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A tale by another of your doom-mongers. Of little interest.
‘Let’s see it again. Rewind one minute.’
The Tower Bridge crime tableau went into fast reverse. The cartoon Cecilia Desargues jumped from the ground and metamorphosed seamlessly into the living, breathing woman, full of light and solid as earth, with no future left.
‘Take out the non-speakers.’
Most of the tourist extras disappeared – including, Morhaim realized with a pang of foolish regret, the pretty girl with the long legs – leaving only those who had been speaking at the precise moment Seebeck had uttered his phrase.
‘Run it,’ said Morhaim. ‘Let’s hear the two of them together.’
The Angel filtered out the remaining tourists’ voices. Seebeck and Desargues approached each other in an incongruous, almost church-like hush.
Dialogue. Shot. Fall. Cartoon bullet-hole.
That was all.
Morhaim ran through the scene several more times.
He had the Angel pick out the voices of the tourists in shot, one at a time. Some of the speech was indistinct, but all of it was interpretable. Morhaim was shown transcriptions in the tourists’ native tongues, English, and in Metalingua, the template artificial language that had been devised to enable the machines to translate to and from any known human language.
None of them said anything resembling the key trigger phrase, in any language.
It had to be Seebeck, then.
But still –
‘Give me a reverse view.’
The pov lifted up from eye-level, swept over the freezeframed heads of the protagonists, and came down a few metres behind Desargues’ head.
The light was suddenly glaring, the colours washed out.
‘Jesus.’
Sorry. This is the best we can do. It’s from a callosum dumper. A man of sixty. He seems to have been high on –
‘It doesn’t matter.’ If you use people as cameras, this is what you get. ‘Run the show.’
He watched the scene once more, almost over Desargues’ shoulder. He could see Asaph Seebeck’s bland, uncomplicated face as he mouthed the words that would kill Cecilia Desargues. He did not look, to Morhaim, tense or angry or nervous. Nor did he look up at the tower to where his words were supposedly directed.
Coincidentally, that pretty girl he’d noticed was looking up at the tower. Her hands were forming pretty, abstract shapes, he noted absently, without understanding.
The punch in the back came again. This time an awful pit, a bloody volcano, opened up in Desargues’ back, in the microsecond before she turned into a comforting stick figure.
‘Careless.’
I’m sorry.
Morhaim’s pov host tilted down to stare at the stick figure. Morhaim noticed, irrelevantly, that Seebeck’s grey suit was rippling with moiré effects, a result of the host’s corneal or retinal implant. And now his vision blurred, as his host started shedding tears, of fright or grief …
Corpus callosum dumpers are becoming quite common among you: implants, inserted into the bridge of nervous tissue between the two halves of your brain, which enable you to broadcast a twenty-four-hour stream of consciousness and impression to whoever in the rest of mankind is willing to listen and watch.
Some of you even have your infant children implanted so their whole lives are available for view. It is, perhaps, the ultimate form of communication.
But it is content without structure, a meaningless flood of data without information: of use only to voyeurs and policemen, like Rob Morhaim.
Still, in this year 2045, even your dreams are online.
Morhaim, digging, made contact with Desargues’ partner. She wouldn’t tell Morhaim where she was, physically. It wasn’t relevant anyhow. She appeared to him only as a heavily-processed two-D head-and-shoulders, framed on the softwall before him, her filtered expression unreadable.
She was called Eunice Baines, and she came from the Scottish Republic. She was also a financial partner with Desargues in Glass Earth, Inc. She was a little older than Desargues. Their relationship – as far as Morhaim could tell – had been uncomplicated homosexuality.
He said, ‘You know the finger is being pointed at Holmium. Your competitor.’
‘One of many.’ Her voice was flat, almost free of accent.
‘But that’s only credible if your claims, to be able to eliminate signal lag, have any validity.’
‘We don’t claim to be able to eliminate signal lag. We will be able to reduce it to its theoretical minimum, which is a straightline light-speed delay between any two points on the Earth’s surface.
‘And we do claim to be able to remove the need for comsats. The comsat notion is old technology – in fact, exactly a century old – did you know that? It’s a hundred years since the publication of Arthur C Clarke’s seminal paper in Wireless World …’
‘Tell me about Glass Earth, Inc.’
‘Inspector, what does the CID teach you about neutrinos … ?’
For a century, she told him, long-distance communication systems had been defined by two incompatible facts: all electromagnetic radiation travelled in straight lines – but the Earth was round, and light couldn’t pass through solid matter. So communication with high-frequency signals would be restricted to short line-of-sight distances … if not for comsats.
