David Brin - Existence

– from The Movement Revealed by Thormace Anubis-Fejel

Despite his hurry to get home, Peng Xiang Bin avoided the main gate through the massive seawall. For one thing, the giant doors were closed right now, for high tide. Even when they opened, that place would throng with fishermen, hawking their catch, and city dwellers visiting the last remaining beach of imported sand. So many eyes-and ais-and who knew how many were already sifting every passing face, searching for his unique biosignature?

I should never have posted queries about an egglike stone that glows mysteriously, after sitting in sunlight.

I should have left it in that hole under the sea.

His fear-ever since glimpsing the famous alien “Artifact” on TV-was that somebody high and mighty wanted desperately to have whatever Bin discovered in a hidden basement cache, underneath a drowned mansion-and wanted it in secret. The former owner had been powerful and well connected, yet he wound up being hauled away and-according to legend-tortured, then brain-sifted, and finally silenced forever. Bin suspected now that it was because of an oval stone, very much like the one causing such fuss across the world. Governments and megorps and reff-consortia would all seek one of their own.

If so, what would they do with the likes of me? When an object is merely valuable, a poor man who recovers it may demand a finder’s fee. But if it is a thing that might shake civilization?

In that case, all I could expect is death, just for knowing about it!

Yet, as some of the initial panic ebbed, Bin felt another part of his inner self rise up. The portion of his character that once dared ask Mei Ling to join him at the wild frontier, shoresteading a place of their own.

If there were a way to offer the stone up for bidding… a way to keep us safe… True, the former owner must have tried, and failed, to make a deal. But no one knew about this kind of “artifact” then… at least not the public. Everything has changed, now that the Americans are showing theirs to the world…

None of which would matter, if he failed to make it home in time to hide the thing and do some basic preparations. Above all, sending Mei Ling and Xiao En somewhere safe. Then post an open call for bidders to meet him in a public place…?

Hurrying through crowded streets, Bin carefully kept his pace short of a run. It wouldn’t do to draw attention. Beyond the public-order cams on every ledge and lamppost, the state could tap into the lenses and private-ais worn by any pedestrian nearby. His long hair, now falling over his face, might stymie a routine or casual face-search, but not if the system really took an interest.

It’s rumored that they have learned to detect the faint vibrations that emerge from each human ear. That each of us has a vibration-as personal as a fingerprint-that can be detected with instruments. Our bodies give off so many signals, so many ways to betray us to the modern state. Just in case, Bin grabbed a piece of paper out of a trash receptacle and chewed it soft, then crammed a small chunk in each ear.

Veering away from the main gate, he sped through a shabbier section of town, where multistory residence blocs had gone through ramshackle evolution, ignoring every zoning ordinance. Laundry-laden clotheslines jostled solar collectors that shoved against semi-illegal rectennas, siphoning Mesh-access and a little beamed power from the shiny towers of nearby Pudong.

Facing a dense crowd ahead, Bin tried pushing his way through for a while, then took a stab at a shortcut. Worming past a delivery cart that wedged open a pair of giant doors, he found himself inside a vast cavity, where the lower floors had been gutted in order to host a great maze of glassy pipes and stainless steel reactor vessels, all linked in twisty patterns, frothing with multicolored concoctions. He chose a direction by dead reckoning, where there ought to be an exit on the other side. Bin meant to bluff his way clear, if anyone stopped him.

That didn’t seem likely, amid the hubbub. At least a hundred laborers-many of them dressed little better than he was-patrolled creaky catwalks or clambered over lattice struts, meticulously cleaning and replacing tubes by hand. At ground level, inspectors wearing bulky, enhanced aiware checked a continuous shower of some product-objects roughly the size and shape of a human thumb-waving laser pincers to grab a few of them before they fell into a waiting bin.

It’s a nanofactory, Bin realized, after he passed halfway through. It was his first time seeing one up close, but he and Mei Ling once saw a virtshow tour of a vast workshop like this one (though far cleaner) where basic ingredients were piped in and sophisticated parts shipped out-electroptic components, neuraugments, and organoplaques, whatever those were. And shape-to-order diamonds, as big as his fist. All produced by stacking atoms and molecules, one at a time, under programmed control.

People still played a part, of course. No robot could scramble or crawl about like humonkeys, or clean up after the machines with such dexterity. Or so cheaply.

Weren’t they supposed to shrink these factories to the size of a toaster and sell them to everyone? Magic boxes that would let even poor folk make anything they wanted from raw materials. From seawater, even. No more work. No more want.

He felt like snorting, but instead Bin mostly held his breath the rest of the way, hurrying toward a loading dock, where sweltering workers filled maglev lorries at the other end. One heard rumors of nano-machines that got loose, that embedded in the lungs and then got busy trying to make copies of themselves… Probably just tall tales. But Bin still had plans for his lungs. They mattered a lot, to a shoresteader.

He spilled out of gritty industry into a world of street-level commerce. Gaily decorated shops crowded this avenue. Sucking air, his nostrils filled with food aromas, wafting around innumerable grills, woks and steam cookers, preparing everything from delicate skewered scorpions to vat-grown chicken meat, stretched and streaked to look like the real thing. Bin’s stomach growled, but he pushed ahead, then turned a corner and headed straight for the nearest section of massive wall separating Shanghai East from the rising ocean.

There were smugglers’ routes. One used a building that formerly offered appealing panoramas overlooking the Huangpu Estuary-till such views became unfashionable. Now, a lower class of urbanites occupied the tower in question.

The lobby’s former coating of travertine and marble had been stripped and sold off years ago, replaced by spray-on corrugations that lay covered with long beards of damp algae. A good use of space-the three-story atrium probably grew enough protein to feed half the occupants a basic, gene-crafted diet. But the dank smell made Bin miss his little tent-home amid the waves.

We can’t go back to living like this, he thought, glancing at spindly bamboo scaffolding that crisscrossed the vast foyer, while bony, sweat-stained workers tended the crop, doing work unfit for robots. I swore I would not raise our son on algae paste.

The creaky elevator was staffed by a crone who flicked switches on a makeshift circuit board to set it in motion. The building must never have had its electronics repaired since the Crash. It’s been what, fifteen, sixteen years? Yes, people are cheap and people need work. But even I could fix this pile of junk.

The car jerked and rattled while the operator glared at Bin. Clearly, she knew he did not work or live here. In turn, he gave the old lady a smile and ingratiating bow-no sense in antagonizing someone who might call up a face-query. But within, Bin muttered to himself about sour-minded “little emperors”-a generation raised as chubby only children, doted on by two parents, four grandparents, and a nation that seemed filled with limitless potential. Boundless dreams and an ambition to rise infinitely high-until the Crash. Till the twenty-first century didn’t turn out quite as promised.