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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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3,456,628 more shopping days until Christmas … Latitude 40.9234°N, Longitude 121.3018°W: Semi-hardened Isis missile warehouse; 102 megatons total … Latitude 59.00160°N, Longitude 87.4763°W: Cluster of three Vega class Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles; 35 megatons total … depth 105.4 fathoms … All-serv IFF codes as follows: I. 398547 … 436344 … 51
… “Hey, let me out!” …
Master of jungle poised, knife ready as … the nature of this rock formation was not realized until the plutonist theory of Bender’s … New Zealand Harbor Defense of Wellington follows: Three antisubmarine detection rings at 10.98 miles from … REO factory depot Boise, Idaho contains 242,925 million-hp consumer fusion packs; inventory follows.
Cold gray light shining in the eyes. And I must escape or … “
die with a stake driven through his heart,” the professor laughed
. STOP or you’ll fall; MOVE or you’ll die; escape escape escape seascape orescape 3scape5scape2pecape4ea 1a00p30 6891 350101121310100010101100001010101000011111010101—
The chimpanzee crouched frozen and glared madly at the soft gray light coming through the window.
THE TINY BLACK FACE LOOKED UP FROM THE STARCHED WHITE OF THE PILLOW and stared dazedly at the ceiling. Around the bed hung the glittering instruments of the SOmatic Support unit. Short of brain tissue damage, the SOS could sustain life in the most terribly mangled bodies. At the moment it was fighting pneumonia, TB, and polio in the patient on the bed.
Dunbar sniffed. The medical ward of the Labyrinth used all the latest procedures—gone was the antiseptic stink of earlier years. The germicidals used were a very subtle sort—and only a shade different from antipersonnel gases developed in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. William Dunbar turned to Pederson, the only other human in the room. “According to the doctors, he’ll make it.” Dunbar gestured to the unconscious chimp. “And his reactions to those questions you asked him under truth drug indicate that no great damage has been done to his ‘amplified personality.’”
“Yeah,” Pederson replied, “but we won’t know whether he responded truthfully until I have these coordinates for his computer checked out.” He tapped the sheet of paper on which he had scrawled the numbers Norman had called off. “For all we know, he may be immune to truth drug in the same way he is to PAX.”
“No, I think he probably told the truth, General. He is, after all, in a very confused state.
“Now that we know the location of his computer, it should be an easy matter to remove the critical information from it. When we try the invention on a man we can be much more careful with the information initially presented.”
Pederson stared at him for a long moment. “I suppose you know that I’ve always opposed your project.”
“Uh, yes,” said Dunbar, startled, “though I can’t understand why you do.”
Pederson continued, apparently without noticing the other’s answer, “I’ve never quite been able to convince my superiors of the dangers inherent in the things you want to do. I think I can convince them now and I intend to do everything in my power to see that your techniques are never tried on a human, or for that matter, on any creature.”
Dunbar’s jaw dropped. “But why? We
need
this invention! Nowadays there is so much knowledge in so many different areas that it is impossible for a man to become skilled in more than two or three of them. If we don’t use this invention, most of that knowledge will sit in electronic warehouses waiting for insights and correlations that will never occur. The human-computer symbiosis can give man the jump on evolution and nature. Man’s intellect can be ex—”
Pederson swore. “You and Bender make a pair, Dunbar; both of you see the effects of your inventions with narrow utopian blinders. But yours is by far the more dangerous of the two. Look what this one chimpanzee has done in under six hours—escaped from the most secure post in America, eluded a large armed force, and deduced the existence of an espionage net that we had completely overlooked. Catching him was more an
accident
than anything else. If he had had time to think about it, he probably would have deduced that distance limit and found some way to escape us that really would have worked. And this is what happens with an experimental
animal
! His intelligence has increased steadily as he developed a firmer command of his information banks. We captured him more or less by chance, and unless we act fast while he’s drugged, we won’t be able to hold him.
