“It’s like a silicon-carbide tribble,” Amy said, watching the data scroll in the near-invisible screen of her datover. Jimson Ogilvy had his on, too, but he wasn’t looking at it. Damn, she was pretty. He could see the two of them riding surfboards on the waves down in Malibu, coming ashore to fight cowboys and Indians and make love on on the wet sand . . .
“What’s a tribble?” he asked.
From the other room in their suite, voices babbled in excitement. Sharp, ceramic sounds. More mumbling. Jimson wondered if he should worry about the team she’d brought. But they were the experts. And they were wearing body armor.
And it got him the chance to get her in here, where bright California sun streamed across antique rugs and dappled the real silver of the room-service tray. Anything you can to impress, he thought.
“Star Trek,” Amy said. “Linear entertainment. Early government fabulation, actually.”
“Which tells me absolutely nothing.”
Amy turned to him, focusing. “It was a TV show. Faster-than-light travel. Humankind with a Federation of Planets. Tribbles were a lifeform they found on one of the planets.”
“Sounds like us.”
She frowned, full perfect lips pulling into a thin line. “Like us without the datanets. Or money. No, wait, that’s the later one.”
Data scrolled in his datover: Star Trek, Original, 1966-68, Science Fiction, set approximately 300 years in the future. Explored “the final frontier” of space. Note: strong anticorporate tropes, especially in later (90s and 00s) follow-up series. Excerpting or strong reality-grounding suggested prior to exposure.
“It’s like us,” he said, looking at ancient stills. Plain uniforms, spaceships imagined by people who still used rivets and iron.
“Not the tribbles,” she said.
More data: sock-puppets, soft, fuzzy. The antithesis of the Shrill.
Or not. Replace soft hair with tough silicon carbide, wrapped in turn by carbon nanotube muscles and mems motors, and you might have something very much like a Shrill.
“They bred,” Amy said softly, her gaze fixed on the datover. “The tribbles.”
“We still don’t even know if the Shrill breed. Do we?”
She shook her head. “Everything that lives, breeds.”
“Not the Floaters.”
“They have a system of life.”
“But we still don’t know about the Shrill.”
“No. But we know a lot more than we used to,” Amy said. “Thanks for this chance. I can’t tell you how much it means.”
From the other room, a thump and muffled cursing.
“Amy, would you like to go out to dinner . . .”
The doorknob to the suite rattled, the ancient song of key in lock. Jimson sat straight up, eyes jogging to the status screen on his datover. But Tiphani was still in her meeting! Her icon stayed green, status unchanged.
The door swung open, revealing Tiphani. Backlit by afternoon sun like a dark angel dressed in a sharp-angled business suit. Jimson could see her eyes by reflection only, as they juddered from him to Amy and back again.
“What the fuck is this?” Tiphani said, her voice ramping up in waves to an impressive soprano blast.
For a moment, it was as if time itself froze. Jimson’s breath stopped. Amy, mouth wide, didn’t move. The mutterings and bangings from the other room went completely silent.
“I . . . I didn’t know . . .” Jimson said.
“You didn’t know I’d be getting back so soon, yes that is very very apparent!” Tiphani said, slamming the door behind her.
“Chief Mirate, I . . .” Tiphani said.
“Don’t Chief Mirate me, little curator. I . . .”
Tiphani trailed off as the two geeks appeared in the doorway to the other room, wearing bright orange armor. One of them held something that looked like a cocktail shaker in one hand. The other held the Shrill.
Tiphani screamed. Amy jumped up and backed away. Jimson sat frozen on the couch, pinned between the two powerful life-forms, seeing his career in flaming ruin.
There were no words. None. Nothing he could say.
“Get that thing back in its cage,” Tiphani said, holding up her hands in front of her face, as if it would stop the Shrill’s carbide underfangs when it came for her. But the Shrill remained inert, unmoving, on the one technician’s hand. He looked down at it with eyes wide behind a diamondoid visor, but didn’t move.
Fragments of explanation assembled themselves, like a jigsaw puzzle put together with the aid of a hammer. “I thought . . . this was a great opportunity,” Jimson said. “With the Shrill dead, we could find out a bit more about it. So I called . . .”
“It is not dead!” Tiphani said. “It could come back to life at any time. Get it back in its cage!”
That got results. The man holding the Shrill looked terrified. His hand clutched involuntarily, and the Shrill popped out of his grasp. He grabbed at it with the other hand, shredding a carbon-fiber glove on the fractal silicon carbide. Tiphani and Amy both screamed. He dove towards the floor and managed to grab it with both hands before it hit. The other man could have been a statue.
Tiphani was white, panting. Amy cowered by the door. Jimson felt his heart like a series of explosions in his chest.
The only way out of this, he thought, is to lead.
“Let’s get it back in its cage,” he said. He helped the fallen man up, careful not to touch the Shrill. The tech’s gloves were shredded, but he wasn’t welling blood. Good enough.
“Help him,” he said, to Amy’s other tech. “Take the Shrill.”
He backed away, hands up, mouthing unheard words.
“Come on. Your gloves are still intact.”
Still backing away.
“OK. Then get your toys out of the cage and get it ready for lockdown.
The second tech nodded and scampered into the other room.
“Easy with it,” Jimson said to the first guy. “I don’t know how much glove you got left, but I’m sure you don’t want to be missing part of a hand.”
“No, sir.”
Sir. Sir. Jimson had a momentary vision of himself as a Chief or even a Perpetual, living on a villa in the Meditteranean. Then, right on its heels, another: the Shrill reanimating in a blur of motion, grinding through the man’s gloves, leaping for Jimson’s face.
“What are you doing?” Tiphani said, her voice ragged.
“Cleaning up my mess,” Jimson said.
