Egan, Greg - Tap

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Tap, by Greg Egan
"I want you to find out who killed my mother, Ms O'Connor. Will you do that?"
Helen Sharp's voice was unsteady with anger; she seemed almost as psyched up as if she'd come here
to confront the killer, face-to-face. Under the circumstances, though, the very act of insisting
that there was a killer was like shouting a defiant accusation from the rooftops -- which must
have taken some courage, even if she had no idea whom she was accusing.
I said carefully, "The coroner returned an open finding. I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine Third
Hemisphere would still settle out of court for a significant -- "
"Third Hemisphere have no case to answer! And sure, maybe they'd pay up anyway -- just to avoid
the publicity. But as it happens, I'm not interested in legalized blackmail." Her eyes flashed
angrily; she made no effort to conceal her outrage. No doubt her lawyers had already given her
exactly the same advice; it didn't look like the idea would ever grow on her. She was thirty-two --
only five years younger than me -- but she radiated so much stubborn idealism that I found it hard
not to think of her as belonging to another generation entirely.
I raised one hand in a conciliatory gesture. "Fine. It's your decision. But I suggest you don't
sign anything that limits your options -- and don't make any public declarations of absolution.
After six months paying my expenses, you might change your mind. Or I might even turn up something
that will change it for you. Stranger things have happened." Though nothing much stranger than a
next-of-kin declining to screw a multinational for all it was worth.
Sharp said impatiently, "The TAP implant was not responsible. There's no evidence to suggest that
it was."
"No, and there's no evidence to suggest foul play, either."
"That's why I'm hiring you. To find it."
I glanced irritably at the north-facing window; the allegedly smart pane was ablaze with sunlight,
rendering most of the office almost as hot as the sweltering streets of Kings Cross below.
Grace Sharp had been dead for a month. I'd been following the case informally, like everyone else
in Sydney, out of sheer morbid curiosity. On the evening of January 12, she'd been at work in her
study, apparently alone. The immediate cause of death had been a myocardial infarction, but the
autopsy had also shown signs of a powerful adrenaline surge. That could have resulted from the
pain and stress of a heart attack already in progress -- or it could have come first, triggered by
an unknown external shock.
Or, the Total Affect Protocol chip in her brain might have flooded her body with adrenaline for no
good reason at all.
Sharp had been sixty-seven -- in reasonable health for her age, but old enough to blur the
boundaries of the possible. Forensic pathologists had struggled at the inquest to allocate
probabilities to the three alternatives, but there'd been no clear front-runner. Which was no
doubt distressing for the relatives -- and no doubt left them vulnerable to the fantasy that there
had to be a simple answer out there somewhere, just waiting to be found.
Helen Sharp said, "The media consensus is that my mother was composing a poem just before she died
-- and she thought a word in TAP so 'powerful' that it killed her on the spot." Her tone was
venomous. "Do they seriously imagine that ninety thousand sane people would put something in their
brains which was capable of doing that? Or that the manufacturers would sell a device which would
leave them open to billions of dollars worth of compensation claims? Or that the government
licensing authorities -- "
I said, "Licensed pharmaceuticals have killed plenty of people. Implants are even harder to test.
And 'fail-safe' software written to the most rigorous military specifications has crashed aircraft
-- "
She seized on the analogy triumphantly. "And how do you know that? Because the aircraft's black
box proved it! Well, the TAP implant has its own black box: an independent chip which logs all its
actions. And there was no record of any malfunction. No record of the implant triggering an
adrenaline release at any level -- let alone a fatal dose."
"Maybe the black box glitched, too. You say it's independent -- but if there's enough connectivity
to let it know everything the implant does, the combined system might still be vulnerable to some
kind of shared failure mode that the designers never anticipated."
Sharp clenched her fists in frustration. "That's not -- literally -- impossible," she conceded.
"But I don't believe it's likely."
"All right. What do you think happened?"
Sharp composed herself, with the air of someone weary of repeating the same message, gathering up
her strength with a promise to herself that this would be the last time.
She said, "My mother was working on a new poem that night -- the black box makes that clear. But
the time of death can't be determined precisely -- and it could have been as much as fifteen
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minutes after the last recorded use of the implant. I believe she was interrupted. I believe
someone broke into the apartment and killed her.
