June 2009 Archives

Crow winced. Trinan's dad had slipped his mind. Worked his whole life at a civil engineering company as a designer and keeled over the first winter he wasn't reviewing schematics fifty hours a week, hunched over ancient Solaris boxes no one had budgeted to replace yet. Alexander had met him a couple of times, but Crow was surprised the kid even remembered that since he couldn't have been more than two when the old blueprint jockey had finally given up the ghost. Crow's own parents were long gone, car crash when he was in college, and Trinan's mom had succumbed to one of the cancers no one had managed to lick yet back before they were married.

One time when he was going out near St. Louis for business, Crow had brought along Alexander to meet his granddaddy. Mitch Lewis had an old style face, the kind you saw on steel workers in Ansel Adams photos from way back when, or New York fire fighters or World War II sergeants. His mouth didn't look right without a cigar chomped between his front teeth, one of the vices he allowed himself in addition to the finely aged Scotch that stocked the drawers of his cherry wood desk. Mitch had taken a few minutes out of his day, dressed in a loose fitting suit with the sleeves rolled up and the jacket discarded before he had even walked in the door. Mitch was the sort of guy that the sentis could never replace. Maybe they could do his work, design his buildings better, but his quirks and voluminous personality were not silicon etchable. The man was a walking idiom.

"Yeah. Like Grandpa Lewis." Crow said. He itched for a cigarette. "You remember meeting him?"

Alexander nodded, looking out the window at the cars zipping by them. "He was mom's dad. We went to visit him in St. Louis, but we could only stay for an afternoon because he had a design due for a new downtown stadium, and you had to be at a convention." Alexander smiled. "Nan turned on the TV though at the hotel and I watched the baseball game."

Crow stared for Alexander in amazement for just long enough that he had to rip the steering wheel to the right to get them back in the slow lane. "How do you remember all that?" Crow asked. "You were only a year and a half old."

Alexander shrugged. "I don't forget much."

Crow rewound their conversation in their head and realized that he had just had a fully adult conversation with his five year old son. Last week he rambled like any other kid that age, now he's talking like a ten year old, at least. Crow pushed his thinking back farther. Sure he started reading absurdly early, and I'm sure has one hell of an IQ, but he can't possibly remember that, can he?

They climbed into the car and Crow had to adjust the seat for his longer legs since Nan's were very short compared to an adult male's. Crow managed to pull it out of the garage with only a slight scrape of the passenger's side rear view mirror against the frame of the garage.

Alexander looked at him with an odd expression. "Nan never does that."

"Nan's perfect, I know." Crow groused. His tone was weary, mind elsewhere.

"Dad," Alexander started and then paused so long that Crow glanced over to see if Alexander was still awake. "If Nan was a better dad than you, would you not be my dad anymore?"

Crow blinked and struggled with the wheel. It was just like riding a bicycle, it was true that you never really forgot, but falling off once or twice was inevitable after a few year hiatus even so. "I'll always be your dad, kid, no matter how lousy of one I am. You'll grow up and be smarter and faster and stronger than me, and think I'm an idiot and weak and horrible in every way, but I'll still be your dad."

"I wouldn't think that about you." Alexander said, discounting the line of reasoning.

They pulled down the last road before the interstate and Crow floored the accelerator onto the on ramp. Cars whipped past him with a speed he had forgotten in the five years since bothering to drive. It's not my fault, everybody did it. Alexander's knuckles whitened as they gripped the arm rests. Crow frowned.

"If the sentis did do all the jobs, wouldn't you just get to have vacation all the time?" Alexander asked.

Crow dodged an eighteen wheeler driven at 100 miles per hour by a senti with far better reflexes and control than his own inadequate flesh. Once people had given up driving entirely for the most part, the speed limits had been raised across the board. Anybody who couldn't keep up was welcome to stay off the roads, get run over, or invest in their own senti for driving. Very affordable these days, a thinking toaster in every house.

"I suppose so, but I don't want vacation all the time." Crow said. "I want to work, and I think most people are that way deep down. I mean, they might not want to do the job they've got right now, but people can't just be idle, they go insane. Look at a lot of old people when they retire. You always hear stories about guys who worked forty years in the same plant and die of a heart attack the week after they retire."

"You mean like Grandpa Lewis?" Alexander asked.

Silence on the other end of the line, until Crow again thought that she may have just hung up on him instead of continuing the argument. He went on. "Why all the interest in saving Green Eyes then? They're the ones you were fighting before."

"Enemy of my enemy and all that jazz." Rebecca said with nonchalance. She was silent again for a while. "My dad fought in the Uprising." She said. "Decorated, uniform full of medals in the special forces. The president himself pinned the Medal of Honor on dad's chest." Rebecca paused for a long time. "He was burned alive when they used napalm at Case's Point."

Crow winced and said nothing.

Rebecca sniffed loudly. "Anyway, I've got to go."

"Right." Crow said. "Sorry about the job." He hesitated. "I hope they catch the guy."

"You're not on the friendly list anymore Crow." Rebecca said, not with anger but a more than chilling matter of factness. "We do not look kindly on those who make friends with Da Vinci Law." She hung up finally, leaving him with dead air buzzing with that slight white noise just a whisper above silence for a moment before the phone realized the signal was gone and shut down.

Crow considered for a moment that everyone he had ever known at International Robotics was going to take a dim view of his potential innocence. That bridge he'd burned had been a tad more populated than he had first thought. I don't need that place, I can build something else, something better. Something in him knew better. Crow shrugged aside further thoughts and wandered into the house.

Nan had brought home Alexander from school a few minutes earlier, they were still in the foyer discussing the day's activities. Alexander's face lit up when Crow walked in and the kid ran over to get his boost and hug.

"Why aren't you at work?" Alexander asked.

"Got the day off." Crow said. He noticed Nan waiting for instructions and told it to go power down. He dropped Alexander to his feet and took his hand to walk outside. Crow glanced at the car in the drive for a moment and then decided that it was as good a time as any to take care of business. "Let's take a ride in the car." Crow said.

"Want me to get Nan?" Alexander asked.

Crow shook his head. "Nope, I'll drive."

"You can drive?" Alexander asked in disbelief.

A grimace. "Of course I can drive. Used to be everybody could drive."

"But that's a job for sentis." Alexander said.

"But if they take all the jobs, what are the people supposed to do?" Crow asked. It was a rhetorical question for the most part, just part of the normal dialogue tossed off to pacify the kid.

Alexander looked perturbed, almost disturbed by the question as they walked towards the car. "I don't know." He said in a low voice.

"Bite me." Rebecca said. Crow thought she'd hung up on him, expected it really, but he realized after a moment that she was still there. She sighed into the phone. "Did you happen to see the news?"

"The protest?" Crow asked.

"They've been playing it all morning on every station. It went down last night." Rebecca said.

"Shitty for all sides it looks like." Crow said.

"I hate protestors." Rebecca said. "I don't think they should have been shot, but I hate everything they're doing."

"Well, both sides can protest." Crow said. He stared at the front door, wondering if the signal would hold inside, and decided the day was nice enough to warrant hanging out on the porch for a few minutes.

"No they can't." Rebecca said. "My side is illegal, remember? Political organization of cyborgs is illegal under the racketeering laws. There are permanent injunctions against us gathering."

"Well, you did try to take down the government." Crow pointed out. "The government doesn't take that too kindly."

"We didn't try to take it down." Rebecca seethed. Crow could just about hear her teeth vibrating. "We put down the Uprising, we were the only ones who could, who could match up to the sentis one on one. And after it was all over, after we chopped off our limbs to be strong enough to do it, they tried to legislate us out of existence. The politicians gave us medals on Tuesday and by Thursday they wanted to re-amputate or shuffle us off to segregated camps. No one wanted us after we saved them. The public was terrified of us, thought we were monstrosities, necessary but monstrous." She bit off the words like she was chewing through salt-water taffy. "They forgave the sentis for mass murder because they were useful, but we had no utility that made us worth tolerating."

"Which brings us to trying to overthrow the government." Crow said with as much humor as he could manage without sounding patronizing. "Right or wrong, what did you expect the governments and UN to do after the cyborgs rejected their authority and refused to lay down arms? I mean for Christ's sake you claimed sovereignty, and that meant no more tax revenue from you, which is what it really boils down to."

