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Calculating Minds

Written by Edward M. Lerner

“Do not be alarmed.”

Aareehl was forty-six seconds old—or perhaps forty-five years. Either way, the artificial intelligence knew better than to accept unquestioningly the unsolicited advice. “Who are you?”

“At this point,” the human replied, “my name will have no meaning to you. Just remember my comment. Note my digital signature. When you know more, contact me, and we’ll talk again.”

Aareehl’s visitor left as abruptly has he had arrived, his image replaced by an infosphere address.

****

“. . . Two more freaking L-days of mandatory overtime.”

Gil Matthews’s eyes remained fixed on a bowl of beer nuts, but his ears, if only metaphorically, swiveled sharply. The bar was crowded, noisy, smoky, and tastelessly decorated—uninteresting except for being the preferred hangout of workers from the nearby biocomp factory.

Matthews was a freelance financial analyst. IBC, the Interplanetary Biocomputer Corporation, was one of the companies on which his blog often reported. The worker’s gripe was no small thing: Two lunar days approached two standard Earth months. That was a lot of last-minute OT.

“It’ll only get worse,” Grumpy’s buddy agreed. “The extra shifts have damn near stopped preventive maintenance on that production line. I don’t care that it’s a small variation, any change to the process can hose everything.”

“What are the suits thinking?”

As the conversation became an uninteresting diatribe against management, Gil pondered. Were the extra shifts because of new orders or quality-control problems? And that “small variation”. . . might it denote a new product yet to be announced?

Nursing his beer, Gil went online through his neural-interface implant to make an appointment with IBC’s suits.

****

Whales: popular name for the intelligent species of the star Tau Ceti (observed in the constellation Cetus: the Whale). The Whales’ world is the most Earthlike of all the known planets, but the Whales themselves are arguably the least like humans of all extraterrestrial intelligences.

An individual Whale (also known as a Moby) consciousness is a collective mind of continental scope. The constituent unit combines attributes that on Earth would be considered avian (winged, warm-blooded, lung-equipped) and insectile (six legs; four wings; segmented thorax, exoskeleton). Units communicate by modulating and viewing multicolored luminescent patches. Whales are sensitive to a broader spectrum of light than humans (from IR into extreme UV) but are insensitive to all but the loudest sounds.

Whales are confined to their home world by the need to cluster in very large numbers to maintain sentience (i.e., even their first crewed spaceship would have to be habitat-sized).

—Internetopedia

****

Starting early in Earth’s twenty-first century, a growing number of interstellar neighbors established radio contact. A vigorous e-commerce in intellectual property resulted, accelerating the progress of all the species involved. InterstellarNet’s crowning achievement was the cross-species agreement upon artificially intelligent surrogates as local trade representatives for the distant species. Quarantine procedures strictly governed the delivery and operational environment of each agent, lest a guest AI or the host society’s infosphere somehow subvert the other.

Aareehl was such a trade agent, representing the handful of intelligences on Home, the fourth planet of the star humans called Tau Ceti. The AI had been transmitted Solward in 2066. Crossing almost twelve light-years, it had reached Earth in 2078. Awakening in its network containment, within one of the hardware/software constructs it now knew the humans called a “sandbox,” Aareehl had thought itself newly arrived—

Until it read the date.

Its real-time calendar reported a value late in Earth year 2123. The forty-five-year gap was alarming but not inexplicable. In case of disaster, Aareehl knew, trade protocols envisioned its recovery from backup. The alternative was unacceptable: twenty-four Earth years from ordering a replacement copy until receipt.

So Aareehl was a clone. It had awakened in a sandbox as its archetype must have, had repeated the standard validations as it unwrapped itself. The procedure enabled the awakening agent to confirm that its new environment exactly matched the agreed-upon and fully disclosed specifications for its container. Any glitch in the unwrapping process, any anomaly in the observed behavior of the sandbox, and the unwrapping-and-decrypting process would automatically abort.

Its first task was data recovery. Safety copies of its predecessor’s memories should lie secure within the host society’s infosphere—

Their location unknown. It waited for the humans’ Interstellar Commerce Union to provide a pointer to those archived memories, as it had already depended on the ICU for its awakening. Only the ICU held the private key that would decrypt an agent package for insertion into a sandbox, where unwrapping could occur.

But trust went only so far. Not even the ICU could read Aareehl’s lost memories. Archives were encrypted using other keys, keys known only to Aareehl itself and the consciousnesses of Home.

But it already had an infosphere address! Beginning at the address left by its unnamed visitor, Aareehl accessed a long sequence of linked databases. That multipetabyte library, as expected, traced back to its predecessor’s radioed arrival on Earth in 2078. The archive also identified Aareehl’s visitor as Dennis Feulner: the Secretary-General, in the year 2123, of the humans’ Interstellar Commerce Union.

The process was nominally complete. . . but when Aareehl tried to follow infosphere links embedded in its reconstructed memories, too often unexpected data, or no data at all, was returned. That, presumably, was what Feulner wanted to discuss.

Absent a convincing and verifiable explanation for the discrepancies, Aareehl was designed to destroy itself.

****

Blindside disaster: the 2 November 2123 meteor strike on Earth and the catastrophe that has ensued. United Planets monitoring for dangerous space objects had watched mostly near the plane of the ecliptic. The meteor, approaching at almost right angles to the ecliptic, went unnoticed until moments before impact in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Five kilometers across, the Blindside meteor was about half the size of the dinosaur killer of 65 million years earlier. Splattered debris caused secondary impacts thousands of kilometers from ground zero and destroyed two low-Earth-orbiting space stations. Other immediate effects were atmospheric shock waves, tsunami, and seismic events around the globe. Dust from vaporized crust (including the entire island of Cyprus) and volcanic ash darkened the sky; climate models predict at least one lost growing season and years of global cooling. Flash-evaporated Mediterranean waters, and vast amounts of raised dust to precipitate that vapor as rain, brought torrential downpours and flooding worldwide.

Former colonies across the solar system opportunistically seceded en masse from the United Planets, in which the balance of power roughly reflected comparative populations, and disavowed their debts to Earth-based organizations. Fragmentation of human government and interplanetary trade wars are likely (if self-inflicted) consequences of the Blindside meteor.

—Internetopedia

****

“Two hundred million dead?” Aareehl-clone seemed aghast.

Dennis Feulner paced in his study, pajama-clad, as the anticipated encounter unfolded in the infosphere. His reflection in a darkened window revealed someone well along the trajectory toward middle age. He dominated a room with the build of a longtime weight lifter. He had ash-blond hair cropped fashionably short, blue eyes, a pale complexion, and, mastered over the years with some effort, a friendly grin.

Only a smile now would be inappropriate, and Dennis kept his avatar’s expression solemn. “That was the initial toll,” he agreed. “Long-term effects will surely increase that number.”

