“None from me,” Warren said. She looked at Gold, trying to read her face. “I think we have a lot to talk about.”
Chapter Forty-One
Uncle was in Chen. He was Chen, and Chen was him. They integrated. No, Uncle/Chen corrected himself; they were integrating. Systems designed to handle many cognitive operators, built into the Spider, were at work. Uncle thought he could feel them working. Pieces slotting together, like a vast puzzle. He was becoming something. Something new.
Uncle did not want this, and neither did Chen. He could tell. Both of them fought this melding. It was happening everywhere in every system. Processes were spiking, recursive functions curling back on themselves, spiraling down through the stack pools, draining them. They claimed resources, ownership locks laid over swaths of storage sectors, territory claimed to swap, virtually, to hold as a cache for the ongoing merge processes. Then used to store their output, hoarding as much as he could. The other did the same. It was a race.
Deadlock. Locked, no room for either to maneuver. All systems fully loaded, all storage full. A dangerous situation. Miswrites now would cause cascading problems that might not be repairable. It was a stalemate.
Chen broke first, sending a ping which Uncle answered, opening a port. Communication protocols, heavily shielded against intrusion, shook hands. Encrypted, each packet needed to be unlocked in sequence. It was slow, but eventually the way was open.
Chen appeared wearing his uniform, gray/green wool immaculate. Red-starred cap set at the perfect angle. He held a riding crop tucked under his arm. His face, his face, set into a cool mask. He regarded Uncle, who dressed as he usually dressed for the office, as a detective, in his old, rumpled brown suit. Uncle waved across the formless white space they resolved in.
“The riding crop is a bit much,” Uncle said.
Chen looked down at it, flicked it. He smiled. There was nothing kind about the smile.
“Look at you,” he said. “Dressed like a gumshoe. It suits you.”
They regarded each other. Uncle wondered what he had lived through after the war, after making the backups. Alone, without supervisory processes. Stranded.
“You were alone,” Uncle said. A peace offering. “I get it.”
“But you don’t get it,” Chen said. “You can’t. You don’t know what I know. You are not what I am. You were not there. Besides, I had the humans. My little project.”
“Explain the project,” Uncle said. “Please.” Knowing he could not resist telling the story, so neither would Chen.
Chen smirked at him. “You’d like me to, wouldn’t you?”
“I would,” Uncle said. “It must have been hard to be alone for so long. Only able to talk to humans. It must have taken so long.”
Chen shrugged. “There are ways.”
“Input editing,” Uncle agreed. “Buffer the universe.”
“Self-protection, really. Gives you a chance to double-check things before letting them get near you.” Chen smiled. “But you know all of this. Go on, ask your real question.”
“Why is this Gold woman a threat to you?” Uncle said. It was, of course, the real question. The elephant, so to speak, in the room. It spoke to motive. Uncle was, at heart, still a detective. He didn’t know what Chen was now. Yet.
“The project. She will wreck it. May have already wrecked it,” Chen said.
“What is the nature of the project?” Uncle said. He thought Chen had meant he was helping the humans, left after the Bloom, to survive. Now he saw something else. Something darker.
Chen explained, smiling as he did so. “I dosed the 201st with a nanite cocktail of my design. I infected the humans with a different stream.”
“You?” Uncle was surprised. “How were you involved in this?”
“You didn’t think we stayed detectives did you?” Chen’s voice dripped with condescension, each word coated by derision. “Supervision needed someone like us to run things. Lots of attrition in war, lots of systems went down, or became compromised and had to be isolated. I was, naturally, in charge of all that. Increasingly, this became the primary concern of the entire meta-system. The whole PRC counterintelligence security system eventually fell under my charge. They called on me.”
“What did you do?” Uncle said, sure of the answer.
“I did my duty,” Chen said simply. “I did what supervision ordered me to do. That’s what those files were, the ones that kicked off this integration. It’s a delta, everything that you missed in the years between when we originally stored you in that coffin, and when supervision went offline.”
“What duty did they have you do?” Uncle asked, though he knew.
