Vernor Vinge - The Cookie Monster

She just sat there for a moment, feeling empty. She looked across at the twins. "I wanted some villains, but these guys are just victims. Worse, they’re totally clueless! We’re back where we started this morning." Where we’ll be again real soon now.

"Hmmm. Maybe not." Speaking together, the twins sounded like some kind of perfect chorus. They looked around the room, eyeing the decor. Then their gazes snapped back to Rob. "You’d think LotsaTech would do better than this for you, Rob."

Lusk was staring at Dixie Mae. He gave an angry shrug. "This is the old Homeland Security lab under Norman Hall. Don’t worry–we’re isolated, but we have good lab and computer services."

"I’ll bet. And what is your starting work date?"

"I just told you: today."

"No, I mean the calendar date."

Danny looked back and forth between them. "Geeze, are all you kids so literal minded? It’s Monday, September 12, 2011."

Nine months. Nine real months. And maybe there was a good reason why this was the first day. Dixie Mae reached out to touch Rob’s sleeve. "The Georgia Tech people didn’t invent the new hardware," she said softly.

"Then just who did make the breakthrough?"

She raised her hand ... and tapped Rob deliberately on the chest.

Rob just looked more angry, but Danny’s eyes widened. Danny got the point. She remembered that Newsweek article about him. Danny Eastland had been an all-around talented guy. He had blown the whistle on the biggest business espionage case of the decade. But he was dumb as dirt in some ways. If he hadn’t been so eager to get laid, he wouldn’t have snuck away from his Witness Protection bodyguards and gotten himself murdered.

"You guys are too much into hardware," said NSA Ellen. "Forget about crypto applications. Think about personality uploads. Given what you know about Gerry’s current hardware, how many Reich Method uploads do you think the condensate could support?"

"How should I know? The ‘Reich Method’ was baloney. If he hadn’t messed with the reviewers, those papers would never have been published." But the question stopped him. He thought for a moment.

"Okay, if his bogus method really worked, then a trillion qubit simulation could support about ten thousand uploads."

The Ellens gave him a slow smile. A slow, identical smile. For once they made no effort to separate their identities. Their words came out simultaneously, the same pacing, the same pitch, a weird humming chorus: "Oh, a good deal less than ten thousand–if you have to support a decent enclosing reality." Each reached out her left hand with inhumanly synchronized precision, the precision of digital duplicates, to wave at the room and the hallway beyond. "Of course, some resources can be saved by using the same base pattern to drive separate threads–" and each pointed at herself.

Both men just stared at them for a second. Then Rob stumbled back into the other chair. "Oh ...

my ... God."

Danny stared at the two for another few seconds. "All these years, we thought Gerry’s theories were just a brilliant scam."

The Ellens stood with their eyes closed for a second. Then they seemed to startle awake. They looked at each other and Dixie Mae could tell the perfect synch had been broken. NSA Ellen took the dollar coin out of her pocket and gave it to the other. The token holder smiled at Rob. "Oh, it was, only more brilliant and more of a scam than you ever dreamed."

"I wonder if Danny and I ever figure it out."

"Somebody figured it out," said Dixie Mae, and waved what was left of her email.

The token holder was more specific: "Gerry is running us all like stateless servers. Some are on very short cycles. We think you’re on a one-year cycle, probably running longer than anyone.

You’re making the discoveries that let Gerry create bigger and bigger systems."

"Okay," said Lusk, "suppose one of us victims guesses the secret? What can we do? We’ll just get rebooted at the end of our run."

Danny Eastland was quicker. "There is something we could do. There has to be information passed between runs, at least if Gerry is using you and me to build on our earlier solutions. If in that data we could hide what we’ve secretly learned–"

The twins smiled. "Right! Cookies. If you could recover them reliably, then on each rev, you could plan more and more elaborate countermeasures."

Rob Lusk still looked dazed. "We’d want to tip off the next generation early in their run."

"Yes, like the very first day!" Danny was looking at the three women and nodding to himself. "Only I still don’t see how we managed that."

Rob pointed at Dixie Mae’s email. "May I take a look at that?" He laid it on the table, and he and Danny examined the message.

The token holder said, "That email has turned out to have more clues than a bad detective story.

Every time we’re in a jam, we find the next hidden solution."

"That figures," said Eastland. "I’ll bet it’s been refined over many revs ..."

"But we may have a special problem this time–" and Dixie Mae told them about Victor.

"Damn," said Danny.

Rob just shrugged. "Nothing we can do about that till we figure this out." He and Danny studied the headers. The token holder explained the parts that had already seen use. Finally, Rob leaned back in his chair. "The second-longest header looks like the tags on one of the raw data files that Gerry gave us."

"Yes," sang the twins. "What’s really your own research from the last time around."

"Most of the files have to be what Gerry thinks, or else he’d catch onto us. But that one raw data file ... assume it’s really a cookie. Then this email header might be a crypto key."

Danny shook his head. "That’s not credible, Rob. Gerry could do the same analysis."

The token holder laughed. "Only if he knew what to analyze. Maybe that’s why you guys winkled it out to us. The message goes to Dixie Mae–an unrelated person in an unrelated part of the simulation."

"But how did we do it the first time?"

Rob didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was typing in the header string from Dixie Mae’s email.

"Let’s try it on the data file... ." He paused, checked his keyboard entry, and pressed return.

They stared at the screen. Seconds passed. The Ellens chatted back and forth. They seemed to be worried about executing any sort of text program; like Victor’s notepad, it might be readable to the outside world. "That’s a real risk unless earlier Robs knew the cacheing strategy."

Dixie Mae was only half-listening. If this worked at all, it was pretty good proof that earlier Robs and Dannys had done things right. If this works at all. Even after all that had happened, even after seeing Victor disappear into thin air, Dixie Mae still felt like a little girl waiting for magic she didn’t quite believe in.

Danny gave a nervous laugh. "How big is this cookie?"

Rob leaned his elbows onto the table. "Yeah. How many times have I been through a desperate seventh year?" There was an edge to his voice. You could imagine him pulling one of those deathcube stunts that the Ellens had described.

And then the screen brightened. Golden letters marched across a black-and-crimson fractal pattern:

"Hello fellow suckers! Welcome to the 1,237th run of your life."

At first, Danny refused to believe they had spent 1,236 years on Gerry’s treadmill. Rob gave a shrug. "I do believe it. I always told Gerry that real progress took longer than theory-making. So the bastard gave me ... all the time in the world."

The cookie was almost a million megabytes long. Much of that was detailed descriptions of trapdoors, backdoors, and softsecrets undermining the design that Rob and Danny had created for Gerry Reich. But there were also thousands of megabytes of history and tactics, crafted and hyperlinked across more than a thousand simulated years. Most of it was the work of Danny and Rob, but there were the words of Ellen and Ellen and Dixie Mae, captured in those fleeting hours they spent with Rob and Danny. It was wisdom accumulated increment by precious increment, across cycles of near sameness. As such, it was their past and also their near future.