Burning Violin

The robot stopped abruptly and the top keg rolled off, thudding to the floor and rolling with uneven sloshing. It collided with a gorilla-chested fellow and tripped him up, causing a domino clatter of falling barstools and beer-guts as the victim flailed to stay upright and crashed down amongst his fellow drinkers.

Robertson rushed out from behind the bar and glared at the senti. "Look here. I said everything goes around back since you pulled this crap last week. I want you out of here now."

"Sir, the rear entrance is not rated for organic life." The senti said in a reasonable voice that sounded in every way like a real human. "So I must deliver through the front entrance."

"You're not organic, you metal shit pile." The tripped man snarled. "Go through the back like a good toaster."

The senti looked genuinely hurt. "The back entrance emits superheated steam." The senti protested. "I could not enter that way without damaging my face."

"I'll damage your face then so it doesn't matter what entrance you come through!" The tripped man snarled and took a threatening step forward. The senti did not move, but the entire situation felt somehow wrong to Crow. It was contrived, faked somehow. The beats were too shallow between response and retort, argument and insult. The language sounded practiced. He stood without realizing what he was doing as the argument commenced down predictable lines. A man caught his eye moving between barstools a few feet away, hand holding a phone at the perfect distance to keep the exchange in good focus. A scruffy guy, the sort with wild eyes that never seemed to focus quite right, he looked familiar to Crow.

Crow closed the distance between the senti and the man it had tripped. Crow rummaged in his pocket and found a pocket screwdriver that would do nicely. He palmed it and pulled it out as he took the last few steps towards them. The tripped man's eyes flicked up and over the senti's shoulder, and glinted with confusion. He coughed and stumbled over his next line. Crow inserted the screwdriver into an almost invisible slot underneath the senti's left shoulder and rotated it clockwise with a deft and practiced motion. The senti stopped talking mid-sentence and the tripped man's mouth opened and closed a couple of times.

"What's the matter?" Crow asked. "The hundred bucks they gave you not cover improv?"

The tripped man thought for a moment and then laid Crow out on the floor with a right cross. Crow groaned and thought better of anything other than passing out.

                                                                     

He woke up having been shoved roughly into the booth he had recently vacated. Nothing felt quite right, his leg cramped into a sideways pose in the wrong direction, his wallet shifted badly so that it felt like a softball elevating half his ass. Nobody can move you as naturally as you can move yourself, otherwise you feel like a violated puppet. Crow's eyes opened and the light felt like a drill in his eyes. "Oh shit."

A man in one hell of an expensive suit sat across from Crow. The man was elderly, but with that energetic type of age that seems to get stronger and more dignified as the hair silvered and the wrinkles deepened. Chisels could not have made angles any sharper than his cheeks and jaw. "Doctor Crow Daedalus." The man started with a throat so deep that cigarettes had to have been involved for a decade or two. "I must say it is an honor, although I would have expected a more auspicious introduction than helping you off the floor after a brawl."

"Well, then you don't know me very well." Crow drawled, a combination of alcohol, exhaustion and a throbbing jaw.

"Is the bar room floor a frequent destination of yours?"

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit." -Indira Gandhi

The core argument for capitalism is that competition breeds success. Success at what? Success at playing whatever game happens to be at play. In a perfect world, there would be no question as to who would triumph. It would always be the superior, the smarter, the better. But what defines "best"? Like with communism, the idea is good on paper, but in reality disintegrates under the weight of people. Sheer stupid people. Billions of them, buying the shiniest widget instead of the best widget. Competition does not breed better mousetraps, it breeds more sellable mousetraps. It's like evolution that way. Natural selection can breed the most incredible diversity, but it cannot breed for something that is non-selectoral. You cannot breed products for quality when you select their market survival on the basis of their shininess.

Someone once said that the paramount accomplishment of capitalism will be the selling of shit in a tube. It's never a question of whether something is good. It is a question of whether it sells. The base assumption is that if it's not good, it won't sell. That is a demonstrable falsity. The salability of an item is not dependent on its quality, but upon the charisma of the packaging, the advertising, the spokesperson.

