“I don’t really have the authori—”
“Just do it,” Allan said, but for once the tone of command didn’t work. Sanderson looked scared but determined.
“No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Not without Skaka’s say-so.”
Allan capitulated. “All right. I’ll call her myself.”
The young programmer looked relieved. Allan went on studying the quiet robots in their gaudy, silly paint, guarding their bucket of totally useless chips.
He couldn’t reach Skaka Gupta, so he left her a message to call him. His flight was delayed, and it was well past midnight before the car left him in front of the unfamiliar apartment building in Kansas City. No, not unfamiliar… it looked comfortingly like the one in Oakland, the one in Denver, the one in Aspen, the one in New Orleans, the one in Atlanta, the one in Raleigh…
Mrs. Canning, alerted by the security system, let him in, then stumbled sleepily back to bed. He checked on Suzette, lying with both arms flung out at her side and one knee bent, looking energetic even in sleep. Her hair had grown. Allan went next to the room Charlie always had.
The boy stirred and mumbled as Allan entered. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hey, son.”
“What… what the reason?”
“The reason for what, Charlie?” Allan said gently, but Charlie was already back to sleep.
For several minutes, Allan watched him. Cathy’s light fine hair, Allan’s beaky nose, Charlie’s own individual chin. His son. On his tablet Allan had the name of a good child psychologist in Kansas City. Just don’t let it be neurological, he prayed formlessly. Not a neurological degeneration, not a brain tumor, not any problem they could do nothing about. Not my Charlie.
In his own bedroom, which he found located where his bedrooms always were, Allan couldn’t sleep. He reviewed the data for the next day’s meetings, both local so he could spend more time with Charlie. He did some sit-up’s and stretches, and then he tossed in the new, familiar bed.
His son sitting and staring into space, unreachable by ordinary communication…
The robots, refusing to turn in their chips…
Tomorrow’s meetings, half the data for which he’d already forgotten… He didn’t really want to attend any of them anyway. Same old, same old… No, what was he thinking? None of it was the same old. It was all interesting new breakthroughs, beachheads on the newest fronts, and he was privileged to have a part in scouting them out… So why did he just want to stay huddled forever in this familiar apartment he’d never seen before? Damn, he hated it when he couldn’t sleep!
Groping beside his bed, Allan picked up his meshNet. Just holding it, unwrapping it, knowing all the information it put at his command, made him feel better instantly. At night the system didn’t signal his messages, merely stored them until he was done sleeping. Maybe there was something from Cathy.
But the only new message was from Skaka Gupta: Please call me at the lab. Important. The transmission time was only ten minutes ago. She had returned early to Boston, and was working very late.
“Skaka? Allan Haller. What’s going on?”
“Hello, Allan.” She sounded tired, as well she might. It was half past one. “I didn’t expect to hear from you till morning. But you might as well know now. We’ve had a temporary set-back.”
“What kind of set-back?”
“The robots have stopped functioning. No, that’s not true—they only look like they’re not functioning because they’re not gathering chips any more, as they were programmed to do. Instead, they’ve speeded up massively the amounts of data they’re pulling off the Net, and processing it in parallel non-stop. And they’re…” Her voice stumbled.
“They’re what?”
“They’re just huddled together in a ring, touching sides, their visual and auditory and infrared sensors shut down. Just huddled there, blind to their environment.”
He didn’t answer. After a minute, Skaka’s tone changed, and Allan realized for the first time that, despite her glossy competence, she really was a scientist and not an information-front soldier. No entrepreneur would have said, as she did next, “Allan—I know your firm is small, and that you’ve invested a lot of money in Novation. We can get another grant, but if this project flops, are we going to bring you down?”
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be all right,” Allan said, which was true. He wasn’t ever insane enough to commit all of his resources to the same battle.
Commit all of his resources to the same battle…
“That’s good,” Skaka said. “But it doesn’t touch the real issue. Allan, I don’t know what the bots are doing.”
“I do,” he said, but so softly she couldn’t hear him. Dazed, he managed to get out, “It’s late. Talk in the morning.” He cut the connection.
And sat on the edge of the bed, naked legs dangling over the side, staring at nothing.
Commit all of his resources to the same battle… That’s what they all had been doing. Many different skirmishes—solar panels, robots, high-resolution imaging, nanotech, smart autos—but all part of the same war. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Age of Chivalry, Space Age… Information Age. The only game in town, the scene of all the action, the all-embracing war. Uncle Sam Wants You!
But no age lasted forever. Eventually the struggle for bronze or gold or green chips—or for physical or digital terrain—would come to an end, just as all the other Ages eventually had. One succeeding the other, inexorable and unstoppable… When it’s steamship time, went the old saw, then nothing can stop the steamship from coming. And when the Age of Steam was over, it was over. Civilization was no longer driven by steam. Now it was driven by information. Gather it in, willy-nilly, put it in electronic buckets, give it to the owners. Or the generals.
Why?
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
That’s why the robots had stopped. That’s why they stood staring into space, only their brains active. They had at their command all the data on the Net, plus the complex-and-growing human neural circuits of their biochips. They were on top of it all, wired in, fully cued for the next stage. Not how can we gather those chips with max-effish but rather why should we gather chips at all?
Not the Age of Reason. The Reasons Age.
Things changed. One day steam, then steam is over. One day you can’t imagine wanting to kiss a girl, the next day you pant after it. One day you rely on your frontier neighbors for survival of your very home, the next day you don’t know your neighbors’ names and don’t have a settled home.
One day the mad rush after information and chips, the next day you sit and stare trance-like, far more interested in why you were interested in chips and information than in the commodities themselves. Not that the information itself wouldn’t continue to accumulate. It would. But the center was shifting, the mysterious heart of each Age where the real emphasis and excitement were. The front.
Charlie must sense it only dimly. Of course—he was a child, and he didn’t have Allan’s honed instincts. But that Charlie sensed it at all, the coming change, was probably because he was a child—this was the world he would inherit. Charlie would be an integral part of it. But integrated more slowly than the bots, which were riding the advance wave of the human Net, shock troops racing toward where the info-wars gave way to the next step in the long, long march of humanity’s development.
Which would be… what? What would the Reasons Age actually be like?
Allan shivered. Suddenly he felt old. He had evolved in the Information Age, had flourished in it… He was a natural as a scout on the high-tech front. Would there be a place for him when the guns grew more muffled, the pace slowed, and the blaze of battle gave way to the domestic concerns of the occupation? Could he adapt to whatever came next?