“And you want to try this thing on a man!
“Tell me, Doctor, who are you going to give godhood to first, hm-m-m? If your choice is wrong, the product will be more satanic than divine. It will be a devil that we cannot possibly beat except with the aid of some fortuitous accident, for we can’t outthink that which, by definition, is smarter than we. The slightest instability on the part of the person you choose would mean the death or
domestication
of the entire human race.”
Pederson relaxed, his voice becoming calmer. “There’s an old saw,
Doctor, that the only truly dangerous weapon is a man. By that standard, you have made the only advance in weaponry in the last one hundred thousand years!” He smiled tightly. “It may seem strange to you, but I oppose arms races and I intend to see that you don’t start one.”
William Dunbar stared, pale-faced, entertaining a dream and a nightmare at the same time. Pederson noted the scientist’s expression with some satisfaction.
This tableau was interrupted by the buzzing of the comm. Pederson accepted the call. “Yes,” he said, recognizing Smith’s features on the screen.
“Sir, we just finished with those two fellows we picked up on the auto pier,” the aide spoke somewhat nervously. “One is Boris Kuchenko, the yuk we’ve had spotted all along. The other is Ivan Sliv, who’s been working for the last nine months as a code man at Sawyer under the name of Ian Sloane. We didn’t suspect him at all before. Anyway, we gave both of them a deep-probe treatment, and then erased their memories of what’s happened today, so we could release them and use them as tracers.”
“Fine,” replied Pederson.
“They’ve been doing the darndest things, those spies.” Smith swallowed. “But that isn’t what this call is about.”
“Oh?”
“Can I talk? Are you alone?”
“Spit it out, Smith.”
“Sir, this Sliv is really a top man. Some of his memories are under blocks that I’m sure the Russkies’ never thought we could break. Sir—he knows of a project the Sovs are running in an artificial cave system under the Urals. They’ve taken a dog and wired it—wired it into a computer. Sliv has heard the dog talk, just like Dunbar’s chimp. Apparently this is the big project they’re pouring their resources into to the exclusion of all others. In fact, one of Sliv’s main duties was to detect and obstruct any similar project here. When all the bugs have been worked out, Stark, or one of the other Red chiefs is going to use it on himself and—”
Pederson turned away from the screen, stopped listening. He half noticed Dunbar’s face, even paler than before. He felt the same sinking, empty sensation he had four years before when he had heard of Bender’s fusion pack. Always it was the same pattern. The invention, the analysis of the dangers, the attempt at suppression, and then the crushing knowledge that no invention can really be suppressed and that the present case is no exception. Invention came after invention, each
with greater changes. Bender’s pack would ultimately mean the dissolution of central collections of power, of cities—but Dunbar’s invention meant an increased
capability
for invention.
Somewhere under the Urals slept a very smart son of a bitch indeed …
And so he must choose between the certain disaster of having a Russian dictator with superhuman intelligence, and the probable disaster involved in beating the enemy to the punch.
He knew what the decision must be; as a practical man he must adapt to changes beyond his control, must plan for the safest possible handling of the unavoidable.
… For better or worse, the world would soon be unimaginably different.
Of course, I never wrote the “important” story, the sequel about the first amplified human. Once I tried something similar. John Campbell’s letter of rejection began: “Sorry—you can’t write this story. Neither can anyone else.” The moral: Keep your supermen offstage, or deal with them when they are children (Wilmar Shiras’s
Children of the Atom
), or when they are in disguise (Campbell’s own story “The Idealists”). (There is another possibility, one that John never mentioned to me: You can deal with the superman when s/he’s senile. This option was used to very amusing effect in one episode of the
Quark
television series.)
“Bookworm, Run!” and its lesson were important to me. Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology, and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It’s a problem writers face every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own. When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity—a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied—and the world will pass beyond our understanding. In one form or another, this Technological Singularity haunts many science-fiction writers: A bright fellow like Mark Twain could predict television, but such extrapolation is forever beyond, say, a dog. The best we writers can do is creep up on the Singularity, and hang ten at its edge.
