Gene Mapper (3 page)

“Gene Analyst, search the file for Mamoru Hayashida.”

Found. There is a crop header in the file 070939-collapsed-SR06 with this name. I will display the header.

The very data I was praying I wouldn’t see scrolled across the workspace. It was the header for SR06.

VENDOR: L&B CORPORATION/FLO CERTIFIED

PRODUCT: SR-06/FLO CERTIFIED

VERSION: 6.01.5

CONTRIBUTOR-PUBLISHER ACCOUNT: ENRICO CONTI @ L&B CORPORATION

And bringing up the rear, in the position of honor …

FINAL EDITOR: MAMORU HAYASHIDA

There I was. Enrico was listed too. He had been the project manager.

This DNA wasn’t just a mix of insect and legacy plant DNA. DNA from SR06 was present too. The second round of samples would prove this was no case of gene collapse. But either way, I had to find out exactly what was contaminating Mother Mekong’s site.

“The intruder.” That’s what I decided to call it. How was I going to go about collecting information? TrueNet would probably have almost nothing helpful.

The Lockout hit two years before red rust. The collapse of the Internet not only wiped out nearly all of the world’s server data, it erased most data on personal computers and phones.

That was in 2017. I still remember the day it happened: the streams of meaningless characters on my mother’s monitor and the live news broadcasts with no text inserts. The rolling blackouts. My father coming home early from work and watching television for weeks.

In high school I took a class on the history of technology and learned that the Internet’s biggest search engine had gone bonkers, hijacking every computer it could reach.

It took several years to get a new network up and running. That was TrueNet, and it was no Internet free-for-all. All programs and data on TrueNet are closely vetted and administered. Nothing nonessential is allowed. After red rust and the great famine hit five years later, most of the legacy rice plant data accumulated over the years was no longer very useful, and very little of it had made it onto TrueNet.

Still, there was plenty of data out there. The problem was getting to it. I needed a specialist—a salvager. That meant another Kurokawa meeting.

If all I needed was authorization for another DNA sample or Mother’s cultivation logs, a text would have been enough. Finding the right salvager was going to be more complicated.

“What a mess …”

Since I hit thirty, I’d been talking to myself more. Then again, my workspace was the only “one” who heard me.

“So we’re back to the Internet.”

I sent Kurokawa my distress rocket.

“Meeting someone? Care for a magazine while you wait?”

I lowered my iced espresso and saw the Perfect Smile above a blinding white shirt.

She knew how to strike a pose. Lean in at an angle, shoulders cocked, chest out, forearm parallel to the floor with a basket of magazines on her elbow. And The Smile. My cast member waitress was real, but what I was seeing was her avatar.

This was the first time I’d called a meeting with Kurokawa at Zucca. It was a popular spot. For the price of a drink you could hang out at the cutting edge of augmented reality. The place was close to packed out, but most of the customers were avatars logged in from outside. When I walked in, the physical café was fairly empty—I could still see the “real” seating—but by the time my lump of sherbet floating in iced espresso arrived, I’d almost forgotten how it looked.

The waitress was walking from table to table, handing out magazine widgets to help people kill time in the late afternoon. Last time I was here, it had been Old Master widgets that let you sketch like Rembrandt. Another time it was ship-in-a-bottle widgets. All you had to do was move your tweezers around a bit and you could build something pretty amazing. Or chess, complete with avatar opponent. Café Zucca worked hard to get the most out of their stage.

“Looks good. What’s the house special?”

“I’d go with
Times of the World
. Sascha has a special feature.”

The banner popped into the space in front of me, beckoning in large letters.
The Horror: Linuxpocalypse 2038!

“Is this for real?”

“Sascha scooped the story. She says we’re going to have a crisis next year. I think she’s right.”

“Sascha?”

The waitress pointed to the banner subtitle:
Sascha Leifens Reports: Engineers Gone Wild!

“Sascha is a founder of World Reporting Network, Mamoru. She’s terribly popular. I’m a fan too.”

I’d never interacted with this cast member before, but she knew my first name. She pulled the July 11 issue of
Times of the World
from the basket and presented it with a flourish. The perfect smile, the model posture, the personalized banter—Zucca’s Behavior Module was top notch.

“Be sure and tell me what you think. Enjoy!”

She winked and waved. As she headed to the next table, the “breeze” blew through her hair. The blinding summer sun was off the zenith, its light creating a halo around her white shirt. As I watched, a river of perspiration started cascading down my spine.

It was 39° C in the shade, a typical midsummer Tokyo afternoon. The tables had umbrellas, but the spaces between were in full sun. No one but an avatar could walk around outside like this without having her shirt plastered to her torso with sweat.

