Hieroglyph (37 page)

ROBERT SKY GOT THE
call while helping his son pick out a new home in West Vancouver. After so many years in Ottawa, on the far side of the continent, he thought maybe his memory was playing tricks on him. He remembered this neighborhood differently—as a place where lichen and moss grew on the curbs, rain-drenched hedges rose twenty feet high, and garden slugs were as long as his thumb. Instead he stepped onto a clean cement sidewalk under blue sky and a hot sun. There were no hedges in sight, and sprinklers were trying to paint over the yellow that had invaded the normally rich green of the lawns.

“What do you think?” Terry spread his arms dramatically.

Rob looked up at the house they'd seen in the listing and grunted. Coral-pink stucco. Not a promising start. “How'd you find it?”

“Nexcity.” Terry tapped his glasses.

“Shit, son, that's a nudge.”

“It can be.” Terry shrugged.

At this point Rob would normally have made some sarcastic remark about using augmented reality to make your decisions for you, but the fact was he had Nexcity open in his own glasses. Instead of saying anything, he took a moment to scout out the neighborhood. “What're they asking?”

“One five.”

“Seems low. I wonder . . .” He turned around and saw why houses on this street might be priced lower. Two blocks away, his glasses showed the virtual wire-frame shape of a condominium tower superimposed against the towers across English Bay. The Nexcity app took data from plans registered at the city planning office and made them into a virtual skyline. The historical city; buildings now being built or renovated; what would or could exist here—all were visible through the glasses. Rob's ant-hill plug-in annotated the condo project with projected desire lines showing which routes foot traffic was likely to take from the project to the new skytrain line. Much of it went right by the house.

“There goes the neighborhood,” he said as he shut the car door. “You don't want to buy here.”

“But, Dad, that tower's the only development.” Had there been anything else registered at the planning department, it would be visible in Nexcity.

“Condos are like cockroaches. Where there's one, there's bound to be more.”

Terry's wife, Margaret, was already inside, but she'd heard this exchange. Her laugh floated out of the foyer. “Check out the staging, boys!”

Whatever the place had looked like before, the fluffers had clearly been at it: all the interior walls were immaculate white, any rugs had been removed to show the blond wood flooring, and the furniture was clearly from some stager's warehouse: it was all utterly generic, like an
Architectural Digest
spread. Margaret was talking to the real estate agent, who looked like the usual bored-housewife recruit. Rob took the information sheet from her, held it up so his glasses could scan it, and overlaid the agent with a liaison for her company.

This synthesized face summarized the ratings given the company by thousands of customers. Bad reviews made it uglier; good reviews, more attractive. The face he saw was bland and unassuming. Not a
bad
company, at least.

Margaret was polite to the agent, taking another information sheet and tapping phones with her. As soon as the woman was out of earshot, she said, “Let's mess the place up a bit and see how it looks.”

“What's the overlay?” asked Terry.

“Renovator Two. You got it?”

“Just a minute.” Terry and Rob both opened store apps and found the overlay she was using. While they downloaded, she changed the wall colors and countertops in her overlay, then passed them on. The new view included renders of their paintings from back home—Kent Monkman originals, of course. Rob rolled his eyes, but actually, eggplant and lime green went better together here than he would have imagined.

Being pleased with something made him instantly suspicious. “The real estate companies pay these app makers, you know,” he said. “Illusion of control. And the colors aren't what you'd actually see. Virtual paint ain't paint.”

“Oh, Dad.” As they looked at the bedrooms, he could see that Terry was convinced. Rob thought they could do better, but he would have happily gone along with Terry's decision had his son not suddenly said, “How's your Dorian look, Maggie?”

Rob snorted. “Oh, you've joined that damned cult, have you?”

“Dad, it's just more decision-support software.”

“And you need more help making decisions? Pah.”

At that moment Rob got the call. He stood there for a minute with his hand to his ear—motionless, so that Terry and Margaret shrugged and went to look at the en suite.