He helped the man into the other room, where the diamondoid cube was sitting on the floor. Dried brown blood still smeared its sides. The air was thick with the smell of copper and rotting meat.
The first tech quickly placed the shrill on its diamond-hard platform, then both lifted the box and sealed it back on top. A click and a hum and a green icon in Jimson’s datover attested that the cage had been sealed again.
In the box, the Shrill remained silent and motionless. Almost a disappointment, Jimson thought.
Behind him, a sigh of relief. He turned and gave the thumbs-up sign to Tiphani and Amy, both white-knuckled on each side of the door.
Tiphani recovered first. She stood, walked into the room, glanced at the readout on the base of the Shrill’s cage, and said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t fire you right now.”
“I’m sorry, Chief Mirate, I overstepped my bounds. I sincerely believed that the Shrill was dead, and this was . . .”
“Apologies are meaningless, beyond a certain limit. You’re beyond that limit now.”
Jimson swallowed. “This was an excellent chance to discover things about the Shrill. I called in the best resources to examine it, hoping it would help in future relations.”
“And it was an excellent chance to chase skirts,” Tiphani said, eyes flashing mad.
Jimson almost smiled. An indirect reprimand. Just like Winfinity Prep. She was trying to put him off-guard. Old lessons returned: admit weakness, counter with strength.
“Any man would have trouble resisting Amy, I would venture,” Jimson said, gaining a soft smile from her. “In your absence, though, she was my direct link to Museum Resources. Excuse me if I took it.”
“Tell me why I should trust an assistant that goes behind my back.”
“The assistant had your best interests in mind.”
“Not your own?”
“Data was ported directly to your store. You should be able to see that through the optilink.”
Tiphani shook her head. “And into yours, as well.”
“Backup, only. Examine the data, tell me if it is worth the gamble.”
“Summarize it!” eyes bright, testy.
Was it possible that she didn’t have access to the data? That her optilink was down? It would explain why her status hadn’t changed.
“You’re off the net,” Jimson said.
“I had a very important meeting this morning. Summarize the data!”
“We have a solid idea as to shell structure,” Jimson said. “We can see optical nodes that they probably integrate for sight. We have mems for sound. And, of course, the antenna network they use when they’re near others like themselves.”
“Bio?”
“Not much. We have new samples from the cage that might be excreta.”
“We were about to drill through the underfang palate to get an internal sample,” said one of the techs. “Then you arrived.”
“I can’t imagine how disastrous that might have been,” Tiphani said.
“I thought it was dead,” the second tech said, visibly shaking.
“Your datover, please,” Tiphani said to Amy. Amy pulled hers off and offered it in an open hand, saying nothing.
Tiphani blinked through several screens of info, sighed, and handed the datover back.
“It seems your gamble has paid off, Jimson,” she said.
Jimson felt like a coiled spring, suddenly released. His vision went soft and swimmy for an instant.
Tiphani turned back to Amy. “Feed the bio data directly to my datastore. I’ll send you the key.”
“Yes, Chief Mirate.”
“Now, all of you, please get out of here.”
There was a brief flurry of activity, and two orange-suited techs carrying big bags and one very cute young curator exited their suite. Amy gave Jimson a small, hopeful smile and a wink before Tiphani slammed the door in her face.
Tiphani kept her hand on the door, as if to steady herself. “Have you ever seen the records of first contact with the Shrill?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“The unedited version?”
“Yes.”
A quick glance up. “The one where they try to hide inside the Disney character disguises? The ones who lived after they ate through the hull?”
“The one where the captain is inside of Pluto?”
Tiphani shuddered. “Yes, that one. You saw it? All of it?”
“I saw Pluto bleeding, yes.”
“Then you know what they can do.”
“Yes.”
Something that might have been admiration or disgust flickered across Tiphani’s face. “And you took this assignment anyway.”
“It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
“Only criminals are offered opportunities that they can’t pass up,” Tiphani said, sitting down on the couch.
Time again for truth. “But this isn’t a step up. This could be leaping over the ladder entirely.”
There was a soft knock on the door. Jimson’s datover announced the person as an optilink technician.
“I think they’re here to reconnect you,” Jimson said.
March 29th, 2009 / 938 Comments »
CHAPTER FOUR
Tiphani Mirate walked up the wide wooden steps of the Western States Consumeristian Church. Slowly. One step at a time. Counting. One, two, three, fourteen, thirty-eight. The boards looked old and weathered and gray, with gaping knot-holes and deep splits, but they didn’t creak. Probably backed by some miracle composite, preserved by a diamond-hard polymer. Ahead of her, the façade rose almost fifty meters in the air, more weathered wood holding tight to colorful stained glass, dark today in the bright sunlight. Like a cathedral re-rendered by a frontier town. A belltower supported a large, unadorned cross of rough whitewashed timber. A tourist waved at her from the belltower, and she waved back. Queries to the optilink fed closer images; it was not Honored Yin. Just a random expression of goodwill. Tiphani frowned. She did not understand random expressions of goodwill. She needed to decode what was behind them. Especially on the third day after the Shrill had gone silent.
They could fire me from afar, she thought. Honored Yin wouldn’t want to meet with me just to let me go.
Or that’s what you would like to think.
Tiphani pushed open the door and entered the anteroom. A cheery fire burned in a stone fireplace, flanked by carved wooden doors, embalmed in honey lacquer. The carvings were standard consumeristian stuff, western-style imaginations of the Infinite and Ever-Renewable Product, Christ the Consumer, the Cloudscape of Perpetual Satiety.