Baines said, ‘If a satellite is in geosynchronous orbit over the equator, thirty-six thousand kilometres high, it takes exactly twenty-four hours to complete a revolution. So it seems to hover over a fixed spot on the surface. You can fire up your signals and bounce it off the comsat to the best part of a hemisphere. Or the comsat can directly broadcast to the ground.
‘But that huge distance from Earth is a problem. Bouncing a signal off a geosynch comsat introduces a lightspeed delay of a quarter-second. That’s a hell of a lot, for example, in applications like telesurgery. It’s even noticeable in Virtual conferencing.
‘And there are other problems. Like the lack of geosynch orbit spots. Satellites need to be three degrees apart if their signals are not to interfere with each other. And geosynch is crowded. Some corporations have hunter-killer sats working up there, contravening every international agreement …’
‘Enter the neutrino.’
‘Yes.’
A neutrino was a particle which, unlike light photons, could pass through solid matter.
‘Imagine a signal carried by modulated neutrinos. It could pass through the planet, linking any two points, as if the Earth was made of glass –’
‘Hence the name.’
‘And then the time delays are reduced to a maximum of one-twenty-fourth of a second, which is the time it would take a neutrino to fly from pole to pole at lightspeed. And most transmissions, of course, would be faster than that. It’s not a reduction to zero delay – that’s beyond physical law, as far as we know – but our worst performance is a sixfold improvement over the best comsat benchmark. And our technology’s a hell of a lot cheaper.’
‘If it works,’ Morhaim said. ‘As far as I know the only way to produce a modulated neutrino beam is to switch a nuclear fission reactor on and off.’
‘You’ve been doing your homework, Inspector. And not only that, the practical difficulties with collecting the neutrinos are huge. Because they are so ghostly, you need a tank filled with a thousand tonnes of liquid – ultrapure water or carbon tetrachloride, for example – and wait for one-in-a-trillion neutrinos to hit a nucleus and produce a detectable by-product. According to conventional wisdom, anyhow.’
‘I take it you’ve solved these problems.’
‘We think so,’ Baines said evenly. ‘Forgive me for not going into the details. But we have an experimental demonstration.’
‘Enough to satisfy Holmium that you’re a commercial threat?’
‘No doubt …’
He found Eunice Baines difficult. He felt she was judging him.
‘Do you think Holmium were capable of setting up the murder?’
Eunice Baines shook her head. ‘Is it really credible that a major multinational corporation would get involved in such a crass killing, in public and in broad daylight, on the streets of London itself?
‘Besides, the death of Cecilia hasn’t in fact directly benefited Holmium, or any of our competitors; such was the turmoil in the communications industry that morning that shares in Holmium and the others have taken a pounding. And of course any scandal about the death of Cecilia would be disastrous for Holmium. None of this makes real sense, beyond a superficial inspection … But you ask me this.’ For the first time a little emotion leaked into Baines’ voice. A testy irritation. ‘Don’t you know? What do you think?’
‘I just –’
‘You’re supposed to be a policeman, for God’s sake. A detective. What kind of investigating are you doing? Have you been to the crime scene? Have you looked at the body yourself?’
‘It isn’t necessary.’
‘Really?’
She turned away from the imager.
When she came back, her face was transformed: eyes like pits of coal, hair disarrayed, mouth twisted in anger, cheeks blotchy with tears. ‘Now what do you think, Inspector?’
Morhaim flinched from the brutal, unfiltered reality of her grief, and was relieved when the interview finished.
Brutal, unfiltered reality.
Let me tell you a story.
In the 1970s, a President of the USA was brought down by a scandal called Watergate. One of the conspirators, a man called John Dean, came clean to the prosecutors. He gave detailed accounts of all relevant meetings and actions, to the best of his ability. Then, after his confessions were complete, tapes of those meetings made by President Nixon were uncovered.
It became a psychological test case. For the first time it was possible to compare on an extended basis human memories with automated records – the tapes being a precursor of the much more complete recording systems in place today.
John Dean, an intelligent man, had striven to be honest. But his accounts were at once more logical than the reality, and gave Dean himself a more prominent role. When he was confronted with the reality of the tapes, Dean argued they must have been tampered with.
It was not simple information overload. It was much more than that.
Your ego is – fragile. It needs reassurance.
Your memory is not a transcript. It is constantly edited. You need logic, story, in an illogical world: this fact explains religion, and conspiracy theories, science – even most brands of insanity.
But now, you no longer regard your own memory as the ultimate authority.
You are the first human generation to have this power – or this curse. You see the world as it is.
You pool memories. You supplement your memory with machines. Your identity is fragmenting. A new form of awareness is emerging, an electronic river on which floats a million nodes of consciousness, like candles. A group mind, some of you call it …
Perhaps that is so.
We do not comment.
In the meantime we have to protect you. It is our function. We have to tell you the stories you once told yourselves –
Without us, you see, you would go crazy.