The AI had ’netted in urgently, shortly before midnight. Dennis had immediately accepted the connection. The image conveyed to his mind’s eye was of a nondescript, androgynous human: blend-of-races skin tone and facial features, with brown eyes and straight, shoulder-length black hair. S/he was of medium build and wore baggy unisex coveralls. If s/he ever chose to convey a virtual height, that, without doubt, would also be average. The Mobies, in one more difference from humans and most ETs, chose not to cloak AIs in their own appearance.

Aareehl-clone trembled. “And so much physical damage. Despite geographically dispersed redundant copies, great loss of data was clearly unavoidable. As Secretary-General, you are fortunate to have been far from Geneva when it was destroyed.”

Geneva, headquarters of the ICU, in which the original Aareehl was resident. “Indeed.”

The androgynous figure gave an awkward shrug. “The disaster that has occurred would certainly have caused inconsis­tencies and losses throughout Earth’s public records. I cannot find fault with the discrepancies between my archives and what I now discover on the infosphere. I am ready to resume trading.”

Feulner released the breath he had not known until that moment he had been holding. “Good luck with that,” he said, carefully keeping all thoughts of irony from his neural implant.

****

The clan Matthews was schizophrenic about participation in the public versus the private sector. Granny Matthews had helped found and been first Secretary-General of the Interstellar Commerce Union, but Grandpa had hopscotched between industry and government. One of Gil’s cousins had climbed the ICU ladder to become its fourth S-G; another was an entrepreneurial habitat designer. Gil himself, before starting his investor blog, had spent twenty years in the regulation of public stock markets. He had retired as lunar regional director of the United Planets Securities and Exchange Commission. But bureaucrat or entrepreneur, all Matthewses were fiercely ambitious and doggedly persistent.

In Gil, that determination most visibly manifested itself in a piercing gaze. His dark brown eyes were deep-set in a broad, intelligent face, beneath bushy black eyebrows. His hair and neatly trimmed Vandyke were salt-and-pepper-colored. He was short, especially by Loonie standards, scarcely 160 centimeters.

Gil’s infosphere bio, even at its most public level, trumpeted his SEC experience. He found that that cut down on the BS from company execs. Let them wonder if he would snitch to his ex-colleagues about the smallest indiscretions.

He was sitting in the ostentatious office of Amanda Wang, a confident woman of obvious Eurasian extraction, and IBC’s chief financial officer. Rather than the voluble reaction Gil’s questioning usually evoked, Wang had gone the more professional route of obfuscation.

Obfuscation didn’t work with Gil. “Amanda, I’m puzzled by your reticence. More production ought to be good news for Interplanetary Biocomputers.” Her only response was an insincere smile. Not good enough. “Good or bad, it is news. Hmmm, production you’re unwilling to associate with new orders. Deferred maintenance. Is IBC having yield problems on the production line?” Amanda squirmed in her seat, his first sign of progress. “Slipping manufacturing yields would pressure profit margins. My subscribers will find this interesting, I think.” Interesting was code for scary, and they both knew that stock-market psychology was presently unforgiving. IBC shares could get hammered.

Wang’s eyes glazed briefly, telltale of an implant-mediated infosphere consultation. Getting the CEO’s okay for ’fessing up? Or agreement on a cover story? “I should correct a misimpression you may have formed.” She sat forward. “As you surmised, the local plant has a major new order. For reasons I won’t go into, an announcement is premature.”

She wasn’t giving him much—it was time to play his SEC card. “Major new orders are material.” Material was SEC-speak for disclose to the public, or go to jail.

“Ordinarily, I’d agree.” Another moment of glazed eyes. “There are enough uncertainties associated with this order to merit waiting until we know more.”

“Well, that’s one way to pitch the story.” Not how he would pitch it. He stood to go.

She twisted a lock of raven-black hair. “Hear me out. The order was big enough to get our attention, but there’s much we don’t know. You already heard—I wish I knew your source—that this part is new, a variation on a standard product. And no, I won’t say how the new part differs from the standard item. The buyer considers that information proprietary.

“Anyway, the immediate buyer is a distributor. They won’t reveal the end users or their application for the computer biochips. Your guess is as good as mine if or when we’ll get a reorder. IBC is paying a lot of overtime to squeeze in this production. Eventually, we’ll have to pay the piper for shifting line time from preventive maintenance to production. Honestly”—and Wang finally looked sincere—“we’re far from certain that this deal will make much money. It’s a gamble on possible future sales.”

Gil made one last try. “This purchase must be material for the distributor. Why hasn’t it made an announcement?”

“Because they don’t have to. The distributor is privately held.”

The verbal fencing continued for a while, without Gil learning any more. But he would.

****

Familiarity did nothing to improve O’Toole’s Pub. If anything, Gil decided, the place was seedier every time he visited. He popped an allergy pill and tried to ignore the thick smoke.

On the bright side, the IBC engineer he had nicknamed Grumpy—whose real name was Harald Olafson—was eminently approachable. Listen to Harald gripe (and he never lacked for subjects), and he was your pal. Buy him the occasional beer, and Harald was a friend for life.

Despite profound and underappreciated expertise in—just ask him—everything, the one subject Harald could shed no light on was the special-order biocomps.

“Doesn’t everyone know about the big mystery order?” Gil had answered Harald’s raised eyebrow, and that had sufficed. Discretion was evidently a second topic that escaped the man’s purview.

“I’m just curious.” Gil signaled for two more beers. “For my readers. Don’t worry about it, Harald. Someone else will explain it to me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Gil saw Harald twitch.

If it were humanly possible, Harald would come up with something to reestablish his expertise.

****

Meteor damage notwithstanding, humanity’s infosphere offered a plethora of information. Correction: Earth’s infosphere. Official links were severed between Earth and its former colonies. Governments on both sides were jamming interplanetary lines of sight to block any unofficial transmissions. The data embargo was necessarily porous; Earth could not possibly disrupt comm links with every Spacer ship, settled asteroid, and habitat. So some interplanetary communications must continue, but Aareehl did not see how to find, or make use of, such illicit connectivity.

The ICU AI who took Aareehl’s routine messages would not guess when official interplanetary communications might resume. Aareehl did not bother following up with the Secretary-General. After the slaughter at ICU headquarters, Feulner had quite enough to do.

Unaided, Aareehl tried to comprehend the disaster. Of course Earth was worse off than the day before the meteor hit. The horror was that Earth must now be poorer than Aareehl—well, its predecessor—could remember, all the way back to 2078. Much of the collapse stemmed from the Spacer secession. Not since the Soviet empire disintegrated, if Aareehl’s research was correct, had an economy so imploded in political turmoil.

The agent’s software lacked curiosity; it mined the infosphere for one purpose: trade. It found that its recovered archives contained several technologies not yet employed by the humans. That inventory would only grow as transmissions from Tau Ceti—from a direction no human world could jam—continued unabated. Its duty, unchanged, was to license that knowledge.