(My extended song-and-dance about this idea is at
http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html
.
In that 1993 essay, I try to track the history of this idea in the twentieth century. Since then I have come to realize even more how my 1960s orientation was simply a product of ideas that others—such as Licklider, Ashby, and Good—had put into the air.)
Warning: There are spoilers in this introduction.
Fred Pohl published my short story “The Accomplice” in the April 1967 issue of
If
. It was only my third story to appear in print. Wolgang Jeschke included a German translation of the story in his collection,
Science Fiction Story-Reader 16
. Its only other appearances were in two program books. So “The Accomplice” is among my least-reprinted stories. Why is that?
The quality of the writing is about average for what I could manage in the 1960s. The hero’s background is probably more intriguing than in my earlier stories. And the ideas? Ah, there’s the problem. To date, “The Accomplice” is the most irritating combination of embarrassing gaffes and neat insights that I have ever created. More than once, I have held it back from reprint collections.
Darrell Schweitzer wrote a marvelously kind and generous piece about the things I got right in “The Accomplice” (
The New York Review of Science Fiction
, April 1996, pp.14–15). As with a lot of SF stories, if you are allowed to pick the good calls, it can look deeply prophetic. “The Accomplice” takes place in 1993. I wrote the story in mid-1966. Either I’m smarter than I think, or I must have been exposed to Moore’s Law. (In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that certain aspects of computer power appeared to be doubling every year or two. In fact, this progress has continued into the early twenty-first century.) In any case, it looks like I have estimated the power of a 1993-era supercomputer fairly well. A major point of the story was that in just a few more years this computer power would be available on the consumer market. And yet … and yet, damn it, I still missed the impact that home computers would have on our world.
My central inspiration for writing the story was a computer application that has turned out to be spectacularly important: I had always been in love with Disney’s
Fantasia
. In 1963, just out of high school, during my first visit to Disneyland, it occurred to me that computers could be used to automate cartoon creation, putting—I thought—large-scale dramatic productions within the reach of individual artists. (Most of this has come to pass, though our largest projects still involve enormous teams of bright people.) The idea of computer animation was probably an independent insight, though I know now that people like Ivan Sutherland were already hard at work with real implementations! Years would pass before computers would be powerful enough to do high-quality motion imagery.
That
I got right!
And this illustrates a subtle deficiency in the vision of this story (well, it’s subtle compared to the other deficiencies!). For years before the first computer-animated short features, people were talking about the possibilities. Before
Fantasia
-class computer-animated features were possible, computer animation had become an industry. And yet, in my story, computer animation comes as a big surprise,
suddenly emerging when computers are powerful enough to do significant figure animation in a major movie release. The generic form of this problem is widespread in SF, and very hard to avoid. With rare exceptions, if a story gimmick is something that could plausibly grow out of the present, then it and its consequences can’t reasonably be presented as a surprise in the story.
Some of the story’s failures don’t bother me: the aircars and the extremely successful space program of my 1993 era. Maybe that’s because such misforecasts have been so common in SF. (Besides, aircars may finally turn up now that they have become a joke. :-)
So what are the truly wretched things about “The Accomplice”? They’re mainly things like missing personal computers, failing to draw the inevitable conclusions from the things that I did get right. There’s the apparent sexism. There’s the “TV tape cartridge” that must be manually threaded into the video tape recorder. There’s … arghh, it’s too embarrassing to go on. But you can read the story and see for yourself.
And yet, I have a soft spot in my heart for “The Accomplice.” Nineteen-sixty-six seems a strange and alien time to me now; I can see myself peering out of it and wondering. I am very pleased the story has a chance to see daylight again.