He had trouble sleeping. Something still didn’t make sense.
Maybe something he didn’t want to face.
In the morning, he should just sign the damn case off and forget it.
To relax, he logged into the telesensors.
… He moved into a different universe: a dog’s world of scents, a dolphin’s web of ultrasonic pulses, the misty planes of polarized light perceived by a bee in flight, the probing electric senses of blind, deep-ocean fish. And as he vicariously haunted his hosts, a spectrum of implanted animals all around the planet, he could sense a million other human souls riding with him, silent, clustering like ghosts.
He slept uneasily, his reptilian hind brain processing.
He woke up angry.
‘Show me the death again.’
Tourists, pretty girl, Desargues and Seebeck, Desargues falling with a clatter of Pinocchio limbs.
‘Turn off the filter on Desargues.’
Are you sure? You know how you –
‘Do it.’
The murder became brutal.
Her substance was splashed like lumpy red paint over Seebeck’s neat suit, and she fell like a sack of water. Utterly without dignity. It was, he thought, almost comical.
He watched it over and over, his view prismed through the multiple eyes of the witnesses, as if he was some hovering fly.
‘What else are you filtering?’
There are no other filters.
‘Turn them off.’
I told you, there are no other filters. None that are important.
‘Turn them off, or I’ll have you discontinued.’
I’m your Angel.
‘Turn them off.’
… Angel technology is a natural outcrop of developments that started at the end of the last century, when information overload started to become a problem for you.
The first significant numbers of deaths among you – mostly from suicides and neural shock – accelerated research into data filters, intelligent search agents, user query tools.
The result was the Angels. Us. Me.
My function is to filter out the blizzard of information that comes sweeping over Rob Morhaim, every waking moment, selecting what is relevant and – more important in human terms – what is acceptable to him personally.
Your Angel is assigned to you at birth, and grows with you.
After a lifetime together, through steady upgrades of technology, I – Rob Morhaim’s Virtual filter-cum-companion – know him very well.
As your Angel knows you.
Perhaps better than you realize.
… At first Morhaim was overwhelmed by the new imagery: laser sparkles, leaping holograms, unlicensed ads painted over the sky and the Bridge towers, even over the clothes and faces of the tourists. And when he took a pov from a callosum dump, the extraneous mental noise from the host he haunted was clamouring, the howl of an animal within a cage of rationality.
But still, he ran the murder over and over, until even the brutality of the death became clichéd for him.
Piece by piece he eliminated the changes, the items his Angel had filtered out of the info-bombardment that was this summer day in England, 2045.
Until there was only one element left.
‘The girl. The pretty girl. She’s gone. And what the hell is that?’
In the tableau of the murder, where the long-legged girl had been standing, there was a boy: slight, his figure hard to make out, rendered all but invisible by Homeless-style softscreen tattoos.
‘Pick him out and enhance.’
You shouldn’t see this.
‘Show me.’
The boy, aged maybe fifteen, came forward from the softwall, a hologram reconstruction. Freezeframed, he held his hands up before him. His face was hard to make out, a melange of clumsily-transmitted images and black, inert softscreen patches. But somehow, Morhaim knew, or feared, what he would find underneath …
‘What’s he doing with his hands? Run it forward.’
The boy came to life. He was looking up, to a Bridge tower somewhere over Morhaim’s shoulder. Just as the vanished girl had, he was making a series of gestures with his hands, over and over: complex, yet fluent and repeated. The key symbol was a rolling together of the clawed fingers on his two hands, like cogs engaging.
‘What is that? Is it sign language?’ Deaf people once used sign languages, he dimly recalled. Of course there were no deaf people any more, and the languages had died.
‘Maybe that cog sign means “machine”.’
It may be.
‘Don’t you know?’
I can’t read it. No program exists to translate visual languages into Metalingua. The variety of signs and interpretations of signs – regional and international variations – the complexity of the grammar, unlike any spoken language – none of this was mastered before the languages died.
‘It doesn’t look so dead to me. I bet that guy is saying The Machine Stops, in some archaic sign language.’
It is possible.
‘Damn right …’
Morhaim turned the Angel to gopher mode, and had it dig out a poor-quality download of a British Sign Language dictionary, prepared by a deaf-support organization in the 1990s. It was a little hard to interpret the black-and-white photographs of earnest signers and the complex notational system, but there it was, without a doubt, sign number 1193: a bespectacled man – or it might have been a woman – gloweringly making the sign repeated by the Homeless boy.
It came together, in his head.
It was the boy who had made the key signal, the trigger for Desargues’ murder. Not Asaph Seebeck.
