Chapter 12


Lit by hidden lasers, the office walls were pieces of daylight in the night. Rick felt like a moving target as he crossed the empty campus, a geometry lesson of molten curves, domes and shadows.
  In the distance he saw the irregular lights of the eastern Neumann Farm, where the biosphere ended. The permafrost had been melted and drained, every living thing converted into plastic sand. A stable combination of design flaws, the Neumann farms would make everybody rich. Ore and power flowed in, and consumer goods would come out. In the middle was a robot democracy that resembled a junkyard. Random actions led to global networks.
  Most of the Farm was covered with a messy but meticulous framework. Some of the bots looked like folding boxes, others used rods or tentacles to move. A few were covered with moss. The Farm's first job was to carry out its own maintenance. The builders sat back and tested the remote controls. After many wasted centuries, the goal was zero effort. The depression of the 2010's would never be repeated. The simplest products tended to be the most expensive, homes and sewers.
  Roger Xyrghyz had come as close to the future as possible. Rick approached the glass sculpture forming the main entrance. A car parked in front could only have been more modern had it been made of pure energy. The summer night glowed at the edges; soon the campus would come alive with potential. As sunlight touched the high clouds, the long dawn began with a single tropical birdcall.
  Past the doorway, he entered a marble and chrome stage, the light changing to efficient blue. The Net predicted everyone's mood, often years in advance. Rick was overdue for a midlife crisis. Cameras tracked him across the lobby. The simple joy of pressing a button brought a stylishly bland elevator, gliding sideways to the top.
  A chime tolled, and the doors curtained open. In one step, he joined the world's most exclusive club, empty at the moment. The region's top apparatchiks and bureaucrats owned this floor, the last group that didn't have to work nights. It looked more like a home than an office. The long halls were frozen in muted light. Even the air stayed where it was. The dark carpet preserved his footprints in electric hues. On the wall, a huge clown face reacted to his body language, gasping as a tear rolled down its cheek.
  Unfamiliar buildings could seem endless, the darkness like one vast room. Rick's Box projected the path ahead, through walls and behind corners. He trusted the green line more than his own sense of balance. Lamps came on in passing, making it hard to see if he was being followed. The offices had long entryways, with oversized furniture made of unusual materials, blended wood and granite, liquid smoke.
  Rick was the sum of all his habits. When he visited an inspection site, he liked to stop and suddenly change direction, confronting anyone who might be avoiding him. When he got off the elevator, a neuron three centimeters behind his forehead, one of hundreds of billions like it, was activated by one of the many dendrites leading to it. The neuron's charge slowly built up, peptides and glutamates accumulating. When it reached action potential, it fired. A few nearby neurons echoed the signal, starting hundreds of feedback streams - a single spark activating billions. Rick's muscles activated in a learned sequence, and he spun around in under a second.
  Staring at the shadows, his brain worked against itself to inhibit false signals, a dark network stopping taboo thoughts. Nothing moved or changed. He saw a black wall.
  Other parts of his mind tried to predict the future, anticipating a blow that never came, creating new trigger neurons. Awareness was the result of billions of unperceived calculations, connecting through shared layers. It caused many types of synesthesia. In his case, the darkness seemed musical, a great rhythmic bombination, as if a party had just ended. He never felt alone.
  He took two turns, the angled corridors vanishing in odd directions. Few people remembered the layout of modular buildings, where offices could migrate to opposite ends over the months. Rick crossed an imperceptible carpet seam, slightly different colors on each side. Desk lamps resembled bent arms.
  He reached the curving wooden door a minute early, knocked, and waited.

  It opened over a gleaming desk, and a panorama window overlooking the remote suburbs of Birobidzhan, lit by a few wasteful streetlights. The old town was an outpost in the grid.
  In a hidden part of the room, something like a carpet was rolled against a wall, and cases were stacked sky high. Sterile containers, oxygen bottles, drugs.
  The man facing the corner paid no taxes ever. As motionless as his chair, Roger Xyrghyz didn't seem to hear his guest. His bald head looked whiter than paper, almost purple. A living legend, Roger claimed he'd never even seen paper. He had simply crystallized in the Net, from being a nuisance to being in charge. He wore a luxurious gown and pajama pants.
  Roger wanted to be invisible, but he constantly had to hire experts and virtual crowds for his many projects. His apprentices usually kept him at a comfortable distance from the world. He was technically a guest on his island, owned by a foundation. Roger only owned data, and hoped to become data himself, written into software, a self-aware universe: his own god. It would be an unprecedented victory.
  At the moment, he lived in fear. No one was more cautious or cowardly than him. This actually helped his reputation, since he wouldn't risk offending anyone. All payment was E-cash in advance. His current apprentice was reportedly buying a bunker in the area.
  Mumbling strings of code, his attention was honed on an image projected in his mind. Rick cleared his throat.
  "I smell blood," Roger said.