"I don't know how they did it. Maybe they just terrorized her -- without laying a finger on her --
and that was enough to bring on the heart attack." Her voice was flat, deliberately emotionless.
"Or maybe they gave her a transdermal dose of a powerful stimulant. There are dozens of chemicals
which could have triggered a heart attack, without leaving a trace. She wasn't found for almost
nine hours. There are carbohydrate analogs of stimulatory neuropeptides which are degraded into
glucose and water on a time scale of minutes."
I resisted the urge to cite the lack of evidence for an intruder; it would have been a waste of
breath. "Why, though? Why would anyone want to kill her?"
She hesitated. "I'm not sure how much you know about TAP."
"Assume the worst."
"Well ... it's been wrongly described as just about everything from 'telepathy' to 'computerized
Esperanto' to 'the multimedia standard for the brain'. Sure, it began with a fusion of language
and VR -- but it's been growing for almost fifteen years now. There's still a word for <<dog>>" --
she sketched the angle-brackets with her fingers, and I picked up on the convention later --
"which might as well be hundo -- and another for <<your beloved golden Labrador standing on the
beach shaking the water from its coat before licking your face>> ... which will evoke all that and
more in all five senses, if you let it.
"But at the leading edge, now, we're creating words for concepts, emotions, states of mind, which
might once have defied description altogether. With TAP, ultimately there's nothing a human being
can experience which needs to remain ... ineffable, mysterious, incommunicable. Nothing is beyond
discussion. Nothing is beyond analysis. Nothing is 'unspeakable'. And a lot of people find that
prospect threatening; it turns a lot of old power structures on their head."
If that cliche came true every time it was invoked, power structures would be oscillating faster
than mains current. Helen Sharp was pushing seven on my paranoia index; on top of all her
understandable grief and frustration, she belonged to a technosubculture which was poorly
understood by the mainstream, frequently misrepresented -- and which clearly liked to think of
itself as a "dangerously" iconoclastic elite.
I said, "I know there are people who find TAP users ... unacceptable. But what's going to drive
them to extremes like murder, all of a sudden? In fifteen years, has anyone, anywhere, been killed
simply for having the implant?"
"Not to my knowledge. But -- "
"Then surely -- "
"But I can tell you exactly what's changed. I can tell you why the conflict has just entered a
whole new phase."
That got my attention. "Go on."
"You know it's against the law to install a TAP implant in anyone younger than eighteen years
old?"
"Of course." The same restriction applied to all neural hardware, other than therapeutic chips
which restored normal function to the injured or congenitally disabled.
"Early in March, a couple here in Sydney will commence legal proceedings with the aim of ensuring
that they're free to install the implant in all their future children -- at the age of three
months."
I was momentarily speechless. These plans had clearly been kept within a very tight circle of
supporters; the saturation media coverage of the inquest hadn't mentioned so much as a rumour.
After a month of intense journalistic scrutiny, I hadn't expected the TAP-heads to have any
surprises left.
I said, "Legal proceedings on what basis?"
"That they're entitled to raise their family using whatever language they choose. That's
guaranteed in Federal legislation: there's a 2011 bill which brings into force most of the
provisions of the 2005 UN Covenant on Human Rights. They'll be seeking a ruling from the High
Court which invalidates the relevant sections of the New South Wales criminal code -- which is far
more difficult, from a legal point of view, than trying to defend themselves against a prosecution
after the fact ... but it does save them the trouble of having to find a surgeon willing to risk
martyrdom."
Sharp smiled faintly. "The same Federal law was invoked about a year ago, by a signing couple who
were being pressured by Community Services to give their son a hearing implant. The parents won
the first round -- and it looks like there isn't going to be an appeal. But a pro-implant case was
always going to be much harder, of course. And signing is positively respectable, compared to
TAP."
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"I assume the police know all this?"
"Of course. They don't appear to be particularly interested, though -- and I wasn't able to raise
it at the inquest. Legally speaking, I suppose it really is just static."
