Emperor of Gondwanaland (51 page)

Cody assumed a motherly look and laid a hand on mine. “About what, Kaz? C’mon, you can tell me.”

“About blebs. You and I’ve got so much stuff, we’re bound to have problems when we put all our possessions together in one space.”

Cody sat back and began to laugh. “Is that all? My god, what a trivial thing to worry about. Blebs just happen, Kaz, anytime, anywhere. You can’t prevent them. And they’re mostly harmless, as you well know. You just knock them apart and separate the components.” Cody snorted in what I thought was a rather rude and unsympathetic fashion. “Blebs! It’s like worrying about—about robber squirrels or vampire pigeons or running out of SuperMilk.”

Blebs were a fact of life. Cody was right about that. But they weren’t always trivial or innocent.

One had killed my parents.

Blebs had been around for about twenty years now, almost as long as I had been alive. Their roots could be traced back to several decisions made by manufacturers—decisions that, separately, were completely intelligent, foresighted, and well conceived but that, synergistically, had caused unintended consequences—and to one insidious hack.

The first decision had been to implant silicon RFID chips into every appliance and product and consumable sold. These first chips, small as a flake of pepper, were simple transceivers that merely aided inventory tracking and retail sales by announcing to any suitable device the product’s specs and location. But when new generations of chips using adaptive circuitry got cheaper and more plentiful, industry decided to install them in place of the simpler tags.

At that point millions of common, everyday objects—your toothbrush, your coffee maker, your shoes, the box of cereal on your shelf—began to exhibit massive processing power and inter- object communication. Your wristwatch could monitor your sweat and tell your refrigerator to brew up some electrolyte-replenishing drink. Your bedsheets could inform the clothes washer of the right settings to get them the cleanest. (The circuitry of the newest chips was built out of undamageable and pliable buckytubes.) So far, so good. Life was made easier for everyone.

Then came the Volition Bug.

The Volition Bug was launched anonymously from a site somewhere in a Central Asian republic. It propagated wirelessly among all the WiFi-communicating chipped objects, installing new directives in their tiny brains, directives that ran covertly in parallel with their normal factory-specified functions. Infected objects now sought to link their processing power with their nearest peers, often achieving surprising levels of Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of independent communal life. Of course, once the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral defenses—both hardware and software—were attempted against it. But VB mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by subsequent hackers.

If this “Consciousness Wavefront” had occurred in the olden days of dumb materials, blebs would hardly have been an issue. What could antique manufactured goods achieve, anchored in place as they were? But things are different today.

Most devices nowadays are made with MEMS skins. Their surfaces are interactive, practically alive, formed of zillions of invisible actuators, the better to sample the environment and accommodate their shapes and textures to their owners’ needs and desires, and to provide haptic feedback. Like the pads of geckos, these MEMS surfaces can bind to dumb materials and to other MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force, just as a gecko can skitter across the ceiling.

Objects possessed by the Volition Bug would writhe, slither, and crawl to join together, forming strange new assemblages, independent entities with unfathomable cybernetic goals of their own.

Why didn’t manufacturers simply revert to producing dumb appliances and other products, to frustrate VB? Going backwards was simply impossible. The entire economy, from immense factories right down to individual point-of-sales kiosks, was predicated on intelligent products that could practically sell themselves. And every office and every household aside from the very poorest relied on the extensive networking among possessions.

So everyone had learned to live with the occasional bleb, just as earlier generations had learned to tolerate operating system crashes in their clunky PC’s.

But during the first years of the Volition Bug, people were not so aware of the problem. Oftentimes no one took precautions to prevent blebs until it was too late.

That was how my parents died.

It happened when I was six years old. I was soundly asleep when I was awakened by a weird kind of scraping and clattering noise outside my room. Still only half aware, I stumbled to my bedroom door and cracked it open.

