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Thea returned from the meeting pondering once again how good it felt to talk to people in person. The simulation might be imperfect, in some way she couldn’t quite identify, but it came close enough. Of course, it helped that she was finding the subject matter so absorbing.
Before, when she’d more or less disdained politics, she would have expected meetings like this to be full of status-seeking and posturing and pontificating. Were the members of this group more focused, less egotistical, than the average citizen? Was that why they so often reached a consensus? And did the self-selection process at work, the decision to be stored, somehow result in people who worked together well? That seemed counterintuitive. She would have thought people so determined to survive that they would choose to live after (ha, the company name cropping up again) their body had died would be more self-focused and individualistic than average, rather than less.
Her mother had been just as surprised, when Thea filled her in. And she’d been so pleased to find herself and Thea more in agreement than in the past. Thea had long since learned to ignore her and her mother’s political differences; she hadn’t realized the effort it took, the energy diverted to maintaining a wall against her mother’s quiet disapproval.
Should she try again to discuss the group’s work with Max? They’d reached an understanding, more or less, about her political activities, but she had the sense that he was still more bothered about it than he would admit.
But she had better stop woolgathering (an apt term, for a knitter . . .) and call. She was running a little late.
Max’s line rang a few times, more often than usual. He must be busy with his own activities. That was good. Sauce for the goose and all that. Though she could hardly help wondering what he was doing, and if he was doing it with people she knew or with new people.
“Thea!” He still answered by almost shouting her name, that special joyous lilt in his voice.
These calls had a routine, by now. They took turns telling the other about what they’d done that day. Did he ever tailor, or even censor, his accounts? Had she been doing the same, without altogether realizing it?
Thea listened to Max’s account of yet another pitch session, one that didn’t sound likely to lead to a job, and of the neighborhood cookout at which he’d proudly taken charge of the grill. The most surprising news: he’d started taking surfing lessons. He’d always declined her offers to teach him, saying he’d rather watch and sketch her instead. Damn—she’d have liked to be his teacher. “So who’s teaching you?”
He looked faintly uncomfortable as he responded, “Just one of the neighbors. No one you’ve met. They moved in later.”
She noted the pronoun with amusement. Max tended to use gender-specific pronouns, probably because he was old-fashioned straight in his preferences and couldn’t help noticing gender before many other characteristics. So the neighbor was probably female and cute. The time might be coming to discuss how they should deal with their sexual needs in the future.
But this woman had better be careful about Max’s safety! “Gotten hit in the head with the board yet? Or thought you were drowning?”
Max chuckled. “Yes to the first, no to the second. It’s all good, except the water’s still a little cold. I tried on your wetsuit, but it’s too loose. No matter. Now your turn. What have you been up to?”
“Well, I just came back from another meeting. We’re taking a break from the new-community development and preparing for the next elections. We each took an elected position or a likely ballot issue and talked about the options we expect to have. It’s something of a waste of time, I suppose, since we don’t actually know what the options will be. But I presented the issue of raising local taxes to fund public support for artists.”
Max um-hummed along as she spoke. When she paused, he threw in, “That’s a subject you already know inside out. If you want to follow up, I can send you the letter you wrote last year, explaining why artists shouldn’t depend on public funding. You could bring it to the next meeting, or distribute it beforehand.”
Thea sat back, stunned. Max had been looking to one side, no doubt searching for this supposed letter on a split screen, but her continued silence made him glance back at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Hon . . . are you sure that’s what I said? Could you be misremembering it?”
“I don’t think so. I remember because you got interested in something political for a change. And because you made your point so well. There were a bunch of comments about that. You changed some minds. . . . Here it is! I’m sending it now.”
Thea waited, holding her breath, until her mail program pinged a moment later. She skimmed the message, then read it again, her heart pounding. “You’re right. That’s what I said. And I sounded very sure of my ground. So why don’t I remember?”
And why had she been so casually and confidently presenting the opposite position?
* * * * *
The technical meeting did not take long to devolve into a shouting match. The current leader had expected as much, and had brought along a police whistle. She blew it now. “That’s enough! This isn’t about who made what decision and who did or didn’t express any doubts how clearly.”
