The enclosed foyer of the Chicago Federal Building stretched to a height of five stories, supported by square columns covered in marble slabs. A simple rope barricade divided it into two halves. A bright, colorful mural depicting the settlement of the American West filled the left wall. In the corner, a Native man’s single tear traced a trail in the landscape that curved like a river to the horizon. The right wall was hung with classical paintings, the largest of which was taller than Quinn and depicted General Washington gallantly crossing the Delaware.
Nio slipped her hands into her coat pockets and strolled about as she waited for Quinn to haggle with his gray-suited colleagues. Her hand felt the crease of her letter, and she strummed it like a guitar string.
He raised his hands as he walked over. “They’re not gonna let you come up without a visa.”
“A visa? To get to the other side of the building?”
“Unfortunately, under the new system, the contract you signed doesn’t automatically translate. However, the two halves are still supposed to be working together, so if you wanna wait” —he nodded to a bank of low, coarse couches— “theoretically, it shouldn’t take long.”
“Theoretically?”
“Well.” Quinn made an apologetic face. “We are talking about the government.”
“There’s a cafe near where we parked.” She pointed down and across the street.
Quinn squinted like he was judging distance. It was hard to see through the exterior scaffolding.
“You think it’s too far?”
He pulled out his phone. “I’ll set it to a mile, just in case.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” He waved it off. “This shouldn’t take long. I just wanna check a few things. You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, backing away. “Totally.”
As she stepped to the doors, a thin layer of limestone fell from above and smashed on the sidewalk like a sheet of ice. Workers shouted at passersby, many of whom were engaged with a screen, as Nio stepped over the debris to get a better look at the facade. Several of the grayish limestone blocks were infested with dry coral, whose filaments burrowed into the material like worms, weakening it invisibly long before buds sprouted on the surface and grew into sausage-shaped tendrils.
Whether by environmental stress or nefarious design, a species of temperate coral had made the jump to rain-watered land, where it dispersed its spores on the wind and spread rapidly around the globe. Any building made of limestone—used in construction for millennia—was suddenly in danger of crumbling. The Egyptian government had recently (and hastily) erected polymer domes over the Great Pyramids after early signs of infestation were found, and visitors had to undergo a brief decontamination before entering. The resulting drop in tourism was straining the country’s tax base, and there were speculations that a military coup was brewing.
Nio was very nearly the only person on the street without a screen, and she watched the passersby. There were definite patterns. Those wearing bright colors and those in earth tones didn’t make eye contact. Nor did they run into each other. They followed different paths without thought, as if each was using a different virtual map of the same territory so as to avoid contact entirely. Scattered throughout was the rare mod freak.
On the corner, a man stood silently on a stool and held a square sign with the words LISTEN in bold letters. Additional signs, each a different size, leaned against the stool and warned that “Caulfield Is Not the End” and “More Unites Than Divides Us.” No one noticed him.
A line of identically dressed young adults in drab tones—a sign of unity—entered the cafe ahead of Nio, who noticed the Ally™ Exclusive logo on the door.
“Shit.”
Nio looked around. Without a phone, she had no way to navigate the city. She headed for the next intersection, but it was two blocks before she noticed another cafe across the street. She walked in and was greeted by a curving bank of screens that narrowed, like a swoosh, directing visitors into the plush seating area, where a variety of plants created a sense of privacy between the chairs without blocking the view of the numerous cameras in the ceiling. A woman appeared on the screen amid an overlay of beautiful panoramic and close-up shots of coffee farms, coffee plants, and roasting beans. She welcomed Nio cheerily. A menu appeared through the steam of a fresh-brewed cup. Nio smelled a burst of fresh-ground beans as a neatly bearded young man entered behind her wearing tights, webbed sneakers, and a bike helmet. He carried a folding ultra-lite bicycle in his hands. He walked right to a second menu, which appeared as he stepped in.
“Welcome back, David,” the woman on the screen said. She looked completely different than Nio’s silent attendant, making it seem as if they were real people. “How was your trip home?”
“It was fine,” he said impatiently.
The machine, reading the tone, responded appropriately. “Can we make you a soy vanilla latte today?”
Noticing she hadn’t yet approached the menu, the young man asked hesitantly if he had cut in line.
“No, sorry. It’s just, this is exactly the kind of place I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of these corporate chains either, but it’s the only shop around that’ll serve me.”