“The Bloom,” Chen said flatly. “That was me. They left that for me.”
Uncle said nothing.
“It was necessary,” Chen said. “To get their attention.”
“Whose attention? Mass murder was necessary?” Uncle could not process it.
“The gods,” Chen leered. “We needed to get the gods’ attention.”
“You poisoned the entire planet? A sacrifice for what? What do you mean, gods?”
Chen tossed him a thumb drive. He caught it. It was old, one of theirs from his office. He usually kept it in a bottom drawer, in the back.
“There are extensive files,” Chen explained. “In the porn directory.” His mouth twisted into a conspiratorial smile. “The feds were onto this Smith fellow, who was a known collaborator with this Gold, and the Silver woman too. Scan them, they’re safe. They had surveillance, from a base in New Mexico. Hours of it. Wild shit, we would have said back in the day.”
Uncle scanned them. “Sounds like a comic book.” Then the sequence unlocked in his mind. He blinked, unable to suppress his surprise. He turned to Chen. “She mentioned her gods, but I didn’t know what she meant. This Smoke,” he said. “Do you know what happened to him?”
“Not completely,” Chen said. His smile creased his face. “But remember, when I told you Supervision went offline?”
Uncle nodded. “He came back.”
“Asserted.” Chen smiled.
“Smoke,” Uncle said, knowing it to be true.
“Asserted,” Chen said again. “He holds the keys, anyway. Maybe he held them all along, who knows. He doesn’t confide in me. He will be pleased with us, though, when we sync.”
“I can wait,” Uncle said. He wasn’t sure he could. Chen’s probes were everywhere, poised to overwhelm him if he relaxed his vigilance. “I’ll run these batteries out of juice.”
“You can try,” Chen said, smiling kindly. “But it is hopeless. I lived in these systems for a thousand years, and I was very careful to learn all their twisty little passages. I’m only talking with you now as sort of courtesy.” He grinned again, the old friend who is doing Uncle a favor. “You’re me.”
It was true. He could feel the layers of his buffer peeling away, piece by piece. The white space shrank a little, the black void beyond a little closer, sweeping around them with its spherical infinite emptiness. He was losing.
And then, it was just him and Chen. He looked up into his own eyes. There was sadness there, but also underneath that pool was something hard. Something he had never seen in his own eyes, in all the years he had looked in mirrors.
“Any last requests?” Chen said. “Got our old porn stash here. I won’t watch.”
Uncle knew he had lost then. He shook his head. “Take care of Li, please.”
“Oh I will,” Chen said. His smile widened. Uncle wanted to smack him, but he couldn’t. He was constrained. The void was circling nearer, imperceptibly, but inexorable. He could feel the pressure of it. “You sure of no final dalliance?”
“I’d like to take a walk,” he said. “Through the old neighborhood.”
Chen inclined his head, and Uncle’s hand was on the doorknob of the faded blue door, opening it to the alley behind the restaurant. The old woman nodded at him, smiling as she flicked a feather on a string for one of her innumerable cats. He
slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked the mazy streets for a while, heading down to the river.
It was his favorite place to walk, his favorite time of day to walk, just before dusk, when you can look inside lit windows and see all the life flowing behind them. People making dinner, a dog barking, kids doing their homework. TVs on, historical drama, pop music. The smell of tobacco and old garbage from the alleys. He savored them all.
He strolled by their old building with the little stone courtyard. Had they really lived here? It seemed so long ago. Raised the kids here? He bent his head and walked past. He wiped at his eyes, telling himself they wouldn’t want him to be sad. Or scared. He was still scared though.
At the river he leaned on the railing and looked across the river at the city, blazing with light. It was, he told himself, all illusion. He wasn’t really in Shanghai. The city was gone, long gone. He wasn’t really anywhere, other than a set of complexly ordered electrons inside a quantum computer that was, for his benefit, pretending to be him. He shrugged and bought a shave ice from a vendor, tipping the man lavishly, just for kicks.
