Robert Sawyer - Triggers

Shortly after reading the book, Seth had invented his own encryption system that he called the “13 Code.” He used it to share secret messages with his fourth-grade friend Duncan Ellerslie about Brenda Jackson, who they both agreed was the cutest girl in their class. One message he remembered sending looked like this:

3-6-4

ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

Zim had recommended clustering letters into groups of five, lest word lengths provide clues to their meaning; he also suggested using all capitals, so that proper nouns or the pronoun I couldn’t be easily detected.

The key to the 13 Code was to pick any three numbers that added up to 13, and put them at the beginning of the message. The recipient would then write down the letters of the alphabet in three paired columns, the lengths of which corresponded to the three numbers given. For the key of 3-6-4, the recipient would produce a decryption table that looked like this:

And then he’d use that table to substitute the appropriate letters to yield the plain text of the message. Thus:

ELBHA DROQB WGBEB XXBLX NDHUI Y!

would become:

BREND ALIKE SMEBE TTERT HANYO U!

or, with word spacing corrected and normal capitalization:

Brenda likes me better than you!

Hah! A perfect “Take that!” delivered by secret code! Seth had loved sending messages that only he and Duncan could read.

But that was then. Now there were no secrets; there was no privacy. He couldn’t encrypt his thoughts and—

Well, yes, he supposed they were encrypted, sort of, in the way he’d heard Singh talk about. Only bits and pieces were stored. In fact, it was sort of like the 13 Code: even after decoding the message, the recipient had to rebuild it by adding to it: guessing at where to put in the spaces, converting characters to lowercase except where it seemed sensible to retain the capitals. Whatever the person reading his memories would recall would be filtered through his or her own experiences, conjuring up something not quite the same as what Seth himself would—but it would be close enough to do damage.

And the damage could be considerable. Whoever was sharing his memories knew what legislation he was planning to veto, what campaign promises he intended to break, what he really thought of the Speaker of the House.

And yet those things were small, in so many ways. But if news about Operation Counterpunch got out early, there might be enormous American casualties. He shifted his head slightly—it was painful to do so—and looked at the large windows. The ever-present nurse was seated by them, and beyond her, through the glass—which he’d now been told had been reinforced with a bulletproof layer—he saw a plume of gray smoke. That smoke contained the ashes of his clothes, his books, all his wife’s things, and priceless mementos of US history: the Resolute desk, centuries-old oil paintings, the artifacts in the Lincoln bedroom, and more.

He wasn’t a monster; none of those who had put Counterpunch together were. They were just people—husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters—who had had enough. Even before today’s terrorist attack, they’d had enough.

He remembered a joke that had gone around the Internet in the fall of 2001: “What’s the difference between Osama bin Laden and Santa Claus?” And the answer, which had seemed so funny back then when people had been forwarding the joke endlessly: “Come Christmas, Santa Claus will still be here.”

But bin Laden had survived an entire decade. Indeed, as today’s events had proved, it was easier to put a bullet in the president of the United States than it was to take out a religious zealot, especially when he had powerful allies.

Seth had taught history for twenty years. The US had had a chance—a brief window—during which it could have pre-emptively struck the Soviet Union, wiping it from the map. The governments of the day—JFK’s regime, and then Johnson’s—hadn’t had the balls. And so the US had instead endured decades of living in fear of the Soviets’ attacking first, and had spent trillions— trillions! —stockpiling weapons.

And it was the same damn thing again.

San Francisco.

Philadelphia.

Chicago.

And now Washington.

A whole nation—a whole planet—living in fear.

He watched the smoke rise and swirl.

Susan finished another interview, speaking with Dora Hennessey, the woman who’d come here to give her father a kidney. Sue took a bathroom break, then stopped by Singh’s lab, which is where he was conducting his interviews. A squat white man was leaving just as Susan arrived. “Any thoughts about how to sever the links?” she asked Singh.

“I don’t even know what caused them,” the Canadian replied. “I mean, memory is chemical. It’s based on molecules squirting across the synaptic cleft from one neuron to the next. How a memory could leap many meters is beyond me.” He shook his head. “That’s why most people with scientific training think claims of telepathy must be junk: there’s nothing your brain puts out that can be read at a distance.”

“What about brain waves?” asked Susan, sitting on the experimental chair next to the articulated stand holding up the geodesic sphere.

“There aren’t any brain waves in the sense you’re thinking,” Singh said. “The brain doesn’t radiate electromagnetic signals the way, say, a Wi-Fi source or radio broadcaster does. And, even if it did, the signals would be weak, and get weaker, as all signals do, over distance—usually according to the inverse-square law. By the time a signal has traveled three times as far away, it’s only got one-ninth the power. Before you knew it, any signal would be lost in the background noise of all the other signals.”

“Then what are EEGs recording, if not brain waves?”

“Well, they are recording brain waves—but, like I said, the name gives the wrong idea. See, the brain contains billions of neurons. When one neuron gets a signal from a neighbor, it can respond by releasing ions—which are charged atoms, right?”

Susan nodded.

Singh went on. “Ions with like charges repel each other, and when a bunch of neighboring neurons release a bunch of similarly charged ions, they all push each other away, creating a physical wave—an undulation—in the material of the brain, which has the consistency of pudding. EEGs measure those actual waves bumping against the skull.”

“Oh.”

“So, you see, there’s no way to read brain waves across a large spatial gap.”

“Your mother’s name is Gurneet and your father’s is Manveer.”

Singh tipped his head in a small sign of concession. “I admit I have no explanation for your knowing that.”

“So, I’m what, six feet from you?”

“About two meters, yes.”

“And this square-inverse law you mentioned—”

“Inverse-square.”

“If I went to the far end of the building, the signal should drop off to almost nothing, right?”

“The building is—I don’t know—a hundred meters on its longest side perhaps. So, yes, if we were as far apart as we could get in this building, the signal strength would be one over one hundred squared, or one one-ten-thousandth as strong, assuming there is a signal, and assuming it is broadcast in all directions.”

“What if it isn’t? What if the linkage is just that—a link, like, you know, a line drawn between you and me?”

Singh stood up and spun in a circle. “And did the link maintain itself during that? What mechanism would there be to keep a beam focused from my head to yours, or from yours to Private Adams’s? It’s inconceivable.”