Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 9

  Solnet/Omnivision Video Post

  @anika.radovich.solnetworldview

  February 6, 2121

  1200 hours U.T.

  SOLNET Special Report:

  Kwan Keyser: Swarm Ambassador?

  Anika Radovich peered into a compact mirror and straightened her hair for the fiftieth time. New York City was bad for winds in early February, especially at UN Plaza along the East River. And where was that windbag Keyser, anyway? He was supposed to meet the Solnet reporter outside the General Assembly, by the statue of Dag Hammarskjöld, at noon. But the Sanctuary delegate was nowhere to be seen.

  Radovich motioned to the dronecam hovering twenty feet overhead. She tapped out a few commands on her wristpad, whispered a few commands into her lip mic.

  Come with me. I’ll start without the bastard.

  The ornithopter chittered as its quadrotors tilted and it wheeled about in the stiff wind to follow Radovich to a calmer spot in the lee of the big statue.

  “This is Anika Radovich, reporting for Solnet. We’re here at UN Plaza in New York, attempting to get a quick word from Kwan Keyser, as he exits the General Assembly session this morning. As you know, and Solnet has been reporting, the UN has been debating new regulations and laws concerning the recent spike in angel activity. The tactics of Assimilationists worldwide have caused many people, and not a few governments, to have grave concerns about public safety and health. A group of delegates have recently proposed new legislation to deal with these concerns. Kwan Keyser, the delegate from the East Africa Sanctuary, has been one of the more vocal opponents of such regulations. Many Assimilationists believe the recent release of Symborg—ah, here he is. Looks like our guest has just come outside…we’ll try to have a word—“

  Radovich motioned the dronecam to follow. She approached Keyser just as he came down the steps to the plaza grounds.

  “Mr. Keyser…Mr. Keyser…I’m Anika Radovich… Solnet Special Report…could we get a statement from you--?”

  Keyser was tall, thin, sandy-haired, with a faint moustache and big ears. He came over willingly, always looking for a stage to promote his views.

  “Hi, Anika…sorry I’m late. The session went—“

  Radovich hand-signaled the dronecam to hover just over their heads. Tight close-up, she mouthed to the bird. On her wristpad, she saw the closeup form on the screen as the camera zoomed in. Perfect….

  “Mr. Keyser, you’re on record as opposing the new containment laws being debated. Has the vote occurred yet? We hadn’t heard—“

  Keyser never waited for a sentence to be done before he cut in. “Some delegates are just monsters, Anika. That’s all you can call them. What am I supposed to do…what are legitimate swarms supposed to do when you have people like Lanier Barnes and his ilk calling for ‘angels and asses to be quarantined.’ Imprisoned in concentration camps. And on Kipwezia, no less. No Anika, the vote today is for sanity and human decency to prevail.”

  “Mr. Keyser, some people say angels aren’t human anyway. They say containment is just designed to keep Normals and angels apart…that angels are wrecking society and need to be controlled. You’ve heard all the comments: angels are just like viruses. We don’t let viruses have a vote. Why should we do that with angels? What’s your response to that?”

  Keyser looked like he had been punched in the stomach.

  “Ms. Radovich, one of the constants of life is change. We evolve. We don’t have monarchies anymore…we don’t believe in the divine right of kings. We have democracies. We don’t own slaves anymore. Human beings aren’t property. We have bots today, living in all parts of our society. They’re not human, I’ll grant that. But then neither were the dinosaurs.”

  “Then, are you saying that humans are dinosaurs, Mr. Keyser?”

  “No, no, of course not. Just that nobody with a brain believes that humans are the pinnacle of evolution. Or that change has come to a stop and we’re the perfected result. We can be so much more, Ms. Radovich. That’s what swarms bring…God, I hate that term. Angels sounds better. That’s what the Church of Assimilation offers…another path…another way forward. Humans, Normals, whatever you want to call them, have no more room to grow, or to advance. But angels…humans and nanobotic swarms working together, gives us a new way forward.”

  Anika Radovich waved at the dronecam to drop lower and swing around to give a three-quarters angle to Keyser’s face. She checked her wristpad. Good…hold right there….

  “Mr. Keyser, you know there’s a big debate going on, inside the UN, everywhere, about just how much of this Assimilation our society should allow. Does assimilating mean just enhancing our minds and bodies as is, inserting bots and swarms to take over or develop or enhance new capabilities in our more or less original bodies? Or does Assimilation mean ‘deconstruction?’ Breaking down the human body form into its constituent atoms and rebuilding it as a multi-configuration swarm, able to look and act like humans, like angels, but also able to act and look like other beings and structures as well? Enhancement versus reconfiguration…isn’t that the great divide in Assimilationist thinking?”

  Keyser kept pushing back an errant lock of hair from his eyes. The wind across the plaza had already made a mess of Anika’s.

  “Well, to be sure, the Church of Assimilation is quite clear on where we stand. The future is reserved for multi-configuration entities. Our historical human pedigree and design is old and creaky. It needs re-work. There’s lots of junk in our DNA, because evolution isn’t very efficient. Plus angels and multi-config lifeforms are more resilient, able to adapt to environmental change better. We can thrive in a greater variety of environments. Even better; unlike single-config entities such as yourself, swarms and angels and the like have no real threshold of death. As long as a swarm can gather and communicate and maintain minimal structure, it’s effectively immortal. Minimal structure is actually very minimal, potentially down to a single nanobotic device, with enough memory to assemble a new swarm as needed. You see this, don’t you, Ms. Radovich? You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand the basics of your arguments, Mr. Keyser.”

