Chapter 42


The words "wealthy" and "philosopher" were not always incompatible. With an apologetic shrug, professor Tarek Golog had called it his only failure. Some suspected he also had secret debts. He wore a tie-less gray suit apparently chiseled from many types of stone, over a purple turtleneck sweater with embedded sparks, and still managed to look disheveled. A short but complex beard, unkempt hair and heavy eyebrows. His famous, perpetually surprised expression gave him a subtle advantage. Always affable, he had a slightly panicked voice and talked too fast. He acted ironically hip with clashing gestures. Few people were as passionate, but his emotions were usually appropriate. A famous media star, he would have argued with Damon. His social life was an ongoing experiment, with multiple marriages and forced emotions.
  When Tina and Rick entered, Tarek was calling several people at once, using a different tone with each. The people Rick visited in the course of his investigations often pretended to say things he would want to hear. Some wouldn't look at him directly when answering questions.
  "That's not good enough," Tarek said, before switching headsets and shouting like a Chinese auctioneer.
  Tarek believed in progress for its own sake. He selected new ideas that seemed unusually profound, and helped arrange financing for them. His wealth came from selling the resulting insights. Rick had seen Tarek's exciting future simulations about all the wonderful things that would happen after he was dead. A well known design law said it was easier to start a new field than to perfect an existing one. The ultimate steam locomotive or sports car had never been built. The UN's goal was to push mankind into a stable state, where these things might happen.
  The ultimate salesman, Tarek could simplify problems until nothing remained. He had allegedly persuaded a pope to become an atheist, but never pressured anyone to conform. "Be yourself," was his motto. He praised everyone he met, but had few close friends. Eventually, everyone would have to separate. He collected flags, logos, group identities. The guests at his parties tried to outdo themselves, like a meeting of aliens.
  Rick and Tina sat on a solid but immaterial block, little more than a dark outline. "Quick, say what you need," Tarek ordered. Most of his data had been frozen in the Total Search.
  Rick checked his notes as if he'd forgotten why he'd come. There was no reason for fear. The danger had already happened. Whatever he did would not affect his ultimate fate. He sensed many quests ending, not just his own.
  "We're part of the Total Search. This is a long shot, but we're desperate. The UN has somehow overlooked a conspiracy going back three generations. Before we can fight back, we need your insights about the Starters. How do they view reality?"
  Tarek was lying on his desk, playing with a toy robot that seemed to try to escape. He frowned intently, and said: "Assuming the Starters are the main suspects in the RedList event, and you're serious about ending the threat, I need access to all human data, including every remaining scrap of paper. At least 50% of humanity would have to cooperate."
  "The Total Search is strictly voluntary, with no subpoena or inquest powers. We could extend the duration, and ask everyone to fill out a survey," Rick said hopefully.
  Tarek slumped on his desk. "No one wants to pay the price, so we all will." He sighed and fell off, but landed perfectly. "Unfortunately, the RedList release was inevitable. The UN is too timid. My request to perform a pain experiment has been rejected three times, even though it would only take a few minutes, and I would perform it on myself," he exclaimed. "We can't hide from the future."
  "We're not scared enough yet to face our deepest fears," Rick said. He realized he was perfectly relaxed, a plunge from the false calm he had felt at times in the past week.
  While Rick was momentarily distracted, Tarek said something else, and promptly walked out of the room. "Fascinating," Tina agreed, already standing up.
  They followed him through a maze of short-cuts, dark corners, and dead ends. After a few steps it looked like a stage set. A group of students was playing digital games in a square of light, testing software metaphors, new ways to explain ideas.
  They passed a display case with microscopic specks of dust, pieces of comets and planets, all part of the same solar family. Nothing mankind could touch was older than five billion years. It included tiny diamonds from the immense impact that had created the moon, a blast sequence that had lasted a day, ending with a century of iron rain. A rock in a glass sphere turned out to be the first known tool, three million years old. Tarek had vividly recounted how primitive humans had passed through a stage of utter barbarism. They had moved cautiously, suppressing most impulses, hitting or stabbing before quickly withdrawing.
  A final case contained a motionless propeller. Lit by stroboscopic flashes, it was actually spinning very fast. Rick remembered a popular science exhibit where a large gold brick was dissolved in acid.
  They ended up in the mirror zone of where they had started. Even Tarek's desk was reversed. He clapped, and the walls filled with spectral pictures of the Singularity, leeching color into the surrounding room, making it look flat by comparison.
  When Tarek sat down, he appeared to be decapitated by a diagonal shadow. There was a small flash from his face.
  "If you wait long enough, anything can happen," he sighed deeply. "I would have warned you about RedList. It's probably too late to negotiate with the Starters. They will use this opportunity to create the chaos they desire. I understand they feel suffocated by our version of reality, and have nothing to lose. Now they can control it. The Singularity is pure information: a stable H-3 edge fold eliminator, connected to every qubit in our universe. A mirror and an index, it could access other universes, and maybe even alter our past. I predict it will make every other problem irrelevant."
  "Then I only have to solve this one," Rick said. "The Assembly probably won't follow your advice, but in your opinion what should we do first?"
  Tarek leaned forward, one of the few people who could think this far ahead. "Our only hope is dispersal. RedList proves the UN has underestimated the risk of human self-destruction. This planet will not exist a century from now. For society to survive, it has to divide." He wiggled his fingers. A better word than fragment, splinter, shatter. "The Singularity is a gateway to offset dimensions we can't even categorize, MM-Space and A-0-Space. Our descendants will disperse faster than the wave of creative destruction, improving at an accelerating rate, like an intelligent storm. Sometimes the fragments will recombine in painful ways. We can't influence the future. Some problems can only solve themselves."
  Rick was able to keep up with Tarek's thoughts. People who hated risk had the worst stress. Stress was good. "We won't authorize any future conditions we wouldn't tolerate now," he replied.
  A red light flashed in his Box screen, Priority Alpha-Z.
  "The minds that replace us will experience lifetimes in moments," Tarek continued. "However long it takes, however difficult, the Starters are willing to pay any price."

