Writers of the Future, Volume 27 Read online

  The nodes were everywhere. They rolled along the paths and through the gardens. They stood ornamental in flower beds and under trees and perched like crows on the eaves of the buildings. I saw several clustered like preschool children around a Magister as he held a class under a huge baobab tree.

  I knew about the nodes, of course, but had never seen one up close before now. They were the æthernet. Each one was a semi-autonomous quantum computer. Each held its own store of information and everything it knew appeared on the æthernet, its knowledge superimposed onto the Higgs field, the quantum field that permeated the entire universe. They dreamed the æthernet into existence. It was not something they did; rather it was a property of what they were.

  However, despite their immense capacity for information, they were no more than savant children, relying on the Magisters to help sort and classify their store of knowledge. It was the nodes that created the æthernet, but it was the Academy and its army of Magisters that prevented it from degrading into useless noise.

  As I walked, I unfroze layers of information and immediately clamped them down again. The amount of data on the field was overwhelming. Every building was overlaid with false-color exploded plans that slid out of the stone and opened like boxes unfolding. Every curve of the sculpted lawns was realized in contour lines that lay across the grass like spiders’ webs. They were so closely detailed that the Magisters cutting between the paths looked like they were trudging through snow. Plants were pregnant with time-lapse recordings of their growth thus far, the recordings set to launch with proximity fuses. I walked through the garden like a god, trees bursting into fruit as I passed, bulbs erupting from the earth at each divine footfall. The air itself was bejeweled with information as particles of quantum static shorted out between air molecules in tiny pinpricks of gold and purple.

  So many nodes, such a cacophony of data. I dialed the level of information back to something more manageable.

  I looked at the Magister sitting cross-legged under the baobab tree and the nodes clustered around him. My wife, Kissa, and I had lost our daughter two years ago. Soon afterwards, Kissa took the trip up the Ladder and then the long sleep on the way to a new life around another sun. After our daughter’s death, she said the world no longer made sense to her. She said she needed simplicity, needed to return to nature. Looking at the Magister, his voluminous robes of peach silk folded around his seated form as delicate and serene as a honey orchid, seeing the nodes clustered attentively around him absorbing the information he dispensed, their thoughts radiating through the æthernet adding layers of data to the superposed field that permeated the universe. Wasn’t this the serene garden of enlightenment she craved? I didn’t understand how dirt under your fingernails added to the spiritual experience, but then I never had, and that, so Kissa had said, was the problem.

  Stromboli led me toward a huge sculpture, a curved standing wave of anodized, heat-striped titanium as tall as a three-story building that formed one long wall and an integral roof over a communal meeting area. It was beautiful from a distance, but as we approached I was uncomfortably aware of the weight of the structure curving above me. I walked under a perpetually breaking wave, waiting for the final, crushing inundation.

  There seemed to be more than the average density of nodes here; most of them perched motionless on the undersurface of the wave like the ceiling bosses of a medieval cathedral. Our destination seemed to be a small steel door in the curved face of the wave with a rectangular viewing window at head height. The window followed the tiger-striped motif of the rest of the structure but in vertical bands of different shades of red.

  A group of Magisters milled around the door. As I was still filtering the Higgs field down to proper names, that’s all I got. Each man’s name appeared in spectral text that hung a perfect half meter above his head; emerald green for Magisters, rose for the two Rhetors and pure white for a tall, blond Westerner, Arch-Mage Bjorn Tjalsten.

  I unfroze a couple more layers and read the Arch-Mage’s bio as I approached. Evidently he did the same number on me as the introductions were brief.

  “Who found the body?” I asked eventually.

  “The Limited Intelligence controlling this facility registered a pressure spike at 10:26 this morning,” the Arch-Mage said. “A maintenance crew found the body shortly afterwards.”

  He used the Western system of time and I had been long enough in Entebbe to have to convert back to Swahili; 10:26 would make it about saa nne na nusu, half past the fourth hour of the morning.

