Peter Hamilton: Misspent Youth

“Yeah!”

“No!” Sue said quickly. “Honestly, you’re worse than he is.”

Jeff pulled a face behind her back. Timothy giggled. He couldn’t resist one last look at the magic tap as they walked back out into the scorching sunlight.

The Bakers headed for one of the biggest pavilions lining the taxiway. They weren’t on the admission list, but Jeff was insistent with the uniformed steward at the gate. Timothy waited impatiently while a senior company official was summoned from the pavilion; aircraft were taking off from the runway, and the pavilion blocked his view. When he arrived, the official was effusive in his greeting. The company would be greatly honored to have the Bakers lunch with them, he said with a wide, eager smile.

Timothy and his parents wound up eating with two members of the board in a glassed-off enclosure at the end of the pavilion. Their table gave him a grand view out across the airfield, and if he did miss any of the exciting aircraft flashing past, a private TV feed to a pair of three-meter screens allowed him to see the planes twisting and diving at all times. It was great. His mother even let him have more ice cream for dessert, with strawberries.

A lot of visitors stopped by their table, corporate executives from across Europe, all of whom were eagerly introduced to Jeff Baker by the ever-smiling board members. Timothy didn’t pay much attention to the adults; he was captivated by the sleek flying cruciforms, which were the newly declassified AiF-080 USAF pilotless interceptors. The machines were less than half the size of the old Hurricanes flown by the European Silver Sky display team, and a lot more nimble.

Timothy asked to be excused while his parents were enjoying coffee and liqueurs. It was very boring in the dining room, although in truth he couldn’t stop thinking about that strange tap. The aircraft were only temporary distractions. He was overwhelmed by the idea that magic could still exist. Such a revelation meant that anything was possible. Anything!

His mother checked that he was wearing his tracker bracelet and let him down from the table. “You’re not to go more than two hundred meters,” she warned as he sped away.

As soon as he was outside, Timothy headed straight for the hangar—it was only a little more than two hundred meters, after all. Well…sort of.

The tap was still there. He stood in front of it, his head cocked to one side as he followed the stream of falling water, his brow furrowed in puzzlement. It couldn’t be real. Yet here it was, happening right in front of him.

“It always looks good, doesn’t it?”

Timothy glanced around. One of the saleswomen behind the stall was smiling at him. “Yes,” he said, then, suddenly bold, he asked: “How did you know the magic was here?”

“Magic?” Her smile widened. “I would have thought a clever boy like you could have worked this out by now.”

“How? I don’t know any spells.”

The woman laughed. “Spells? Well I don’t know about that. We just put a little fountain pump below the bowl, and squirt a jet up into the tap. Takes an age to set it up just right.”

Timothy stared resentfully at the treacherous fountain. He couldn’t even look at the woman; she must think him the stupidest boy on the planet. Embarrassment gave way to anger and sadness as he slunk away. His father had lied to him. Lied! There wasn’t any magic in the world; there never had been.

HAVING A FAMOUS FATHER is a difficult concept for any child to understand. After all, he is just your father, nothing else, nothing exceptional. Tim was almost ten before he finally grasped that his dad was a little different from everyone else’s dad; that people were interested in the old man, what he was doing, what he said, and most important, what he was thinking about. And not just the villagers in Empingham, where they lived, but people on a lot of sites in the datasphere. In fact, when Tim, age nine, typed JEFF BAKER into a findbot, he was rather surprised when it came back listing two hundred and thirty-eight thousand primary references.

According to the first eight entries, all university libraries, Jeff Baker had designed the molecular structure of solid state crystal memories, the ultimate electronic storage mechanism. It was the single most important component around which the entire datasphere now revolved. All human information was stored in the one specific type of lattice that his dad had worked out. His dad. The man who wouldn’t let him have a puppy, and who was hopeless at playing football with him. His dad! The datasphere had to be kidding—like magic, Tim told himself sourly.

But the datasphere didn’t lie. His dad was truly famous. Not that fame was of much practical use in this case. Fame usually came hand in hand with fabulous wealth. The Bakers were very comfortably off, living in a sprawling manor on the edge of the village, with acres and acres of grounds; and Tim went to the nearby Oakham School for a private education; and his grandma was well taken care of in her nursing home. But it wasn’t an own-your-private-Caribbean-island style of wealth.

It could have been, Tim read with growing dismay. That was the bigger part of Jeff Baker’s fame. He could have had a fortune that rivaled that of Bill Gates or Eleanor Pickard. Memory crystals were universal. Without them the entire world would crash to a halt; there would be no information economy—no economy at all, in fact. The tiniest royalty percentage would have given him an income of billions of euros a year from the uncountable numbers of crystals that were grown to feed the voracious global electronics industry.

Instead, in an act of benevolence and philanthropy essentially without parallel, Jeff Baker had refused to patent the crystal structure. Instead he published it on his Web site, and told anyone who was interested to go right ahead and make the crystals. The server crashed for ten days straight due to the millions of attempted hits from across the planet.

Jeff Baker, Tim realized as he read his own family history, didn’t have fame so much as respect. A billion datahead nerds regarded his dad as more important than God. Very nice, but what actual use was it? Tim would have much preferred him to be a cable star. At least that way they would have gotten a constant stream of invitations to glamorous showbiz parties, and he could have mixed with celebrities. That would have done wonders for his kudos at school.

“Is it true?” Tim asked that suppertime. “Did you invent the datasphere?”

“Not really,” Jeff said with a gentle smile. “But my crystal idea certainly helped it to grow up from being the Internet.”

“Why didn’t you make money from it?”

“I did. I’ve got a whole load of nonexecutive directorships. And my consultancy work pays for your schooling, as well as your mother’s clothes. Just.”

Sue Baker narrowed her eyes to give him a cautionary look over the table.

“It said in the sphere you could have been the richest man in the world,” Tim said.

“Trust me on this, Tim, being the richest man in the world isn’t necessarily a good thing.”

“But… you didn’t get anything out of it. I don’t understand.”

“I got peace of mind. And I got you.” His smile became one of admiration. “You’re more important than money.”

“Thanks. I just don’t think it’s fair, that’s all,” Tim protested. “The whole world depends on your idea. You should be rewarded.”

WHICH IS WHAT DID HAPPEN, but not until eight years later.