Gardner Dozois - The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

Me and my people.

Back in the QA lab, Amin was looking decidedly thoughtful.

“What do you know?” I asked.

He shook the photocopy at me. “Looks good,” he said. “I don’t understand it all, but it’s at least credible.”

“How does it work?”

He shrugged. “It’s a topological transform. You know how most NP - incomplete problems, like the traveling salesman problem, are basically equivalent? And they’re all graph-traversal issues. How to figure out the correct order to carry out a sequence of operations, or how to visit each node in a graph in the correct order. Anyway, this paper’s about a method of reducing such problems to a much simpler form. He’s using a new theorem in graph theory that I sort of heard about last year but didn’t pay much attention to, so I’m not totally clear on all the details. But if this is for real…”

“Pretty heavy?”

He grinned. “You’re going to have to re-write the route discovery code. Never mind, it’ll run a bit faster…”

I rose out of cubicle hell in a daze, blinking in the cloud-filtered daylight. Eight years lay in ruins behind me, tattered and bleeding bodies scattered in the wreckage. I walked to the landscaped car park: on the other side of the world, urban renewal police with M16’s beat the crap out of dissident organizers, finally necklacing them in the damp, humid night. War raged on three fronts, spaced out around a burning planet. Even so, this was by no means the worst of all possible worlds. It had problems, sure, but nothing serious-until now. Now it had just acquired a sucking chest wound; none of those wars were more than a stubbed toe in comparison to the nightmare future that lay ahead.

Insert key in lock, open door. Drive away, secrets open to the wind, everything blown to hell and gone.

I’d have to call Eve. We’d have to evacuate everybody.

I had a bank account, a savings account, and two credit cards. In the next fifteen minutes I did a grand tour of the available ATM s and drained every asset I could get my hands on into a fat wodge of banknotes. Fungible and anonymous cash. It didn’t come to a huge amount-the usual exigencies of urban living had seen to that-but it only had to last me a few days.

By the time I headed home to my flat, I felt slightly sheepish. Nothing there seemed to have changed: I turned on the TV but CNN and the BBC weren’t running any coverage of the end of the world. With deep unease I sat in the living room in front of my ancient PC : turned it on and pulled up my net link.

More mail…a second bulletin fromcomp.risks, full of earnest comments about the paper. One caught my eye, at the bottom: a message from one of No Such Agency’s tame stoolpigeon academics, pointing out that the theorem hadn’t yet been publicly disclosed and might turn out to be deficient. (Subtext: trust the Government. The Government is your friend.) It wouldn’t be the first time such a major discovery had been announced and subsequently withdrawn. But then again, they couldn’t actually produce a refutation, so the letter was basically valueless disinformation. I prodded at the web site again, and this time didn’t even get the ACCESS FORBIDDEN message. The paper had disappeared from the internet, and only the print-out in my pocket told me that I hadn’t imagined it.

It takes a while for the magnitude of a catastrophe to sink in. The mathematician who had posted the original finding would be listed in his university’s directory, wouldn’t he? I pointed my web browser at their administrative pages, then picked up my phone. Dialled a couple of very obscure numbers, waited while the line quality dropped considerably and the charges began racking up at an enormous-but untraceably anonymized-rate, and dialed the university switchboard.

“Hello, John Durant’s office. Who is that?”

“Hi, I’ve read the paper about his new theorem,” I said, too fast. “Is John Durant available?”

“Who are you?” asked the voice at the other end of the phone. Female voice, twangy mid-western accent.

“A researcher. Can I talk to Dr. Durant, please? “I’m afraid he won’t be in today,” said the voice on the phone. “He’s on vacation at present. Stress due to overwork.”

“I see,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” she repeated.

I put the phone down.

From: nobody@nowhere.com (none of your business) To: cypherpunks Subject:John Durant’s whereabouts Date:…

You might be interested to learn that Dr. John Durant, whose theorem caused such a fuss here earlier, is not at his office. I went there a couple of hours ago in person and the area was sealed off by our friends from the Puzzle Palace. He’s not at home either. I suspect the worst…

By the way, guys, you might want to keep an eye on each other for the next couple of days. Just in case.

Signed,

Yr frndly spk “Eve?”

“Bob?”

“Green fields.”

“You phoned me to say you know someone with hayfever?”

“We both have hayfever. It may be terminal.”

“I know where you can find some medicine for that.”

“Medicine won’t work this time. It’s like the emperor’s new suit.”

“It’s like what? Please repeat.”

“The emperor’s new suit: it’s naked, it’s public, and it can’t be covered up. Do you understand? Please tell me.”

“Yes, I understand exactly what you mean…I’m just a bit shocked; I thought everything was still on track. This is all very sudden. What do you want to do?” (I checked my watch.) “I think you’d better meet me at the pharmacy in fifteen minutes.”

“At six-thirty? They’ll be shut.”

“Not to worry: the main Boots in town is open out of hours. Maybe they can help you.”

“I hope so.”

“I know it. Goodbye.”

On my way out of the house I paused for a moment. It was a small house, and it had seen better days.

I’m not a home-maker by nature: in my line of work you can’t afford to get too attached to anything, any language, place, or culture. Still, it had been mine. A small, neat residence, a protective shell I could withdraw into like a snail, sheltering from the hostile theorems outside.Goodbye, little house. I’ll try not to miss you too much. I hefted my overnight bag onto the backseat and headed into town.

I found Eve sitting on a bench outside the central branch of Boots, running a degaussing coil over her credit cards. She looked up. “You’re late.”

“Come on.” I waggled the car keys at her. “You have the tickets?”

She stood up: a petite woman, conservatively dressed. You could mistake her for a lawyer’s secretary or a personnel manager; in point of fact she was a university research council administrator, one of the unnoticed body of bureaucrats who shape the course of scientific research. Nondescript brown hair, shoulder-length, forgettable. We made a slightly odd pair: if I’d known she’d have come straight from work I might have put on a suit. Chinos and a lumberjack shirt and a front pocket full of pens that screamed engineer: I suppose I was nondescript, in the right company, but right now we had to put as much phase space as possible between us and our previous identities. It had been good protective camouflage for the past decade, but a bush won’t shield you against infrared scopes, and merely living the part wouldn’t shield us against the surveillance that would soon be turned in our direction.

“Let’s go.”

I drove into town and we dropped the car off in the long-stay park. It was nine o’clock and the train was already waiting. She’d bought business-class tickets:go to sleep in Euston, wake up in Edinburgh. I had a room all to myself. “Meet me in the dining car, once we’re rolling,” she told me, face serious, and I nodded.