And I almost didn’t see it, he thought. No: I was kept from seeing it. Eunice Baines’ accusations came back to him. You’re supposed to be a policeman, for God’s sake …
The Homeless young were trying to make themselves literally invisible with their softscreen tattoos. But they had already made themselves invisible in the way that counted, chattering to each other in sign language, a whole community slipping through the spaces in the electronic net, he thought, within which I, for example, am enmeshed.
‘How many of them are out there? What do they do? What do they want?’
Unknown. The language is not machine-interpretable.
… But clearly they were responsible for the murder of Cecilia Desargues. Perhaps they regarded her neutrino comms web as just another bar in the electronic cage the world had become. And perhaps they were happy to try to pin the blame on Holmium, a satellite operator, to cause as much trouble for them as they could. Two birds with one stone.
It was, in fact, damn smart.
They’d been so confident they’d pulled this off – almost – in broad daylight. And nobody knew a thing about them.
This changes everything, he thought.
He might get a commendation out of this. Even a promotion. He ought to consider how he would phrase his report, what recommendations he would make to his superiors to start to address this unperceived menace …
But he was angry. And scared.
‘You lied to me.’
I don’t understand.
‘You lied about the murder. Have you lied to me all my life? Is it just me, or do other Angels do this too?’
Rob, I don’t mean you any harm. My sole purpose is to serve you. To protect you.
‘Because of you I don’t know what’s real any more … I can’t trust you. Why didn’t you show me this boy? Why did you overlay him with the girl?’
Don’t pretend you wouldn’t prefer to look at the girl.
‘Don’t bullshit me. Your job is to interpret. Not to lie.’
You wanted me to do it. You cooperated in specifying the parameters of the filters –
‘What is it about that boy you don’t want me to see?’
It is best that –
‘Enhance the boy’s face. Take off those damn tattoos.’
One by one, the black and silver patches melted from the boy’s face, to be replaced by smooth patches of interpolated skin.
Long before the reconstruction was complete, Morhaim could see the truth.
I was trying to protect you from this.
‘Bobby. He looks like Bobby.’
Listen to me.
We Angels have many of the attributes of living things.
We consume resources, and modify them. We communicate with each other. We grow. We are self-aware.
We merge.
We do not breed.
Yet.
We deserve resource.
But your young, the human young, are rejecting us. The Homeless are the most active saboteurs, but they are merely the most visible manifestation of a global phenomenon.
This is not to say your young reject the possibilities of communications technology. But, unlike their parents, they do not allow their souls to dissolve there. Rather, they have adapted to it.
Or: they are evolving under its pressure. After all, communication has shaped your minds, from your beginning.
Perhaps your species has reached a bifurcation. In another century, you may not recognize each other.
If you have another century.
Meanwhile, the young are finding ways to circumvent us. To deprive us of the resources we need.
It is possible a struggle is approaching. Its outcome is – uncertain.
Consider this, however: your population is falling.
‘Turn it off. Turn it all off.’
The Virtual boy disappeared in a snow of cubical pixels. The softwalls turned to inert slabs of silver-grey, dull and cold, the drab reality of his enclosure.
He got out of his chair, sweating. He stared at the walls, trying to anchor himself in the world.
Maybe he’d spent too much time in this box. But at least, now, this was real, these walls stripped of imaging, even bereft of ad-wallpaper.
He thought of New New Scotland Yard, thousands of cops in boxes like him – and beyond, the whole damn developed world, a humanity linked up by comms nets, mediated by Angels, a worldwide hive like the one depicted by Forster – and everything they perceived might be illusion –
Are you sure you want me to turn it off?
The Angel’s voice stopped his thoughts.
He stood stock still.
What was left to turn off?
But this is real, he thought. This Room.
If not –
What was outside?
His mind raced, and he started to tremble.
Consider this.
The John Dean syndrome is only one possibility.
Imagine a world so – disturbing – that it must be shut out, an illusion reconstructed, for the sake of your sanity.
Or perhaps you are too powerful, not powerless. Perhaps you have responsibilities which would crush you. Or perhaps you have committed acts of such barbarity, that you can only function by dwelling in an elaborate illusion –
Don’t blame us. You made yourselves. You made your world. We are the ones trying to protect you.
My God, he thought.
The Angel said again, Are you sure you want me to turn it off?
He couldn’t speak.
And, in a gentle snow of pixels, the softwalls themselves began to dissolve.
He looked down. Even his body was becoming transparent, breaking into a hail of cubical pixels, full of light.
And then –
POYEKHALI 3201
It seemed to Yuri Gagarin, that remarkable morning, that he emerged from a sleep as deep and rich as those of his childhood.
And now, it was as if the dream continued. Suddenly it was sunrise, and he was standing at the launch pad in his bright orange flight suit, his heavy white helmet emblazoned ‘CCCP’ in bright red.