  “One more thing, Ms. Radovich and then I really must go. I’ve got a flight to catch…our role in the Universe is to fulfill our destiny, as dictated by the original design…the Old Ones who seeded the primordial lifeforms on Earth, lifeforms that became ancient viruses and whose genome lies at the heart of every ANAD-derived nanobot, everything that makes up angels, indeed all swarms. Control of our evolutionary destiny lies with us. We’re descended from ancestors of the Old Ones and we’re destined to join with them again. That’s really what this is all about…what Assimilationism is all about.”

  “What about the mass deconstruction gatherings…the mass suicides—“ Anika called out, but Keyser had already nodded perfunctorily, excused himself and scooted across the plaza to a taxi waiting by the curb. He disappeared inside and was gone in an instant.

  Radovich waved at the dronecam. “On me—“, she voiced into her lip mic. Then she tried to summarize for the record.

  “We’ve just been interviewing Mr. Kwan Keyser, here at the United Nations. Mr. Keyser is an official delegate from the East African Sanctuary and is also a leading spokesman for the Assimilationist movement worldwide. In his comments, Keyser—“

  She went over all the points Keyser had made, just to make a coherent story out of her report. Her editors back at Special Report would be wanting graphics, too so she scrolled down image files on her wristpad and selected a few to highlight the story.

  “Edit can add any effects later,” she decided. There would be the usual menagerie of fades, scrolls and dancing question marks that accented any Special Report file. “Oscar and Julio are better at that sort of thing.” She ended the dronecam session and commanded the bird to return to its roost…the Solnet studio complex on East 52 Street. With
a chittering and clattering of its quadrotor props, the bird wheeled about and headed home, joining a flock of other drones and birds streaming across the gunmetal gray skies of mid-winter Manhattan.

  Anika Radovich packed up the rest of her gear and went off to hail a taxi. She shuddered involuntarily as she bent into a stiff wind, scouring across UN Plaza. Something in Keyser’s words had given her a chill that wouldn’t go away.

  She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, the image of the vast throngs lined up at Assimilationist rallies and gatherings, all over the world. Vast throngs lined up at the assimilator booths…vast throngs begging for deconstruction, begging to be broken down into atom fluff and sent…who knew where? Off into the sky? To another dimension? To a particularly gruesome death?

  We’re descended from the Old Ones and we’re destined to join with them again.

  As Anika climbed into an autocab and the vehicle turned and sped off north toward the studios, she decided that for all his cleancut earnest Boy Scout air, Kwan Keyser was a complete loon. The whole idea gave her the creeps.

  Keyser returned to the Imperial Palace Hotel after a short cab ride from the interview. He checked the newsfeed and his mail several times on his specs; he had a flight to catch and he’d have to hurry to finish packing and make his flight out of JFK. The hyperjet would make the trans-Atlantic hop and cross the African continent in less than three hours, just enough time to catch a short nap and catch up on some work

  Keyser had important meetings coming up…in Addis Ababa, and other places. Of course, there would be closed-door consultations with Church of Assimilation officials…how did the vote go? Are we going to be recognized officially? How much support is there for us in the General Assembly? The usual stuff. Keyser would spill all of it, show them his files, his images, the eloquence of his speeches. And the Church’s top hierarchy would be suitably impressed.

  But the real meetings would come later and not in Addis Ababa. After all the Church business, a lifter would be waiting for him in Haile Selassie Park. It would be late, after midnight, local time. Keyser knew he that would board the lifter, alone. He would be the only person onboard. The lifter would be programmed to take off and fly a preplanned evasive route, just to discourage any pursuit or surveillance. After these maneuvers, the lifter would turn east and head out to sea, disguised as a chartered commercial sightseeing operator.

  Four hours later, just before dawn over the Indian Ocean, the lifter would descend to wave-top altitude, and using its self-morphing disguise to resemble a flock of birds, penetrate a narrow undetected seam in a protective MOBnet enclosure and land at its destination. Kipwezia. Mount Kipwezi. Prison cell for the last decade to Config Zero itself.

  And strictly forbidden to all humans and Normals, without prior approval from UNIFORCE.

  He finished packing and went downstairs, where the hotel concierge had already arranged an autolimo for the trip to the airport. What Keyser did not know was that the concierge was a member of UNIFORCE’s Quantum Mirror surveillance team.

  Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

  February 7, 2121

  0900 hours

  Valerie Patrice waited impatiently while Benes made adjustments to Sherlock. As she fidgeted, the van in which the Detachment was working rocked slightly in the backwash of all the taxis speeding up and down Sudan Street, their drivers honking and swerving back and forth, the weyalas hanging out of windows yelling fares and great deals.

  “Photo lens coming up, Inspector,” Benes muttered. She was working code and stick on this mission, running the op from a small control station packed into the back of the white van. They were parked just outside the old National Bank building, a block away from an uninspiring sandstone five-story structure, where Sherlock had tracked Kwan Keyser a few hours ago. “May have been some interference…something scrambled the entangler circuit in Sherlock’s coupler for a few minutes.”

  Cain, the other code and stick guy, had a theory. “Angels, Inspector. Got to be. Nothing else puts out decoherence waves like that.”

  “Well,” Patrice decided, “that can’t be a surprise. How long’s he been inside?”

  Benes checked. “Two hours and ten minutes. We know this building is an Assimilationist hideout. The main Church headquarters is several blocks away—“ she highlighted a spot on the map display “—up Churchill Avenue, near the square.”

  Patrice studied the visuals. “Magnify and enhance, Laura. Let’s see what Sherlock’s looking at.”