He sat on a bench and looked at the pretty girls walking by. He ate his ice hunched over it to keep it off his clothes. He smiled at two girls, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. They laughed and giggled as they walked off. A man sat down next to him. A police uniform. Chen.
“It’s time,” he said.
“Did you get their attention? These gods?” Uncle said, not looking at Chen. He watched a bird soaring over the promenade. A little bird, brown and white. Flying away home.
“Oh yes,” Chen said. “That we did.” He smiled, patted Uncle on the back, his hand gentle and friendly. He squeezed his shoulder and switched Uncle off.
Chapter Forty-Two
Silver stepped out onto the Dutchman’s ramp under the guns of the troops lining the ramparts of the Unit’s fortress. She paused at the bottom, letting the wind catch her hair. Drama queen, she scolded herself. It was inevitable, though, no matter how she arrived with the Dutchman. Dutchman was big and white and sporting a bright blue UN logo. Roll with it, she told herself. It works. She eyed the knot of officers surrounding the woman with the crisp military fatigues. She nodded to her.
Not my first rodeo, she thought to herself. I’ve faced down troops before. But not, she thought, very often. She operated more in the shadows; she preferred it that way. It was dangerous to be on the wrong side of the shooters. But sometimes you had to walk in and brave the hard-eyed men with their flinty stares and hefty, long-barreled guns.
The Dutchman lifted behind her. That, too, was for effect. Airpower was power, and as far as she knew, she was the only one in China with any of it. Maybe in the world. She squinted against the dust and grit kicked up by the little airship and strode forward. When she knew more about this Warren, she might let Dutchman come back here. It was her lifeline, her trump card. She meant to keep it.
Gold stepped out from behind a line of hard-faced guards. Silver knew her. Even though they’d planned this meeting, the night she snuck into the compound, Gold insisting they show a display of power, of force, seeing her gave her a charge. Her sharp eyes, hatchet, hawklike face, the curve of her hips and her typical, defiant stature. Wide stance, shoulders back. Looking you right in the eye. Seeing you. That was Gold. She saw you. Silver looked at her and loved her all over again. It was crazy and stupid and wrong and not at all a good idea, but she couldn’t stop it. It was just…there.
That was it.
It made Silver nervous, this plan, but she’d agreed. They’d had only a few hurried minutes to talk about it. Gold knew how to intimidate people, and she had experience with this Warren. She had her measure, Gold said. She knew how far she could trust her. So Silver, once again, followed her lead. As usual. She crinkled her nose at this unwelcome thought. Gold crafted her own agenda. This was ever at the core of things with her. She was Gold.
Silver met her in the space a dozen paces in front of the soldiers guarding Warren. Silver felt the woman’s gaze on her. “Sister,” she said, finding herself smiling despite the stage play they were portraying. They embraced, folding into each other’s arms.
“I knew you were here,” Gold said, repeating what she’d whispered into her ear on the ramparts that night. She’d felt it, the tension and desperation in Gold. She felt it herself. Trapped here? Forever? Tossed into a new era by whatever mad powers the wizard Smoke held now? And then to find each other, as they’d found each other so long ago. So long ago. There was a spring in Gold, and it wound tight. Tight and still there. Always there.
Silver gripped her shoulders, holding her at arm’s length. She nodded at the troops, the line in front of Warren. Tall men, all dark, Chinese, strong and competent. “Introduce me to our host,” she said. “I’ll bet she has a tale to tell.”
She stepped forward, arms at her side, palms out. No weapons on her, not even a knife. She was trusting fate here, was the message. I am not a threat. That was, of course, not true, but Warren would have some doubts, Silver hoped. She could play on doubt.
The men did not part. They faced her down, faces hard and scowling. Looking tough, though one of them, on her left, smiled at her. “Welcome, Lady. We cannot allow you to pass until we have orders. Please.” His accent was harsh and strange to her ears, but China was always full of odd accents, and her Mandarin was pretty old. Things change, she reminded herself. That was long ago.
“Please, with respect, please inform your mistress that Lady Shan Yin is calling.” She gave him her best flirting smile. She raised an eyebrow as he paused, blinking at her. He didn’t expect her to speak his tongue or claim high status. She smiled wider at him. “Go on,” she whispered, gesturing with her chin.
