Existence

  Footing was tricky as he made his careful way between ancient-style clay tiles and solar panels that he hoped to get working again, someday. Bin stepped gingerly among broad, lenslike evaporation pans that he filled each morning, providing trickles of fresh water and voltage, plus salt to sell in town. Wherever the weight could be supported, garden boxes recycled organic waste into herbs and vegetables. Too many shoresteaders lost their claim by carelessly dropping poo into the bay.

  One could fall through crumbling shingles and sodden plywood, so Bin kept to paths that had been braced since he took over this mess of tilting walls and crumbling stucco. This dream of a better life. And it can be ours, if luck comes back to stay a while.

  Bin pinched some greens to bring his wife, while doing a quick visual check of every stiff pipe and tension rope that spanned the roof, holding the hammock-home in place, like a sail above a ship going nowhere. Like a hopeful cocoon. Or, maybe, a spider in its web.

  And, like a spider, Mei Ling must have sensed him coming. She pushed her head out through the funnel door. Her jet-black hair was braided behind the ears and then tied under the chin, in a new, urban style that she had seen on-web.

  “Xin Pu Shi didn’t take the stuff,” she surmised.

  Bin shrugged, while tightening one of the cables that kept the framework from collapsing. A few of the poles—all he could afford—were durable metlon, driven into the old foundation. With enough time and cash, something new would take shape here, as the old house died.

  “Well, husband?” Mei Ling insisted. A muffled whimper, then a cry, told him the baby was awake. “What’ll you do now?”

  “The county scrap barge will be here Thursday,” Bin said.

  “And they pay dung,” she answered, picking up little Xiao En. “Are we to live on fish and salt?”

  “People have done worse,” he muttered, looking down through a gap in the roof, past what had been a stylish master bathroom, then through a shorn stretch of tiled floor to the soggy panels of a stately dining room. Of course, any real valuables had been removed by the original owners when they evacuated, and the best salvage got stripped during the first year of overflowing tides. A slow disaster that left little for late scavengers, like Peng Xiang Bin.

  “Right,” Mei Ling laughed without humor. “And meanwhile, our claim expires in six months. It’s either build up or clean out, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Do you want to go back to slaving in a geriatric ward, wiping drool and cleaning the diapers of little emperors? Work that’s unfit for robots?”

  “There are farms, in the highlands.”

  “They only allow refugees who prove ancestral connection. But our families were urban, going back two revolutions. Red Guards, bureaucrats, and company men. We have no rural roots!”

  Bin grimaced and shook his head, eyes downcast. We’ve been over this, so many times. But Mei Ling continued. “This time, we may not even find work in a geriatric ward. You’ll get drafted into a levee-building crew—maybe wind up buried under their New Great Wall. Then what will become of us?”

  He squinted at the monumental barrier, defending the glittery towers of Xidong District against the most implacable invader, worse than any other to threaten China.

  “I’ll take the salvage to town,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll get a better price ashore. For our extra catch, too. Anyway, we need some things.”

  “Yeah, like beer,” Mei Ling commented sourly. But she didn’t try to stop him, or mention that the trip was hazardous. Fading hopes do that to a relationship, he thought.

  They said nothing further to each other. She slipped back inside. At least the baby’s crying soon stopped. Yet … Peng Xiang Bin lingered for a moment, before going downstairs. He liked to picture his child—his son—at her breast. Despite being poor, ill educated and with a face that bore scars from a childhood mishap, Mei Ling was still a healthy young woman, in a generation with too many single men. And fertile, too.

  She is the one with options, he pondered, morosely. The adoption merchants would set her up with a factory job to supplement her womb-work. Little Xiao En would draw a good fee, and maybe grow up in a rich home, with education and implants and maybe …

  He chased the thought away with a harsh oath. No! She came here with me because she believed in our dream. I’ll find a way.