"But you think -- "
"I think a death widely attributed to the TAP implant would transform the prospects of the
challenge succeeding from merely poor to ... politically impossible. I think there are people
who'd consider that to be a result worth killing for."
Sharp fixed her gaze on me for a moment, and then nodded slightly, almost sympathetically -- as if
I'd just uttered a word which expressed all the conflicting emotions running through my head:
<<Neural hardware in the skull of a three-month-old child -- just to indulge its parents' whims --
would be an obscenity. But ... if the ubiquitous hearing implants which grant English-before-sign
are no "whim", why is one which grants TAP-before-English? And if Grace Sharp was murdered to sway
the odds against the challenge, her self-righteous killers belong in prison, regardless -- and my
own knee-jerk revulsion at the prospect of infant TAP-heads only goes to show that it could easily
have been a powerful enough motive.>>
She said, "And I think you're going to take the case."
I started work that afternoon, reviewing the technical literature on the TAP implant -- the
closest thing to an objective account of its capabilities I was likely to find. Like most people,
I imagined I already understood all the salient features -- but it turned out that I'd swallowed
more misinformation from the nets than I'd realized.
The two chips -- the implant proper and the black box, both less than a millimetre wide -- sat at
the back of the skull, sharing access to a fine web of conductive polymer threads which wrapped
the brain, making billions of quasi-synaptic contacts with the visual and auditory cortex, and
Wernicke's speech area in the temporal lobe. Other threads penetrated deeper, some as far as the
limbic system. TAP could always be spoken or written, but bandwidth requirements made modulated
infrared the medium of choice, so the implant was linked, via the spinal cord, to bioengineered IR
transceiver cells in the skin of the palms.
Merely installing the implant didn't grant instant fluency in TAP; the language still had to be
learnt. A complete, "preloaded" vocabulary would never have worked; the precise meaning of most
words in TAP could only be encoded in context, once the implant resided in a particular user's
brain. The implant's own electronic neural net was ninety percent blank at installation,
containing only a specialized language acquisition system and a simple "bootstrap" vocabulary. And
though the learning process left its mark mostly within the implant itself -- along with some
relatively minor changes to the regions of the brain where a second natural language would have
been encoded -- it was meaningless to talk about either brain or chip "knowing TAP", in isolation.
An experienced user who exchanged his or her old implant for a new one straight from the factory
would have been dragged back almost to square one (in practice, all the data from the old hardware
would be copied to the new) -- but equally, an experience-enriched implant placed in a novice's
brain would have been as unusable as a slice of someone else's cerebral cortex.
These observations applied strictly to adults, of course. Despite several dozen theoretical papers
-- most of them cautiously optimistic -- no one really knew how a young child's brain would
interact with the implant.
A TAP user could interpret a standard VR sensorium -- but there was, deliberately, no provision
for interacting in the conventional way with a nonexistent environment. Immersive VR implants
temporarily paralysed the organic body and diverted motor impulses from the brain into a fully
computerized somatic model: a virtual body which could function as part of the virtual environment
-- subject to the environment's rules. In contrast, a TAP user's idea of interaction was more
along the lines of rethinking the whole sensorium and spitting it back out, or responding with
something entirely different -- arguing with the whole premise, instead of passively accepting it.
A VR user had little choice but to suspend disbelief, or quit -- a full-sense environment, surreal
or not, was always compelling -- but a TAP user could deal with the same kind of information with
as much or as little detachment as he or she desired. Words in TAP -- which included the entire
sensorium-descriptor vocabulary of VR -- could evoke images ten thousand times more vivid and
precise than the densest poetic English ... or they could be held at arm's length and scrutinized
dispassionately, as easily as any English-speaker could contemplate the phrase "a flash of
blinding radiance" or "the overpowering stench of ammonia" without experiencing anything of the
kind. In the jargon of the implant's designers -- English words, predating TAP itself -- every TAP
word could be scanned (understood analytically), or played (experienced subjectively) -- or
interpreted in a manner lying anywhere at all between those two extremes.