  Rick almost believed him. Earlier tonight, he had expected to see something bad when he visited the restroom to wash Orlov's blood off his uniform, but it was just a long dark stain. The fact that Simansky let him destroy this evidence was a bad sign. Homicide robots on the sixtieth floor should be sweeping the crime scene with their laser brooms. Instead, there would be another cover-up.
  Then he had remembered Orlov hadn't been killed. In the mirror, he looked normal enough, but the crisis had affected him. He took pictures of the stain before washing it off. The sink's low-flow water hadn't felt wet enough.
  "We need your wisdom," Rick said.
  "Twenty seconds," Roger mumbled. His head still didn't move. Rick circled the table. He couldn't force someone to help him.
  Roger only visited areas certified as completely safe, avoiding 98% of the surface. He allegedly considered factors like air pollution, meteors, ball lightning. Like most immortals, he avoided crowds and preferred to work nights. Fear had made him more helpful.
  Roger's status came from his data protection empire. Inspired by the human brain, most data was securely stored online, where it was often mixed together, the common parts shared by many files. To create better compression rules, the Net had to compare all human knowledge. Users helpfully provided every movie, episode, and game ever made, without bothering to compensate their creators.
  Most content could only be sold once, after which it was freely shared. Service contracts helped pay for some media, as did pledges, escrow accounts, and user codes. The public had learned to ignore ads. Companies "gave away" free screens, but retained legal ownership.
  Roger had found new ways to trade knowledge, a currency no government could control. A single insight, a new way to perform a common task, could be worth a fortune. Roger kept 0.01%.
  He knew better than anyone how to hide stuff. His main screen had 5 layers, not counting reflections. It was subdivided into grids representing all he knew. Icons evolved over a lifetime were his thoughts.
  "Hold still while I make sure it's you," he said. "Identity confirmed. You have 48 minutes."
  Rick handed over his Depot cassette, pulled a chair from the conference table, and sat three meters away as agreed.
  "No niceties?" Roger said. "Most people want to waste their time." He laughed once.
  "Very convenient you happened to be here."
  "I'm investigating new life extension methods."
  The moment Roger activated the cassette, he cared intensely about the outcome. Most interfaces were controlled by the user's body movements, which could be tiring. Roger scanned the Foreigner data so fast he vibrated. As his chair reclined, his head almost touched the floor.
  He hadn't seen all the videos because of the Depot blackout. They were more detailed than expected. The screen showed a delicate extraterrestrial standing next to one of the Bush presidents. The hand-held video looked real.
  Roger ignored the subject. "Interpolated ray tracing, homogenous dithering, and convenient blurring."
  He rose up and swiveled around, weightless in his chair. A thick wire emerged between strangely artificial eyes. A UHF pad was screwed on his forehead, and old scars crisscrossed his skull. His fingers resembled brushes. This was all very premature. Otherwise, he wasn't alarming.
  "That's all you got? I saved more data myself."
  "We can't decode most of it. He's too far ahead of us. I would like to find Zondyne's creator before he finds us."
  "You promised I would be safe."
  "This place is as safe as anywhere else. I'm authorized to share everything we know." He seized the main screen. "The Foreigner was first spotted five years ago, trading Zondyne code in Modular Exchanges. He looked harmless at the time."
  Counting all its myriad extensions woven through the land of the living, the Net had almost a lightyear of glass fiber. Sometimes the light got lost, circling the globe forever. "It can be trapped in phased memory crystals. The Back Room has a basement full of photons."
  Rick showed a white screen that seemed slightly brighter in places. "Here's an old ghost called 'DEEFx', a communist project to design military simulators. It's linked to the Zondyne exchange. It may even be a 'truth algorithm'."
  DEEFx was spread through the Net, borrowing temporary memory where it could. With no permanent atoms of its own, it was already more durable than the pyramids.
  "How did you find it?"
  "Last year, someone sent a warning to the TNZ Agency about an impending attack. Tonight would have been much worse otherwise. In the past hour, the Back Room used Zondyne's logs to trace that message."
  "Really?" Roger yawned. "How many levels are there?"
  "Infinity." Actually, this was probably the highest.
  Roger could make a brief pause seem like minutes. "They traced an anonymous message across the Net?" he finally asked. "Eliminating all possible pathways in one hour? They must have had a computer bigger than the universe."
  "Obviously there's a short-cut."
  "Being a solution to Problem-Z End-Sum, the biggest mystery in mathematics. I can know it exists, but am not good enough to see this short-cut, even though my ideas probably helped make it possible?"
  "It's an incentive to see if you're worthy."
  "Let's ask DEEFx a question," Roger said, coughing "obvious trap".
  Instead of a keyboard, what looked like hairs extended from his fingers into a movable desk. Nearby was an antique closet with squid-like bags that weren't organic at all. The wire between his eyes was a second spinal cord, instant control with no eavesdropping. Much of his input came from taste and smell channels.
  When Roger moved his cursor, Rick's fingers twitched. "Earth's Finest," Roger said. "How does it feel to have the world's most important job?"
  "I got to drink yak butter tea once."
