"Once you do, I'm sure you'll sign."
"In blood, I suppose?"
"Oh, you're so old-fashioned, Professor. No blood. Not yet."
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., had brought work home from the office. That's how he thought of it anyway, when he worked in the time that both he and Alice thought should be theirs and Miri's. But Miri had her own studying to do tonight, and Alice… well, her latest assignment was the worst yet. She wandered about, stony-faced and terse. Anyone else in her position would be dead by now, or a raving lunatic. Somehow she hung on, often simulating something like her natural self, and successfully managing the prep for her latest assignment. That's why the Corps keeps driving her harder and harder .
Bob pushed the thought away. There was a reason for such sacrifice. Chicago was more than a decade past. There hadn't been a successful nuclear attack on the U.S. or any of the treaty organization countries in more than five years. But the threat was always there. He still had nightmares about the launchers at that orphanage in Asuncion, and what he had almost done to shut them down. And as always, the web oozed with rumors of new technologies that would make the classical weapons obsolete. Despite ubiquitous security, despite the efforts of America, China, and the Indo-Europeans, the risks kept growing. There would still be places that would come to glow in the dark.
Bob sifted through the latest threat assessments. Something was in the wind, and it might be closer than Paraguay. The really bad news was two paragraphs further on: An analyst pool at CIA thought the Indo-Europeans might be somehow collaborating with bad guys. Christ! If the Great Powers can't stand together, how can humanity make it through this century ?
There was motion behind him. It was his father, standing in the doorway.
"Dad," he acknowledged politely.
His old man stared for a second. Bob made the general form of his paperwork visible.
"Oops. Sorry, Son. You're working?" He squinted at Bob's desk.
"Yeah, some stuff from the office. Don't worry if it looks blurry; it's not on the house menu."
"Ah. I, I was wondering if I could ask you some questions."
Bob hoped he didn't look too surprised; this diffident approach was a first. He waved for his father to take a seat. "Sure."
"At school today, I was talking to someone. Voice only. The caller could have been on the other side of the world, right?"
"Yes," said Bob. "If it was from far away, you might notice."
"Right. Jitter and latency."
Is he just parroting jargon ? Before he lost his mind, Dad had been a technical ignoramus. Bob remembered once in the days of very-dumb-phones when Dad insisted that his new cordless handset was a cheap substitute for a cellphone. Mother had proven him wrong by having Bob take the cordless down the street and try to call her home-business number.
She'd rarely made mistakes like that; the old man had been hell on her for weeks afterward.
Dad was nodding to himself. "I suppose timing analysis could reveal a lot."
"Yes. Your average high-school student is good at both sides of that game." If you hadn't ruined things, you could learn all this from Miri .
His old man looked away, introspective. Worried?
"Is someone hassling you at school, Dad?" The thought was boggling.
Robert gave one of his old malevolent chuckles. "Someone is trying to hassle me."
"Um. Maybe you should talk to your teachers about this. You could show them your Epiphany log of the incident. This is a standard sort of problem they have to deal with."
There was no return fire; the elder Gu just nodded seriously. "I know, I should. I will . But it's hard, you know. And given your job, well, you've spent years working on life-and-death versions of these problems, right? You'd have the most expert possible answers."
It was the first time in Bob's life that his old man had said anything nice about his career. This must be a setup !
There was silence for a moment as the father waited with apparent patience, and the son tried to think what to say next. Finally, Bob gave a laugh. "Okay, but the military answers would be overkill, Dad. Not because we're that much smarter than a billion teenagers, but because we have the Secure Hardware Environment. Down at the bottom we control all the hardware." Leaving aside the moonshine fabs and the hardware abusers .
"The fellow I was talking to this afternoon styled himself 'an all-encompassing cloud of knowingness.' Is that bull? How much can he know about me?"
"If this jerk is willing to break some laws, he can find out a lot about you. That probably includes your medical history, maybe even what you've said to Reed Weber. As for spying on you moment to moment: He can usually watch you in public places, though that depends on your defaults and the density of local coverage. If he has confederates or zombies, he can learn what you do even in deadzones, though that information wouldn't come to him in real time."
"Zombies?"
"Corrupted systems. Remember what things were like when I was a kid? Almost any nastiness we had on home computers, we have on wearables now. The situation would be absolutely intolerable without the SHE." Dad looked blank, or maybe he was Googling. "Don't worry about it, Dad. Your Epiphany gear is about as secure as you'd be comfortable wearing. Just remember that other folks may not be so trustable."
Robert seemed to be digesting what his son had said. "But aren't there other possibilities? Maybe little gadgets the, ah, kids can stick on you?"
"Yes! The little dufuses are no different than I was, but they have more opportunities for mischief." Last semester it had been the crawling-up-your-skirt spidercams. For a while, the gadgets had been a god-damned mechanical infestation. Miri had raged about the invasion for days, and then dropped the issue so abruptly that Bob suspected she'd wrought some terrible revenge. "That's why you should always come into the house through the front hall. We have a good commercial bug trap there. Just you and I talking here is as private as your Epiphany can be… So what exactly is this fellow hitting you up for? You're from so far outside the school scene, I can't imagine you being successfully hassled."
By God, Dad actually looks shifty ! "I'm not really sure. I think it's just the hazing a new kid gets" — he gave a little smile — "even when the new kid happens to be an old fart. Thanks for the advice, Son."
"Sure thing."
The old man sidled out of the room. Bob's gaze followed him into the hall and up the stairs to the privacy of his room. Dad was definitely a man with things on his mind. Bob stared at the closed bedroom door for a moment, wondering at life's inversions and wishing he and Alice were like some folks, the ones who snooped on their own miscellaneous dependents.
15
When Metaphors Are Real
For the next week Robert avoided UCSD, just to see if the Mysterious Stranger would react.
He was beginning to feel confident with Epiphany, although he might never be as skillful as kids who grew up wearing. Xiu Xiang was lagging behind him, mainly because of her self-doubts. She had refused to wear for three days after one particularly mistaken gesture had dumped her into — into she refused to say what, but Robert suspected it was some kind of porn view.
The language in the Gu/Orozco project, while not poetry, had risen above the level of egregious noise. Robert had a surprising amount of fun working with video effects and network jitter. If their project had been shown in the 1990s, it would have been taken as a work of genius. That was the power of the libraries of cliches and visual gimmicks that lay in their tools. Juan was properly afraid it wouldn't count for much with Chumlig. "We need some added value or she'll fred us." He Googled up some high schools with manual music programs. "Those kids think it's a tragic form of gaming," he said. In the end, Robert chatted up student musicians in Boston and southern Chile — far enough apart to really exercise his network ideas.