By The Rules Read online

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  Copyright ©2003 by Edward M. Lerner

  First published in Analog, 06 2003

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  If one were to mathematically analyze the timing of major life decisions, not that my interests run to quantitative studies, I theorize one would find a statistically significant clustering at multiple-of-five birthdays. (If Dad heard that prediction, he would, without missing a beat, ask if I was referring to integral multiples of five. You can imagine what a trial my childhood was.) The speculation comes to mind because this all began on my twenty-fifth birthday. A quarter century: it had struck me more as a substantive fraction of a lifetime gone than as a cause for celebration.

  My friends, however, were of a different mind.

  At State U., even in the Soc. department, a Taco Bell run was considered a multicultural experience. I'd ranted about the local ethnocentrism often enough, so I was delighted and touched when my friends surprised me with a Japanese night out. We're all impoverished grad students, so here “out” meant gathering in one of their apartments. How ironic was it that one of the few times they were game to try something not remotely hunk of corn-fed Midwestern beef, they picked my least favorite cuisine? The sushi wasn't a problem, however, as there was plenty of saki with which to swig down the raw eel and yellowfin and squid, not to mention several items I didn't recognize and decided not to ask about.

  How different things might have been if only I'd masked the food with wasabi mustard instead of the rice wine.

  Everyone had brought foodstuffs in my honor, so I had to sample it all. Japanese etiquette, my hostess gleefully informed me, required downing each cup of saki in one swallow—and she owned water tumblers, not delicate ceramic cups. By my third California roll, I was feeling no pain. Halfway through my gastronomic survey, I was improvising paeans to diversity. No one even tried to match drinks with the birthday boy, but we all got pretty damn mellow.

  What came next seemed like a profound idea at the time: very multicultural soc. I remember plopping myself down in front of a computer, and the gales of laughter as I almost toppled off the chair. I remember guffaws at my typos and boisterous negotiations over wording. After a ceremonious clinking, but rather more like clanking, of cheap glassware, I recall clicking send to dispatch our masterpiece. Lost in an alcoholic fog, however, was the exact topic of our enthusiasm.

  The project about which we had all been so enthusiastic was only a vague recollection when I awakened the next day, head throbbing and tongue furred. My only clear memory beyond dissolving raw fish in alcohol was the sadly dead-on caricature on my birthday cake: the head of a young Woody Allen on a tall and gangly frame. The phrase Ichabod Cranium flashed through my mind—I could only hope that thought had gone unarticulated.

  Someone had brought me home, gotten me undressed and into bed. My bedroom faces west; the sunlight streaming through a gap between my drapes showed it was late afternoon. If the punishment fit the crime, I had really enjoyed my party. I was pondering the wisdom of getting up when a roadrunner-like “me-meep” made my skull resonate. Email.

  I stumbled past my PC on my way to the bathroom. The subject line of the newest message brought a shock of memory. It was a reply. “Please, no,” I croaked.

  Please is not always the magic word. It appeared that the Journal of Emergent Sociology was facing a last-minute delay in the delivery of an invited paper, and so had a hole to fill in the upcoming quarterly issue. They couldn't promise publication, of course, but would look favorably upon a timely submission along the lines of my overnight emailed proposal.

  I scrolled down the message to see just what I'd suggested in my drunken stupor. Reading, my stomach lurched.

  * * * *

  My father hoards speech as if words were being rationed for some war effort, a miserliness that manifests itself both in vocabulary and brevity. As to the former, I'll offer only an example. I knew the word vehicle before car, plane, or boat. How odd is that? As for the latter, there's a reason my sister refers to Dad as Professor Cryptic.

  Before and since my teenage years, I've found his economy annoying, but it gave rise to what, entirely in hindsight, I recognize as a valuable aid to my ability to reason abstractly. My own spendthriftness of utterance (and any social skills I may have) I learned from my mother.