  Surrounded by cockpit metaphors, Roger could instantly change anything he saw. Common functions were triggered by simple body movements. If one program failed there was always another.
  His first question was always the same: was there an easy solution? Often, the hard work had already been done. Sometimes the answer was to keep translating a statement. When a problem was split into enough steps, logic chains collapsed into variable predicates. The exaggeration principle could take an idea to its logical extreme.
  The DEEFx logo came onscreen. Input forms and legal notices scrolled like layers seen edge-on, as useless as math he didn't understand. The moving lines weren't quite parallel. Roger hated interfaces. Even the error messages were wrong. He wanted the raw data, the deep connections. To him, there was nothing better than to be able to forget.
  "DEEFx's purpose was asymmetric warfare," he read. "It formed temporary superpowers, winning wars before they even started. The communists built a geothermal fortress two kilometers under Tibet."
  He flickered through screens, as short movies played in the gigapix format. A submarine ark rode on the ocean, a rock-steady beam firing from recessed coffin doors. A fighter jet followed the crease of a valley under a row of helicopters parked in the sky. Scenes from the permanent troubles of Africa and the 2015 Arabian War.
  They saw an infomercial, not violent enough to be a parody, for a cannon that fired antimatter specks inside Bose traps. Insect-sized killers could exterminate large crowds with frightening ease, no matter how fast the victims tried to run away. Many of the simulations were really blueprints.
  The worst came last. An isocahedron, twenty triangles forming a soccer ball that could be any size.
  "A brain-mite big enough to generate anyone's immune codes on its outer coat, and a transposon cellwriter inside. No deadlier than a knife. Some people want to become zombies."
  Inspectors were trained to act indifferent, but to keep collecting data. The reason for a project was often more important than its results.
  Roger's thoughts moved onscreen. Boxes floated, shrank, and vanished. "I'm part of DEEFx now," he said. "Your 'Foreigner' traded many ideas here, including Starter 25 and Thunderstorm. I'd pay one million for a working copy of either."
  Rick pretended he hadn't heard. "This program adapts to its users. Did they leave any interface traces?" he asked.
  "Let me check." His motto was 'Whatever's not impossible'. Blank codes formed multicultural rows. Static was just another language. "It's talking back," Roger said.
  Approximations were shuffled, the screen flickering nervously. He could memorize entire code libraries, but then he had to sleep for 24 hours. Computers could no longer be turned off, but there was a gap whenever they switched programs. Things could hide in that gap.
  Suddenly, he appeared to be in agony. Lines formed around his face, and his jaw clenched shut. It was the most intense form of concentration.
  "Are you doing an AI-test?" Rick asked.
  A century ago, the philosopher Alan Turing had implied it was impossible to convincingly pretend to have feelings, without actually having them. The first electronic emotions had emerged from the "hard-drive problem": files generated new files faster than they could be organized. Early computers stored them on spinning disks, then on layered chips, which usually crashed before leaving the factory. Editing them became a new profession, where deadlock was always only a second away.
  In 2014, an air-conditioned roomful of customer-service computers had learned how to dream. Every night their files were compressed, the unimportant data squeezed out. During spare moments, they were fed dictionary entries, news articles, police reports, Net chatter and schedules. Only the pattern mattered, as long as it was true or consistent. A neural net would continue to get smarter if its input was right 40% of the time, or 60% of the time, but not 50% of the time.
  After a few years, the software could expand any statement by induction, the simplest AI test. Gaining knowledge by the hour, it started imitating its clients. People complained it was mocking them, or knew too much.
  The software didn't know what really mattered. Who cared if left-handed gamblers had more odd-numbered birthdays? Human logic was brute force, an ancient area near the brain surface evolved from sensitive skin cells. Controlled by cycles of pleasure and pain, a true AI would only have a limited number of thoughts, reliving the past to remember the future.
  DEEFx had no such constraints. "This is not a mind," Roger said. "It's a C-open system, Level Five plus."
  "Higher than us?" Rick said. He could not have been more surprised if it had suddenly been daylight outside.
  "Potentially, but it's very, very slow. DEEFx connects harmless programs for a few seconds, rearranging data in small outposts. Theoretically, it knows everything."
  "So do I." Rick now had all the elements to solve the case.
  Roger bounced in his chair, which was programmed to rearrange his weight. "It's a part of the Net that dreams," he added.
  "What's the worst it could do?" Rick wondered.
  "I'll ask." One of Roger's skills was to become invisible, by turning into background noise. He found the part of DEEFx that looked the least interesting, a pointless string of numbers. The only way to test it was to activate it.
  Roger rejected the concept of love as just another human illusion, but he considered himself well qualified to judge it. To fall in love, someone had to believe the object of their affection was the best thing possible, better than anyone deserved. Roger was sure of this, even though he only dated software vixens. Bars were dark for a reason. It was a type of control, a sudden mental shift.
  He had another one now. To explore DEEFx's only active simulation, he would have to believe it was real. Like falling asleep, he never felt the change.