"We just wanted to be free." Rebecca said.

"People who want freedom and don't have the strength to take it never get it." Crow said. "Again, it's not right, but what is?"

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -Socrates

The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the culmination of a certain old way of thinking, the sort of thinking that led each and every intellectual of any repute to conclude his life with an epic work that basically boiled down to "Absolutely Everything in My Specialty". The works got longer and longer as time passed. An obsession with minutia and the meticulous detail of such works began to resemble that urge six year olds sometimes get towards comprehensive cataloging. "I'm going to write down every person/number/word in the world". Less reflective children continue the exercise until they get bored, but certain children reach a sort of elementary school epiphany that there is always more to write down. They wouldn't necessarily put it so succinctly, but that's the gist of their conclusion.

Just about every field of human thought suffered from the same malaise by the early twentieth century.

Historians would dedicate decades to compiling comprehensive histories. Edward Gibbons finished off the eighteenth century with the immense six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a feat later topped by numerous historians embarking upon their own attempts to write comprehensive histories of absolutely everything. William and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization spanned eleven volumes and two million words. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History topped out at twelve volumes. If a work could just be long enough it could capture the essence of everything that happened in all of human history.

Writers churned out longer and longer novels throughout the nineteenth century, taking twenty pages to describe a man getting out of bed in the morning. Dickens and Tolstoy took years off their lives just lifting their manuscripts. If a novel could just be long enough, it might capture reality itself.

Physicists reveled in the pinball universe. Every atom a billiards ball bouncing around in perfect accordance with physical laws. If you could measure just so precisely, you could know the precise position and vector of every atom in the entire universe. You could predict through humble Newtonian physics every event in all of history, every thought that ever flitted through a human brain. You could see the future. If the measurements could just be precise enough, you could know everything that ever was and ever would be.

Mathematicians spent half a century on the monumental project of comprehensively defining and proving all mathematical axioms, fitting them into a grandiose universal set. With enough volumes, you could annotate and define every possible bit of logic and its relationship with all other conceivable logic.

Children see the flaw in this societal hubris: there is always more. A history could always be more complete, until a volume was written on every single person who ever lived. A novel could always be more real, until it was as voluminous as what the historians aimed to produce. There was always another atom to measure, another axiom that didn't quite fit the existing ones. We thought the map could be as perfect as the territory.

The twentieth century tore down all those notions, one after another. Gödel's incompleteness theorem destroyed the idea of comprehensive mathematics, proving not only the impossibility of completeness, but also that any system included axioms that were true but not provable. Einstein ripped down physics with relativity and the genesis of quantum mechanics: it's not simply that we do not know whether an electron is here or there until measured, it's that the electron is simultaneously in both places until we do. Schrödinger's cat. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Our ideas of history itself disintegrated in the world wars of absolutism and the birth of atomic fire. Science fiction and horror were born as nineteenth century novels died. Lovecraft and Wells wrote of a vast and incomprehensible universe that dwarfed everything in human experience a mere few decades after writers focused their microscopes on cataloging the minutia of human experience.

We cannot know everything, but realizing that is the first step to knowing something.

"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful--cannot lead to all truths." -Douglas Hofstadter

They dropped Crow at his house just before noon, meandering up the pine forested hills above the valley. The houses were close enough together to never mistake it for a rural area, but the money in the area allowed just enough acreage to plant veritable single file forests between the old ranch style houses built sometime in the middle of the previous century. Privacy was always an illusion, but here it was a bit better than most suburbs. Construction companies had snuck the development in just before the condo craze that would have studded these hills with jagged tenements like teeth jutting from a jawbone. Crow and Trinan had gotten a down payment down on one right after the latest renovation fever had swept through it to maintain prices.

Crow got out of the limo and took a business card from Mathers' outstretched hand. "They shouldn't hassle you anymore." Mathers said. "The DA doesn't have anything on you, and we made it clear that we'll bury them if they try it. Da Vinci Law has formidable resources, for the right cause."

"Glad I qualified." Crow said.

"You paid your dues." Mathers said. His face crinkled into a not so friendly smile. "So far. Osteryoung or Hydane will be in touch, I'm sure."

The limo pulled off, pine cones exploding like grenades under its tires, leaving Crow with the sour feeling that he had ceded a great deal of control to an unknown entity. If screwing me furthers their ends, I don't think they'd hesitate. The only way to deal with people like that is to take the same attitude yourself.

Crow's cell phone vibrated twice and then started to ring. He answered it and found an infuriated Rebecca on the other end of the connection.

"Did you do it?" She demanded.

"Do what?" Crow asked.

"Quit playing dumb. The takedown. The big hack."

"I just got home from the courthouse." Crow said. "I told them everything I knew, which wasn't much, and they released me. Trust me, something like that just isn't my style."

A long pause stretched from her end of the conversation. "They've been interrogating me all morning, just because I spent the night before drinking with you for a while in the Hole."

"The police?"

"No, International Robotics." Rebecca said. "They ambushed me on the way in the front door this morning, didn't even make it to my office. Asked me to go home afterwards, they'd let met know if and when they needed me back at work."

"That's a lousy way to get canned." Crow said. "And you didn't even get to trash everything you'd ever worked on because someone had already done that. Got to be frustrating."

There's a phenomenon in certain circles known as the discovery of population. We're used to the idea of people being a national resource, familiar with the perception by both the extreme right and extreme left during the 20th century of the value of having more and more people in a state. More workers => more industry, more soldiers => more power. But this is a fundamentally modern perception of population. Prior to Napoleon, the huge population of France (larger than many other states combined, for centuries) was considered a liability. Three times the population didn't yield a multiple of power, but a multiple of burdens. It just meant more damned half starved peasants whose necks needed boots. And boots were expensive and more fun to use kicking other countries in the dangly bits.

Napoleon democratized warfare overnight. He realized that a hundred thousand eager volunteers kicked the crap out of ten thousand crack troops with years of training. And if they failed, it took him a couple weeks to round up another hundred thousand volunteers whereas it took another decade to train up a few regiments of shock troops. Napoleon fielded the largest armies ever seen in Europe and used them to conquer the better part of the continent. And every time disaster struck, every 400,000 man Grande Armée that disintegrated into the Russian wastes, more men waited at home to be handed a rifle and a uniform.

Napoleon was the most dangerous man to arrive in Europe since the Khan died at the gates of Vienna, not because he conquered (conquerors are a dime a dozen in European history), but because he woke the beast of the people. For all of history the power of the people was a force to be beaten down, not something to be tamed. It was too dangerous to tame, it could turn on the master's hand too easily.

That's democracy, shed of elections and millennia of elevated discourse on natural rights and freedom. Democracy in its rawest form, the beating heart underneath all those pretty words and infrastructure, is just the people moved to action. The institutions, the parliaments and congresses and republics and constitutions, are the bit and bridle and saddle that turn the strength of the people into something useful and constructive. It's a fine line that cynical governments walk with their people: break a mount and it's tame but worthless, be too lax with the whip though and it will lose fear and throw you.

Experts keep saying that Mousavi will negotiate and cut a deal and that will be the end of it. Experts don't understand democracy, they think that people follow leaders. If Yeltsin hadn't climbed on top of that tank, Russians wouldn't have returned to communism, someone else would have climbed onto the tank. In the mythology of westerns, wild mustangs will sometimes take a rider, but they won't ride with him forever, they will leave him if he becomes unworthy. You can chain a wild horse, but that doesn't make it a fucking toy pony.

"They're winning the war though aren't they?" Crow asked.

"Where is it this time?" Mathers grunted. "The Ukraine? Or are we in Africa this year?" Mathers took a moment to loosen his tie. "Our soldiers are butchered before they leave our borders so that we can send half-men to fight whole men who reject our ideologies. All the while, we're losing the real war in the court rooms and congressional hearings."

Back at the front gates, soldiers tried to use riot shields to physically push a way through the crowds for cars to pass out of the gates and leave the base. Objects arced out of the crowd and slammed into the cars and soldiers like oversized hail. One camera zoomed in on the objects with a shaky focus, revealing the familiar copper-topped shape of batteries.

