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fictionQ
Category:
Mystery/Suspense
Type: Fiction
Pages: 300
Copyright: Aug 1 2001
In 2048, politics and old-fashioned ambition yield to neural network computer technology in this speculative thriller. THE MEDIA REPUBLIC describes a society surprisingly similar to its twentieth-century ancestor, despite all the differences like game-show elections, mergers between the political parties and the media networks, and robotically-enforced electoral rules. Dueweke, a Silicon Valley research physicist and author of four other novels and several award-winning short stories, integrates realistic computer and robotic technology into a continually twisting and evolving plot.
It’s election year 2048. Campaigns and politicians are not like they used to be. Baseball sluggers and porn queens on game shows — that's the new American politics. TV networks have merged with political parties to run "quality" candidates. A new Government superagency, Committee for Political Equality, COPE, is making sure everybody plays by the rules, and using state-of-the-art computer and robotic technology to enforce those rules. They call it a disciplined democracy. But computer evolution has outstripped society’s literacy, and has even bypassed COPE itself. A Nobel physicist discovers a whole level of technology-driven fraud that even the media party moguls don’t suspect, and he ends up on a computer's hit list. Adapting his own technology, he defeats robotic assassins sent to protect the electorate from such “anarchists” as him. But the ultimate question he confronts is — does anyone care?
THE MEDIA REPUBLIC is a thriller from beginning to end, yet makes the reader think about political and social evolutionary issues that only a visionary with his finger on the artery of technology could foresee.
Excerpt
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE HUNT
He backed his car out of the garage into the street and drove away. After he had gone about a half block, the little gray robot car lurched forward in pursuit. Elliott rounded the corner as usual and then floored the accelerator. By the time the robot rounded that corner, Elliott was nearly to the end of the block. He reeled around that corner with a squeal and saw his opportunity. He screeched to a halt, opened the door, pressed the AUTO button, and dove out between two parked cars in the street slamming the door behind him. He lay perfectly still on the street as his car sped away toward a destination that he'd programmed into it. He stopped his heart as the robot car zoomed by.
When he heard it disappear around the next corner, he raised himself onto his stiff and bleeding knees and thought, Those robots aren't so smart after all. He limped toward home, hardly noticing his torn and bloodstained pants. He had defeated a professional hit robot, and it was easy. He proudly walked up to his front door. Within a few minutes, he left for the lab on his bike.
* * *
Elliott was not the only one making progress, however. The robot had soon determined that Elliott's car was lacking an occupant and began a methodical backtrack. The exploration progressed slowly but exhaustively, using the robot's visual, infrared, and chemical sensors to their fullest. The hunter worked onerously backward, searching for any trace of Elliott.
It appeared to be more bloodhound than automobile as it scouted both sides of the street back along its path. Shuffling forward, backward, to each side, it moved like a bloodhound, systematically comparing and analyzing; intensively exploring, sniffing, scanning, until it reached the two parked cars where Elliott had taken refuge. It probed the fresh blood stain on the pavement, noting the residual heat where Elliott had lain, interrogating the surroundings to determine the direction he had gone. It easily located the trail from Elliott's DNA scent.
The rear hatch popped up just a crack, then checked itself. Some event swelled the shadowed interior, some ritual driven not by zeal but by millions of lines of computer code, a program so complex that no human genius could decipher it in a human lifetime yet so simple in function that it radiated an artform, a lifeform, all its own.
The hatch opened completely with a snap, splitting the Sunday dawn silence. Out of the inner gloom emerged a slender, black leg. Its curved shape extended, then straightened, then curled, then waved in a circular motion as it searched for footing. Once it located a ledge, it probed briefly to locate its edge, all the while the leg growing, twisting, curling sinuously like a shiny black-racer snake seeking prey. It probed further, locating the ground a few inches away.
Having surveyed the bounds of its environment, deliberation and caution transformed into quickness and confidence as it rose from the car in an artfully choreographed and executed pas de huit. Each of its eight legs danced to some unheard melody, anticipating the needs and movements of the other seven. Eight legs acted in concert as the spider scrambled in fluid movements onto the ground.
It was a spider, yet it was not a spider. It lived but had never been alive. It saw and felt but had no passion or vision. It engendered vitality but propagated death. When the spider walked, its legs seemed to be dancing like a principal of the Bolshoi. When running, its legs seemed simply to disappear and then reappear in a different place, each reappearance furthering the ambitions of the brain within.
The spider had much more highly developed functions than the gray car. But what made it such a terrible adversary had less to do with its sensors and cunning than with its incredible mobility. Each of its jet black, seemingly jointless, legs actually comprised over a hundred joints made of piezorestrictive materials which allowed the legs to tie themselves into knots if desired. In spite of this amazing flexibility, a spider could arm wrestle eight men to a draw and run down a target like a panther.
Its body was the size, shape, and color of a pure black house cat, but turned sideways. It could move in any direction equally well without turning. Two camera eyes were attached to a pair of telescoping tubes to elevate or separate the eyes when it needed stealth or stereo vision. A third lens for infrared gleamed spitefully like the mirror of the wicked Queen Aurora and was confined to the body of the spider .
It hunted and killed in almost total silence, the only sound coming from the tap, tap, tap of its carbon and urethane feet when it charged across a hard surface, terror writhing from it like an octet of cobras.
Now those finely honed hunting instincts had been released. It lunged forward with electronic emotion on the trail of Dr. Elliott T. Townsend.
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