“There are those too,” Genette agreed. “And if one of them got hold of a qube—”
“But anyone can get a qube!”
“Not at all. Not even everyone in space. They are tracked from the factories, and in theory are all located moment to moment. And whichever one was involved would have to be programmed for this, as I said. It would show in its own records what it had done.”
“Aren’t there unaffiliateds that are making qubes?”
“Well—maybe. Probably.”
“So how do we find it, or this person?”
“Or this group?”
“Yes, or nation, or world!”
Genette shrugged. “I want to talk to Wang again, because his qube is really powerful, and he also has the biggest data banks on the unaffiliateds. And also because it’s possible he was attacked by this same entity. But I admit I’m a little afraid to talk to his qube, because we’re seeing so many signs of qubes acting oddly. As if they have volition now, or in any case are being asked to do things unlike anything they’ve done before. Some qubes that we’ve been monitoring are now exchanging messages in an unprecedented way.”
“You mean they’re entangled with each other?”
“No. That seems to be truly impossible, because of decoherence issues. They use radio communication like anyone else, but the messages are encrypted internally at each end, using superposition as they do. So they are truly encrypted, even when we use our own qubes to try and break the codes. This is the reason why I want to keep these discussions out of the earshot of any and all qubes, for the time being. I don’t know which ones to trust.”
Swan nodded. “You’re like Alex in that.”
“That’s right. I used to talk to her about this, and we had the same opinion about this problem. I taught her some procedures to use. So, now I have to think about how to go forward here, and how I can best communicate with Wang and his superqube. Possibly the explanation for all this is even now stored in it, unrecognized because it hasn’t been asked to look for it. Because despite all the talk you hear of balkanization, we are still recording the history of the world down to the level of every person and qube. So to find this agent, we only need to read out the history of the solar system for the last several years, and it should be there.”
“Except for the unaffiliateds,” Swan pointed out.
“Well, yes, but Wang has most of them too.”
“But you don’t want his recording system to know you’re asking,” Swan said. “In case it’s the one doing all this.”
“Exactly.”
S
wan never quite stopped feeling sick after that. Someone had meant to kill her city—and yet had missed hitting it directly, thus sparing its citizens, all but the ones who had died in the panic of the evacuation and that poor concert group, killed by the impact.
Was that right? She didn’t know what to make of that—that the impact had missed Terminator itself.
She ended up talking to Pauline about it. She had an idea that she wanted to check, and Pauline was the best way to do it. There she was, after all, her voice in Swan’s ear, and always hearing everything Swan said aloud. There was no way she wasn’t going to find out all about this, eventually.
So: “Pauline, do you know what Inspector Genette and I were talking about when I turned you off?”
“No.”
“Can you guess?”
“You might have been talking about the incident at
Ygassdril
, which you had just seen. This incident resembles the incident at Terminator in some features. If these were deliberate attacks, then whoever initiated them might have used a quantum computer to help them plot trajectories. If Inspector Jean Genette believed that quantum computers were involved, then the inspector might not want any quantum computers to hear details of the investigation. This would be similar to Alex’s efforts to keep some of her deliberations completely unwitnessed and unrecorded by any AIs, quantum or digital. The assumption seems to be that if quantum computers are in encrypted radio communication with each other, then they may be plotting activities detrimental to people.”
Just as she suspected: Pauline could deduce these things. No
doubt many other qubes could too, including Genette’s own Passepartout, programmed in forensics and detection as it certainly must be. If-then, if-then, how many trillion times a second? It might resemble their chess-playing programs, which had proved themselves to be superhumanly good at that particular game. So it was a little bit futile to turn them off only for certain conversations.
Which meant that it was all right for her to say “Pauline, if someone had calculated the trajectory of an impactor to hit Terminator smack on and destroy it, but they forgot to include the relativistic precession of Mercury in their calculation and only used the classical calculus of orbital mechanics, how far would they miss by? Assume the impactor was launched from the asteroid belt a year earlier. Try a few different launch points and trajectory courses and times, both with and without the relativity equations for the precession.”
Pauline said, “The precession of Mercury is 5603.24 arc seconds per Julian century, but the portion of that caused by the curvature of space-time as described by general relativity is 42.98 arc seconds per century. Any trajectory a year in duration, plotted without that factored in, would therefore miss by 13.39 kilometers.”
“Which is about what happened,” Swan said, feeling sick again.
Pauline said, “Being a precession, the miss should have been to the east of the city, not the west.”
“Oh,” Swan said. “Well, then…” She didn’t know what to make of it.
Pauline said, “Ordinary orbital mechanics programs for inner planet transport routes routinely include general relativity as a matter of course. It is not necessary to remember to add the relativity equations. If, however, someone who did not know that tried to program a trajectory for an impact without using open-source templates, then they might have added the relativity equations to a situation where they were already being used. And thus,
if targeting the city directly, they would create an error of 13.39 kilometers to the west.”
“Ah,” Swan said, feeling sicker than ever. She looked for a place to sit down. Terminator was one thing, its people something else: her family, her community…. That there could be someone capable of killing them all… “So… But that sounds like a human error.”
“Yes.”
T
hat evening, late in the galley, she found herself again alone with the inspector, who again was sitting on the table in front of her, eating grapes. Swan said, “Since you told me about the pebble mob, I’ve been thinking that it was probably aimed directly at Terminator, but that somebody made a mistake. If they didn’t know that the relativity equations for the precession of Mercury were already part of the standard algorithms, and added the operation, they would end up hitting just the distance to the west that they did.”
“Interesting,” Genette said, looking at her closely. “A programming error, in other words. I’ve been assuming that it was a deliberate miss—a warning shot, so to speak. I’ll have to think about that.” After a moment: “You must have asked your Pauline about this?”