  So was Rick. He read the alert twice before speaking: "I just received an important message. In the past ten minutes, the UN has placed the Reality Center under remote observation, using scanners neither of us knew about. We now have evidence you work for an unregistered division of the Starter Fam." He cleared his throat. "Tarek Golog, you are hereby charged under UN Amendment 15.2: intentionally aiding WMD creation by releasing classified data, specifically RedList. You are hereby placed under arrest. We ask that you reveal everything you know about this event." His voice began to falter as he ran out of breath. He certainly wouldn't try to restrain Tarek.
  The silence seemed inappropriate, as if they were sleeping. Tina hadn't moved since entering. Rick continued. "If you cooperate, you can continue your research, under supervision from 'Camp Xeno', our intelligence base on Unity Island." There was a rehab/detox facility nearby.
  "I will," Tarek replied as if Rick was joking. "Once we own it." The confrontation still hadn't begun.
  Once again the opposing forces balanced out perfectly, like standing between a freezer and a furnace, or swimming in lukewarm gasoline. He had never felt this disconnected without being drugged.
  Rick addressed a group that only talked to itself. They should have the worst fights. He suspected the Starters had survived this long by being boring, the best way to fool the UN.
  "How did you manage to hide for seventy years?" he asked.
  Too late for that. His ears popped, and the room's colors began to fade. Tarek's eyes went blank, as if he had done this a thousand times before. Moving with casual speed, he tapped buttons and rearranged controls. The standoff had lasted thirty seconds.
  "By nightfall, you will wrongly believe you have won," Tarek said conversationally. "You should really take that vacation."
  Rick doubted it. Tiny lights flashed on the walls, perhaps testing their reflexes. It could be hypnotic. Rick remembered that tribes who had never heard music before thought it sounded like water or birds. He realized the Starters would use the Total Search to get mankind's undivided attention.
  "We are surrounded," Rick read aloud, wishing for a more spectacular sign. "The Bundeswehr Rapid Action Force has deployed out of Offenbach and Neustadt, with an organic Millipol platoon under UNSEC."
  More than two hundred cops surrounded the Polytechnic, while a second ring of media formed outside. Traffic was being diverted around the edge of town. The nearest soldiers were seventy meters away, beginning to extract the building's occupants.
  The room's average color didn't change, but he felt a new weight. At the edges of their vision, laser-projected faces blended into every surface, vanishing faster than their eyes could follow. He tried calling the Back Room and the local field agents, but his radio only received a hiss.
  Tina checked the spectrum up to a trillion Hertz, a trillionth of the way to cosmic rays. "Modulated interference. Field reconnection," she read. "We are at the center of a Tesla void."
  She spent two hours every day studying threats, and recognized a familiar code from Anonymous's mansion. Proof of information exchange.
  The Tesla void was a static charge network, an unstable electronic organism affecting every atom in the building. Made of slightly displaced electrons, it had more components than the average human, and used far more energy. The building, the air, and every object inside was filled with tiny electric circuits, loops and knots along the edges and corners, grids in every flat surface. The average charge separation was fifty million volts per meter, acting over distances no larger than the ATP molecules that powered thought. Powered by oscillating charge imbalances, fields lined up in alternating bands, or formed self-sustaining waves, "smart lightning", electromagnetic whips that could seize objects from within. Electrostatic control could turn ordinary objects into diamond, and form solid structures from the air itself. This early version had to use huge generators and nearby electromagnets. They should be able to hear them.
  Rick read Tina's summaries as if they could fight back. He realized he was part of the distortion. His hairs didn't stand on end, but he felt a breeze, and the room trembled when he turned his head. He moved slowly, as if to prevent an avalanche.
  Tesla voids could leap between control stations like invisible assassins, hide inside a matchbox or edit reality across a continent.
  This would not be a fight, but an encounter. He thought about the ten previous attacks by this group, even before Zondyne. At worst, they would change in ways he couldn't imagine. If someone wanted to reprogram him, they would have to copy him first . . .
  "Stop thinking," Tina said, her code for a false alarm. "It's not what it seems. The Polytech has a Teravolt 'entropy scanner'."
  There was no pattern in the static electricity around them. It merely equalized the field potential throughout the building, a wall of static. A RedList method to confuse their enemies.
  Rick didn't feel safer. Why did the Back Room think a Tesla void was even possible? He now considered himself a hostage.
  For a moment Tarek seemed to struggle against himself, a brief flash of horror on his face. He shook violently and pulled sideways at a strange angle. Then he was suddenly serene. Sliding backwards, he appeared to become semi-transparent, before turning around and walking out of the room.

