Gregory Benford - Zoomers

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ZOOMERS

by Gregory Benford

___________________________________

Taken from: Year's Best SF 2

Edited by David G. Hartwell

ISBN 0-06-105746-0

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-30-02 [v1.0]

She climbed into her yawning work pod, coffee barely getting her going. A warning light winked: her

Foe was already up and running. Another day at the orifice.

The pod wrapped itself around her as tabs and inserts slid into place. This was the latest gear, a top of

the line simulation suit immersed in a data-pod of beguiling comfort.

Snug. Not a way to lounge, but to fly.

She closed her eyes and let the sim-suit do its stuff.

May 16, 2046. She liked to start in real-space. Less jarring.

Images played directly upon her retina. The entrance protocol lifted her out of her Huntington Beach

apartment and in a second she was zooming over rooftops, skating down the beach. Combers broke in

soft white bands and red-suited surfers caught them in passing marriage.

All piped down from a satellite view, of course, sharp and clear.

Get to work, Myung, her Foe called. Sightsee later.

"I'm running a deep search," she lied.

Sure.

"I'll spot you a hundred creds on the action," she shot back.

You're on. Big new market opening today. A hint of mockery?

"Where?" Today she was going to nail him, by God.

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Right under our noses, the way I sniff it.

"In the county?"

Now, that would be telling.

Which meant he didn't know.

So: a hunt. Better than a day of shaving margins, at least.

She and her Foe were zoomers, ferrets who made markets more efficient. Evolved far beyond the

primitivo commodity traders of the late TwenCen, they moved fast, high-flying for competitive edge.

They zoomed through spaces wholly insubstantial, but that was irrelevant. Economic pattern-spaces

were as tricky as mountain crevasses. And even hard cash just stood for an idea.

Most people still dug coal and grew crops, ancient style grunt labor--but in Orange County you could

easily forget that, gripped by the fever of the new.

Below her, the county was a sprawl, but a smart one. The wall-to-mall fungus left over from the

TwenCen days was gone. High-rises rose from lush parks. Some even had orange grove skirts, a chic

nostalgia. Roofs were eco-virtue white. Blacktop streets had long ago added a sandy-colored coating

whose mica sprinkles winked up at her. Even cars were in light shades. All this to reflect sunlight, public

advertisements that everybody was doing something about global warming.

The car-rivers thronged streets and freeways (still free--if you could get the license). When parked,

cars were tucked underground. Still plenty of scurry-scurry, but most of it mental, not metal.

She sensed the county's incessant pulse, the throb of the Pacific Basin's hub, pivot point of the largest

zonal economy on the planet.

Felt, not saw. Her chest was a map. Laguna Beach over her right nipple, Irvine over the left. Using

neural

plasticity, the primary sensory areas of her cortex "read" the county's electronic Mesh through her

skin.

But this was not like antique serial reading at all. No flat data here. No screens.

She relaxed. The trick was to merge, not just observe.

Far better for a chimpanzeelike species to take in the world through its evolved, body-wrapping neural

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bed.

More fun, too. She detected economic indicators on her augmented skin. A tiny shooting pain spoke

of a leveraged buyout. Was that uneasy sensation natural to her, or a hint from her subsystems about a

possible lowering of the prime rate?

Gotcha! the Foe sent.

Myung glanced at her running index. She was eleven hundred creds down!

So fast? How could--?

Then she felt it: dancing data-spikes in alarm-red, prickly on her left leg. The Foe had captured an

early indicator. Which?

Myung had been coasting toward the Anaheim hills, watching the pulse of business trading quicken as

slanting sunshine smartly profiled the fashionable, post-pyramidal corporate buildings. So she had

missed the opening salvo of weather data update, the first trading opportunity.

The Foe already had an edge and was shifting investments. How?

Ahead of her in the simulated air she could see the Foe skating to the south. All this was visual

metaphor, of course, symbology for the directed attention of the data-eating programs.

A stain came spreading from the east into Mission Viejo. Not real weather, but economic variables.

Deals flickered beneath the data-thunderheads like sheet lightning. Pixels of packet-information fell as

soft rains on her long-term investments.

The Foe was buying extra electrical power from Oxnard. Selling it to users to offset the low yields

seeping up from San Diego.

Small stuff. A screen for something subtle. Myung close-upped the digital stream and glimpsed the

deeper details.

Every day more water flowed in the air over southern California than streamed down the Mississippi.

Rainfall projections changed driving conditions, affected tournament golf scores, altered yields of solar

power, fed into agri-prod.

Down her back slid prickly-fresh commodity info, an itch she should scratch. A hint from her sniffer-

programs? She willed a virtual finger to rub the tingling.

--and snapped back to real-space.

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An ivory mist over Long Beach. Real, purpling water thunderclouds scooting into San Juan Cap from

the south.

Ah--virtual sports. The older the population got, the more leery of weather. They still wanted the zing

of adventure, though. Through virtual feedback, creaky bodies could air-surf from twenty kilometers

above the Grand Canyon. Or race alongside the few protected Great White sharks in the Catalina

Preserve.

High-resolution Virtuality stimulated lacy filigrees of electro-chem impulses throughout the cerebral

cortex. Did it matter whether the induction came from the real thing or from the slippery arts of

electronics?

Time for a bit of business.

Her prognosticator programs told her that with 0.87 probability, such oldies would cocoon-up across

six states. So indoor virtual sports use, with electro-stim to zing the aging muscles, would rise in the next

day.

She swiftly exercised options on five virtual sites, pouring in some of her reserve computational

capacity.

But the Foe had already harvested the plums there. Not much margin left.

Myung killed her simulated velocity and saw the layers of deals the Foe was making, counting on the

coming storm to shift the odds by fractions. Enough contracts-of-the-moment processed, and profits

added up. But you had to call the slant just right.

Trouble-sniffing subroutines pressed their electronic doubts upon her: a warning chill breeze across

her brow. She waved it away.

Myung dove into the clouds of event-space. Her skin did the deals for here, working with software

that verged on mammal-level intelligence itself. She wore her suits of artificial-intelligence . . . and in a

real sense, they wore her.

She felt her creds--not credits so much as credibilities, the operant currency in data-space--washing

like hot air currents over her body.

Losses were chilling. She got cold feet, quite literally, when the San Onofre nuke piped up with a

gush of clean power. A new substation, coming on much earlier than SoCalEd had estimated.

That endangered her energy portfolio. A quick flick got her out of the electrical futures market

altogether, before the world-wide Mesh caught on to the implications.

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