“It’s a matter of etiquette,” Keishi said, picking up the cup that had materialized before her. “It would be inconvenient if someone else were to sit in the bar stool where I’m manifesting. So I’m paying for the privilege of occupying space that could hold a real customer.”
More information than I’d wanted. “So where are you physically, and where’s my research? You said you were going to have it for me by now.”
“My flesh is at the archives and so is your research, for now,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “When I gave you that estimate, I was planning to get everything through the Net and send it straight into memory, bypassing my conscious mind to save time. But it turns out that most of the material on the Holocaust was never uploaded. Some of it’s on paper and the rest is on something called microfilm. So even though I could uptake the information at around ten megabaud, that doesn’t do me any good, because my eye muscles can only move about a hundredth that fast. Then I had the bright idea of looking at it through a videophone camera, only to find that the hardware wouldn’t go over a refresh rate of sixty frames per second, and I couldn’t even turn the pages that fast. And this microfilm thing is insane—it takes longer to thread the damned spools than it does to read them. So the bottom line is, working straight through, I can have it for you by noon tomorrow. Um, I mean today, since it’s past midnight.”
I looked at her with a new respect. “I’ll give you one thing. You know how to work.”
“Well,” she said, “somehow I got the idea that if I worked my ass off for you, you might start taking me seriously.”
“What makes you think I don’t take you seriously?”
She looked at me as though I’d solemnly informed her that the moon was made of green cheese. Right. Never lie to your screener.
“All right, it’s true,” I said. “I didn’t at first. You look so young that it’s hard to. But I’m working on it.”
“Age is easily fixed.” She morphed older, the skin of her face curdling, silver corrupting her hair; then smiled at my horror, and switched back to an age just a few years older than she’d been before. “Better?”
“Not so you’d notice,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter.”
She added a few more years and glanced at the mirror behind the bar. Then, satisfied, she drank down the last of her coffee, holding the cup in both hands. “I’d better get back to the library,” she said. “I’ve got a deadline to meet. Besides, now that I’m almost your age, I’ll have to add an afternoon nap to my schedule.”
“Make sure you get someone to burp you afterward,” I said, smiling despite myself into my coffee cup. “How much data do you have so far?”
“Nearly everything for the Calinshchina. I’ve got about three-quarters of what’s out there on the Terror-Famine, and maybe half on the Holocaust. Add it all up, and the minimum descriptive algorithm is about a megaturing.”
“How many bytes is that?”
“Well,” she said, “you really can’t express moist memory in bytes, because it’s not a string of ones and zeros and there’s no single way to convert it into one. See, if I converted it all back to the forms I found it in, it would be one number of bytes, but if I just recorded the connections of each neurode in the network it’s stored in, it would be a completely different number. It’s like those bone-head British cameras on Science News who give you the weight of a space probe. The probe would have one weight on Earth and another on the moon, and besides, those are just potentials—it doesn’t actually weigh anything, as long as it’s out there between the stars. Space probes have mass, moist memories have minimum descriptive algorithms. Measuring it in bytes wouldn’t tell you anything.”
I nodded. “So,” I said, “how many bytes is that?”
Keishi sighed. “About a trillion.”
I laid my hand on her arm. The virtual software let me feel the fabric, but could not make her arm solid, so my hand passed through skin, vein, and bone. “Mirabara—Keishi—get some rest,” I said. “I’ve never seen a terabyte of research on one chip in my life. You must be exhausted. You know, I didn’t even think about it, but what a horrible assignment. That telepresence, especially. It must have really put you through the wringer.”
“Actually,” she said, “the books are worse. I can send the telepresence straight to disk, so I don’t have to look at most of it. And it looks like the telepresence is all by cameras, not the survivors themselves. Some of the books are by people who were there, and—” She shivered.
“Now, that’s funny,” I said. “Why shouldn’t there be telepresence from survivors? There were thousands, weren’t there? You’d think that at least one of them would have put it on disk.”
“The Army took over all the camps,” Keishi said, “so the survivors were enlisted. And most of them didn’t already have sockets, because they were prisoners. The Army had to give them sockets. Now, when you’ve been drilled by an Army soldier in the middle of a field, with a rock to the head for anesthesia, further implants….”
“Oh. Yes, that makes sense,” I said. “Too bad; I thought I was onto something. No moist memory either, I suppose?”
“Of the survivors themselves? Not a single disk.”
“Well, it can’t be helped. Anyway, what I really need is that megascops-hour of making sense out of it. But get some sleep first and do it in the morning—I mean, the afternoon—when you’re fresh. How long will that take you?”
“I can do the ’hour on the train home from the archives, and have the chip waiting for you when you wake up.”
I looked at her in disbelief. “You can do—that’s what? three hundred and sixty million scop?—on the train home? Keishi, how fast are you?”
“For simple stuff like this, a couple meg. It should take me about half an hour.”
A few hundred scop—Standard Consciousness Operations—go into the making of a typical word of interior monologue. An unaugmented human brain does maybe a thousand such ops per second, a kiloscops. Keishi was talking about thinking two thousand times that fast. That’s raw processing speed, mind you; the wet-memory interface is much slower. So it’s not quite as incredible as it sounds. It’s I-saw-an-alien incredible but not I-am-an-alien incredible.
“You were wired in Japan, then?”
“No,” she said. “On Zanzibar.”
Oh—African tech. In that case, go back to the I-am-an-alien thing. “How’d you manage that?”
“Under the Law of Return. My skin’s just dark enough to make me Presumptively African—yes, I know, what a term for it—so that got me in long enough to dive for the nearest knife while they decided to reject my blood sample.”
“I’m surprised the Africans don’t keep a better lid on their tech.”
“Oh, it’s illegal all right, but they don’t enforce the laws. They love watching us dissect their chips, not understand a thing about them, and build exact replicas that don’t work.”
I thought for a moment. “You know, I could do that for the last segment, if all else fails. How world politics are still determined by the Army’s actions. Try to figure out why they left so much of Leningrad and Tokyo, and didn’t get past the Sahara at all.”
“Easy question. The Sahara’s too hot, Leningrad’s too cold, and… oh, I don’t know, one of the hackers who made the Army probably had a grandmother in Tokyo or something.” She smiled at me. “But in the Netcast, you talked like you already knew what you were doing next week. It was a little transparent, you know. You weren’t trying to lie to your screener, were you?”