The White-Hole Situation

Cats and Dogs

Oh, I care, September said to herself, I care too much, and did her best to put that part of the conversation out of her mind. She didn't need any of her special training in subtext assessment to understand exactly what Pagan was feeling at any given moment. Oh, she cared all right, and Pagan knew it too, but cared about something, someone else more. Right now it was the rest of it that bothered her most. She'd never known the I.B.U. ("wherever you are") to be so squirrely, so coy. Is it actively deceiving me? she wondered, or is it really as clueless as it seems? All of her questions were going atypically unanswered.

"Computer," she had said, "tell me about yesterday's selected applicant for ad #47264924."

"I'm sorry," the voice replied. "I don't have that information."

"You told me it was some eleven year old girl. California I think?"

"I must have been mistaken," the voice said. "I have no record of that ad."

"What?" September shook her head. "I'm looking at it right now. White Hole Situation: Explorers Needed. Investigate the Unknown. Be Among the First. Physicists Preferred, bla bla bla et cetera."

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I cannot confirm. Please look again."

She looked again. The ad was gone. Just gone. It was there and then it wasn't.

"Computer," she demanded, "tell me about the white-hole situation."

"Any situation involving a white hole could be considered a white-hole situation," the pleasant voice replied.

She considered yelling at the thing, but where was it to yell at? The voice was everywhere and nowhere, among the nodes and not in any node. The blue sky seemed to mock her. The canyon beneath her feet reflected her opinion of the I.B.U. ("we say yes") at that moment. She had intended to ask more questions. How were the chosen applicants selected? What was the interview process? What were the questions? If physicists were preferred, why an eleven year old girl? What happened to the chosen? Were these the same white holes that Captain Geronimo described? She suspected that the I.B.U. ("always online and always on time") might dance around the issue, but never imagined it would deny it entirely. She was expecting to have to interpret some vague terminology, but to get nothing? No information whatsoever? That surprised her.

Think! she told herself. The system could never be entirely opaque, could it? What exactly had the voice said? "I cannot confirm". What did that mean? "Please look again". Was that a taunt or an invitation? "I have no record of that ad". Had they changed its number? She had given the number, and some of the words that she recalled from the ad. Maybe it had mutated slightly, enough for the voice to give her the slip? But then her search terms could be tweaked and modified indefinitely, and each time she was slightly off it could change the whole game once again, and how could she know? Where to start? The I.B.U. ("to be your best") was uncanny in its ability to know exactly what you meant whatever you asked it, so she had no doubt she could never trick it into revealing anything it did not want her to know. She considered the art of reverse psychology. Could she fool the system into thinking she didn't really want to know about the hole thing?

She chuckled at "the hole thing" joke.

Geronimo could probably tell her more, but was she willing to go that far? Their last mission together hadn't ended well, and they hadn't spoken since. Sometimes she thought it was her fault. Usually she thought it was his. He was the one, after all, who had left her alone in that cave on Piptima Seven with the giant ice bear. But she was the one who'd insisted on chucking the universal translator device.

"What's a stupid ice bear gonna say?" she challenged him.

"That's for it to know, and you to find out?" Geronimo suggested, before taking off at a full sprint, September's right leg still trapped beneath the fallen stalactite. Later on she realized her intuition had been accurate. The ice bears, like a dog or a cat, did not have much to talk about.