Charles Sheffield: Dark as Day

She took his hand. “You can’t stay here much longer, things are getting worse. We have to make plans. No, not for Jupiter. Jupiter is a giant, it would crush even you. Come on. We have to go back down.”

“In a minute.” He turned his head, to scan the whole sky. “Where’s the other one? I can’t see it.”

“Because it’s not so bright as Jupiter.” She pointed to a star whose light had a leaden gleam compared with its neighbors. “There you are. That’s Saturn. It’s big, but not so big as Jupiter.”

“But I can go there?”

“You can go. There, or maybe Jupiter.” She laughed again, at some secret joke. The platform was beginning its slow descent into the dark shaft. The circle of microphages began to creep in. She painfully straightened her rachitic spine. “Oh, yes, you can go. And one day, my dear, you will go to one or the other. And then they’ll pay, all of them, for what they’ve done to us.”

It was hard to say which was worse: waiting for Seine-Day to arrive, or enduring the torrent of hype that preceded the event.

Alex Ligon stared at the output that filled the two-meter display volume of his Ganymede office. In that display the solar system was evolving before his eyes. The year showed as 2098, ticking along a steady daily tally of status: population, economic activity, material and energy production and use, and transportation and information flow between worlds. Any statistic was available for the asking. And every statistic, he knew from past experience, was likely to be wrong. For anything beyond a week, the predictions steadily diverged from reality.

It was not the fault of his models, he felt sure of that. It was simply that he was forced to run them with too-high levels of aggregation. Otherwise, a one-day prediction would be slower than real-time and take more than a day to run.

The Seine, once it came into operation, would cure that completely. He would be able to model each individual human unit, all five billion of them, together with data bank details from everywhere in the System. He would also, if the Seine’s performances matched the promises made for it, be able to run at a million times real-time. He could sit back and watch his models blur through a century of solar system development in an hour.

“When I dipped into the future, far as human eye can see.” Or well beyond, with a little help from the right computer. More than that, with the Seine’s quantum parallelism you could vary any parameter and observe the effect of changes.

If the Seine’s performance matched the promises.

Alex glanced at the bottom left-hand corner of the display, where media inputs were displayed. He had the sound level damped way down, but the picture was enough to tell him what was going on. It was another puff piece about the Seine, set against a background of a high-level entangling unit. A smiling woman with an unnatural number of teeth was doing the talking; a portly older man beside her was nodding confidently; and a thin woman with worry lines marking her forehead stood in the background — probably one of the engineers, poor bastard, who actually had to deliver the Seine’s entangling and instantaneous data transfer across the whole System.

Alex turned his attention back to the main display. It was chugging along toward the end of 2099, almost two years from now, and the model showed a million tons of materials were being shipped daily between Ganymede and Rhea, Saturn’s second largest moon. And if you believed that figure you would believe anything. Present shipping was less than a hundred tons a day. The model was diverging again. Higher resolution was a must if the results were to mean anything.

Alex swore and glanced back to the media corner. They were handling the return of the Seine as the event of the century, bigger even than the war that had disrupted and dispersed the original Seine. Maybe they were right. The original pre-war version of the Seine had linked the System, but it was primitive compared with its quantum logic successor. And Alex needed every bit of computing power he could lay his hands on.

The media corner switched without warning from a shot of the worried computer engineer. Kate Lonaker’s face appeared, and the sound level changed. “Sorry to pull an override on you.” She grimaced out at Alex. “But Mrs. Ligon is on the line.”

“Shit. Will you tell her that I’m not—”

“No, I won’t. She knows that you’re here.”

“Tell her I’m working.”

“You’re always working. Come on, sweetheart, you can’t refuse to talk to your dear old mother.”

“But I’m right in the middle of running the model—”

“Right. And from the look on your face it’s going nowhere, so you can afford to take a break. Here she comes. Be nice to her.”

Kate vanished. In her place appeared a woman whose vitality and beauty seemed to burst out of the display. She smiled at Alex. “There you are.”

“Hello, Mother.”

“The young woman who put me through to you seems like a sweet little thing. Is she your assistant?”

“No, Mother.” Alex checked that they were on Record. He wanted to watch Kate’s expression when she learned that she was a sweet little thing. She would hate it. “Ms. Lonaker is my boss.”

“Boss?” Lena Ligon’s perfect face took on a startled look.

“Boss. I report to her.”

“But that’s ridiculous. No one in our family needs to report to anybody. Who is she?”

“She’s division chief for Advanced Planning in the Outer System. She works for the government. Like me.”

“Doing what?”

“The same as the last time you asked me. I build predictive models for the whole solar system — Inner and Outer.” Alex glanced at the big display, where the simulation was still rolling along. Estimated shipping tonnages for 2101 had exceeded fixed-point range and were being reported as floatingpoint, with ridiculously large exponents. “Not very good models, I’m afraid.”

“If that’s what interests you, you could do it just as well by yourself without reporting to anybody. We’re not exactly paupers.”

“I know.”

“And you wouldn’t have to work in a place like that.” The single word covered all of Alex’s spartan office, where the display volume left space for only a single chair and a small desk. The walls were neutral pale yellow, with no pictures or decorations.

“I know. Let me think about it. Maybe we can discuss this after the family meeting.” Alex knew he was committing to something else he didn’t want to do, but it was the easiest way to avoid an argument he couldn’t win.

“That’s why I called, Alex, to make sure you will be there. And don’t forget about the other thing. I can make arrangements whenever you are ready.”

“I won’t forget.” Alex studied his mother’s image, seeking the invisible. “I’ve been considering it.”

“Good. We’ll talk about that, too. Tomorrow, then. At four.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Lena Ligon nodded. “Try not to be late, as you usually are.” To Alex’s relief she vanished from the display. He glanced at the main simulation, where half the variables now showed overflow. Gibberish. He touched the pad to terminate the run, at the same time as he heard the door behind him slide open.

It was Kate, he knew without looking. He could smell her perfume, which always made him think of oranges and lemons.

“Got a minute?” she said.

“The model run—”

“Is garbage.” She took his arm. “I’ve been keeping an eye on it. Come on, sweetie, let’s go to my office.”

“I should change parameters and do another case.”

“It can wait. Me, I think we could easily take the rest of the day off.” Kate was leading the way along a narrow, dingy corridor. “If the Seine performs as advertised, tomorrow everything changes.”