Scale Free

  I sat up again and swung my legs over the side of the bed and pulled the cover off to have a look at myself. My muscles were tighter, the fat was all gone, but other than that I still appeared to be me. Something felt different though. I had been so used to the 'feeling' of my own body that I had been unconscious of it my whole life. Now the feeling had subtly changed, and I became aware of it. It wasn't anything I could put my finger on. It didn't hurt, but I felt oddly different.

  Dr. Song came back into the room. "How do you feel?"

  "Strange, not bad, just different somehow. It’s weird."

  "That's normal. Your nervous system is being fed signals from a simulated body. It's impossible to perfectly reproduce the feelings of your old body, though the virtual body has been tested and fine tuned for many years now. In a few hours you'll grow used to the new feelings and soon you won't be aware of it at all. Try to stand up."

  I shifted off the bed and put my weight onto my feet. After a few hesitant steps I was relieved to learn that there was nothing wrong with my sense of balance.

  "Good, we've reproduced the proportions of your old body perfectly, and for the time being the speed of your reflexes are dialed down to biological levels, so you should still have the same sense of balance as before."

  I nodded in agreement and smiled. "This isn't so bad. I actually feel really good. Full of energy."

  "That's how an athlete feels in the real world. You're in perfect health now, with a perfect level of physical fitness. In fact better than perfect. You could run for days here without stopping." Dr. Song smiled benevolently. She was actually quite good looking; tall, slender with long black hair, porcelain skin and fine Asian features. I felt my libido begin to stir for the first time in weeks. With a start I realized I was blushing, which made me blush further.

  I shook my head to clear it. "Um, I'd like to see Emma now, if that's alright."

  "Are you sure you don't want to take some more time to orient yourself? She'll remain asleep until you're ready."

  "No, I need to make sure she's alright."

  "Ok, this way please." Dr. Song led me out of the room and back to the one I had left Emma in. With tremendous relief I saw her lying there on the bed extending out from the uploading machine, just as I had left her. Her face looked exactly the same, and as Dr. Song had promised, she appeared to be asleep, breathing softly. Dr. Song quietly left the room and closed the door. I sat down on the chair next to the bed and gently shook her shoulder.

  "Emma, wake up Emma." She began to stir. Her eyes opened. She saw me and smiled.

  "Hi Daddy. Is it morning?"

  "Yes Honey, we're here. We made it to that special place Emma, our new home."

  Emma giggled sleepily, “But Daddy we're still in the same place as before.”

  She closed her eyes again and nuzzled her face into the pillow with a sigh.

  Then suddenly her eyes shot wide open and she sat bolt upright. Her frame stiffened and she gasped.

  "Daddy I feel weird!" she said. I put my hands on her shoulders.

  "It's ok Honey."

  "Daddy I feel weird!" She looked down at her own hands, turning them palm up then palm down, then palm up again. "I... I don't feel right." she said, panic rising in her voice as she struggled to process this new sensation. "Daddy, I don't feel like me. I, I think I'm inside someone else! Daddy!!"

  I hugged her tightly, fighting back my own panic as she sobbed.

  "It’s ok honey, It's ok. It's normal. This place just makes you feel a bit weird at first. It'll go away soon. It's ok. It's ok Emma. I'm here."

  I held her like that for a long while, stroking her hair and soothing her until she began to calm down. Finally I let her go and looked her in the eyes.

  "Do you feel better now?"

  "A little" she sniffed. "But it still feels like I'm inside someone else."

  There was a mirror on one of the walls. I stood her up and walked her over to it.

  "Look Emma, you see? You're still inside you. This place just makes you feel a little funny at first. You'll be back to normal again soon. Don't worry."

  "It is me.”

  “See? It’s just a feeling this place gives you.”

  But Daddy, this is the same place as before."

  "It only looks the same, but we're actually far from there now. They make these rooms look the same to make us feel better, I think. Funny isn't it? I think you'll find that a lot of things about this place will be a little strange, but also fun. Come on, let's get you dressed and go find the doctor and then we'll go outside and have a look around."

  With that I got us both dressed and then headed back to the waiting room. Dr. Song was there waiting for us.

  "Hi Emma, I'm Dr. Song. How do you feel?"

  "Hello" Emma smiled at her. "I feel better now. I just felt really weird when I woke up."

  "Don't worry, you'll be back to normal in no time. You did very well, you should be proud. Would you like some goodies before you go? I keep a drawer full of candy for good little girls. Let’s go see what we have in it."

  Emma's face lit up and she eagerly followed Dr. Song back behind the counter to rifle through the drawer.

  "Thank you" I said to Dr. Song. "So what's next?"

  "Take the elevator back down to the lobby. You'll find your transition support family waiting for you there. Bob and Alice Keating, and their three children. Two boys and a girl, 6, 8 and 13. They’re waiting to take you back to their home where you'll live with them until you're ready to move into a place of your own."