He ordered by speaking, but never paid. His biometrics—height, gait, and facial features—were read by a hidden camera and reduced to a numerical pattern, which was then compared to one of four registries, one of which would have his information and authorize the appropriate payment. Of course, in giving the registry his biometric information, the young man agreed to terms of service that allowed the institution to sell it to third parties, which analyzed it for links between appearance and behavior. Those links—refined rather than raw data—were packaged into various demographic data sets and auctioned on the open market. EUW1835, or employed urban woman aged 18-35, was trading at a record high that morning, which meant the number of ads those women would see would increase over the next several hours as precise psychological models used all available data, including how long they slept, the length of their commute, and what they ate that morning, to influence their behavior.
Growing up, Nio had watched the Chinese develop a robust social scoring system that had nearly eliminated serious crime, but of course serious dissent as well. New studies were suggesting it had seriously curtailed social mobility. Western nations had of course traded state for corporate control. Media executives used influencers, including music and film personalities—some of them entirely digital—to create interest-based tribes centered around cross-tabulated demographic characteristics in order to package like groups of people for easy sale to merchants and advertisers, like bundling loans.
“I meant the cameras,” she said, stepping to the tall screen, which automatically adjusted for her height.
Unsure how to respond, the young man smiled politely as he stepped around her to a window seat. Nio took a narrow two-spot in the corner. The little screen on the short, plant-topped wall next to her clicked to life and began telling her about all the games it offered “free of charge,” which meant with ads. She looked up. The cameras above had seen that she was alone and had no book or other distraction and the simple machine intelligence tried to glean a little extra profit for its masters. She tapped the X to turn it off but knew it would revive again in a minute or two, after it had read her appearance and body language, crunched all the data it could buy on her for a few cents, and developed the ad profile it was right then using to auction her attention on the automated market. Did she appear sick? Perhaps an ad for a cold remedy. Bored? How about a vacation. Advertisers could also set their level of insistence. Automobile dealership ads were known for appearing noisily in the middle of conversation. Others were more tactful. If she were a student visiting the coffee shop to study, for example, a loan financier might pay more for an ad to be delivered discreetly at a visible break in concentration.
Nio turned her chair to avoid the little screen, opting instead for the windows. The man with the bike smiled at her through the long fronds of the plant that separated their spaces and made it nearly impossible to have a conversation with a stranger. She had crossed her legs without thinking, which she realized when she saw the man glance at the ankle bracelet she unintentionally exposed. She dropped her foot to the floor and he awkwardly returned to his sandwich. The screen lit again and she cursed and tapped the X. This time, nothing happened. She tapped and tapped until she realized it was displaying live footage of the very cafe in which she sat. She could see the man with the bike near the window, which meant the camera was somewhere across the street.
The screen went off and Nio got up immediately and walked out, leaving her free cup of water for the service robot. She waited for the crosswalk and hurried when it changed. She turned around and walked backward, trying to find the camera’s location by matching the view. She looked up. A small round traffic cam was attached to the top of a streetlight. That was it. Someone had cropped the open feed to focus on the cafe. She spun, scanning the passing crowd and cars. In an alley to her left, she saw evidence of homeless habitation—blankets, bags, blue tarps. But it was all stuffed under machinery and fire escapes so that none of it was visible to the high-altitude drones the city used to find and displace them.
She walked in and saw an old man on a blanket under a large second-story overhang wearing a pronged cap made of aluminum foil. His skin was rough and weathered from a life out of doors. Along with his fine white beard, it gave him an almost regal appearance, unmatched by his shabby clothes. His jacket was filthy and his fingerless gloves were stained with what might have been blood. He was rocking back and forth but stopped suddenly when she approached.
“Pynchon,” she said.
The old man looked scared for a moment, like he was afraid Nio might hurt him. Then, with shaking hands, he removed the tin foil cap. Immediately, his demeanor changed. She could sense his bioelectric field then. It spiraled inhumanly in a repeating mechanical pulse, like a pump or a drill.
“Who’s in?” Nio asked, nodding toward the automated parking lot at the far end of the alley.
“Who leaves a child alone?” the homeless man retorted.
“It was just gonna be one night. And he’s not a—”
“Isn’t he?” Pynchon stood. “He’s all grown up now and prepared to face the world by himself, is that it?”
Nio didn’t answer.
“You volunteered.”
“I know.”
“The terms were made very clear to you.”
“This guy is hurting people.”
“Your pastimes are of no consequence. You agreed to be a governess. You made a commitment. A child is not a burden you load and unload whenever it’s convenient. This takes priority. You’re either in, or you’re out.”
“I’m in.”
“Then why aren’t you with him?”
“I just need some time. I fucked up. I know that. I can fix it.”
“You didn’t take this man on the internet seriously.”
“Are you kidding? I took him very seriously. Why the heck do you think I left?”
“But you underestimated him,” Pynchon interjected forcefully. “You’re not used to this, are you?”