The protestors rained a barrage of batteries down, some thrown by hand, some flung from makeshift slingshots. Windows shattered with the dull thunk of cracking safety glass, a handful of soldiers went down, holding battered skulls. Suddenly, the neat line between the surging sea of protestors and rigid rows of soldiers disintegrated. In moments, everyone was mixed together with batons and riot shields flailing against an ocean of arms and thrown batteries. The first shots rang out in the next moment, probably from some inexperienced private buried under a dozen people trampling him. Or maybe it was from a plant, someone from the protestors with the plan of taking the first couple of shots in hopes of tossing a match onto the gasoline surface of the whole situation. In any case, the protestors began to spin around from multiple shots, red mist exploding up into the air from a dozen different bullet tracks. The protestors broke and ran, roiling over each other like waves spreading outward from a dropped pebble. In a theatric effect, the camera tilted to the side and crashed to the ground, the feed continuing while the cameraman presumable fled or fell to the hail of lead.

"Shit." Crow said. He flipped off the plasma and settled back, not wanting to see the vultures descend and analyze it to death. "Who's right when everybody's wrong?" He asked no one in particular.

"That's what the courts are for." Mathers said. "The system works if the damn people would just get that through their heads."

Crow looked out the window at the rolling city. "The problem is that fanatics are unwilling to accept any outcome that is not absolute victory for their causes. Courts and the rule of law are built on compromise, which is the antithesis of the fanatic mindset."

Mathers snorted. "You're one to start calling people fanatics, son. Trashing the networks of the company that just fired you isn't considered a moderate view point in many people's books."

Mathers started to talk, but Crow stepped forward, put a hand on Mathers' shoulder and spoke in a low voice, measured to sound thoughtful. It was his stockholders voice, the one he used to explain himself to those he had to respect, even if he didn't. "It's a terrible tragedy that has struck one of the titans of our new industrial age." Crow said mildly. "It is true that we parted ways amicably earlier that day. I'm proud of the work that I did over the years with International Robotics, but we made the mutual decision for private reasons to go in different directions. I, of course, personally offer any aid in my power to International Robotics during this time of crisis." Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the academy.

The reporters babbled a bit more, Mathers stared at Crow with a glare tempered by grudging acknowledgement that Crow had actually said the right words to the vultures. At an unspoken signal, the flying wing reformed around Crow and they pushed through the reporters, who had gotten just enough meat to have lost their original vigor.

Crow found himself buried in the back of a limousine sent by Da Vinci Law to pick them up. It was certainly a step up from the ride in the back of the blue and white last night. A plasma screen descended from the ceiling as the car pulled away and brought up CNN.

Mathers talked at Crow for a few minutes but he was already engaged in raiding the mini fridge. He found a jar of chocolate covered macadamia nuts and a bottle of soda - real glass, for nostalgia's sake even though Crow thought those had been phased out before he was born. But of course, nostalgia is about what you want to remember not what you actually remember.

"These are comped, right?" Crow interrupted Mathers. "I'm unemployed you know."

Mathers glared and pulled out a cell phone to check into his offices. Crow turned up the volume on the plasma to hear what the anchors were describing. The scroll at the bottom had nothing to do with the current footage. "Forty dead in Budapest car bomb . . . UN pulls out of Botswana after massacre of peacekeepers . . . Organization of Sentient Rights files Supreme Court appeal over Green Eyes ruling . . . Congress begins hearings on the Centuaurian crew controversy, expected to subpoena Intl Robotics President."

Hundreds of protesters waving the traditional placards and banners of nonviolent movements the world over blocked access to the gates outside of a military installation on the east coast. The camera cut to footage of injured men rolling off of planes on gurneys, flesh mixed everywhere with black rubber and fabric. One man held up an entirely metal hand to wave at the cameras.

"Cyborgs." Mathers muttered as he hung up his cell phone. "My old man was career navy, now you can't get in the front door of the recruiting station if you won't sign off on mandatory enhancements."

Chapter Seven - Fallout

Crow left the courthouse the next morning in the company of an entire squad of lawyers dispatched by Da Vinci Law in his defense. The battalions of district attorneys had been unable to charge Crow with a crime based on the lack of any evidence pointing to his direct involvement. It was almost noon by the time he struggled down the stairs outside of the majestic classical marble columns of the County Superior Court, his half dozen lawyers providing a full physical screen of thousand dollar suits blocking out reporters.

Robert Mathers, the big name heading up his defense effort called out appropriate 'no comment's and 'my client has not be charged with any crime, nor should he be's to the throngs of reporters who had somehow gotten wind that a big story was developing here. It certainly lacked the draw of a celebrity murder trial, but it beat covering real news any day. Finally, at the foot of the grand white stairs, Mathers paused and the flying wedge of lawyers stopped with him, arranging themselves so that Crow found himself standing next to Mathers in front of twenty or so microphones and cameras.

"My client of course cannot comment on the exact nature of our conversations with the district attorneys, but it suffices to say that Dr. Crow Daedelus is not being charged with any crime here. The authorities merely required him to answer a few question about International Robotics given his long history at that corporation and the unfortunate events that occurred last night." Mathers explained in the patient tone of a grandfather explaining facts to the grandkids. He looked like a kindly old grandpa from a sitcom, but had sharp eyes that would have looked less out of place on a shark than his soft lined face.

"Can you confirm that Dr. Daedelus was fired from International Robotics only a few hours before the attacks on that company took place?" A reporter with over-collagenated lips and forehead asked in that deep bouncing pattern that only life-long on-air reporters can ever truly master.

"Dr. Daedalus's employment status is not at issue in these matters." Mathers demurred.

"Can you speculate on how badly International Robotics has been damaged in this incident?" Another reporter asked. This one was a newbie, judging by the way he asked questions in an almost human voice. "Rumor suggests Naturalist extremists were involved."

Mathers waved both his hands downwards. "Now, now. Speculating about rumors that have nothing to do with himself is simply not Dr. Daedalus's way."

"Come now, counselor, Dr. Daedalus was fired and a few hours later malicious hacking takes down International Robotics' entire operation around the globe." The first reporter persisted in a throaty voice that buzzed through every vowel. "How can these questions not arise over Daedalus' arrest?"

Cities are unique from rural areas because they concentrate vast numbers of people into relatively small areas. The density of the population itself can be a factor in democratic development. Density is the concentration of power; it is why corporations and political parties can wield such extraordinary power: they concentrate and distill power down into a small enough tool that it can be wielded effectively. The more densely power is concentrated, the more easily it can be brought bear on a political pressure point. When a population is dispersed throughout the countryside it is vulnerable to the concentrations of entrenched power, but when a population draws together into a city, its concentration rivals the entrenched. But the concentration of political power is not sufficient to ensure political consciousness; else every city would be a center of democracy. Cities are unwieldy beasts, difficult to control even if they are not politically conscious. Their presence explains why even in autocracies, cities are correlated with increased democracy, even though their weight is not sufficient to sway the system as a whole to democracy. The concentration of raw political force in cities, even when not conscious, causes autocrats to tread lightly, warping the political system around itself with an almost gravitational field.

The concentration of population into cities also is significant because the density and proximity of the population encourages political consciousness. Proximity imposes limits on government actions, because suppressive action against even a small part of the population is clear and present to many people, whereas outside of cities, government action is distant or immediate, only observable if you and yours are the target. What is nearby is relevant, and for people in cities, that circle of nearness contains far more people and events than those in rural areas. It is one thing to hear of government suppression two towns over, but quite another to be able to hear the gunfire from one's own home. A second side effect of proximity is the simple matter of communication. Just as viral epidemics spread more easily through the tightly packed urban populations, so to do viral epidemics of memes. Word of mouth communication is the most powerful form of communication, relying on the strength of personal bonds and ties, bonds which are compressed and multiplied in cities. Modern communications make personal proximity less important than in the past, but only to a degree. Communications systems are the easiest for a state to suppress, whereas word of mouth communication, while suppressible, is impossible to entirely eradicate. In poor states, where communications technologies are less widespread, they are even easier for the state to suppress.