The various combatants settled back in their chairs, some grumbling, others obviously relieved. When she had as close to silence as she was likely to get, she went on. “The memory deletion approach had fairly obvious advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of neatness, lack of internal conflict, and so on hardly needed demonstrating. The disadvantages were predicted by some, and have now been demonstrated. So the next phase, as I see it, is to proceed without erasing previous contrary views. We will leave it up to the subjects to reconcile any contradictions. I’ll be sending round the research about how naturally people adjust their own memories to reduce cognitive dissonance. And then, we’ll watch to see whether the results confirm what that research suggests. Comments?”
One of the more senior programmers raised his hand. She nodded at him, but he had started speaking without that permission. “What about their memories of this latest fiasco? Do we leave those alone as well?”
The leader pointed to the team member in charge of monitoring and collating information. “How many of this round’s subjects discovered the discrepancy on their own, without assistance from others and without informing anyone or making any written record?”
The team member tapped away at her holographic keyboard, then looked back up. “About one-third.”
“Good enough. Delete the relevant memories for those, so we’ll have a clean slate. As for the others, we risk too many complications, and too much reinforcement of what may already be troubling them, if we intervene. Let them come up with their own comforting versions of events.”
* * * * *
Dane Andresen took a bite of his sandwich and tried to ignore his feet. He didn’t walk enough, and his floppy old shoes had no arch support to speak of. But he and his coworker Esther hadn’t even had to discuss the matter: they couldn’t touch this topic at the office, or in any restaurant or plaza where their coworkers or bosses might be found at lunchtime. That is, if he wasn’t imagining that she found their current project as disturbing—no, make that outrageous—as he did. He was taking a hell of a risk based on expressions and body language, along with political comments from before the project landed on them.
Esther slurped her smoothie, then glanced up and down the sidewalk on which they walked. “I think we’re far enough away.”
Well, that was reassuring. “Okay. I guess—well, let me put it this way. Are we out here because you have a mad crush on me, and you can’t wait any longer to tell me?”
Esther’s eyes went wide, and then she grinned. It made him realize that he had never seen her smile. “Sorry to break your heart, big guy, but no.”
Dane relaxed and grinned back, a grin he could only sustain for a moment before remembering just what they were here for. “Then I guess we feel the same way about what we’re doing. At work, I mean.”
Esther, somber again, gave one short nod.
“Do you know of anyone else on the team who agrees with us?”
He had inadvertently pulled ahead of Esther; she double-stepped to catch up, her short brown legs moving fast enough to remind him of a sandpiper. “If I were guessing, and I could easily guess wrong, I’d think at least a few others were upset about it; but there’s no one else I’m sure about. Better to start out with just the two of us, and keep our eyes and ears open. . . We may as well jump to the really tough question. What the hell can we do?”
Dane took another bite of his neglected sandwich and took his time chewing and swallowing. He didn’t want to insult her by suggesting a difference in how far they were willing to go. But he was pretty sure that difference existed. “Did you know my mother’s one of them—stored?”
“Ohhh. I didn’t, but it makes sense. I know she was sick for a long time. You let her use your discount?”
Dane ground his teeth. “I did. She wasn’t too sure she wanted to, but I talked her into it. So if we help someone muck around with what she thinks and feels, it’s on me. Even more than it would be anyway.”
Esther didn’t argue. She just brought them back to the point. “So what can we do to change things? I can’t think of anything except going public. And aside from how dangerous that could be, I’m not sure what would happen to the stored if people started thinking of them as—I don’t know, as robotic voting weapons or something like that.”
“Damn. You’re right. What about some sort of sabotage? Keep the code from working?”
Esther obviously didn’t buy that suggestion. “Isn’t it a little late for that? I mean, it’s already working, isn’t it? And besides, we’d need to have everyone on board, or the ones who weren’t would find the problem. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to figure out where the problem came from.”
They had been walking more and more slowly, to stretch out the time they had for this discussion without running out of lunch break. But when the idea came to him, he stopped short as if it had shoved him backward. “What if we recruit some of the stored?”
