A la Node

It seemed to be made of glass, though Harry assured me almost fervently that it wasn’t. I could see that it wasn’t, didn’t imagine it would be, I had just commented on the appearance – but Harry was oblivious, too habitually jovial to ever really notice his own condescension. I tuned him out and looked at the piece, the depth and sheen of it changing as I looked. I couldn’t seem to find the same perspective twice, it always looked as if it had been turned ever so slightly away from the orientation you saw a moment ago. It made my eyes water.

Harry seemed unusually thrilled with it, or with something. Of course he got paid either way, and for that matter so did I, but to him the prospect of a unique object was exciting, a grand discovery. To me, it would be a defeat, which is why it was not going to happen, Harry’s good mood be damned.

“It’s another phased coherence metamaterial, Harry, we’ve had four this week.” Harry didn’t let his smile slip, but he watched me, carefully.

“Chaotic, sure, but the initial state can be replicated, I bet, if not with an entanglement device, then computationally. Seriously, Harry, get a grip. What makes you think this one is any different from the others?”

“All the boys at Uniquity say it’s a breakthrough, and you’ve been rubbing their noses in it for so long, I don’t think they’d bother getting up in the morning if they weren’t really onto something. Give it a shot, there might be more there than meets the eye.” He grinned manically.

It was true, Uniquity had been trying hard to create an irreproduceable object for most of the previous decade, and for the last three years it had been my job to burst every balloon that made it out of their fab. Technically we were a consultancy, Harry on the business end and I in the lab, but Uniquity was our only paying client and probably always would be. For one thing, I had made indistinguishable copies of every object their best brains could come up with  for those three years, they were not about to let me interact with anyone else in the field if they could pay me enough to prevent it.

And of course, I was the best. The very best, on either side of the fence. If I couldn’t make a copy, Uniquity knew damn well no one else on the planet was going to, not the pirates and not the competitors. I don’t consider modesty a virtue, any more than bragging is – I am the best at what I do, and I get paid damn good money to do it, by people who know I am the best.

What I do is this: I make copies. Uniquity sends me a piece, usually something heavy and around ten centimeters tall, deep and wide. Some are startlingly beautiful, but less so now than in the past – they are nominally art pieces, but the truth is no one really cares what they look like. They care that there can only be one of them. If i can make an indistinguishable copy, they trash it and try again.

The problem is an old one, copying. No one really worries about being sold a fake masterpiece these days, though, what they worry about is everyone else having the same masterpiece. It’s too easy to make things now, anything someone can design, scan or photograph is something anyone else on the planet can have one of, in about 5 minutes. This drives the high society folks batshit crazy.

I looked at the false glass, a mis-shapen lump on a perfectly flat metal disk. It glimmered, shifting before my eyes. I nearly reached out to stop its apparent rotation, but I knew it wasn’t moving. Optics, just fancy optics. I got to work.

Harry was not wrong about the breakthrough, but I had no reason to think it was going to present me any more problem then the last breakthrough, or the one before that. There really just aren’t many things that can’t be copied, no matter how complex you make them. The big trend these days is to make quantum uncertainty macroscopic, to make an object whose properties literally can’t be classically predicted. Doesn’t matter. You can entangle the whole damn thing, make an identical, indistinguishable state from which the same unpredictable properties will flow. Assuming you can figure out what the damn thing is made of to begin with.

It was ugly inside. It took me the rest of the day just to determine what it was made of, and the answer was half the periodic table. It was a mess of metastable states, atoms from the super-heavy islands of stability, and waves of excitation that sloshed back and forth inside, solitons that refused to lose more energy than they gained from their environment. Yeah, it was clever, I’ll give them that, but it was also a semi-stable mess. It was as if they had walked into a shopping mall and spent weeks balancing every object they found on top of every other object, spinning half of them and bouncing the other half until a kind of high energy chaotic rhythm was reached. And yes, it was going to be hard to copy.

The next day, Harry gloated over his coffee at me. “You were up all night. Damn, I knew they had made progress, the last one took you what, half a day?”

“Three hours, twenty seven minutes.” I glowered at him.

“Look, Rostovskaya is coming for brunch, I want you to clean up a bit. He and I have been having some very interesting discussions lately, and he wants to check in on you himself.” Gennedy Rostovskaya, founder and CEO of Uniquity, the man who ultimately paid my salary.

