Phase Space. Stephen Baxter
said anything resembling the key trigger phrase, in any language.
It had to be Seebeck, then.
But still –
‘Give me a reverse view.’
The pov lifted up from eye-level, swept over the freezeframed heads of the protagonists, and came down a few metres behind Desargues’ head.
The light was suddenly glaring, the colours washed out.
‘Jesus.’
Sorry. This is the best we can do. It’s from a callosum dumper. A man of sixty. He seems to have been high on –
‘It doesn’t matter.’ If you use people as cameras, this is what you get. ‘Run the show.’
He watched the scene once more, almost over Desargues’ shoulder. He could see Asaph Seebeck’s bland, uncomplicated face as he mouthed the words that would kill Cecilia Desargues. He did not look, to Morhaim, tense or angry or nervous. Nor did he look up at the tower to where his words were supposedly directed.
Coincidentally, that pretty girl he’d noticed was looking up at the tower. Her hands were forming pretty, abstract shapes, he noted absently, without understanding.
The punch in the back came again. This time an awful pit, a bloody volcano, opened up in Desargues’ back, in the microsecond before she turned into a comforting stick figure.
‘Careless.’
I’m sorry.
Morhaim’s pov host tilted down to stare at the stick figure. Morhaim noticed, irrelevantly, that Seebeck’s grey suit was rippling with moiré effects, a result of the host’s corneal or retinal implant. And now his vision blurred, as his host started shedding tears, of fright or grief …
Corpus callosum dumpers are becoming quite common among you: implants, inserted into the bridge of nervous tissue between the two halves of your brain, which enable you to broadcast a twenty-four-hour stream of consciousness and impression to whoever in the rest of mankind is willing to listen and watch.
Some of you even have your infant children implanted so their whole lives are available for view. It is, perhaps, the ultimate form of communication.
But it is content without structure, a meaningless flood of data without information: of use only to voyeurs and policemen, like Rob Morhaim.
Still, in this year 2045, even your dreams are online.
Morhaim, digging, made contact with Desargues’ partner. She wouldn’t tell Morhaim where she was, physically. It wasn’t relevant anyhow. She appeared to him only as a heavily-processed two-D head-and-shoulders, framed on the softwall before him, her filtered expression unreadable.
She was called Eunice Baines, and she came from the Scottish Republic. She was also a financial partner with Desargues in Glass Earth, Inc. She was a little older than Desargues. Their relationship – as far as Morhaim could tell – had been uncomplicated homosexuality.
He said, ‘You know the finger is being pointed at Holmium. Your competitor.’
‘One of many.’ Her voice was flat, almost free of accent.
‘But that’s only credible if your claims, to be able to eliminate signal lag, have any validity.’
‘We don’t claim to be able to eliminate signal lag. We will be able to reduce it to its theoretical minimum, which is a straightline light-speed delay between any two points on the Earth’s surface.
‘And we do claim to be able to remove the need for comsats. The comsat notion is old technology – in fact, exactly a century old – did you know that? It’s a hundred years since the publication of Arthur C Clarke’s seminal paper in Wireless World …’
‘Tell me about Glass Earth, Inc.’
‘Inspector, what does the CID teach you about neutrinos … ?’
For a century, she told him, long-distance communication systems had been defined by two incompatible facts: all electromagnetic radiation travelled in straight lines – but the Earth was round, and light couldn’t pass through solid matter. So communication with high-frequency signals would be restricted to short line-of-sight distances … if not for comsats.
Baines said, ‘If a satellite is in geosynchronous orbit over the equator, thirty-six thousand kilometres high, it takes exactly twenty-four hours to complete a revolution. So it seems to hover over a fixed spot on the surface. You can fire up your signals and bounce it off the comsat to the best part of a hemisphere. Or the comsat can directly broadcast to the ground.
‘But that huge distance from Earth is a problem. Bouncing a signal off a geosynch comsat introduces a lightspeed delay of a quarter-second. That’s a hell of a lot, for example, in applications like telesurgery. It’s even noticeable in Virtual conferencing.
‘And there are other problems. Like the lack of geosynch orbit spots. Satellites need to be three degrees apart if their signals are not to interfere with each other. And geosynch is crowded. Some corporations have hunter-killer sats working up there, contravening every international agreement …’
‘Enter the neutrino.’
‘Yes.’
A neutrino was a particle which, unlike light photons, could pass through solid matter.
‘Imagine a signal carried by modulated neutrinos. It could pass through the planet, linking any two points, as if the Earth was made of glass –’
‘Hence the name.’
‘And then the time delays are reduced to a maximum of one-twenty-fourth of a second, which is the time it would take a neutrino to fly from pole to pole at lightspeed. And most transmissions, of course, would be faster than that. It’s not a reduction to zero delay – that’s beyond physical law, as far as we know – but our worst performance is a sixfold improvement over the best comsat benchmark. And our technology’s a hell of a lot cheaper.’
‘If it works,’ Morhaim said. ‘As far as I know the only way to produce a modulated neutrino beam is to switch a nuclear fission reactor on and off.’
‘You’ve been doing your homework, Inspector. And not only that, the practical difficulties with collecting the neutrinos are huge. Because they are so ghostly, you need a tank filled with a thousand tonnes of liquid – ultrapure water or carbon tetrachloride, for example – and wait for one-in-a-trillion neutrinos to hit a nucleus and produce a detectable by-product. According to conventional wisdom, anyhow.’
‘I take it you’ve solved these problems.’
‘We think so,’ Baines said evenly. ‘Forgive me for not going into the details. But we have an experimental demonstration.’
‘Enough to satisfy Holmium that you’re a commercial threat?’
‘No doubt …’
He found Eunice Baines difficult. He felt she was judging him.
‘Do you think Holmium were capable of setting up the murder?’
Eunice Baines shook her head. ‘Is it really credible that a major multinational corporation would get involved in such a crass killing, in public and in broad daylight, on the streets of London itself?
‘Besides, the death of Cecilia hasn’t in fact directly benefited Holmium, or any of our competitors; such was the turmoil in the communications industry that morning that shares in Holmium and the others have taken a pounding. And of course any scandal about the death of Cecilia would be disastrous for Holmium. None of this makes real sense, beyond a superficial inspection … But you ask me this.’ For the first time a little emotion leaked into Baines’ voice. A testy irritation. ‘Don’t you know? What do you