Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

"Yes. Your average high-school student is good at both sides of that game." If you hadn't ruined things, you could learn all this from Miri .

His old man looked away, introspective. Worried?

"Is someone hassling you at school, Dad?" The thought was boggling.

Robert gave one of his old malevolent chuckles. "Someone is trying to hassle me."

"Um. Maybe you should talk to your teachers about this. You could show them your Epiphany log of the incident. This is a standard sort of problem they have to deal with."

There was no return fire; the elder Gu just nodded seriously. "I know, I should. I will . But it's hard, you know. And given your job, well, you've spent years working on life-and-death versions of these problems, right? You'd have the most expert possible answers."

It was the first time in Bob's life that his old man had said anything nice about his career. This must be a setup !

There was silence for a moment as the father waited with apparent patience, and the son tried to think what to say next. Finally, Bob gave a laugh. "Okay, but the military answers would be overkill, Dad. Not because we're that much smarter than a billion teenagers, but because we have the Secure Hardware Environment. Down at the bottom we control all the hardware." Leaving aside the moonshine fabs and the hardware abusers .

"The fellow I was talking to this afternoon styled himself 'an all-encompassing cloud of knowingness.' Is that bull? How much can he know about me?"

"If this jerk is willing to break some laws, he can find out a lot about you. That probably includes your medical history, maybe even what you've said to Reed Weber. As for spying on you moment to moment: He can usually watch you in public places, though that depends on your defaults and the density of local coverage. If he has confederates or zombies, he can learn what you do even in deadzones, though that information wouldn't come to him in real time."

"Zombies?"

"Corrupted systems. Remember what things were like when I was a kid? Almost any nastiness we had on home computers, we have on wearables now. The situation would be absolutely intolerable without the SHE." Dad looked blank, or maybe he was Googling. "Don't worry about it, Dad. Your Epiphany gear is about as secure as you'd be comfortable wearing. Just remember that other folks may not be so trustable."

Robert seemed to be digesting what his son had said. "But aren't there other possibilities? Maybe little gadgets the, ah, kids can stick on you?"

"Yes! The little dufuses are no different than I was, but they have more opportunities for mischief." Last semester it had been the crawling-up-your-skirt spidercams. For a while, the gadgets had been a god-damned mechanical infestation. Miri had raged about the invasion for days, and then dropped the issue so abruptly that Bob suspected she'd wrought some terrible revenge. "That's why you should always come into the house through the front hall. We have a good commercial bug trap there. Just you and I talking here is as private as your Epiphany can be… So what exactly is this fellow hitting you up for? You're from so far outside the school scene, I can't imagine you being successfully hassled."

By God, Dad actually looks shifty ! "I'm not really sure. I think it's just the hazing a new kid gets" — he gave a little smile — "even when the new kid happens to be an old fart. Thanks for the advice, Son."

"Sure thing."

The old man sidled out of the room. Bob's gaze followed him into the hall and up the stairs to the privacy of his room. Dad was definitely a man with things on his mind. Bob stared at the closed bedroom door for a moment, wondering at life's inversions and wishing he and Alice were like some folks, the ones who snooped on their own miscellaneous dependents.

15

For the next week Robert avoided UCSD, just to see if the Mysterious Stranger would react.

He was beginning to feel confident with Epiphany, although he might never be as skillful as kids who grew up wearing. Xiu Xiang was lagging behind him, mainly because of her self-doubts. She had refused to wear for three days after one particularly mistaken gesture had dumped her into — into she refused to say what, but Robert suspected it was some kind of porn view.

The language in the Gu/Orozco project, while not poetry, had risen above the level of egregious noise. Robert had a surprising amount of fun working with video effects and network jitter. If their project had been shown in the 1990s, it would have been taken as a work of genius. That was the power of the libraries of cliches and visual gimmicks that lay in their tools. Juan was properly afraid it wouldn't count for much with Chumlig. "We need some added value or she'll fred us." He Googled up some high schools with manual music programs. "Those kids think it's a tragic form of gaming," he said. In the end, Robert chatted up student musicians in Boston and southern Chile — far enough apart to really exercise his network ideas.

Sharif had returned to Corvallis, but they had several more interviews. Some of the guy's questions were a lot more intelligent than Robert would have expected from their first encounters.

He surfed the web a lot, to study up on security issues and — on occasion — to see what had become of literature. What was art, now that surface perfection was possible? Ah, serious literature was there. Most of it didn't make much money, even with the microroyalty system. But there were men and women who could string words almost as well as the old Robert. Damn them !

Still silence from the Stranger. Either he had lost interest, or he understood his power over Robert. It is so easy to win when your victim is desperate . It had been a long time since anyone had beaten Robert Gu at a stare-down… but then one Saturday he skipped his session with Juan. Instead, he took a car to UCSD.

Sharif showed up on the way. "Thank you for accepting my call, Professor Gu." The image sat down in the car seat, part of its butt disappearing into the cushions. Zulfi didn't look nearly as well put together as recently. "It's been hard to reach you lately."

"I thought we covered a lot of ground on Thursday."

Sharif looked pained.

Robert raised an eyebrow. "You're complaining?"

"Not at all, not at all! But you see, sir, it's possible that perhaps I've allowed my wearable to become, um, perhaps somewhat corrupted. It's possible that I'm subject to some degree of… hijacking."

Robert thought back on some of his recent reading. "That's like being a little bit pregnant, isn't it?"

Sharif's image shrank further into the upholstery. "Indeed, sir. I take your point. But frankly, my systems are sometimes subject to a small degree of corruption. I wager that is true of most users. I had thought the situation was manageable, but things have reached the point where… well, you see, I did not interview you Thursday. Not at all."

"Ah." So the Mysterious Stranger had had it both ways: bludgeoning Robert with silence at the same time he carried on as another player.

Sharif waited a moment for Robert to say more, then rushed forward with "Please, Professor, I do so very much wish to continue these interviews! Now that we know there is this problem, we can easily work around it. I beg you not to cut me off."

"You could clean up your system."

"Well, yes. In theory. I had to do that once in undergraduate school. Somehow, I ended up the zombie in a cheating conspiracy. Not my fault at all, but the University of Kolkata required me to fry-clean all my clothes." He raised his hands up in open-palmed prayer. "I've never been very good about backups; the debacle cost me more than a semester of progress toward my degree. Please don't make me do that again. It would be even worse now."