  “What exactly is this facility?” I asked.

  “Beneath us is a workshop for the manufacture of nodes,” the Arch-Mage replied. “The workshop requires a sterile environment and as it utilizes a nano-scale fabrication crucible, it is housed inside a high-pressure containment system. In the event of any kind of breach, it is designed to implode rather than explode, thus containing any potentially harmful nanobots.”

  “And this containment system malfunctioned?”

  “Not exactly. It appears that one of the Magisters initiated a flash purge of the clean-room containment system,” he continued. “The order came from inside the air lock. I’m afraid he was killed instantly.”

  I looked at the red streaks coating the inside of the air lock viewing window.

  “And you know the identity of the deceased from his quantum signature?”

  “That is correct. Although the body is . . .” He gave a small cough that was one good poke in the gut away from being a retch. “Although the body is unrecognizable, the mass that made up Magister Musoke is still contained within the air lock system.”

  It seemed the Arch-Mage suffered from a weak stomach. I decided to test him a little. “Whereabouts in the system?” I asked.

  “Mostly in—” The cough again. “In the mesh screens of the filters.”

  “And yet despite the degree of damage, you can still be certain of the individual’s identity?”

  “Of course. There is nothing the nodes know better than the identity of their Magisters.”

  “And there were no witnesses other than the LI?”

  “Magister Musoke was working on a special project and his teaching duties had been scaled back commensurate with his new responsibilities. He was working alone at the time.”

  Suddenly I was interested. “What can you tell me about this new project?”

  The Arch-Mage paused. If there was any Higgs-level communication between the assembled Magisters, then it was on a level I was not privy to. On some secret command, the nodes that dotted the structure above us dispersed. The black spheres scattered, rolling away from our little group like ripples from a thrown rock. Only Stromboli remained. It waited at my side like a faithful hound.

  “Do you realize how much work goes into keeping the æthernet accurate?” the Arch-Mage asked.

  “It is obviously significant, but I couldn’t put a figure on it, no,” I admitted.

  “The workload is prodigious. The Academy houses the densest concentration of LIs allowed by law and all are running continuously. Everything a node knows is available over the æther and yet the nodes cannot teach themselves. They cannot go out into the world and update their own information. They must rely on being taught by the Academy’s LIs and, of course, the Magisters. Keeping that information up to date occupies a century of human-equivalent man-hours every day.”

  “And Magister Musoke’s project had something to do with this workload?”

  “Indeed. The Magister was developing a new node. One that can read the Higgs field as well as write to it.”

  “But any splinter can read the Higgs,” I said, referring to the implant that allowed humans to read and filter the sea of data that the Academy poured over reality.

  “Not directly. The splinter can read the information superposed onto the field by the nodes. But I am talking about
a node that could read the field itself.”

  The distinction was lost on me.

  “The Higgs field permeates the entire universe,” the Arch-Mage continued. “You could say it is an intrinsic part of everything around us. It is what creates the property of mass. A node capable of reading the Higgs directly could see mass as well as inferring other properties related to mass such as energy and momentum. It is our hope that such a node would be capable of interrogating the world outside the Academy’s walls. Capable of verifying its own memory.”

  Now I was the one feeling sick. “You’re describing a machine that’s as close to omniscient as makes no difference.”

  “Omniscient,” the Arch-Mage weighed the ancient word. “I suppose so, within certain practical parameters of storage, processing capacity and power consumption. But in any case, the project is at an early stage.”

  “How many people know about this project?” I asked. There were plenty of people who would fight against any expansion of the æthernet’s already-pervasive reach.

  “If you are formulating a motive for murder, Detective, I can assure you it is quite out of the question. The Academy grounds are well monitored. We devote an entire LI to the job of security and, in any case, there are the nodes. There is no way for anyone to enter the grounds without being seen.”

  “A long-distance hack then,” I ventured. “Could someone have triggered the purge from a distance or with a timer?”

