The Art of Adaptation Page 6

  Chloe sat on the floor, with Brad on the couch, his virtual legs crossed. She still hadn’t figured him out, and had given up trying. The entire Beam was strange — like Crossbrace in concept, until you delved under the surface. The network’s organization was familiar, without really being all that familiar at all.

  Brad said that in time The Beam would touch everything. Every surface in a house would be Beam-enabled. Every appliance and household system would know what all the others were doing. Environments would learn their users and mold themselves to them.

  Brad was tight-lipped, but Chloe got the impression that biological enhancement, such as she understood it, had only just started … and that as more and more enhancements were developed, The Beam would speak to those as well. Living with the fully realized Beam would be like gaining a few new senses, Brad said.

  And Chloe, from what she could see so far, believed it.

  After enough time playing around on The Beam beta, she began to see the way its apparent disorganization differed from the neat structure she knew. Crossbrace was a giant filing cabinet: ordered and indexed, searchable by subject and cross-referenced across the various subtopics. Using Crossbrace was like rooting around in the ancient filing cabinet her grandfather still had from his days working at Boeing. Grandpa Amos, who’d been an engineer before the fall, kept his files neat. The drawer was filled with hanging green folders. Each had a clear tab at the top where Grandpa slotted a neatly lettered label announcing the folder’s content.

  The Beam, by contrast, was … well … messy. But it was messy with purpose. Like a human brain — messy because nature was messy. Only things made by man were ordered and rigid. Crossbrace had been a noble first attempt to evolve the information superhighway into a multi-sense experience, but it had too much order to ever truly work. The Beam was scant by comparison, with thin beginnings that the programmers apparently trusted to grow and expand as it incorporated its users’ crowdsourced intelligence.

  Chloe explored and saw the layers. The Beam had been built on Crossbrace. In places, she could see its framework shining through.

  She sat on the floor with her legs in a V, Brad mute and the apartment quiet, using her gesturing fingers to push the web aside and peel over to a new sector — porn. This was O’s domain, yet the experience was disappointing.

  Everything within the porn sector was incomplete, with O’s influence barely visible. As big as porn was on Crossbrace, Chloe had expected to find remarkable new things on The Beam. But there was nothing. O had stocked their beta with rather ordinary vidstreams, holos, photos, and non-intuitive simulations. The resolutions weren’t impressive, and the immersions didn’t remotely immerse her.

  But as Chloe peeled further, pushing aside inferior porn where good Beam porn should be, she began to again find order beneath it all. Again: Crossbrace, showing through. It was disappointing to find such typical content on The Beam, where she’d expected the extraordinary. Most of the beta was full-on Beam … but the porn sector was all just Crossbrace, rehashed.

  Chloe picked at the web like a scab, realizing she could find the edges of the intertwined networks, separating pages and sites that felt like Beam adaptations from those that felt native to the older system. She was looking at static data. The beta was basically a time capsule: messy Beam on top of neat Crossbrace on top of …

  Sitting on the floor, her interactive gloves up, Chloe froze. Her face pinched. For a moment she didn’t want to move.

  She suddenly had the feeling she was grabbing the edge of something that threatened to slip from her fingers and retreat underground.

  Chloe raised it slowly, fingers casting aside archival pages. Then she saw it, shimmering between her fingers. She pulled at the strange thing, but it didn’t want to come; it was crosslinked to dozens of pages deeper in the holo web.

  She pushed The Beam and Crossbrace pages away like clearing dirt from the site of an archeological dig and inspected what she’d found deep down, beneath even Crossbrace’s meticulous order.

  It was a complete jumble — not messy with purpose like The Beam, but messy because it had been mostly overwritten. One fossil inside another. She’d found something beneath even Crossbrace — another layer under everything, down where nobody was probably ever supposed to find it. Everything that deep had been cached and half-fragmented, and the holographic page in her hand was no exception.

  “Canvas,” she said.

  She turned her head to look at Brad’s hologram, which was raising its eyebrows.

  “What is 18 USC 2257?” she asked.

  “Context?”

  “There’s a page here. Look.” Chloe tapped, showing the canvas which page she wanted to know more about.

  Brad didn’t look. He didn’t have to. He was a projection of the canvas.

  “It’s a U.S. child protection law. Practically speaking, the page you’re looking at declares the site’s compliance with the record-keeping aspect of that law. It designates a record-keeper and tells the viewer where to find that person.”

  “What do you mean, U.S. law?”

  “A law of the United States of America.”

  Chloe frowned. She’d learned about the USA in history class. It had ceased to exist sometime during Renewal, when the NAU was formed in conjunction what used to be Canada and Mexico. Why was something about the USA on a Crossbrace page?

  “Does the law have any meaning today?”

  “No. NAU laws have replaced the old laws. Much of the code you’re referencing related to obscenity, and the pre-fall definition of obscenity was almost puritanical by modern NAU standards. Only the child protection statues have remained.” Brad held up a hand. “And to answer your next question: yes, even O must still keep records for that reason.”

  “So why does this page cite the old, obsolete law?”

  “I don’t have enough information to answer that. It’s probably buffer memory. The page you pulled up is highly fragmented, almost deteriorated. The only reason it’s even still here, I think, is that the sector of the machine where it’s housed was never zeroed. It was simply overwritten, so what you see is probably a piece of—”

  “It’s the Internet,” Chloe whispered.

  “It’s—”

  Chloe, not looking at Brad, held up a finger to silence him.

  She needed to think this out. That earlier sensation that what she’d found might slip away was still heavy upon her. But it was the Internet; Chloe was certain. A collection of ancient pages carried over from surviving servers, duped in some batch transfer and never erased.

  Crossbrace had originally been hailed as the old Internet’s first true evolution, and The Beam evolved from Crossbrace. They’d probably meant to tuck in the loose edges over time, but there was a lot of porn out there and some had been missed. Now each older network was showing under Chloe’s skilled hands like skin through a threadbare garment.

  Looking at it now, Chloe felt like she was hurtling back through time. There was more inside that deeper layer; the ancient URLs were all interlinked, simple enough to drag out now that she knew what she was looking at. But the process of extracting the Internet pages was like yanking cable from the ground, watching it tear sod as it came, surprising the excavator by how much there was once she started delving beneath the surface.

  Chloe stopped digging, spellbound. Something she’d seen inside the old Internet had stopped her cold.

  She pulled the page closer, taking it in.

  “Is that …” she said, not knowing how to finish.

  “Yes it is,” said Brad. “And on a totally unrelated subject, now would be the right time to re-check your connection’s security, and perhaps change your password.”

  WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

  The Future of Sex continues in The Avatar Experiment.

 

 

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