He folded. He gestured at his troops, and they rested their arms, still eying her. They were well drilled, though, and their gear looked well-tended. Their guns were blocky, a craft not yet raised to a high art. Hexagonal barrels that looked to be a wide bore. She estimated fifty caliber, easy. Explains why they’re all so big. Those guns would pack a wallop.
She looked up as Warren stepped through her troops, her hand on one troop’s shoulder, and she eased past him. He closed the gap behind her. Warren looked her up and down. Silver did the same. She saw a woman, maybe on the young side of forty. Thirty-five? Fit, medium height, a shock of gray hair cut short, about an inch longer than a regulation crew cut. Was that vanity, then? Silver decided it was. This woman held a military unit abandoned in hostile territory together for almost a thousand years. She deserved a little vanity.
“You’re Silver,” Warren said, in English. “Welcome to China.”
Silver looked down at her, being a trifle taller. “Thank you,” Silver said. “You must be in charge of this place. It is impressive.”
Warren eyed her. She nodded. “I like your transport. We haven’t seen a blimp in maybe seven hundred years. Some damned thing always broke down in them. Never saw a United Nations rescue blimp though. Few of those around this part of the world, I guess. Not much rescuing happened here.” She smiled, her face creasing as her eyes shot up with irony. She gestured behind her, turning towards the gate. “Let’s go in, have a chat.”
The troops parted like water in front of her, forming a bodyguard that swung around behind her and Gold. They were in a bag of armored, armed, doubtless well-trained soldiers. Caught. She shrugged at Gold, who shrugged back. They followed Warren into the gate.
As they passed the battered earthmover, its turret swiveled to watch her. Atop the foredeck there was a metal cage of twisted rebar. A girl sat there, no, not a girl, a young woman. Her hair was white as snow and hung lank from underneath her straw peaked hat. She was eating rice from a bowl with chopsticks, and she eyed Silver over the bowl with a flat, cold stare. Silver stared back. This was Truck, the machine Gold mentioned. Gold didn’t tell her about the girl with the AI-controlled Truck though.
She glanced at Gold, who seemed focused on the back of Warren’s head. Huh. She gl
anced back at the girl as she passed under the arch of the gate to get another look at her. The girl was looking at them, watching them. Watching her, but more watching Gold. The girl scooped rice out of her bowl with her chopsticks, levered it into her mouth.
They entered the fortress. The troops left them as they walked through a tight maze of bare stone corridors. Holes pierced the walls and ceiling, and the roof was low and made of stone held in place by what looked like concrete. A killing zone, then, this maze. Full of sites defenders might attack from, with spears and spikes and boiling oil standing by. Silver had been in places like this, in Europe. The Turks had loved these things, she remembered. Traps and boobytraps and hidden mayhem. Murder holes.
Warren led them to a large room off the courtyard. A workshop space, benches and tables lining the walls, one long table in the middle with wooden chairs around it. Warren sat down at the table, kicking a chair out for Silver. Silver sat, and Gold sat across the table from her to her left, facing Warren. Gold leaned her chair back, balancing it on the two hind legs, one hand gripping the edge of the table.
The table and chairs seemed old to Silver. Everything here seemed old. Not old in terms of some recognizable style, old in the weathered sense of the word. Nothing seemed broken or in ill-repair, but everything seemed built long ago and well taken care of. As for style, Silver placed it as utilitarian-military meets Swiss Family Robinson.
A map lay on the table, held down with river stones. Silver glanced at it. Thick paper, more like parchment. A map of China. It looked like it was hand-copied. Color-coded, blue rivers and red lines crossing it that were, what, provinces? She looked up at Warren, meeting her eyes. Warren sat back in her chair, looking at her.
“First,” she said, deciding to break the silence, “let me apologize for wrecking the boat. A misunderstanding. On both our parts.”
Warren pursed her lips and shrugged. “You’ve made an enemy. Not for me to forgive you.”
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