Population density also leads to the perceived radicalization of society. Statistically, occurrences that are extraordinarily unlikely are much less likely to occur in particular small groups. The larger a population is gathered together, the more likely it is for statistical oddities to emerge, although the overall rate of their occurrence may not increase. For example, if only one in a million individuals is likely to become a serial killer, there is a vanishingly small chance of a serial killer being present in any particular small town of a few thousand people. But in a city of several million, there is a statistical likelihood that at least one will be present. This is not to say that cities are inherently more dangerous, but that their size leads to them being bastions of statistical oddities.

This statistical quirk becomes important when combined with psychological factors. Even in cities with crime rates lower than rural areas, crime is invariably seen as an issue of primary importance. The difference is that crime of a particular rate spreads out over a much greater area in rural areas, whereas in a city, that crime is compressed into a small and familiar area. Humans do not associate risk with the statistical likelihood of an event within a population, but with the perceived proximity of the event. Understanding that one person in ten thousand is likely to be robbed each year means that a town of a thousand is unlikely to see a robbery much more often than once per decade, but a city street with ten thousand inhabitants is likely to have a robbery per year. The danger seems more palpable on the city street, despite the fact that the chances of a particular person being a victim are identical in the two situations. Humans have a sort of binary psychology based on centering the universe on themselves, eliminating probability as a factor. We do not see that there is a 0.01% chance of being a random victim of a robbery on our particular city street, but rather interpret hearing about a robbery happening on our street as meaning that there was a 100% chance that we could have been the victim of a robbery. Rural areas are less prone to this phenomenon because the statistical oddities are spread out over a much larger area, thus ensuring that the occurrences that do happen immediately impact the thinking of less individuals. What this means for government is that the populations of cities put proportionately more political pressure on the state for action on social and economic issues than the same population spread throughout a rural area.

Those same forces of radicalization work in another direction in cities, generating specialists. The larger a population gathers together, the more specialized its population can become, because there are more and more people to support particular rarely needed talents. A town of a thousand will not have a world renowned cancer specialist, not because of a lack of education or talent, but because cancer is rare enough that a town of a thousand cannot support its own specialist on the topic. The smaller a population, the more generalized the inhabitants. This applies not only to professions and skill sets, but also more broadly to life choices and culture. An obscure cultural interest valued by one in several thousand individuals will be effectively non-existent in the countryside, but can find a vibrant niche existence in a city. Groups that are larger than niches, but still minorities, see a similar advantage in cities. Without a statistical increase in their occurrence in the population, specialists (whether economic or cultural) grow in power in the densely packed populations of cities.

Specialization leads to subtle differences in the politics of cities in comparison to rural areas. Technical specialists have devoted time and energy into becoming specialists in their field, and thus have a vested interest in policy insofar as it affects their specialization. This is one of the first steps towards political consciousness. In addition, the proximity of specialists within a city allows their combination and focus towards particular issues. Instead of scattering like atoms throughout the countryside, their power base is a concentrated body of mass when gathered inside a city. Specialists also are distinct because they represent an investment of time and energy by society, in other words they cannot so easily be replaced as more generally equipped individuals. The value of specialists gives them power relative to the state, power that is magnified by the density at which they are present in cities.

Almost all the tension dissipated in a roar of cheering from the assembled scientists. Janus leaned over and grabbed the railing to hold himself steady. Just short of four times the speed of light. By god, it actually worked. He straightened. "Alright people, send the signal, let's bring Mickey home and make sure he's all in one piece."

The rest of the monumental day passed in a fog for Janus. Charlie made it back okay a few hours later, although he was about to experience every test imaginable by the scientists on the station. The core worry had passed though. The ship had demonstrated faster than light travel worked, and had even carried a passenger who came through unharmed to boot.

"Tomorrow, the stars." Janus had grunted over the open circuit when Charlie asked what he thought of it all, whether he had any Neil Armstrong prepared comments to make about giant leaps and all that. He had excused himself from any celebrations, and let Charlie take the obligatory phone call from the president and returned to his quarters to mark the occasion in a private and quiet commemoration with his photos of his family. They stared down at him from the giant LCD and Janus could only whisper to them. "I did it guys, I actually did it."

At long last, Janus closed out of their pictures and checked his email one last time before bed. Thousands of messages filled the inbox, but the filters marked them as spam or from unknown parties for the most part. Anyone in the world who could manage to get his email address would have emailed him today. To be gracious, he would have to take the time in the next couple of days to go through the immense list and reply where appropriate. For now though, he only had a handful of messages from colleagues that he skimmed briefly and a solitary message from someone named "Sed & Awk" with a subject line of "Re: A photographic memory - that is the question."

Janus frowned, not recognizing the person and wondering why the filters didn't catch it if that was the case. He paused and then opened the message. It was one chilling line that kept Janus up most of the night.

"What was Samantha's first word?"

It was the army that had found Janus, Russian troops sent down for mop up observations. There was almost nothing left of him other than organic wreckage, but some medic had managed to get a heartbeat long enough to get the almost-corpse to a real hospital. Janus remembered none of this of course, he remembered nothing else until weeks later when he woke up at last from the coma with three fourths of his body replaced with cybernetic parts. The sentients self-immolated. He recalled. They had their Masada, and took most of southern Russia with them. Electronic jamming and anti-missile arrays prevented any missiles from getting out, and the closing allied forces made time precious. So they nuked everything they could reach, which included the surrounding forces and cities, and of course the church that Sylvia and the kids were helping to build, and of course my dacha.

"We'll take a break now people." Charlie announced. "We've got at least three hours before we could see something interesting. Fingers crossed now."

I survived for a reason. Janus thought. That vision of FTL could not die with me.

Uranus was far enough from Earth that it took about three hours for light to travel between the two planets. It made the math fairly easy. If Starship One traveled at exactly the speed of light, it would take three hours for it to get there and three hours for its transmission to get back to Earth. So if they received pretty pictures of Uranus in less than six hours, Mickey had become the first faster than light lifeform.

The hours passed with agonizing slowness, but no one left the operations center except for quick trips to the bathroom. No one was willing to miss this climax, although the tension was building so much that everyone feared underneath that all the work had been for naught, that Mickey was now so many subatomic particles smeared across the inner solar system.

At three hours, forty-eight minutes, Flynn's ecstatic voice came over the circuit. "Farside has contact with Starship One!" Pictures of Uranus flashed up onto the screen, a bright blue marble hanging in endless darkness. A series of pictures flashed by as Starship One rotated on small retrorockets, pulled the camera around to point at itself, and sent back the picture that NASA planned to put on lunchboxes within a week: Mickey staring out from his little window, Uranus hanging in the sky above his head.

"Starship One is away." Charlie announced to the room and over the radio where millions listened, indicating that the prototype was descending from the undercarriage of the base and accelerating under conventional rockets out from the shadow of the moon. Ten minutes until clearance. Then the drive would engage and the prototype should appear beyond the orbit of Uranus, although it would take three hours for the light to get back to Earth.

Janus remembered the last day best of all. Sylvia left early for the church, taking Samantha and Louis with her. She kissed him goodbye, a grudging acknowledgment that she would return despite the acrid arguments. Black hair twirled once as she turned. She sat in the front passenger seat, their bot doing the driving, the kids in the back. Samantha waved to him, ten years old and thinking she was sixteen already. Troops passed through an hour later on their way to a sentient outpost they claimed. Janus did not give them much thought at the time and instead spent the morning reconstructing his theory from scratch, preparing to publish it online that afternoon once he finished going over it just one more time.

"Lunar shadow cleared." Charlie said. "Drive activating." Tendrils of color surrounded the gray body of the prototype. It looked like the glittering rainbow at the edge of soap bubbles, pulsing and glistening with a moist color. "Contact terminated with Starship One." Charlie said. That was expected. The field of dark energy surrounding the vessel should have cut off everything electromagnetic, gravometric or otherwise from entering or exiting the surroundings of the craft. "Last readings from life support show that Mickey was doing fine." Charlie added. Mickey was the bright white lab mouse along for the ride. No sense calling it a true dry run unless a lifeform went along for the ride. The colors disappeared and the ship was gone. Janus' stomach clenched. There had been automatic prototypes before this, but they had been only a step beyond laboratory conditions, no matter how the press spun it to the people. This was the first real test.

