Flight of the Vajra (17 page)

Kallhander evidently didn’t know this, or didn’t care,
as he plowed on. “From the report I read, you asked for and received a copy of
the IPS forensics on the ship’s wreckage. Shortly after that you ran your own
tests.”

The cake was good enough that it kept my mouth
glued shut for almost a minute on end, so I had to nod and nod while chewing. I
could have just CLed back my answer, but I’m a stubborn li’l slag. “Yeah,” I
said, “and I got the same results you guys did. All the protomic code remnants
they scooped up, barring maybe a sliver of a percent, matched either the hull
or something inside the ship.”
They found a bit of Biann’s dress, but not
her body. I’m almost glad they didn’t find a body.
“The rest was junk code.
That happens in any accident: there’s heat, there’s shock, all kinds of other
stress, and at least some percentage of protomic code gets turned into so much
molecular gumbo.”

“Did you notice anything interesting about the
segment lengths in any of the junk code?”

“No, why?”

I did my best not to let the cold feeling on my
scalp run down the rest of my body. The code segment length was about as
innocuous a detail as there could be, like the number of holes for someone’s
shirt buttons. And no, I hadn’t paid any attention to it because I had no
earthly reason to do so. But the very tone of Kallhander’s voice told me that
was the one thing I should have been looking at.

“About two years ago,” Kallhander said, “there was
a paper published about segment lengths in protomic junk code—” I was about to
shout
Don’t send me anything
but it was too late; he’d already CLed me a
file that I assumed was the paper in question. Whatever; I filed it and let him
talk. “—which dealt with the possibility of protomic machines designed for
traceless sabotage. Now, you can create a protomic machine that causes
destruction of some kind, but it will leave behind a fairly obvious signature.”

“So, you encrypt it.”

“Exactly, but the encryption itself will also be
something of a giveaway. Protomic code that’s been encrypted tends to look
nothing like junk code. You’ve seen both; you know the differences.”

I did. Encrypted protomic code was at least
consistently random. Junk code looked like someone had set fire to a dictionary:
there were gaps, distortions, long stretches of total entropy.

“I’m not even reading that paper you sent me right
now,” I said, “but I think I can guess where this is going. Someone found out a
way to disguise encrypted hostile protomic code so it looks like junk code.”

“Up to a point. The code segments will have
detectable periodic boundaries, although it’s difficult to tease them out
unless you see the code in action. But someone theorized that a way to conceal
it is possible, yes.”

“So who is this someone?”

Kallhander’s smile was no less phony than ever. “You’re
talking to him.”

I sat back. I had to.

“I worked protomic investigations for sixteen
years,” he said, “and then took a sabbatical and went back to school for three years.
After that I ended up doing doctorate work in protomic encryption theory, and
then I decided I wanted to take what I knew back with me to IPS and apply it in
the field, not just in a lab.”

One of the advantages of a longer-lived populace,
I thought. I had been considering something of the same thing back before the
accident derailed it all. Even a modestly advanced world now could have a
sixty-year-old with the body of a plain-gene thirty-year-old. I was fifty-one
solar and still looked like I was in my plain-gene late twenties. It was now more
about what you chose to do with it.

“Congratulations,” I said, not sure what else
would fit the bill. Still hated having yet another reason to respect him,
though.

Kallhander nodded a you’re-welcome at me. “I
continued publishing even after returning to IPS as an enforcer. My experiences
in the field proved useful to my theoretical work, and vice versa. I happened
to be planetside when you and the Kathaya arrived, and was immediately assigned
to your case.”

“You’re telling me a lot more than most other IPS guys
would.”

“An observation from experience?”

“How’d you guess? Because it feels like one of
those lead-ups into something where I feel like the biggest shitheel alive if I
don’t trust you ‘cause you’ve been so, you know,
trustable
. —Wait, we
already went there and came back again. Never mind.” I realized just as I was
finishing the sentence that I had no idea where Ioné was, again; I twisted in
my seat and saw her in the little indentation that passed for a kitchen area,
scarcely bigger than the one I’d had in the
Vajra.
What I wouldn’t give,
I thought, to spend a day—even just an afternoon—in a place that had an
honest-to-god
stove.

Kallhander replied while my head was still turned.
“I’m only telling you all this because I want you to see that I’m coming at
this from a technical and academic perspective as much as anything else.
Especially a law enforcement perspective.”

Ioné was preparing something in a glass of water,
which she promptly downed in one long swallow. Probably her version of a Highend
meal substitute. The punchline of an old joke came back to mind:
Yeah, and
when I’m done she has to be plugged back in for the rest of the night!
I
tried not to snicker.

“I also know,” Kallhander went on in a tone that
you could just barely call apologetic, “without having to look too closely,
that your ship is almost certainly loaded to the gills with contraband. But
given that it’s now an official diplomatic vessel . . . ” Shrug,
smile. “That was a very clever bit of political expediency on your part.”

“It was
her
idea. Seriously.”

“Again, we’re not interested in what you were
carrying, or in cases of political graft. There are far too many other, bigger
fish. It’s not our policy to make examples out of people, if that’s what you’re
thinking about.”

“How about you stop telling me what you
don’t
want from me and just tell me what you
do
want? I think by this point I’m
willing to hear you out.” If only to get rid of him all the faster, I thought.

“We want to have you as a collaborator.”

“Come again?”

“A co-researcher; a consultant. You have expertise
that I could not duplicate on my own, and I imagine the reverse is true. You
have years, decades, of unmatched experience in real-world protomic design and
assembly. And this recent incident has demonstrated that you also have a degree
of—well, fearlessness. That’s admirable, but as I see it, that sort of
fearlessness can cross over into foolhardiness. I decided it would be worth the
effort to seek you out and broker this offer, and after what just happened I decided
the sooner this was done the better—before you were embroiled in anything else
life-threatening. Losing you would have been tragic.”