  Using the mansion’s crumbling grand staircase as an indoor dock, Bin built a makeshift float-raft consisting of a big cube of polystyrene wrapped in cargo net, lashed to a pair of old surfboards with drapery cord. Then, before fetching the salvage, he dived to visit the traps and fishing lines, surrounding the house. By now he felt at home among the canted, soggy walls, festooned with seaweed and barnacles. At least there were a dozen or so nice catches this time, most of them even legal, including a big red lobster and a plump, angry wrasse. So, luck wasn’t uniformly bad.

  Reluctantly, he released a tasty Jiaoxi crab to go about its way. You never knew when some random underwater monitor, disguised as a drifting piece of flotsam, might be looking. He sure hoped none had spotted a forbidden rockfish, dangling from a gill net in back, too dead to do anything about. He spared a moment to dive deeper and conceal the carcass, under a paving stone of the sunken garden.

  The legal items, including the wrasse, a grouper, and two lionfish, he pushed into another mesh sack, wary of the lionfish spines.

  Our poverty is a strange one. The last thing we worry about is food.

  Other concerns? Sure. Typhoons and tsunamis. Robbers and police shakedowns. City sewage and red tides. Rot and mildew. Low recycle prices and the high cost of living.

  Perhaps a fair south wind will blow today.

  This old mansion had been doomed from the day it was built, of course, even without nature’s wrath. Windows faced too many directions letting qi leak in and out. Ignoring lessons of the revered past, no doorsills were raised, to retain good luck. The owners must have hired some foreign laowai as an architect. Bin hoped to correct these faults someday, using rolls of mirror sheeting to reflect both light and qi in positive ways. Pixelated scenery cloth would be even better.

  Bin checked his tide-driven drill, pushing a metlon support pole into the foundation. Just ten more and the hammock-home would have an arch frame, strong as bedrock. And then? A tidal generator. A bigger rain catchment. A smart gathernet and commercial fishing license. A storm shelter. A real boat. More metlon.

  He had seen a shorestead where the settlers reached Phase Three: recoating the old house plumbing, connecting to the city grids, then resealing the old walls with nano-crete to finish a true island of self-sufficiency. Every reclaimer’s dream. And (he sighed) about as likely as winning the lottery.

  * * *

  Peng Xiang Bin propelled the polystyrene square by sweeping a single oar before him in a figure eight, with minimal resistance on the forward stroke. His goal—a static pull-rope used by other shoresteaders, leading ashore near Dongyuan Hanglu, where the mammoth seawall swung back a hundred meters to protect Pudong Airport, allowing a beach to form. One might sell fish there, to merchants or chefs from the Disney resort. On weekends, a few families even emerged to frolic amid surf and sand, sometimes paying well for a fresh, wriggling catch.

  But the rising tide that pushed him closer also meant the massive gates were closed. So, I’ll tie up at the wall and wait. Or maybe climb over. Slip into town, till it ebbs. Bin had a few coins. Not enough to buy more metlon. But sufficient for a well-deserved beer.

  Bin’s chunk of polystyrene held a hollow tube with a big, fish-eye lens for scanning below as he rowed—a small advantage that he kept secret. No matter how many times you took a route, there were always new things revealed by the shifting sea. Most of the homes in this zone had been bulldozed after evacuation, then cleared with drag lines, before shoresteading became accepted as a cheaper alternative. Let some poor dope slave away for years, driven by a slender hope of ownership.

&nbs
p; Here, little remained but concrete foundations and stubby utility pipes. Still, Bin kept peering through the tube, deliberately veering by what had been the biggest mansion along this coast. Some tech-baron’s sprawling seaside palace, before he toppled in a purge, was dragged off, tried in secret and disassembled for parts—quickly, so he could not spill secrets about even mightier men. Or so the story told. There had been a lot of that going on twenty years ago, all over the world.

  Of course government agents picked the place cleaner than a bone at a Sichuan restaurant, before letting the bulldozers in, then other gleaners. Yet, Bin always felt a romantic allure, passing a couple of meters overhead, picturing the place when walls and windows stood high, festooned with lights. When liveried servants patrolled with trays of luscious delicacies, satisfying guests in ways that—well—Bin couldn’t imagine, though sometimes he liked to try.