“Tell him it’s too early to gloat.”

“Eleven, at the Elysium, be there and for god’s sake throw a lab coat over that outfit, you’re two weeks out of fashion.”

I sighed with ostentatious bedragglement, but I was actually relieved. I had had to turn to the computers to sort out the dynamic state of the ugly little lump, but the results were in, all I needed to do was fire up the Bose-Einstein condensates and push atoms.

“You’re the boss, Harry, I’ll be there.”

The Elysium was a little restaurant not so much good as it was handy. It was handy, though, to some of the richest people and some of the most fashionable corporations in Manhattan, so the atmosphere and bill made you think it must be substantially better than it actually was. I did in fact wear my lab coat, which for the time being still seemed to pass the dress code.

Harry and the Big Boss sat at a little table near the wall of glass overlooking Central Park, sunlight gleaming on the wood between them. Rostovskaya was dressed in a flowing dark blue robe, but as I approached it changed shape, faded, became a pastel blouse. The very rich could afford to ignore fashion if they chose, or they could afford to always be wearing something no one else was.

I placed a strange little lump of not-really glass down on the table, and then placed another one next to it. I sat down, keeping my expression almost painfully immobile.

“See, that my boy, that’s our Wunderkind. Didn’t I tell you sir? You can bet that’s a perfect copy, I know Drew, he doesn’t make mistakes.”

Rostovskaya was calm as he regarded the two pieces glimmering in the sun, slowly rotating without moving. He didn’t look at me when he spoke, and he spoke quietly, knowing we would listen. His blouse grew a high collar.

“In my summer home, I have a copper basin, hammered by hand. It holds a pool of prismatic superfluid, very beautiful. The fluid reacts to the sunlight, the warmth of the room, the currents of air, the sounds of birds echoing from the walls and ceiling and every shifting tree outside the window. Is that not a unique work of art, Drew Angelotti?”

“The basin can be copied down to the arrangement of atoms, the energy states of each intact. The fluid as well.”

“But the surroundings, surely no other place on earth can be the same?”

“Objects can be copied, the environment is made of objects. I would hate to have to copy the Sun, but if you insist, I think we can replicate that scene for your winter home as well.”

He still didn’t look at me, but his smile widened and the corners of his eyes crinkled infinitesimally. I had met him once before, and he had liked my sense of humor then, too. His clothing continued to morph, what was the change rate? How many seconds did it take an image from a public camera to become someone else’s outfit? Fast enough that he had to change every fifteen seconds to stay ahead?

Harry made a show of ordering us tea, an effort to distract us and keep himself as close to the center of attention as possible without actually interrupting our boss. The little spherical glass cups that arrived shortly held a quite pretty bloom of tea leaves tied together such that they opened in the hot water like an exotic flower. The water was tepid, the flavor weak but bitter, a typical Elysium triumph of appearance over substance.

“Tell me, Drew, what cannot be copied? The scientists tell us that anything can be, in principle, but in practice surely something must yet be beyond our reach?”

“A conscious human mind, apparently. Anything of that level of complexity seems to be beyond the current state of the art.” Current state of the art, by the way, was me.

“Experiments have been done,” injected Harry, “most animals come out looking identical, but with odd behaviors or mental defects. Different personalities, you might say.”

“They’ve copied people,” I said. “Harry, you showed me the paper yourself, remember? The Korean group, they managed to do viable copies of cryogenic test subjects, I think the UN bombed their lab shortly after publication.” Harry looked at me, apparently perplexed.

“Ah, I am glad to see some forms of counterfeiting remain illegal,” said Rostovskaya.

Then food came, slightly stale brioche, bland gazpacho.

“It is actually easier to be unique now than it has been in centuries, since the industrial revolution. You might decry the ease of making things, the fact that any design is instantly copied, distributed and shared, but that just means there is an enormous variety of everything now. Statistically, my combination of personal items and clothing is just about guaranteed to be unique just because everyone has a choice of many thousands of designs for every individual item they own.”

“It is easy for you to say so, young scientist, but you do not have the eye of the public taking notes on your every wardrobe choice, every painting you hang on the wall, every piece of jewelry you select.” His outfit chose that moment to become something very like a child’s penguin costume, tuxedoed, a hood extending out over his face like a beak. Long practice at such things made it easy for me to suppress a smile. “Nothing unique can be possessed anymore, unless Uniquity can can find a way to outsmart you,  Mr. Angelotti. Still we do well selling what is merely very very hard to replicate.”