“Jesus,” said Rob.

Terry poked his head out of the little bathroom. “What is it?”

“Should I come back to Ottawa? No, here's better, right . . . three hours.” He blinked and looked over at his son. “No matter how hard we try, we can't escape our roots,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“A goddamned tanker's run aground in the Inside Passage. It's the worst possible moment, 'cause we've almost sealed the negotiations to build the Northern Gateway Pipeline.” That pipeline was the last chance for Alberta's oil sands, as all other transportation costs skyrocketed and pipelines through the United States and east into Ontario had been stymied. “The First Nations were the roadblock, and they were about to sign on. That goddamned tanker just handed them a big environmental stick to beat us with. They're insisting on final, binding renegotiations of their original treaties. Land for oil, it's that simple. And guess who's leading the charge?”

“Oh. Don't tell me, it's—”

“You're always so proud to call them
our
people,” said Robert Skaay. “Well,
our
people want a lands-claim settlement—and they're gonna use this spill to get it.”

“The Haida are blocking the pipeline?” Rob could see the hint of excitement in Terry's eyes.

He sighed. “Not the pipeline, but the tanker terminal, which is pretty much the same thing.

“And it looks like I'm going to be across the table from them.”

“FORTY THOUSAND TONNES DRY
weight,” said Krishnamurti, director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. “We're not sure how much oil it was carrying but it's enough to make a hell of a mess. We're pretty sure the Haida are behind it.”

Robert had taken over a conference room in downtown Vancouver and dimmed the lights so his glasses could take over, projecting a virtual rendition of the Ottawa room where the rest of the cabinet ministers sat. Like Rob, Krishnamurti was attending the meeting remotely.

The prime minister leaned back in his chair, arms crossed and obviously angry. “The Haida would never
cause
an environmental catastrophe! They're all about preserving the land, aren't they?”

All eyes turned to Rob. He sighed. “How would I know?” He stared them all down. After all this time they should know he'd never lived in the Haida Gwaii.

They should also know that, behind anything the Haida did these days, there was a couple hundred years' worth of frustration with the Canadian government's bad faith and broken treaty promises.

Krishnamurti cleared his throat. “It's not
their
shoreline that's threatened. There's a mosaic of overlapping First Nations around the Passage, like the Oweekeno and the In-SHUCK-ch. The Haida may have risked screwing them over for the greater good.”

“More likely they're all in on it,” said the minister of foreign affairs. “The bands that are affected can sue us for compensation.”

Rob shook his head. “But why do you think the Haida are behind it? Was there a bomb on the ship?”

“It's purely circumstantial,” said the CSIS director. “It's about timing.”

“Can you pass Rob that overlay?” said the prime minister to Krishnamurti.

“Right.” A flag in the corner of Rob's vision told him he had new e-mail with an attachment. He blinked at the symbol for the attachment and something loaded into his interface. “What is it?”

“Have you got a window to look out? It works best that way.”

Warily, Rob rose and shifted the heavy curtain. Outside sprawled the green glass towers of downtown Vancouver. He could see the ski runs on Grouse Mountain, a green crosshatch under the summer sky.

Standing up out of the city in a profusion as thick as the surrounding forests were thousands of virtual flags. He poked at one and expanded it so he could see the caption. It was a man's name, vaguely familiar; a spiderweb of faint lines radiated out from it. “What is this?”

“It's an augmented reality overlay that tells you who owns what,” said Krishnamurti. “A Big Data aggregation of publicly available information on real estate, machinery, infrastructure, you name it—linked back to the shareholders, boards, and individuals who own it. A map of who owns what . . . and not just modern financial data. It's got all the First Nations land claims. It was uploaded to the Vancouver Urban Overlays site six hours ago, just before the tanker ran aground.

“Whoever uploaded it did so from Haida Gwaii.”