  Of course, the sand and broken crete still held detritus. Old pipes and conduits. Cans of paint and solvents still leaked from the ruin, rising as individual up-drips to pop at the surface and make it gleam. From their hammock-home, Xiang Bin and Mei Ling used to watch sunsets reflect off the rainbow sheen. Back when all of this seemed exciting, romantic and new.

  Speaking of new …

  Bin stopped sweeping and bent closer to his makeshift periscope, peering downward. A glitter. Something different.

  There’s been a cave-in, he realized. Under the foundation slab.

  The sea was relatively calm, this far beyond the surf line. So Bin secured the oar and slipped on his facemask. Then he grabbed a length of tether from the raft, took several deep breaths, and flipped into the warm sea with barely a splash, diving for a better look.

  It did look like a new gap under one corner of the house. But, surely, someone else would have noticed this by now. Anyway, the government searchers were thorough. What were the odds that …

  Slip-knotting the tether to a chunk of concrete, he moved close enough to peer inside the cavity, careful not to disturb much sediment. Grabbing an ikelite from his belt, he sent its sharp beam lancing inside, where an underground wall had recently collapsed. During the brief interval before his lungs grew stale and needy, he could make out few details. Still, by the time he swiveled and kicked back toward the surface, one thing was clear.

  The chamber contained things.

  Lots of things.

  And, to Xiang Bin, almost anything down there would be worth going after, even if it meant squeezing through a narrow gap, into a crumbling basement underneath the stained sea.

  WAIST

  Wow, ain’t it strange that—boffins have been predicting that truly humanlike artificial intelligence oughta be “just a couple of decades away…” for eighty years already?

  Some said AI would emerge from raw access to vast numbers of facts. That happened a few months after the Internet went public. But ai never showed up.

  Others looked for a network that finally had as many interconnections as a human brain, a milestone we saw passed in the teens, when some of the crimivirals—say the Ragnarok worm or the Tornado botnet—infested-hijacked enough homes and fones to constitute the world’s biggest distributed computer, far surpassing the greatest “supercomps” and even the number of synapses in your own skull!

  Yet, still, ai waited.

  How many other paths were tried? How about modeling a human brain in software? Or modeling one in hardware. Evolve one, in the great Darwinarium experiment! Or try guiding evolution, altering computers and programs the way we did sheep and dogs, by letting only those reproduce that have traits we like—say, those that pass a Turing test, by seeming human. Or the ones swarming the streets and homes and virts of Tokyo, selected to exude incredible cuteness?

  Others, in a kind of mystical faith that was backed up by mathematics and hothouse physics, figured that a few hundred quantum processors, tuned just right, could connect with their counterparts in an infinite number of parallel worlds, and just-like-that, something marvelous and God-like would pop into being.

  The one thing no one expected was for it to happen by accident, arising from a high school science fair experiment.

  I mean, wow ain’t it strange that a half-brilliant tweak by sixteen-year-old Marguerita deSilva leaped past the accomplishments of every major laboratory, by uploading into cyberspace a perfect duplicate of the little mind, personality, and instincts of her pet rat, Porfirio?

  And wow ain’t it strange that Porfirio proliferated, grabbing resources and expanding, in patterns and spirals that remain—to this day—so deeply and quintessentially ratlike?

  Not evil, all-consuming, or even predatory—thank heavens. But insistent.

  And Wow, AIST there is a worldwide betting pool, now totaling up to a billion Brazilian reals—over whether Marguerita will end up bankrupt, from all the lawsuits over lost data and computer cycles that have been gobbled up by Porfirio? Or else, if she’ll become the world’s richest person—because so many newer ais are based upon her patents? Or maybe because she alone seems to retain any sort of influence over Porfirio, luring his feral, brilliant attention into virtlayers and corners of the Worldspace where he can do little harm? So far.

  And WAIST we are down to this? Propitiating a virtual Rat God—(you see, Porfirio, I remembered to capitalize your name, this time)—so that he’ll be patient and leave us alone. That is, until humans fully succeed where Viktor Frankenstein calamitously failed?