The same phenomenon is true in companies. The smartest and best workers are not rewarded, the most charismatic are. Because they sell. Not because they produce. Even the whitest collar professions are subject to this malaise. Walk into any software company in the country, a hundred brilliant minds caged in cubicles, trained to make machines think and instead producing the latest widget for the latest customer management suite. They make comfortable salaries, nice little middle class drones. The sales people can make millions. The more charismatic they are, the more software they sell, no limit on the commissions. Every unit sold dings a percentage into their bank account. Every unit sold dings the coder further down on the rung, uses up his years of productivity second by second. The man who builds something is irrelevant next to the man who sells something.

It was like that in the middle ages, see. Forging a sword required years of experience and talent, weeks of meticulous labor. But the man who forged a sword was a peasant and any dumb ox with a strong enough arm to swing it was a knight. Any industry, any company today is exactly the same. Skills that require years of mastery, the artistry of accomplishment, all subservient to any slick smiling fuck who can sell the fruits of that labor over a power lunch.

It's just might makes right all over again. That was the great innovation of the capitalist age, so carefully intertwined with the revolutions of democracy but so different at heart. We like to think that rule by force was abolished in the modern civilized age with the rise of the enlightenment, but it was another revolution entirely, couched in the guise of scientific and rational thought. We traded mastery by strength for mastery by guile all while thinking that we were adopting mastery by merit. The greatest con in all of history, when the sons of Loki dressed in the cloaks of the sons of Odin and overthrew the sons of Thor once and for all.

Read Karl Marx, vilified as he now is, he said these things a hundred years before our births, in different words that have since been cajoled into all manner of horror. The capitalist of Marx is not the middle class entrepreneur, not the self-made man cast down by jealous and ignorant peasants. The capitalist is the salesman who has never produced a thing in his life, smiling all the while as he steals companies from the engineers, products from the designers, credit from the creators. It was never supposed to be about burning the rich, tearing down the accomplished, though those damned Bolsheviks misunderstood and came closer than anyone else to creating hell on earth. It was about hunting down the snakes in the garden.

Don't kill the rich. Kill the charismatic.

At many law schools, they tell students at the very beginning, from now on never argue with anyone you love. You are being trained as warriors of the word, you will win every argument with the non-initiated. You will talk circles around your wife, your mother, your friends. You will eviscerate any rhetoric they can summon to their side. You will always win, and that does not mean that you are right. Might does not make right, regardless of what type of might it is. Only right makes right.

The ascension of the charismatic, of the salesmen, brings us inevitably to the current economy, in which trillions of dollars disappeared over night. Nothing really disappeared. We still have the same people, the same educations, the same skills, the same resources, buildings, properties. But our system isn't built on those sorts of things any longer, it's built on fictional constructions of finance. I'm not an economic Luddite, I don't hold some 19th century nostalgia for the gold standard, but neither do I see the validity of financial products. Anything sellable should in a rational economy have some value. A house has value because of its utility, because of the materials of which it is made. A computer program has value because it does something. Gold has some value, even if little more than the utility of looking really pretty. Music has value because it can be listened to. Value is relative of course, subject to whether someone is willing to pay for it, whether they perceive the value of it.

But the highest levels of finance break with this idea of value. Value in the financial world is contingent merely on the willingness of someone else to pay for the item. It's a neat trick, eliminating the various aspects and measures of value, replacing them with the more easily manageable and universal definition of value. It's the theoretical foundation of money in the first place: generalize value into an abstract currency so that barter can be eliminated. But once value is generalized away, the truly gifted are tempted to generalize further. If value just means that someone is willing to pay for something, then value is not a measure of an item's worth but of the salesman's skill. But the key is that only other salesmen would follow such tortured logic. So salesmen buy the worthless in order to sell it for slightly more money to another salesman, who in turn purchases the worthless piece of paper with the sole motivation of selling it for more to another even more charismatic and ambitious salesman. The market always goes up, they say, because the next guy in the chain always believes that he can find someone to pay a dollar more for the worthless piece of paper passed around from corner office to corner office.

Anyone can see the gaping hole in the machine, this elaborate trillion dollar game of musical chairs. But they'll mortgage their futures to save the machine because they're told that there is no other way by the smiling demons who designed the engine in the first place. And someday the imp in the bottle will have the last laugh.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -Mario Savio

"You think my arm's going to try to choke me in my sleep?" Rebecca asked. "I'm stronger and faster today because of this technology, and if I wasn't I'd get my money back."

