Engineering Infinity (24 page)

“You’re sending yourself a
message, Lee,” he said. “This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for.”

I sent my daughter out of the
room and dressed, dazed. “Who is going to send the orphan film to me?” I said.

“The universe,” my ex-wife Bev
told me at some time in the near future. She looked plumper, and a lot happier.
Was she pregnant? Did the man pepper the planet with his offspring? “But I’ve
found out who sent me that Rauschenberg, Lee, and I thank you. Of course, it
will be a lot cheaper to buy it in 1951.”

The universe looked at me, and I
looked back, and found myself blinking in bright snowless winter afternoon
light in New York, an older New York with far fewer of the great mirroring
skyscrapers that will someday be built. Were. Up ahead, I saw the Reverend
ranting, and I strolled past. Some nameless amateur cinematographer was
cranking a Ciné-Kodak, and as I passed him I remembered the kid’s cheeky wink
and slipped the fellow one of my own. The two boys were horsing about, an
irritated old geezer slapped out with his cane, but Krastio, the younger, had
his eye focused on the middle distance. An intent, lovely woman in a long dowdy
1930s dress appeared out of nowhere at the entrance to a laneway. Quantum tunnelled,
I suppose Tzvetan would call it. Nobody but the younger boy and I saw her,
except everyone and everything, forever. Krastio yelled out hoarsely to Ivaylo,
“Your mother’s at
teh
- begin time slot.” He pulled
out his display and flashed a page of equations to the rolling film. I walked
briskly past, and took Radka’s hand. The universe observed us in silence amid
the rumbling noise of the city.

Robert Reed

Robert Reed
was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1956. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from
the Nebraska Wesleyan University, and has worked as a lab technician. He became
a full-time writer in 1987, the same year he won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of
the Future Contest, and has published eleven novels, including
The
Leeshore
,
The Hormone Jungle
,
and far future science fiction novels
Marrow
and
The
Well of Stars
. An extraordinarily prolific writer, Reed has
published over 180 short stories, mostly in
F&SF
and
Asimov’s
, which have been nominated for the
Hugo, James Tiptree Jr. Memorial, Locus, Nebula, Seiun, Theodore Sturgeon
Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and have been collected in
The
Dragons of Springplace
and
The Cuckoo’s Boys
. His novella “A Billion Eves” won the Hugo Award in 2007.
Nebraska’s only SF writer, Reed lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter,
and is an ardent long-distance runner.

Infinity windows were installed
two months ago, but technical troubles, nebulous and vexing, delayed their
coming on-line. The tall squidskin sheets were left transparent, revealing
white walls and assorted cables leading back to the building’s servers and
power plant. Mr Pembrook is our club manager, and whenever he bounced past he
made the point of apologizing for any inconvenience. But I didn’t particularly
miss the mirrors that used to hang here; staring at my pained, sweat-sheened
face was never an attraction. And I didn’t pine for the giant televisions tuned
to sports I didn’t follow and the 24/7 crime networks. White and bland suited
my task, and after the first week it felt as if this was the way it had always
been.

My club sits ten storeys above
the apartment where I live with my son. Fifty machines of various designs fill
a long, narrow, well-ventilated room. My favourite machine is near the back
corner, and it’s usually unoccupied in the early afternoon. As a rule, I avoid
the newer models. I’m avid but lazy, and their “miles” feel long to me. I know
what to expect when I work the pedals and swing the long arms, the onboard
computer interfacing with a heart and lungs it knows as well as any. I prefer
hill workouts while watching history programs from my own library, and one hard
hour is usually enough to cleanse a brain evolved to chase antelope across a
grassy plain.

Mostly the same faces haunt the
club every day, and we know each other on sight and sometimes by name. A few
regulars are passing acquaintances. Not Berry. I know her name only because
somebody once called her that in front of me. Berry might be her first name, or
last, or a nickname. Or I didn’t hear things right, and she’s somebody else
entirely.