  When they followed (Rick wouldn't remember if they had ever sat down), a force pushed back. The floor and the walls looked crooked, and he almost fell. They made it through the door in time to see Tarek turn a corner. No one else remained on the floor. This department looked like folded cardboard, with inconstant angles and surfaces.
 "Remember we're expendable," Tina advised. "You have the option to do nothing." Often the best policy.
  They turned the corner, and again the scene changed as if they had jumped ahead. It was hard to be afraid in a place this exposed, almost comically cluttered with cables, plumbing, and interfaces. Homes and workplaces designed by the Starters were like engines. Their lives had no unplanned moments, not even when they were sleeping.
  "Our fate has already been decided," Rick replied.
  "That's what they expect us to think."
  They saw bright light at the end of a curving passageway, a jetway to the future. The view widened like opening a book.
  They stood on the floor of a funnel-shaped stadium spiraling up forever. He looked up at spectators in endless ascending rows, billions of eyes, countries and continents, a mountain of minds. Overhead was half the universe. Rick was often outclassed, but he could usually appraise his opponents. He sensed this scene was real in a way that mattered.
  With the right codes, static could always be defeated. Tina's radio extracted a thin signal from the air. "Stand by. I'm getting reports on Tarek's colleagues," she said.
  "I have a bad feeling about this."

  The Back Room had been busy. Before anything else could happen, Tina explained the Starters' origin and secret history, in her usual non-judgmental voice. They were part of an ancient conflict beyond hope of compromise. They had first been incorporated under a different name in the early 2000's as a respectable "Crippler" firm. For a fee, they modified electronic content to reduce the ways it could be used. Their customers were entertainment and software companies that wanted to control their knowledge, and prevent unauthorized copying. The firm had used artificial scarcity, downconverters and interface locks, non-refundable non-disclosure contracts. Their ultimate goal was to establish a subscription service for daily life. Every bit of information would be certified and paid for multiple times. Their lobbyists had passed laws in the war against illegally copied and modified content, harmonizing international law through the WTO. Users had limited usage rights in their own homes, and did not own their own computers. In one case, someone's face had been copyrighted against his will. The firm had helped the police raid houses to search for media that hadn't been properly paid for, even conducting limited interrogations. Temperature, isolation, the threat of rape by fellow prisoners. After the Moscow attack, they had helped catch the responsible groups.
  "They almost won," Tina said.
  Around 2015, alternatives to traditional money first became practical. The golden age of online tax evasion had threatened every government. The firm proposed a radical solution: they wanted to outlaw private electronics, forcing everyone to use a proprietary network. Naturally, many dictatorships went along.
  For the next five years, the world's cops and prosecutors had been too busy checking tax returns to enforce copyright and patent laws. It was a time of widespread corruption and destructive innovation. Net users had sold and traded popular content at will. People became citizens of virtual countries. Communism had briefly controlled a third of the globe, and changed most of the rest. A hidden division of Millipol had brought the crisis to its inevitable conclusion, ending all forms of intellectual property. It was the start of a new rivalry.
  The Cripplers were defeated, but they had become addicted to being in control, the respect that came with great power. History showed some groups could survive indefinitely as the world changed around them. After studying the Church of Ultimate Truth and other totalitarian groups, they had infiltrated the Starters, and seized power from within. After ten years, the conspiracy had evolved beyond recognition. Parts of the story were still missing.

  The new age began with an alert tone repeated thoughout human space. Standing inside a three-dimensional test pattern, Rick and Tina saw the automated message. So did everyone else.
  "It's a top-level Total Search alert," Tina said. "They spent over ten billion dollars on contact codes."
  "Here it comes," Rick said. He couldn't wait another minute.
  Almost everyone alive was able to watch the subsequent lecture, and over a third saw at least part during the next hour. The problem of a multi-billion person audience had forced the Starters to invent an artificial language which preserved its meaning when translated.
  A man with the steady eyes of a cliff diver stood before a bright screen. Everyone knew this was what they had been waiting for. More important than the moment of his own death, Rick immediately realized it was a deception. Just by watching, he helped it happen, but he couldn't stop himself.
  Tarek had recorded the speech this morning. When he opened his mouth he looked slightly impatient. The deadpan delivery was unusual for him, but very effective. He never seemed to draw a breath in the next five minutes.