People.
Paul plugged into real-time TV, and watched an episode of The Unclear Family flash by in less than two minutes, the soundtrack an incomprehensible squeal. A game show. A war movie. The evening news. It was as if he was in deep space, rushing back toward the Earth through a sea of Doppler-shifted broadcasts. The image was strangely comforting; his situation wasn't so bizarre, after all, if flesh-and-blood humans could find themselves in much the same relationship with the world as he did. Nobody would claim that the Doppler shift could rob someone of their humanity.
Dusk fell over the recorded city. He ate a microwaved soya protein stew -- wondering if there was any good reason, moral or otherwise, to continue to be a vegetarian.
He listened to music until long after midnight. Tsang Chao, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass. It made no difference that each note "really" lasted seventeen times as long as it should have, or that the audio ROM sitting in the player "really" possessed no microstructure, or that the "sound" itself was being fed into his model-of-a-brain by a computerized sleight-of-hand that bore no resemblance to the ordinary process of hearing. The climax of Glass's Mishima still seized him like a grappling hook through the heart.
And if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same?
It was outrageous to admit it -- but the answer had to be yes.
He lay in bed, wondering: Do I still want to wake from this dream?
The question remained academic, though; he still had no choice.
4
(Remit not paucity)
NOVEMBER 2050
Maria had arranged to meet Aden at the Nadir, an Oxford Street nightclub where he sometimes played and often went to write. He could usually get them both in for free, and the door -- an intimidating, airlock-like contraption of ribbed black anodized steel -- let her pass unchallenged after a brief security scan. Maria had once had a nightmare in which she'd been trapped in that chamber, a knife inexplicably strapped to her right boot -- and, worse, her credit rating canceled. The thing had digested her like an insect in a Venus flytrap, while Aden stood on stage, singing one of his cut-up love songs.
Inside, the place was crowded for a Thursday night, and poorly lit as always; she finally spotted Aden sitting at a table near a side wall, listening to one of the bands and jotting down music, his face catching the glow of his notepad. So far as Maria could tell, he never seemed to be unduly influenced by anything he listened to while composing, but he claimed to be unable to work in silence, and preferred live performances for inspiration -- or catalysis, or whatever it was.
She touched him on the shoulder. He looked up, took off his headset, and stood to kiss her. He tasted of orange juice.
He gestured with the headset. "You should listen. Crooked Buddhist Lawyers on Crack. They're quite good."
Maria glanced at the stage, although there was no way of telling who he meant. A dozen performers -- four bands in all -- stood enclosed in individual soundproof plastic cylinders. Most of the patrons were tuned in, wearing headsets to pick up one band's sound, and liquid crystal shades, flickering in synch with one group of cylinders, to render the other bands invisible. A few people were chatting quietly -- and of the room's five possible soundtracks, Maria decided that this tranquil near-silence best suited her mood. Besides, she never much liked using nerve current inducers; although physically unable to damage the eardrums (sparing the management any risk of litigation), they always seemed to leave her ears -- or her auditory pathways -- ringing, regardless of the volume setting she chose.
"Maybe later."
She sat beside Aden, and felt him tense slightly when their shoulders brushed, then force himself to relax. Or maybe not. Often when she thought she was reading his body language, she was making signals out of noise. She said, "I got some junk mail today that looked just like you."
"How flattering. I think. What was it selling?"
"The Church of the God Who Makes No Difference."
He laughed. "Every time I hear that, I think: they've got to change the name. A God which makes no difference doesn't rate the definite article or the pronoun 'who.'"
"I'll rerun the program, and the two of you can fight it out."
"No thanks." He took a sip of his drink. "Any non-junk mail? Any contracts?"
"No."
"So . . . another day of terminal boredom?"
"Mostly." Maria hesitated. Aden usually only pressed her for news when he had something to announce himself -- and she was curious to find out what it was. But he volunteered nothing, so she went on to describe her encounter with Operation Butterfly.
Aden said, "I remember hearing something about that. But I thought it was decades away."
"The real thing probably is, but the simulations have definitely started. In a big way."
He looked pained. "Weather control? Who do they think they're kidding?"
Maria suppressed her irritation. "The theory must look promising, or they wouldn't have taken it this far. Nobody spends a few million dollars an hour on supercomputer time without a good chance of a payoff."
Aden snickered. "Oh yes they do. And it's usually called Operation something-or-other. Remember Operation Radiant Way?"
"Yes, I remember."
"They were going to seed the upper atmosphere with nanomachines which could monitor the temperature -- and supposedly do something about it."
"Manufacture particles which reflected certain wavelengths of solar radiation -- and then disassemble them, as required."
"In other words, cover the planet with a giant thermostatic blanket."
"What's so terrible about that?"
"You mean, apart from the sheer technocratic hubris? And apart from the fact that releasing any kind of replicator into the environment is -- still, thankfully -- illegal? It wouldn't have worked. There were complications nobody had predicted -- unstable mixing of air layers, wasn't it? -- which would have counteracted most of the effect."
Maria said, "Exactly. But how would anyone have known that, if they hadn't run a proper simulation?"
"Common sense. This whole idea of throwing technology at problems created by technology . . . "
Maria felt her patience desert her. "What would you rather do? Be humble in the presence of nature, and hope you'll be rewarded for it? You think Mother Gaia is going to forgive us, and put everything right -- just as soon as we throw away our wicked computers and promise to stop trying to fix things ourselves?" Should have made that "Nanny Gaia."
Aden scowled. "No -- but the only way to "fix things" is to have less impact on the planet, not more. Instead of thinking up these grandiose schemes to bludgeon everything into shape, we have to back off, leave it alone, give it a chance to heal."
Maria was bemused. "It's too late for that. If that had started a hundred years ago . . . fine. Everything might have turned out differently. But it's not enough any more; too much damage has already been done. Tip-toeing through the debris, hoping all the systems we've fucked up will magically restore themselves -- and tip-toeing twice as carefully every time the population doubles -- just won't work. The whole planetary ecosystem is as much of an artifact, now, as . . . a city's microclimate. Believe me, I wish that wasn't the case, but it is -- and now that we've created an artificial world, intentionally or not, we'd better learn to control it. Because if we stand back and leave it all to chance, it's just going to collapse around us in some random fashion that isn't likely to be any better than our worst well-intentioned mistakes."