slowly getting used to his new body. He'd spent six months in counseling preparing for the transference. They'd told him this replacement body wouldn't feel like his old one, and they'd been right. Most people didn't transfer until they were old, until they'd enjoyed as much biological physicality as they could—and until the ever-improving robotic technology was as good as it was going to get during their natural lifetimes.

After all, although the current robot bodies were superior in many ways to the slab-of-flab ones—how soon he'd adopted that term!—they still weren't as physically sensitive.

Sex—the recreational act, if not the procreative one—was possible, but it wasn't quite as good. Synapses were fully reproduced in the nano-gel of the new brain, but hormonal responses were faked by playing back memories of previous events. Oh, an orgasm was still an orgasm, still wonderful—but it wasn't the unique, unpredictable experience of a real sexual climax. There was no need to ask, "Was it good for you?," for it was
always
good, always predictable, always exactly the same.

Still, there were compensations. George could now walk—or run, if he wanted to—for hours on end without feeling the slightest fatigue. And he'd dispensed with sleep. His daily memories were organized and sorted in a six-minute packing session every twenty-four hours; that was his only downtime.

Downtime
. Funny that it had been the biological version of him that had been prone to downtime, while the electronic version was mostly free of it.

There were other changes, too. His proprioception—the sense of how his body and limbs were deployed at any given moment—was much sharper than it had previously been.

And his vision was more acute. He couldn't see into the infrared—that was technically possible, but so much of human cognition was based on the idea of darkness and light that to banish them with heat sensing had turned out to be bad psychologically. But his chromatic abilities had been extended in the other direction, and that let him see, among other things, bee purple, the color that often marked distinctive patterns on flower petals that human eyes—the old-fashioned kind of human eyes, that is—were blind to.

Hidden beauty revealed.

And an eternity to enjoy it.

"I demand to see a lawyer."

Shiozaki was again facing the flesh-and-blood shell that had once housed George Rathburn, but the Japanese man's eyes seemed to be focused at infinity, as if looking right through him. "And how would you pay for this lawyer's services?" Shiozaki asked at last.

Rathburn—perhaps he couldn't use
his
name in speech, but no one could keep him from thinking it—opened his mouth to protest. He had money—lots of money. But, no, no, he'd signed all that away. His biometrics were meaningless; his retinal scans were no longer registered. Even if he could get out of this velvet prison and access one, no ATM in the world would dispense cash to him. Oh, there were plenty of stocks and bonds in his name . . . but it wasn't his name anymore.

"There has to be something you can do to help me," said Rathburn.

"Of course," said Shiozaki. "I can assist you in any number of ways. Anything at all you need to be comfortable here."

"But
only
here, right?"

"Exactly. You knew that—I'm sorry;
Mr. Rathburn
knew that when he chose this path for himself, and for you. You will spend the rest of your life here in Paradise Valley."

Rathburn was silent for a time, then: "What if I agreed to accept your restrictions? What if I agreed
not
to present myself as George Rathburn? Could I leave here then?"

"You
aren't
George Rathburn. Regardless, we can't allow you to have any outside contact." Shiozaki was quiet for a few moments, and then, in a softer tone, he said, "Look, why make things difficult for yourself? Mr. Rathburn provided very generously for you. You will live a life of luxury here. You can access any books you might want, any movies. You've seen our recreation center, and you must admit it's fabulous. And our sex-workers are the best-looking on the planet. Think of this as the longest, most-pleasant vacation you've ever had."