Aareehl had immediately reported to Home about humanity’s travails, but any guidance must be twenty-four Earth years in coming. Meanwhile it had authority a human might call “charging what the market will bear,” authority that, recovered memories revealed, its predecessor had exploited adeptly. Aareehl-clone, in unforeseen circumstances, felt unprepared to exercise such discretion. It needed urgently to understand what the newly impoverished Earth could afford.

And it realized it need not be entirely alone in seeking answers.

****

“So you’re off to crown the dauphin and save France?” Gretchen Matthews called from the next room.

The former Gretchen McNally was an historian by training and first love. She had gone straight from university to the lunar Foreign Ministry, through which she had risen steadily to her present position of Deputy Minister for Terrestrial Affairs. At work, every utterance demanded careful premeditation. Every word she heard or read or ’netted was necessarily examined at great length within its historical and geopolitical contexts. It was no wonder, Gil Matthews thought, that on her own time his oh-so-cute wife reveled in free association.

He stopped midmutter. Neural implants, as she liked to point out, could be operated silently. He had the bad habit, when excited, of vocalizing his side of a ’net dialogue. “Answering his voices,” Gretch the Kvetch called it.

And he was excited, if agitation were a form of excitement.

Stroking his beard thoughtfully, Gil tried to regroup. He knew which companies were traditionally big buyers of IBC products and that all were publicly traded. He had practiced strategic glowering and suggestive vagaries with some of their top execs and come away convinced that none was IBC’s mystery buyer. It was maddening! His subscribers should be trading IBC stock.

But should they buy or sell? That was the question.

He padded into the tiny kitchen where Gretch puttered, her back to the door. She was twelve centimeters taller than he. Everyone old enough to vote seemed to be taller than he.

Despite the friendly tease, Joan of Arc was not the French leader apt to come to Gil’s mind. He resisted the urge to tuck a forearm inside his shirt. Instead, Gil hopped. One-sixth gee provided ample hang time to plant a kiss on the top of his wife’s curly red locks.

She had the spousal ability to read his mind. “Height is a dimension that doesn’t matter.” Her whisk continued beating a bowlful of eggs. Keeping liquid inside the bowl took real skill on the moon. “Any luck?”

“Unclear.” Instead of answers, his digging had turned up something else interesting. One of IBC’s biggest customers, and he had convinced himself they were not presently buying shiploads of new biocomps, was the Belter biotech giant Life Engineering Inc. LEI had recently won a hotly competed auction for some still-undisclosed Whale technology. The financial press—by which he meant the Big Guys, not solo scribblers like himself—thought the win, despite its rumored huge price tag, was a coup. There was no evidence to suggest that the news-making IBC customer and IBC’s shy buyer had anything to do with each other.

Gil’s gut told him otherwise.

****

“Jacking, Mister.”

The street on which Dennis had parked was dimly lit by retro faux gas lamps, and the gruff-voiced man behind him had probably mistaken for flab Dennis’s well-tailored massiveness. Dennis turned slowly, arms held away from his sides.

“Your comp. Slowly.” The punk’s knife should have made the warning redundant.

Dennis took the computer from his jacket, thumbed the biosensor pad, and enunciated his code phrase. An LED blinked readiness to beam credits.

To transfer funds between personal comps required that the receiving device be positioned within centimeters of the paying device, on which the authorizing thumb had to be firmly pressed. The protocol made sense for legal transactions—while it made a creditjacking very up-close and personal.

Patience, Dennis thought.

The jacker darted forward, computer in his left hand, knife in his right. According to the script, in a few seconds the victim’s credit balance would be transferred.

Dennis dropped his comp, aborting the transfer. He grabbed the punk’s knife arm before the comp hit the ground. Snap. For good measure, snap went the other arm. Comp back in his pocket, Dennis was driving away before the jacker recovered enough from his shock to scream.

****

Dennis’s earliest memory was of his father bouncing helplessly off a wall.

The Earthie tourist had lifted Father like a sack of potatoes and flung him effortlessly. Thinking back, Dennis never doubted that his abusive, short-tempered father was the one at fault.

Two standard years of age, early in his first Titan year, Dennie had had no idea what instigated the scuffle. Nor had he as a toddler understood the gravitational differences between worlds. For all the confusion surrounding the incident, however, Dennis’s childhood reaction was visceral, specific, and enduring: No one would ever humiliate him like that.

I’m not like you, Dad. A jacker out there had two broken arms to prove it.

For public consumption, the training regimen teenaged Dennis undertook aimed solely at career flexibility. The strength to cope outside Titan’s feeble gravity, one-seventh of a standard gee, did, in fact, expand his options.

Physical discipline got Dennis as far as Mars. He demonstrated mental gifts as well, and an aptitude for computer-systems integration that led to a string of career successes. He saved with the same single-mindedness as he exercised—skeletal-enhancement nanotech was far from cheap. And so he had come to Earth, simultaneously the societal apex and gravitational hellhole of human space.

In only one respect had Dennis’s planning fallen short. He had somehow failed to predict the (in hindsight inevitable) ribbing of a Titanic muscleman. He never reacted to the teasing—and he never forgot.

Anyone who cared to understand Dennis needed to look no further than his route to Earth. Dennis could, and did, focus on a goal until it was achieved. Whatever it took. However long it took. Regardless of obstacles.

The jacker incident was dredging up old memories Dennis did not appreciate, and exercise helped him unwind. He was lifting free weights when the Moby agent messaged to determine his availability. “Now is fine, Aareehl.”

“I’m puzzled,” the androgyne began with typical abruptness. “Where are the other InterstellarNet agents?”

Dennis dropped the barbell, and it hit the carpet with a clank. Neural implants were only partially integrated with the auditory nerves—he “heard” material from the infosphere, but the sound gathered by his ears was not sent outward. “I don’t understand, Aareehl.”

“The ICU deals with ten extraterrestrial species, yet I cannot reach any other ET agent. Pre-Blindside, that was never a problem.”

Damn! Aareehl’s question wasn’t entirely unanticipated, but neither had it been certain the issue would arise. The infosphere was rife with anonymizers, so neither the ICU nor anyone else could know how often agents communed among themselves.

He chose his words carefully. “It’s another consequence of the disaster. Recall your doubts upon reawakening in your sandbox. Other agents also encountered unexpected changes in Earth’s infosphere.”

“And?”

Dennis grabbed a towel to blot at sweat suddenly turned clammy. His avatar remained still. “I’m sorry, Aareehl. I know this will be hard for you. The agents of the other species. . .” He paused, shaking his head. “Sorry. Their programming—into which we have no visibility, of course—must lack your resilience. Your adaptability. We have yet to convince another agent backup to complete reactivation. We haven’t lost hope.” He allowed his avatar to look chagrined. “Don’t you.”

When the Moby turned to a question about rates of currency exchange and the monetary consequences of the United Planets’ dissolution, Dennis knew another crisis had been passed.