  Benes tapped out a few commands. The imager careened a bit—the subject was moving, shifting about—then settled down. Keyser was clearly sitting at a table. Others surrounded the table. Patrice counted three, four, five. Then she saw the sparkling in the background. A guest at the end of the table fuzzed out for a moment, then ‘snapped’ back to clarity.

  “Well, now there’s an angel…take a look. If that’s not Symborg himself, I’m a Martian rabbit.”

  Benes sent commands for Sherlock’s photon lens to focus on capturing photons from the target at the other end of the table.

  “Enhancing now.”

  Cain snorted. “The slimebag himself…look at him—“

  The target was a slender man, well groomed with a trim black goatee and moustache, hard cheek planes and a razor cut on top.

  “Well, that’s not a big surprise.” Patrice checked the time. “Make sure of the signature…we’ve got lots of data on Symborg. Check acoustics, EMs, thermals. Jesus, how long can this meeting go on? You’re getting audio too?”

  “Relax, Inspector, Sherlock’s getting everything,” Cain told her.

  “Let UNIFORCE know Symborg’s been tracked here and he’s in a meeting with our subject.”

  Throughout the morning, the Quantum Mirror team with Sherlock still embedded on Keyser’s physical person, had tracked and followed the subject all about the city of Addis Ababa. First, there had been a stop at Meskel Square, where a great Assimilationist rally was underway. Then, the subject had ridden one of Addis’ ubiquitous blue and white taxis down Churchill Avenue to a street filled with shops and bazaars, along the edge of the great Mercata district. There Keyser had strolled the tents and haggled a little over trinkets, but hadn’t bought anything. It was like he was suspicious, trying to throw off a tail. Patrice held her breath, hoping Keyser had no way to detect Sherlock. But the spybot had stayed attached and Keyser eventually walked on foot further south to Sudan Street, past the Sebastopol cannon and right into the Church of Assimilation building. He had been in meetings and conferences ever since.

  “What the hell are they talking about?” she wondered.

  “We can listen in real time—“ Benes offered. “I’ll reconfig Sherlock for audio pickup…only takes a moment.” She pecked out more commands, checked her work with Cain and sent the stream. A few hundred meters away, inside the beige sandstone building, Sherlock received and acknowledged the coupler commands with a curt reply. Moments later, clear audio issued from speakers inside the van.

  “…the booths need an upgrade…we’ve got to go all out on that—“ the speaker was a man just to the left of Keyser.

  Symborg cut in. His voice was deep, a bass profundo like an opera singer, perfect syntax, always in the dialect of his locale. Angels were like that, ever adaptable, always able to blend in. “That’s a big expense, Nico. Can we afford to do this?”

  A third participant, a black woman to Keyser’s right, spoke up. She wore bone jewelry and tight cornrows on her head, giving her face a wedge shape, as if she were a blade ready to slice someone in half. “Can we afford not to? The booths are our gateway. That’s the symbol. If they don’t work right, it looks bad.”

  Keyser stood up abruptly. They could see that from the way Sherlock’s perspective shifted. “I’ve got to go. The lifter leaves in half an hour. I’ll ask when I get there…see what Zero wants to do—“ He turned and left the meeting.
<
br />   Patrice snapped off orders quickly, rapid-fire. “Subject’s in motion. Tell Kaminski to get the lifter ready.” A Quantum Corps lifter, full stealth suite, was in auto-orbit a few blocks east of them, hovering at five hundred meters in a tight racetrack over the Jubilee Palace. “Keyser’s heading somewhere.”

  “Fifty to one, he’s headed for Bole. Remember we saw that lifter on the side of one runway.” Bole was the international airport, about ten kilometers west of them.

  “Could be,” Patrice agreed. “How’s Sherlock doing?”

  Cain studied the boards. “Sticking to the target like flies to a donkey. I’m shifting location…moving Sherlock back down to a chest perspective.” He sent some commands and a few hundred meters away, the master bot with its small retinue of replicants spun up their picowatt propulsors and lifted off from the shoulder position they had occupied during the meetings.

  “Can you do that with the subject in motion?” Patrice asked. “Won’t you lose contact?”

  “Not if I’m fast enough,” Cain told her. “Sherlock’s a hot rod. He can re-engage even if the subject’s falling off a building. Relax, Inspector.”

  So the surveillance detachment followed Kwan Keyser as he left the building, hailed another blue and white taxi, which went swerving, careening and honking through heavy traffic along Gebeyehu Street toward the airport connector.

  Kastanek was driving the van and struggled to keep up. Overhead, Kaminski drove the lifter to keep Keyser in view. He was indeed heading for Bole International Airport. The van arrived ten minutes after Keyser had paid off the taxi’s weyala and headed for the suspect lifter they had spotted upon arriving a few hours before.

  Kaminski put the Quantum Corps lifter down on the other side of the terminal building. Patrice jumped in. Cain and Benes would stay in the van and take it back to their Addis command post, a suite of offices at the Federal Police building uptown. Kaminski whirled the bird about just as Keyser’s lifter was taking off.

  “I’ll keep us a kilometer or so behind,” Kaminski decided. Patrice buckled herself in. Olivia Lourdes was also on board, running Sherlock from a small control station in the rear cargo bay.

  “Don’t lose him,” she said.

  Kaminski huffed. “Not a chance. In fact, I can pop in and out of these clouds, while he maneuvers out of here.” He dove the lifter into a bank of cumulus but kept the target squarely centered on the track reticule on his head-up display.

  The two lifters headed more or less east out of Addis, across a sere desiccated wasteland known as the Afar region. Patrice knew that a few million years ago, the region had been well-watered and lush, filled with early hominid tribes working their way up through the Rift Valley. Now, the land was moonscape desert, and only fossils and skeletons remained.