Whatever the name, the woman
seems to be in her late sixties. She has a long face framed with hair dyed a
luxurious, unnatural black. She never asks anything of her machine except a lot
of easy minutes. She watches old hospital shows, turn-of-the-century stuff.
Like me, she has her favourite machine or two, and she always wears the big
smile of somebody who is relentlessly nice and almost certainly boring.

One afternoon while my son was at
school, I arrived to discover the infinity windows working. The room had been
transformed, and I laughed out loud. Happy Mr Pembrook explained that in the
end the problem was nothing mechanical. “Inspiration at the AI level,” he said,
whatever that means. It seems that the windows aren’t just hybrids between two
ordinary technologies - teleconferencing and digital entertainment. Some level
of bottled genius was at work here. The new-generation squidskins are energy
frugal and startlingly realistic, but instead of piping in a scenic overlook of
some great city or Martian canyon, we were being treated to a downtown corner
in some cookie-cutter city. The most prosaic setting possible, which startled
me as much as anything, and that’s another reason why I laughed and why I kept
chuckling until I was perched on top of my usual apparatus.

Berry’s favourite machines were
occupied, which was why she happened to be riding the old warhorse on my right.
“Yes, the window’s working,” she said, throwing her simple smile my way.

“Well, good,” I offered in
return.

It was the first time we had ever
spoken.

From the menu, I selected “Killer
Hill-3.” My heart set to work with gratifying eagerness. Then I called up my
library, ready to plug in sixty minutes of Ancient Greece or World War II. But
I couldn’t stop staring at the world stretched out before me. It felt as if we
were really at ground level. Judging by the shadows, we were facing north or
south. A few busy strangers walked past - people of means with bright clothes
and fine firm bodies. Some kind of tree was growing from a square of raw ground
between the sidewalk and curb, and across the street stood a brick building
that might have looked pretty for a couple days in its hundred-year life. Like
a genuine window, diluted outdoor sounds passed through the squidskin. I heard
the angry motor of a truck before I saw it. Several men on my left shouted
their approval, and an ancient dump truck appeared, impossibly long and
carrying what looked like the marble leg and torso and battered face of an
ancient statue - the statue of a naked goddess pulled from Greek mythology or
adolescent fantasy.

That was such an unlikely detail.
Human faces are supposed to be doctored, leaving viewers unaware of who they
might be watching. Privacy laws are clear on that score. But what I had heard
once or twice was obviously true: The new infinity windows were as much
invention as they were reality. Somewhere in the world was a city like this
one, and it was inhabited by about as many pedestrians and vehicles as we saw
for ourselves. But those people had different faces. And the AI, endowed with
genius and the threat of boredom, was endlessly editing everything that was
here, sculpting its own little storylines and odd sights; a marriage of the
clever and peculiar leading to a view that people would watch, if only for fear
that they might miss something remarkable.

Moments later came the musical
hum of a real bus. An efficient box pulled to the curb and opened up. Six or
seven strangers climbed out, every face twisted to protect identities. And
every one of them wore a red nose and the bright white skin of a clown.

I like to think that I appreciate
new technologies. Not that I’m an expert in AI genius or digital gamesmanship.
But curious, endearing joy kept rolling through me. These little nuggets of
fiction made me laugh, reminding me of those silly pictures that my son liked
when he was five, where the game was to spot the chicken wearing a hat and the
panda eating steak. Except these were stranger and much funnier visions, and to
a man who wasn’t going anywhere for another fifty-five minutes, endlessly
entertaining.

The biggest story was subtle.

After a lull in foot traffic, a
young fellow appeared. I noticed him at a distance, although I couldn’t say
why. Nothing about him seemed unusual. His clothes and face were ordinary. He
walked toward the corner and stopped, his back to Berry and me. My assumption
was that he was waiting for the next bus. Wherever this was, the day looked
sunny and hot, and he stood against the building’s shade. After a few moments,
he turned, and with shameless intensity he stared at my face. Then with the
same laser care, he examined Berry. And stepping back from the building, he
laughed, lifting his arms and knees, and with a clown’s oversized motions
pretended that he was one of us, riding a marching machine that took him
nowhere.

I didn’t laugh so much as gasp.