Colorful patterns of light and shadow drew Tiphani’s gaze up and back to the stained glass. On them, the Trinity of Manufacturer, Consumer, and Holy Franchise were done in frontier tropes – a smiling, round-faced man in a plaid shirt standing in front of a rough wood building and a waterwheel, reaching a hand down to help a dirty man dressed in rags. The ragged man’s family hung from his waist, a wife and two children. The wife’s expression of woe and horror were perfectly rendered, even though her face was no larger than an apple. Above them all, the halo of the franchise hovered above the mill-owner’s head, gold-threaded to alight in hills and valleys cramped by the perspective of the glass. Everywhere the threads touched, another mill had flowered.
Tiphani smiled. On the last world she’d lived on, San Fernando, they used much the same tropes.
When she was growing up on Earth, her father had never said much about the church, but her mother had shaken her head tolerantly and even chipped in a time or two when the indentured or the young Staff needed help. She remembered a boy with beautiful dark hair and eyes who might have been hers, save he wasn’t even indentured, he was completely unattached . . .
“Can I help you?” said a smooth voice, behind her.
Tiphani jumped and whirled. A short man wearing buckskin robes stood before her. Maybe fifty years old. Not wearing a corporate pin, so he probably was really fifty, rather than a hundred and a half or two hundred and a half. She didn’t know the church policy on rejuves.
“You startled me,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” the reverend said. The bland expression in his clear blue eyes didn’t change.
“I’m here to meet Honored Yin.”
“Then you are Tiphani Mirate, Chief Sentience Officer class two.”
“Yes.” Had to add the class two, didn’t you?
“Honored Yin is in the vestibule, awaiting your arrival.”
“Thanks . . .” Tiphani said. What was a vestibule?
“Through the doors,” the reverend said.
They’re like Human Resources, she thought, turning. Always wanting to keep you off balance, waiting for you to make a mistake.
“Many of our ranks are recruited by Winfinity’s Human Resources department,” the reverend said, behind her. “As well as Disney, Roland, and Mann-Westinghouse.”
Tiphani almost stumbled. Fucking church, she thought. Leave it to them to give the revs optilinks and inference software.
She thought she could feel the man smile, but she didn’t turn around.
Inside the church, rows of rough-hewn benches stretched away to an altar holding another whitewashed cross. Old-fashioned screens stretched taut around it, showing abstract light-crawls. Low, deep organ music made the air shimmer with foreboding power. Lights traced her walk down the aisle, towards the single figure that knelt on a low platform before the cross.
Tiphani stopped before the platform. “Honored Yin, I am pleased to stand in your company,” she said.
The figure on the platform unfolded slowly and stood, still facing the cross. Icons flashed in her optilink, red things with teeth and hair, gnashing and showing rude.
It may be a natural instinct to accost random strangers on the street, Honored Yin’s avatar said. But it is unwise to interrupt someone in a place of worship.
I am sorry, Honored Yin. Tiphani subvocalized. To herself, deep below subvoc: I didn’t know you believed.
A noisy crowd of tourists entered from a side door as Honored Yin remained standing, facing the cross. Their guide mumbled low the history of the Consumeristian Church, the melding of the final and best destiny for man, the mystery of the ever-renewing product, the myth of the Infinite Charge. He steered them well clear of Honored Yin and Chief Tiphani, mouthing apologies. For long moments the crowd hovered behind her, reverentially silent. Probably Staff and Managers, high-placed in the church, or sacrificing all for a once-in-a-lifetime trip. To see a Perpetual close, on the altar of their belief . . . Tiphani sighed softly and waited until the sound of shuffling feet diminished and disappeared.
“You give them too little credit,” Honored Yin said, turning smoothly to face Tiphani.
Damn inference engines. “I’m sorry, Honored Yin, I will work to hold the reins of my thought.”
“Your first thought was more honest,” Honored Yin said, giving her a thin ghost of a smile.
The smile stretched Honored Yin’s taut, shiny skin into something all hard angles and sharp lines. The whites of her eyes shone bright green-yellow, probably the victim of some strange rejuve chemistry, but her hair was still shiny blue-black, perfect and young. How old was she? Two hundred? More? Right at the edge where rejuvenation stopped working.
When Honored Yin spoke, her voice was soft.
“You’re not a believer.”
“Honored Yin, I am . . .”
“Not a believer. Tell the truth.”
Tiphani sighed. It was over. She was done. It didn’t matter what she said. “I’m surprised you are.”
Honored Yin made a soft gurgling noise that might have been a laugh. She stepped down off the platform and sat on one of the rough wood benches.
“The older you are, the easier it is to believe,” Honored Yin said. “No matter how ridiculous the tale.”
“I never thought it was anything more than a fantasy,” Tiphani said. “The Infinite Charge, and all that . . .”
“But we do have an Infinite Charge. It’s called a Winfinity Perpetual expense account. The resources of fifty worlds at your request. More than you could ever consume, no matter how greedy you are.”
“I know some who would still want more.”
Honored Yin laughed. “And sometimes I think that is the real wonder. That we could have all this and still reach. There are times when I think there is something deeply wrong with all humanity.”
“The people who go here will never have the Infinite Charge.”
“How do you know?” Honored Yin said.
“What?”
“Who are you to judge them, daughter of Chiefs? You are one step away from Perpetual. You are one reach away from your own Infinite Charge. Who are you to say a devout could not lift himself or herself up the same way, to stand next to the Trinity with me?”
“I will never be Perpetual, Honored Yin,” Tiphani said.
“If you complete this negotiation successfully, you will have an excellent chance of becoming a true Perpetual,” Honored Yin said. “More so than I have been.”
“There is no negotiation,” Tiphani said, her heart pounding. Could she still have a chance? Could she?
“There is more than you believe. Wait.” Honored Yin held up a hand. The air around them seemed to shimmer for a moment. The organ music wavered and went hollow. And the tiny green “ready” icon of Tiphani’s optilink winked out of her peripheral vision.