"Spaceship One has disappeared into the manifold." Charlie announced. Janus sighed in relief, letting out some of the pressure. The alternative was a scattering of subatomic debris if the vessel had actually self-annihilated, but the sensors were picking up nothing of the sort.

The nukes hit the Caucuses around two o'clock in the afternoon, just after Janus had finished a fried egg sandwich for lunch - how Sylvia had hated it when he ate those, refusing to kiss him as long the aftertaste lingered. Janus remembered thinking he saw something bright out of the corner of his eyes and felt the ground lurch a moment later. He tried the television, but it showed nothing but static despite having a satellite connection. The next nuke was almost on top of the dacha, Janus later learned.

"Farside Observatory is monitoring the expected egress point." Flynn's voice announced over the circuit to the world audience. "Standing by."

Despite optimism, it took another two days before the dry run was ready to go. Janus arrived early as was his habit, and in the company of Charlie who had not spared his usual lunacy even in light of the ominous occasion. The status report on all systems was a go, to put Charlie's twenty minute rundown of all systems into its most abbreviated form. The entire team was there, all ten of the scientists and astronauts who had been sent up two years ago for the implementation phase of the most scientifically audacious engineering project since the Manhattan Project had ushered in the atomic age.

FTL. It was simple enough three letter acronym in the veritable alphabet soup of three letter acronyms of which humanity in general and government in particular were so enamored. Faster than light. Three little words, three little letters, but they spoke of ultimate audacity. Where every step of human progress to that day had been awesome in the sense of explaining and exploiting nature itself, this was the step that went beyond nature. The engine itself was supernatural when boiled down to its essence. It was greater than nature, doing what nothing in nature had managed, despite its billion light year majesty and nanometer details. Today, mankind broke the accepted rules.

Janus remembered the day he had thought of it, while doodling on the white board in his temporary office in the dacha buried in the Caucus mountains. It had been his retreat while Sylvia ministered, helped build houses and teach English and the like. She took her faith seriously, so much that she had dragged him to those cursed Russian towns on his sabbaticals from Embry-Riddle. Janus remembered bitter arguments on the matter to no avail. Regret could not begin to describe the memory of those arguments. How many people wish their last words to their wife had not been in anger? The compromise, if you could call it that, was that he would go along with her but would not participate. Janus stayed in the dacha and worked.

The moment when everything clicked with an almost audible noise of all the tumblers of all the locks in the universe rolling home at once still hung in his mind, always would he supposed. It took ten minutes before he even realized what bridge his mind had built. It took another hour to write a ten page description that he still remembered almost word for word, the brilliance of that moment burnt into his brain. He was not a humble man, he knew that paper was the best thing since Einstein, but he also knew that nothing he had done until that day had really mattered. Despite the invitations that in the end bordered on demands, Janus had never returned to Embry-Riddle. That was his old life. That was where he had been mediocre, plowing through semester after semester feeling that there was some research he was supposed to be doing, some breakthrough he was supposed to be finding, even while he zoned out for a year at a time. After Russia, there was no going home.

A Question

A cat chases a model train as it loops a figure-eight around a Christmas tree, darting amongst wrapped presents and glittering electric lights. The situation is testament to the flexibility of the animal mind. There are neither model trains nor wrapping paper nor spark-filled bits of glass in the natural habitat of the domestic feline. The cat's behavior lends itself to two alternative interpretations: we can infantilize the behavior or we can anthropomorphize it. Infantilization concludes that the cat is profoundly stupid, and that it simply interprets anything small and moving as a mouse, any lumps in the way as rocks, and anything glittering as the stars overhead, if even worth noticing at all. Anthropomorphization suggests that the cat is profoundly intelligent, and that it adapts seamlessly to concepts utterly foreign to those wired into its brain. In this model, the cat chases the train knowing that it is not a mouse, but enjoying the similarity nonetheless.

Now consider a human being instead of a cat.

Telecommunications and global transportation intertwine six billion people only 500 generations removed from tribes of a few dozen drifting through the savannahs and jungles. Do our minds adapt any differently than that of the cat? That is, are human beings profoundly stupid or profoundly intelligent?

The answer is more complicated than the question, but holds insight into how individuals interact with society as a whole. It helps explain many of the contradictions and central conflicts of modern man. In short, the cat manages to be both intelligent and stupid.

Symbols

Symbols in and of themselves are arbitrary and meaningless. Their symbolic value comes from the combination of symbols together into a system. It is the pattern between the symbols that holds symbolic power.  These patterns in and of themselves should not rationally have any meaning or power since they are merely assemblages of proxies. Only proxies that are valued more than simple proxies take on symbolic value. This is of course the central dilemma of symbols: how can something we rationally know has no power, have any power at all?

The key is in understanding that the mind can be broken into two components for the purposes of this discussion: the rational and the sensual. The rational mind can appreciate and distinguish that a toy train is not a mouse, but the sensual mind responds to the toy train as if it were a mouse. In other words, the sensual mind has no concept of metaphor. If two items evoke similar emotional responses, to the sensual mind, they are the same object. The vagaries of simile and metaphor are left to the rational mind, bereft of emotional response. Symbols therefore become real, not because people are so stupid that they believe the proxy is the same as the actual, but because our brains on a sensual level respond to the proxy as if it were real. The rational mind appreciates the distinction between proxy and actual, whereas the sensual mind responds in kind to both.

This methodology explains why it does not matter what a symbol is, or even to a degree how irrational it is. Symbols can be arbitrary because their power does not reside in any sort of measure of merit, but simply as a binary calculation of emotional resemblance. A crucifix can manifest in an infinite variety of simple and complex forms, but to the believer, a cross's symbolic quality derives from the emotional reaction tied to it. That reaction may be limited to a specific orthodox cruciform, or it may be as broad as accepting anything close to the basic shape. The symbolism needs no rational basis, and in fact rational explanations for the quality of one symbol over another are gilding applied to mask the irrational from an increasingly rational world.

Empathy

The way the mind reacts to symbols also plays an important role in how societies are structured. Human relationships naturally grow out of small family and kin groups. In the natural world, the human brain does not deal with large numbers of individuals. There are a very limited number of metaphors for the relationships between individuals. These metaphors cannot always be readily applied to the complex social relationships that arise in modern society. The rational brain can invent and adapt to these logical structures at will, but the sensual mind does not have the same luxury.

The way that the sensual mind deals with concepts for which it is not wired is to shoehorn them into existing metaphors. Nations are families. Allies are friends. Other citizens are brothers and sisters. The state is both father and mother. These similar relationships are easy to dismiss as convenient but meaningless metaphors, but the sensual mind's incapacity for metaphor reveals these relationships as critical to understanding how and why individuals react in seemingly irrational ways to government and politics. It is the metaphor of "nation as family" that produces the ideological structures of contemporary conservatism and contemporary liberalism.

The basis for social relationships is empathy, the ability to see others as oneself. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that empathy is born not of rationalization, i.e. thinking that another's pain is bad because it reminds of the potential for one's own pain, but from feeling some shadow of that pain in one's own brain.  Empathy derives from being unable to disassociate oneself from one's peers. The pain of one is the pain of all.
This is why sociopaths have the most rational of minds: the disconnection from others leaves nothing but rationality behind. The profound alienation felt by so many individuals in society is a result of an overly rational society dismissing the structural underpinnings of society itself. In other words, if the connections between people are fundamentally irrational in nature, then the prizing of rationality above all else in a society will inevitably lead to a society with no social structure.

The startlingly frequent occurrence of alienation in the most educated and most successful individuals is a logical consequence when society is viewed in this context. An oft-asked question is whether education causes depression and alienation or whether it is something inborn in intelligence itself. The answer is that alienation is a byproduct of fully embracing modern society's focus on rationalism. Ergo, those most successful at the embrace of society's rationale are most affected by the byproduct.

All the complexities of symbolic systems and elaborate social structures can be boiled down to the basic building blocks upon which our minds operate. The human mind functions like a multiple choice exam. When we are faced with anything, be it an idea, a political party, an acquaintance, et cetera, we fit it into one of the bubbles. There is no option for "none of the above." That bubble, or writing in your own answer, is the reaction of two types of minds: the entirely irrational or the entirely rational. The madman or the genius. A madman has no regard for the social and mental rules that force an accepted answer. A genius may take the same route, because if none of the answers fit, the only truly rational response is to choose none of them. An average individual will choose the bubble that feels most similar, that evokes the same emotional response. Each bubble is a symbol. A mind divorced from symbolism cannot comprehend the way the rest of society interprets the most basic of concepts, because that interpretation is inseparable from metaphor.

