In Paul J. McAuley’s “Crimes and Glory” after Earth has been devastated by wars, economic collapse, and radical climate events, an alien race named the Jackaroo have come to help mankind. The Jackaroo have transported many humans from Earth to colony worlds. People win a lottery to move from Earth to a dystopian New World, grim but filled with opportunity. People dream of escaping from troubles on Earth by starting over on a new planet. The colony worlds once housed other races collectively called the Elder Culture. These long vanished races also received the Jackaroo’s aid. The Elder Culture left behind abandoned space ships and other pieces of their technology.
The story has a hardboiled tone. Emma, the main character, works as a detective for the U.N. Technology Control Unit. Among humans there is both legal and illegal traffic in Elder Culture technology. Some Elder Culture technology is helpful. Some is both helpful and dangerous. Some “is simply dangerous. Stuff that could give an individual the power to hold worlds to ransom. Stuff that could change the human race so radically that it would either die out or become something other than human.” ( The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection 94) Coders working at code farms study, decipher, and learn the code that makes the technology run. Consider this passage about the ships left behind by the Elder Culture called the Ghajar:
“In any case, whether dead or alive or smashed to flinders, all the ships were to some degree or another infested with code. It was quantum stuff, hardware and software embedded in the spin properties of fundamental particles in the molecular matrices of the ship’s hulls, raw and fragmented, and crusty with errors and necrotic patches that had accumulated during millennia of disuse and exposure to cosmic radiation.
“Coders working in farms like Meyer Lansky’s analysed and catalogued this junk and stitched together viable fragments and spent hours and days trying to get them to run in virtual partitions on the farm’s hypercomputer cloud. Code approved by the licensing board was bought by software developers who used it to patch controls ships reclaimed from the vast Sargassos, manipulate exotic matter, refine front ends of quantum technology, and so on and so forth. There were theoretical applications, too - four of the so-called hard mathematical problems had been solved using code reclaimed from the farms.” (YBSF 94-95)
For some people, coding is like a recreational drug which sometimes proves fatal. Emma’s husband suffered this fate. It’s suggested that his death fuels Emma’s obsession as she pursues a criminal named Niles Sarkka much like Ahab pursued a certain white whale. “Crimes and Glory” starts with Emma in pursuit of Sarkka and then backtracks to the murder mystery which led to the pursuit. Her investigation takes us on a trek through the vicious underworld of the city of Port of Plenty (featuring that Meyer Lansky fellow mentioned above).
Sarkka is a rogue expert on the Elder Cultures. He once was a University Chair. Handsome and charismatic, Sarkka also hosted a popular TV show in which he and his team went on various expeditions to recover Elder Culture technology while expounding what Emma calls crackpot theories. Sounds like a nice fit for the Discovery Channel. Sarkka argued that the Jackaroo were manipulating human history long before their appearance and that they created the crisis from which they saved us. He believes the colony worlds aren’t a refuge. They’re a trap. Sarkka was discredited and became a criminal after one of his exploits resulted in disaster. “My boss had been one of the team who had prosecuted Niles Sarkka after most of his crew had become infected with nanotech viroids while excavating the remains of ancient machinery in a remote part of the Great Central Desert. Marc had seen the bodies, all of them horribly transformed, some still partly alive. His boss, who’d later shot himself, had ordered cauterisation of the site with a low-yield nuclear weapon.” (YBSF 102)
Is Sarkka a greedy egomaniac? Is he a nutty conspiracy theorist? Or is he right? The story prompts the reader and the narrator herself to wonder who’s the hero and who’s the villain.
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