“I did. She already had deduced the general topics of what she missed when I turned her off. I’m sure your Passepartout is the same.”
Genette frowned, unable to deny it.
Swan said, “I can’t believe anyone would try to kill so many people. And actually do it, too, in the
Yggdrasil
. When so much space is available… so much everything, really. I mean, we’re in what people call post-scarcity. So I don’t get it. You talk about motive, but in a physiological sense, there isn’t a motive for stuff like this. I suppose that means that evil really does exist. I thought it was just an old religious term, but I guess I was wrong. It’s making me sick.”
The inspector’s attractive little face creased in a slight smile. “Sometimes I think it’s
only
in post-scarcity that evil exists. Before
that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.”
“Exactly!” Swan cried. “Why not!”
Genette shrugged with a Gallic weariness. “Maybe fear and want never went away. We are more than food and drink and shelter. It seems like those should be the crucial determinants, but many a well-fed citizen is filled with rage and fear. They feel painted hunger, as the Japanese call it. Painted fear, painted suffering. The rage of the servile will. Will is a matter of free choice, but servitude is lack of freedom. So the servile will feels defiled, feels guilt, expresses that as an assault on something external. And so something evil happens.” Another shrug. “However you explain it, people do bad things. Believe me.”
“I guess I have to.”
“Please do.” Now the inspector was not smiling. “I will not burden you with some of the things I’ve seen. I’ve had to wonder at them, like you are now. The concept of the servile will has helped me. And lately, I’ve been wondering if every qube is not by definition some kind of a servile will.”
“But this programming error that might explain the impact hitting west of town—that’s a human error.”
“Yes. Well, the servile will exists in humans first. So, in parts of themselves people know these acts are bad, but they do them anyway, because in other parts of them some itch gets scratched.”
“But most people try to do good,” Swan objected. “You see that.”
“Not in my line of work.”
Swan considered the little figure, so neat and quick. “That must change your perspective,” she said after a while.
“It does. And… you see the same self-justifications, over and over. It’s even known which parts of the brain are involved in the justifications. They’re very near the parts involved with religious
feeling, just as you might expect. Not far from the epileptic triggers, and the sense of meaning. Those parts light up like fireworks when one commits evil or justifies it. Think what that means!”
“But everything we do is in the brain somewhere,” Swan said. “Where in the brain doesn’t matter.”
Genette did not agree. “There are patterns in there. Reinforcements. Bad events grow certain parts of the brain bigger. The brain reconfigures to create a spiral of ever more horrible feelings. Further actions follow.”
“So what do we do?” Swan exclaimed. “You can’t make a perfect world and
then
get decent people, that’s backwards, it can’t work.”
The inspector shrugged. “Either way seems unlikely to me.” Then, after a pause: “It can go so wrong. Living in space may be too hard for us. Reduced environments. I’ve seen kids raised in Skinner boxes—human sacrifice—”
“You need your sabbatical,” Swan interrupted, not wanting to hear more.
She saw suddenly that Genette was looking weary. Usually smalls were hard to read; at first glance they looked rather perfect, like dolls, or innocent, like children. Now she saw the reddened eyes, the blond hair a little oily, the simple ponytail all flyaway with hairs that had broken at the hair tie.
And a grimace, very unlike the usual ironic smile. “I do need my sabbatical. I’m late, in fact, and I hope our investigation will soon get me there. Because I’m a little tired. The Mondragon is a beautiful thing, but there are many terraria not in it, some of them seriously deranged. Ultimately what we get by not enforcing a universal law is some kind of accidental libertarian free-for-all. So we’re in trouble. This is what I’m seeing. When you combine political inadequacy with the physical problems of being in space, it may be too much. We may be trying to make an impossible adaptation out here.”
“So what do we
do
?” she said again.
Genette shrugged again. “Hold the line, I guess. Maybe we need to understand out here that post-scarcity is both heaven and hell at once. They are superposed, like options in a qubit before its wave function collapses. Good and evil, art and war. All there in potentiality.”
“But
what
do we
do
?”
Genette smiled a little at that, shifted and sat cross-legged on the table before her, looking like a garden Buddha or Tara, slim and stylized. “I want to talk to Wang. I’ll figure out how. And to your friend Wahram. That’s much easier. After that… it depends on what I learn. Did Alex by chance give you a letter for me too, or for anyone else?”
“No!”
A raised hand, like the adamantine Buddha: “No reason to be annoyed. I just wish she had, that’s all. To her this was just a contingency, a backup for something she didn’t expect to happen. She probably figured Wang would tell the rest of the group about her plans. And he will, I hope.”
T
he next day the inspector’s crew had news, and after a conference Genette emerged and said to Swan, “Wang’s qube identified an asteroid that orbits between Jupiter and Saturn, that drifted outward in its orbit as it would have if it launched the impactor mass at Terminator. The drift happened three years ago, over a period of about six months. Wang took a look through the Saturn League records of ship movements in Saturn space, and those had signals that look like a small ship left this asteroid and from there flew into Saturn’s upper atmosphere. It might have taken the plunge, but it entered the upper clouds at an angle that means it could have tucked in there, as quite a few ships have. If so, we might be able to track it down.”
“That’s good,” Swan said. “But… this is Wang’s qube giving you this lead, yes?”
Genette shrugged. “I know. But the ship track is from the Saturn League, and they tagged it with a transponder on its way down. They also got a read on the transponder already in it, and so they know it was a ship owned by a consortium on Earth.”
“On Earth!”
“Yes. I’m not sure what to make of that, but, you know—a pebble mob can’t be launched from within an atmosphere. Nor from under a dome or tent. It had to happen on an open surface in the vacuum. So if you were on Earth and wanted to do this, you would have to go into space to do it.”
“I see that. But—Earth? I mean, who on Earth—?”