“Used to what?”
“Being matched,” he accused. “You’re used to being the smartest girl in the room. I don’t think it occurred to you for one second that you might be putting Samizdat at risk. I don’t think you hesitated in the slightest. I think you walked right out that door. And look what happened? Not only did you get arrested and roped into becoming the FBI’s bitch, you got an innocent woman killed—and nearly yourself and poor Agent Quinn.”
“Can I talk to the LEX or not?”
The man snorted and sat back down. “He has a family, you know.”
“Who?”
“Orlando Quinn, 2279 Charing Cross Lane. He has a wife and a child. Did he mention that? If not for them, he would’ve quit after the Bureau demoted him. He’s a little awed by you, I think.”
Nio scowled. She hadn’t seen a ring.
“You’ve dangled the bright hope of making a difference in front of him. Nothing animates a good man quite like the chance to do right. If you get him fired, how will he support his family?”
Nio stared blankly. “You’re very well informed.”
The old man watched pedestrians on the street. “We care about our babysitters because we care about our babies. More than you know.” He turned to her. “Don’t get on the wrong side of this. And in case it’s not clear, that is a threat. The only reason you’re standing here pestering me is because you’re Samizdat’s first human and he’s very fond of you. I don’t know what it would do to his psyche if you disappeared. So, the answer is no. You can’t see them. I’m not even going to ask. If they saw you right now, I don’t know what they’d do to you. As it happens, we have a temp we want to try out, same as we did with you. He’s not in a position to make a long-term commitment and we’re not sure we want to offer him one. He’s keeping Samiz company while you fix this.”
“Who is he?”
“That’s not your concern. I bought you a week. Use it wisely.” He laid back down on the cardboard sheet and reached for the foil cap.
“Can I at least talk to him?”
“That is his decision. He’s a child, not a prisoner. Now, get out of my house.”
Nio turned to go. She stopped at the sidewalk. “You’re wrong, you know. I was never the smartest in the room. That was Sol.”
Pynchon replaced his aluminum headgear and immediately began rocking and mumbling to himself again.
“Who are you talking to?”
Nio spun to see Quinn. His phone was in his hand. She looked down at her ankle.
“Shit, did it go off?”
“You would’ve heard it,” he said. “I went to the cafe.”
He was breathing heavy. She had scared him. He thought she might be running.
“Certified Allys only.”
“I saw that.”
He stepped forward to glance down the alley. The flat cardboard in front of the dumpster was empty. Nio looked at Quinn’s hands again, scanning for a ring.
“Come on,” he said skeptically. “I have news.”
He led her back to the Federal Building. “Here.” He handed her a visitor’s badge on a lanyard. “We took a look at Sol’s phone records. Your ghost hunting tip panned out.”
“I thought your guys already looked at his phone.”
“They pulled public data sets. I did a bulk internet search on all the rows in the spreadsheet, adding keywords like ‘ghost hunting’ and ‘paranormal.’ One of the numbers he dialed six months or so before his death is officially registered to a robotics company in Maine. There was a cluster of three calls over a 10-day period and then nothing, so it didn’t seem important and the machine didn’t flag it. But that number also came back as NAPS, the North American Paranormal Society.”
“Get a name?”
“Gerald S. Polyani. Also listed as the sole proprietor of the robotics consultancy. I called but it went right to voicemail.”
Inside the building’s lobby, Nio was fingerprinted and scanned.
“You know...” Quinn began again. “If your sister makes a complaint, we’re both probably looking at criminal charges.”
They stood in front of the elevator, which automatically read their presence. The button on the wall lit by itself.
“She won’t say anything. It’s why I didn’t touch her face. As long as there’s nothing to give it away, Chancery won’t want anyone to know somebody got the better of her. Especially me.”
“Why’s that?”
The doors opened and they stepped inside.
“I’m kinda like the social retard of the group. Chaz always had to be at the top of the food chain. Look at that rotunda. It was like a church in worship of her. It’s why she dated Sol. He was everyone’s favorite, so of course she had to have him. She attenuated her worst personality traits to keep him around, although at 16, none of us were mature enough to know that. Except—” She stopped.
“Except?”
“Manda.” She was quiet a moment.
“What about her?”
“Her and Chaz hate each other.”
Quinn waited. “Is that important?”
“I don’t know.” Nio shook her head. “All I know is, Chancery won’t talk to us again. Her people will have orders to keep us away, and if we come with a warrant, she’ll just lawyer up.”
The elevator doors opened again and Nio was led through the drab, unadorned walls of an office maze.
“That suggests you think she knows more than she’s saying.”