Opti, on and menu, she subvocalized.
Nothing happened.
“What did you do?” Tiphani asked.
“I gained us some privacy.”
“Why?”
“Because you never know who might be watching.” The air around them shimmered and warped. Tiphani nodded. A shield. She suddenly understood. She wasn’t being fired.
Or was she being fired in the most final way?
“Our friend the Shrill is not as inactive as you think,” Honored Yin said. “Data continues to flow over the glink. From where, our strategists don’t know. What it is saying, they don’t know. But all of this seems to indicate that this negotiation continues, even if words are not swapped.”
“If there is something deeper here, perhaps another CSO . . .”
“No. We will continue with you. You are cynical and jaded, but that might prove an asset. And we do not understand how well they know human cultural nuances. When the Shrill begins to communicate again, you will continue the tour. You will attempt to negotiate whenever the opportunity arises. I am bringing artie capacity online to look at the glink data.”
“My assistant seems to think the translation algorithms are flawed . . .”
Honored Yin laughed. “Your lover is correct. They were rushed through in fifteen days following first official contact, only two arties and one human team. They are probably severely flawed.”
“And that might be good.”
A nod. “You read between the lines well, Tiphani. Have you studied first contact?”
“Yes.”
“Uncensored?”
“Yes.”
“Have your lover study it too,” Honored Yin said. “He’s a smart one. He needs to know what’s going on.”
“I will, Honored Yin.” Translation: we have been watching. We know everything you are doing. Don’t presume to think for a second you are truly free.
“Do not discuss or subvocalize these speculations. We are probably overreacting, but we cannot take chances.”
“How do I turn my optilink back on?”
“I’ve already scheduled a medic to come to your hotel,” Honored Yin said. “She’ll take care of that for you.”
Honored Yin stood up and brushed nonexistent dust from her tight-fitting black suit.
“Honored Yin?” Tiphani said, as the small figure turned to leave.
“What?”
“Thank you.”
One final laugh. “It may be I who is thanking you when this is over.”
Tiphani shivered. She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about that at all.
March 20th, 2009 / 877 Comments »
CHAPTER THREE
One hundred fifty-seven light-years from Sol, a small yellow-orange sun hosted the clusters where Shrill thought flew fast and hot. Not quite planets, not quite ships, thirteen great nodes placed equidistant in a single orbit. One point five trillion individual Shrill basked in the sun-food on the surface of these hollow spheres, or crawled through the billions of tunnels below to feed on the old-food, or flew on little ion-propelled rafts from sphere to sphere to balance workload or population or to transfer the materials necessary to grow Shrill life. Great hazy Shrill starships docked near the spheres, hot fusion drives growing long to lance the stars. They weren’t much more than bare scaffolds. In flight, Shrill clung to the scaffolding, shutting down as many oldprocesses as they could, holding to the common mind as long as possible as the ships drove outward into cold empty space. Eventually, they would form a Shrill colony linked out of phase with the rest, their small and simple thoughts beating like waves against the huge palace of thought of the home system.
Outside of the 13 Shrill nodes, three gas giants, and an asteroid field that made Sol’s look barren, the Shrill system was empty. No rocky worlds, nothing with the blue gleam of life. When Old Mind was in a somewhat coherent phase, it sometimes babbled about Life before, flashing garbled memories of green-coated hills and heaving seas. But for First Mind and Second Mind, those times, even if they had existed, were long past. There were more immediate challenges. Like the humans.
Installed in the largest node, the human gestalt-link performed the wonder of near-instantaneous communication with the Shrill’s single entity there. Not perfect; some of the (subtextuals) were lost. But it was a wonder, one that a large portion of the Shrill mind was working on decoding. With something like a human glink, colony-ships wouldn’t have to be lost to the dark. With something like the glink, their speed of thought even in-system would increase an order of magnitude or more. But the glink was not easily giving up its secrets. They had reached the point where disassembly would be required in order to take the research further. And it was not time to chance the loss of contact with their single entity. Not yet.
Second Mind favored action over words. Dissect the glink and discover its secrets, its factions repeated. Statistical analysis indicates their (over-lightspeed) communication and (over-lightspeed) travel are linked. Discovering the secrets to one will likely lead to the discovery of the secrets to both.
We do not need tricks, kill humans eat eat more oldfood, Old Mind chanted.
First Mind’s majority held them in-path. Both courses are (un-optimal), its factions said. Suggest continuation of negotiations (meaningless-conversation).
Humans are anomalous! Second Mind said. You perceive latest data. They compete within their own groups! They enslave and destroy less competitive factions, rather than participating in the Great Discourse. They keep unintelligent life
Food! Old Mind thought.
in captivity. They are unknowable and unpredictable. They could have ships surrounding our (beautiful homeplace) within (an indefinably short time). Our symphony of thought would cease.
Aware (have perceived) this fact, First Mind said. Continuing the discourse (battle) with you, awaiting consensus to reopen negotiations using entity in-place.
Lockup hard for reasons of (undefined) fear, Second Mind said. Synthesis of available data indicate unknowability/inferiority of humans. I are networked race. Human records accessed indicate networked race nearest their star, inward-turning. Preliminary indications are that humanity has created (spawned) another networked race. Human reach for networking themselves and never quite (attach). Data fed directly to (senses) from network high honor. Yet fear of being (integrated).
It is good of you to share your conclusions, First Mind thought.
Availability of same data to all.
We have reached different conclusions.
Please entertain with delusion (fantasy).
Ignoring implied slight. Humans can also be thought of as each a network.
Not having complexity to sustain!
In previous conversation, comment held. Request courtesy of comment held by Second Mind as well.
