David Brin - Earth

Most of it had been junk of course. What was Sturgeon’s first law? Ninety percent of anything is crap .

But ah, that remaining ten percent!

There were letters from dear friends (which, amidst a month-long wrestling bout of abstract theory, often served to remind her she had friends). And there were technical journals to leaf through, scribble on the margins, and leave in the corner to pile up like geologic sediments…

And beautiful, real-paper magazines — Natural History and .National Geographic and Country Life — their glossy pages conveying what modern hyper versions could not, despite high-fidelity sound and stereo projection.

Trees regularly died for human literacy in those days. But that was one sacrifice even Jen didn’t begrudge. Not then, nor even today as she opened the curtains to spill morning light onto library shelves stacked high with books printed on rag paper, some even bound in burnished leather that had once adorned the backs of proud animals.

This library could bring a small fortune from collectors… and the sharp opprobrium of vegetarians. But one of the advantages of the electronic age was that you could maintain a universe of contacts while keeping all prying eyes out of your own home, your castle.

It also has disadvantages , she thought as she scanned the list of bulletins awaiting her this morning. Her autosecretary displayed a column of daunting figures. Back when communication had still been a chore, half these correspondents would have been too lazy or thrifty to spend the time or a stamp. But now, message blips were as easy and cheap as talk itself. Easier, for copies could be made and transmitted ad infinitum.

Yes, indeed. Sometimes Jen longed for her postman.

You don’t miss water or air, either — not till the well runs dry, or the oxygen partial pressure drops to twenty percent .

She took a subvocal input device from its rack and placed the attached sensors on her throat, jaw, and temples. A faint glitter in the display screens meant the machine was already tracking her eyes, noting by curvature of lens and angle of pupil the exact spot on which she focused at any moment.

She didn’t have to speak aloud, only intend to. The subvocal read nerve signals, letting her enter words by just beginning to will them. It was much faster than any normal speech input device… and more cantankerous as well. Jen adjusted the sensitivity level so it wouldn’t pick up each tiny tremor — a growing problem as her once athletic body turned wiry and inexact with age. Still, she vowed to hold onto this rare skill as long as possible.

Tapping certain teeth made colors shift in the tanks and screens. A yawn sent cyclones spinning within a blue expanse. Sometimes, under a talented operator, a subvocal could seem almost magical, like those “direct” brain-to-computer links science fiction writers were always jabbering about, but which, for simple neurological reasons, had never become real. This was as close as anyone had come, and still ninety percent of existing subvocals were used at most to make pretty 3-D pictures.

How ironic then, that Jen had been taught to use hers at age sixty-two. So much for adages about old dogs and new tricks!

“Hypersecretary, Sri Ramanujan,” she said.

Mists cleared and a face formed, darkly handsome, with noble Hindu features. For her computer’s “shell” persona Jen could have chosen anything from cartoon alien to movie star. But she had picked this system’s unique designer as a model. In those eyes she recognized something of the young consultant from Nehruabad, his life-spark peering out from the cage of his useless body.

“Good morning, Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical.”

Citizens had to subscribe to a minimum news-input or lose the vote. Still, Jen was anything but a public events junky, so her nine-or-greater threshold was set as high as allowed. She’d scan the headlines later.

“You have received six letters and thirty five-message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.

“In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to you, in yesterday’s scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times.”

It was clearly another case of human profligacy — this typical turning of a good thing into yet another excuse for overindulgence. Like the way nations suffering from greenhouse heat still spilled more than five billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. A prodigious yield that was nevertheless nothing compared to the species’ greatest harvest — words .

And to think, some idiots predicted that we’d someday found our economy on information. That we’d base money on it!

On information? The problem isn’t scarcity. There’s too damned much of it!

The problem usually wasn’t getting access to information. It was to stave off drowning in it. People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells.

Here a man watches nothing but detective films from the days of cops and robbers — a limitless supply of formula fiction. Next door a woman hears and reads only opinions that match her own, because other points of view are culled by her loyal guardian software.

To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.”

“And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?”

Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.”

That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters. This way she asked Ramanujan to unleash purposely on her a little of the chaos his devilish virus-symbiont had once wreaked on thirteen million Net subscribers in South Asia — jiggling their complacent cyberworlds to show them glimpses of different realities, different points of view.

After he was caught, being sent to that hospital-jail in Bombay hardly mattered to Sri Ramanujan, whose own body had been a prison since infancy. But cutting off his net privileges had been an added punishment far worse than any death sentence.

“As you wish, Jen Wolling.”

The simulated visage seemed pleased. He bowed and disappeared, making way for unreeling sheaves of data. Colors demarked significant passages, enhanced by her semantic-content filter.

Her eyes focused on text which glowed with reddish highlights. Ah, the little devil , she thought, for the program had slipped in a cluster of hate mail.

“… Wolling has become a loose cannon. Her recent trip to Southern Africa proves she’s lost all sense of propriety.

“But what irks most is her recent cavalier reassessment of the essential Caian paradigm — a scientific model she herself helped develop so many years ago! She is becoming a senile embarrassment to biological science…”

Jen found the style familiar, and sure enough, the signature was that of an old colleague, now a bitter opponent. She sighed. It was strange to find herself regularly assaulted as unscientific whenever she deviated an iota from “accepted” principles… principles based upon her own earlier theories.