“It looked very much to the cyberphage as if some large number of people and machines had either been cut off from the net, or left voluntarily, or something—but whatever it was, it wasn’t good for the network. The cyberphage thought about this for a very long time, the way an entity that lives on the net between all the universes can think—quickly and thoroughly—and decided that since no information seemed to be emanating from that country—not a transaction record, a phone call, a bill, or a bit of mail of any kind—the only solution would be to go have a look for itself.
“That took some effort,” Iphwin said. “About twenty-five years, but of course a cyberphage is immortal, and there’s the advantage of being able to operate across billions of event sequences all at once. The hard part was the need to get a physical body in which to walk around, if I was going to go and take a look myself.”
There was a long pause as we all digested that, and then, very tentatively, Jesús said, “Sir, am I to take it that you want us to believe that you are that cyberphage?”
“Well, perhaps a better term would be that I am its avatar. The cyberphage not only still exists, it runs ConTech; one reason you heard the sort of rumors you did about the company was that its only real purpose was to accumulate money and power, as a means to the more important end of getting an embodied form of myself into a physical world, with an appropriate team of people so that we could go and have a look at what’s become of America. That required a million man-years of bioengineering, as you might guess, and a great deal of tinkering with the brain-body interface, but... here I stand. If you were to lift up the flap in the back of my head, you’d find a billion-nanopin interface for reporting back to Iphwin Prime—that’s what I call my progenitor—and I was in a tank till I was physically adult, but other than that, I guess you’d have to say I’m as human as you. And just as bewildered.”
Helen had been sitting with her arms folded, sometimes glaring at Iphwin and sometimes glaring at me. Now, finally, she spoke. “And all the manipulations?”
“I didn’t have any way,” Iphwin explained, “to control who or what went to which world. Nobody has that ability—the very thing that lets you shift worlds is the uncertainty with which it happens. But while I can’t control the shuffle, I can control how fast it’s dealt, and I can look at every hand. What I did was that I recruited teams of people that I thought might be able to solve the problem, and then I kept shifting them between event sequences till I had some version of all of the critical people together in one event sequence, or to be more precise about it, until I knew it was very likely that I had all of you together.
“Then to join you, I made that voice phone call, and did it in a system that hung up and reconnected at terahertz frequencies. It kept checking against other stuff you were doing, till I got it narrowed down as much as could be managed; then in the last few seconds I just oscillated until the system found you. There was an uncertainty trade-off, as always—I have some big gaps in my memory and neither I nor the cyberphage knows exactly which Iphwin I am. Millions of Iphwins must have shuffled right out of reality to get me here.”
“But you didn’t feel them go,” Helen said.
“Does that matter?” Iphwin asked, puzzled.
“You bet it does,” she said. “I’m just wondering if by any chance you’ve noticed that most of us gave up our old lives to be here, and you never asked us if we wanted to.”
Iphwin nodded. “That’s true. And if you really insist, you can leave now. I’m hoping you’ll stay for a variety of reasons— that is, both, I have a variety of reasons to hope you will stay, and there are a variety of reasons why any one of you might. I hope you will at least hear me out.”
“I’ll do that much,” Helen said. “But right now I’m not very inclined to believe you. You’re a ghost personality, one created by a machine to embody itself. You didn’t give up relatives, friends, lovers, any of that. You were created mostly to be thrown away—”
“All human beings, ultimately, are thrown away,” Iphwin pointed out. “Most for no reason, since the universe has none, and they simply go away, used up, never to return. You were picked because, first of all, you were a likely bunch of people to care about what had happened to America. Most people don’t or wouldn’t, you know. Why should they? Whatever its importance in the world might once have been, it doesn’t have it any longer. The cultural role has been taken over by the expat culture, the physical economy of the world seems to have disconnected without anyone noticing, and in most of the event sequences there’s no active military balance-of-power problem. America seems to have faded everywhere, long before it disappeared completely. Fortunately for this project, there still are a very few people who are still concerned about it, and you all are among them.
“Then there’s the matter of skill at abduction. The cyber-phage of which I am an avatar, being a machine, may have overrated the importance of abduction, since so far no one has found a good way to provide machines with the skill. But I’m as human as you are—”
“So you say,” Helen said, making her contempt clear.
“I have a personality physically embodied in flesh made according to human DNA, and that’s good enough,” Iphwin said, firmly. His face got red as he said it, and I could hear the stress and anger in his voice.
There was a very long, awkward pause, before Iphwin finally resumed. “To summarize, Lyle Peripart is an authority on the mathematics of abduction. Helen Perdita’s discipline involves solving practical problems in abductive reasoning, plus many versions of her are skilled in operations in dangerous areas, plus of course she’s personally loyal to Lyle, which may be valuable in a tight spot. Then I needed someone who could handle command and who was closely linked to Lyle, hence your presence, Colonel. I got you your two old executive officers, with a bonus that I needed a couple of investigating detectives—which is why I got not only Esmé Sanderson, but also Jesús Picardin.”
After a minute, Kelly said, “You haven’t explained why Terri and I were brought into this, and you went to some extra effort to get us.”
Iphwin nodded. “I had no creative artists, and that’s a whole other style of abduction. And I needed someone who practiced the harder creative arts, the ones where you accommodate to the world around you rather than the ones where you just dump out whatever you’re feeling inside and then shape it for others. That kind of talent for making the piece that fits with the other pieces, that ability to fit in, the thing actors call rapport or chemistry, was a kind of creativity I wanted to make sure of, and that’s the kind that actors are good at. And then, for Terri...” he sighed. “Ethically I’m on shaky ground here, but, well, she was the only member of that VR chat room that I didn’t already have coming, and somehow that felt like a mistake. She’s physically healthy and bright, and I would guess quite adaptable.”
“And she’s right here listening to you, so you can stop talking about her in the third person,” Terri said, flushing with rage.
Iphwin went right on. “Also, Terri, like most smart teenagers, you don’t have an excessive respect for authority. My feeling is that whatever we find when we get north of the border, it’s not going to be so much finding it that’s a problem—it’s going to be understanding whatever it is we’ve found. The erasure is so complete—and so perfectly confined to the old 48 contiguous states—that it just doesn’t seem like it could be any kind of natural phenomenon. Nor does it seem like anything anyone could do on purpose. Which seems to cover all the reasonable and comprehensible possibilities, and so chances are that what we are looking for is unreasonable and incomprehensible. Hence my urge to throw a few wild cards in—purely a hunch.”