Zucca’s powerful AR stage was full of cast member avatars who were indistinguishable from the real thing. My real waitress was walking around in this melting summer heat wearing the same white shirt, long slacks, and a garçon-style apron, but no way could she have looked as fresh as the avatar she was “wearing” on the stage.

The paper copy of
Times of the World
was heavier than I expected. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d held a physical magazine in my hands.

Out of habit, I poked the title with my index finger and flicked left, but all that did was move the paper a little. I carefully grasped the upper right corner of the page—the feeling took me back—and peeled it to the left. The familiar
PLAY
button was waiting under the
linuxpocalypse
banner on the next page. Zucca’s stage had inserted an AR projection into a physical magazine. I was probably just holding a bundle of blank pages. So you got the luxury of real paper but a familiar way to enjoy the content. Nice. I tapped the playback button.

“Shut up and listen, bitch!”

I heard a snarl of anger. Something white flew at me from out of the page. I automatically ducked. Luckily I wasn’t holding my espresso.

It was 3D video. A red-faced old man was sitting up in a hospital bed. His breathing was ragged, and his arm was stained with blood where the IV tube had torn loose. It was hard to watch. The object that flew off the page at me must have been a pillow.

“I told you, we fixed it!”

“Oh, dear. You mean you fixed it on
your
computers. Isn’t that right? Why didn’t you think about the hundreds of millions of
other
PCs around the world?”

The interviewer was off-screen, her voice dripping with sarcasm. Baiting her subject didn’t seem like the best way of getting useful information. Was this the famous Sascha?

“Was the whole world my responsibility?”

“So you don’t feel responsible after all. Such a shame.”

“I
told
you, we upgraded
time_t
support from 32- to 64-bit almost immediately. Weren’t you listening? We had a 64-bit patch as soon as the processors came out. It was there for anyone who— What’s so funny, you piece of shit?”

The old guy pulled the IV bag off the stand and fastballed it at the camera. The video reframed. Now I was looking at a TV studio, with the man in the hospital frozen on ranks of monitors along the walls. The World Reporting Network logo revolved slowly in the lower right corner. A woman in a short jacket and slacks was perched on a tall chair, legs crossed. I guessed she was in her early thirties.

sascha leifens
was subtitled across her chest. So this was the reporter my waitress liked so much.

Sascha shrugged her shoulders and tossed her bobbed red hair as she stepped down. I knew she was an avatar when her hair returned to exactly the same position. Most casters use RealVu to at least give the impression that they’re communicating facts. Not Sascha.

“There you have it. What do
you
think?” It was the voice from the interview. “The operating system he coded in a trance, while ignoring his responsibilities to society, has an astonishing flaw.”

A large chart appeared above her head with a string of thirty or so ones and zeros along the top. Below the ones and zeros was a date readout: years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds.

“These are time values for Unix. Look closely. He used a 32-bit integer to express these values to the second, even though he knew very well that Unix would have to be viable for at least decades. The way he coded it, the time value will reach its overflow point next year—at seven seconds past 3:14 a.m., January 19, 2038.”

The time count on the chart rolled toward the overflow point. Now almost all the numbers were ones. Sascha made a pistol with her thumb and index finger and took aim at the chart.

“Bang!”

The last zero changed to a one, and all the ones rolled over to zeros. The time readout flipped to January 1, 1970, and the chart shattered into a million pieces.

“I’d like to invite everyone out there to ask software engineers and corporations what will happen when our PCs can’t handle time signatures correctly. I did, and this is the answer I got.”

Sascha lifted a corner of her shapely mouth and faked a male growl. “Well, miss, there won’t be enough 32-bit computers left in the world to matter.”

She shrugged. “When I asked how many computers will be affected, they couldn’t answer. Why? Because they don’t know. But for some reason, they
do
know there
won’t be any problems
. That’s techies for you.”

The sugar in my espresso couldn’t mask the bitter undertaste. Zucca’s coffee wasn’t very good. I felt like blaming Sascha. I couldn’t believe that a major information conduit like
Times of the World
would stoop to this kind of tabloid agitation.

First, nearly all CPUs are 128-bit now. Maybe there are some 32-bit devices out there that can’t be patched, but the programmer Sascha spoke to was right: there couldn’t be enough devices like that to make a difference one way or the other.

“Want to hear something even
scarie
r
? This flaw will affect programs that control forces powerful enough to threaten our very existence.” The studio monitors switched from the guy in the hospital to images of mushroom clouds over nuclear power plants, ICBMs popping out of silos, and fusion reactors melting down. Sascha frowned, shook her head, and turned both palms upward in a “Whatcha gonna do?” gesture.

“If this was a problem the human species never faced before, we might cut those programmers some slack. But in the year 2000, during the Internet era, the man in the hospital and his friends created an identical problem. They never learn.”