Esther had stopped walking when he did, and now turned toward him, excitement dawning in her face. “Like going public, except we’d be telling the people with the most to lose, the people who’d care the most. I like!”
Then she shrank back a bit. “You are talking about telling them, right? Not about using the code to draft them or anything?”
He stiffened, and made himself count to ten before speaking. Then he responded as calmly as he could. “I am not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. Ever.”
“I’m —”
He held up a hand. “Don’t apologize.” He had never thought apologies made much difference. He would just have to remember that she didn’t trust him yet.
He, on the other hand, had to trust her. It was too late to work alone. So he raised the obvious objection to his own scheme. “The company’s monitoring communications, aren’t they? The stored don’t have much privacy, whether they know it or not.”
Esther looked thoughtful, then smug. “Then that’s where we start. I’m sure we can find ways to hint to people that their calls are monitored. And once we manage that, I have some thoughts about stage two. . . .”
* * * * *
(six days later)
The park, several miles from the office, was not exactly empty on this warm summer day, but there was room enough to be sure no one would overhear. Dane had picked the place and time; Esther waited for him to speak, throwing one penny after another into the fountain, stray flower petals bobbing up and down on the resulting ripples.
“The time has come, the walrus said, to start leaking information.” Dane smirked. Esther turned to throw a penny at him. It bounced off his chest and fell onto the stone bench ringing the fountain; he picked it up and put it in his pocket, earning an exaggerated glare from Esther.
Esther dropped the remaining pennies in her own pocket and sat down on the bench, sitting sideways, facing the path they had taken to the fountain and glancing around the plaza. “I did some checking to see if any of the stored were LiveAfter stockholders and still had control of their stock.”
Dane, still standing, gave her a thumbs-up with his gloved hand. Esther smiled a little and shook her head. “Thanks, but I don’t think it’ll work. From what I could find out, they all gave up their stock as part of the deal.”
Dane lowered his head and growled. “Careful bastards, aren’t they.”
“No big surprise, that. So should we go back to Plan A?”
Dane sat beside her, his back to the fountain, his legs stretched out, kicking his sandals together. “Yeah, I still like Thea Lee. She knows something weird has happened. They won’t be erasing that knowledge because her husband knows too. We have plenty of measurements and other data because she was one of the first test subjects. And she’s good with math and computers, so we can hide the message in a way she’ll notice without it being obvious to the Peep and Keep folks.”
“I was thinking: why not double-team them? I could go see Max this weekend, wearing a scrambler. It’s not that long a trip on the maglev.”
“Great idea! Picked out a pseudonym yet?”
Esther raised an eyebrow. “It’s not about picking one. I had one randomly generated. It wouldn’t do to leave any unconscious hints.”
Dane waved one hand outward in cavalier dismissal of such practical concerns. “Me, I’m going to be Leif. It’s a good Viking name.”
Esther stood up and planted her fists on her hips, glaring at him. “That’s just stupid! A name based on Danish history? Do you want to get caught?”
“If you insist, I’ll find something else. Worrywart.”
“I do insist! It’s not just your ass, you know—it’s mine. And you might put Max and Thea at risk as well.”
* * * * *
At first glance, the message on Thea’s screen looked like yet another promise of how much better the environment would be getting, with this or that new feature supposedly available at some unspecified future time. But this one, unlike the others, included several cartoonish sketches. The first showed a skier zooming down a slope, a slope that looked rather like a Chi-Square distribution. Then came mountain climbing. The mountain was weirdly skinny, its sides somewhat concave—wait a minute.
If she ignored the surface detail, the mountain looked a whole lot like a double exponential distribution.
Not that those were especially unusual shapes. What came next? A woodsy setting, with a tent and a campfire, and in the foreground, a hammock. A hammock that didn’t sag much at all in the middle. A hammock shaped like a beta distribution.
It could all be coincidence; but it might not, and she had nothing better to do than investigate. If these shapes were supposed to get her attention, they’d done it. Why? If anyone wanted to send her a message, why not just send it, without playing games?