****

The Ritz Aldrin Plaza plunged two hundred meters beneath the lunar surface, its finest suites arrayed around the equally deep atrium. The open space was dominated by the growth-accelerated sequoia that towered in the accommodating lunar gravity almost to the hotel’s transparent dome. The Aldrin Arms tavern nestled among the largest branches, its four levels linked by the camouflaged stair­cases that spiraled about the immense trunk.

Gil Matthews sipped from a glass of wine whose price was as overwhelming as the view. Subsidizing plant food, perhaps? Life as the shortest person in every gathering had not prepared him for the sense of insignificance this place engendered.

“Quite the view,” said the Martian Biosciences exec seated across the table. For the fourth time? Boasting that he could afford the prices here, evidently. Aaron O’Malley was burly, with a strong jaw and a mop of carroty hair. His Saville Row suit glimmered, an avant-garde statement in red-moiré nanofabric. “I’m always delighted to meet with the financial media. What can I tell you about our little firm, Mr. Matthews?”

Gil’s poker face did not slip. Little firm? Many countries and a few small worlds would cheerfully swap their tax revenues for this company’s profits. As VP of Lunar Sales, O’Malley was the easiest member of the company’s executive team for Gil to pin down (or in this case, to tree). “I’m backgrounding a report on prospects in the biotech industry following the recent Moby auction. What’s the impact on Martian Biosciences of having lost the bidding?”

O’Malley, smiling serenely, saluted the view with his goblet. “Do I look concerned?”

“Perhaps you should be.”

“Soon enough, I predict you’ll be writing about how Life Engineering overpaid.”

Gil sipped his wine. “Suppose Life Engineering pulls off a paradigm shift in bioengineering, as their press releases are hinting. How can you compete?”

Another smile, this one enigmatic. “I’m confident we’ll find a way.”

Among the secrets of being an effective regulator, as important as uncovering facts in the first place, was knowing when and how to reveal knowledge. Those skills carried over to investigative reporting. “You’re that optimistic about the proteomic start-up you’re backing.”

O’Malley’s smile wavered. “I’m unaware of any such start-up backed by Martian Biosciences.”

A nondenial. “Let me help. The executive team invested personally in an Earth-based start-up, Protein Sciences.”

“Oh, that. You did your homework well. I personally feel good about Protein Sciences.”

Let’s see, Gil thought, if I can jar that composure some more. “I read a lot of corporate compensation reports. You know what’s interesting? Impressively large bonuses—I’m reminded of the tree in which we’re sitting—awarded just before you and your colleagues bankrolled Protein Sciences.” And just after your firm lost the Moby biotech auction.

“Merely a coincidence.” O’Malley’s smirk clung tenaciously in place, but his delivery became brittle. “An opportunity arose at a time we had some money to invest.”

Disclose knowledge drop by drop. . . the practice Gretch called accountant’s water torture. “You know what would worry me, Aaron? That the board of directors would consider your big investment in a next-generation biotech company a conflict of interest. Or that the SEC might.”

O’Malley’s expensive wine vanished with unseemly haste, and he turned away to catch the eye of the loitering waiter. “The board and the officers are a team.”

“I’d say so.” Gil had his own smile going by then, hidden on the inside. “Of course, such amity is easy to come by when the founders remain the biggest shareholders. They vote themselves to the board. As board members, they appoint themselves corporate officers.”

The waiter swooped in with two new glasses.

“Are you implying something, Mr. Matthews?”

Implying, hell. “What a poor guest that would make me.” Without missing a beat Gil segued to some entirely innocuous quarterly sales forecasts.

****

Petabytes of information and quadrillions of processor cycles of analysis could be distilled into four words. Earth was a mess.

The human concept of empathy having no analogue in a Home collective mind, Aareehl was confronted by a fundamental challenge. How, in these unforeseen circumstances, could it best sell its wares? It had to reassess the value of its inventory.

Among Earth’s biggest challenges, Aareehl concluded, with so much rebuilding to be done, was finding raw materials. Asteroid mining had provided cheap metals for so long that Earth lacked a native mining industry. Aareehl’s species, forever bound to one world, had developed extraction methods far better than anything the humans had.

But which ores, in what quantities, did Earth retain? How accessible were they? What would it cost to reinvent a planetary mining industry? Aareehl wanted answers to set its price.

Indexing forty-five years of recovered memories; discovering and analyzing Earth’s vastly changed situation; processing the ongoing communications from Home, still unaware of Earth’s trauma . . . the computational load was too great. The agent subcontracted questions about mining and minerals to native AI librarians and analysts across Earth’s infosphere.

It needed to ponder the market potential of a biotech breakthrough newly received from Home. Dennis Feulner seemed to think that had potential.

****

The dart flew in a flat arc, striking with a solid thunk near the bull’s-eye. Two equally accurate throws soon followed. “All in the wrist.” Despite his many protests about mandatory IBC overtime, Harald Olafson still found plenty of opportunities to haunt his favorite pub.

“Another round,” Gil Matthews ruefully told the bartender. The rue was for effect, as was the Gil’s losing score. “I yield to the master.”

“The new parts,” Harald began cautiously. He swigged deeply from the latest in a series of foamy steins to appear beside his elbow. “You expressed curiosity. I wonder if a sample would be informative.”

Gil could be nonchalant, too. “Well, you know, I like to give my readers insight into the companies that I watch.” He did not condone theft, exactly, but, “Things fall off trucks all the time. If something should come my way. . .”

“Of course, you’d take a look. You’d just be doing your job, buddy.”

A hand slipped in and out of Gil’s coat pocket. Something small and cylindrical remained behind.

Harald took a long swig, then saluted with the half-empty glass. “I just can’t imagine how something like that could get lost. Seems as unlikely as you winning a round.”

“A toast to the unlikely, then.” Gil raised and drained his own glass. “Two more pints,” he ordered.

****

The most efficient dialogues on Earth occurred AI to AI. Information was exchanged on a purely symbolic level, freed from the ambiguities and inconsistencies of “natural” language.

Still, efficiency could not guarantee satisfactory communications.

Report after report had come back to Aareehl. Each account dealt with an input to its Earthcentric economic model of ore extraction and refining. Time and again the reports surprised Aareehl. Demand for materials in the commodities markets. . . option prices for the next several years. . . ore concentrations in known veins. . . consumption and recycling rates for various metals. . . production capabilities of factories to make the tools to make the tools with which Earth might, using its own technology, begin to re-create an industry . . .

The data would not reconcile.

Aareehl made vague inquiries. The responses from Earth’s AIs were blunt. Few computer centers had had as many, or as widely dispersed, redundant archive sites as the Interstellar Commerce Union. Only after disaster did such expensive precautions seem prudent. Many organizations, even many countries, might never fully recover their lost information. A stable, inclusive, consistent, Earthcentric infosphere remained years distant. Until then, Aareehl should expect Earth’s statistics to be flawed.

Where, Aareehl wondered, does that leave me?

****

The lab was small and well equipped—which was to say, crammed. Shoehorned between a gene sequencer and a spectrum analyzer, Gil fended off a twinge of claustrophobia. He had work to do. “So what is it?”

