As lush Vietnamese jungle gave way to choppy gray water, we exchanged a few pleasantries about the view—and further commiserations about the ordeal of reaching the conference. Despite my gaffe, I was intrigued by Lee’s profession, and I finally worked up the courage to raise the subject again. “What’s the attraction for you, in devoting your time to studying physicists? I mean… if it was the science itself, you’d be a physicist. You wouldn’t be standing back and watching them.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “Isn’t that exactly what you plan to do, yourself, for the next fortnight?”
“Yes—but my jobs very different from yours. Ultimately, I'm just a communications technician.”
She gave me a look which seemed to say I’ll deal with that one later. “The physicists at this conference will be there to make progress on TOEs, right? To trash the bad ones and refine the good ones. They’re only interested in the end product: a theory that works, that fits the known data. That’s their job, their vocation. Agreed?”
“More or less.”
“Of course, they’re aware of all the processes they use to do this beyond the actual mathematics: the communication of ideas, the withholding of ideas; acts of cooperation, acts of rivalry. They could hardly fail to know all about the politics, the cliques, the alliances.” She smiled, a proclamation of innocence. “I'm not using any of those words pejoratively. Physics is not debunked—as groups like Culture First continue to insist—just because some perfectly ordinary things like nepotism, jealousy, and occasional acts of extreme violence play a part in its history. But you can hardly expect the physicists themselves to waste their time writing it all down for posterity. They want to purify and polish their little nuggets of theory, and then tell brief, elegant lies about how they found them. Who wouldn’t? And it makes no difference, on one leveclass="underline" most science can be assessed without knowing anything about its detailed human origins.
“But my job is to get my hands on as much of the real history as possible. Not for the sake of ‘dethroning’ physics. For its own sake, as a separate discipline. A separate branch of science.” She added, in mock reproof, “And believe me, we don’t suffer from equation envy anymore. We’re due to outstrip them any day now. The physicists keep merging theirs, or throwing them out. We just keep inventing new ones.”
I said, “But how would you feel if there were meta-sociologists looking over your shoulder, recording all your messy day-to-day compromises? Keeping you from getting away with your own elegant lies?”
Lee confessed without hesitation: “I’d hate it, of course. And I’d try to conceal everything. But that’s what the game’s all about, isn’t it?
“The physicists have it easy—with their subject, if not with me. The universe can’t hide anything: forget all that anthropomorphic Victorian nonsense about ‘prising out nature’s secrets.’ The universe can’t lie; it just does what it does, and there’s nothing else to it.
“People are the very opposite. There’s nothing to which we’ll devote more time, and energy, and cunning, than burying the truth.”
East Timor from the air was a dense patchwork of fields along the coast, and what looked like native jungle and savanna in the highlands. A dozen tiny fires dotted the mountains, but the blackened pinpricks beneath the smoke trails were dwarfed by the scars of old open-cut mines. We spiraled down over the island in a helical U-turn, hundreds of small villages coming into sight and then slipping away.
The fields displayed no trademark pigments (let alone the logos of fourth-generation biotech); visibly, at least, the farmers were refusing the temptation to go renegade, and were using only old, out-of-patent crops. Agriculture for export was almost dead; even hyper-urbanized Japan could feed its own population. Only the poorest countries, unable to afford the license fees for state-of-the-art produce, struggled for self-sufficiency. East Timor imported food from Indonesia.
It was just after midday as we touched down in the tiny capital. There was no umbilical; we walked across the sweltering tarmac. The melatonin patch on my shoulder, pre-programmed by my pharm, was nudging me relentlessly toward Stateless time, two hours later than Sydney’s— but Dili was two hours in the other direction. I felt jet-lagged for the first time in my life, physically affronted by the sight of the blazing midday sun—and it struck me just how eerily effective the patch ordinarily was, when I could alight in Frankfurt or Los Angeles without the slightest sense of violated expectations. I wondered how I would have felt if I’d had my hypothalamic clock slavishly synched to the local time zones, all the way along the absurd loop of my flight path. Better, worse… or just disturbingly normal, one part of my perception of time laid bare as the simplest of biochemical phenomena?
The single-story airport building was crowded—with more people seeing off, or greeting, travelers than I’d ever witnessed in Bombay, Shanghai, or Mexico City, and more uniformed staff than I’d seen in any other airport on the planet. I stood in line behind Indrani Lee to pay the two-hundred-dollar transit tax on the near-monopoly route to Stateless. It was pure extortion… but it was hard to begrudge the opportunism. How else was a country this size supposed to raise the foreign exchange it needed in order to buy food? I hit a few keys on my notepad, and Sisyphus replied: with great difficulty.
East Timor had none of the few exotic minerals which still needed to be mined to meet net global demand after recycling and it had been stripped long ago of anything which might have been useful to local industry. Trade in native sandalwood was forbidden by international law, and in any case engineered plantation species produced a better, cheaper product. A couple of electronics multinationals had built appliance-assembly factories in Dili, during a brief period when the independence movement appeared to have been crushed, but they’d all closed in the twenties, when automation became cheaper than the cheapest sweated labor. That left tourism and culture. But how many hotels could be filled, here? (Two small ones; a total of three hundred beds.) And how many people could make their living on the world nets as writers, musicians, or artists? (Four hundred and seven.)
In theory, Stateless faced all the same basic problems, and more. But Stateless had been renegade from the start—its very land built with unlicensed biotech. And no one went hungry there.
It must have been the jet-lag, but it only dawned on me slowly that most of the people in the airport weren’t there to greet friends, after all. What I’d mistaken for luggage and gifts was merchandise; these people were traders and their customers: tourists, travelers, and locals. There were a couple of stuffy-looking official airport shops in one corner… but the whole building seemed to double as a marketplace.
Still in the queue, I closed my eyes and invoked Witness; a sequence of eyeball movements woke the software in my gut, which generated the image of a control panel and fed it down my optic nerve. I stared at the LOCATION slot on the panel, which still read SYDNEY; it obligingly blanked. I mimed vertical one-handed typing, and entered DILI. Then I looked squarely at BEGIN RECORDING, highlighting the words, and opened my eyes.
Witness confirmed: “Dili, Sunday, April 4th, 2055. 4:34:17 GMT.” Beep.
The Customs Department collected the transit tax—and apparently their hardware was down. Instead of our notepads dealing with everything via a brief exchange of IR, we had to sign papers, show our physical ID cards, and receive a cardboard boarding pass with an official rubber stamp. I’d been half expecting some petty harassment if the opportunity arose, but the Customs officer, a softly spoken woman with a dense Papuan frizz beneath her cap, gave me the same patient smile as she’d given everyone else, and processed my paperwork just as swiftly.