  I led Emma to the elevator and pushed the down button, then turned to nod at the doctor a second time.

  "Thanks again doctor."

  "Good luck Mr. Roamer, and welcome to VivraTerra."

  Chapter 20

  When Melanie found us, I was frying up the fish we had caught with some sliced pineapples. They were sizzling and popping in a large metal skillet over the hot coals at the center of our village. The sun was getting low in the sky and other villagers were preparing their dinners as well. People greeted one another, mingled and shared food and stories. I portioned out the fish onto banana leaves and handed them out to anyone who wanted some, then I wandered around to look at what others had prepared and accepted a portion or two. When I began to tuck into my meal, Melanie gave me a nod and drifted back from the fire-pit. I followed.

  We sat down together on wicker chairs in front of her hut. Between bites of fish and roasted pineapple, Melanie filled me in on her work.

  “I found out where those superconductors came from. There’s only one company that makes them that big. They sell them almost exclusively to physics labs, particle accelerators and the like. The company’s called Oshiro Superconductor, out of Japan.”

  “Any idea who they were dealing with on our end?” I asked.

  “No. I managed to get hold of one of their VPs, but they’re pretty good about customer privacy. I couldn’t get anything out of them.”

  “So it’s a dead-end then.”

  Melanie shook her head “Once I knew the supplier, I thought I might be able to trace the source of any network traffic between VivraTerra and Oshiro. I told Mr. Speer what I needed and he managed to arrange access to the communications logs for me.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “It’s actually more about what I didn’t find. Except for the call I made today there’s been absolutely no comm traffic between VivraTerra and Oshiro for as far back as the logs go, which is about 7 years.”

  “Which would tend to support the premise that Gaudet doesn’t know what he’s talking about” I said.

  “Well, it’s also possible that the comm traffic travelled through some other channels; anonymizing proxy servers for example. There’s a significant amount of traffic from VivraTerra that gets routed that way. Lots of polizens don’t want the people on the other end of the line to know that they’re communicating with an upload.”

  “Hmm. Any other leads?”
>
  “One thing. I wanted to be really sure there had been no traffic between us and Oshiro, so I did some double checking to make sure the logs haven’t been tampered with. You probably know that our servers are hooked up to three separate Internet service providers, the idea being that if one provider goes down we have redundancy.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

  “Well, given that there are 200,000 uploads and only three outgoing connections, you can imagine that each of the pipes carries a lot of traffic. Each pipe is a big fat fiber-optic cable. For outbound traffic, the cables are fed with data from several queues. If you want to send some data to the outside world, it’ll go into a queue, and once the data ahead of you has been sent, yours gets transmitted via one of our service providers.”

  “How does this help us trace messages to Oshiro?”

  “Well it doesn’t, but here’s the thing. Because there's so much of it, we only keep a week's worth of detailed traffic logging. That`s data we use to track and optimize our network infrastructure, and we also use it for security purposes. But we also log the total amount of data passing through each of our queues on a minute-by minute basis, and those logs we keep. Now, when the internet service providers bill us, they send us their own bandwidth usage numbers. If you sum up the amount of data passing through our queues, it should exactly match the amount of data they report. But according to our logs, there were about 1800 instances between 6 months and 12 months ago where we report a little less data than they do. I checked with the service providers and our own network people, and no-one can account for the discrepancy.”

  “Are you taking that as evidence that our logs were tampered with?”

  “It looks that way to me. The only explanation I can come up with is that someone erased data from the detailed logs and also altered the permanent bandwidth usage logs to make them correlate, but they either couldn't access the logs of our external service providers, didn`t think of it, or didn`t bother.

  “But VivraTerra puts a huge amount of effort into security. Wouldn`t it be really hard to erase our logs?”

  “As far as I can tell, it’s pretty much impossible. It took a council resolution just to get me full read-access to the logs. VivraTerra’s computer infrastructure was built from the ground up with security as one of the top priorities. These computers host people. They host us. The only reason a Polis like this works at all is that its citizens have trust that the servers are secure. If the servers were hackable then we ourselves could be hacked.”

  I sat back and looked at the fire in the center of our circle of huts. Emma was eating with a group of her friends. Smaller children were kicking a ball around the clearing. The adults were sitting in small groups, talking and laughing softly.

  “I remember the literature they made me read before signing up with VivraTerra." I said. "They had over a page on security, how important it was and how it could never be compromised. If people can hack our comm logs, what else can they do? How can any of us feel safe?”