“You’re making me cry.”

“Mr. Sim, I’ll be blunt.”
About time
. “I’ve
been a fan of your work. I was saddened when I heard about your family, and
. . . I was dismayed to find out what has happened to you since.
There was at least one other agent in my department who would have been happy
to bring charges against you for your use of contraband. I argued against that,
and I was given a chance to prove that you would be more useful as an asset
instead of a case for prosecution.”

I’d lost about what little patience I had for his glad-handling
circumlocution. “What,” I said, “do you want me,” I said, “to do?”

“Within an hour or two after you left Cytheria, we
received a few reports from that world’s IPS liaison, right before we lost
touch with them as well. Part of Central Parliament was destroyed by what we
think was an anti-protomic disruption weapon. We had a first set of forensics
transmitted back to us—very preliminary, again, but there was something very
telling. The junk code in the salvaged protomics had the same segment lengths
as junk code salvaged from another forensic report in a vaguely similar
incident several solar months ago.”

“Where was that?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Just that the two were
similar. However—I imagine you have assumed this already—it also appears to have
the same kind of segment-length offset pattern structures as the junk code
salvaged from the
Kyritan.
”

I gave the faintest of nods. I didn’t even want
the creaking of my muscles blocking my hearing just then.

“There’s more,” he went on, “and I imagine you’re
interested in it and want to do your own research with it. I’m willing to allow
you access to our forensics in detail, on the condition that you work with us
as well.”

“How long?”

“That would be entirely at your discretion. If you
wanted to stay on with us as a freelance consultant, that could be arranged—although
they would probably want other conditions met in the interim.”

Like, lose the
Vajra
, I thought. No. Not
happening.

I splayed out my hands at him. “Let’s talk about
the immediate term. What do you want
now
, and how much of it?”

“For now, we’ll start by pooling information on
the Cytherian uprising. I imagine that should keep us both busy for a while.”

Not again with the indeterminate timeframes, I
thought. “Define ‘a while’.”

“Days to weeks, depending on the results.”

“You mean depending on whether or not I produce
anything useful.”

“That’s accurate.”

“When do we start?”

“As soon as you wish, but the sooner the better.
Is that a yes, then?”

“That is a yes.”

From behind me and up the hall, I heard the bathroom
door open and feet too light and quick to be anyone but Enid’s go padding into
the adjoining bedroom.

When CL first appeared,
the hype was
loud enough to deafen even generations not yet born. Sometimes I think that’s
precisely what happened.

The technology of cortical linking was probably
inevitable. The idea of attaching an artificial extension to one’s higher
nervous system had been a goal of neuroscience for ages. Once they got around
to doing it, though, they found that—as with a lot of things—the whole thing
didn’t quite behave the way you expected.

Yes, it was possible to directly connect your CL
to someone else’s and think pictures or speech at them. But it also took a
remarkable amount of discipline on the sender’s part to make it coherent. Your
CL could turn down the input volume, but it couldn’t make someone else’s chatter
any less inane or uncomfortable. Some of this could be ameliorated with
technical refinement—the old-school “blink override”, for instance, which let
the user cut external visual input whenever you closed your eyes. But most of
it was not a technical issue in the first place, and so couldn’t be fixed
through technical innovation.

CL didn’t revolutionize education, either. Raw
information—or even raw experiential playback—dumped into a brain via CL produces
almost no retention. Ditto raw experiences, or raw anything. The only way to
really
learn
something is to not just suck it up with a straw, but to
do
it, again and again.

Well! huffed the CL-lovers. Since we can record
and play back experience through the CL, let’s just use that to simulate the
experience of learning. Give someone a virtual year in the classroom—or a year
in any particular line of work—and compress it into the space of, oh, a month.

It worked . . . at first. It produced a
pretty good facsimile of learning. But you couldn’t accelerate the process by
more than a piddling few percent before the brain revolted and kicked all that
fake learning back out your left earhole.

The problem, again, wasn’t getting the information
in
; it was getting it to
stay
, and getting it to be
useful
.
And generations of effort only confirmed that the Old Way had been more right
than wrong. If you wanted to learn something, you learned by listening, by
looking, by doing, and by participating—and there were no shortcuts to that.
Knowledge was one thing, experience another, wisdom a third entirely, and you
couldn’t cheat your way to any of them. Those three all had to be
earned
,
and in roughly that order too.

Most of how CL was made useful, at least on worlds
where a fair percent of daily life still could be conducted without it,
revolved around the proper socialization of its use. Just as standing right in someone’s
face and bellowing up their nose (and showering their cheekbones with spittle)
quickly revealed itself to be a bad idea most anywhere, an etiquette of CLing
evolved as well. Projecting key moments of your life experience into people’s
eyes and ears, without them consenting ahead of time, was a very bad idea.
Hacking was a big no-no, whether for the sake of malice or well-intentioned “civil
disobedience”.

I was lucky enough to be born into an age where direct
CL hacking had finally become the sort of thing that only happened under
controlled laboratory conditions and nowhere else, but some of the past horror
stories I’d heard in school gave me a few sleepless nights about the thing under
the skin in the back of my head. I suspect that was deliberate. Today, you
didn’t hack someone’s CL from the outside; you took someone they loved hostage
and made them give you their CL keys. Or you looked for someone who had rolled
their own CL ‘ware and looked for the inevitable bugs in such a setup.

Old Way worlds either minimized dependence on CL
or banned it outright, depending on what they were capable of getting away
with. A resort world like Cytheria had less trouble saying “no CLs please, we’re
on vacation” than, sadly enough, did any of the worlds that had played host to
the Kathaya.