In one respect, though, TAP could be more immersive than the most authoritarian VR: it could
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induce emotional states directly. VR was confined to pure sense data (albeit often manipulative in
the extreme), but in Total Affect Protocol there were words for <<fear>>, <<euphoria>>,
<<sadness>> (or rather, nuanced subtypes of these crude English categories) -- and the implant
could reach deep into the limbic system and trigger these states as easily as any VR chip could
generate the illusion of an unambiguously blue sky.
The user's power to keep the language at a distance remained, of course -- and the TAP word for
<<crippling despair>> could only induce the "referent state" if a conscious effort was made to
play it. And though TAP's formal grammar ruled out nothing, low-level filters stood guard against
potentially stupefying linguistic singularities -- such as <<the desire to play this word
forever>> -- or anything physiologically dangerous.
Still, although the literature was blithely reassuring on this point, in the end it came down to a
question of trusting the manufacturers and the regulators. I didn't doubt that, in theory, a TAP
chip could be designed which was no more likely than the unmodified human brain to strike the user
dead if the word for <<fatal adrenaline rush>> accidentally came to mind -- but whether or not
Third Hemisphere had achieved that level of safety -- for every conceivable user -- was another
matter.
Grace Sharp had been the oldest of the ninety thousand TAP speakers on the planet, and reputedly
one of the most proficient -- but whether proficiency implied more risk, from a greater
vocabulary, or less, due to better control of the language, I couldn't say.
By half past seven, I'd had enough of wading through papers on distortion-free affect-compression
algorithms. I closed the office and headed for the station.
I could still smell the day's heat wafting up from Victoria Road, but there was a faint hint of a
breeze from the east. The gaudy advertizing holograms never looked quite as tacky at dusk as they
did at dawn, although the colours were just as washed-out; maybe it was really all down to the
mood on the streets. A few sweat-stained commuters were still on their way home, radiating
palpable relief -- and a few freshly laundered revellers were already arriving, full of hopeful
energy. Somehow, dawn in Kings Cross never looked hopeful.
I passed a gaggle of saffron-robed monks from the Darlinghurst Temple, out hunting for alms, on
the other side of the street. James didn't seem to be among them -- though it was hard to tell:
they all looked interchangeable to me, and my strongest memories of him didn't encompass the
terminal, shaven-headed stage. Even when I recalled the night he announced that he was leaving me
and Mick for a life devoted to selfless contemplation -- "There's no point arguing, Kath," he'd
explained, with an expression of transcendent smugness, "I'm not enslaved by the illusions of
language anymore." -- even then, strangely enough, I pictured him as he'd looked ten years before.
Buddhism had been growing ever more fashionable throughout the country for most of my lifetime --
taking the place of retreating Christianity, as if the "vacuum" left behind needed to be filled by
something equally absurd -- but in the last ten years the Federal government had started
supporting the monasteries in a big way, with a program of "community spiritual development"
grants. Maybe they were hoping to save on social security payments.
I hesitated outside the station, thinking: A single TAP word could capture this moment --
perfectly encoding my entire sensorium, and everything I'm thinking and feeling. A word I could
speak, write, recall. Study at a distance -- scan -- or play, relive completely. Inflect and
modify. Quote exactly (or not) to the closest friend or the most distant stranger.
I had to admit that it was a deeply unsettling notion: a language which could encompass, if not
the universe itself, then everything we could possibly experience of it. At any given moment,
there were "only" ten to the power three thousand subjectively distinguishable states of the human
brain. A mere ten thousand bits of information: quite a mouthful, encoded as syllables -- but only
a millisecond flash in infrared. A TAP user could effectively narrate his or her entire inner
life, with one hundred percent fidelity, in real time. Leopold Bloom, eat your heart out.
I boarded the southbound train, the skin on the back of my neck still tingling. The carriage was
packed, so I stood strap-hanging with my eyes closed, letting the question spin in the darkness of
my skull: Who, or what, killed Grace Sharp? Work was never something I could switch on and off --
and unless I reached the stage where part of me was thinking about the case every waking moment,
the chances were I'd make no progress at all.
Helen Sharp believed in some faceless conspiracy against TAP as a first language, driven by sheer
linguistic xenophobia -- though the real opposition might also be motivated, in part, by perfectly
valid concerns about the unknown developmental consequences for a child growing up with TAP.
