Halo
Tom Maddox
The resources of Aleph, the artificial intelligence that operates the high-orbital space station Halo, are being diverted to its experimental sections. And when the corporation that owns Halo hires freelance data auditor Mikhail Gonzales to observe the problem, Aleph starts spinning out of control.
"A clear and well-conceived plot . . . Maddox is a name to watch".--SF Chronicle.
Halo
Tom Maddox
From the author:
You may read these files, copy them, and distribute them in any
way you wish so long as you do not change them in any way or
receive money for them.
I have entered HALO into the distribution networks of the Net, but
I retain the copyright to the novel.
If you paid for these files, you were cheated; if you sold them,
you have cheated.
Otherwise, have fun and spread the book around.
If you have any comments on the book or this distribution, you can
send me e-mail at:
tmaddox@halcyon.com
November, 1994
HALO
Tom Maddox
To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen,
my friend; and all our lamented dead, lost in time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Here are some of the people I owe in the writing of this
book.
My wife Janis and son Tom. They have had to put up with the
problems of a novelist in the houseincluding arbitrary mood
swings and chronic unavailability for many of the usual pleasures
of life. To both, my love and gratitude for their love, patience,
and understanding.
My best friends: Leo Daugherty, Jeffrey Frohner, Bill Gibson
and Lee Graham.
My mother Jewell, my brother Bill and sister Janet.
Ellen Datlow: she published my first stories in Omni and
showed me how a really good editor works. Also, two friends who
patiently read through drafts of those stories before Ellen got
them: Geoff Hicks and Larry Reed.
The readers of various incarnations of this book: Beth
Meacham, my editor at Tor Books; Merilee Heifetz, my agent; Bruce
and Nancy Sterling, great readers; Melinda Howard and Gary
Worthington; Lynne Farr; Carol Poole. Also, the members of the
Evergreen Writers' Workshop, especially Pat Murphy.
The Usenet community, friend and foe, for ideas about a quite
astonishing number of things, and for the continuing fascination
of life online; with special thanks to Patricia O'Tuana and the
members of "eniac."
The usual suspects at the Conference on the Fantastic, with a
special nod to Brian Aldiss, because we'd all be happier if there
were more like him running around.
At The Evergreen State College, many people who gave
technical advice. (Perhaps needless to say, any consequent
blunders are entirely mine.) Mike Beug and Paul Stamets, world-
class mycologists and explainers, talked to me about mushrooms and
provided invaluable references. Mark Papworth applied a coroner's
eye to a carcass I made. The faculty and students of the Habitats
Coordinated Studies Program, 1988-89 helped me to think about a
space habitat's ecosystem.
A list, much too long to include here, of friends, both
colleagues and students, at Evergreenthough I have to mention
Barbara Smith and David Paulsen, whose cabin and cat make cameo
appearances.
And all I've known who can find a piece of themselves in this
book.
PART I. of V
Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.
Jean Baudrillard, America
1. Burning, Burning
On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the
egg. A week ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once
was prepared: he had become an alien, at home in a distant
landscape.
His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread
white flesh torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On
the dark stained oak door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their
faces beatific in the cold fire. Staring at the animated carved
figures, Gonzales thought, the fire is in my eyes, in my brain.
He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through
to the hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope
scuffing without noise across floors of bleached oak. Through the
open door at the hallway's end, morning's light through stained
glass made abstract patterns of crimson and buttery yellow.
Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far
wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the
center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed
steel, cracked and waiting. One half-egg was filled with beige
tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half with hard dark
plastic lying slack against the shell.
Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his
hair back into a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over
it. He reached to his waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his
navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head. Dropping it
to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan
pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale
skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes
grainy, stomach sore.
He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and
lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which
began to balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick
cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in
the back of his neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask
over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled. Catheters moved
toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms. The
egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.
He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply
as elation punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated
by drugs, meditation, and the egg. No matter that he was going to
relive his own terror, this was what moved him: access to the
many-worlds of human experiencetravel through space, time, and
probability all in one.
Virtual realities were everywherevirtual vacations, sex,
superstardom, you name itbut compared to the egg, they were just
high-res videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks
to simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled
only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were
conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing
suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got total
involvement through all sensory modalitiesthe worlds were so
compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the
waking world, as if it were a dream.
A needle punched into a membrane set in o
ne of the neural
cables and injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
#
It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan,
the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its
records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon.
