Rainbows End (23 page)

Robert couldn’t suppress a start of surprise. The invisible stranger gave a little chuckle; somehow he had distinguished the movement from Robert’s natural twitchiness. “No need to be coy. You can’t disguise your reactions here. The medical sensing on school grounds is so good that you might as well be hooked up to a lie detector.”

I should just walk away
. Instead he watched the “soccer” match for a few moments. When he was sure he had proper control of his voice, he said, “You are admitting to a crime, then.”

Another chuckle. “Of sorts, though it’s the crime of superior network skills. You can think of me as something of a higher being, empowered by all the tools with which mortal men have chosen to smarten the landscape.”

This must be a kid
. Or maybe not. Maybe the visitor was invisible because even his virtual presence on school grounds was a violation of law. Robert shrugged. “I’d be happy to report your ‘superior network skills’ to interested parties.”

“You won’t do that. Primus, because the police could never identify me. Secundus, because I can return to you what you have lost. I can give you back your poetical voice.”

 

This time, Robert was in control and managed a creditable chuckle of his own.

“Ah,” said the other, “such suspicion. But also the beginning of belief! You should read the news, or just loosen up your ad filters. In olden times, you had athletes on steroids and students on amphetamines. Those drugs were largely false promises. Nowadays, we have things that really work.”

A drug dealer, by God
! Robert almost laughed for real. But then he considered himself, his smooth skin, his ability to run and jump and scarcely feel out of breath.
What’s already happened would be magic by the standards of my past life
. Yes, this might be a drug dealer, but so what? “Where’s the profit in drugs for recovering world-class poesy?” Robert spoke the words with proper flippancy, then realized how much he was revealing. Maybe that didn’t matter.

“You are so old-fashioned, Professor.” The stranger paused. “See those hills to the south of you?” Hills covered with endless housing. “A few miles beyond them is one of the few places on Earth where physical location is still important.”

“UCSD?”

“Close. I mean the biotech labs that surround the campus. What goes on in those labs is nothing like twentieth-century medical research. Modern cures are awesome things, but often they are unique to the individual patient.”

“You can’t finance research that way.”

“Don’t get me wrong. Broad-spectrum cures are still the big moneymakers. But even those use custom analysis to guard against side effects. Yes, you are a singleton case. The Alzheimer cures are sometimes incomplete, but the failures are idiosyncratic. There is no other great poet who’s had your problem. As of
today
, there is no cure.” This clown knew how to mix the brutal putdowns with flattery. “But we live in an age of enhancement drugs, Professor, and many of them are singleton hits. There is a chance, a very good chance, that the labs can be
caused
to find you a cure.”

Magic.
But what if he can do it? This is The Future. And I am alive again, and maybe
— Robert felt the hope growing within him. He couldn’t help it.
This SOB has me. I know it’s manipulation, but that doesn’t matter
.

“So who am I dealing with, O Mysterious Stranger?” It was a losing question, but it just slipped out. “Mysterious Stranger? Um — ” There was a pause, no doubt as this para-literate looked up the reference. “Why yes, you got my name on the very first try! Mysterious Stranger. That is good.”

Robert gritted his teeth. “And I take it that getting your help involves something dangerous or illegal.”

“Definitely illegal, Professor. And somewhat dangerous — for you, that is. Whatever might cure you would be pushing into unknown medical territory. But at the same time, very much worth it, don’t you think?”

Yes
! “Maybe.” Robert kept the tension out of his voice, and glanced mildly at the empty space beside him. “What’s the price? What do you want from me?”

 

The stranger laughed. “Oh, don’t worry. I simply want cooperation with a project you’re already involved in. Keep seeing your pals at the UCSD library. Go along with their plans.”

 

“And keep you up-to-date on them?” “Ah, no need for that, my man. I am an all-encompassing cloud of knowingness. No, what I need is your hands. Think of yourself as a droid who was once a poet. So, Professor, do we have a deal?”

“I’ll think about it.”
“Once you do, I’m sure you’ll sign.”
“In blood, I suppose?”
“Oh, you’re so old-fashioned, Professor. No blood. Not yet.”