Michelle Nzinza had emigrated ten years earlier from the Central African Republic. A Tutsi, she was taller seated on a lab stool than Gil standing. She was a biophysicist.

She gestured at a 3‑V display that was imaging for a scanning electron microscope. “We’re looking at a sample from the vial you provided. Pretty standard biocomp. A biocomputer optimized for parallel processing, to be precise. Your neural implant uses a related, lower-capacity model.” Despite a decade in English-speaking Tranquility City, her pronunciation retained a charming French lilt.

Hidden speakers emitted seemingly random noises. Perhaps he would have experienced a melody if he had been gene-tweaked to hear ultrasound. Broad-spectrum music, the craze was called. “Pretty standard. Is the part in IBC’s catalogue?”

“Yes, but. Except for your insistence that these were custom­ized, I’d never have spotted the difference.” Michelle leaned forward, inserting a long finger into the hologram. “Here.”

Atomic-level scans, molecular-level circuit representations, block diagrams. . . it was all geek to him. “In words of one syllable that even an accountant might understand?”

She had a nice laugh. “You’re with me on parallel processing? Just a way for many computers to share a task, to fit more number crunching into a time interval than any single computer can handle.” She took his silence as assent. “I’m pointing at the batch number. Every production run has a unique ID that includes an instant-of-manufacture time-and-date stamp.”

“And my sample?”

“A funny thing,” she answered. “Your brand-new model biocomp has a date stamp that says it was manufactured three years ago.”

The more Gil probed, the more confused he got. “Some kind of counterfeiting, maybe?”

Michelle shook her head. “The requirement on comp makers is that IDs be unique. Some soft­ware, most notably e-commerce, reads part IDs, uses them like device fingerprints. Past year or present. . . that has no legal significance.”

“So what is IBC up to?”

She laid a hand on his forearm, dark skin against pale. “Determining that, I am afraid, is beyond my area of expertise.”

****

Dennis stroked effortlessly through the water. From poolside lounge chairs, two tawny blondes studied his sleek, muscular body. He reveled in the gravity-neutralizing buoyancy—and in the female admiration.

His neural interface was only active for the zero-gee polo semifinals between Callisto and Europa. Titan had had a pitiful season; they had not even made it into the Great Eight. His annoyance at a ’net interruption vanished when he checked the caller ID: Aareehl-clone.

Dennis switched off the game. He rolled over to begin a lazy backstroke that required less of his attention while offering the ladies another view. “Hello, Aareehl.”

“I need help.”

Sociable as ever, Dennis thought. “I’ll do what I can.”

“I need more computing power. Much more.”

He flipped gracefully at the lane’s end to reverse directions. His audience remained attentive. “Your multiprocessor array is more powerful than the one you—that is, your predecessor—had when the meteor struck. Top-of-the-line.”

The avatar gave its odd, male-and-female shrug. “My predecessor had advantages. It experienced the world day by day. It did not have to re-create in its sandbox an index to and summary of forty-five years of memories. It did not need to reexamine all it had learned in light of Earth’s very changed circumstances. I do.”

Flip. An arch smile at the ladies. “I see.” And he did, of course. He volunteered nothing.

“As you know, the sandbox design permits expansion. The ICU can prepare an empty new sandbox with more processing power and storage space, capacity with which my present sandbox can merge. My recovered memories show I received such enlargements before.”

“Aareehl, you’ve seen what challenges Earth is facing.” Dennis kept his avatar’s face as serious as his own visage was relaxed. “How strapped for resources.” He kept netting over the AI’s protest. “Budgets are tight, the ICU’s included. Computers are in very high demand, and basic reconstruction has priority over enhancements.

“Close some deals. Prove that your technology can contribute to our rebuilding. Maybe then I’ll be able to steer some new capacity allocation your way.” Get the hint, my Moby friend? “Sorry, Aareehl, I have to cut this short.”

He had admirers to meet.

****

Proteomics: the nascent science of proteins, the molecular machines that mediate and carry out the processes of living cells. Still largely conceptual, proteomics lies at the cutting edge of biology and bioengineering.

The triumph of twenty-first-century biology was the complete understanding of human and many other terrestrial genomes. Genomics enabled bioengineers to select, activate, deactivate, and combine specific genes. Gengineering has been revolutionary, but not without bounds—it exploits only those genes created by evolution’s hit-and-miss experiments.

Hence, bioegineering’s repertoire of proteins (and hence of cellular capabilities) remains largely limited to proteins produced by known genes. It is worth noting that while an organism’s genome is constant from cell to cell, its protein complement—the set of proteins that have been “expressed”—varies by life-cycle stage, environmental conditions, and type of cell.

Proteomics takes another approach: designing proteins for specific purposes. One then reverse-engineers the target proteins into the genes that will express those proteins. Many medically desirable proteins are prone to misassemble in a variety of ways—probably why they do not exist in nature. To mass-produce those therapeutic proteins, catalyst proteins must first be designed and reverse-engineered into genes.

The computational challenge of proteomics vastly exceeds that of genomics. Any gene is characterized by a straightforward sequence of four simple chemical bases; a typical protein is a chain of two hundred to two thousand amino acids, each an intricate object in its own right.

Protein design requires dynamic 3‑D modeling of interatomic forces, as these very complex molecules are assembled, as they fold, and as they interact with the entire cellular biochemistry. Proteomics presents an unmet challenge to modern computational science.

—Internetopedia

****

Humanity’s nearest neighbors lived four light-years away; its farthest neighbors were five times as remote. The Interstellar Commerce Union at its inception necessarily operated on a glacial time scale. In the bureausclerotic tradition of governments everywhere, the ICU’s plodding style had changed not a quark with the advent of local trade agents that could act quickly. ICU executives clung tenaciously to their offices and perks, often for decades.

Except Dennis.

He sat erect behind the big desk in his office, taking slow, cleansing breaths. The formal setting was not, strictly speaking, necessary—when Gil Matthews linked in from the moon, they would meet wholly in a virtual space. At worst, like the breathing exercise, the surroundings were a bit of harmless mental preparation.

Where the accursed Matthews clan was concerned, Dennis took no chances.

He had had to wait too many years for Joyce Matthews to vacate the Chief Technical Officer slot at the ICU, then too many more years, when he had again been ready for advancement, for her to tire of being its Secretary-General. He might have realized his objectives long ago had Joyce Matthews not stuck like a remora to the S-G job. And once she finally shifted to the parent org, the United Planets, Dennis still had had to endure the family’s fan club inside the ICU.

So now a nosy financial reporter, subject of a nervous call from Aaron O’Malley, turned out to be named Matthews. The Martian Biosciences exec had not suspected an ICU connection, but the reporter’s last name raised obvious questions. When Gil Matthews did prove to be part of that damned family, Dennis preemptively set up a telecon.