  The Arch-Mage shook his head. “No, no, no. The logs show that the command to purge the chamber was input directly by Magister Musoke on the keypad inside the chamber.”

  “You’re telling me it was suicide?”

  “In order to disable the safety mechanisms he bypassed several levels of security. The pass codes he used should not have been known to him as part of his usual duties and he could not have hit on them by chance. We cannot know Musoke’s reasons, but it is obvious that he did what he did with deliberation and premeditation. For some reason, Magister Musoke entered the chamber, disabled the safeties and then initiated the command that ended his life.”

  I decided to keep the air lock hermetically sealed until a forensic team could make its examination. In the meantime I asked to inspect the dead Magister’s quarters. I had expected them to be basic. Perhaps it was the priestly robes that triggered monklike, puritan associations, but Magister Musoke’s apartment was anything but Spartan.

  It was described as a bachelor suite, but looked as clean as my mother’s conscience. It was the height of modern interior design: tactile, sensual. In a world where any color scheme, smell or visual image can be projected through the æthernet, touch was the last remaining sense available to the interior designer. Every surface screamed to be touched. The walls were dimpled like the surface of a golf ball, the couch a large, anemone-like mass of form-fitting fronds. There was plenty of natural material, too, from the whorled knots of wood framed on the walls like paintings to the checkerboard slabs of cool slate mixed with induction-warmed concrete that made up the floor.

  “And the Magister lived alone?” I asked.

  The Arch-Mage had left me in the hands of Rhetor Matahiro Adhola. He was an unusual mix. He had the typical Ugandan height but his eyes were pulled taut by Japanese genes. In the perfectly climate-controlled apartment, he glistened with sweat like a tall glass of iced coffee.

  “Alone, yes. For approximately two years since leaving the Rhetors’ dormitory.” He edged closer to the wall and ran fingers like brown twigs over one of the framed wood knots. The action settled him although he still refused to make eye contact. I had not yet decided if this should be put down to his emotional state or perhaps some quirk of custom due to his mixed ancestry.

  “No wife or girlfriend?”

  Adhola shook his head. “His work did not allow him much time for socializing.”

  “Are you familiar with his project?”

  “I was part of the Magister’s team. We had worked together for about eighteen months.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I wasn’t aware that you and Magister Musoke were close.”

  The sweat on Adhola’s clean-shaven skull ran in rivulets and began to stain the collar of his robes.

  “This must be a stressful time for you.”

  Some acknowledgment there, but no tears, only sweat. Whatever emotion Adhola felt, it wasn’t sadness.

  I let Adhola lead me through the apartment. The node, Stromboli, followed at my heels although Adhola paid it no attention. The other rooms were as clean as the living area. When I saw a waste bin in the bedroom, I picked it up and rifled through it, determined to find some evidence of human habitation in the pristine space. I found it.

  The bag looked like it had once held candy. I sprayed my hand with a contact sealant and picked it up out of the trash. It was laser-branded with a small glyph in Japanese kanji. I recognized the character—it was the stylized sparrow used by a small-time pusher called Tommy Nagura, a specialist in Bounce, a mildly addictive stimulant. Fairly harmless in the grand scheme of things, but still illegal.

  I held the bag up to the light, making sure I gave Adhola a good look while I watched his expression. It hardly changed; there was no shock of recognition. Whatever the Rhetor’s worries, he did not dull them with narcotics.

  A thought brought up Tommy Nagura’s arrest records and they scrolled down my vision in soft yellow text.

  Tommy had been busy: busts for a bunch of lower-case larceny, pimping, drugs and street violence in various combinations. These sorts of busts were just the cost of doing business for a guy like Tommy, but a year ago they just stopped. After that, nothing, just a hole in the æther. Either Tommy got very good very quickly, or there was something else at work in his success.