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., had brought work home from the office. That’s how he thought of it anyway, when he worked in the time that both he and Alice thought should be theirs and Miri’s. But Miri had her own studying to do tonight, and Alice… well, her latest assignment was the worst yet. She wandered about, stony-faced and terse. Anyone else in her position would be dead by now, or a raving lunatic. Somehow she hung on, often simulating something like her natural self, and successfully managing the prep for her latest assignment.
That’s why the Corps keeps driving her harder and harder
.

Bob pushed the thought away. There was a reason for such sacrifice. Chicago was more than a decade past. There hadn’t been a successful nuclear attack on the U.S. or any of the treaty organization countries in more than five years. But the threat was always there. He still had nightmares about the launchers at that orphanage in Asuncion, and what he had almost done to shut them down. And as always, the web oozed with rumors of new technologies that would make the classical weapons obsolete. Despite ubiquitous security, despite the efforts of America, China, and the Indo-Europeans, the risks kept growing. There would still be places that would come to glow in the dark.

Bob sifted through the latest threat assessments. Something was in the wind, and it might be closer than Paraguay. The really bad news was two paragraphs further on: An analyst pool at CIA thought the Indo-Europeans might be somehow
collaborating
with bad guys.
Christ! If the Great Powers can’t stand together, how can humanity make it through this century
?

There was motion behind him. It was his father, standing in the doorway.
“Dad,” he acknowledged politely.
His old man stared for a second. Bob made the general form of his paperwork visible. “Oops. Sorry, Son. You’re working?” He squinted at Bob’s desk. “Yeah, some stuff from the office. Don’t worry if it looks blurry; it’s not on the house menu.” “Ah. I, I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.”

Bob hoped he didn’t look too surprised; this diffident approach was a first. He waved for his father to take a seat. “Sure.”

 

“At school today, I was talking to someone. Voice only. The caller could have been on the other side of the world, right?”

“Yes,” said Bob. “If it was from far away, you might notice.” “Right. Jitter and latency.”

Is he just parroting jargon
? Before he lost his mind, Dad had been a technical ignoramus. Bob remembered once in the days of very-dumb-phones when Dad insisted that his new cordless handset was a cheap substitute for a cellphone. Mother had proven him wrong by having Bob take the cordless down the street and try to call her home-business number.

She’d rarely made mistakes like that; the old man had been hell on her for weeks afterward. Dad was nodding to himself. “I suppose timing analysis could reveal a lot.”

“Yes. Your average high-school student is good at both sides of that game.”
If you hadn’t ruined things, you could learn all this from Miri
.

His old man looked away, introspective. Worried?
“Is someone hassling you at school, Dad?” The thought was boggling.
Robert gave one of his old malevolent chuckles. “Someone is
trying
to hassle me.”

“Um. Maybe you should talk to your teachers about this. You could show them your Epiphany log of the incident. This is a standard sort of problem they have to deal with.”

There was no return fire; the elder Gu just nodded seriously. “I know, I should. I
will
. But it’s hard, you know. And given your job, well, you’ve spent years working on life-and-death versions of these problems, right? You’d have the most expert possible answers.”

It was the first time in Bob’s life that his old man had said anything nice about his career.
This must be a setup
!

There was silence for a moment as the father waited with apparent patience, and the son tried to think what to say next. Finally, Bob gave a laugh. “Okay, but the military answers would be overkill, Dad. Not because we’re that much smarter than a billion teenagers, but because we have the Secure Hardware Environment. Down at the bottom we control all the hardware.”
Leaving aside the moonshine fabs and the hardware abusers
.

“The fellow I was talking to this afternoon styled himself ‘an all-encompassing cloud of knowingness.’ Is that bull? How much can he know about me?”

“If this jerk is willing to break some laws, he can find out a lot about you. That probably includes your medical history, maybe even what you’ve said to Reed Weber. As for spying on you moment to moment: He can usually watch you in public places, though that depends on your defaults and the density of local coverage. If he has confederates or zombies, he can learn what you do even in deadzones, though that information wouldn’t come to him in real time.”