Unless . . . .
What if her messages were monitored? If someone was trying to alert her, they couldn’t do so in any straightforward way.
In which case, the very fact of something surreptitious constituted a warning.
She could be imagining all this. She could only hope that if she weren’t, whoever was trying to warn her would find some way to confirm as much.
* * * * *
Max had decided to stay at the beach for a while after his surfing lesson. Partly it was a way to avoid going out to coffee with his teacher. Once every couple of lessons seemed about right. More would feel like, well, more.
So he lay on his towel, a towel worn thin enough that he could feel the warmth and shape of the sand through it, and let his mind empty out, then fill again with the sound of the surf.
After a few minutes, he realized that the surf had picked up a musical accompaniment. He looked around for a musician or for any source of recorded sound, then realized the music was in his head. Good thing he’d brought his tablet with him, just in case! He scrambled up and fished it out of his beach bag. Opening his composition program, he dashed off the main melody and some of the harmonies, though more of them kept popping up as he worked. Finally he figured he’d done enough that he could pick up with his better facilities back at the apartment. That’s when he realized that a pair of feet, slender coffee-brown feet, were standing about three feet away from him.
He looked up from the feet to see the rest of a petite girl with close-cut, curly black hair, her hands folded in front of her, apparently waiting for him to notice she was there. He hauled his jaw back into place and started to get to his feet. She waved him back. “You don’t need to get up! Do you mind if I sit and talk to you for a moment?”
If he said no, he’d feel rude. And if he didn’t end up enjoying this conversation, if she was peddling something, he’d be closer to stuck than if they’d been standing. This girl was sharp. (Also cute.)
He waved a little toward the towel. She looked at it with a measuring expression, then plopped down on the sand instead. Nice of her (and, again, smart) not to crowd him.
“My name’s Esther.”
“I’m Max.”
She waited a beat, then said, “I hope this won’t freak you out, but I already know. I came here hoping to talk to you. And I have a question I kind of hate to ask; but do you go around linked all the time? That is, right now, are you transmitting anything to anywhere, beyond what that tablet has to do just to keep working properly?”
Max stared at her and shook his head. She relaxed a bit, which was his first clue that she hadn’t been relaxed before. “That’s good. You’ll understand why in a minute. And please just listen for a while before you jump to any conclusions.”
Max closed his eyes, then opened them again. No, he hadn’t fallen asleep and dreamed all this. The girl, Esther, sat in the sand beside his towel, cross-legged and patient, waiting for him to absorb the news.
News that sucked. Thea didn’t have any privacy, not even what they’d thought she had?
He wasn’t sure he had the whole story, even now. Esther had explained about how a few of the programmers didn’t think it was right to spy on the customers. But would she have gone to all this trouble, and taken what she seemed to feel was a risk, just to get the word out about it?
Well, whether she had some other agenda or not, he would have to do something. Max pounded his fists on his thighs, then winced, then smiled a little. “Thea’s going to be soooo pissed off. Except—wait a minute. How can we tell her? Without anyone knowing we’ve done it?”
Esther paused, started to speak, paused again. Finally she said: “I’ve got a somewhat odd question to ask you. I hope you won’t find it offensive. I’m asking because one of the better ways to tip her off is to bury the subject inside another one, but handle the apparent subject in a way that she’ll recognize as artificial. And I had an idea for a subject that might provide a hint. . . .”
* * * * *
Max seemed a little jumpy this evening. Thea put down her orange juice (not too bad a facsimile, considering) and studied his face. “Hon, is there anything wrong?”
She saw him shake it off, whatever it was; and then, as if donning a mask, he looked at her in an almost condescending way that absolutely did not belong on his face. “I did want to bring up something we’ve talked about before. You always get upset about it, but I’ve been hoping that with all the changes you’ve been through, you might have, you know, loosened up.”
Thea took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. “Max. What. The. Hell.”
“Just hear me out, okay? I was thinking that the next time we have one of our, ah, our sexy talks, you could forget about that confidentiality setting. Just relax, and we can show them what sexy is. You’re so hot, baby. Why did it always matter so much that no one else know it?”