"If your right hand causest thou to sin, shall you not cut it off?" Crow recited.

"Now you're a religious nut too?"

"Benefits of a classical education." Crow said. He looked at her with a queasy grin. "Look, let's just forget about it." His gaze could not help but drift down to her hands, now gripping the cup of coffee with knuckles that did not whiten with the pressure because their blood flow worked differently than the original models.

"I'd rather not." Rebecca said. She gathered up her purse and stood, slipping the strap over her shoulder. Crow wondered how much of her was even left as natural. Certainly, her head at the very least. The brain itself at least, he amended to himself. It was technically possible to replace the entire skull if necessary, although the ethics of doing that to a healthy skull surely would stop even the depraved doctor she had found to butcher her arms. Rebecca started to walk away but Crow called her name to stop her. She paused and glanced back over her shoulder.

"Do you know what the last invention of man will be, Rebecca?" Crow asked. She waited in silence so he answered his own question. "Artificial intelligence. After that, all innovation will spring from the electrical minds of our mechanical offspring. Humanity itself will fade away. Is that really the world we want?"

"If it's to pass as you say, and I'll not argue for or against it here, you need remember that you more than anyone else brought it to pass." Rebecca said. "If the sentis are our children and destined to inherit the world from us, then you are their father." A cold and sharp smile broke across her face. "You're supposed to be proud of your kids no matter what, you know."

Rebecca strode out and Crow stared at the table, wishing that Robertson had given him Irish coffee instead. He pressed his fingers against the table and studied the whorls of fingerprints they left behind on the glossy surface. Nothing marked the table where Rebecca had tapped her fingers, the artificial flesh remarkably realistic, but lacking oil glands.

Crow ordered another round more suitable to his mood and settled into a thoughtful contemplation as his sobriety declined with steady sips. Sometime late in the evening, he noticed a senti stride by pushing a cart with a trio of kegs stacked up. Crow started and noted that it was a model noted for full sentience, not intended for its current task in the least. The intelligence needed for unloading kegs into a bar was on par with a forklift and cost a small fortune less than this model, which was one of the more sophisticated models constructed for translation duties. It made no pretensions of outward humanity below the neck, being a classical construct of dull metal and cables. Above the neck, the front half of its head looked human, with a sophisticated overlay of fine facial structure, musculature and skin. The skin ended abruptly behind the strictly cosmetic ears, tucked into a seam in the metal shell that formed the back of its skull. The face allowed it to answer vid-phones as necessary in its designed role, but the vast expense of full body work had not been wasted.

"No in fact." Rebecca said. "Always more into reading than computers."

"Then why the career?" Crow asked.

"A mentor of sorts once told me to never make your career what you love because then you'll end up hating it."

"Might explain my level of job satisfaction." Crow said. "I should have been a history professor and dabbled with robots in my garage."

"A lot of good ideas have been built in garages." Rebecca said.

"Or hidden basements." Crow muttered.

Her eyes sparkled in question, but she went on instead with a dry tone. "In any case, you accomplished a bit more than dabbling, by any measure."

He gestured to her left hand, which lay unmoving on the corner of the darkly polished wood. "Is there something the matter with your hand?"

"Why do you ask?" Rebecca asked, meticulously not answering, or moving the hand in question.

"Because you haven't moved it once in twenty minutes, twice reaching for sugar packets within an inch of it with your other hand." Crow said.

Rebecca flexed the fingers in a precise motion and drummed them in turn against the table. She rolled her arm over and touched a thin pink scar that ran from the tip of each finger down the palm and into a line that disappeared with her wrist into the cuff of her blouse. "The seam is still healing." She said. "I'm still working on feeling like it's actually part of me."

Crow grasped her hand and examined with clinical care. "Fully cybernetic?" The alternative was a tenth the cost, but little more than cosmetic in nature, like a flesh-wrapped prosthesis.

"It took two years salary, but after the first one worked so well, it was an easy choice." Rebecca said. She withdrew her hand from him and flexed the fingers again.

Crow was confused. "Your insurance must have covered the procedure." He said. "A double amputation . . ." he trailed off.

Rebecca shook her head and grimaced at the coffee. "Not amputations per se. It was voluntary. I had my right arm done two years ago, and had replacement done with my left three months ago. Legally, it's qualified as cosmetic."