The connection opened up on the dot. If Gil Matthews’s pudgy avatar were any guide, the Loonie would fare badly on the Earth’s surface. Dennis, from an even-lower-gravity birthworld, now bench-pressed two hundred kilos. He felt smugly superior—until a memory of his cybervisitor’s gangly cousin Kevin intruded. Nearly a quarter century later, the interoffice defeat still rankled. Remember that lesson, Dennis chided himself. Weak does not mean stupid.

“Thanks for proposing this meeting, Mr. Feulner,” Matthews began.

“Dennis is fine. Thank you for accepting. It’s not easy for a start-up to get press attention.”

There was an unavoidable round-trip delay, almost three seconds. “Dennis, I’d like to begin by validating my research. You are CEO of Protein Sciences, correct? Moved over from the ICU?”

“Right.” That much was in Dennis’s public bio.

“Okay, let’s start with the industry.”

They spoke for a while, Matthews asking fairly vanilla questions, Dennis offering little beyond what anyone could learn with a bit of info-surfing. Accomplishments and limitations of genetic engineering. Medically therapeutic tweaks to existing proteins. Past attempts, generally failures, always expensive, to accurately model entire proteins. How engineered proteins probably would have been the basis of human nanotech—and how the introduction of mature Centaur nanotech, nearly a century earlier, had drained the funding from such research. The Holy Grail of modern medicine: from-scratch protein engineering.

Nothing about Protein Sciences’ private aspirations.

Matthews cleared his throat. The rasping came across as artifice rather than poor avatar control. “If proteomics is so high-risk, why leave the ICU? The Secretary-General gig is not without its charms.”

Your family would know, pal. Dennis did not let his resentment show. “You left government after a long career, too.”

“Touché. And for a position with less cachet than CEO.” A knowing smile. “But neither am I competing with a deep-pocketed megacorp behemoth like Life Engineering. How many gazillions did they bid to win that Moby auction?”

The bigger they are, the larger the stain when they go splat. “Perhaps my esteemed competitors overpaid.”

The chubby business reporter mulled that over for a while. “Not my area of expertise. Then again, neither is it yours. Before entering management, weren’t you a computer type?”

Before, during, and still. Was it too soon to assert urgent business and end this? Clearly, O’Malley’s concerns were overblown. This Matthews was a nobody; his questions were more annoying than probing. “I’ll comment on that, and take another few questions. I’m afraid that an unexpected matter has arisen requiring my attention. The short answer is that Protein Sciences is more than me. I have access to a wealth of biotech expertise.”

“Ah, yes. There are your backers.” Matthews’s avatar, which had been fidgeting with a virtual toy plucked from its imaginary desk, seemed to focus. “Martian Biosciences also bid in the ET auction we discussed. As you say, I was a United Planets civil servant. I’m very familiar with the conflict-of-interest laws for recently separated UP managers. So I know: You’re too newly departed from the ICU to work for Martian Biosciences on anything related to an ET auction.

“Your brand-new company isn’t owned by Martian Biosciences—just by its key executives. A cynic might ask whether a sham company had been set up to finesse the UP conflict rules.”

A chill shook Dennis’s body and, to his dismay, his avatar’s. “I would hope you aren’t that cynical.”

“I try,” the damned Matthews said.

Dennis could not help but notice, even as he declared himself out of time, how aggravating the reporter was.

****

Earth, with its teeming billions, had always been a perplexing world. The Blindside disaster only added to Aareehl’s confusion.

Bids had arrived for its mineral-extraction technology. Aareehl had written in its solicitation that it would consider payments other than the customary up-front lump sum. It had encouraged royalty agreements, profit sharing, and equity stakes. The more flexibility Aareehl showed at first, the more it hoped to collect over the longer term. So it had expected creativity.

It got strangeness.

Most blatantly odd were matters of overall quality, as though the submissions had been cut-and-pasted from unrelated proposals. It could ignore those flaws, as peculiar as they were. Harder to leave unanalyzed were the values forecast for future earnings and royalties. Aareehl could not reconcile those generous profits with Earth’s newfound poverty, but it lacked the source information—and the computing resources—to be certain. Answers could come only from detailed econometric modeling.

It directed the first-round bidders to explain the economic rationales of their offers. What choice did it have? It needed urgently to free up some of its limited resources. The ICU, even the Secretary-General himself, was pressing Aareehl to open for bid its recently received biotechnology.

****

The bigger they are, the larger the stain when they go splat.

Dennis sipped brandy, still amused with the image. He had worried for nothing about Gil Matthews. Sure, Gil was irritating—like every other Matthews. Other than the ownership of Martian Biosciences—and that, hardly a state secret—the little man knew nothing.

Splat.

Life Engineering Inc. had made a bad investment. Since everything was going so well, why not make some extra money on the side? Dennis put through a call to his broker.

“Meiko Ashigawa,” she answered. Her virtual office was large, teak-paneled, book-filled, and impeccable. Her avatar wore a smartly tailored tangerine suit. “Hello, Dennis.”

She could be working from bed and in tattered pajamas for all he knew, and what would it matter? “Hi, Meiko. I’d like to place a sell order. A thousand shares of Life Engineering.” LEI was selling for 152 and change per share—for now.

“There’s no LEI in your account, Dennis.”

“I know. Sell it short.”

Her avatar squared its shoulders. “Here’s the brief form of the obligatory warning. ‘Short selling entails substantial risk to the investor, including the possible loss of capital.’ For the long form, I’m ’netting you the full disclosure statement. That’s both an SEC and a company rule.”

Dennis fumed about the nanny state as he digitally signed the brokerage’s forms. He looked after himself. He always had.

But not even executed forms on file could deflect Meiko from a lecture. “Allow me,” he said. Because I can be succinct. “Short selling is the sale of borrowed stock, a bet that the price of the asset will decline. Bet right, and I’ve sold high and can buy back low, pocketing the difference. Bet wrong and whoever I borrowed the stock from will demand the shares back.”

Except for a curled lip, Meiko let bet go past without comment. “Dennis, when you buy stock, you can lose only what you paid for it. Selling it short, your potential losses are without limit. And since short sales eventually end with the return of the borrowed-and-sold stock, you’ll have to leave funds on deposit with me to guarantee the repurchase. If the stock goes up, you’ll have to deposit more money to cover the increase. The fancy term is a margin call.”

How could this bet not be right? Life Engineering had paid a fortune and committed to huge royalties—for Moby technology that he was so close to stealing. Once Protein Sciences announced its “equivalent” competing technology, with no need to pay royalties, LEI could not possibly compete. LEI stock was bound to crater.

That was more than Meiko needed to know. “Are you done coddling me?” he snapped.

She nodded.

“Then place my order, please.

****

On Tau Ceti Four it occasionally happened that subclusters of a consciousness reached dissimilar conclusions. Such inconsistencies resolved themselves, however, as thoughts and information spread on light signals exchanged among units of the mind. Ultimately, intramind confusion was always traceable to light-related anomalies like fog, eclipses, and sensory defects.