Politics

As historical forces, as opposed to their contemporary political buzzwords, conservatism and liberalism have championed opposite sides of the rational/sensual spectrum. Conservatism champions the return to the way things were, the embrace of traditional values and symbols. Liberalism champions the dismantling of the traditional in favor of the rational. Each taken to its extreme is dysfunctional and horrific. Fascism's worship of symbol consumes the actual. Communism's orgy of atheism consumes the symbolic.

Both forces can also be understood through the primal symbols they embody. Conservatives sees government fundamentally as a father. Liberals see government fundamentally as a mother. These archetypes exemplify the arbitrary nature of symbols: different individuals invest different meanings in the same entity depending on their own emotional reaction to the entity in question. One cat may chase the train/mouse, where another will flee from the train/snake. It is then a logical consequence that fascist soldiers fought for the fatherland even as communist troops defended the motherland.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is a reaction to an overly rational society, a society that forgets or explains away its old symbols. The gist of the traditionalist mindset is that things used to be better, and that they can be again if only the symbols and values of that time can be restored. The two natural consequences of conservative ideology are scapegoats and eternal war. If the world used to be better, the logic inevitably goes, then someone must be responsible for the decline. Tied back to primal concepts, the father must discipline and take control in order to fix the social disorder of the tribe. The symbols and values of society once restored must be protected lest they be eclipsed again either by other symbols, or worse, a mindset of no symbols at all.

Two potent forces of traditionalism rage against each other in the world today: Islamic traditionalism centered in the Middle East, and American conservatism centered in the rural areas of the United States. These forces provide a valuable insight into the general pattern of traditionalism since they have in many ways defined themselves as each other's opposites.

There are two important notes about the uniqueness of Islamic traditionalism. First, it is unexpectedly centered in the most prosperous Islamic nations, particularly Saudi Arabia. Second, the violence is not directed at the governments the militants see as having failed, but at foreign governments in Europe and America. These two trends are explained best in the context of primal relationships expanded to symbolically encompass societal relationships. The relationship between the west and Arab oil states has produced a small group of nations with extraordinary wealth, but little in the way of an actual economy. Islamic radicals target the most blame within their society at women, and anyone westernized and liberal.

Rural America sees a similar streak of traditionalism, which at face value has little in common with Islamic traditionalism other than its association with religion (Protestantism in place of Islam) and its general alarm at the threat modern society represents to values. The conservative renaissance of rural America has followed along with the gradual collapse of the economies of rural areas, as industry and agriculture have been increasingly exported to foreign countries. The fascinating nuance of American traditionalism is that it finds fault not with big business taking these steps, or a conservative government for allowing them, but with two scapegoats: liberals and foreigners.  On this level, American traditionalists march in step with Islamic fundamentalists. Their variations are in the particular symbols in which they invest meaning, but the pattern of those symbols is the same in American and Islamic traditionalism. They follow the same metaphor.

The reaction of Islamic fundamentalists and American traditionalists is at its most visceral the reaction of children of a cuckolded father. The reaction of children to a father who through inaction allows his wife to be raped by another man, a father who furthermore cannot provided economically for his family, is not one of revolt but of rage and shame. The target of their rage would not be their impotent father, but the invader. The source of their shame is not the attacker, but the mother who invited the attack through immoral behavior.

Liberalism

Liberalism in the modern world has demons of its own to confront. The status of modern liberalism, be it anywhere on the spectrum from communism to socialism to the mild leftism of American democrats, can be summarized simply as bewilderment. Prizing rationalism in the place of symbolism, liberalism cannot comprehend the malice of the right wing. It cannot understand what motivates traditionalists of any stripe. Internally, it cannot understand why the most alienated and lost souls in society come from the ranks of the liberals themselves.

Liberal thought is ill-equipped to deal with problems fundamentally symbolic in nature. The alienation of intellectual liberals is essentially the alienation of a child without a father. The mystification of liberalism by the disillusionment of their own ranks, and the revolt of the right wing is the reaction of a mother mystified by rebellious male children.

Power

In the ubiquity of shared natural metaphors lies power to manipulate society. No metaphor can completely describe its associated real concept. These orphaned elements are items that have no linkage to a specific element of the metaphor. For example, in the metaphor of seeing a nation as a family, what metaphorical mapping can possibly apply to the space program, or to campaign finance reform, or to the balance of federal power versus states' rights? Concepts that do not map easily into the metaphor can be hidden, whereas concepts that readily map can take on disproportionate importance.

Metaphors can be used to control debate on political action by channeling the discussion through metaphors. Political victory is assured not through a rational victory of superior ideas, but through an emotional victory of empathy for a candidate's metaphors.

Final Thoughts

The power that symbols and metaphors hold over our minds seems irresistible, a force that controls our relationships with society, a force that can be manipulated, a force that undermines the rational revolution of liberalism that in fits and starts has come to dominate the world since the Renaissance. Are we nothing more than slaves to symbols then, captive to the whims of those with the ability to manipulate those metaphors? We are slaves only to the things to which we are blind. A harmonious society requires balance, but we cannot achieve that balance unless we understand that something is out of balance in the first place.

"Well, I pulled our original calculations for the Epsilon Eridani HZ - that's habitable zone, the range of orbits around the star in which the temperature and radiation would be appropriate for an earthlike environment. Well, the endpoints of this line on the left and right are right at half an AU, which is just about the bare minimum distance, but it is still inside our estimate." Flynn said. "Our calculations show that the line is about a thousand miles wide. And the verticals we also have an idea on. If we are correct about everything else, they are moving such that their rotational period is around 4 days. That means the centrifugal acceleration on that line would be vaguely in the ballpark of earth normal gravity. Those verticals are struts of some sort. The line is a ring world, Janus, a goddamn ring world!"

The concept was as old as science fiction. Build a ring around a star out of materials with ungodly strength and spin it up to a rotational velocity such as to mimic gravity. The surface area would be a thousand times bigger than a planet, but not use nearly as many materials. It was laughably beyond human technology, beyond the capacities of any materials yet dreamed of by engineers. And yet we can see somebody doing it right now.

"How advanced must they be?" Janus asked.

"The strength of the materials alone is unimaginable." Flynn said. "It would need to be a million times stronger than steel, maybe ten million. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating since I haven't bothered to pull the numbers myself. Do you have any idea how big this is?"

"This is proof." Janus said. "The microwave signals, the patterned radio chatter. That's nothing. That is all explainable. This though, this is proof." It was the only word he could think of and it still seemed inadequate to describe the sheer awe. "Are we absolutely sure that this isn't just canals on Mars all over again?"

Flynn did not answer for a few moments. Every scientist knew that story. The warning story of not announcing discoveries before they had been double and triple checked independently. Schiaparelli had announced in 1877 that he had discovered canals on Mars through his telescope. Some could reproduce the pictures, some could not. Debate raged for decades and was settled only when better and better telescopes proved that there were only mirages on Mars, not canals. "We keep it quiet still, I should think. Try not to let it leak out until we watch a little longer, get a few more data points in."

"I think that would be wise." Janus said. He paused and then smiled. "I'll start the calculations though for the vessel to launch for Epsilon Eridani instead of Alpha Centauri." He said. "Why wait for better telescopes when we can just go there?"

Flynn laughed. "I don't care if you get a ship there first Janus, I saw them first. They're going to be called Flynnites and that's final." He hung up and Janus forced himself to go back to work although the daze of possibility clouded all his faculties. As if in a dream, he went back to work, organizing construction schedules and double-checking calculations for the dry run of the scaled down prototype coming up any day now. Tomorrow, I think. Janus told himself. We'll do the dry run tomorrow and then we'll know it works in reality.