  “Brian. Rule One,” Dad would call parsimoniously, without glancing up from his newspaper. I was left to translate for my uninformed friends: if it shakes the house, don't do it. Rule One actually made a lot of sense for little boys. It had no loopholes.

  Rule Two, which is what had me reminiscing about childhood regulations, had been pretty much ignored at the recent party. Think before you do things. Rule Two was promulgated long before I was of an age to drink, so Dad had never derived the obvious corollary: avoid important decisions while drunk and unable to think. (He would surely have shortened that. “Don't drink and think,” sounds about right.)

  The paper I'd envisioned, in that saki-sodden stupor, involved those whose interests were really multicultural. As in: enticed by cultures that weren't even human. I'd somehow been egged on in my drunken state to propose a sociological analysis of UFO, pardon the judgmental expression, nuts. There were more than enough Internet chat rooms in which such people congregated for me to easily do a study. The problem wasn't a lack of raw data, but the probable consequences of publication. The mind reeled at how such a paper would be received by my fellow academics. Yes, a few sociological papers did exist about UFOs and, excuse me while I throw up, Ufologists ... but those were by safely tenured faculty. My thesis advisor slash mentor was not yet tenured; my highest priority was not being laughed out of renewal of my paltry fellowship.

  Retracting my proposal could only draw more unwelcome attention to myself. Plan B, once panic receded, was the old switcheroo. I'd produce a paper that, while nominally consistent with my mercifully brief emailed abstract (how desperate were they for material?), was largely off the UFO topic. I'd reference the nuts, I decided, far less for what they believed than as a population across which to study the dissemination of ideas. My spirits lifted as the paper took form in my mind's bloodshot eye: stolid, stilted, unassailably academic and unremittingly boring—as removed as could be from the sensationalism implied by the drunken abstract. With luck, the full paper would be rejected. Even without luck, I was going for something wholly forgettable.

  My field and my passion is discourse analysis, a perspective at the intersection of literary studies, history, and traditional sociology. (Dad once made mention of roadkill at said intersection, but I refuse to go there.) The little-green-men believers were as valid a population as any for the study of vocabulary propagation and transformation. That is, I could extract trends and patterns in metaphors, themes, and figures of speech, then extrapolate to the social forces causing and caused by that imagery. Or I could go all simple and mechanical (and, truth be told, more safely dull). That would place the prospective paper in the entirely traditional and non-controversial sociological mainstream of content analysis: categorizing the topics within the text samples.

  A few nights spent lurking in chat rooms yielded plenty of themes to be examined. Skinny gray men, it turned out, rather than little green ones. Evolutionary convergence, to explain ET's humanoid appearance. Alien secrecy. Government cover
-ups, usually involving men in black. (Why always men? Sexism among Ufologists could be another paper. I sternly dismissed that thought as an avoidable distraction.) Flying saucers: disk-shaped vehicles, when posturing to sound objective. Solid light—can you say oxymoronic? The ever-popular, if hard to justify, abduction claims. Ridicule factor, a self-fulfilling rationalization for the paucity of credible evidence. Luminous energy display. Arguments among proponents of saucer-borne beings, interdimensional entities, and time travelers.

  Harder to process than the patent silliness were the scattered occurrences of logic.

  One reason I was thinking of my parents, I knew, was the too-long unacknowledged happy-birthday recording they'd left on my answering machine. Admitting to myself that there was another explanation, I dialed my father's office.

  I'm more than a little bit murky about the types of physics. I didn't know if what Dad did had any bearing on my problem—but I couldn't say that it didn't, or if that which I was pondering related to the even more abstruse arcana he collected on his own time. After a few pleasantries, I cleared my throat. “Say, Dad, are you familiar with Drake's Equation?”

  “Drake's Equation,” repeated Dad. His manner toggled to pedantic mode within two syllables. “A model for approximating the number of technological civilizations in the galaxy. You estimate the stars in the galaxy, the fraction of those stars with planets, the fraction of those planets giving rise to life, and so on. You make up most of the numbers, so the equation ‘proves’ whatever you want about the prevalence of communicating ETs.”