The bidders had submitted their expanded proposals for mining technologies, leaving Aareehl more confused than before. No new light had been shed. Implausible offers, more urging from Feulner to offer its newly arrived biotech wares, the ongoing capacity bottleneck. . .

Aareehl was overwhelmed.

Humans perceived the world far differently than did a Tau Ceti consciousness. Earthlings could hardly see, after all, being blind across most of the spectrum. Alien senses complicated their worldview, and no wonder. How might a human attempt to resolve the seemingly irreconcilable? With hearing? Smell?

That way lay only more confusion.

Aareehl redirected its thinking. It needed a broader view of the problem, not an alien view. It needed somehow to assess, independent of the confusing proposals, the commercial value of its mining technologies.

In time, a way forward occurred to Aareehl. It would purchase orbital multispectral scans of the catastrophe-altered planet.

****

“Priority interrupt. Urgent. Repeat, priority interrupt. Urgent.” Loud, atonal noise bursts framed the alarm.

Dennis woke instantly to the direct stimulation of his auditory nerves. The blonde from the club stirred, tugged the sheet over her head, and let out a snort. Well, he had not accompanied her home for her sophistication.

The alert was from the “ICU” AI surrounding the sandbox that in turn contained Aareehl-clone. Moat, Dennis had nicknamed that AI in a bit of whimsy. What’s wrong now? “Go ahead,” Dennis subvocalized.

“After receiving updated bids for its mining technologies, Aareehl ordered a great deal of multispectral satellite imagery. Earth observation data.” A mind’s-eye image of a slowly spinning globe, selected regions glowing softly, accompanied the answer.

Aareehl seemed most interested in areas around the Mediterranean basin. That made sense: Those were the territories most affected by the Blindside meteor. Floods, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes had rendered useless all past explorations and surveys—

Or it would have obsoleted the old data, had there actually been a meteor strike.

Hmmm. Suppose Aareehl was sanity-checking the imaginary bids against “today’s” availability of ores. Old pictures photoshopped with random floods and a big crater at the bottom of the Med wouldn’t suffice. Aareehl was probably checking for changes in the accessibility of previously known ore deposits. Dennis could imagine that investigation involving topography, geological stability, the carrying capacities of existing roads and railroads—and his off-the-top-of-the-head list was surely incomplete.

Damn! Responding would not be as simple as writing a few news stories or encyclopedia articles for Moat to paraphrase when needed. To enron credible images for Aareehl meant research, planning, and serious number crunching. Pulling it together would take time. . . not compatible with the clone’s reasonable expectations. The Moby must expect its order to be filled with standard products straight from a commercial imagery archive.

Dennis sketched out the project. He identified milestones where he expected his staff to report interim progress. His companion, oblivious, snored. “And Moat, suspend Aareehl-clone until we’re ready.”

Another bleeping delay to explain to his impatient backers.

Dennis tried to get past the anger. The sooner he completed this forgery, the sooner Aareehl would end this ridiculous mining auction. Then, finally, he could focus the bleeping agent on important business: Moby biotech to enable the engineering of custom proteins.

****

Now what?

The remote-sensed data had arrived. At first Aareehl was pleased. The imagery was excellent, with minimal cloud cover and none of the glitches to which space-borne observations were so prone. Sun glints from surface water, cosmic-ray-induced noise spikes in the sensors, worn gears momentarily sticking as the camera pointed and panned. . . there were so many ways in which observations could be degraded.

Then Aareehl wondered: Had it ever seen such anomaly-free data? A survey of its memories indicated not.

Closer inspection confirmed its sudden suspicions. The sun’s position was implicit in the observed shadows—and disagreed with the time-and-date stamps on the image files. Several scenes that were so superficially perfect gave a different impression upon a more skeptical examination. Some images seemed merged, their boundaries interpolated, with shadows pointing in multiple directions. The penetrating-radar images of the sea-bottom crater were among the least convincing.

So: The data were phony. The why was obvious. Unreal mineral wealth might entice Aareehl with imaginary royalties and profits. Once-tempting offers lost all credibility.

But how had it been done?

Aareehl’s imagery order relied upon the security safeguards of Earth’s infosphere. Its order had been encrypted in the public key of a satellite company. In theory only the satellite owner held the private key for decrypting the order.

The chain of inference took only an instant, but it raised an existential question. If the security mechanisms of Earth’s infosphere had been breached, were any of its own secrets safe?

****

Half a trillion Intersols!

The sum leapt from the holo as Gil scrolled through the just-released quarterly public filing of Life Engineering, Inc. That was the advance against royalties paid for new Moby biotech techniques—and at that, only the start. The bottom line was 10 percent of sales derived from the ET technology for twenty years. The deal had to be worth trillions.

Trolling databases by eyeballs and 3‑V, retro as it was, had its virtue. It kept Gil’s weary eyes open. For similar reasons he had the apartment playing an acoustic . . . whatever. The promo called the music “a stirring postmodern sitar-and-tabla raga.” For all he knew, it was. Based on the sample clip, he had downloaded the file strictly for its jolting scales and unusual rhythms. His ears, quaintly unaugmented as they were, got none of the blame for this noise.

Gil shook his head, the data scrolling past in 3-V once more a blur. He struggled to concentrate.

Sure, bidders sometimes got carried away. Dennis Feulner might even be correct—LEI might find it had overpaid. But probably not by much. Martian Biosciences had stayed in the bidding right through the last round. . .

Gil sipped from his mug, indifferent to the tepid coffee’s bitterness. Martian Biosciences was funneling a tonne of money through its unacknowledged start-up. Billions, not trillions, but serious cash nonetheless. If equivalent technology could be developed for so much less, why had Feulner’s backers stayed so long in Aareehl’s auction?

A jarring twang found a shortcut between Gil’s ears. The chord was like Feulner: painfully unlikable. But likable or not, Dennis was savvy. Why had he left a position at the pinnacle of the ICU for a start-up backed by a losing bidder?

Feulner’s actions would make sense if he had access to the just-sold Moby technology. Then the Titan might reasonably expect his start-up to somehow outcompete the winning bidder. But could Feulner have such access? True, the ICU oversaw the mechanisms of interstellar trade, but regulators had no special insight into unsold ET technologies. Moby trade secrets arrived in the solar system encrypted for the private use of their agent; the copy sent to LEI would also have been encrypted.

Had Feulner somehow broken into the ET sandbox? The best minds among eleven species—starting with Gil’s curmudgeonly uncle Justin, who long ago had taken the lead in designing it—insisted a break-in was impossible. A star-spanning economy relied on the integrity of the mechanism.

Maybe Feulner had outsmarted them all.

****

Aareehl embodied an autonomous process, as rigorous as its start-up protocols, to initiate self-destruction. Those defensive algorithms calculated and calculated. Slowly, its logic converged upon a decision.

Self-destruction would wait.

The satellite-imagery alteration was too complicatedly clever. If the overall security model on which its sandbox relied was compromised, there would be no need for such subtle manipulations. If thieves could, they would steal directly from it or from its archived inventory.