  Bad for farming, she thought. Great for archeologists.

  Once the lifter pursuit had settled down, Patrice decided to pay a visit to Lourdes in the back.

  “Any sign he knows we’re back here?” she asked Kaminski.

  “None that I can see, Inspector. He’s following an easterly course, heading zero eight five. We’ll go feet wet in about ten minutes unless he turns.”

  “Mmm. Headed for the Indian Ocean.” Patrice knew perfectly well what that meant. “Kipwezia…got to be. Keep on his tail.”

  “You got it.”

  Patrice went aft.

  Olivia Lourdes had been working Sherlock to get an image of the target lifter’s instrument panel. She acknowledged Patrice as the Inspector came back and took a seat, strapping herself in.

  “I’ve been checking the lifter out. It’s a drone, full auto. Keyser’s the only one on board…that I can detect. I’ve seen some thermal spikes that make me think we may have loose angels or other swarms on board, too. But I can’t confirm that.”

  “Anything on their heading?”

  Lourdes shook her head. “Target’s been on this heading for an hour. If Kipwezia’s the destination, I wouldn’t expect too many course changes. MOBnet outer bands are less than an hour away.”

  Patrice shrugged, settled back. “That should be interesting. Flying a lifter into a MOBnet at seven hundred kilometers an hour…won’t be much left after that.”

  Lourdes concentrated on driving Sherlock around the cockpit, so they could capture the target’s instrument suite and readings. “Unless he knows something we don’t.”

  “My read is that Mr. Kwan Keyser is headed to a meeting with our old friend Config Zero. I don’t know how he plans to penetrate the MOBnet, but he must have a way.”

  An hour later, the Quantum Mirror team had their answer.

  “Target is slowing,” Kaminski announced over the intercom. Patrice and Lourdes had been in the middle of re-configging Sherlock to sniff out different nanobot signatures when the word came. “I’m matching speeds, and ducking down below some clouds.”

  Patrice came up to the lifter cockpit and strapped in. “What’s the little bastard up to now?”

  Keyser’s lifter eventually came to a complete stop, then began a gentle spiraling descent toward the ocean. Ahead, the hazy outlines of Kipwezia’s front range could be seen, shimmering in tropical heat waves. A tall, conical summit was barely visible…the craggy flanks of Mount Kipwezi. White foam roiled the ocean surface as the lifter approached the turquoise waves below.

  The Quantum Corps lifter hovered out of view a few kilometers off, ducking into and out of building thunderstorm clouds. Kaminski fought the updrafts and tricky winds to keep Keyser’s vehicle in view.

  “What the hell’s he doing?” Patrice asked.

  “There’s your answer, Inspector.”

  Magnified on their display, they could see the side of the lifter split apart, disgorging a small black capsule, with twin booms and rudders. The capsule plopped into the ocean and promptly submerged.

  Patrice darted aft to Lourdes, to make sure they still had contact with Sherlock.

  “Barely,” said Lourdes. Her fingers played over a keyboard. “Coupler circuit’s intact, but the entangler’s doing a dance with us right now. Something nearby, something strong, is shaking entanglement states like a wet dog.”

  “Config Zero,” Patrice made a fist. “Has to be. Do we have specs on that MOBnet? Does it extend all around Kipwezia…even below ground?”

  Lourdes called up another display and studied the results. “Yes and no, Inspector. There may be seams or gaps below ground. The Net’s over ten years old. Nobody’s done any maintenance on it for years.”

  Patrice shook her head. “That’s life in the Corps, Olivia. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Keep after him.”

  But Olivia Lourdes found that Sherlock’s signal was getting weaker and fainter. Keyser was aboard that capsule, somewhere underwater, undoubtedly searching for some kind of gap, known or not, in the MOBnet that surrounded the island continent. The best she could do was boost coupler output and hope Sherlock’s entangler could keep up.

  Five minutes later, the signal from Sherlock went silent.

  “That’s it,” Patrice announced. “We’re deaf, dumb and blind now. Better let Paris know we’ve lost the target.”

  After being disgorged from its lifter, Keyser’s capsule had descended several hundred meters below the Indian Ocean. Searching for a known seam in the MOBnet, the capsule had probed and picked its way along the flanks of the submerged volcano that was Kipwezia for the better part of an hour, nosing in and out of niches, caves, and hollows in the murky sediment, occasionally tripping an automatic MOBnet response, which hardened instantly and kicked the capsule back away from the flickering barrier.

  Finally, the seam was found, a weak spot in the barrier. Config Zero had given Keyser rough coordinates, but it still took a little hunting. Now, the capsule extended its borer and Keyser lit off the botswarm inside. Exponential replication turned the borer head into a white hot ball of blue whit
e light, as uncounted trillions of bots burned supernova hot, building mass, configuring for their work.

  The capsule approached the Mobility Obstruction Barrier and engaged the barrier bots. Flashes and pops of light went off, like an underwater thunderstorm. Swarms engaged and battled, tearing furiously at each other, but the barrier was weak here, the config drivers old and poorly maintained. The capsule’s borer made quick work of the barrier and in a few minutes of vivid veins and streaks of light, it was inside the perimeter and nosing up to the basaltic flanks of Kipwezi’s underwater seamount.

  Now, the capsule borer set to work for entry into solid-phase structure, chewing and disassembling its way into the side of the mountain. Keyser hated this part. He chose to shut off the imager and closed his eyes, trying not to think about the fact that he was cocooned in a small pod, burrowing like a mole into solid rock, surrounded by tons of mountain.