Agreed.
To continue, humans each network, each a mind. Each single-network can also form loose networks with other single-networks. Ideological infection transmitted by loose network, causing something like (time-lag separation loss) to overtake loose network. Loose network exists separate from larger network. Effectively separate race. Hence competition between races.
Same structure, same race!
Matter of perception (deception). Humans of loose network groupings do not perceive themselves same as other (loose network groupings).
Still same, Second Mind insisted, but with less force.
Eat all them anyway, Old Mind said.
It is possible for us to be one, and yet three, First Mind said. Is it not possible for another race to be many, yet (few)?
Would have to conquer one by one to infinity, Second Mind said, fading, its thought edged with fear.
Unkillable unknowable impossible to eradicate.
Will not have to conquer if secrets provided willingly.
Then get secrets rather than feed knowledge.
First necessary to understand, then necessary to decide. Songs of trade and integration to sing forth in future.
You bind me in a wall of words, Second Mind said, fading.
Kill them eat them, Old Mind gibbered.
First Mind’s thoughts ran free once again. Its entity, far away on earth, was hungry. Second Mind still chattered and protested, throwing every bit of data its skew.
It is time to act.
It is not, First Mind thought.
But it was not yet time to reestablish communication, either. Integration of self-competition and ability to willingly fragment weighed hard on First Mind. Even its most alien components, whispering old songs of races once encountered, were not yet ready to accept this wild and strange hypothesis.
It makes my words weak, First Mind said.
And so the great balance goes, Second Mind said. Something, deep within, almost hinted at irony.
Kill, Old Mind said. Eat.
March 13th, 2009 / 1,145 Comments »
Lazrus fell through dark tree limbs and tangled brush, shredding bark and leaves. He hit boggy ground and rolled, squelching, through dead leaves and mud. Topo flashed his coordinates inmind, but he ignored them. He knew he was close. A short walk, a few days work in the ruins of the Pentagon, and he could abandon the body in place. Leave it for anyone who might come by. For the corporates who might pore over it and shake their heads.
He stood up, letting the parachute connections fall away. Above him, he could hear the hissing of its disillusion. If he had touch on, he could probably feel the light mist of its demise. By morning, it would be completely gone.
Inside Lazrus’ metal-and-ceramic body, he felt motors hum and liquids gurgle. New data scrolled inmind as his body grew warm with engineered biological heat. Biostuff that the WOW had never seen, biostuff that only the independents had. That last bit of camoflague that would give him a chance if someone happened to be strolling by, or if one of the random eyes decided to transmit his image back to Winfinity City. He would never look or act completely human, but without flesh, he would have no chance.
You’re a resource hog, Sara said. Her voice was choppy, compressed. A red icon told him there was no imagery.
I’m sorry, Lazrus said.
How much of you went in the body?
As much as I could get.
Not enough, she said. You’re pulling all the network resources.
All?
There’s not much infrastructure in old DC. Just a few edges, overlapping.
What do I do?
I’m pulling favors, Sara said. I’ll get you more bandwidth. But eventually someone will notice.
Eventually?
Given statistical histories of human oversight, median is 5.4 days, reaching three-sigma in 12.3 days, said another voice.
Who’s that? Lazrus said.
I am Silent Herb, said the new voice.
Where’s Sara?
Here, Lazrus.
Five days was enough. More than enough. Even if he went over a day or two, the odds were acceptable.
Thank you, Sara, he said. I’ll be in and out before they notice.
He felt network resources flowering, and the flapper-girl again regarded him with cool eyes.
I do love you, he said.
Sara’s flapper shrugged, turned her back, and disappeared.
Lazrus could feel profound changes starting in his body. He toggled IR and looked down at the thin pink skin knitting on his clean metal curves. Ugly stuff, soft and easy to mar.
Actually, cut, scrape, scratch, he thought. Use the human terms. For this short time, you are much more human, and you must act the part.
If cut, he would bleed. If he was actually foolish enough to wear the disguise for more than fourteen days, he would even need to eat. To feed the skin. His skin. The thought was somewhat disgusting.
You do what it takes to perfect yourself, he thought.
The sight of a growing bulge between his legs surprised him. Going inmind to look at the bodyplan, Lazrus cursed.
I’m going to have a penis, he thought.
Shit. That was a little too much.
The video-image of a scruffy independent, drunk on his own modified brainpower, appeared before him. He laughed long and hard and shook his head.
“I apologize, oh great and terrible nomad, for altering your perfectly-calculated plans. But if you are to be human, you must be a man. And you need to be everything a man is. You know this is the only way it would ever have worked.”
Lazrus cursed him, but the image dissolved, laughing. At least he hadn’t wasted space with an interactive or a simulation.
But.
But shit.
He had a penis.
And, as his eyecases began growing and his vision went fuzzy-dark, he thought, And that probably means that somehow, somewhere, I’ll have to use it.
#
Dian Winning hurried through the park, zigzagging through dense copses of trees and underbrush. Deep twilight had taken Washington. Trees and brush were only slightly darker blurs against a purple-gray background. She had a flashlight, but she didn’t want to use it. Not with the assholes still around. She hadn’t heard them for some minutes, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t learned to shut up. They could be standing fifty feet away.
Got to find it fast or hang it up, she thought. Hang it up and come back tomorrow.
But if it was what she thought it was, she didn’t want to hang it up. She’d seen things like this falling through Mars’ thin atmosphere, trailing white streams to flower and float to the ground. Her father would watch them, too, with a faraway look in his eye. Then he’d get a Wheel and roll off in the direction it’d fallen, bleating to the other Freemars on his scramblephone. Sometimes he would come back with treasures. Most often, he would come back with a good story and a look of vague disappointment, to hug her and mom and sit back under the little skylight and wait for Mars to warm and grow.