Video from the early oughts rolled past on the monitors. There was a red-faced kid with curly hair wearing a hoodie in a cubicle crowded with toys, then a guy with a bowl cut and old hippie-style clothes hunched over an old fliptop PC.

“These men developed one Internet service after another that violated our rights, especially our right to privacy. Worse still, they ignored the lawful ownership of intellectual property with their ‘Open Source’ movement, which brought billions in economic losses.”

As I half listened to Sascha’s anti-programmer tirade, I was thinking about something else.

The genetic engineering that had led to distilled crops used programming techniques developed during the golden age of the Internet. We isolate every gene that expresses specific traits and use object-oriented programming methods to manipulate these strands of DNA as black boxes. When we get the output we’re looking for, we capture it in genetic algorithms. The number of algorithms is sufficiently large that no one engineer can master them all.

My crop style sheets are based on methods originally developed to specify the look of websites. I don’t need to know everything about the genome itself. I just apply the extracted code for physical features to design the look of the plant.

I wondered what these young programmers were thinking when they first connected computers on a global scale, opening one door after another to the unknown. When he designed his operating system, the aging developer Sascha interviewed knew very well that his 32-bit timestamp would be obsolete in a few decades. He knew the risk, but he had other issues to juggle. The conflicts with human rights, privacy, the economy, national security—each new idea opened another door, a door they couldn’t close. But opening doors was always more important than the possible consequences.

“I’m sure you all remember what happened in 2017. The computer network known as the Internet collapsed because of built-in flaws, and the rest of us were locked out. This was a warning.”

Sascha peered intently into the camera and clasped her hands. Her tirade was about to peak. With apologies to the cast member who put me onto this, I had to say, it was all pretty trite.

“We must be vigilant about the relentless advance of science and technology. There’s no guarantee that programmers share the same dreams as the rest of us. What damage will their latest blunder bring? We’ll have our answer in six months. The apocalypse is coming.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mamoru. Now what is that, a printed magazine? How retro. What are you reading?”

As I lifted the page to pause the video, Kurokawa was leaning over my shoulder, still dressed exactly as he had been this morning. It was four o’clock. He was right on time.

“Some kind of journal called
Times of the World.
It’s pretty awful.”

I opened the page again and put the “magazine” on the table. Sascha had already launched into her next piece.

“Synthetic rice is close to certification for worldwide use. But how long will these artificial organisms remain under human control? Is the ‘distilled’ development process really safe? We bring you the frightening truth.”

Now she was dumping on distilled crops.

“What a bi—”

I closed the magazine. I felt like the old guy in the hospital, but I caught myself. Maybe not appropriate for the café.

“You mean, what a bitch? I agree.”

Kurokawa smoothly finished my sentence for me. He signaled one of the cast members and ordered a cappuccino.

*   *   *

“I like this café.”

The sun was lower. The shadows of buildings were falling across the avenue outside. Kurokawa blew on the foamed milk in his big mug of coffee. The steam rose and fogged his glasses. It was hot as hell. Kurokawa was probably in a nice air-conditioned room somewhere, but at least he could have ordered something cold for my sake.

“The stages you pick for our meetings are always pleasant and peaceful. I liked the room this morning, but this café is very tranquil. Sorry, my glasses …”

Kurokawa took his glasses off and wiped them with a handkerchief from his pocket. I thought the fogged lens effect was another Zucca touch, but apparently he was actually drinking something hot from a mug the same size as those used by the café.

“Are you home right now?” I asked.

“Home office.” Kurokawa put his glasses back on. Now I noticed that his hair, always as carefully arranged as a doll’s, was slightly out of place here and there.

“Did you even get any sleep?”

The contact from Mother Mekong couldn’t have come in later than ten last night. Kurokawa was conferencing with L&B at four-thirty a.m. Then he conferenced with me, and this meeting was scheduled through half past four. Which meant he hadn’t slept. No wonder he looked tired.

“I’ll get some sleep after we’re done. I’ve got another meeting tomorrow morning at four. If I don’t sleep, I won’t be in any shape to talk.”

He put his hand to the back of his neck and shook his head from side to side. A waitress with a tray of empty cups and glasses came over quickly, smiled as she took his mug, and walked away. He returned her bow casually.

Zucca offers full service combined with total augmented reality, but people’s need for human contact is another reason it’s popular. I started coming here after work with friends from my polytechnic, but the chance to communicate with some pretty nice-looking people adds a bit of color to the drabness of everyday life.

“Sorry to take your time, but before we get started I need you to get me up to speed for tomorrow. Enrico is going to be there, and if that weren’t enough, the VP is sitting in. We’re going to talk about the SR06 package you delivered.”