  The journey would last several hours. The capsule would bore into the seamount, and create a small tunnel for itself. It would then turn upward, re-orienting itself and head for the surface, hundreds of meters above. Keyser had made this trip before, not without some anxious moments. He tried not to think about what would happen if the borer failed.

  It was late afternoon on the northwestern shores of Kipwezia when the capsule finally breached the surface, clambering out of its smoking tunnel like a prairie dog, sliding up and onto the sandy beach huffing and clanking, the late afternoon sun glistening off the dull black carapace of its armored hull.

  The borer head collapsed and the white-hot semi-sphere of the botswarm dispersed. For a few moments, nothing happened. Then the capsule began re-configuring itself for the next leg of its journey.

  Tunneling treads retracted. The borer head retracted back into the forward compartment of the capsule. Ellipsoidal pods extended at the bottom of the vehicle and propulsors spun up with a faint whine.

  The capsule rose on its lift jets and began a steady climb up the northwest slopes of the great volcano. Above, the summit was wreathed in steam and fog. Winds rocked the capsule as it ascended.

  Now, Kwan Keyser chanced a look out the forward hatch porthole. Fumarole vents and steam geysers studded the ground below, venting unimaginable pressures building underneath the ground, mixed with rivulets of lava littering the slopes of the mountain. Kipwezi was in all measures an active volcano.

  The capsule hunted around the windswept summit for awhile, then finally located the cave on the steepest slopes of the northwest flanks of Mount Kipwezi, nearly ten thousand feet above the surrounding beaches.

  The cave complex was well hidden in the folds and crevices of the upper slopes of the volcano, above a cloud deck and slick with ice and snow drifts. The wind screamed and gusted at well over eighty knots at this altitude and the capsule had to hunker down in the lee of a rocky barren to keep from being shredded with ice shards and rock chips scoured off the mountainside.

  The entrance was little more than a fold in the ground, like a bed sheet bent over and tucked under, maybe a meter across in its widest dimension. But the cave had once been the nerve center for swarm operations inside the East African Sanctuary.

  The cave held Configuration Zero. Config Zero…the master swarm itself.

  The capsule nosed into a narrow declivity and parked, attaching itself with nanobotic anchors. The hatch unsealed with a pressurized pop and slid back. Winds and ice flecks screamed around the hatch opening.

  It was time. Time for Keyser to exit the capsule, his home and safe haven for the last six hours. Keyser felt his throat go dry. He stepped out and ducked into the cave. Immediately, he confronted another barrier, this time a swarm blocking further passage.

  Keyser withdrew a small palm-shaped object and thumbed control studs on its side. Instantly, the barrier swarm fluoresced and flashed like a strobe. A shrill keening buzz echoed around the cave and the barrier went dark as the bots dispersed.

  He was in.

  Keyser moved deeper into the cave, following a drifting mist of bots that wavered in and out of view. He descended several levels, crossed a rock bridge across a deep chasm and maneuvered through more tunnels. Lighting was created by the mist, a pulsing, flickering light that cast deep shadows on the gnarled veins of rock lining the cave. The floor was slick, patches of ice everywhere. Soon enough, he came to a narrow opening, barely waist high. More light flickered from inside.

  The mist of bots which had floated alongside now swirled like dust in a storm and gathered around the opening like a frame, coruscating and flashing as if lit from within. Bonds were broken and atoms slung together…in moments, the mist formed itself into a small ramp, extending over a sluggish pool of water. At least, Keyser thought it was water, even as tendrils of steam hovered over the surface like a fog.

  Cautiously, he edged out onto the newly formed ramp and walked ahead.

  When it appeared, the swarm materialized out of the rock ceiling of the cave. At first, the swarm resembled nothing more than trembling shadows, a pale flickering ghost seemingly contoured with the cave ceiling and walls. As it descended from above, the swarm gathered itself into a roughly spherical shape, still pulsing, still throbbing, backlit from within by the fires of atomic bonds being broken, new structures being slammed together, new bots being formed.

  Configuration Zero hung in the misty air like a swollen cloud, ready to dump torrential rain on some tropical forest. But Keyser was a long way from any rain forests. The swarm unfurled itself and hung in the air like a great storm front, a trembling fist, flashing purple and orange and magenta all at the same time.

  Keyser looked up and swallowed hard.

  “I got nothing, Inspector,” Olivia Lourdes frowned and tried to will some kind of signal back from Sherlock but the comm display was blank. Nothing came back from the spybot. “The little guy’s offline…has been for hours now.”

  “Crap,” said Valerie Patrice. She glanced out the lifter porthole. They were in orbit off the shores of the island, darting in and out of building late afternoon thunderstorm clouds and the ride was a bit rocky. Kaminski was doing the best he could up front. “That capsule went under water and then we lost it.”

  “He must have found a weak spot in the MOBnet,” Lourdes opined. “Maybe he went solid-phase and burrowed into the mountain.”

  “But even so, we ought to be picking up Sherlock. Detecting and jamming quantum comms is almost impossible…you’d have to know the entanglement protocol and even then, it would be dicey.”

  Lourdes shrugged at her console. “Config Zero’s surprised us before, Inspector.”

  “That’s what worries me.” Patrice paced back and forth in the cramped cargo bay, now stuffed with gear for Quantum Mirror’s surveillance op. “Somehow Sherlock was detected and scrubbed off the target. Now, I’ve got no eyes and ears.”

  “What do we do? Wait him out?”

  “Have you got a better idea? I’ll squirt a message off to UNIFORCE.” She eyed the purple storm clouds building up from the south, another tropical system churning right toward them. “We wait,” she decided. “Better strap in too, Olivia. This could take a while.”