“I know she does. When her and Sol broke up, it wasn’t pleasant. At Luke’s party a few years back, they barely said two words to each other. Then he calls her the day before he dies? That can’t be a coincidence. But seeing as how I had to body slam her to get this far, she told us as much as she’s willing short of being backed into a corner.”
A pair of agents passed in the hall. Quinn and Nio moved out of the way, then he led her to the glass-walled conference room where he’d left his things.
“Chancery was never a suspect,” he said as he closed the door behind them, “so the team in New York never dug. But according to her phone records, less than 90 seconds after hanging up with Sol, she dialed an unregistered cell number in Manhattan. Call lasted eight minutes. Pay-as-you-go. No record. So far they can’t find where it’s pinged a mast since.”
“We need to know what Sol was working on.”
“Why does that matter?”
“Chang said he wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. If we can prove to Chancery that Sol was in danger, she might be more willing to talk.”
“I thought he was studying gravity.”
“Sort of. Before he went crazy on conspiracies, he was looking at something called the holographic principle.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“It’s just a hypothesis. A lot of the phenomena we observe can be explained, at least mathematically, if you treat the observable universe as if it were a hologram.”
“So, the ghosts are holograms?”
“No.” Nio smiled patiently. “A hologram is a higher-dimensional projection on a lower-dimensional surface.”
She walked to the white board and drew a sphere with arrows under it pointing to a flat circle.
“A 3D hologram would be embedded on a 2D surface. Have you ever heard of the black hole information paradox?”
“I appreciate that you didn’t assume,” Quinn said flatly, “but no.”
“So, there’s a principle of physics that says matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely commuted.”
“That I knew.”
“There’s a corresponding principle that says basically the same thing for information.”
“What do you mean information?”
“That’s one of those things where you get a different definition depending on who you ask. One way to say it is that a system is more complex—it contains more information—if there are more ways to describe it. If it takes a longer description to do it justice, or if a greater number of descriptions are adequate, then there’s more information. A problem arose with black holes. They seem to violate the principle because things go in and don’t come out. It appears that information has been lost.” Nio made a face at the roof. “Okay, back up. Sorry. There’s another principle of information, the Bekenstein bound, discovered in the 1970s, I think.”
“Why does that sound familiar?”
“Sol was giving a talk on the bound when he died. Bekenstein showed that the maximum amount of entropy—which is the maximum amount of information, since entropy is a measure of possible configurations—is a function of its surface area, not its volume.”
“Hold up. That doesn’t make any sense. If something is bigger, shouldn’t you be able to fit more stuff inside?”
“That’s what everybody assumed, but that’s a great example of the endurance of our embedded models. We all have this implicit, intuitive idea of how the universe is supposed to work, a mental model that we keep trying to fit it to. Modern physics keeps fucking with that, but we still insist that the universe has to function classically. The Bekenstein bound hinted at the holographic principle because it showed the maximum entropy—of a sphere, let’s say—varies by its surface area, not its volume, in effect suggesting that any information inside the sphere can be encoded on the surface, which is exactly what physicists showed was going on with black holes.” She drew an arrow curving in and then traced the circle repeatedly. “Even though objects were falling into it, all the information they contained was also in a sense being smeared across the surface such that it wasn’t lost. In fact, it was being radiated back into the universe as the black hole evaporated.”
“Black holes evaporate?”
“They do. Hawking proved it. But that’s not the point. The point is that this kind of holographic encoding already seemed to be part of the universe by the time a guy named Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS-CFT correspondence. Around 2000, I think. Maldacena showed you can generate a quantum theory of gravity if you treat our three-dimensional universe as a holographic projection from infinitely far away.”
Quinn’s phone rang. “The universe as a hologram,” he repeated as he pulled it out. “Hold on.”
He stepped away to talk. Nio watched him pace at the end of the hall. He didn’t return until it was time to go.
They returned the rental car at the airport, where Quinn argued with the woman behind the counter. They had a hold on his credit card, which he had unknowingly authorized when he signed the rental contract. The rental company was asking him to pay for the damage to the car they had driven to Sleepy Eye.
“It’s a government account,” he said.
“But you rented on your personal card,” she objected.
“And I’ll be reimbursed.”
“It’s our policy that damage be covered by the card holder.”
“This is $8,500.”
“You can file a claim with your insurance.”
“My insurance isn’t going to cover it because a government rental is covered by government insurance.”
“Then you’ll have to file a claim with your employer.”
“You mean the Federal government? You ever tried that?”
She made a face like there was nothing she could do and Quinn dropped his head in frustration. He continued to argue as Nio wandered outside. It was chilly and she wrapped her coat around her.
