Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

Robert looked out at traffic. His car had turned onto Highway 56 and was tooling toward the coast. Up ahead were the first of the bio labs. And perhaps the Mysterious Stranger was there too. By comparison, Sharif was a known quantity. He looked back at the young fellow and said mildly. "Okay, Mr. Sharif. Carry on in your slightly corrupted state." An old memory struck him, how the computer techs at Stanford had always badgered him about the latest antivirus updates. "We'll simply rise above all the petty vandalism."

"Quite so, sir! Thank you so much." Sharif paused, exuding profound relief. "And I'm more eager than ever to proceed. I have my questions here somewhere." Hesitation and a blank stare as he changed mental gears. "Ah, yes. Has there been any progress on the revised Secrets of the Ages ?."

"No," Robert replied a little shortly. But this was the sort of question you'd expect of the authentic Zulfi Sharif. Robert mellowed his answer with some half truths: "I'm still doing high-level planning, you know." He launched into a long discussion of how, even though Guian poetry was sparse, its creation required infinitely precise planning. He'd said things like that in the old days, but never laid it on quite as thickly as now. Sharif ate it up.

"So over the next few weeks, I'm going to be visiting my old friends — you know, in the library. That will give me some insights into the plight of the, er, vanquished aged. You're welcome to come along. If you watch carefully, you may learn things about how I work. And afterwards, I'd be happy to critique your conclusions."

The younger man nodded eagerly. "Wonderful. Thank you!"

Amazing the thrill it was to have someone look up to him, even if it was the sort of no-talent that he had shielded himself against all through his earlier life. This must be how poor Winnie worked it, using big words and pomposity to fool the even less inspired . Robert looked away from Sharif's image, and tried to keep his smile from turning predatory. And when Sharif gets smarter, I'll know it's the Stranger .

There were no demonstrators at the library today, but — surprise — there were lots of in-person students. This was heartwarmingly like his recollections of years past, with the library the center of the university's intellectual life. What good things had happened in the last week? He and virtual Sharif walked through the glass doors and took the elevator to floor six. The building interior was not visible to Robert, even with his new access skills. Okay, look for recent news items… but by then he was on the fifth floor. Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: Hey! I've lost the view!

Juan — > Lena, Miri, Xiu: The sixth floor isn't publicly searchable today.

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Maybe if I just ask Robert for forwarding.

Sharif had faded to a luminescent reddish blob. "I can't see anymore," he said. "And I'll bet you're the only person I can hear."

Robert hesitated, then waved permissions in Sharif's direction. Let's see what the cabal makes of that .

Winnie and Carlos Rivera were sitting at the window wall. Tommie was hunched over his laptop.

" Ní háo , Professor Gu!" said Rivera. "Thanks for coming."

Tommie looked up from his laptop. "But I'm not sure we want your little friend."

Sharif got support from an unexpected place. Winston Blount said, "Tommie, I think Sharif might be of some use."

Tommie shook his head. "Not anymore. Now that UCSD is shredded — "

"What?" The stacks were still full of books. Robert stepped back and ran his hand across the spines. "These feel real to me," he said.

"You didn't see the propaganda on the lower floors?"

"No. I took the elevator, and so far I'm not very good at seeing through walls."

Tommie shrugged. "We're on the last unshredded floor. Like we figured, the administration was just waiting for the fuss to die down. Then one night they swooped in with extra shredders. They were done with two floors before we had a clue. By then it was too late."

"Damn!" Robert settled into a chair. "So what's the point of protesting now?"

Winnie said, "It's true that we can't save UCSD. In fact, the clever SOBs have twisted things around so that the Librareome Project is more popular with the students than before. But so far, UCSD has the only library that's been shredded."

Rivera burst into Mandarin: " Duì, dànshi tāmen xūyáo huí diào qitāde túshūguān, yīnwèi — " He hesitated, seemed to notice the blank looks. "S-Sorry. I meant to say, they still need to destroy other libraries. For crosschecking. The data reduction and virtual reassembly will be an ongoing project, tending 'asymptotically toward perfect reproduction.'"

Robert noticed that Tommie Parker was watching with a faint smile. "So you do have a plan?"

"I ain't saying nothing while Sharif is here."

Winnie sighed. "Okay, Tommie. Go ahead and shut him down."

Sharif's rosy glow moved a little ways out from the stacks. "It's all right. I don't want to be a prob — " The glow vanished.

Tommie looked up from his laptop. "He's gone. And I've deadzoned the sixth floor." He pointed at an LED on the edge of his ancient-looking laptop.

Robert remembered some of Bob's claims: "Even the Homeland Security hardware?"

"Don't tell, Robert." He patted his computer. "Genuine Paraguayan inside, shipped just before they shut the fabs down." He gave them a shifty grin. "Now it's just us, unless one of you is wearing dirty panties."

Blount looked pointedly at Robert. "Or unless one of us is a fink."

Robert sighed. "This isn't Stanford, Winston." But what if the Mysterious Stranger were actually a cop? That should have occurred to him before. He pushed the thought away. "So what's your plan?"

"We've been reading the Economist ," said Rivera. "Huertas International is on shaky financial ground. Delays here at UCSD could force him to dump the whole project." He stared at Robert through his thick spectacles. You could see images flickering around in the things.

"Even though they've shredded almost everything here?"

" Duì ." The young man leaned forward, and his T-shirt showed a torrent of worried faces. "It's like this. The Librareome Project isn't just the video capture of premillennium books. It's not just the digitization. It goes beyond Google and company. Huertas intends to combine all classical knowledge into a single, object-situational database with a transparent fee structure."

Object-situational database? This was beyond Robert's newfound nerdliness. He stared over Rivera's head, trying to look up the term. Nothing was coming back. Tommie's deadzone, yeah.

Rivera took his stare as disbelief. "It's really not that much data, Dr. Gu. A few petabytes. The main thing is that it's very heterogeneous compared to similar-size datasets in most applications."

"Of course. Your point?" From the corner of his eye, he saw a smile come to Winnie's face. The guy knew Robert was blowing smoke.

"So," Rivera continued, "the Huertas collection will contain almost all human knowledge up to about twenty years ago. All correlated and connected. It's the reason Huertas is paying the State of California to let him commit this atrocity. Even the first rough compilation could be a gold mine. From the project start six weeks ago, Huertas International has a six-month monopoly on the Librareome they're creating. That's six months with sole access to real insight on the past. There are dozens of questions that such a resource might resolve: Who really ended the Intifada? Who is behind the London art forgeries? Where was the oil money really going in the latter part of the last century? Some answers will only interest obscure historical societies. But some will mean big bucks. And Huertas will have exclusive rights to this oracle for six months."