Nancy Kress - Steamship Soldier on the Information Front

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Steamship Soldier

on the Information Front (v1.1)

Nancy Kress, 1997

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.

As soon as he entered the unprepossessing concrete-block building, he could feel the data

rush. Vibrating, racing, dancing. Whatever made a place blaze on the very edge of the

information front, this place had it.

His contact entered the lobby just as Allan did. On top of the moves. She was an Indian

woman in her late thirties, dressed in khaki slacks and a red shirt. All her movements were

quick and light. Her black eyes shone with intelligence.

"Allan. I'm Skaka Gupta, Chief Scientist at Novation." Although of course Allan already knew

that, plus everything relevant about her career, and she knew that he knew. "Welcome to our

Biorobotics Unit."

"Thank you."

"Would you like a max-effish print-out of our current status?" A courtesy only; Novation's

official profile would have been supplied to his firm yesterday. With an update this morning, if

anything had changed overnight. And she'd know he'd prefer the figures and projections put

together by his own people, in which the official profile was only one factor.

"No, thank you." Allan smiled. "But I am very eager to see your work directly."

"Then let's do that." She smiled back, completely sure of herself. Or of her work. Allan

hoped it was of her work; he could sniff genuine success here. It smelled like money.

"Let me babble about the basics," Skaka said, "and you jump in with questions when you

want to. We're passing through the biolab now, where we build the robots. Or, rather, start

them growing."

Behind a glass wall stood rows of sterile counters, each monitored by automated

equipment. A lone technician, dressed in white scrubs and mask, worked at a far counter.

Allan said, "Let me test my understanding here. Your robot bodies are basic mass-ordered

cylinders, with electro-field intercommunication, elevation-climbing limbs, and the usual

sensors."

"That's right. We'll see them in a minute -- they look like upended tin cans with four skinny

clumsy legs and two skinny clumsy arms. But their processing units are entirely innovative.

Each circuit board you see here, in each clear box, is being grown. We start with textured

silicon plate etched with logic circuits, and then seed them with fetal neurons, grown on

synthetic peptides. The fetal tissue used comes from different sources. The result is that

even though the circuit scaffolds are the same, the neurons spin out different axons and

dendrites. And since fetal brains always produce more neurons than they ultimately need,

different ones atrophy on different boards. Each processor ends up different, and so the

robots are subtly different too."

Allan studied the quiet, orderly lab. Skaka merely waited. Finally he said, "You're not the

only company exploring this technique."

"No, of course not. But we've developed significant new variations -- significant by several

orders of magnitude. Proprietary, of course, until you've bought in."

Until, not if. Allan liked that.

"The proof of just how different our techniques are lies right ahead. This way to the

primate house."

"Monkeys?" Allan said, startled. This had not been in the pre-reading.

Skaka, walking briskly, grinned over her shoulder. "P-r-i-m-e E-i-g-h-t House. It's a joke.

Currently we have eight robots in each of two different stages of development. Both groups

are in learning environments modeled on the closed-system forests once used with chimps.

Follow me."

She led him out of the lab, down a long windowless corridor. Half-way, Allan's tie-tack

beeped twice.

"Excuse me, Skaka, is the men's room -- "

"Right through that door."

Inside, Allan flipped over his tie tack. The PID icon for Charlie had completely stopped

vibrating. Immediately Allan phoned his son.

"Charlie? Where are you?"

"What do you mean, where am I? It's Friday, right? I'm at school."

"In ... "

"In Aspen."

"Why aren't you in Denver?"

"Not this week, Dad, remember?"

Allan hadn't. Mrs. Canning's tutorial schedule for the kids' real-time educational experiences

was complex, although of course Allan could have accessed it on his meshNet. Maybe he

should have. But Charlie's physical location wasn't the issue.

"What are you doing in Aspen, son? Right now?"

"Nothing."

Allan pushed down his annoyance. Also his concern. Charlie -- so handsome, so smart,

twelve years old -- spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. Just sitting in one room or

another, staring into space. It wasn't normal. He should be out playing soccer, exploring the

Net, teasing girls, racing bikes. Even reading would be more productive than this passive

staring into nothing.

Allan said, "Where's Mrs. Canning? Why is she letting you do nothing? We don't pay her for

that, you know."

"She thinks I'm writing my essay about the archeological dig we did in the desert."

"And why aren't you writing it?"

"I will ... look, Dad, I gotta go now. See you next week. Love you."

"But Charlie -- "

The phone went dead.

Should he call back? When Charlie got like this, he often didn't answer. Got like what? What

was wrong with a kid who just turned himself off and sat, like a lump of bacon fat?

Nothing. Nothing was wrong with his son.

"Allan? Everything all right?" Skaka, rapping discreetly on the men's room door. Christ, how

long had Allan been staring at the motionless Charlie icon on his PID? Too long. The schedule

would be all shot to hell.

"Fine," he said, striding into the corridor. "Sorry. Now let's see the Prime Eight house."

"You've never seen data like this," Skaka promised, and strode faster to make up for the

lost time.

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摘要：

SteamshipSoldierontheInformationFront(v1.1)NancyKress,1997JustbeforetheplanetoucheddownatLogan,AllanHallergaveonelastchecktothePIDonthebackofhistie-tack.Good.IntensevibrationintheCathyicon,superintenseinSuzette,andevenCharlieshowedacceptableoscillation.Noneedtocontactanyofthem,thatwouldsavetime.Patt...

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