Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 18

Exclaiming, we took it back to the car.

The P-L6344 rhomboid! Dating techniques showed it to be something over two and a half million years old. It opened when chilled down to 185:333K.

From inside it emerged a complex thing which was at first taken for a machine of an elaborate, if miniature, kind. The machine moved slowly, retracting and projecting series of rods and corkscrew-like objects. a.n.a.lysis showed it to be made of various semi-metal materials, such as were unknown to us, created from what we would have called artificial atoms, where semiconductor dots contained thousands of electrons. It emitted a series of light flashes. This strange thing was preserved at 185:333K and studied.

Recreationals got in on the act because research was funded by treating this weird object from the remote past as a form of exhibition. I was often in the laboratory area. Overhearing what people said, as they shuffled in front of the one-way gla.s.s, I found that most of them thought it was pretty boring.

At night, Roslyn and I screamed at each other about "the tourists." We longed for a universe of our own. Not here, not on the Moon. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were the most intelligent I ever sucked.

Talking to Roslyn about this strange signaling thing we owned, I must admit it was she who made the perception. "You keep calling it a machine," she said. "Maybe it is a kind of a machine. But it could be living. Maybe this is a survivor from a time when the universe did not support carbon-based life. Maybe it's a pre-biotic living thing!"

"A what?"

"A pre-life living thing. It isn't really alive because it has never died, despite being two million years in that can. Terry, you know the impossible happens. Our lives are impossible. This thing delivered to us is both possible and impossible."

My instinct was to rush about telling everyone. In particular, telling the scientists on the project. Roslyn cautioned me against doing so.

"There must be something in this for us. We may be only a day or two ahead of them before they too realize they are dealing with a kind of life. We have to use that time."

My turn to have a brainwave. "I've recorded all its flashes. Let's decode them, see what they are saying. If this little object has intelligence, then there's a meaning awaiting discovery..."

The universe went about its inscrutable course. People lived their inscrutable lives. But Roslyn and I hardly slept, slept only after her sharp little hips had ground into mine. We transformed the flickering messages into sound, we played them backward, we speeded them up and slowed them down. We even ascribed values to them. Nothing played.

The stress made us quarrelsome. Yet there were moments of calm. I asked Roslyn why she had come to the Moon. We had already read each other, yet did not know the alphabet.

"Because it was easy just to walk through the neighboring Bagreist, in a way my grandparents could never have imagined. And I wanted work. And-"

She stopped. I waited for the sentence to emerge. "Because of something buried deep within me."

She turned a look on me that choked any response I might make. She knew I understood her.

Despite my job, despite my career, which hung on me like a loose suit of clothes, I lived for distant horizons.

"Speak, man!" she ordered. "Read me."

"It's the far perspective. That's where I live. I can say what you say, 'because of something buried deep within me.' I understand you with all my heart. Your impediment is mine."

She threw herself on me, kissing my lips, my mouth, saying, "G.o.d, I love you, I drink you. You alone understand-"

And I was saying the same things, stammering about the world we shared in common, that with love and mathematics we could achieve it. We became the animal with two backs and one mind.

I was showering after a night awake when the thought struck me. This pre-biotic semi-life we had uncovered, buried below the surface of the Moon for countless ages, did not require oxygen, anymore than did Roslyn's and my perceptions. What fuel, then, might it use to power its mentality? The answer could only be: Cold!

We sank the temperature of the flickering messages, using the laboratory machine when the place was vacated during the hours of night. At 185:332K, the messages went into phase. A degree lower, and they became solid, emitting a dull glow. We photographed them from several angles before switching off the superfrigeration.

What we uncovered was an entirely new mathematical mode. It was a mathematics of a different existence. It underpinned a phase of the universe which contradicted ours, which made our world remote from us, and from our concept of it. Not that it rendered ours obsolete: far from it, but rather that it demonstrated by irrefutable logic that we had not understood how small a part of totality we shared. This was old gray information, denser by far than lead, more durable than granite. Incontrovertible.

Trembling, Roslyn and I took it-again at dead of night, when the worst crimes are committed-and fed its equations into the Crayputer which governed and stabilized Luna. It was entered and in a flash-We climbed groaning out of the hole. Here was a much larger Bagreist. As we entered into the flabby light, we saw the far perspective we had always held embedded in us: that forlorn ocean, those leaden waves, and that desolate sh.o.r.e, so long dreamed about, its individual grains now scrunching under our feet.

Behind us lay the ball which had been the Moon, stranded from its old environment, deep in its venerable age, motionless upon its side.

We clasped each other's hands with a wild surmise, and pulled ourselves forth.

Creative Destruction

EDWARD M. LERNER.