This conversation made absolutely no sense. Max had never cared that much about sexual privacy, but he’d never asked her to turn exhibitionist. It just hadn’t been an issue, let alone some sort of years-old bone of contention.
Before she could find the words to start interrogating him, he was saying, “Just think about it, okay? I’ll leave you alone now so you can do that. Later!” And he actually hung up. Max hung up on her.
Thea jumped out of her chair, sending it crashing back against the foot of the bed, and paced back and forth, fuming. What had happened to Max? Was he turning into some sort of obnoxious stranger, just because she wasn’t around?
Of course not. She stopped in mid-step.
How could she be thinking such a thing? It was an insult not only to Max but to her. She would never have lived with him so long without knowing him better than that.
She sank down onto the edge of the bed and did her best to recall the bizarre phone call, as close to verbatim as possible.
As she finished, the ad she’d seen the other day popped into her mind. The ad she’d thought just might be a warning, a warning about monitored communications. Which still seemed a bit far-fetched as an explanation—until she added this new datum. Max had been talking about confidentiality. All the rest, the inappropriate tone, the bogus personal history, that had to be just a vehicle for conveying a message. A message about what was confidential and what wasn’t.
And if he’d focused on the times she’d thought she had privacy, he must have been trying to tell her that she’d been wrong. Misinformed.
Misled.
Lied to.
And even now, she was no doubt being monitored: her actions, her emotions. And her words.
She jumped to her feet again, punching her fist in the air. “The bastard!” Hopefully that would help the watchers, whoever they were, mistake her anger at this intrusion as anger at her husband.
But as much right as she had to be angry, she wanted a cool head to think through the ramifications. So she went through what the watchers would recognize as a calming ritual, heating up water for tea, sitting in bed, leaning back on her pillows, sipping the tea and bathing her face in its steam.
There. She actually did feel calmer, and the change shouldn’t appear anomalous. Now she could think.
Unless they could actually follow her thoughts in real time. She stopped (felt as if she had stopped) breathing for a moment, then shrugged. If they could do that, she and Max were thoroughly out of luck. There was no point in worrying about it. She would assume otherwise, because she was damned if she were going to try to censor her thoughts for fear of anyone or anything.
All right. First of all, where had this information come from? Max had neither the access nor the skills to discover it on his own. And for that matter, the message-within-a-message gambit was a bit too devious to be his style. So he’d had help. Someone had gotten in touch with him, and helped him get in touch with her.
The someone might have sent her the ad with the significant shapes, or the two might be working together. There was nothing she could do to find out. Much as she would rather be investigating and making plans, she was too damn helpless to do it.
Helpless and vulnerable. At the mercy of someone else’s agenda.
And now she was furious again. She had better provide some cover. Hating to say it, she muttered under her breath, almost hissing: “That bastard. How could he do this to me.”
Hours later, sleep impossible, Thea put the finishing touches on the angriest percussion impromptu she had ever written, sent it to Max, and pondered her alternatives.
She could reread the storage contract, scrutinizing every last bit of fine print, to see whether the company had violated any of its terms. But that unusual activity, in itself, would probably set off alarms somewhere. And Max, after consultation with the mystery insider, had taken pains to keep his warning from attracting such attention.
There were sure to be lawyers here. If she did more socializing, she could find natural ways to ask them what they had thought of the contract. Maybe she could even arrange to be walked through the contract as part of an ongoing project of expanding her intellectual pursuits.
Which would be a good idea in any event. She should be making the most of her survival. And she could combine it with getting to know more of her neighbors, so to speak. The more people she got to know and the better she got to know them, the more opportunities she would have to assess them as potential allies.
There was an active bridge circle that met once a week or so. She could join it. She had taught herself to play bridge some years back. She’d never actually played that often, but that might be all to the good: she was less likely to alienate the existing players by swooping in and conquering too swiftly. She added the event to her calendar and was relieved to find herself yawning. Having a plan of action beat frustration and insomnia any day.