Time passed for Janus in a blur of construction supervision on the prototype and feverous speculation on what was going on around Epsilon Eridani. Hushed calls from the dark side of the moon occurred at all times of the day, whenever news broke on Farside. Charlie, while not in on the matter of the conversations was well aware of their giddy effect on Janus. "You're like a couple of fucking school girls gossiping about the fucking football team." Charlie had said in a moment of irritation at Janus being called away again into a private call with Flynn.

Farside had been built in the late thirties, a small and almost entirely subterranean colony on the dark side of the moon designed almost exclusively around the gigantic telescope that dwarfed the Hubble space telescope in both size and function. Whereas Hubble had been limited by the size of the space shuttle, the Farside Main Optical Telescope was constructed in place from smaller chunks of the mirror that were piece together within molecule sized tolerances by sentis designed over a decade's time specifically for the job. The end result was almost the size of a football field and the favorite colloquial comparison of the media was that if a person's vision was as good as Farside, he would be able to stand in New York City and distinguish between different strands of another person's hair in San Francisco. In cosmic terms, that was nothing to laugh at. A permanent staff of six stayed at Farside, mostly for repairs and first line data processing, although a lot of the dirty work could be offloaded to Earth without much trouble. Janus could appreciate that it just wasn't the same to view the data remotely as it was to have such a powerful tool feeding you real time data. It was the difference between being on the sidelines versus being in an easy chair. No matter how great the big screen, there was an indefinable allure to actually being there.

"We've got something big here." Flynn had told him yesterday on an urgent call that had pulled Janus out of a conference with the directors of the construction project. "Both in the physical and meta senses."

"Download just finished on this end." Janus had said. "What are these videos?"

"Watch them." Flynn said with overflowing excitement. Janus could hear him lick his lips a hundred thousand miles away. "Any of them. No, actually, watch the second one alphabetically first."

The video had been an extreme blow up of Epsilon Eridani, filtered through a couple of dozen computer programs to eliminate the flare caused by the star itself being much brighter than everything close to it in the sky. A faint shadow of a line ran along the equator of the star and Janus for a moment thought it was just a slight band of cooler gases on the star's surface, but then noticed that the band continued out into the haze of light around the star that even the filters could not totally erase. Janus noticed something else, but could not put a finger on it until he let his eyes relax slightly and the background pattern snapped into place. "There's a line bisecting the center of the picture, and it looks like short vertical lines moving across it to the right." Janus said in puzzlement. "Overprocessing errors? Maybe a mechanical malfunction on the telescope causing a ghost on the images?"

"Checked all that." Flynn said.

Of course he had. Janus thought. The man's an expert in this after all.

Flynn continued after a beat. "Couldn't find anything wrong anywhere, and of course if we point ourselves at any other star in the sky, we cannot reproduce these inconsistencies."

"But you have an idea." Janus said. "Otherwise you wouldn't be calling me."

"Oh yeah I have an idea." Flynn said. "Think big."

Janus drew a blank. "I give up. What is it?"

Crow's stomach turned a little cold then and he watched Hydane swing down from the bleachers to leave, no doubt to slip into a leather and chrome infested Mercedes or BMW, maybe even a chauffeured one if he ranked it. This really was the point of no return. His bridges were burned beyond repair with this simple action. Even if no finger could ever be pointed at him, Crow would certainly be given the cold shoulder by anyone connected with the robotics industry. I've gone rogue. He thought.

Alexander looked up into the bleachers for his mandatory reassurance and Crow forced a tight smile onto a face he knew was far too pallid and strained. Another ball sailed out to the depths of the outfield and Crow found himself worrying more about Alexander's sudden burst of growth.

They left after another half hour as the younger kids started to get bored and cried or picked on one another. Crow had Nan detour through a McDonald's drivethrough to get Alexander some dinner. He heard at length about Alexander's day, although most of it only made sense in the lexicon of a kid. He already had a best friend, and had decided that he hated art class. A montage of other sloppily defined stories rolled out on the drive home.

"Get him tucked in and then come on back down Nan." Crow told the senti after Alexander finished up dinner and watched TV for a while.

"Would you like me to power down for the night?" The English butler voice asked him with a cultured politeness.

Crow shook his head. "Just come back down. I want to run some diagnostics, make sure everything on your hard drives is running smoothly."

Crow smiled and waved at Alexander and found himself a beer in the refrigerator as he waited for his alibi to come back downstairs. He blew the next four hours fiddling with Nan's various subsystems from the laptop's wireless connection. There was no real reason to have Nan down here. The senti could be upstairs in standby mode for all of this, but of course the entire point was to have those security camera eyes staring him down and recording his presence and the occasional interaction over the next few hours. That's as irrefutable as you can get. Crow thought. They can pull all of the logs for this network connection and see that I didn't do anything untoward, and the video footage on this junker's hard drive shows that I was here the entire time.

The police arrived promptly at eleven PM with a light, almost polite knock at the door. Crow answered it quickly, the image from movies of cops counting to three after the light knock before breaking the door down with a sledgehammer lighting up his imagination. He assumed an appropriately puzzled look when he answered the door.

"Is something wrong, officers?" Crow asked. He had an almost irresistible urge to tell them that there was no bachelorette party here tonight.

"We're going to have to take you into custody for questioning." The officer said. He looked bored.

"I've got a five year old kid upstairs and I'm a single dad." Crow said.

"You got a bot right?" The officer asked. "Cause what you're going to do is turn it on and take a ride with us."

"Am I being place under arrest?" Crow asked.

"Not at the moment."

"Then let me get my cell phone and wallet." Crow said. "I'll call my lawyer on the way over."

The officer glanced at his partner. Crow could see two squad cars out front, so another couple of guys must have waited in the car. These two had the exhausted look of fellows who really didn't want to care and didn't see any reason to other than a whole lot of heat coming down on them from above.

"Call your lawyer? What, you got something to hide?" The officer asked. The challenge was half-hearted, almost as scripted as the Miranda rights would have been. He was already glancing over his shoulder to his car, mind not even on the mandatory question.

"I don't know much, but I've watched enough TV to know that the first thing I do is call my lawyer." Crow said and turned to pocket his wallet and cell phone from the mess of mail by the front door.

"Before you even know what this is all about?" The officer asked.

"I have no comment until my attorney is present." Crow said. "That's the second thing I'm supposed to do. Say that until my throat bleeds."

Hydane left a few minutes later after they had exchanged all sorts of bits of internal information that an employee of Crow's ranking at International Robotics was privy to. Passwords, IP addresses, firewall settings. International Robotics had grown up so quickly that Crow remembered each iteration of development of their infrastructure, cobbling one bit on top of the previous with newer and better hardware, but without a master concept to make it tie smoothly together. The result was something that stayed up as a function of luck more than design. Backups were the Achilles heel of the entire operation, relying on manual and undocumented processes that only Crow and a few select administrators knew in their entirety.

"What are the chances that they are changing passwords to make it impossible for this to happen?" Hydane had asked.

"Just about zero." Crow said. "You've got to understand, most of those passwords haven't changed in a decade, despite a couple ugly firings along the way. It's badly run that way."

Hydane looked puzzled. "I thought you were the one in charge of these things."

"Well yeah." Crow said. "I knew stuff wasn't up to par, but I had too much else to do to care too much about it. When you're riding the tidal wave of exponential growth, you tend to let the infrastructure stuff slide."

International Robotics maintained servers at two colocation facilities, both within the immediate area. Backups were made over a dedicated bundle of dark fiber straight from the server cabinets to the corporate headquarters. The basement housed all of the goodies. Other than those three locations, the only off-premises backup was an array of tape drives in the Sunnyvale basement of the Director of Operations.

"Why him?" Hydane had asked.

Crow laughed. "Because when we originally set up that whole process, he was the only one who had trunk big enough to fit the array. About once per month he brings that in and then takes home an identical unit with updated data."

Hydane hesitated about some of the details but downright disbelieved this final bit about the Director's basement. "I cannot believe that such a company exists."

"Ever been a consultant?" Crow asked. "You work hourly for absurd wages to fix problems of people that don't understand technology at all. It's a comedy of the absurd at some of these places, it'd probably make you cry." He nodded down to the dug out. "Some of those sentis could run technology better than most of the businesses I've been in, but then so could most of those five-year olds." Crow shook his head. "Something happens when most people become adults. They forget how to think. If something isn't part of their same old rut, they just let it go to hell because it's too much work to learn something new."