(I did a little searching about the history of computer animation. Here is what I came up with in June 2001. I would be interested to learn of other references.
http://www.sun.com/960710/feature3/alice.html
graphics
http://www.sun.com/960710/feature3/cg.html
)
T
here was a thief on my staff. Hell. It was someone I trusted, too; it had to be.
Arnold Su grinned enthusiastically as he laid the proof on my desk. “Computer time is expensive, Mr. Royce,” he pontificated. Now
that
was a discovery. “And someone has embezzled more than seventy hours on our 4D5 during the last year.”
I raised my eyes prayerfully to the mural that covered three walls of my office. The holograph gave the three-dimensional illusion that we were perched among tall conifers somewhere in the Canadian Rockies. You’d never guess that my office is buried under the Royce building in Greater San Diego.
“God preserve me from your efficiency, Arnold. Seventy hours on the 4D5 computer is worth four million dollars. You’re an extraordinary security officer; it only took you a year to discover that someone is robbing us blind.”
Su was pained by my unjustified criticism. “It’s someone with a private computer readout.”
“You’re pretty good at the obvious.” Most computers, especially the
really big ones like our 4D5, can be programmed by remote consoles in the offices of favored company researchers. Such use is automatically recorded for later review.
“So it must be someone highly placed in the company. Someone smart. Chief, he actually programmed the computer to cover up for him. The 4D5 has been keeping two sets of books to conceal the embezzlement from our weekly checks.”
Of course there have been cases of computer-camouflaged embezzlement (usually of money) in the past—that’s one reason why CPA’s are computer technicians. However it takes a real expert to thoroughly cover his tracks. Evidently we were up against an expert. “How did you discover the theft, then, Arnie?”
Arnold’s grin spread even further across his face. This was the question he had been waiting for. “Boss, you really don’t appreciate me. I’ve been expecting something like this for a long time. My section has an agreement with Control Data Corporation. Every year we audit their computer complex with ours, and vice versa. That way the problem is reduced to a battle of the computers, and we can detect this sort of automated deception. But the crook started embezzling sometime after the 1992 audit, so he wasn’t discovered until yesterday.”
I picked up Arnold’s report. “Any idea who the culprit is?” Four million dollars, I thought. If I ever got my hands on the crook who—no wonder our general efficiency had fallen off in the last year.
“Not the vaguest,” Su replied, “except that he’s a company VIP with computer privileges. Now if you had just let me bug the executive offices and washrooms …”
“You know, Arnie,” I said slowly, “sometimes I think you would have been just as comfortable on Herr Himmler’s staff as you are here.”
Arnold turned red. “Sorry, Boss, I didn’t mean—”
“Never mind.” Su is a good man, the graduate of one of this country’s best schools of business administration. It’s just that he’s an incurable snoop, which makes him, properly supervised, an excellent security officer.
Su continued, subdued, “We can’t even reconstruct what sort of problems the computer was doing during those seventy hours. The thief did a magnificent job on that computer.”
I looked down the valley in the mural. Someone I trusted had sold me out. I’d worked twenty years to make the name Royce synonymous with computers and to make Royce Technology, Inc., competitive with IBM and CDC. In that time, I’ve collected a lot of good men under one corporate roof. They are the backbone of Royce, more than I, with my high school diploma, ever was. And one of them was rotten. Who?
There was one individual who might be able to find that answer. I got up and started for the door. “We’re going to see Howard.”
“Prentice?” asked Su. He grabbed his report off my desk and followed me. “You don’t think that he’s responsible?” Arnold was genuinely shocked.
“Of course not,” I said, locking the door to my office.
When we were out of earshot of my secretaries and their recording equipment I continued. “Whoever we’re up against obviously knows computers inside and out. We can’t catch him with old-fashioned automation techniques. We’re going to have to get him by exploiting the human angle. Howard Prentice has been kicking around longer than both of us put together. He knows human nature, and he knows more ways to skin a sucker than we’ll ever imagine. He makes the perfect investigator.” I noticed the hurt look on Arnold’s face and added quickly: “On a unique case like this.”
