Vernor Vinge - The Cookie Monster

Both Ellens look at him; you could tell they both knew Victor from way back. But they seemed to take what he was saying seriously. "Could be," they both said.

"Sorry," grader Ellen said to NSA Ellen. "You’ve got the dollar."

"You could be right, Victor. But cognition is my–our–specialty. We two are something way beyond normal dreaming or hallucinations."

"Except that could be illusion, too," said Victor.

"Stuff it, Victor," said Dixie Mae. "If it’s all a dream, we might as well give up." She looked at Michael Lee. "What is the government up to?"

Michael shrugged. "The details are classified, but it’s just a post hoc survey. The isolation rules seem to be something that Professor Reich has worked out with my agency."

NSA Ellen flicked a glance at her double. The two had a brief and strange conversation, mostly half-completed words and phrases. Then NSA Ellen continued, "Mr. Renaissance Man Gerry Reich seems to be at the center of everything. He used some standard personality tests to pick out articulate, motivated people for the customer support job. I bet they do a very good job on their first day."

Yeah. Dixie Mae thought of Ulysse. And of herself.

NSA Ellen continued, "Gerry filtered out another group–graduate students in just the specialty for grading all his various exams and projects."

"We only worked on one exam," said grader Ellen. But she wasn’t objecting. There was an odd smile on her face, the look of someone who has cleverly figured out some very bad news.

"And then he got a bunch of government spooks and CS grads for this surveillance project that Michael and I are on."

Michael looked mystified. Victor looked vaguely sullen, his own theories lying trampled somewhere in the dust. "But," said Dixie Mae, "your surveillance group has been going for a month you say .

. ."

Victor: "And the graders do have phone contact with the outside!"

"I’ve been thinking about that," said grader Ellen. "I made three phone calls today. The third was after you and Dixie Mae showed up. That was voicemail to a friend of mine at MIT. I was cryptic, but I tried to say enough that my friend would raise hell if I disappeared. The others calls were–"

"Voicemail, too?" asked NSA Ellen.

"One was voicemail. The other call was to Bill Richardson. We had a nice chat about the party he’s having Saturday. But Bill–"

"Bill took Reich’s ‘job test’ along with the rest of us!"

"Right."

Where this was heading was worse than Victor’s dream theory. "S-so what has been done to us?" said Dixie Mae.

Michael’s eyes were wide, though he managed a tone of dry understatement: "Pardon a backward Han language specialist. You’re thinking we’re just personality uploads? I thought that was science fiction."

Both Ellens laughed. One said, "Oh, it is science fiction, and not just the latest Kywrack episode. The genre goes back almost a century."

The other: "There’s Sturgeon’s ‘Microcosmic God’."

The first: "That would be rich; Gerry beware then! But there’s also Pohl’s ‘Tunnel Under the World’."

"Cripes. We’re toast if that’s the scenario."

"Okay, but how about Varley’s ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’?"

"How about Wilson’s Darwinia?"

"Or Moravec’s ‘Pigs in Cyberspace’?"

"Or Galouye’s Simulacron-3?"

"Or Vinge’s deathcubes?"

Now that the ‘twins’ were not in perfect synch, their words were a building, rapid-fire chorus, climaxing with:

"Brin’s ‘Stones of Significance’!"

"Or Kiln People!"

"No, it couldn’t be that." Abruptly they stopped, and nodded at each other. A little bit grimly, Dixie Mae thought. In all, the conversation was just as inscrutable as their earlier selfinterrupted spasms.

Fortunately, Victor was there to rescue pedestrian minds. "It doesn’t matter. The fact is, uploading is only sci-fi. It’s worse that faster-than-light travel. There’s not even a theoretical basis for uploads."

Each Ellen raised her left hand and made a faffling gesture. "Not exactly, Victor."

The token holder continued, "I’d say there is a theoretical basis for saying that uploads are theoretically possible." They gave a lopsided smile. "And guess who is responsible for that? Gerry Reich. Back in 2005, way before he was famous as a multi-threat genius, he had a couple of papers about upload mechanisms. The theory was borderline kookiness and even the simplest demo would take far more processing power than any supercomputer of the time."

"Just for a one-personality upload."

"So Gerry and his Reich Method were something of a laughingstock."

"After that, Gerry dropped the idea–just what you’d expect, considering the showman he is. But now he’s suddenly world-famous, successful in half a dozen different fields. I think something happened. Somebody solved his hardware problem for him."

Dixie Mae stared at her email. "Rob Lusk," she said, quietly.

"Yup," said grader Ellen. She explained about the mail.

Michael was unconvinced. "I don’t know, E-Ellen. Granted, we have an extraordinary miracle here–" gesturing at both of them, "–but speculating about cause seems to me a bit like a sparrow understanding the 405 Freeway."

"No," said Dixie Mae, and they all looked back her way. She felt so frightened and so angry–but of the two, angry was better: "Somebody has set us up! It started in those superclean restrooms in Olson Hall–"

"Olson Hall," said Michael. "You were there too? The lavs smelled like a hospital! I remember thinking that just as I went in, but–hey, the next thing I remember is being on the bus, coming up here."

Like a hospital. Dixie Mae felt rising panic. "M-maybe we’re all that’s left." She looked at the twins. "This uploading thing, does it kill the originals?"

It was kind of a showstopper question; for a moment everyone was silent. Then the token holder said, "I–don’t think so, but Gerry’s papers were mostly theoretical."

Dixie Mae beat down the panic; rage did have its uses. What can we know from here on the inside?

"So far we know more than thirty of us who took the Olson Hall exams and ended up here. If we were all murdered, that’d be hard to cover up. Let’s suppose we still have a life." Inspiration: "And maybe there are things we can figure! We have three of Reich’s experiments to compare. There are differences, and they tell us things." She looked at the twins. "You’ve already figured this out, haven’t you? The Ellen we met first is grading papers–just a one-day job, she’s told. But I’ll bet that every night, when they think they’re going home–Lusk or Reich or whoever is doing this just turns them off, and cycles them back to do some other ‘one-day’ job."

"Same with our customer support," said Victor, a grudging agreement.

"Almost. We had six days of product familiarization, and then our first day on the job. We were all so enthusiastic. You’re right, Ellen, on our first day we are great!" Poor Ulysse, poor me; we thought we were going somewhere with our lives. "I’ll bet we disappear tonight, too."

Grader Ellen was nodding. "Customer-support-in-a-box, restarted and restarted, so it’s always fresh."

"But there are still problems," said the other one. "Eventually, the lag in dates would tip you off."

"Maybe, or maybe the mail headers are automatically forged."

"But internal context could contradict–"

"Or maybe Gerry has solved the cognitive haze problem–" The two were off into their semi-private language.

Michael interrupted them. "Not everybody is recycled. The point of our net-tracking project is that we spend the entire summer studying just one hour of network traffic."

The twins smiled. "So you think," said the token holder. "Yes, in this building we’re not rebooted after every imaginary day. Instead, they run us the whole ‘summer’–minutes of computer time instead of seconds?–to analyze one hour of network traffic. And then they run us again, on a different hour. And so on and on."