“Zombies?”

“Corrupted systems. Remember what things were like when I was a kid? Almost any nastiness we had on home computers, we have on wearables now. The situation would be absolutely intolerable without the SHE.” Dad looked blank, or maybe he was Googling. “Don’t worry about it, Dad. Your Epiphany gear is about as secure as you’d be comfortable wearing. Just remember that other folks may not be so trustable.”

Robert seemed to be digesting what his son had said. “But aren’t there other possibilities? Maybe little gadgets the, ah, kids can stick on you?”

“Yes! The little dufuses are no different than I was, but they have more opportunities for mischief.” Last semester it had been the crawling-up-your-skirt spidercams. For a while, the gadgets had been a god-damned mechanical infestation. Miri had raged about the invasion for days, and then dropped the issue so abruptly that Bob suspected she’d wrought some terrible revenge. “That’s why you should always come into the house through the front hall. We have a good commercial bug trap there. Just you and I talking here is as private as your Epiphany can be… So what exactly is this fellow hitting you up for? You’re from so far outside the school scene, I can’t imagine you being successfully hassled.”

By God, Dad actually looks shifty
! “I’m not really sure. I think it’s just the hazing a new kid gets” — he gave a little smile — “even when the new kid happens to be an old fart. Thanks for the advice, Son.” “Sure thing.”

The old man sidled out of the room. Bob’s gaze followed him into the hall and up the stairs to the privacy of his room. Dad was definitely a man with things on his mind. Bob stared at the closed bedroom door for a moment, wondering at life’s inversions and wishing he and Alice were like some folks, the ones who snooped on their own miscellaneous dependents.

15
For the next week Robert avoided UCSD, just to see if the Mysterious Stranger would react.
When Metaphors Are Real

He was beginning to feel confident with Epiphany, although he might never be as skillful as kids who grew up wearing. Xiu Xiang was lagging behind him, mainly because of her self-doubts. She had refused to wear for three days after one particularly mistaken gesture had dumped her into — into she refused to say what, but Robert suspected it was some kind of porn view.

The language in the Gu/Orozco project, while not poetry, had risen above the level of egregious noise. Robert had a surprising amount of fun working with video effects and network jitter. If their project had been shown in the 1990s, it would have been taken as a work of genius. That was the power of the libraries of cliches and visual gimmicks that lay in their tools. Juan was properly afraid it wouldn’t count for much with Chumlig. “We need some added value or she’ll fred us.” He Googled up some high schools with manual music programs. “Those kids think it’s a tragic form of gaming,” he said. In the end, Robert chatted up student musicians in Boston and southern Chile — far enough apart to really exercise his network ideas.
Sharif had returned to Corvallis, but they had several more interviews. Some of the guy’s questions were a lot more intelligent than Robert would have expected from their first encounters.

He surfed the web a lot, to study up on security issues and — on occasion — to see what had become of literature. What was art, now that surface perfection was possible? Ah, serious literature was there. Most of it didn’t make much money, even with the microroyalty system. But there were men and women who could string words almost as well as the old Robert.
Damn them
!

Still silence from the Stranger. Either he had lost interest, or he understood his power over Robert.
It is so easy to win when your victim is desperate
. It had been a long time since anyone had beaten Robert Gu at a stare-down… but then one Saturday he skipped his session with Juan. Instead, he took a car to UCSD.

Sharif showed up on the way. “Thank you for accepting my call, Professor Gu.” The image sat down in the car seat, part of its butt disappearing into the cushions. Zulfi didn’t look nearly as well put together as recently. “It’s been hard to reach you lately.”

“I thought we covered a lot of ground on Thursday.” Sharif looked pained. Robert raised an eyebrow. “You’re complaining?”

“Not at all, not at all! But you see, sir, it’s possible that perhaps I’ve allowed my wearable to become, um, perhaps somewhat corrupted. It’s possible that I’m subject to some degree of… hijacking.” Robert thought back on some of his recent reading. “That’s like being a little bit pregnant, isn’t it?”