Mark Tiedemann - Mirage

Isaac Asimov's Robot Mystery

Record module CF941 attach log sequencing file "Commerce and Culture Committee, minutes " reference subheader "Humadros-Eliton General Trade and Tariff Negotiations " running virtual conference Maui Overlook fill visual fill audio status On This will be our last meeting before the arrival of the Humadros legation and the start of the conference. If there are any other issues which need to be discussed or added to the agenda, now is the time to put them on the table. I think it best that there be no surprises from any of us."

The thick man with amber-tinged white hair looked around the table at the eighteen others. All of them appeared here, in this non-place, altered or enhanced. Younger, slimmer, more hair, fewer lines-opportunistic vanity. Even the chairman tweaked his appearance here. It was a running joke among them outside the Maui construct.

When no one raised any new issues, he nodded solemnly. "I thought not. We've pretty much talked this thing to death over the last year. How we failed to kill it is beyond me."

The laughter that rippled around the table was light, though sharpened with an edge of nervousness. The chairman reached out and touched a button on the table.

"I'm uploading the final draft of our platform. In four days the Spacers arrive at Kopernik Station. The day after, they shuttle down to Union Station in Washington, D. C., for the mediafest Senator Eliton has planned. There will be a grand reception that evening. After that, the negotiations begin. I want us all well-versed on our agenda. I don't think I'm overstating it to say that these talks will be the most significant this century, possibly this millennia. A great deal is at stake. I don't want anyone breaking ranks on this at the last minute."

"Just how much, if anything, do you really think we're going to lose?"

The chairman looked at the man at the far end of the table. "I don't expect to lose very much at all. Ambassador Humadros hopes to alter our traditions and change history by offering more open markets, exchange of technologies, better policing along the shipping routes, lower tariffs-the usual package of incentives intended to force policy to change. Not that it isn't a tempting package-I expect that we'll end up signing off on some of it, maybe even a lot of it. In fact, I imagine it would be very profitable in the short term. But she hopes to break our resistance to positronics. I expect her to go home disappointed."

Anxious looks crossed the table. Not everyone on the committee, he knew, agreed that positronics was a bad thing, but all of them understood how the markets and their future holdings could be effected. The chairman was always impressed at the degree of nuance the program translated. He could always tell, no matter what each member did to modify their own projection, who was genuinely comfortable with the setting and who still felt uneasy. The chamber did not exist outside the buffers of the data module, but it was patterned on one that had once jutted from the side of a tower built just below the summit of Puu Kukul, on the island of Maui in the Hawaiian chain. The view was spectacular, overlooking a meandering valley through which the Honokahua Stream ran on its way to the Pacific Ocean. The openness of it challenged them. The suggestion of limitless sky unnerved the average Terran, but none of the members of this forum considered themselves average. A little agoraphobia would not, they claimed, dictate to them.

Still, it was a construct, and they all knew it. The chairman wondered if they could so bravely attend meetings in the flesh outside the walls that defined their existence and their identities as citizens of Earth.

"In my view," he continued after a pause, "we have come to a consensus on this matter. Are we, in fact, agreed?"

Nods rippled all around.

"Good. The upload is complete. Please be thoroughly familiar with all the points before the conference begins. I know I can depend on you."

Singly and in groups of two and three the attendees faded from the table. Alone finally, the chairman stood and walked to the window. He felt his pulse increase, a tremulous thrill in his groin and behind his sternum, as he stood at the edge of the view and confronted it. It was lovely. The ocean far in the distance formed a sharp, straight horizon above which the blue, blue sky arched. He wondered at times what had driven people to hide from the universe and burrow into the Earth. It surprised him sometimes to realize that in this he had much in common with both Spacers and Settlers.

Some, at any rate. He knew of Settler worlds where the warrens of Earth had been and were being duplicated in alien soil under other suns. What, he wondered, was the point of leaving a place only to bring it with you?

His heartrate regulated finally. He reached into his jacket pocket and found the small square. He gave it a squeeze and the windows opaqued to black. It was a good illusion, this chamber. He sometimes forgot for a few seconds that he was not standing in anything, that it was all a construct of numbers and electrons. A mirage.

He turned back toward the table and squeezed the square in his pocket again. There was barely a flicker. The scene seemed to skip sideways a centimeter or two, hardly noticeable unless anticipated and expected. The automated recorders were now being fed a secondary illusion, one that showed the chairman sitting in a chair, gazing out at the lovely, frightening vista of naked Earth, the way he often did.

The deception was necessary because of the redundant monitors the entire committee maintained on the site. Time records, the comings and goings of members, the alternate uses of the chamber-all recorded for the benefit of mutual distrust and mutual oversight. The committee conducted official business here and so the construct was always running. Of course, they could meet in public, but there were other monitoring and recording systems in many of those places; it was much safer to say certain things here, within the sphere of their own complimentary suspicions, where only they could get at the records. The system had been built to prevent exactly what the chairman was now doing.

"Secured," he said.

Two figures reappeared at the table. They ran their own masking programs, so their faces were difficult to see clearly, and their voices were altered into unrecognizability. But the chairman knew who they were, and they knew him.

"Where's our Judas?" the chairman asked.

"He wished to be absent during the final preparations," the indistinct apparition to the chairman's right said. "He's in agreement, but wants to remain free of the actual planning. Deniability, he says."

"A true politician," the other figure said.

The chairman suppressed a disgusted response. He sat down.

"Very well." He drew a loud, dramatic breath. "Briefly, everything is in place on my end. The program is running and we'll have fifteen minutes of operational time. What about security?"

"Taken care of," the left-hand ghost said. "My people are in place and ready."

"And the operations team?"

"Set," answered the right-hand ghost. "Give the word and we go."

The chairman leaned back, enjoying a sensation of accomplishment. He sighed. "Ambassador Galiel Humadros of Aurora believes she can change the face of Terran policy and tradition. She has our own Senator Clar Eliton to thank for validating that illusion." He looked across the table to the ghost on his right. After a few seconds, the indistinct face looked away.