  “Well they weren’t lying about the importance we place on security. Every single piece of software executed on our core servers is read over line by line by at least three separate teams of people. Then when we run it, it’s executed inside layer upon layer of security sandboxes. You and your supporting software live in sandboxes too. The types of communications allowed in and out of a sandbox is defined very specifically and multiple layers of security enforce it. Non-critical software programs don’t even get to run on our core machines, they’re run on banks of virtualized servers, on machines on a completely separate network. To get around that kind of security? I know these systems pretty well, but I’m pretty sure I could never do it.”

  I nodded. “If this gets out, everyone will panic”.

  “Ya. I sent my result to the networking and IT heads and it’s got them very worried. They’re going to do everything they can to figure out how this happened and who did it. In the meantime, nobody’s being told who doesn’t need to know.”

  “Is there any way to find out who did it?”

  Melanie shook her head. “The detailed logs are long gone. All we have is the discrepancy in the amount of data transmitted.”

  I looked back at Emma. She was cracking lobsters with some of her friends. “So here we have two extraordinary events occurring at the same time. Someone, presumably one of our uploads, manages to secretly build a working nuclear fusion reactor; something the world has been trying and failing to do for over 100 years. Around the same time, someone hacks our comm traffic logs and erases thousands of entries. I think it’s very unlikely that these events are unrelated.”

  Melanie nodded. “Whoever’s responsible for the reactor may have free run of our computers. That makes them very dangerous.”

  We sat together in silence for a what felt like a long time. The dusk was gradually settling and the stars were beginning to come out. Emma had run off with her friends.

  “What do you think we should do next?” I asked.

  “Well obviously we need to figure out who these people are, but I’m out of leads. I asked the network guys to tell me if they find anything, but they’ve taken over that investigation so who knows if we’ll get anything back from them. If you want me to do any better you’ll have to give me something new.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well other than the hacked logs, the only other thing we have on them is the wrecked nuke at that lab. Maybe we’d be able to work out something else if we knew more about what happened there. The NASC must have taken the place apart by now, but Gaudet just gave you an address and a couple of photos. I think you should try to get more information out of him.

  “How would I do that? He works for the NASC for god’s sake.”

  Melanie shrugged. “You’re the diplomat."

  "Great"

  "Look, you know he really wants that nuke - that’s leverage."

  Chapter 21

  The next morning I found myself back in Gaudet’s office. I had messaged Gaudet earlier and asked to speak with him, and he had replied with a curt one-liner ordering me back to his office. It was irritating that he insisted on making me come to him in person when a simple telepresence call would have been perfectly adequate.

  Gaudet was tapping the surface of his wooden desk and shuffling around virtual files that only he could see. He didn’t look up as I entered.

  “Do you have it?” He asked.

  “If you mean the blueprints for the reactor, no. We have been making some progress though. I can tell you now with some certainty that VivraTerra’s administration had nothing to do with the events at the lab. Now we’re trying to determine whether any of our citizens were involved.”

  Gaudet glared up at me. “So you deny involvement.”

  “VivraTerra itself had nothing to do with this. Accounting for every one of our 200,000 private citizens is a different matter and will take some time.”

  “So what do you want?”

  I took a deep breath. “Right now we have no evidence linking the activities in Utah with any of our citizens. You’ve given us very little to go on, just a few photos and an address. If you want us to make your deadline then we’re going to need a lot more information to help us narrow our search. For one thing, what information do you have linking the lab to VivraTerra in the first place?”

  Gaudet’s scowl deepened. “You already have everything you need. Just search your files until you find references to that address or to the reactor or anything else suspicious.”

  My robot shook its head. “All of the public and government documents on our system have already been searched. As for our uploads’ private documents, we can’t read them. By law and by custom, every upload is entitled to considerable privacy. All private files are protected by very strong encryption and only the owners themselves hold the keys. You’d encounter the same problem if you were to try to scan our servers yourself.”

  It was time to take the offensive. “If you want those p
lans, then we need to know what you know about the lab. What happened there? What have you found out about it? What do you know about this Orion Research company that was running it, and what were they trying to accomplish? If you don’t share what you know then it's very unlikely I'm going to be able to do anything else to help you.”

  I sat down in a chair in front of Gaudet’s desk and waited for his response. Awkward as they were, these robot bodies could put on a perfect poker face when you needed them to.

  Gaudet’s own poker face was much more impressive given that he had to do it for real. His hands were folded in front of him on the table. His suit looked freshly pressed and starched. His eyes studied me impartially. Was he weighing the odds? Searching for his best move? Gaudet’s office was deep in the NASC building and it was very quiet. I increased the gain on my robot’s microphones. The hum of the ventilation became louder. I could hear Gaudet’s heartbeat now. It was beating strongly. I layered infra-red onto my field of view. Gaudet’s brow and neck were hot. I wondered if inside he was raging like he had so openly at our last meeting. If so he had reason not to show it. At length he spoke. His words were slow and measured.