He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a
central rosewood table in the main conference room. The table's
work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in
front of them.
Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The
local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with
its primary information utilities: all its records of personnel
and materiel, and all transactions among them. A month earlier,
SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the
home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his
memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.
So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had
explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal
movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there
were records, and the two followed. They searched cash trails,
matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher
signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel
records themselves against government databases, and traced the
backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they
read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they
verified daily transaction logs.
Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it
had shown nothing but the usual inefficienciesGrossback didn't
run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he
didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor
SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would
come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at
their leisure.
Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end
of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-
out, eager to go. He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane
out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with
whatever commercial flight's available there."
Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving.
Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he
had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features.
He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese
style: a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton shirt.
During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him
coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and
clenched teeth. Fair enough, Gonzales had thought: the man's
operation was suspect, and him along with it. Anyway, people
resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing
Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head,
F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone
nervous.
"You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?" Grossback asked.
"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone
else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's
official airport, where partisan groups had several times brought
down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew that.
Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"
Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything
about that." Even mentioning the matter constituted an
embarrassment, not to mention a reportable violation of corporate
protocol. The man was either stupid or desperate.
"You haven't found anything," Grossback said.
What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data
to examine before I can make an assessment."
"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look
like," Grossback said. His face had gone cold.
"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish
packing." For the moment, he just wanted to get out before
Grossback did something irretrievable, like threatening him or
offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales said. The other man said
nothing as Gonzales left the room.
#
Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of
low bungalows fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood
above the Irrawady River. The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's
tattered version of Asian tourist decor: lacquered bamboo on the
walls, along with leaping dragon holos, black teak dresser,
tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in
from the twentieth century just to give your average citizen that
rush of the Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had
been rebuilt less than a decade before, so, by local standards,
Gonzales had luxury: working climatizer, microwave, and
refrigerator.
Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and
Gonzales lay sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights
then was greeted just after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby
neck flaps and doing push ups.
He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the
cart paths that threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among
the temples and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning
mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers sticking
up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the temples,
thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the
Conqueror was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government
agencies nested among thousand year old pagodas, some in near
perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more
than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit by building
pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.
Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was
trying to recover from late-twentieth century politics; in
Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military
dictatorships and the chaos that came in their wake. And as was
so often the case in politically wobbly countries, it still
restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds of
governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free
information flow unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive,
their use licensed by permits almost impossible to get. As a
result, Gonzales and the memex had been like meat eaters stranded
among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.
He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions
dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum
shock-cases, ready for transport. The other case held memory boxes
containing SenTrax Myanmar group's records.
When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the latest
news about Grossback, how the man had cracked at the last moment.
Gonzales was sure the m-i would think what he didGrossback was
dog dirty and scared they would find it.
#
At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales waited
for his plane. Gonzales wore his usual international traveller's
mufti, a tan gabardine two-piece suit over an open-collared white
linen shirt, dark brown slipover shoes. His hair was gathered
back into a ponytail held together by a silver ring made from
lizard figures joined head-to-tail. Next to him sat a soft brown
leather bag and the two shock-cases.
In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to a
gilded and jeweled umbrella top, pointing to heaven. On its
steps, beside the huge paw of a stone lion, a monk sat in full
lotus, his face shadowed by the animal rising massive and lumpy
and mock fierce above him. The lion's flanks were dyed orange by
sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood. The minutes
passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.
"Come tour the temples of ancient Pagan," a voice said.
"Shwezigon, Ananda, Thatbyinnu"
"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had rolled up
behind him. It would hold two dozen or so passengers in eight
rows of narrow wooden benches but was now emptyalmost all the
tourists would have joined the crush on the terraces of
Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over the temple
plain.
"Last tour of the day," the cart said. "Very cheap, also
very good exchange rate offered as courtesy to visitors."
It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen: in Myanmar,
even the machines worked the black market. "No thanks."
"Extremely good rate, sir."
"Fuck off," Gonzales said. "Or I'll report you as
defective." The cart whirred as it moved away.
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side
of the road, ready to come across and beg for pencils or money.
Gonzales caught the monk's eye and shook his head. The monk
shrugged and walked on, his orange robe billowing.
Where the hell was his plane? Soon hunter flares would cut
into the new moon's dark, and government drones would scurry
around the edges of the shadows like huge mutant bats. Upcountry