“He can see us,” I muttered.

One of Berry’s doctor shows was
playing. She paused it with a voice command and turned to me, never slowing her
gait. But her smile changed, growing more serious. Then with a slow, careful
voice - the voice that smart people use on diminished souls - she explained, “The
window works in both directions.”

“It does?”

Why didn’t I remember that?

“Of course it does,” she said. “One
AI can serve two markets at once, which helps with energy demands and the
general economics.”

“But he doesn’t see our faces,” I
said hopefully.

“Of course not.” She gave out a
big laugh, adding, “The window makes me twenty years younger, I hope.”

Our new friend wasn’t especially
young or handsome. In fact, he seemed a little disreputable, his shoes were
worn out and no socks, his shirt two mends short of being a rag. He was the
kind of fellow that would earn a cautious look from me, if I found myself on his
street. Which wouldn’t happen, of course. But he or the window had a redeeming
sense of humour, and his audience ended up having a good long laugh.

Once the mocking workout was
finished, the stranger suddenly knelt down. I didn’t understand why. Then a hand
that could have used a good scrub touched our club’s corporate emblem - the
healthy red heart and two pink lungs full of good health and happy endorphins.

I cut my pace, allowing extra
oxygen to flood my foolish brain. “It does make sense though, working both
ways.”

Berry didn’t respond immediately.

“I just expected us to be high in
the sky.” It seemed important, explaining away my temporary stupidity.

“Windows serve many functions,”
she explained. “Advertisement, for one. This gentleman sees spectacular
versions of you and me, and he’s more likely to join his local club.”

“He doesn’t look like money,” I
mentioned.

“Looks,” she said with a
dismissive tone. “We don’t know what to believe. Maybe in real life, he’s
wearing a suit. Besides, those legs are strong, and he isn’t exactly starving.”

No, I couldn’t believe anything I
was seeing. But more important, I had to be careful when I talked.

An uncomfortable moment passed
between us. Then this woman I didn’t know turned to me. Her smile was anything
but simple. With a grave, almost morbid tone, she said, “These windows bother
me.”

“Why?”

“Solipsism,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Do you know what the word means?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“The premise that everything
outside your own mind could be unreal.”

“I know the concept,” I said.

“Anyway,” she said. “I am
troubled.”

“By what?”

She didn’t answer immediately.
Growing bored with the window, or at least with us, our new friend had stepped
out into the sun. We watched him looking up into the branches of the little
tree. I noticed the leaves: very green and shaped like fans, veins radiating
out from the stem. Which seemed phony.

“Since I was a teenager,” Berry
said, “the notion that the world isn’t real has been gnawing at me.”

“Every kid thinks that way,” I
said. “Everybody else is a figment of my vivid, important imagination.”

“But today, anything is possible,”
she reminded me. “Algorithms can draw any scene, and AI wetware can string
together any narrative. And everybody has to deal with that thirteen-year-old’s
conundrum: ‘Am I real?’“

“I’m real,” I said reflexively.

“And how would you know?” There
wasn’t any smile left on the old face. Gloomy and honest, she said, “Maybe we’re
illusions. Some AI dreamed us up. We’re being used as an advertisement for the
health club, and the target audience is standing out there, scratching his
butt.”

I looked at our friend’s casual
ass-rubbing. “I don’t believe that,” I said.

“Of course, you can’t,” she said.

And then I gave up talking,
working the imaginary hill as hard as I could.

Buses are destined to run late.
No system involving dozens of vehicles and thousands of humans can exclude
chance, and chance wants to place every player ahead or behind schedule. That’s
why any two buses will usually be closer than expected or farther apart.
Prospective riders face three possibilities: Arrive at their stop exactly as
the next bus pulls up, which gives them reason to believe in God or their
special luck. Or they hit an interval between two closely spaced buses - a
rather more likely scenario reinforcing the idea of effective, efficient
government. But the most common outcome is to enter one of the longer gaps, and
if it’s near the beginning, even the most rational citizen of the world will
glance at the time and cluck his tongue, wondering why his goddamn bus isn’t
here yet.