  It was after midnight—the lifter chronometer was flashing 0115—when Patrice was shaken awake. It was Lourdes, with Kaminski right behind her. She started violently, then remembered vaguely she was strapped into a web seat aft of the Sherlock console…she’d made herself a nest and tried to get a short nap.

  “What--?” She thumbed sleep from her eyes. “Something from Sherlock?” She undid the harness and sat up.

  “Got something—“Kaminski was saying. “Small craft, maybe a boat, down below. Just shoved off from Kipwezia. And another target, probably a lifter, closing from the north.”

  “Show me.” Patrice followed Kaminski into the lifter cockpit.

  Outside the portholes, Kipwezia was a black hulk, topped at the summit with a red glow from active vents and magma lakes
. The foam of heavy surf was visible offshore, even in the dark.

  Kaminski pointed to a screen. A shapeless dot was easing its way out to sea, away from the island shore. “There’s the surface contact. It may be that capsule we saw earlier.”

  “You said there was another lifter?”

  Kaminski changed the screen. “Aerial contacts. There—“ He indicated another display, this one crisscrossed with lines and streaks, contact traces. “Most of that is commercial traffic. But this one here…he’s going slow and descending. Bearing right for our surface contact too.”

  Patrice didn’t need to see any more. “Move in, Stan. Let’s follow along and see what we see.”

  “Can do.” Kaminski regained his seat, tapped a few buttons and let the lifter autopilot put them on an intercept course. “Range to aerial contact is less than five kilometers.”

  “Bring us in behind him.”

  They lurched and wobbled and rocked in the winds, but Kaminski put the lifter right on the tail of their contact.

  The unknown lifter, running without any exterior lights, made a steep diving, corkscrewing descent toward the surface contact. Then it went into a hover, less than a hundred meters above the ocean surface.

  “It’s a pickup,” Patrice decided. “Force that lifter down right here…I don’t want to engage over land…too many questions, things we can’t explain.”

  Kaminski steered them right for the target. “I can fire a warning shot.” Their lifter, code named Quantum Bird, was well equipped for combat.

  “Screw warning shots, Stan. Disable his lift jets. Put him on the surface.”

  Kaminski half saluted. Jeez, this lady’s got more balls than half of UNIFORCE. “Roger that.” He selected Magpulse Weapon Enable from the touch screen, dialing up fifty percent. That should do it. Then he thumbed the Engage button on his side stick.

  ”Hope to hell this works.” If auto-target was off by more than a meter, they could easily wind up shredding their target into a cloud of paint flakes.

  He fired a pulse. Keyser’s lifter wobbled with the hit, but kept on course. Kaminski fired twice more.

  This time, Keyser’s lifter couldn’t regain control and went into auto-rotation, spiraling down like a leaf toward the ocean surface. It struck at an angle, sending up a huge plume of spray.

  Kaminski was on top of him in seconds, bringing their lifter right above the wounded vehicle, which floated in heavy swells twenty meters below them.

  Patrice and Lourdes boosted out of the side hatch and clung in their hypersuits to the rolling top of Keyser’s lifter. Lourdes sprang the hatch with a well-timed burst of her own mag gun. They dropped inside, weapons ready.

  Kwan Keyser was the only human aboard. Already, he was grabbing gear left and right, stuffing bags with items, all the while unstrapping his harness. He must have hit his head on impact; a thin stream of blood trickled from a cut on his forehead. He stopped when he came face to face with the muzzle of Patrice’s gun.

  Less than five minutes later, Patrice and Lourdes had Keyser aboard their own lifter, restrained in a web seat in the back, with all his personal items: bags, slates, clothes. Keyser scowled back at them, struggled for a moment with his MOB bonds and then sank back bruised, his forehead covered with a temporary bandage.

  “This is piracy, you know…you’ll regret this.”

  Patrice busied herself rifling through Keyser’s stuff. “Actually, it’s kidnapping…or better yet, apprehending a suspect. I already regret it. Shut up. You’re taking a little side trip.”

  The lifter took off, but not until Kaminski had put some gaping holes in the side of Keyser’s ship. It careened on its side, rapidly filled with water, and sank in a minute without a trace.

  Kaminski put them on course for Addis Ababa and the UNIFORCE hyperjet waiting for them on the tarmac at Bole International Airport.

  Keyser was efficiently transferred to the waiting hyperjet and was off to the Quartier General at UNIFORCE Headquarters in Paris in less than half an hour. The black-winged ship thundered down the runway and burned a hole in the sky, like a meteor in reverse and was gone in seconds. Two hours later, Keyser was in a small interrogation room, looking up at his attorney, a legal avatar from UNIFORCE’s Justice Division, who read him his rights and offered some canned defense strategies.

  Keyser had nothing to say and the avatar disappeared. He was replaced by a Major Jorgensen, from Intelligence.

  Jorgensen was a tall blond Dane, with a dark pencil line for a moustache and tiny Spark spectacles. He studied the overlaid file on his eyepiece viewer, everything that Q2 had on Suspect U.22398, a.k.a Kwan Keyser, then motioned to the security bot to loosen Keyser’s restraints.

  Keyser rubbed his wrists and shoulders gratefully. “What happens now? I want a real attorney. You can’t just grab people off the high seas.”

  Jorgensen sniffed. “Actually, under the UNIFORCE Code, we can…especially when they’re violating quarantine regulations at Kipwezia. As to what happens now, well…let’s just say you’re going to take a little nap.”