Edward M. Lerner [www.sfwa.org/members/lerner] is a physicist and computer scientist. He says he's paid to find "solutions for Internet service providers, satellite-based Earth observation, and other messy-but-fun problems. I like to think that background lends realism and depth to my fiction." He published his first story (in a.n.a.log, where most of his fiction has appeared) in 1991.

His novel Probe also came out in 1991. He has published only seven stories, including a series of four novelettes, in Artemis and a.n.a.log, that tell the story of an InterstellarNet, where interspecies dealings are radio-based. "In an Edward M. Lerner story," says Jay Kay Klein in Lerner's Biolog, "hi-tech never stands still. Computers continue to evolve, being still very new. Neural interfaces, AI, and ever-more-ubiquitous networks have to affect social and economic structures. A writer must take the exponential growth of technology into account-or explain what stopped it."

"Creative Destruction," published in a.n.a.log, is built like a compressed novel. The characterization is condensed; the story moves with a fast pace, and the illusion of a world much bigger than the story is created. The tale starts out in the noir detective mode-a man must investigate an old friend's mysterious death. It rapidly gets larger scale as it goes along, until it is full-blown hard SF s.p.a.ce opera.

1.

There is no good way to learn that your best friend has died.

Justin Matthews stared at the now-blank screen of his personal digital a.s.sistant, numb from an overload of unwelcome information.

"Alice didn't suffer," Alicia's lawyer had said. Justin hoped the attorney had a better grasp of his other facts than he had of his client's name. "Hit and run. There hasn't been an arrest yet."

Dead at the age of thirty-seven-his age, too-in a senseless accident. In his mind's eye, Alicia Briggs remained twenty-three, their ages when they'd met at MIT. In truth, she hadn't changed much for as long as Justin had known her: short, wiry, and athletic. Mischievous. She was an extraordinarily accomplished software engineer who tackled projects with a tenacity that approached the mythical.

How could she be gone?

To the extent that, in his shock, his thoughts had focus, he wondered mostly how in an era of automated cars such an accident could have happened. He worried about how her sister was taking the awful news. He tried to grasp the notion of life without his longtime friend.

Those sad reflections left only one corner of his mind to consider an oddity: why on Earth had Alicia named him the executor of her estate?

Technomics: the synergistic combination of the engineering and economic sciences. Technomists seek to understand the economic impacts of major technological changes of the past and to predict theconsequences of prospective new technologies. Technomists are employed in government and industry.

Xenotechnomics, a prominent sub-specialty within the discipline, focuses on the economic implications of possible radio-based technology exchanges with humanity's extraterrestrial trading partners. See related entry, "Interstellar Commerce Union."

-Internetopedia

Countryside vanished past the express-train windows at 500 kph, too fast for details to be discernible even had Justin's attention been directed toward the scenery. It wasn't. He was focused instead on the screen of his personal digital a.s.sistant. The whisper-soft quiet of the maglev train was interrupted only by his occasional spoken requests to the PDA to navigate through data or download new files.

A spidery bridge caught his eye as the train whipped across. "Leo supersteel," he identified reflexively.

As the staff xenotechnomist for ISI, Interplanetary s.p.a.ce Industries, he was highly attuned to applications of ET technology.

"Too broad a topic," answered the PDA. "Please refine your query."

"Cancel request." Justin smiled at his reflection in the train window. Far above the blur of farmland, sun glints from hundreds of aircraft caught his eye. The high-density, crisscrossing highways in the sky were made practical by-he managed not to vocalize this thought-Aquarian flight-control algorithms.

The high-temp superconducting magnets that helped make this train possible: Centaur technology. The ultra-light, high-energy-density fuel cells that powered the train: another Leo innovation.

A discrete trill from the PDA announced an incoming e-mail, interrupting Justin's woolgathering. The tone pattern told him the communication was personal, rather than ISI-related. His mind wasn't on work today anyway. "Display new message."

"Request approval to decrypt." On the screen only the send and receive addresses were in plaintext.

He knew who he was, and the indicated sender was a popular e-mail anonymizer service. The real sender's ident.i.ty was, presumably, shown inside the encrypted message.

Strange. His business e-mail was often encrypted; his personal messages rarely were. Pressing his right index finger to a sensor pad, he enunciated softly, "Go for it." His words, fingerprint, and voiceprint together authorized the conversion.

"Justin ... if you're not seated, find a chair," said Alicia's image on the PDA screen.

"Stop." Here he was, the reluctant executor, en route from his Richmond home to Boston for Alicia's funeral-and here was an e-mail purportedly from her. Although the nearest pa.s.senger was across the aisle and two rows away, Justin was uncomfortable airing on a public conveyance what might be Alicia's final words. He put in his earpiece. "Play from the beginning."

"Justin ... if you're not seated, find a chair." She flashed a half-wry, half-weary smile. "Delivery of this e-mail means that something has gone badly wrong, that I've been unable to reset the timer that controls the message's release. The cause of my unavailability may be totally innocent, however unpleasant the implied mishap is for me. It may not. To help you decide which is true, I've attached some items that should be useful.