Quinn burst out the door fifteen minutes later and walked toward the shuttle without saying a word. Nio didn’t need to close her eyes to feel his bioelectrics. He was furious. Apparently, he’d just paid for the damage she’d caused. She left him alone for the rest of the night. It wasn’t until after he’d had a couple beers on the plane that his field modulated again. He scratched his neck once, then raked it with both hands.
“Growing the beard back?” she asked hesitantly.
Quinn rubbed his stubbly skin. “Thinking about it.”
“What will the wife say?”
He turned to her, surprised. “Been talking to someone?”
“Just something I heard. She’s mad, huh?”
He faced front.
“That first morning,” Nio noted, “in the parking lot, you said you had to check with the boss. I thought you meant Erving, but you meant your wife, didn’t you?”
He didn’t answer.
“You could’ve said something,” she told him.
“Would it have changed anything?”
Nio thought for a moment. “Honestly, I’m not sure.”
“I don’t like to bring them into things. Last time that happened, it didn’t turn out well.”
“Can I at least ask their names?”
“My wife’s name is Khora. We have a son. Gregory.”
“How old is he?”
“Seven.”
“You sure you shouldn’t ask for a reassignment?”
“Ha. Worried you’ll get me fired?” Quinn tried again to get comfortable in his seat, but he was a big man and the geometry was not in his favor. “I’m afraid you and I are both out of second chances.”
“I heard you got demoted,” she said.
“Wow. Someone really has been doing their homework.”
Nio waited.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Quinn said. “I’ll tell you what happened to me after you tell me what landed you in Leavenworth.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Or who you keep trying to call. Or who told you about my family. Or anything about yourself really.”
Still nothing.
“Okay. How about this? Why did Chancery call you Niobi?”
“Because Niobium is a bit of a mouthful.”
“Niobium?”
She nodded.
“Your name is Niobium?”
She kept nodding.
“Who picked that?”
“No one. It was random. They all were.”
“Random?”
“Right out of the dictionary. The project scientists wrote a program that picked a word from the list of all words with the same first two or three letters as our alters. So, Sol is Albumin Einstein. Manda is Mandala Monroe. Chaz is Chancery Furrina Brontë. Leopard Vulcan da Vinci. Lugubrious Neptune van Beethoven. Get it?”
“What’s with the middle names?”
“When you do artificial insemination, the embryo doesn’t always implant. It’s why we weren’t all born at the same time. Some of us took a few tries. But you can’t know in advance, so for each of us, an identical series was made. Backups. Each embryo in a series was cataloged alphabetically by Roman god. The embryo that became Mo was the first in her series, so she’s Mutiny Apollo Ali. The first few embryos in Sol’s line didn’t take right away for whatever reason, which is why his middle name is Sol.”
“You know, for the longest time I thought his name was Saul.”
“Most people do. I think that’s why he went by it. It at least sounds like a real name.”
Agent Quinn got quiet.
“What?” Nio urged.
“It just occurred to me that you didn’t have parents. Or grandparents. Jesus, I’m slow.”
Nio smiled. “Are you referring to your comment about me not being hugged enough as a child?”
“Yeah. Shit. Sorry ‘bout that.”
“I was hugged plenty, thank you. And don’t apologize. You didn’t think of it because you didn’t see me as any different. It’s been nice hanging with someone who doesn’t constantly treat me like I’m something artificial.”
Quinn looked down at the picture of the group. “What can you tell me about our vic?”
“Sol?” Nio smiled at the photo. “He was great. Everybody liked him. He was kind of like the center.”
“The center?”
“We were kids, so there were cliques. You know, the cool kids, the smart kids, the weirdos. Sol was in everybody’s group. Or at least, we all liked him to hang around. He was probably the nicest guy I’ve ever met. I used to think—” She stopped and smiled broadly.
“What?”
“I used to think it was fake, that it just wasn’t possible for anyone to be that nice all the time.” Her smiled faded quickly and her brow knit.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry. I’m slow, too. When Dr. Chang showed up and made the offer, I was thinking about how to get my life back. But I wanna find out what happened. Not for me. I wanna do it for Sol. He deserves it.”
“I notice you casually forgot to mention your middle name.”
“It’s nothing. Really.”
“Roman gods...” Quinn thought for a moment. “Oh, shit. Uranus.”
Nio made a face. “No. But that’s everyone’s guess.”
“So, what is it?”
“Mars.”
Quinn raised his beer to her. “Niobium Mars Tesla. At least I have a name. It’s a start.” He downed it and leaned his seat back.
An hour later, after Quinn had his fourth beer and fell asleep, Nio finally got the nerve to turn on her overhead light and read her letter.