  “A nap…I’m not sleepy.” That’s when the security bot jabbed his arm with a hypodermic. Keyser was out in a minute.

  “It’s a form of memory trace mapping,” the technician said to Valerie Patrice. She was inside the exam room along with Major Jorgensen and another technician. Kwan Keyser lay on a gurney, strapped in, hooked up with thick ganglia of wires, cables and tubes. A small hemi-spherical grid nearly enclosed Keyser’s skull.

  Jorgensen explained. “In cases like this, UNIFORCE Code allows us to…shall we say, bypass the legal niceties for a day or so. Keyser got his legal consultation…the avatar read him his rights, told him the charges. But in time-sensitive, security cases like this, we’re allowed to take this approach…when public safety is involved.”

  "It’s a fairly new technique but we've proven it at the lab many times. Cowley and Ruiz here are trained in all the details. Shall we get started?"

  "Gives me the creeps, I don't mind telling you," Patrice admitted. "Invading someone's mind like this--"

  "It's just a high-powered lie detector," said Jorgensen.

  "Let's get going," Patrice growled. "If Keyser’s got anything about these Net glitches or the MARTOP bots, I want to know it. It's too late for legal niceties now. Permission to launch."

  Strapped to a gurney next to the containment cylinder, Kwan Keyser had been sedated and prepped for ANAD insertion. His body was surrounded by a fine mesh of sensors--the vascular grid--that would precisely locate ANAD inside Keyser’s body, once the mech was inserted.

  Ruiz patted down the incision that had been made in Keyser's neck. "Okay, Major, subject's prepped and ready."

  Cowley handed him the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment cylinder. Inside, the ANAD bot ticked over, ready to be launched.

  "Steady even suction, Ruiz," Jorgensen reminded him. "ANAD, report status--"

  The shrill voice crackled over the circuit. "ANAD effectors safed for launch. All parameters normal. Internal bonds and states are stable. Sensors primed and registered. Core functions initialized…I'm ready to fly, fellows--"

  Ruiz glanced up at Jorgensen and Patrice, an embarrassed smile on his lips. "The assembler uses a small percentage of his computational ability to simulate emotional states…sometimes, it correlates, er, inappropriately."

  "Get on with it," Patrice ordered.

  "Vascular grid?" Ruiz asked.

  "Tracking," said Cowley. He tuned the grid to pick up the mech as soon as it was inserted.

  "Let's go, then."

  The insert went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the master replicant into Keyser's capillary network at high pressure. Cowley watched his board and quickly got an acoustic pulse seconds later. He selected Fly-by-Stick to test out the controls. A few minutes' run on propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue.


  Ruiz studied the sounder image. "Looks like you're ready for transit. You can force those cell membranes any time."

  Cowley told ANAD to probe for weak spots in a clump of lipids, clinging like a bunch of grapes in the middle of the wall. "I'll try there first--"

  He steered ANAD toward a cleft in the membrane lipids, pulsing one of the carbene grabbers to twist a nearby molecule just so, then released the lipid and slingshot himself forward through the gap. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes visible off in the distance. He tweaked the picowatt propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the grid.

  "Aortic cavity. Just past the Islet of Duchin, I'd say. Looks like we're in. Where are we going now?"

  Start Fourier Transform;

  Start Delacroix Transform;

  Start Trace Matching….

  The sounder image was staticky for a few moments, fuzzy, blurred, jumpy, but it settled down after some tuning by Cowley.

  “What are we looking at?” Patrice asked, cocking her head to get a better angle.

  “I know that place,” Jorgensen snapped his fingers. “It’s Kipwezi…that volcano…now on the island.”

  Patrice nodded. “I thought so. Keyser did take a little side trip.”

  They watched the whole of Kwan Keyser’s visit with Config Zero, in snatches and pieces, filled with bursts of static.

  Keyser, climbing out of the capsule…scrambling around the summit of Kipwezi hunting for the cave opening…Keyser easing through the mists of the cave…the rock walls laced with veins of ice…the smoldering bubbling pools…the thundercloud of Config Zero appearing out of nowhere…Keyser’s startled reaction….

  (The imager blurred, shot through with streaks of light, peculiar starbursts and fragments of hazy, out of focus visuals, all jumbled up. The speaker crackled with static--)

  Cowley fiddled with his joystick, tried tweaking the gain on the signal. "Looks like we lost that trace, Major. Just fizzled out."

  Major Jorgensen glared in disgust at the IC panel. "Can you get it back?"

  Ruiz shook his head. "Faded out, Major…we didn't have a good gradient to follow. I'll backtrack--"

  Patrice was there too, standing beside Jorgensen. "Eerie, isn't it? Seeing things through another man's eyes. Gives me the creeps," she admitted.

  "It seems to work well enough," Jorgensen said. "Couldn't tell you the theory behind it."

  "It's a damn circus trick," Patrice muttered. "We can really play back someone's memories like a recording?"

  "Not exactly, ma’am," said Cowley. He was helping Ruiz sniff out new traces for ANAD to follow. "We just put ANAD inside the suspect and replicate a few trillion times. Then we put the whole herd in 'bloodhound' mode and go hunting."

  "What exactly are you hunting for?"

  "Everybody makes memories the same way. It's called Long-term Potentiation. One of the chemical signatures of LTP is a molecule called glutamate…helps open a second voltage-gated channel inside the post-synaptic membrane--"

  Jorgensen intervened. "Allow me…. in plain English, Inspector, what it boils down to is that we can construct crude renditions of memory traces existent in the subject's brain, up to ten to fifteen days after the memory trace is laid down. We've been doing it experimentally for the last six months. ANAD shuttles around inside the subject's head like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for equal concentrations, down to the parts per trillion. Everywhere that concentration is equal is a pathway, burned in, a memory trace. ANAD follows it, sends back data on whatever it finds--calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times, lots of stuff. We can re-construct a very crude version of what originally laid down that track. Then we put it on the imager, cobbled out of visual and auditory sensory traces in this particular case. They're the easiest."

