“Well,” I said, when the last one had finished, “that was very interesting and completely not informative. And if there’s anyone home at those numbers, I bet they’re getting really annoyed at the phantom rings.”
“I wonder if, when we get phantom rings, it’s because people in the American Reich are trying to call us?” Helen asked.
My head ached for a second and I said, “What did you just say?
“I just said ... I can’t remember. Do we have a recorder on at the moment to see what it was?”
We did—it’s SOP in most business offices in the Dutch Reich, as a form of political CYA, to record all conversation in offices unless it’s specifically switched off. We pulled back the last couple of minutes of sound recordings from our office, and listened to the question together. “I wonder if, when we get phantom rings, it’s because people in the American Reich are trying to call us?”
My head hurt. Helen’s head hurt. And neither of us could seem to get our minds around the question. We played it again and transcribed it, and then read it aloud several times. “This works a lot like the forbidden words on-line,” Helen said, abruptly. “After all the practice, now I can ask the question, and it doesn’t seem like it’s all that radical—but at the same time it doesn’t seem like it has an answer we can get. But you know, most of us get phantom rings much, much more often than we dial a wrong number and hang up, don’t we?”
“Certainly I do. I kind of think everyone does, too. Do you suppose maybe, if there’s a forbidden zone for phone calls or something ... but who’s forbidding it? And why control our behavior, if that’s what they’re doing, rather than just tell us the number is unavailable?”
Helen sat back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, obviously thinking hard. “There are several great big assumptions we’re making, aren’t there, Doctor Abduction? And wouldn’t your method be to look at what they all have in common?”
“That would be it. We assume that we exist in the real world and we’re not in VR at the moment,” I said. “That’s a big assumption that we ought to be able to check, somehow. If we are in VR, it’s got the biggest bandwidth ever seen, because it’s perfectly smooth, with none of the little glitches that are always there in VR.”
“Why is that assumption important?”
“Oh, because all the inexplicable events we’re having would be perfectly explicable in a VR program that either had different reality rules or wasn’t fully enforcing the ones it had. For that matter it would explain all of Iphwin’s problems. Unfortunately, I guess, we seem to be real.”
She sighed and took a sip of her coffee, making a face because it was cold. “That’s a test right there. If we are inside a VR world, the world had no way to know I was going to reach for the coffee, and it made it the right temperature for the circumstances instantly, and gave the cup a different weight coming up and going down. That’s way too complex for most programs. Well, all right, then, we are in physical reality, and one easy explanation goes away. What other assumptions are we making?”
“Well, about the phone experiment,” I said, thinking hard— “you know what? We’re assuming that we want to hang up the phone and then we forget about it. But we have no way of knowing what we wanted at the time, do we? Suppose we take wanting right out of it—we’ll just have the computer record whatever comes through the phone, use the dialer on the computer to call the number, and stand clear across the room. This time we won’t listen.”
The result was oddly impressive; the computer dialed and then hung up, instantly, yet when we checked its logs, there was only a disconnect with no indicator as to which end had hung up.
“Hmm,” Helen said. “Now let’s see what happens if a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there.”
We dialed the number on the handset, walked out of the room, and came back a minute later.
A tiny tinny voice was saying, “Hello, hello? Who the hell is this? I’m going to report this to the—” And the line went dead.
This was getting interesting, as I explained to Helen. “Hmm. It would appear that it responds faster to the computer than to us, which suggests it somehow knows the difference between us and the computer. And as soon as any information starts to come through—notice how the first few words there could have been anywhere, but at the moment when poor Mrs. Culver would have had to speak whatever the local noun for the local cops is in Miami, the connection broke?”
“Let’s pick on someone else next time,” I suggested. “What can we try next?”
Next we tried putting the call up on a speaker phone, with a recording of Helen saying, “Hello. Sorry to bother you. This is your phone company calling to determine whether there is a phantom ring problem on your line. We believe you may have been getting a large number of rings without anyone on the other end of the line. If you have been having this problem, please say ‘Yes’ and state your name clearly. If you have not been having this problem, please say ‘No,’ and feel free to tell us about any other problem that you may be having with your telephone service.”
When we were satisfied with the message, Helen said, “Well, shall we pick on Culver in Miami again, go back to Babbit in Chicago, or do one of the ones we’ve called less?”
“Culver. Definitely Culver. Very likely she’s at home, and we know she’s picking up the phone and yelling. If she’s called the cops, that’s even better—they’ll be on the line.”
“Seems like kind of a nasty prank to pull on an old lady.”
“How do you know she’s old? Maybe she’s a young widow. Maybe her husband forgot to wear his flameproof sheets and stood too close to the burning cross and was burned to death last week.”
“I guess we can always hope. Okay, we’re setting up Mrs. Culver to do her part for science.”
We set the message to play out loud in a few seconds, dialed the number, and left for ten minutes to get coffee from the cafeteria, to make sure we wouldn’t be anywhere near when the phone was picked up and the message played. The house recording system would pick up whatever was said.
We had just sat down to coffee and more fruitless speculation when the lights went out in the cafeteria. There was still plenty of afternoon sun through the window, so it wasn’t dark, but there was that weird hush that falls in a really big building when the power goes out, as if everything had suddenly been smothered in thick cotton.
An alarm screamed from the direction of our office, and a voice announced, “All personnel, Floor 188, Block C, please stand by to evacuate as needed. We have a fire in Room A-210. Fire suppression is being applied. Please stand by.”
Room A-210 was our office.
“Well,” Helen said, tucking a loose strand of chestnut hair back in, “I think we’re hitting Iphwin with something considerably more expensive than a phone bill. I don’t suppose either of us is willing to consider the possibility that it’s a pure coincidence?”
A minute later the voice announced that the fire in A-210 was out, and specifically asked Helen and me to go in and assess damage. Power came back on as we were walking back to our office.
We found what I might have expected: the computer and the phone, along with all the data cables, had become hot enough to partially melt. The robot sprinklers in the room had done their job, aiming the foam streams at the hot spots, and therefore though the carpet was a messy ruin, and one chair that had the bad luck to be behind the computer from the sprinkler’s viewpoint would probably never be the same, most of the place had been saved.