WHEN ROB WAS GROWING
up, they'd still been called the Queen Charlotte Islands. An hour north of Vancouver by plane, the Gwaii nestled just under the Alaskan Panhandle. An inverted triangle of coastal rain forest, the islands were known for their gigantic trees and for the art that those had inspired. As inhabitants of one of the last areas of North America to be touched by European conquest, the islanders had a more direct connection to their ancestry than any other Canadian First Nation; their strength hadn't faded until around 1900 when smallpox devastated the islands.

That the aboriginal side of Rob's family was from there had always meant, well, nothing, to him. Artistic though they might be, the Haida were a footnote in North American history. Yet they had never entirely gone away, and they had never thought of themselves as a conquered people.

Maybe it was that one simple fact about them that made them dangerous.

He looked behind him. The augmented reality interface gave Rob the illusion that he was not standing alone in a commandeered conference room high above the Vancouver skyline but was in fact closeted with the rest of the cabinet back in Ottawa. Turning back to the window, he stared out at the unsettling skyline, wondering how many other people were looking at the city—the country—through the same new lens. This app was a step beyond Nexcity, which merely showed you the future of local real estate. This . . . this was inequality made visible.

It wasn't just the present-day ownership tags. The whole visible vista of mountains and coast was subdivided by faint curving virtual walls, like the sheets of the northern lights, except tagged with the relevant treaty claims. All the betrayals by the British and Canadian governments over the centuries were visible, shimmering in the sky. Even the currency that the money was counted in—it wasn't dollars, but Gwaiicoin. That variant of Bitcoin was quickly becoming the most popular currency on the West Coast, and not just among the First Nations.

There was more.

The interface included something called
Fountains View
. When he tried it, the skyscape shifted; instead of shimmering walls of light, he was looking at . . . well, fountains. Fountains of money, rising off Indian lands and falling on the city, into glass-walled towers that wore the logos of logging and mining companies like crowns. Fountains of money that you could follow as they left the lands of the Aishihik and Te'mexw, the Klahoose and Nazko, and vanished into the vaults of white men—an accusation as clear as a cry from God.

“This can't be legal,” he said. “Where are they getting the data?”

“It's all from legal sources. Shareholders' reports, mostly,” said Krishnamurti.

“We think the same people somehow grounded the tanker?”

“We don't know it for sure. We're assembling a liaison for them. Here, I'll bring it up.”

Rob turned back to the conference room, repopulated with the transparent images of his colleagues and a newcomer. A new figure sat in one of the previously empty chairs: a young aboriginal man, well dressed and calm, who gazed back at Rob through intelligent, dark eyes.

Rob shuddered. “Is it live?”

“Not yet; we don't have enough behavior of the group it models to bring it to life. When it is, maybe we can learn more.”

“Meanwhile,” said the prime minister, “let's look at our policy options. Your people have run the padgets?” Krishnamurti nodded and called up SimCanada. Back in Ottawa, it would be appearing on the wall screen; for Robert, the data sprang to life as a series of virtual screens floating in and even beyond the boundaries of the room.

There were sixteen Canadas up there, blotched with color that showed relative levels of political support for the Party, as well as economic well-being across the country, industrial measures, and even those new intangibles, the “happiness quotients” that were in such vogue now. Each map showed a different possible future for the country. The damned program provided only multiple futures, never a single projection, which was one of the things Rob hated about it. It had to do with how morphological analysis worked, but it was annoying anyway. What good was a system that let you see the future if it couldn't tell you
which
future was going to come to pass?

The sixteen maps showed Canadas six months from now, based on different policy choices the government was working on. These options were flight-tested in an agent-based simulation of the entire country that included the behavior of individual virtual citizens. The simulations were fed by real-time polling and econometric data, and by data from the padgets—policy-development gadgets—employed by the country's political parties. Krishnamurti used a slider on the screen to move forward and backward in time and sideways through the different options. “So here are the results with and without the tanker spill, depending on which of the response packages we select. As you can see, there's broad support for a crackdown to start with, but the padgets show quick deterioration of public support if the perceived threat declines . . .”