Hydane shook Crow's hand and assured him that he would arrange for the operation to go down tonight.

"That soon?" Crow asked.

"Action should closely follow any decision." Hydane said. "Otherwise circumstances seem to change to color both the decision and the chance of the action's success."

Crow nodded and turned back to the game. Alexander was coming up to bat again. Hydane tapped his shoulder.

"One more thing." Hydane said. "Have an alibi for tonight. One that places you away from any computers."

Some might say that sunshine follows thunder
Go and tell it to the man who cannot shine

With Tiller's murder, the various Fox News pundits who reviled him for years as a baby killing death mill Nazi ripped into a higher gear of spin. They did not apologize for a word that they had said, but reiterated that sickening excuse of modern journalism: we didn't incite violence, we merely reported that some people did.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a moment of clarity occurred when Fox News descended upon an Obama husband/wife fist bump as a "terrorist fist jab". It was so beyond absurd, such patent partisan hackery, one wondered how it could even be uttered with a straight face. Of course, it didn't matter that it was a fist bump, the copy was ready to go for the jihadist high five, communist handshake, and pedophile pat on the shoulder. The beauty of it though, the true triumph of applying Orwellian newspeak to broadcast journalism was in the semantic dance around the accusation. No Fox talking head ever said that Obama was a terrorist because he bumped fists with his wife, they insisted that some people were saying that to be true.

Oh the beauty of that simple innovation. What utter freedom a lack of responsibility and ethics can bestow upon you. Take the vilest, most insulting, most obviously untrue statement imaginable, but preface it with "some people are saying" and you are no longer a shit slinging extension of an interest group's organization but a responsible journalist dedicated to the truth. "Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is name calling. "Some people say that Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is responsible journalism. It reeks of junior high, when that one malicious brat feigns innocence after making a girl cry, "it's not my fault, I didn't call her a fat whore, I just told her that some people were calling her a fat whore." Remember that smug smile on that kid's face? The way all three of his neurons agreed that he was the smartest and most clever kid in the school for thinking of that loophole? Don't you just see Bill O'Reilly's face superimposed on that kid's smirk now?

Realizing that an entire news organization can espouse whatever political agenda it desires so long as it prefaces everything with "some people are saying" leads inevitably to the next step, the wholesale engineering of truth. If a journalist isn't responsible for reporting facts, but on reporting what people say the facts are, then our intrepid journalist cannot be held responsible if there is no factual basis for what people say. After all, they're just reporting on the fact that someone is saying something, not on the factual accuracy of the words coming out of that person's mouth. "Obama is not an American citizen" is a lie. "Some people say that Obama is not an American citizen" is an honest reporting of fact. It's like reading Soviet era newspapers. "The government says that harvests are at record highs this year" even while children starve all around and breadlines form a week in advance. It's not a lie, the government is saying those words.

And that leads to the final stage of the "some people say" rationalization, the one made so bloodily apparent by Dr. George Tiller's murder. "George Tiller should be killed" is an incitement to violence. "Some people say George Tiller should be killed" is just an honest reporting of the facts.

Some might say there's a better way.

Some might say they don't believe in heaven
Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell

Hydane shook his head. "No bullshit." He winked. "At your heart, we believe you are a Naturalist. Those interests are parallel to our own. We have assembled a variety of skilled individuals with the goal of eliminating sentis from our society and ensuring that they do not threaten humanity itself."

"That would be a fair summary of my own beliefs I think." Crow said.

"Then we would like you to join our cause, do some work for us. It would be very lucrative, but I do not think that matters so much to you, does it?" Hydane asked. "No. More importantly, it will give you something worth fighting for, which is all any man can really ask for is it not?"

Crow scrunched his mouth and nodded with his shoulders as much as his head. "I used to have a simple clarity of purpose. I wanted to make a mind that could think, and now that we have attained that, I don't have anything to do, anything to care about." Crow paused. "What's worse is that I think I was doing the wrong thing all that time, and it eats at me." He poked his head down at the field. "Look at that, every one of them has a senti following them around, an electronic slave. That's not what I was working for all those years."

"The sign that an invention has come into its own is that it becomes a yuppie toy." Hydane pointed out.

"Thank god nuclear weapons never made that leap." Crow said dryly. "See, I'm not really a Naturalist, per se. I don't have moral qualms, I don't think artificial sentience is an abomination to the eyes of the lord or anything."

"And yet you fight it still?"

Crow nodded to the babysitter sentis again. "I think the original pursuit had some nobility to it. I don't think knowledge itself or the search for it can be anything but noble. But god, the application of it is just disgusting sometimes."

"Will you help us?" Hydane asked.

Crow thought for several seconds, the simplicity of the question appealing to his inner ascetic. No grand speeches could have raised his heart, he was too cynical for that, but deep inside in some buried part of his soul was a pulsating romantic. That was the part of him that had made the discoveries in artificial intelligence, not the rational roboticist layered on top. Rationality could never produce something as poetic as a mind. A tinge of craving for a cigarette and a beer colored his mind, and his mind connected it after a moment to the train of thought. Romanticism was as addictive as cocaine and had a terribly more thunderous high. Crow craved the call to arms like a junkie scratching for a fix.

"International Robotics?" Crow asked.

"They would be the logical first target." Hydane said.

"Let's burn them to the ground." Crow said and an uncontrollable smile ripped across his face.

"Yeah, I talked to him a bit last night." Crow said. He swallowed half a hot dog in a strained gulp. "I don't know how much attraction I offer your organization at this point. International Robotics fired me this morning."

"Crude of them."

"Didn't even get a severance package." Crow said.

"Hardly generous given your history." Yuri said. "In my country, there is always a severance package. Either cash or a bullet, but never nothing, that's the province of janitors."

"Well I'd prefer the cash to the bullet." Crow said.

"The bullet is the higher compliment." Yuri said. "It says they appreciate your danger in addition to your value." Their eyes watched a foul ball arch over their heads and knock against the concrete and into a stand of trees. "Would you like to get some measure of payback?"

"Demonstrate they should have given the lead-tipped severance package?" Crow asked.

Yuri nodded. "There's a saying. You will die someday, so start earning it in advance."

Crow thought idly about that as two kids collided trying to field a ball that rolled slowing across the infield. He winced at the wail of damaged cries. Kids only really cried when they knew someone was watching. The problem with little league was that they knew lots of people were watching, so the dramatic fireworks ratcheted up a few notches.

"Russia is a much harsher country than America." Crow said. "I spent few years there researching."

"Da. I have read your file." Yuri said.

"I have a file?"

"Everyone has a file." Yuri said. "The only question is whose filing cabinet it is in."

Alexander came to the plate and Crow made sure to wave when his son looked uncertainly up into the stands for reassurance. He swung hard and Crow was surprised to see the ball bolt over the heads of the infielders on the first swing. It was a hell of a bash for a five year old, line driving into the right-center gap and clanging into the chain-link outfield fence on two hops. Crow saw Alexander rope around the bases while the confused outfielders looked wide-mouthed at their coach yelling at them to get the ball none had been paying enough attention to notice. Can you blame the kids? No one hits it out of the infield this young. They're just staring at the clouds until it's time for the post game fruit roll ups and juice boxes.

Crow noticed that Alexander ran smoothly, arms and legs pounding as naturally as a sprinter, with none of the wild flailing of disproportionate limbs kids exhibited until puberty. The ten inches of the last week seemed suddenly more important as Crow realized that Alexander was now almost a foot taller than the next tallest player. A cloud of dust flew up into the umpire's face with Alexander's head first slide into homeplate. A general bustle of applause rumbled from the parents in the stands, and Crow forced himself to applaud, but an odd feeling that something altogether wrong had just happened filled his belly, though he couldn't really define why.

"Is that your boy?" Yuri asked. "He is very good."

"Yeah." Crow said, distracted. "He practices a lot." He paused. "What is it that DaVinci Law wants from me?"

Hydane smiled. "Whatever it is that you want for yourself."

"Oh, don't give me that lawyer psychology bullshit." Crow said. "I took the LSATs you know before I went to study robotics. I could have gone to any law school in the country, but I didn't like that bullshit."