Zeitgeber by Greg Egan

Author:Greg Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

6

None of Sam’s students could focus on the lesson he’d prepared, so he made the best of the situation.

“A hash function takes some data, like a string of text, and gives you a single number that’s a whole lot shorter than the original message.” He drew a big box full of squiggles, joined by an arrow to a small box full of digits. “The correspondence can’t be unique, though; there are billions of messages that have the same hash code. So why doesn’t that matter? If someone shows you a message today that gives the hash X, along with proof that someone you trust saw that same number, X, two years ago … why should that be enough to persuade you that they actually wrote the whole message back then?”

The tactic seemed to work, so he stuck to the same theme for the next few days, but there was only so much cryptography he could teach before it started squeezing out everything else. And then just when he thought he’d exhausted the subject, the Time Thieves dumped a truckload of new material into his lap.

Sam gave in and showed excerpts from the videos. The biohackers had apparently spent months testing their products on macaques, and they were offering up thousands of hours of recordings as evidence that they possessed both the agent behind the syndrome and an effective cure. Every shot contained a bank of screens behind the cages, showing international news channels playing live, along with a certified time-stamped hash of a previous, rolling segment of the video, to prove that the backdrop was not just a recording. But that left only the narrowest of windows between the original broadcast and the time stamps, so if everything involving the animals had been added with CGI, it must have been generated in something close to real time—a feat most experts judged unlikely. If the images were genuine, then according to a team of biologists with the patience to watch much more of the footage than Sam had, they showed that the macaques had entered a free-running state at the start of the experiment, and then abruptly returned to a normal circadian rhythm three months later.

“Maybe they put in brain implants before the experiment started—before the cameras started rolling,” Angela suggested.

“Good point,” Sam conceded. There was always going to be some potential loophole; macaques were too long-lived for the experiment to stretch back to their birth, and shorter-lived species like mice were too different in their circadian biology.

Ehsan said, “The technology didn’t exist two years ago, did it?”

“Not that we know of,” Angela replied.

“Yeah, but how many different things are these geniuses meant to have invented?” Ehsan retorted. “We’re talking about implants, now, because all the millionaires are getting them … but I bet it never even crossed these people’s minds.”

“Forget implants,” Nora interjected. “They could have trained these monkeys to wake and sleep for any reason: some sound we can’t hear, some smell. They could be pulling all kinds of invisible strings.

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