"I'm truly sorry to say this in so impersonal a manner, but I've always cherished our friendship. I know I can trust you to do the right thing, whatever this situation turns out to be."

He displayed the three attachments. The first was a net address that he recognized, that of a data archival service. She presumably kept backup files there. Next came a user ID/pa.s.sword pair for access to the archive.

The final, and by far the largest, item looked like gibberish. It was labeled as her private encryption key, and with it he could impersonate her, could legally obligate her, anywhere on the net. If this really was her private key, and not some sort of sick joke.

All keys look alike, like random nonsense, so there was really only one way to be sure. He needed to test the key.

Security keys came in pairs. One key was called private and (normally) kept secret, under personalized biometric protection. Justin stored his private key on his PDA, accessible only via afingerprint scan, a code phrase, and a voice-print match. The second, or public, key was published to the net. Anyone could send Justin a confidential message by scrambling a plaintext using his public key; only someone who knew his private key could recover that message. It worked both ways: a message encrypted with a private key could be decrypted with the corresponding public key. In the latter case, the mechanism served as a digital signature.

Justin encoded a test message with Alicia's supposed private key. He had his PDA decode the result with Alicia's published public key. The resulting file matched the one with which he'd started. He repeated the decryption using several different public-key repositories. The outcome was unchanged.

Justin didn't much care for any of the logical explanations for his test findings. Once more he found himself staring at the countryside as it streamed by. Alicia was a hacker for hire, and one of the best in the solar system at that. Either the e-commerce infrastructure of the world had been compromised-and how was that for paranoid thinking?-or someone had sent him Alicia's private key.

It was simply not possible that his friend had innocently lost control of her private key. To take her message at face value meant believing that she'd implemented the fail-safe delivery of her private key. If so, something had had her very worried. To doubt the message but accept that the attachment was her private key would imply that the key had been coerced from her with intent to mislead him. Again, hard to believe.

What had she been up to?

Justin suspected that once he had the answer to that question he would also understand why she'd named him as her executor.

2.

Alicia's memorial was held in the chapel of a funeral home, amid hushed whispers and sad, soft background music. Her parents had died years earlier in a plane crash; her only close relative was a sister, Barbara, who had flown in from L.A. Most of those in attendance seemed to be Alicia's neighbors or local friends; they chatted amongst themselves, leaving Barbara seated alone in the chapel's front row.

Barbara rose as Justin approached. Each gave the other a hug. "I'm so very sorry for your loss."

"Thank you, Justin." Subtract two inches of height and add some curl to her hair and the visual result would be Alicia. "And I'm sorry for you, too. I know how close you and my sister were."

"She was a special person." True, but hardly sufficient. Still, he didn't know what else to say.

The silence stretched awkwardly. "I'd like to ask you a question," she said finally. "How should I put this? Were you and Alicia more than just friends?"

His long-ago suitemates in the grad dorm had badgered him into wondering whether the relationship had any such potential. He'd asked Alicia if she felt any chemistry between them. Alicia's answer: "Yes, but it's all inorganic." She'd been right.

"No, Barbara. We were too much alike for anything beyond friendship to work for us."

"Then can you explain why Alicia went outside of the family for an executor?"

Outside the family meant: not her. Justin shook his head slowly. "I wish I did know."

Interstellar Commerce Union: the administrative body within the United Nations with responsibility for oversight of humanity's commercial communications with extraterrestrial species. The ICU reviews and must approve all candidate technologies for import, having as its primary goal the avoidance of unintended and unantic.i.p.ated economic disruptions (such as the energy glut that followed the initial ET contact). See related entry, "Lalande Implosion." The ICU also authorizes all technology exports to other solar systems.

-Internetopedia

An armada of sail- and powerboats swarmed in Boston Harbor like so many bathtub toys in the eighteenth-floor perspective from Alicia's new condo. Justin had not been able to visit in person since she'd moved here; the VR tour he had gotten hadn't done the place justice. He'd known she was verygood at what she did, but he had not realized quite how well it paid. Not that the money would do her any good now.

"Where's Allie's computer?"

Justin turned. Barbara used the childhood nickname that Alicia had hated. "I wouldn't know where she kept it."

"I do know where she had it," said Barbara, pointing. She had accepted his invitation to help inventory the things in the condo. "I used it the last time I visited. It's not here."

Justin rubbed his nose thoughtfully. Per Alicia's lawyer, her PDA had not been found at the accident scene. He didn't much care for the pattern. "Is anything else missing?"

Barbara walked from room to room. Drawers and cabinet doors squeaked and slammed. "That I notice, the living-room 3-V and an objet d'art or two."