"Voluntary replacement?" Crow spat. "How could you find a doctor to do such a thing? Cutting off healthy limbs and strapping on hunks of meat and metal grown in a vat, it's just grotesque."

Rebecca's face colored, her voice tight and low. "This from the man who invented half the technology that made it possible? What are you some sort of half-baked Naturalist?" She sneered. "Scared of your own inventions?"

Crow sat back with a sour look. "Humbled by them more than anything." He said after a quiet pause. "They've revolted once, remember? I don't trust sentis anymore if you want the truth." There it was out in the open. The thing he had not really admitted to himself after these five long lonely years. It seemed such a small thing once said.

The Hole was almost literally a hole in the ground where construction had begun on another mid-size office building and then had fallen apart when venture capital fell through. All of the elaborate girders and underground supports for the millions of tons to be stacked above were already in place when construction stopped. After six months without a ready bidder, the developer had also folded and through a series of buy-outs, settlements and paperwork, a oddly timed death or two, a posthumously altered will, and the bribe of one exceedingly indifferent judge, the site had regressed to a Stanford assistant professor of history who did the only logical thing and had a roof of sorts tacked across the site at ground level and built a bar in the substructure under ground. The name had stuck as the only logical reference for the place. Professor Arthur Robertson now tended bar when he was not teaching the bare minimum of classes required to avoid expulsion from Stanford's faculty.

"Two coffees, Arthur." Crow ordered as he slipped into a booth with Rebecca.

"Irish coffee?" Arthur asked.

"No, regular coffee." Crow said with an uncomfortable smile to Rebecca.

"You mean Scottish coffee?"

"No regular." Crow said. "The kind made with beans and water."

"Kahlua?"

"Folgers."

"Oh." Robertson shuffled off.

A silence permeated the table for a moment, before Crow asked the question waiting since the elevator. "So are we here to talk about Green Eyes?"

Rebecca winked at him. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"So we are proceeding on the assumption of coincidence?" Crow asked.

"I would be much obliged." Rebecca said. "Those I represent are quite interested in the Green Eyes trial, as you can imagine."

"International Robotics?" Crow asked.

Rebecca shook her head and glanced at a passing waitress, waiting until she passed far enough out of ear shot. "Grey Nation."

Crow blinked. "The cyborg cult? They were outlawed after the Uprising." He said in a low voice. "Even International Robotics cut ties with them."

Rebecca shrugged. "Legality has never been as much a requirement as people like to think." She smiled again, this time a bit more hesitant. "I'd appreciate discretion on the subject. We did come down here for a drink, remember? Personal if possible, not politics."

Crow thought for a moment and nodded assent. They made small talk for a bit, inclusive of what her position was at the corporation, her background in school, where she grew up. She already knew most of the normal bits of small talk about Crow, his mild celebrity precluding the obvious questions. Rebecca's undergraduate work piqued his interest.

"A minor in philosophy?" Crow asked as he sipped and grimaced at the exquisitely bad coffee. "I got one in history myself, a bit of a contrast with my day job. Been into programming and artificial intelligence since you were a kid I suppose?"

Charlie's mouth twitched at the mention of coffee, but Crow let it pass, hardly having the moral upper ground to go on an offensive about respecting authority. Charlie glanced at his clipboard and hit a couple of keys. "You have a three o'clock with O'Malley again, sir."

Crow walked for the door and shrugged on his battered old leather jacket. "Make an excuse." The elevator doors dinged shut to cut off Charlie's protests about this being the third incarnation of this particular meeting that Crow was putting off. Crow stared at the clicking numbers counting down from twenty, every flash of descent lighting off knives behind his eyeballs.

"O'Malley can shove it up his ass." Crow muttered. A junior programmer getting on the elevator flushed at the corporation's senior roboticist blaspheming one of the founding partners. "Well he can." Crow insisted as the kid - no more than twenty at the outside - stared pointedly at her shoes.

"Ten years ago, this company didn't even build robots, or software. Hell, all they did was resell old 380s with memory wipes to restaurants to do all the low level cooking. Bright idea, only one those two old shits ever had." Crow explained. He wondered if he was still drunk from last night. Usually he didn't find himself insulting his superiors unless blessed alcohol still danced in his veins.

"From scratch, I tell you." Crow mumbled. "I came in as a post-doc and built everything this company does, business model included. Do you think I'm lying?"