  To duplicate the deSilva Result and provide our creation with a mate.

  11.

  NEWBLESSE OBLIGE

  “Are you certain that you want to keep doing this, Madam Donaldson-Sander?” the holographic figure asked, in tones that perfectly mimicked human concern. “Other members of the clade have been more attentive to their self-interest, spending millions on far better surveillance systems than you have.”

  Lacey almost changed her mind—not because her artificial adviser was speaking wisdom, but out of pure impatience. She begrudged the time that this was taking—arguing with a computer program when she could be looking out through a double-pane window, as mountaintop Incan ruins rolled past, giving way to misty rain forest, then a moonscape of abandoned Amazonian strip mines, each one filled with a unique, bright color of toxic runoff.

  It was quite a view. But, instead of contemplating ruins of ancient and recent societal collapse, she must pass her time debating with an artificial being.

  Still, it kept her mind off other worries.

  “I pay my dues to the zillionaires club. I am perfectly entitled to the information. Why should I jump through hoops in order to get it?”

  “Entitlement has little to do with matters of raw power, madam. Your peers spend more money and effort acquiring sophisticated cryptai. As you have been warned repeatedly, a top-level tech-hobbyist may have access to snoop programs that are better than me. Surely a few clade-members will detect the queries you are making.

  “In short, I cannot guarantee that I am protecting you properly, madam.”

  Lacey glared at the simulated servant. Though depicted wearing her family livery, with every fold of his uniform real looking, the features were altogether too handsome to be real. Anyway, you could see right through the projection, to a cubist-period Picasso, hanging on the far bulkhead of her private jet. The irony of that overlap almost made Lacey smile, despite her frustration and worry. Semi-transparency was a flaw inherently shared by any creature who was made entirely of light.

  At least, when the Hebrew patriarch, Jacob, wrestled with an angel, he could hope for a decisive outcome. But with aingels, there was nothing palpable to grapple. All you could do was keep insisting. Sometimes, they let you have your way.

  “I don’t care if some other trillionaires listen in!” she persisted. “I’m not endangering any vital caste interests!”

  “No, you aren’t.” The handsome, lambent image simulated a concerned head shake. “But need I remind that you are already seeking help from your peers, in the matter of lookin
g for your son? Isn’t that the reason for this hurried trip?”

  Lacey bit her lip. Hacker’s latest misadventure in space had yanked her away from the altiplano observatory, even before first light could fall on the experimental Farseeker Telescope that bore her name. What typically infuriating timing! Of course, the boy was probably fine. He generally built his toys well—a knack inherited from his father—a kind of hyper-responsible irresponsibility.

  Still, what kind of mother would she be, not to drop everything and rush to the Caribbean? Or to call in favors, summoning every yacht and private aerocraft in the region, in order to help search? Despite a misaligned trajectory and unknown landing point, Hacker’s final, garbled telemetry told of an intact heat shield and chutes properly deployed. So he was probably floating around the warm waters in his tiny capsule, chewing emergency rations while cursing the slowness of rescue. And the difficulty of finding good help these days.

  Lacey chased away gut-wrenching thoughts about the alternative—the unspeakable. So, grimly, she clung to this argument with an artificial being that she—in theory—owned.

  “You don’t find it fishy that the NASA and Hemispheric Security satellites have been retasked, just when we could use their help?”

  “Fishy … as in suspicious? As in some hypothetical reason why they might not want to help? I cannot penetrate top-level government crypto, madam. But the patterns of coded traffic seem consistent with genuine concern. Something unexpected seems to have occurred, an event that is drawing high-level attention. Nothing to indicate a military or reffer or public health crisis. The tenor seems to be one of frantically secretive … curiosity.”

  The aissistant shook its simulated head. “I fail to see how this applies to your situation, except as a matter of bad luck in timing.”

  Lacey scoffed, indelicately.

  “Bad timing? More than one of those damned sport rockets malfunctioned! That snotty, aristobrat son of Leonora Smits—he’s gone missing, too.”