Vernor Vinge - The Cookie Monster

Michael said, "I can’t imagine technology that powerful."

The token holder said, "Neither can I really, but–"

Victor interrupted with, "Maybe this is the Darwinia scenario. You know: we’re just the toys of some superadvanced intelligence."

"No!" said Dixie Mae. "Not superadvanced. Customer support and net surveillance are valuable things in our own real world. Whoever’s doing this is just getting slave labor, run really, really fast."

Grader Ellen glowered. "And grading his exams for him! That’s the sort of thing that shows me it’s really Gerry behind this. He’s making chumps of all of us, and rerunning us before we catch on or get seriously bored."

NSA Ellen had the same expression, but a different complaint: "We have been seriously bored here."

Michael nodded. "Those from the government side are a patient lot; we’ve kept the graduate students in line. We can last three months. But it does ... rankle ... to learn that the reward for our patience is that we get to do it all over again. Damn. I’m sorry, Ellen."

"But now we know!" said Dixie Mae.

"And what good does it do you?" Victor laughed. "So you guessed this time. But at the end of the microsecond day, poof, it’s reboot time and everything you’ve learned is gone."

"Not this time." Dixie Mae looked away from him, down at her email. The cheap paper was crumpled and stained. A digital fake, but so are we. "I don’t think we’re the only people who’ve figured things out." She slid the printout across the table, toward grader Ellen. "You thought it meant Rob Lusk was in this building."

"Yeah, I did."

"Who’s Rob Lusk?" said Michael.

"A weirdo," NSA Ellen said absently. "Gerry’s best grad student." Both Ellens were staring at the email.

"The 0999 reference led Dixie Mae to my grading team. Then I pointed out the source address."

"lusting925@freemail.sg?"

"Yes. And that got us here."

"But there’s no Rob Lusk here," said NSA Ellen. "Huh! I like these fake mail headers."

"Yeah. They’re longer than the whole message body!"

Michael had stood to look over the Ellens’ shoulders. Now he reached between them to tap the message. "See there, in the middle of the second header? That looks like Pinyin with the tone marks written in-line."

"So what does it say?"

"Well, if it’s Mandarin, it would be the number ‘nine hundred and seventeen’."

Victor was leaning forward on his elbows. "That has to be coincidence. How could Lusting know just who we’d encounter?"

"Anybody know of a Building 0917?" said Dixie Mae.

"I don’t," said Michael. "We don’t go out of our building except to the pool and tennis courts."

The twins shook their heads. "I haven’t seen it ... and right now I don’t want to risk an intranet query."

Dixie Mae thought back to the Lotsa-Tech map that had been in the welcome-aboard brochures. "If there is such a place, it would be farther up the hill, maybe right at the top. I say we go up there."

"But–" said Victor.

"Don’t give me that garbage about waiting for the police, Victor, or about not being idiots. This isn’t Kansas anymore, and this email is the only clue we have."

"What should we tell the people here?" said Michael.

"Don’t tell them anything! We just sneak off. We want the operation here to go on normally, so Gerry or whoever doesn’t suspect."

The two Ellens looked at each other, a strange, sad expression on their faces. Suddenly they both started singing "Home on the Range," but with weird lyrics:

"Oh, give me a clone Of my own flesh and bone With–"

They paused and simultaneously blushed. "What a dirty mind that man Garrett had."

"Dirty but deep." NSA Ellen turned to Michael, and she seemed to blush even more. "Never mind, Michael. I think ... you and I should stay here.

"No, wait," said Dixie Mae. "Where we’re going we may have to convince someone that this crazy story is true. You Ellens are the best evidence we have."

The argument went round and round. At one point, Dixie Mae noticed with wonder that the two Ellens actually seemed to be arguing against each other.

"We don’t know enough to decide," Victor kept whining.

"We have to do something, Victor. We know what happens to you and me if we sit things out till closing time this afternoon."

In the end Michael did stay behind. He was more likely to be believed by his government teammates.

If the Ellens and Dixie Mae and Victor could bring back some real information, maybe the NSA group could do some good.

"We’ll be a network of people trying to break this wheel of time." Michael was trying to sound wryly amused, but once he said the words he was silent, and none of the others could think of anything better to say.

Up near the hilltop, there were not nearly as many buildings, and the ones that Dixie Mae saw were single story, as though they were just entrances to something under the hills. The trees were stunted and the grass yellower.

Victor had an explanation. "It’s the wind. You see this in lots of exposed land near the coast. Or maybe they just don’t water very much up here."

An Ellen–from behind, Dixie Mae couldn’t tell which one–said, "Either way, the fabrication is awesome."

Right. A fabrication. "That’s something I don’t understand," said Dixie Mae. "The best movie fx don’t come close to this. How can their computers be this good?"

"Well for one thing," said the other Ellen, "cheating is a lot easier when you’re also simulating the observers."

"Us."

"Yup. Everywhere you look, you see detail, but it’s always at the center of your focus. We humans don’t keep everything we’ve seen and everything we know all in mind at the same time. We have millions of years of evolution invested in ignoring almost everything, and conjuring sense out of nonsense."

Dixie Mae looked southward into the haze. It was all so real: the dry hot breeze, the glint of aircraft sliding down the sky toward LAX, the bulk of the Empire State Building looming up from the skyscrapers at the center of downtown.

"There are probably dozens of omissions and contradictions around us every second, but unless they’re brought together in our attention all at once we don’t notice them."

"Like the time discrepancy," said Dixie Mae.

"Right! In fact, the biggest problem with all our theories is not how we could be individually duped, but how the fraud could work with many communicating individuals all at once. That takes hardware beyond anything that exists, maybe a hundred liters of Bose condensate."

"Some kind of quantum computer breakthrough," said Victor.

Both Ellens turned to look at him, eyebrows raised.

"Hey, I’m a journalist. I read it in the Bruin science section."

The twins’ reply was something more than a monologue and less than a conversation:

"Well ... even so, you have a point. In fact, there were rumors this spring that Gerry had managed to scale Gershenfeld’s coffee cup coherence scheme."

"Yeah, how he had five hundred liters of Bose condensate at room temperature."

"But those stories started way after he had already become Mr. Renaissance Man. It doesn’t make sense."

We’re not the first people hijacked. "Maybe," said Dixie Mae, "maybe he started out with something simple, like a single superspeed human. Could Gerry run a single upload with the kind of supercomputers we have nowadays?"

"Well, that’s more conceivable than this ... oh. Okay, so an isolated genius was used to do a century or so of genius work on quantum computing. That sounds like the deathcube scenario. If it were me, after a hundred years of being screwed like that, I’d give Gerry one hell of a surprise."

"Yeah, like instead of a cure for cancer, he’d get airborne rabies targeted on the proteome of scumbag middle-aged male CS profs."