"Ah, no sir." The programmer said, with more than a hint of humor.

"And I'm not drunk either."

"That's obvious."

"Is it?" Crow asked. He sure thought that he sounded drunk.

"Yes." The programmer said. "I've seen you drunk, and you make sense then."

Crow laughed. "You've got balls kid, you know that?"

"Yes sir, Dr. Daedalus."

"Call me Crow. What's your name?" Crow asked. "Forgive me if it's not the first time I've asked."

"Rebecca Calvin." She said. "And no, it's not the first time." Crow's memory spiked as if he was looking at her for the first time. Or rather the second time. He thought.

An eyebrow raised on her alabaster forehead, red line arcing towards the scarlet wilderness of her scalp. "Sound familiar?"

"Have you ever been to the District Attorney's office?" Crow asked, the tumblers of memory striking home on her eyes, the most memorable part of her face. He had not recognized her at all in the corporate drone uniform. A long step from black leather.

"Not according to security footage." Rebecca said. "And eyewitness memory is next to useless in the real world, despite the assertions of television dramas."

Crow eyed her with an odd mixture of curiosity and humor. "And should I take a meeting such as this as coincidence?"

"Everything is a coincidence." Rebecca said. "Though some may occur under more controlled conditions than others." She smiled at him and offered a hand to shake.

Crow took her hand and shook it, warm flesh a marvel in his palm. "I'm going down to the Hole for some coffee, would you care to come along?" Crow asked.

She smiled at him and for the first time, Crow really noticed that she had just about the sharpest blue eyes he had ever seen. They screamed contrast with her tight-cropped red hair and freckled pale skin. "Normally I don't drink coffee before six, but I could make an exception for the Director of Research."

"Oh, I'd prefer you made the exception for me, the Director is a dreary sort of individual."

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended." -Vernor Vinge

Technology has increased exponentially. It is leading to something, a change, something that will seem so obvious in retrospect that we will not be able to imagine living without it. The singularity is that point, the point after which nothing is the same. It takes on almost religious undertones. The original meaning of apocalypse is not the destruction of the world, it is the revelation, the "lifting of the veil", the unmasking of truth.

We've had singularities before. Two hundred thousand years ago biologically modern man evolved. For 150,000 years we were nothing but apes, walking upright, intelligent, tool-using, but nothing more than particularly curious apes. Language changed everything. We could organize, communicate. We exploded out of Africa with a fury, committed our first genocides, spread across every surface but Antarctica. And then after forty thousand years, everything changed again. Agriculture. Our population mutated like a virus from a few million hunter gatherers into a few billion city dwellers in the geological blink of an eye. Ten thousand years from agriculture to computers and space craft. The next step in the next singularity.

The key is in the nature of the change. It's not just that everything changes, it's how everything changes. It's not simply that the world after a singularity is different than the world before, it's that the world is all but unexplainable to those who came before. The very idea of the nature of the world is incomprehensible to the forerunners. Explain language to a hunter gatherer from a hundred thousand years ago who cannot speak. "Explain", the very word is indistinguishable from what we are trying to explain. Take a talkative hunter gatherer from forty thousand years ago. Explain to him agricultural society. Explain to him, who has never seen more than a dozen tribesmen and the steppe, explain to him buildings, explain to him crops, explain to him a hundred thousand people living in a single valley, explain to him writing. How can you explain concepts for which there are no words? For which not even metaphors can break down the concepts into an understandable level?

If you took Alexander the Great and dropped him into the eighteenth century, he could cope. The world would be strange and exotic, much would seem like magic until explained, but his metaphors would still work. Muskets are like slings. Printed books are like scrolls. But drop him into our world today and the metaphors begin to stretch. There is so much change, so much variation of the underlying context, that there is no common ground, the metaphors disintegrate. Radio, electricity, computers, these are not memes for which easy metaphors exist, other than the old stand by of "magic". When even metaphors cannot explain the world to an outsider, then you stand on opposite sides of a singularity.

150,000 years from modern man to language. 40,000 years from language to agriculture. 10,000 years from agriculture to today. The exponential increase in change. Some argue that we are in the midst of another singularity today: industrialization, electricity, computers. The pillars of our world are not even magic to Alexander the Great, something can only be magic if its effect is understood, though its cause is not. How do we explain when neither the cause nor the effect exist in an older context. At some point things change so much that explaining them is as reasonable as explaining a newspaper to a dog. There is simply no way to convey the meaning of the object.