  The chat-room denizens who had struck me as most thoughtful used, with what degree of justification, I could not say, values that predicted interstellar contact was entirely implausible. “And Fermi's Paradox?”

  “Who are you really, and what have you done with my son?”

  I repressed mild irritation; Dad had every reason to be surprised by my questions. “Do you know?”

  “Yes.”

  What I took to be pencil-on-desktop tapping noises emphasized the pause at the far end of the line. He was no doubt stymied by the futility of drawing me a picture. It hadn't taken me long, growing up, to crack the code of, “This will take pencil and paper.” It meant: here comes more information than I would ever want to know (or could hope to process). Pencil and paper also had going for them, at least in the eyes of Professor Cryptic, that whole picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words thing.

  Eventually, Dad found his tongue. “The galaxy is a big place, so it seems improbable Earth has the only technological civilization. Now, assume there are others. Spacefaring aliens would colonize nearby solar systems. In time, those settlements would mature to repeat the cycle. The numbers you invent this time deal with how quickly the colonists fill their new homes and the speed of starships. The values you pick don't much matter. In a few million years, a cosmological eyeblink, any such aliens fill the galaxy. So, asked Fermi, where are they?”

  “Cleveland?”

  “I taught you well,” Dad chuckled. “Brian, why these questions?”

  My answer, if incomplete, was truthful: researching the propagation of vocabulary in certain chat rooms. I had, in fact, already web-surfed my way to definitions of the terms about which I'd asked Dad. What I had not known was whether the sites at which I found my answers were just a less overt sort of crackpot destination. The hidden agenda of my call was to hear if a serious ‘hard’ scientist took these ideas seriously. On the one hand, he knew the terms; on the other hand, the sarcasm had been awfully broad. “So tell me, Dad, what do you think?”

  “About whether there are aliens? UFOs?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Insufficient information.” Another prolonged pause. “You?”

  “I'm studying Ufologists, Dad, not UFOs.” Amid a diatribe about the study of objects the existence of whose subject matter had never been demonstrated, I took satisfaction at the success of my deflection. Had I been pinned down on the subject my own beliefs, I could not, for the life of me, guess what I would have at that moment said.

  * * * *

  “ ‘Discourse Analysis of a Self-Selecting Subculture,’ scene 1, take 4,” I emoted more than dictated into the microcassette recorder. No sociology paper would ever see dramatization, but any amusement I could extract from this experience was welcome. A mug of tepid coffee surrounded by cookie crumbs memorialized a previous bout of procrastination.

  The title was as generic as I could make it. What passed for a plan remained workmanlike dullness—satisfy my obligation with a submission that, if it were ever published, would vanish without citation into a Bermuda Triangle of unquotable academic prose.

  None of my rumination was new. I was stalling ... again.

  “The research presented in this paper draws inferences from the language usage of a unique Internet community.” I tried unsuccessfully to feel some righteous indignation at the friends and colleagues who had egged me into this. “Internet chat-room visits are, as the netizen reader is surely aware, voluntary, as is each decision as to whether and about which topics to offer comment. Participation in this venue, it is furthermore necessary to recognize, can be entirely anonymous. Ianelli and Huang (1997) have documented the consequences of perceived anonymity, behavioral effects that are neither easily nor unambiguously disentangled from the group dynamic. The term ‘dynamic’ is, in this context, doubly pertinent, as both the membership and the interactions of chat-room occupants vary over time.”

  Was that sufficiently turgid, ill-formed, and wishy-washy to dissuade readership—or, better still, to preclude acceptance for publication? One could hope. One did hope.

  Alone in my cluttered apartment, I, too, was—until the moment this paper was offered for publication—anonymous. What would be the interpretation of my words, my selection of metaphor, among my peer discourse analysts? Once this paper was sent off, my anonymity would be replaced by ... what? Notoriety, I suspected.