The serious media favoured a simple failure of technology; several worthy editorials had rewritten
the Sharp case as a cautionary tale about the need for improved quality control in biomedical
engineering. Meanwhile, the tabloids had gleefully embraced the idea of the <<death>> word, quasi-
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mystical enough to give their anti-tech subscribers a frisson of self-righteousness at the poetic
justice of a TAP-head thinking herself into oblivion ... and their pro-tech ones a frisson of awe
at the sheer Power of the Chip.
And it was still possible that Grace Sharp had simply had a heart attack, all by herself. No
assassins, no fatal poetry, no glitch.
So far, I could only agree with the coroner: I wasn't prepared to rule anything out.
By the time I arrived home, Mick had already eaten and retreated to his room to play Austro-
Hungarian Political Intrigues in Space. He'd been running the scenario for almost six months,
along with a dozen friends -- some in Sydney, some in Beijing, some in Sao Paulo. They'd
graciously let me join in once, as a minor character with an unpronounceable name, but I'd become
terminally bored after ten minutes and engineered my own death as swiftly as possible. I had
nothing against role-playing games, per se ... but this was the most ludicrous one I'd encountered
since Postmodernism Ate My Love Child. Still, every twelve-year-old needed something truly
appalling to grow out of -- something to look back on in a year's time with unconditional
embarrassment. The books I'd read, myself (and adored, at the time) had been no better.
I knocked on his door, and entered. He was lying on his bed with the headset on and his hands
above his head, making minimalist gestures with both control gloves: driving a software puppet
body which had no sense of touch, or balance, or proprioception. He was moving its limbs with
actions which had nothing to do with moving his own ... but he was seeing and hearing everything
through the puppet's eyes and ears.
Most of the studies I'd read had suggested that the earlier a child took up VR (headset-and-glove,
of course, not implant-based), the fewer side-effects it had on real-life coordination and body
image. The skills of moving real and virtual bodies didn't seem to compete for limited neural
resources; they could be learnt in parallel, as easily as two languages. Only adults got confused
between the two (and did better with VR implants, which let them pretend they were using their
physical bodies). The research suggested that an hour a day in VR was no more harmful than an hour
a day of any other equally unnatural activity: violin practice, ballet, karate.
I still worried, though.
The room monitor flagged my presence. At a convenient break in the action, Mick slipped off the
headset to greet me, doing his best to hide his impatience.
I said, "School?"
He shrugged. "Bland-out. Work?"
"I've got a murder case."
His face lit up. "Resonant! What class weapon?"
"Unkind words."
"¿Que?"
"It's a joke." I almost started to explain, but it didn't seem fair to hold up the other players.
"You'll quit at nine, okay? I don't want to have to check on you."
"Mmmm." Deliberately noncommittal.
I said calmly, "I can program it, or you can stick to the rules voluntarily. It's your choice."
He scowled. "It's no choice, if it makes no difference."
"Very profound. But I happen to disagree." I walked over to him and brushed the hair from his
eyes; he gave me his I-wish-you-wouldn't-but-you're-forgiven-this-time look.
Mick said suddenly, "Unkind words? You mean Grace Sharp?"
I nodded, surprised.
"Some guru last week was prating about her TAPping herself to death." He seemed greatly amused --
and it struck me that "guru" was several orders of magnitude more insulting than anything I would
have dared to say in front of my mother, at his age. At least put-downs were getting more elegant;
my generation's equivalents had relied almost exclusively on references to excrement or genitalia.
Mick and his contemporaries weren't at all prudish -- they just found the old scatological forms
embarrassingly childish.
I said, "You don't believe in the <<death>> word?"
"Not some banana skin land mine you make yourself, by accident."
I pondered that. "But if it exists at all, don't you think it'd be easier to fight if it came from
outside, than if you stumbled on it in your own thoughts?"
He shook his head knowingly. "TAP's not like that. You can't invent random words in your head --
you can't try out random bit-patterns. You can imagine things, you can free-associate, but ... not
all the way to death, without seeing it coming."
I laughed. "So when did you read up on this?"
"Last week. The story sounded flash, so I went context mining." He glanced at his terminal and
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made some slight hand movements; a cluster of icons for Universal Resource Locators poured into an
envelope with my name on it, which darted into the outgoing mail box. "References."