He pushed the art piece and its copy closer together on the table and watched their synchronized optical tricks.

“They will decay in about a week.” He looked up at me when I said it, it was the first time he had ever met my eyes. His were cold blue, more defined than any other part of his face, he looked like a man wearing a mask. Mask or no, I could see the edge of hope in those eyes, and could feel Harry holding his breath.

“And the original, it was made some time before your copy, it will decay first, and then -”

“No. They will go at the same time, you can count on it.” The tension held for a few long seconds, and then the CEO smiled in earnest, broadly, showing opalescent teeth.

“Ha! I do not doubt you, you are as good as they say you are. Ah, thank you for a most enlightening talk, my young friends. I am afraid it is time for me to be away, but thank you, truly.”

“What the hell was that all about?” I demanded when the man finally made his way out of the dining room, dressed now in a golden toga and flanked by discrete bodyguards. Harry didn’t answer me, but he still beamed like an idiot as if he had won something.

Nothing new was due from Uniquity the next day and probably not for a little while, since I had crack their fancy atomic balancing act. At Harry’s urging, I took some vacation days and went fishing. On my way back to New York, I picked up a virus and spent several days in my apartment sick, sweating and feverish, tangled in my blankets trying to run from nightmare jailers.

Recovered but still out of sorts, I found Harry waiting at my desk when I finally returned to the office. He sat in my chair as if he had no intention of getting out of it.

“Well, what have they sent for me to copy while I was out? Conscious human brains?”

Harry kept the laugh in the back of his throat, his lips closed but grinning.

“They haven’t sent a thing, Drew. I think you’ve put a crimp in them for a while, they’re probably chasing their tails around trying to see past their asses.”

“Well, I’ll clean up a bit and go back home then, I could use another day of rest.”

“Feeling OK? You look rough. Still recovering?” He stayed in my chair, I wondered if I was going to have to physically kick him out of it.

“I’ll be fine, I just want to sit down for a bit.”

“Drew, I’m sorry about this.”

For a moment, the non sequitur didn’t register, then there was a warm pain in the back of my neck. I started to say something, felt my mouth go soft around the words, then felt my legs very slowly stop supporting me. Arms took hold of mine, they seemed very distant, I could barely feel them.

“Wha… Wha.. What?” I managed, the words sounded as distant as the arms that held me up. Harry slowly stood up and walked towards me, a wistful smile on his face.

“Sorry Drew, you did too good a job impressing the boss. You know what he can own that no one else has? Any idea what that man is willing to pay for the conscious mind of Drew Angelotti?”

It took all my concentration to say a single word: “No…” My mind was screaming though, lines and paragraphs that wouldn’t have been enough to express my shock even if I had been able to get them out.

“I’ve got a copy Drew. A copy -of- Drew. That wasn’t a virus you had, we froze you and made a duplicate. The boss man has friends in Korea, apparently.”

No. Too complex, even the copies that had gotten the Koreans bombed were not copies in personality or mental function.

“Yes, I know it, Drew, he’s not really you. Course if we could make a perfect copy, the boss wouldn’t have bought you off me. No, the new Drew is smart though, we can train him. He thinks he’s the original, by the way, we’ve told him he had a bit of an accident. He even remembers the lab and the work, though I have to say he seems to have a much better sense of humor than you. Laughs a lot.”

There was nothing in my mind but incoherent rage.

“Oh, you are wondering why not sell the copy? Aside from the much better attitude your double has, the boss asked for you specifically. Don’t know what he’s actually going to -do- with you, but it’s definitely you he wants. You’ll be his new piece of art, I suppose, the one thing his rivals can’t copy.” He was standing close to me, too close. The smile never quite left his face. “Drew, I am sorry, but this is really an amazing amount of money. It’s business, you know that’s my job here, that’s what I do. In a week, all the movers will have their own personal unique people, snagged off the street or bought at auction, whatever. The bottom will drop out of the market. This is my big chance, it’s nothing personal.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the rage or the sedative, but my vision was closing in, going red, then dark at the edges. Harry either didn’t speak more, or I couldn’t hear him over the rushing in my ears. He turned away and I saw him extend a hand, saw Rostovskaya take it and shake it primly, before darkness closed.

Irreproduceable by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.