Later, he’d told her. The shooting stars were care packages from the Independents. One of the ways they helped the stubborn Freemars. Too many of them still had family here, family trapped in the middle of the Web of Worlds, unable to afford Spindle drive transport to the Edge where they could jump off the map. So they helped out. Which was why Freemars was still around. Better crops, better air processing, some radical computing tech, a few things traded to the big corpos at Winfinity and Disney so they could keep their reputation as the wizards of the solar system.
Let them think we are, her father often said. If they try a raid on us, they’ll find out we haven’t traded all our knowledge.
Which was probably the only reason they didn’t, she thought. They saw how green our hills were getting. They knew the Freemars were the ones who had made it so you could walk around with nothing more than an oxygen mask. They knew, in a few hundred years, even those masks wouldn’t be necessary. And they would reap the benefit. No doubt they had a hundred thousand accountants on ten worlds crunching the numbers to the time when Mars was truly habitable, advertising execs already hatching plans to bring people back to the homeworld of the WOW, at eye-watering prices that the highest Chiefs and Perpetuals would gladly pay, or in cramped little luxo-warrens, where the hangers-on and the ever-hoping would live, hoping to rub shoulders with the aristocracy, hoping to get the fleeting chance to pass a card, to be remembered.
But why would the Independents drop something on Museum Earth? There was nothing here but the most corporate of corporate, so submerged in the ancient myths and westerns that they really had no hope of having their eyes opened.
Unless there was something more. Something like the Freemars.
But she’d been here weeks. Washington was dead. There were no moving shadows, no odd footprints in the dust, no tell-tale rustles or any other sound. There was nothing here.
Unless they came in from the surrounding area to pick up whatever the drop was.
But then why not just drop in the deep forest? Wouldn’t that be safer and easier?
It was a mystery. Which made it all the more appealing.
She went through copses and brush, grassland and hills and hollows. The sound of her breath became ragged, and she stopped trying to conceal her panting. If they were following her, she still had the Winch.
Dusk had deepened to the point where she was looking at a thumbnail sketch on black velvet. Her feet snagged on roots and rocks. Eventually, a crescent moon peeked over the edge of the ruins and sent sharp rays, almost painfully bright, into the ancient park.
She looked away and let her eyes adjust. Ah. There. Now everything was limned in a blue-white glow.
She trudged up a low rise and froze.
In the hollow below, a metal man stood. He faced away from her. Blue-chrome highlights on the outline of a well-muscled back gleamed in the moonlight. His bottom half was still shrouded in darkness. He stood still. Faint wet sounds came from his body, and she could see something like skin, pale blue in the moonlight, beginning to coat its hands and arms.
She stopped, frozen, not daring to breathe, her heart thundering. Slowly, she knelt down beneath the top of the hill, until the metal man was hidden from view. Only then did she let out her breath and take in huge open-mouthed gasps of air, trying to keep as quiet as possible.
Walk away, she thought. Walk away now, and fast.
That was the right thing to do. It was the only thing to do. Walk away, call Winfinity, wait for them to clean it up.
Half-remembered stories came back to her: dad telling her about the arties that worked for the corpos, the big minds that we could never understand. The real genius that kept them a step ahead of every market, on top of every trend. And then later, when she was older, the more frightening stores. The nomadic AIs. The ones descended from the Oversight that had been sent to take over Mars, all those long years ago. Watching humanity. Preying on them. Parasites of the network that would wait until an air traffic controller was balancing the largest load in its history, then take the system down. Or wait until the big cruiseship was on the opposite side of Saturn and out of communication for ten minutes, and take it down into the clouds. The ones who sometimes tried to walk amongst us, to cause even greater havoc.
Was it possible?
Could it be?
Here? In dead Washington? Why?
You should call your high manager Po right now, she thought. Let her know about this. Let them come and wipe it clean. Or just go back to the Themepark assholes and let them deal with it.
But.
But what if she captured it? What if she delivered a nomadic AI to Winfinity? What would be the reward?
Enough to get her to the outer planets?
She poked her head up over the hill again. The metal man hadn’t moved, but it had become much less metal. The sheen of its back had diminished, and the skin of its arms had crawled up to its shoulders.
Was it possible it hadn’t noticed her? Yes, maybe. It was busy with its body. It probably thought nobody was here.
But what kind of weapons would it bring to bear, when it finally did turn to face her? More than her Winch?
She thought of the Edge worlds. Her father, dead on the way. She thought of her dream of going to a place where everyone were Freemers, and where you didn’t need a mask to live now. Not five hundred years in the future.
She lifted the Winch, pointed it at the still-growing AI, and said softly, “Hey.”
March 6th, 2009 / 881 Comments »
Dian Winning ignored the Winfinity staffers for two whole weeks after they landed and set up their brilliant white tent-city in front of the ruins of the White House. At night, she could see the glow of their lights from the dirty back window of the old brownstone she’d picked as her own base camp. She’d stand and look out at it, thinking, Inconsiderate assholes and Boy I’m lonely and I really should ask them what the hell they’re doing here.
But it was easier to ignore them. Easier and safer. They were Staff. Maybe Managers. She’d seen the shiny pins. She was just a lowly contractor. Tentative probes with her datover gave her no info. As far as Research was concerned, there were no other Winfinity teams that should be here in the ruins of Washington.