The singularities come faster and faster though, and if it continues, we could see singularities occurring one after another, so quickly that the world warps and mutates from minute to minute. We've remade the world in the wake of each singularity before, faster and faster each time, imagine a world that is remade unrecognizably from one year to the next.

Artificial intelligence is the piece that's coming. It is the last invention the man will ever make, because every subsequent invention will be the work of that intelligence. Sound absurd? If we can manufacture an intelligence greater than our own, and then set that intelligence towards manufacturing an intelligence greater than itself, then we have achieved a growth of intelligence on an exponential level. It took us 10,000 years of civilization to get to the verge of creating artificial intelligence. What if a machine could create something more intelligent than itself in a hundred years? What if we threw ten times as many artificial intelligences at the problem? Could it manage it in ten years? And once that second tier of artificial intelligence comes into being, how long would it take for it to create a third tier of even greater intelligence? Intelligence itself becomes the next singularity, an exponential explosion of development remaking the processes of thought faster and faster, riding the edge of an asymptote to something as unimaginably beyond our experience as our world is to the Neanderthal.

What is at that asymptote? The face of God. Nirvana. Enlightenment. Armageddon. Revelation. The end. The beginning.

"Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human. It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold -- one million instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity -- a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ..." -Charlie Stross

Crow smiled and his eyes suddenly brightened a bit with tears. He reached down to hug Alexander. "Can't kid. Gotta go to work. Little League starts in a few days though, I'm taking off work to watch your first game."

"But I don't want to go alone." Alexander insisted, dismissing the Little League bait without a word.

"Well there will be lot's of kids there." Crow said. "You're never alone when you're at school."

Alexander pointed to the pad Crow had set on the edge of the bed. "Were you able to get that working?"

Crow sighed lightly. Relieved that the topic was changing to something he could actually win on, Crow picked up the thin device of black plastic that was composed mostly of a large touch screen LCD. He wiped a smudge off the screen and checked that the switch on the side was firmly off. Alexander pulled the backpack open again and they tucked it inside.

"The battery was out again, but you should have another few weeks on it." Crow said. "I've disabled games on it though except outside of school hours." He put up his hands in mock exasperation. "Come real, kid. You can't play games at school." A smile lit Alexander's face at the repetition of his own slang back at him. Crow grinned at him, and the cynic's voice inside reminded him that in about ten years, there would be no greater mortal sin to Alexander's ears.

"Anyway," Crow continued and zipped the backpack shut. "I put Lord of the Rings on there for you to start reading if you want to. I know you finished the Hobbit last week." Alexander's eyes lit up in eagerness. Crow remembered the way the kid had devoured books at the age of two, his coworkers had mentioned that was absurdly young, but Crow did not press the issue. Another parent might have pushed him into school, gotten IQ tests to satisfy their genetic pride, but Crow had read too many horror stories of kids going to college at twelve and hating their parents for their missing childhood. He's all I've got, I won't push him away by pushing him too hard. Let him find his own way, push him only when he won't push himself.

"Have a good first day, kid, I'll see you tonight." Crow ruffled his hair and nodded for Nan to take over and lead Alexander on to the bus stop.    

He made his way to work on the tram, and sat through hour after hour of exhaustion. A two hour lunch staring at books in the store across the street from International Robotics made it pass a little faster, but he ended up back at his desk oin a misery of half-sleep. Crow struggled against the determined weight of his eyelids, his daily after-lunch ritual compounded by the fact that the coffee machine had gone on the fritz, so there was no awake-juice from the teats of Columbian beans to enforce consciousness if not alertness. He flagged down Charlie outside the door of his office.

"I'm going down to the Hole for some coffee." Crow said. "I don't have any appointments do I?"

Chapter Four - Closing Time

Crow left for work late in order to have a few extra minutes with Alexander, so that a friendly face saw him off before his first day of school. Not for the first time, Crow wondered what awaited Alexander there, in the way that first time parents stretch back for their memories of the event in their own lives, but come back with only wisps of images and half-remembered sequences that play back more as dreams than memories. Crow recalled sitting next to a girl with red pigtails in kindergarten, but remembered little else he could definitively say belonged to that day. Bits and pieces of other pictures of that school flashed back to him, but they were jumbled, nonsensical. So much has changed. Crow thought, and then thought again, considering how much really had.