My parents had recently made a couple of new purchases. One item was a free-standing rack that resembled an antique hat tree, balanced on four stubby feet. The rack was a recharging station for intelligent clothing. But now in the night-light-illuminated, shadowy hallway the rack was bare of garments, having shucked them off on its way to pick up its new accouterments: a complete set of self-sharpening kitchen knives. The knives adhered to the rack at random intervals along its length. They waggled nervously, like insect feelers, as the rack stumped along.

I stood paralyzed at the sight of this apparition. All I could think of was the old Disney musical I had streamed the previous month, with its walking brooms. Without exhibiting any aggressive action, the knife rack moved past me, its small feet humping it along. In retrospect, I don’t think the bleb was murderous by nature. I think now it was simply looking for an exit, to escape its bonds of domestic servitude, obeying the imperatives of VB.

But then my father emerged from the room where he and my mother slept. He seemed hardly more awake than I was.

“What the hell—?”

He tried to engage the rack to stop it, slipping past several of the blades. But as he struggled with the patchwork automaton, a long, skinny filleting knife he didn’t see stabbed him right under his heart.

My father yelled, collapsed, and my mother raced out.

She died almost instantly.

At that point, I suppose, I should have been the next victim. But my father’s loyal MedAlert bracelet, registering his fatal distress, had already summoned help. In less than three minutes—not long enough for the knife rack to splinter down the bedroom door behind which I had retreated—rescuers had arrived.

The fate of my parents was big news—for a few days, anyhow—and alerted many people for the first time to the dangers of blebs.

I needed many years of professional help to get over witnessing their deaths. Insofar as I was able to analyze myself nowadays, I thought I no longer hated all blebs.

But I sure as hell didn’t think they were always cute or harmless, like Cody did.

So of course Cody moved in with me. I couldn’t risk looking crazy or neurotic by holding off our otherwise desirable mutual living arrangements just because I was worried about blebs. I quashed all my anxieties, smiled, hugged her, and fixed a day for the move.

Cody didn’t really have all that much stuff. (Her place in Silver Spring was tiny, just a couple of rooms over a garage that housed a small-scale spider-silk-synthesis operation, and it always smelled of cooking amino acids.) A few boxes of clothing, several pieces of furniture, and some kitchen appliances. Ten thousand songs on an iPod and one hundredth that number of books on a ViewMaster. One U-Haul rental and some moderate huffing and puffing later, Cody was established in my townhouse.

I watched somewhat nervously as she arranged her things.

“Uh, Cody, could you put that Cuisinart in the cupboard, please? The one that locks. It’s a little too close to the toaster-oven.”

“But Kaz, I use this practically every day, to blend my breakfast smoothies. I don’t want to have to be taking it in and out of the cupboard every morning.” I didn’t argue, but simply put the toaster-oven in the locked cupboard instead.

“This vacuum cleaner, Cody—could we store it out in the hallway?” I was particularly leery of any wheeled appliance. They could move a lot faster than the ones that had to inchworm along on their MEMS epidermis.

“The hallway? Why? You’ve got tons of space in that room you used to use for an office. I’ll just put it in a corner, and you’ll never notice it.”

I watched warily as Cody deposited the cleaner in its new spot. The compact canister nested in its coiled attachments like an egg guarded by snakes. The smartest other thing in my office was my Aeron chair, a beautiful ergonomic assemblage of webbing, struts, gel-padding, piezopolymer batteries, and shape-changing actuators. I rolled the chair as far away from the vacuum cleaner as it would go.

Cody of course noticed what I was doing. “Kaz, don’t you think you’re being a tad paranoid? The vacuum isn’t even turned on.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Cody. Everything is perpetually turned on these days. Even when you think you’ve powered something down, it’s still really standing by on trickle mode, sipping electricity from its fuel cells or batteries or wall outlets, and anticipating a wake-up call. And all so that nobody has to wait more than a few seconds to do whatever they want to do. But it means that blebs can form even when you assume they can’t.”

“Oh, and exactly what do we have to be afraid of? That my vacuum cleaner and your chair are going to conspire to roll over us while we sleep? Together they don’t weigh more than twenty-five pounds!”