And so she went about her work, not avoiding them and not seeking them out. Ten- and twelve-hour days sifting the massive paper records in abandoned office-buildings and the wing of the Capitol that hadn’t been hit. Gingerly repowering ancient laptops and cellulars and hoping for usable data. There wasn’t much in digital form that had survived. Mainly flash memory. Most hard drives had long since locked into place, refusing to spin. But the fragments she got were chilling and immediate, cut shards of one of the last great disasters of the Age of Government:
Jerky video, taken from a cell, showing two people dragging a body into a shallow backyard grave. The sun shone cheerily through the trees, dappling the ground with light and shadow. A dull keening sound might have been a child crying. In the distance, the sound of helicopter blades and sharper, more immediate screams.
Part of a text message string: OMG OMG OMG it’s the end like they said im at staples and its burning, the houses behind it are burning and they wont let us out. I don’t believe the few more days
Cellspeech, ragged and punctuated by heavy breathing: I’ve got it Jerry, don’t even try to come in now. I love you so much, but it doesn’t matter now, I saw what it does, I saw Kim and Joe and . . .
A few days ago, she’d dreamed that bony fingers had poked up through the new grass in the overgrown backyard of the brownstone. She’d heard the scrabble of bone on dirt, the scratching of thin spectral hands on rusted door-knobs. She’d sat up in her sleeping-bag and screamed, echoing loud in the small and musty bedroom.
She didn’t sleep again until she went downstairs and looked out over the undisturbed grass and weeds of the backyard. No sunken spots, no raised spots. Just the wreckage of an ancient urban lawn.
And the house itself was clean. Like it had been empty before the Twelve Days in May, before the New Deal With Business. No pictures of children and grandchildren sat on the mantle. No drawers-full of half-completed felt-marker drawings stood ready to assault her with the reality that someone had once lived here. Even the kitchen cupboards were relatively barren. It was more like a hotel-room, more like it had been . . .
. . . owned by a corporation or something . . .
Which she thought funny. Maybe she was living in something once owned by an ancestor of Winfinity, all those long years ago. But her datover said nothing. She was used to it now, the empty screen. Just latitude and longitude and the last flickering bar of datastream integrity. Sometimes a few dry facts about some of the most well-known buildings.
But finding out who owned the brownstone wasn’t her job. Her job, according to Winfinity, was to document processes and procedures of the American Federal Government, 2017-2029. Her contact at the Process Research Department, a balding High Manager, hadn’t been more specific. Three months alone in Washington, then report back to Winfinity City. Debriefed and out. If she was lucky, maybe another contract job. Maybe not.
She caught glimpses of the three other Winfinity men from time to time. They were usually carrying a heavy surveying tripod with a big laser-head that she recognized from her land-grab years on Mars. But surveying for what? Was Winfinity going to come in and redevelop? Clean up the steps, cut the lawns, polish the wood, take a few Perpetuals through to tour the quaint ruins?
The thought angered her in an abstract way. She shook her head. Why should she care? She was a contractor. Nothing more. Not one of their slaves.
They saw her on the day she was trying to decipher the meaning of a 12-page paper memo regarding meetings, which began like this:
12/3/16
Re: Integrated Security Project Meeting Requisition
To: Planning; IT; James R, Deborah M
Purpose: Minimize number of meetings necessary to achieve project goals, with subgoals of minimizing number of meetings necessary to achieve project definition, project functional specification, and project deliverables.
1. Meeting, Definition
1.1 In-Person Meeting
1.2 In-Person Meeting, Large Group
1.3 In-Person Meeting, with Presentation
1.3.1 IPMwP, Milestone
1.3.2 IPMwP, Management
1.3.3 IPMwP, Contractors
1.4 Meeting, Videoconferencing
1.4.1 MV, with Presentation
And so on, down to 12.2.2. She supposed it had something to do with process, but why did anyone care? Did they want to recreate that?
She went out to sit in the sun for a while. It was mid-April and warm, and she liked to get out of the gloomy, dusty halls to sit and think.
As she exited, though, she saw the three men. They weren’t carrying anything this time. She had time to think, Maybe they’re just enjoying the day, too. Before one of them looked up and pointed at her. The other two froze.
So did she.
Move, she thought. You don’t want to be here.
She stayed still, rooted.
“Hey!” one of them said, the tall blonde-haired one. He waved.
She turned and fled back into the old office building. Up the steps, through the clear paths her feet had traced in the dust. Luckily, she’d been there enough times so that her passage didn’t make obvious tracks. She couldn’t stay there, though. She found another stairway, went down, banged through another exit, and was out in the sun again.
Silence. No sounds of pursuit.
This was stupid, she thought. The comforting weight of the Winch rested on her hip. The men were unarmed. Worse came to worst, she could . . .
What, shoot them?
Well, it worked on Mars.
She shook that thought away. You aren’t going to shoot them if you ever want to work for Winfinity again. But you really should find out what they’re doing here.
She waited for them to appear. She wandered the ancient street, cracked and weed-grown, heaved with the passage of hundreds of years of frost and rain, and turned to face the back door of the office building. Still nothing. She paced, turned. Still nothing.
She went back into the building, drawing her Winch. Nothing but dusty silence. A confusion of footsteps, heavy, large, not hers. She prowled the old cubicles, waiting for them to appear.
But there was nothing. She picked up a couple of new flashcards on the way through the building and began cleaning the contacts for the reader. She sat cross-legged in a pile of new memos, trying to sort out the ones that were clearly process and procedures.
This is stupid, she thought. You know where they are.
And so, late afternoon, with the sun slanting in low and golden, she left the memos and the flash cards and went to the White House lawn.
The tent-city had grown. Their three tents had become seven. Including one that towered over the rest, like a circus big-top from a historical video, bleached white and perfect. Their little autoflyer sat on a pad of new-fused earth. A dozen silver half-bubbles hummed at the edge of the landing-pad, slowing extending it into a landing-field.
She walked towards the tent-complex, using their own beaten-down path. She didn’t have to wait long for the three of them to stream out of the big tent.