"Thanks. I wasted the whole afternoon -- I should have come home early and picked your brains
instead." I was only half joking.
I sat on the edge of the bed. "If she didn't stumble on the word herself, though ... I don't see
how anyone could have spoken it to her: as far as the police could tell, she'd had no visitors --
or communications -- for hours. And if someone broke into the apartment, they left no trace."
"How about ... ?" Mick gestured with one gloved thumb at the shelf above his bed.
"What?" I parsed the clutter of objects slowly. "Ah."
He'd set up an IR link with his friend Vito, who lived in an apartment block across the park; they
could exchange data twenty-four hours a day without either family paying a cent to the fibre
barons. The collimated beam of the five-dollar transceiver passed effortlessly through both their
bedroom windows.
"You think someone outside the apartment ... shot her in the palm with a <<death>> word?" The
notion conjured up bizarre images: a figure taking aim with a gunless night-sight; Grace Sharp
with outstretched arms and infrared stigmata.
"Maybe. Split the fee, if I'm right?"
"Sure. Minus rent, food, clothes, communications -- "
Mick mimed violin playing. I feigned a swipe at his head. He glanced at the terminal; his friends
were losing patience.
I said, "I'd better leave you to it."
He smiled, held up his hand in a farewell gesture like a diver about to submerge, then slipped the
headset back on. I lingered in the room for a few seconds, feeling profoundly strange.
Not because I felt that I was losing touch with my son. I wasn't. But the fact that we could
comprehend each other at all suddenly seemed like the most precarious voodoo. Natural language had
endured, fundamentally unchanged, through a thousand social and technological revolutions ... but
TAP made it look like some Stone Age tool, a flake of crudely shaped obsidian in an era when
individual atoms could be picked up and rearranged at whim.
And maybe in the long run, all the trial-and-error and misunderstandings, all the folk remedies of
smiles and gestures, all the clumsy imperfect well-meaning attempts to bridge the gap, would be
swept away by the dazzling torrent of communication without bounds.
I closed the door quietly on my way out.
The next morning I started going through the transcripts of the inquest -- which included a 3D
image of Sharp's study. The body had been found around 8:20 AM by a domestic aid who came three
times a week -- Sharp, although generally fit, had suffered from severe arthritis in her hands.
Paramedics had removed the body before the police became involved, but they'd snapped the scene
first as a routine procedure.
The apartment was on the 25th floor, and the study had a large window facing west. The curtains
were shown fully open -- although there was nothing in the transcripts, one way or the other,
about the possibility that the man who'd found the body, or even the paramedics, might have opened
them to let in some light. I grafted the image into the local council's plan of the suburb, and
did some crude ray-tracing from where the forensic software suggested Sharp had been standing
before she fell. A bullet would have left directional information -- but a burst of IR could have
come from any location with a clear line of sight. Given the uncertainty in her position, and the
size of the window, the possibilities encompassed the windows and balconies of sixty-three
apartments. Most were beyond the range of cheap hobbyists' IR equipment -- but I looked up skin-
transceiver sensitivity, attenuation in the atmosphere, and beam spread parameters, then started
checking product catalogues. There were several models of communications lasers which would have
done the job -- and the cheapest was only three hundred dollars. Not the kind of thing you could
buy from an electronics retailer, but there were no formal restrictions on purchase or ownership.
It wasn't a weapon, after all.
The world's greatest TAP poet, shot by a word? It was a seductive idea -- and I was surprised that
the tabloids hadn't seized on it, weeks ago -- but in the cold light of morning, I was finding it
increasingly difficult to believe that Grace Sharp had died from anything but natural causes. The
building had excellent security; the forensic team had found no sign of an intruder. The testimony
of the black box wasn't watertight, but on balance it probably did exonerate the implant. And
Helen Sharp herself had been convinced that the <<death>> word was impossible.
I spent the morning slogging through the rest of the transcripts, but there was nothing very
illuminating. The experts had washed their hands of Grace Sharp's death. I didn't blame them: if
the evidence supported no clear verdict, the honest thing to do was to say so. At most inquests,
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