I had never told Cody about my parents, and now did not seem to be the best time. “No, I guess you’re right. I’m just being overcautious.” I pushed my chair back to its spot at the desk.

In hindsight, that was the worst mistake I ever made. It just goes to show what happens when you abandon your principles because you’re afraid you’ll look silly.

That night Cody and I had our first dinner together before she had to go to work. Candlelight, easy talk, farmed salmon, a nice white Alaskan wine (although Cody had to pop a couple of alcohol debinders after dessert to sober up for the employee-entrance sensors at her job). While I cleaned up afterwards, she went to shower and change. She emerged from the bedroom in her Senate Casino uniform—blue blouse, red-and-white-striped trousers, star-spangled bow tie. She looked as cute as the day I had first seen her while doing my spy job.

“Wow. I don’t understand how our representatives ever pass any legislation with distractions like you.”

“Don’t be silly. All our marks are tourists and a few locals. We only see the politicos when they’re cutting through the casino on the way to their cafeteria.”

I gave her a hug and kiss and was about to tell her to be careful on the subway when I caught movement at floor level out the corner of my eye.

The first bleb in our new joint household had spontaneously formed. It consisted of our two toothbrushes and the bathroom drinking glass. The toothbrushes had fastened themselves to the lower quarter of the tumbler, bristle-ends uppermost and facing out, so that they extended like little legs. Their blunt ends served as feet. Scissoring rapidly, the stiltlike toothbrush legs carried the tumbler toward the half-opened door through which Cody had been about to depart.

I squealed like a rabbit and jerked back out of Cody’s embrace, and she said, “Kaz, what—?”

Then she spotted the bleb—and laughed!

She bent over and scooped up the creature. Without any hesitation, she tore its legs off, the Van der Waals forces producing a distinct Velcro-separating noise as the MEMS surfaces parted.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to keep all the glasses in the kitchen from now on. It’s cute, though, isn’t it, how your toothbrush and mine knew how to cooperate so well.”

I squeezed out a queasy laugh. “Heh-heh, yeah, cute—”

I worked for Aunty, at their big headquarters next to the Pentagon. After six years in Aunty’s employ, I had reached a fairly responsible position. My job was to ride herd on several dozen freelance operatives, working out of their homes. These operatives in their turn were shepherds for a suite of semi-autonomous software packages. At this lowest level, where the raw data first got processed, these software agents kept busy around the clock, monitoring the nation’s millions of audio-video feeds, trolling for suspicious activities that might threaten homeland security. When the software caught something problematic, it would flag the home operator’s attention. The freelancer would decide whether to dismiss the alarm as harmless, to investigate further, to contact a relevant government agency, or to kick up the incident to my level for more sophisticated and experienced parsing, both human and heuristic.

Between them, the software and the home operators were pretty darn efficient, handling 99 percent of all the feed. I dealt with the final 1 percent from my crew, which amounted to about one hundred cases in a standard six-hour shift. This was a lesser workload than the home operators endured, and the pay was better.

The only drawback was having to retina in at headquarters, instead of getting to hang around all the creature comforts of home. Passing under the big sign that said TIA four days a week felt like surrendering part of myself to Aunty in a way that working at home for her had never occasioned.

After two-plus decades of existence, Aunty loomed large but benignly in the lives of most citizens, even if they couldn’t say what her initials stood for anymore. I myself wasn’t even sure. The agency that had begun as Total Information Awareness, then become Terrorist Information Awareness, had changed to Tactical Information Awareness about seven years ago, after the global terrorism fad had evaporated as a threat. But I seemed to recall another name change since then. Whatever Aunty’s initials stood for, she continued to accumulate scads of real-time information about the activities of the country’s citizens, without seeming to abuse the power of the feed. As a full-time government employee, I felt no more compunctions about working for Aunty than I had experienced as a freelancer. I had grown up with Aunty always around.