Another story that mixes sci-fi and noir; in the near future, Aman is an accomplished profiler, someone who tracks people by building profiles according to the trail they unwittingly leave (through purchases, or by exchanging services) online. When a new case gets into his conscience, he deviates from his usual cold demeanor, triggering a series of events that will change his life… as well as bring an unexpected closure.
This is a well-written but pretty pedestrian story, a decent read within the vein of noir-style, dystopian near-future sci-fi. What sets this apart is the unintended irony of how quickly its main dystopic feature has aged.
The reader is supposed to be shocked at how pervasive the loss of privacy in a fully-connected world is, and how little protection is granted to the common citizen in such a society. This might have been upsetting in 2005 – the year of this story’s publication – but is bound to leave the current reader pretty unfazed. Data tracking (whether legal or not) has now become common practice, and most internet users have come to terms with the fact that the traces they leave online are used and abused to construct profiles that are then used (with or without consent) to create anything from statistical tables to personally-targeted advertisements.
That is the main merit of this story, in my opinion. It makes one wonder how, in the relatively brief span of fifteen years, we have achieved a level of dystopia that surpasses one envisioned to shock and amaze. Whether intended or not (and I am pretty sure it was not), it is this discrepancy that leaves an impression. Stories live lives of their own, independently of what their writer originally intended. They are artefacts that can be enjoyed in the spirit they were written in, or enjoyed for what they tell us about the past and the present. This one sits firmly in the latter category, and it is worth a read, if only to make us look back at the innocence we might have lost when we gained the comfort of an entire world at our fingertips.
“Search Engine” was originally published in 2005 in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. I have read it in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois and published in 2006 bt St. Martin’s Press.
Hamletic Tortoise 