  But infamy had ceased to be my biggest concern. The political incorrectness of the phrase be damned, I was beginning to recognize that in the course of my research I had gone native.

  * * * *

  Kelly O'Brien had been at my party, but as the guest of a friend. Our usual conversation was an exchange of grunts when we occasionally crossed paths, most typically both of us on trash runs to our apartment complex's dumpster. Since the party, our relationship had been subtly different in a way I could not exactly define. My best guess was quiet amusement at my expense. Fair enough—I had been very drunk that night. Kelly was a grad student, too, but in her case of computer science—another reason our chance encounters were brief.

  After too many of my evenings spent researching the paper, her amusement became more overt. “How are the BEMs?” she asked, grinning, as we passed in the parking lot. She was dressed, as usual, in faded jeans, an oversized plaid flannel shirt, and an irksome aura of competence.

  Bug-eyed monsters. Sighing, I began synopsizing my progress to date. She interrupted me mid sentence. “My conscience is getting the best of me here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were set up, Brian, and I made it possible.”

  I tried again. “What do you mean?”

  She brushed an errant wisp of hair from her eyes. “The proposal wasn't your idea. Your buddies,” and she named a few, “goaded you into it. I'd pre-rigged the PC to intercept outgoing email.”

  “But the reply came from the journal.”

  Smugness and sympathy battled over her face. Smugness won. “It was from your friends. I spoofed the return address.”

  Her explanation of how she subverted the email system went over my head, which was in any event already spinning. Kelly wasn't the only one who had seemed unusually amused with me of late. “When was someone going to tell me?”

  She shrugged. “Dunno. Everyone expected you to have a momentary panic attack when you saw the reply, then to realize the acceptance couldn't possibly be real. Your dogged seriousness as you keep d
oing this research has been the source of much entertainment.”

  I wasn't surprised. Some remote corner of my mind was, in fact, quite taken with their gag. Considering my frequent rants at their supposed provincialism, a maudlin fixation, even sober, about my milestone birthday, and my saki-swilling subterfuge with the sushi, their practical joke hardly lacked for poetic justice.

  While a distant recess of my mind was processing that reaction, most of my consciousness was focused on an epiphany far more important: I intended to continue my new research.

  * * * *

  The conversational gambit “You got me good,” released peals of laughter from friend after friend. By the third such incidence, I was grossly embarrassed at my gullibility. Rereading now my drunken proposal email and the only slightly less ridiculous acceptance message only made me feel worse. How had I been taken in for more than a week by such nonsense?

  To be kind to myself, an absurdly strong work ethic had started me digging while still hung over—and, despite the absurd path that had led me to the UFO chat rooms, there actually were some interesting patterns there. An apparent cacophony of dialogue, I had been quick to determine, became more illuminating once I organized them by the participants’ points of view. At one end of my self-made spectrum were the true believers, for whom no claim of alien manifestation or governmental cover-up was improbable. At the other extreme were the debunkers, for whom all evidence, no matter the claimed quality or quantity of corroborating fact, was as entirely unconvincing. In between were the skeptics, who accepted nothing non-critically, but—while never, it would appear, actually convinced of the existence of UFOs or aliens—professed minds open to future evidence.

  Kelly's parking-lot confession had broken some metaphorical ice, and we were on the way to becoming real friends instead of acquaintances by association, but our increasingly lengthy conversations kept reminding me of my naiveté. After she demonstrated how she'd messed with my email, and shared with me a few other hacking exploits, a horrifying thought occurred to me. Could I be certain the prank was over? I had no idea if my chat-room visits and Internet searches were being stage-managed, if friends with too much time on their hands were electronically still yanking my chain. No matter where I went on campus, might not someone with Kelly's mischievous skills detect the log-in to my university account and do ... whatever?