Steamship Soldier on the Information Front
by Nancy Kress
Illustration by Alan Giana
Just before the plane touched down at Logan, Allan Haller gave one last check to the PID on the back of his tie-tack. Good. Intense vibration in the Cathy icon, superintense in Suzette, and even Charlie showed acceptable oscillation. No need to contact any of them, that would save time. Patti and Jon, too—their icons shivered and thrilled at nearly top speed. And three minutes till landing.
“My, look at what you have there,” said his seatmate pleasantly. A well-rounded grandmotherly sort, she’d been trying to engage him in conversation since La Guardia. “What sort of gadget is that, might I ask?”
No, Allan almost said, because what ground could possibly be gained? But then he looked at her again. Expensive jacket, good haircut, Gucci bag. Certainly money, but probably not entrepreneurial—rich old women tended to safe and stodgy investments. Still, what could he lose? Two and a half-minutes until landing, and speculative capital, as he well knew, was sometimes found in very odd places.
“It’s a PID—a personal-icon display,” he said to Grandma Money. “It shows the level of electronic interaction going on with my family—my wife Cathy here, my son and daughter on these two icons—and of my two chief business associates. Each of them is wired with a WIPE, a ‘weak interactive personal electronic field’ in various items of clothing that communicate with each other through a faint current sent through their bodies. Then all interactions with other electronic fields in their vicinity are registered in their WIPES and sent wireless to each other’s PIDs. I can tell, for instance, by how much the Cathy icon is vibrating that she’s probably working at her terminal—lots of data going through her icon. Suzette is probably playing tennis—see, her icon is superoscillating the way WIPE fields do when they’re experiencing fast-motion physical interference, and Charlie here—”
“You send electric current through your children’s bodies?” Grandma Money sounded horrified.
“It isn’t dange—”
“All the time? And then you Big-Brother them? All the time?”
Allan flipped down the tie-tack. Well, it had been worth a skirmish, as long as the time talking to her would have been downtime anyway. With a slight bump, the plane made contact with the runway.
“Don’t they… well, I don’t mean to be rude, but doesn’t your family object to—”
But Allan was already moving down the aisle toward the jetway, from the forward seat he’d had booked precisely because it was the first to disembark. By the time the other passengers were reaching for their overhead luggage, he was already in the airport, moving fast, talking into his phone.
“Jon, what have you got?”
“A third prospect. Out in Newton; the car company will do the max-efficient route. The company is Figgy Pudding, the product is NewsSort. It goes through the whole Net looking for matches to key words, then compares the news items with ones the user has liked in the past and pre-selects for him—the usual statistical-algorithm gig. But they’re claiming ninety-three percent success rate.”
“Pretty good, if it’s true.”
“Worth a skirmish,” Jon said, in New York. “That’s all in Boston.” He hung up.
Allan didn’t break stride. “Figgy Pudding”—the cutesy name meant the talent was old, left over from the generation that could name a computer after a fruit and a communications language after a hot beverage. Still, some of those geezer geeks still had it. Worth a skirmish.
“Your car is waiting at these coordinates,” his wristwatch said, displaying them along with a route map of Logan. “Thank you for using the Micro Global Positioning System.”
Allan tacked through the crowd, past the fast food kiosks, the public terminal booths, the VR parlors crammed with kids parked there while parents waited for flights. The driver, who had of course been tracking Allan through MGPS, already had the car door opened, the schedule revisions from Jon, the max-effish route. No words were necessary. Allan sank into the back seat and unfolded his meshNet.
This was Haller Ventures’ latest investment to come to market. Allan loved it. A light, flexible cloth meshed with optic-fiber wires, it could be folded almost as small as a handkerchief. Yet it could receive as much data as any other dumb terminal in existence, and display it in more varied, complex configurations. Fast, powerful, keyed to both Allan’s voice and to his chosen tactile commands for max effish, fully flexible in interacting with his PID and just about every other info-device, the meshNet was everything high-tech should be. It was going to make everyone connected with Haller Ventures rich.
Richer.
“Jon message,” Allan said to the meshNet. “Display.” And there was the information about Figgy Pudding: stock offerings, annual reports, inside run-downs put together and run through the Haller investment algorithms with Jon’s usual efficiency. Nobody on the information front could recon better than Jon, unless it was Allan himself.
Carefully he studied the Figgy Pudding data. Looking good, looking very good.
“Five minutes until your first scheduled stop,” his wristwatch said. A second later, the phone buzzed, then automatically transferred the call to the meshNet once it verified that the meshNet was unfolded. Cathy’s icon appeared on the soft metallic surface.
“Cathy message,” Allan said. The driver, curious, craned his gaze into the rearview mirror, but Allan ignored him. Definitely no ground to be gained there.
“Hey, love,” Cathy’s voice said. “Schedule change.”
“Give it to me,” Allan said, one eye still on the Figgy Pudding projections.
“Suzette made it. She’s in for the Denver Preteen Semi-Final Skating Championship!”
“That’s great!” Allan said. Damn, but he had great kids. Although Charlie… “I’ll send her congratulations.”
“Good. But she needs to leave Tuesday, on a nine-twenty a.m. plane. I have to be in court in Albuquerque on the Darlington case. Can you see her off at the airport?”
“Just a sec, hon.” Allan called up the latest version of his schedule. “No can do. Patti’s got me in Brussels from Monday night to Tuesday afternoon, with a stop at a London biotech on the hop home.”
“Okay,” Cathy said cheerfully. She was always cheerful; it was one of the reasons Allan was glad she was his wife. “I’ll get a driver for her, and Mrs. Canning can see her off. Consider it covered. Are we still on for dinner and hanky-panky Wednesday?”
“Let me check… yes, it looks good. Five o’clock at the Chicago Plaza.”
“I’ll be there,” Cathy said. “Oh, and give Charlie a call, will you? Today?”
“What’s with Charlie?”
“Same thing,” Cathy said, and for just a moment her cheerfulness faltered.
“Okay,” Allan said. “Don’t worry.”
“You on your way to Novation?” Cathy of course received constant updates of his schedule, as he did of hers. Although she had fewer updates; even consulting attorneys as good as she was sometimes stayed in the same city for as long as three days. “Novation is the biorobot company, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Allan said. “Patti’s pushing it pretty strong. But frankly, I don’t have much faith in radical tech that makes this many extravagant claims. Promise the moon, deliver a rusty asteroid. I don’t expect to be impressed.”
“That’s my man. Make ’em work for it. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” Allan said. The Cathy icon vanished from his meshNet.
“Two minutes until your first scheduled stop,” his watch said.
Perfect.
Allan was wrong. He might not have expected to be impressed with Novation, but, almost against his will, he was.