  Tommy’s last known address was a bar in the Japanese quarter. There were districts like that in every hub from Quito to Singapore. The Japanese came to build the Ladders and when that decades-long project was completed, they just stayed. Forty years later they remained a community within the community.

  The flight from the Academy to Shinjuku-Kidogo—Little Shinjuku as Entebbe’s district was called—took a little under fifteen minutes. I sat in the back of the squad car as it piloted itself around the Ladder’s no-fly zone and tried to avoid losing my lunch as the car spiraled down to the sprawling mass below. I had never been a good flier and the recommended æthernet slideshow of open green fields and cool breezes bringing the smell of freshly cut grass only made things worse.

  Tommy Nagura died while I was in the air. While I was circling the Ladder, Tommy was taking a flight of his own. The squad car landed outside the cordon that surrounded his body.

  He was pretty messed up. About halfway down he’d fallen through a swarm of smog-filtering carbon microbots. He’d been traveling pretty fast already by that time and the bots, embedded as they were in an electrostatic field, had punched through him like ten thousand millimeter-wide crystal flechettes.

  He’d kept falling, eventually hitting the pavement like a sponge soaked in blood. You could see the splatter at eye height on the wall next to him and in the hair of the pedestrians unfortunate enough to be near him when he hit. His clothes had held him together somewhat, but his twice-pulverized bones poked through them in a dozen places as if he had suddenly grown thorns.

  Suicide: that was the verdict of the attending officer. I replayed some footage from a traffic control camera through my feed. Tommy hadn’t changed much. I remembered his spiky mop of anime-styled hair, his red leather biker jacket. I recognized his arrogant strut as he walked across the roof of the building and out into space.

  Tommy wasn’t about to tell me anything, but I knew of someone who might.

  Uncle Majope wasn’t your usual pusher. He dealt in smart drugs, most of them so new that the statutes against them hadn’t even been drawn up, and he e
njoyed an edgy, quasi-legality, at least until the legislators caught up with each new pharmaceutical innovation.

  I once saw a documentary about those chimps they shot into space at the start of the space program. Once they came back, they couldn’t be set free. Damn things had too much money and time invested in them, so they were rewarded by becoming the subject of government experiments. One poor bastard had the two hemispheres of its brain separated while it was still conscious. It lived, kind of. I saw a video of it being carried aloft on its handler’s shoulders like a kid at the fair. It could understand English pretty well and when the handler asked which way it wanted to go, damned if the thing didn’t point in two opposite directions simultaneously.

  Uncle Majope could make you feel like that.

  He lived and worked in a converted dirigible tethered to the dilapidated stalk of an advertising pylon. Business must have been good because he had spread out of the blimp and colonized the upper reaches of the skeletal tower. I walked through rooms of aluminum and foam panels epoxied roughly around and between the black carbon struts of the tower. There were no corridors—no such thought had gone into its fabrication—just a series of rooms leading off each other through raggedly cut doorways giving the whole place the feel of a hive as if it had been spat from the mouths of wasps.

  Uncle Majope’s specialty at the moment was autoscopy. He could mix you a cocktail of ketamine and dextromethorphan that would knock your mind out through the back of your skull and send you floating into an out-of-body experience. I walked through rooms full of people. They lay on mattresses on the floor, eyes open but vacant like wax dummies. Some of them moved their hands out in front of them in ghostly tai chi as if reaching up to their disembodied selves.

  Other rooms, smaller and padded, held parties of synesthetes, giggling at each other as they heard colors and tasted music for the first time. They gibbered nonsensically as they struggled to share the experience through their rewired sensorium. The synesthesia only worked on the natural senses. Anything heard or seen through the æthernet bypassed enough of a person’s own biological systems to reduce the effect. So, in search of a better buzz, their rooms were decorated with old-fashioned video screens, audio pods and hanging shrouds of velvet, sandpaper and chain mail. They were scented with cut limes and what looked like small metal braziers of smoldering hair that smelled like cinnamon doughnuts and peppermint.