Who's afraid of Wolf 359?

Ken MacLeod «Who's afraid of Wolf 359?»

When you're as old as I am, you'll find your memory's not what it was. It's not that you lose memories. That hasn't happened to me or anyone else since the Paleocosmic Era, the Old Space Age, when people lived in caves on the Moon. My trouble is that I've gained memories, and I don't know which of them are real. I was very casual about memory storage back then, I seem to recall. This could happen to you too, if you're not careful. So be warned. Do as I say, not as I did.

Some of the tales about me contradict each other, or couldn't possibly have happened, because that's how I told them in the first place. Others I blame on the writers and tellers. They make things up. I've never done that. If I've told stories that couldn't be true, it's because that's how I remember them.

Here's one.

I ran naked through the Long Station, throwing my smart clothes away to distract the Tycoon's dogs. Breeks, shirt, cravat, jacket, waistcoat, stockings, various undergarments — one by one they ran, flapped, slithered, danced, or scurried off, and after every one of them raced a scent?seeking but mercifully stupid hound. But the Tycoon had more dogs in his pack than I had clothes in my bundle. I was down to my shoes and the baying continued. I glanced over my shoulder. Two dogs were just ten metres behind me. I hurled a shoe at each of them, hitting both animals right on their genetically modified noses. The dogs skidded to a halt, yelping and howling. A few metres away was a jewelry booth. I sprinted for it, vaulted the counter, grabbed a recycler, and bashed at the display cabinet. An alarm brayed and the security mesh rattled down behind me. The dogs, recovered and furious, hurled themselves against it. The rest of the pack pelted into view and joined them. Paws, jaws, barking, you get the picture.

“Put your hands up,” said a voice above the din.

I turned and looked into the bell?shaped muzzle of a Norton held in the hands of a sweet?looking lass wearing a sample of the stall's stock. I raised my hands, wishing I could put them somewhere else. In those days, I had some vestige of modesty

“I'm human,” I said. “That can't hurt me.”

She allowed herself the smallest flicker of a glance at the EMP weapon's sighting screen.

“It could give you quite a headache,” she said.

“It could that,” I admitted, my bluff called. I'd been half?hoping she wouldn't know how to interpret the readouts.

“Security's on its way” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Better them than the dogs.”

She gave me a tight smile. “Trouble with the Tycoon?”

“Yes,” I said. “How did you guess?”

“Only the owner of the Station could afford dogs,” she said. “Besides …” She blinked twice slowly.

“I suppose you're right,” I said. “Or serving?girls.”

The stall?keeper laughed in my face. “All this for a servant? Wasn't it her Ladyship's bedroom window you jumped out of?”

I shuddered. “You flatter me,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know about — ?”

She blinked again. “It's on the gossip channels already.”

I was about to give a heated explanation of why that time?wasting rubbish wasn't among the enhancements inside my skull, thank you very much, when the goons turned up, sent the dogs skulking reluctantly away, and took me in. They had the tape across my mouth before I had a chance to ask the stall?keeper her name, let alone her number. Not, as it turned out, that I could have done much with it even if I had. But it would have been polite.

The charge was attempting to wilfully evade the civil penalties for adultery. I was outraged.

“Bastards!” I shouted, screwing up the indictment and dashing it to the floor of my cell. “I thought polygamy was illegal!”

“It is,” said my attorney, stooping to pick up the flimsy, “in civilised jurisdictions.” He smoothed it out. “But this is Long Station One. The Tycoon has privileges.”

“That's barbaric,” I said.

“It's a relic of the Moon Caves,” he said.

I stared at him. “No it isn't,” I said. “I don't remember” — I caught myself just in time — “reading about anything like that.”

He tapped a slight bulge on his cranium. “That's what it says here. Argue with the editors, not with me.”

“All right,” I said. A second complaint rose to the top of the stack. “She never said anything about being married!”

“Did you ask her?”

“Of course not,” I said. “That would have been grossly impolite. In the circumstances, it would have implied that she was contemplating adultery.”

“I see.” He sighed. “I'll never understand the… ethics, if that's the word, of you young gallants.”

I smiled at that.

“However,” he went on, “that doesn't excuse you for ignorance of the law — ”

“How was I to know the Tycoon was married to his wenches?”

“ — or custom. There is an orientation pack, you know. All arrivals are deemed to have read it.”

“ 'Deemed',” I said. “Now, there's a word that just about sums up everything that's wrong about — ”

“You can forego counsel, if you wish.”

I raised my hands. “No, no. Please. Do your best.”

He did his best. A week later, he told me that he had got me off with a fine plus compensation. If I borrowed money to pay the whole sum now, it would take two hundred and fifty seven years to pay off the debt. I had other plans for the next two hundred and fifty seven years. Instead, I negotiated a one?off advance fee to clean up Wolf 359, and used that to pay the court and the Tycoon. The experimental civilization around Wolf 359 — a limited company — had a decade earlier gone into liquidation, taking ten billion shareholders down with it. Nobody knew what it had turned into. Whatever remained out there had been off limits ever since, and would be for centuries to come — unless someone went in to clean it up.

In a way, the Wolf 359 situation was the polar opposite of what the Civil Worlds had hitherto had to deal with, which was habitats, networks, sometimes whole systems going into exponential intelligence enhancement — what we called a fast burn. We knew how to deal with a fast burn. Ignore it for five years, and it goes away. Then send in some heavily?firewalled snoop robots and pick over the wreckage for legacy hardware. Sometimes you get a breakout, where some of the legacy hardware reboots and starts getting ideas above its station, but that's a job for the physics team.

A civilizational implosion was a whole different volley of nukes. Part of the problem was sheer nervousness. We were too close historically to what had happened on the Moon's primary to be altogether confident that we wouldn't somehow be sucked in ourselves. Another part of it was simple economics: the job was too long?term and too risky to be attractive, given all the other opportunities available to anyone who wasn't completely desperate. Into that vacancy for someone who was completely desperate, I wish I could say I stepped. In truth, I was pushed.

Even I was afraid of Wolf 359.

An Astronomical Unit is one of those measurements that should be obsolete, but isn't. It's no more — or less