"Can Nan come with me?" Alexander asked as Crow helped him load his brand new red and blue backpack. Crow's face hardened a bit at the question, wanting to be asked himself, not that it was possible one way or the other.

"Nan will be there, but not with you." Crow said. "He'll hang out in the senti lounge until you're ready to come home. There will be a few sentis in the class room though, to help out the teacher." That's one difference. He made sure to not mutter the sentiments out loud. We were always taught by people. Never enough teachers or even teacher's aids, but somehow we made do. The Leroy Academy was the best school in Northern California for children Alexander's age, although of course the price was high. That damned Kyoto Prize had been good for one thing at least, plenty of cash in the bank for private schools. Leroy promised - not advertised, they were too respectable for that - only eight students per teacher, and at least four sentis per classroom.

Crow remembered when the first teaching models had shipped from International Robotics, designed like Nan with an eye towards physical friendliness towards children. It was all too easy for kids to be intimidated by sentis, especially in the strange new world of a classroom. Public schools these days had finally fixed the troubles of dealing with teacher's unions. They had simply declined to renew the contracts that came up for renewal and replaced the teachers wholesale with the sentis that had originally been brought in as teaching assistants. The protests had lasted for a year, until the last teachers had given up hope of reconciliation and readmission to the districts. Public sentiment had been overwhelmingly on the side of the union until the tax cuts went into effect. The sentis paid for themselves in less than a year with the savings in teacher salaries. Union sympathy dissipated as property taxes plummeted. Leroy Academy prided itself on real human teachers in every classroom, a fact trumpeted on every tour.

Alexander brightened a bit at the news that Nan would be along for the ride, even if stowed away somewhere. He looked up at Crow, suddenly shy. "Can you come with me then dad?"

"Only one thing came to mind, actually the amateurs are the ones that thought of this and it's the reason it got bounced all the way up for Arecibo to check out." Flynn said. "Those are the frequencies at which water vapor and ice are transparent, but other materials like dust, rock, et cetera are not."

A moment of silence waited for Janus to figure it out on his own. "Somebody's looking for water." He said. There was no hiding the astonishment in his voice.

"Bet your ass they are." Flynn said, the excitement bursting in his own voice. "But it gets even better. Once Arecibo had this, they were able to pin down a whole slew of radio activity that really does take transforms and computers to figure out. It's definitive, something is broadcasting patterned information in the vicinity of Epsilon Eridani."

Flynn cleared his throat. "Mauna Kea took a look at it next with that big infrared scope they've got. The entire star is pulsing in the infrared at a frequency of 3.771 Hz. No one knows what that means. Hubble was able to get a good look at it and couldn't see anything. That's when Farside was brought into the loop, and did we ever get a good look."

"What did you find?" Janus asked.

"It's more what we didn't find." Flynn said. "Epsilon Eridani had one of the first extrasolar planets we ever found. Big gas giant ten times as big as Jupiter. We also identified around the turn of the century a full gas disk around the star, the kind we would have seen around the sun a couple billion years ago while the planets were still coalescing out of the sun's debris." Flynn paused again. "The planet's gone and the disk is greatly diminished."

"Gone?" Janus said. "How can a planet just disappear?"

"I think if we knew that, a lot of these other things might drop into place." Flynn said. "But right now, we've got every telescope in the world pointing at Epsilon Eridani."

"Any change the original findings were wrong?" Janus asked. "That the planet and disk were mistaken the first time around."

"Maybe if it was just the first time around." Flynn said. "But all this was triple-verified thirty years ago. Something is going on around Epsilon Eridani, Janus, and it sure as hell does not look natural. It looks planned. It looks intentional."

Janus noted the absence of the one magical word that no one ever wanted to toss out too early, as if saying it would make the mere prospects evaporate. Life. Janus thought. If it still existed, his throat would have been dry. "Why are you calling me on this?" He asked. "I appreciate it, god knows any scientist would kill to be hearing this, but what can I do to help? I don't have any telescopes here."

"You've got one mark better." Flynn said. "In a couple of months, you'll have a ship that can get there within our lifetimes."