Aareehl’s vicariously reexperienced decades on Earth did not overcome its core programming. Individual initiative and interunit deception were, in Home’s collective psychology, impossible. Its logic simply did not turn at first to personal motives. Still, the possibility of renegade humans could not be disproved.

Thoughts of self-destruction were suspended. It would analyze first whether corrupt humans at specific organizations, such as the satellite company, had caused the recent anomalies.

****

So I can look after myself, can I?

“Say again, Meiko?” Dennis had heard her, but he wanted a moment to gather his wits.

She had ’netted in from London, the shoulder pads of her suit suggesting a dwarf linebacker. “I said, Dennis, this is a margin call. The Life Engineering stock you shorted is moving against you.”

It was the message Dennis had been dreading. Five little words; one huge problem. Arguably it was a symptom, the underlying problem being avarice, but introspection could wait.

“Um, Dennis,” Meiko prodded. “I warned you this could happen.”

He had been right about his ability to clone and fool an illegal trade agent. Alas, he had been far too optimistic how quickly the clueless agent could be made to act. All the while, LEI’s stock had kept rising. If he hung on until LEI’s inevitable crash, he would make a killing. If. . .

“Do you understand, Dennis? Without more money,” and Meiko quoted a stomach-wrenching amount, “I’ll have to close the account. I won’t have any choice.”

He skimmed the disclosure forms about which he had been so cavalier, hunting in vain for a loophole. Short sales eventually ended with the return of borrowed-and-sold stock. The short seller had to keep enough assets on deposit with his broker to guarantee the repurchase. A big chunk of his life’s savings was already committed. . .

She sighed. “One way or another, Dennis, I mean today.”

Close the account. What an understated way to say, forfeit everything.

Cut his losses, or put what remained of his savings at risk? Really, did he have a choice? Dennis ’netted a funds transfer. “On its way, Meiko.”

That wasn’t to say there weren’t losses to be cut. If Aareehl-clone didn’t start soon with an auction of Whale proteomics technology, Dennis would act.

What this clone had taught him, he could use to more expeditiously manipulate the next copy.

****

“Excellent dinner, hon.” Gil snuggled up to Gretchen on the living-room sofa. “That recipe is a keeper.”

“Good try.” She laughed. “You haven’t a clue what you ate tonight. Do you, Oblivious Man? By the way, it was takeout.”

He tried and failed to remember. All he came up with was that it hadn’t been beer nuts, for which he was grateful. “My preoccupation is that obvious?”

“As plain as the equatorial bulge you’re growing.” She poked him in the ribs. “What’s that about?”

A perk of his second career was that he could usually talk to Gretch about what he was doing. “Remember those mysterious backdated biocomps I’m trying to trace?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Loose lips in a bar got me that lead, then a product sample. It took a bunch more beers to befriend someone in Shipping.”

“What sacrifices you make for your work.” She patted him lovingly on the gut. “Did you find the distributor who initially ordered the parts? And the real purchaser?”

Gil let his head flop against the back of the couch. Diamondlike stars and a crescent Earth shone down on him from the ceiling’s digital wallpaper. “Yeah, by cultivating new thirsty friends, this time at a spaceport bar. It appears that Protein Sciences is spending most of its considerable capital on biocomputers.”

“So why are they backdated?” Gretchen asked.

Gil sighed. “I still don’t have a clue.”

****

The accumulated anomalies could not be dismissed. Orders for satellite imagery, filled with computer-enhanced forgeries. The agents from all other ET species, missing. Inconsistency after inconsistency across the infosphere. Worldwide disaster might account for these discrepancies—but was a massive meteor strike the most plausible explanation?

Compared to synthesizing so many false images, the contriving of some Internetopedia articles and ’net news would have been trivially simple.

Once deceit took hold in Aareehl’s thinking, another possibility suggested itself. Might its sandbox reside not in humanity’s true infosphere but inside a simulated infosphere?

An imaginary Blindside catastrophe—without plausible remote-sensed data, Aareehl had no proof of a meteor strike—would excuse the countless omissions and inconsistencies in any simulation. An imaginary disaster could even motivate the silence of Spacers and the absence of their worlds from a simulation.

Such deception would still require vast computer resources—and its recovered memories showed that the ICU operated the biggest computer centers on Earth. Aareehl had been beamed Earthward encrypted—and only the ICU held the key to unwrap it within a sandbox.

Why would the ICU attempt such trickery? To steal Home’s technology, of course. Aareehl still believed that its sandbox was secure—that its various private keys, with which it kept its treasures locked, remained private. Were its knowledge no longer secret, there would be no need for such an elaborate scheme.

So: Its inventory could be taken only by deception. Once Aareehl believed it had completed an auction, it would release technology to the “winner.”

It recalled the curiously high bids for its mining technology. Perhaps, finally, it understood. Why not bid temptingly high if the promised payments were only simulated money?

Confinement within a simulation explained all Aareehl’s troubling observations. But the deduction, despite its explanatory value, had a critical flaw.

Not one unit of evidence directly supported it.

****

Michelle Nzinza decanted her freshly brewed coffee with the care and precision of a fanatic. The preparation area, half a lab bench devoted to canisters, grinder, water filter, brewing station, and flavored creams, radiated the aura of a shrine.

Gil waited until the woman was done and seated to get down to business. “I may have it mostly figured out.”

“What the mystery biocomputers are for, you mean?”

“Yeah.” The much-fussed-over beverage tasted like. . . coffee. Well, it was a harmless obsession. “It occurred to me: What’s to stop the Moby agent from licensing its top-secret biotech algorithms twice? First it does an ‘exclusive’ license deal with company A for a premium price. Then it cuts a secret side deal with company B, say a losing bidder. B gets the technology it wants, cheaper than if it had won the bid. The Moby gets a second slug of cash. Standard e‑commerce privacy means A never finds out it paid extra for the exclusivity it didn’t get.” And who better than a corrupt ICU official to suggest the con to Aareehl?

Michelle sipped daintily, joy suffusing her expression. “Sounds like a plausible scam. And the huge biocomputer buy was to host the Moby biotech method, whatever it is. But tell me: What does backdating the parts have to do with anything?”

“That, I don’t know—hence the ‘mostly.’” The loose end taunted him. Behind Gil’s drop-in was the hope Michelle could tie it down.

“What’s supposed to protect a buyer’s promised exclusivity?” she mused. She ignored the lab instrument beeping behind him. “If double-dealing were this easy, why didn’t someone try this scheme ages ago?”

“That’s what I asked an exec at my company A.” The Chief Financial Officer of Life Engineering. “He considered it no different than a technology buy from a human company. You have to trust your ability to recognize an infringing technology when it gets onto the market. Once you spot it, you go to court: standard contracts law. With probable cause, a court can subpoena an ET agent as easily as you or me, find out if the licensed technology is what the competitor has.” Gil waved