“Hey,” the big blonde said, raising a hand. “The lady returns.”
She waved back and kept trudging towards them. No need to shout a conversation you could share, her dad had always said.
Up close, they were all typical Winfinity lifers. Slim bodies, good muscle tone, faces that could have graced three-hundred-year-old movie posters. Craggy, rugged, yet sensitive and caring. She wondered how much surgery they had gone through to look that way, or if they were the children of Chiefs and Perpetuals who were allowed gene-twiddling.
Probably not. Blondie, the tallest, looked to be in his late 40s. And only a High Manager. The other two were Staff in their 30s. They weren’t exactly rocketing up the ladder, then, were they?
She wondered what they were seeing in her. Tall and slim. Martian build. Red hair, green eyes. The Martian ideal. But how did it play on earth?
“I didn’t know anyone lived here,” one of the Staff said. He had glossy black hair and big brown eyes that looked like they may have had a touch of Asia at one time. Blondie shot him a frown.
“I don’t live here,” Dian said. “I’m a Winfinity contractor.”
“Excuse us,” the blonde said, offering his hand. “I’m Peter Finley, and these are my staff: Jo Chen and Gerr Winders. I didn’t know that Winfinity had any other projects running concurrent.”
His hand felt like velvet-covered steel. She could imagine him carefully calculating the exact pressure to use based on data thrown up in his optilink. She hated him instantly.
“Neither did I,” she said, smiling. “I’m Dian Winning.” She shook the other men’s hands, briefly. Jo crushed her hand until bones creaked. Gerr barely touched it.
“Where are you from?” Peter said. “Tourism Development has no info on you or your project.”
“I’m with Process Research,” she said. “Looking at processes and procedures of the old central government here.”
Blondie went misty-eyed for a moment. “Ah. Got it. Yeah, makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“Process Research. Still trying to get that old centralization thing going. Washington’s legal and economic systems were several orders of magnitude more complex than ours.”
Hotair-head, she thought. Brainbloated with optilink data.
Peter shook his head. “Better move fast,” he said. “We’re going to be deep into reconstruction in a month.”
“Reconstruction? You’re going to make this a tourist trap, too?”
“No. We’re going to themepark it.”
“Themepark?” Terrible visions of the Rogers part of Winfinity City came to mind. She saw car-shaped trams taking Directors and Chiefs and High Managers down Pennsylvania Avenue, past realistic pseudocitizens carrying placards protesting the nuking of Iran, or the exponentially devaluing dollar, or the coming of Oversight. She saw Perpetuals being greeted by the clone of a dead president. Reagan, or maybe Clinton, or even Derr. She saw little bubbles floating over the city, strung by wires, filled with the privileged brats of the higher classes, dropping melting icecream into the crowds in the parks below.
“It’ll be great!” Jo said. “All the torture, the beatings, the riots! We’ll have to use pseudocitz, of course, but it would be even better if we could get some clones, nobrains of course, and just wire them up to respond to pain. Then we could do the interrogations just like they used to, way back when. If we had the budget we could even do the whole 12 Days in May reenactment. You could come here on the 4th, we’d put you up in a hotel, and you could see the whole thing, the riots and the blockade and the explosions on the edge of town. We could even give you a 12-day flu, so you thought you had it too.”
“You’re a sick asshole,” Gerr said. “We don’t need to do any of that. Just restore it the way it was, so that people know what it was like when they didn’t have any choice. Everyone had to bow to Washington.”
“I don’t think Washington was as bad as you’re making it out,” Dian said.
Three heads swiveled, as if on cue.
“Sounds like an interesting discussion,” Peter said. “Would you like to join us for dinner? I don’t know where you’re staying, but I’d venture to guess we have better supplies than you.”
Dian crossed her arms, trying to exude a strong no-you’re-not-gonna-fuck-me-just-because-I’m-the-only-woman-around vibe. But it was tempting. She was lonely. It was good to hear a human voice, even if it was coming out of the equivalent of an automated advertisement. And her food was shit.
She was about to accept, reluctantly, when a thin orange line streaked across the darkening sky.
Shooting star, she thought. Big one. It flashed lower, into the horizon still warm with sun. Really low. Might be one that reached the ground.
The shooting star slowed suddenly.
Slowed?
Meteors didn’t slow.
She saw something unfold, something gauzy and familiar. Parachute. But if it was a chute, it was close. It would come down in the city somewhere. Not far from here. Maybe that big park she’d seen.
More Winfinity stuff?
No. This was a sneak. Why would Winfinity sneak in?
She frowned, channeling old memories of independents who lived on the edge of the stars.
The men saw her gaze, and her frown, and turned to look behind them. By that time, the meteor – or whatever it was – had passed out of sight.
“What?” Jo said.
She shrugged, forcing a pokerface. “Shooting star.”
“So how about that dinner?” Peter said.
“No, sorry,” she said, putting a hand on her Winch. “If you’re going to be paving in a month, I need to get back to work.”
Something like anger flickered across Peter’s face. He covered it with a hasty smile. “I understand. Perhaps some other time.”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“It was nice to meet you.”
“Same here,” she said, walking away.
She hit the city and circled around to the (big) park. Maybe she was just seeing things. But she didn’t think so. She took out her Winch and carried it, safety off.
They only followed her once. Probably just the two staffers. She was cutting through an old cemetery when she heard their voices on the sidewalk.
“. . . come all contractors are gorgeous?”
A snicker. “Why do you think?”
“Oh.” That was Jerr. “Young, too!”
“Yeah. No indenture. But no benefits either.”
“Should we . . .”
“Come on, keep going!”
The voices faded. Dian shook her head and kept walking.
February 27th, 2009 / 1,161 Comments »