It’s only five minutes by aircar from Chula Vista to the Royce Research Labs at Oceanside. In fifteen minutes we were standing in the hall outside Prentice’s lab. I prefer to see people in person rather than by phone—I get more out of them. But this time it backfired: Prentice wasn’t in his lab, which was locked. I was starting back to the parking lot when Su stopped me.
“Just a minute, Boss.” He produced a flat, metal plate and inserted it in the lock. “Master key,” he explained confidentially. “Now we can wait for him in here.”
I was too surprised to bawl him out for this latest invasion of privacy. Besides, he’ll never grow up.
The room lighted up as we entered. Packed against one wall were the usual programming typers and TV screens. I also recognized a high-resolution video tape recorder and a picture reader. Stacked in orderly rows along the work benches were hundreds of Prentice’s oil paintings. Sometimes I wondered whether he considered himself an artist or a scientist—though I didn’t care what he did with his time as long as he completed assigned projects. Su was already rummaging among the paintings—admiring them I think.
Prentice couldn’t be out for long. As a section chief he was in charge of thirty different computer labs. And right then his section was busy designing the optical and communications system for that probe NASA wanted to boost out toward Alpha Centauri A next year.
I sat down in the chair before the computer console and tried to relax.
The holograph on his desk caught my eye. It was a color pic of Howard and Moira taken on their diamond wedding anniversary. Moira must be more than ninety years old. Only one woman in a billion could look even faintly attractive after a haul like that—but tall and slim,
somehow Moira managed it. She was holding Howard’s arm like a fifteen-year-old who’d just discovered boys. Quite a gal; quite a man she had, too. Howard must be pushing ninety-five. You know, he personally worked for Thomas Edison? Fact. The man’s like history. When the 1929 Depression came he was a top executive for some oil company out East. The Depression apparently soured him on industry. He spent the next forty years—an ordinary adult lifetime—in Greenwich Village as an artist-bum, a beatnik. Then, some time around 1970, he changed careers again.
He entered college
. If you’re old enough, maybe you remember the headlines:
75-YR-OLD FROSH VOWS HE’LL GET PH.D.—
in math, no less. And he did it. Howard’s been with me for fifteen years.
One of my best men. I tapped an impatient tattoo on the arms of the chair. But where the devil was he now? “Boss, this stuff is tremendous!” I stood up to see what Arnold was talking about. He was pointing at several paintings he had pulled out from the bottom of the pile. Su is quite an art and film fan. He has a tape collection of all films made since 1980, as well as a very large collection of paintings from all periods.
He had reason to admire Howard’s paintings, though. Prentice is an excellent, maybe a great, painter. Though he’s done many traditional abstractionist pieces, Howard has been a neo-realist ever since I’ve known him. Take the paintings in the lab; they were all clear and unambiguous as far as execution went. There were landscapes, portraits, interiors. But the landscapes were from no area in the real world. And the portraits were expressionless mugshots: face on, quarter face, profile. Not all of the subjects were even human. Every canvas was the same size. Over the years I often asked Howard about this, but he always answered with some line about artistic profundity. I don’t think he even let us see everything he did.
Arnold had called me over to see three landscapes he had discovered. When he placed them side by side it was like a composite photo—a panoramic view. It was one of the most spectacular things I’d seen by Prentice.
When I looked at it, the lights in the room seemed to dim a little. In the picture it was night. A sickle moon lit a deep valley or mountain pass. Our viewpoint was halfway up the side of the valley. Scrubby brush and volcanic slag were visible nearby. Far away, down in the center of the valley, was a castle or fortress, its immense black structure outlined by the moonlight. Though vast and strong, somehow it was also decayed and diseased—a skull rotting in the earth. Around the castle were fields of purple flowers glimmering faintly with their own light (fluorescing paint?). But the flowers weren’t beautiful—even at this distance they were fungi growing on death’s decay.

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