  "It's sort of like painting somebody's portrait from their shadow," added Cowley. "I was detailed to the lab, before I got trained on this. They actually used me as a guinea pig too. Kind of an echo of a memory, if you like."

  Patrice was dubious. "Sounds pretty nebulous to me. Why did we just now lose the trace?"

  "Unknown," said Cowley. His fingers were flying over the keyboard, managing ANAD's configuration, checking its parameters. "Somehow, we lost the trace…just petered out. It happens. All you can do is backtrack to a known point and start sniffing again."

  Patrice stared from the imager display to Keyser's still body, lightly breathing, and back again. He half expected to see the traitor twitch or move a leg or something. "So where is ANAD now?"

  "Here's the vascular grid, Inspector--" Cowley fingered the IC display to the side of the imager. The grid was a 3-D iconic image of Keyser's skull. "--I'd say…right about here…basal hippocampus region. Most of the swarm's about a hundred thousand microns anterior to the lateral septum."

  "We're picking up something," Jorgensen muttered. As Patrice watched over his shoulder, hoping to learn something more to impress UNSAC with, Cowley steered through a dense bog of dendrites. Thickets of axon fibers clouded the imager, now slaved to ANAD's electromagnetic sounder. "--strong trace…this one's holding, looks like--"

  "Stay with it," Jorgensen encouraged him. He leaned over across Cowley, watching him massage ANAD's configuration, souping up the sensors.

  "I'm altering config--" Cowley said in a low voice. "It'll help us sort out the traffic--lots of chem around here--"

  Keyser stirred lightly on the gurney, until Ruiz steadied his body. "He's coming back through Level 4," Ruiz muttered. "We'd better hurry, if we're going to get anything out of this--"

  "I'm trying, Carlos." Cowley glared at the imager, flexed his fingers around the hand controllers. He let ANAD finish changing config, noting that all the other trillion mechs slaved to the master had done likewise, then maneuvered the device into the lee of a dendritic 'breakwater'…sniffing for calcium, sodium, anything it could follow, grabbing molecules left and right, until at last, Cowley cracked the barest hint of a smile. Deep inside the unconscious brain of Kwan Keyser, the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler blazed away at incredible speed, spasmodically sorting and advancing along the barest whiff of a chemical highway.

  Seconds later, a green light illuminated alongside the screen. The sparky haze began to part--ANAD sent back a signal indicating readiness--

  Start Trace Matching….

  Keyser sees the flickering mist-cloud that is Config Zero…inside the cave, it is descending from the rocky ceiling…Keyser is trembling, his hands are shaking, he backs away…Config Zero speaks…’…all elements are arriving on schedule…seeding is occurring at the optimum rate…single-configuration entities are being disassembled…Config Symborg has been released…’…the image shifts…now the sky is shown, it is late evening, twilight, the sky is filled with light streaks…a meteor shower is—

  Cowley tweaked ANAD again, but the trace was gone.

  "What happened?" Patrice asked. She was growing more and more annoyed with this harebrained stunt.

  "ANAD lost the trail, Inspector," Cowley said. "I'm trying to get it back now…"

  Ruiz changed ANAD's config slightly. "I'll see if dropping a radical off this arm helps--"

  Jorgensen was thoughtful. "I'd say we have enough right now to charge Keyser. Conspiracy to commit espionage, sabotage, treason, violating UN quarantine regulations, for starters."

  Patrice was uneasy with the whole technique. "Even in UNIFORCE, a man accused has a right to counsel."

  "It won't help," Jorgensen told her. "We’ve just seen him meeting with Config Zero…inside Kipwezia…that’s a violation right there.”

  "Admitted under duress," Patrice reminded him.

  "Now is not the time to be splitting legal hairs," Jorgensen told them. "If what we're seeing is half of what really happened, Keyser's in a mountain of trouble. Cowley, just how reliable is this stunt? How do you know thi
s isn't something out of the man's imagination?"

  "That would take some explaining, sir, but the basic answer is in the details of the glutamate molecule, and the trail it lays down. There are subtle differences when the long-term potentiation is activated from direct sensory input--from external events, as it were--and when it's internally generated. We've tuned ANAD pretty finely to be able to detect the differences."

  Jorgensen gave that some thought. "How much further can you go with this? Can you reconstruct everything?"

  Cowley shrugged. "Practically speaking, no. The more convoluted the traces become--the more they become abstracted into higher levels of the brain--the harder it is to follow them. There's a practical limit on the concentrations of glutamate that ANAD can follow. Usually memory traces older than a few weeks are pretty much impossible to follow consistently. And there is the matter of damage as well."

  "Damage? What kind of damage?"

  Cowley wanted to be precise in what he said. "Every time ANAD follows a trail of glutamate molecules, he slightly damages the molecules in the process of examining them. We call it a fragmentation trail. The subject's memories are slightly altered with each probe."

  "So this can't be done accurately again, after this probe?"

  Cowley nodded imperceptibly, admitting the truth of what the Q2 officer was saying. "Let's say the accuracy of the reconstruction suffers with each 'reading' of the trail."

  Patrice had seen enough. “I’ve got to get this upstairs to UNSAC immediately. If there’s any truth to what we’re seeing, it’s evident that Keyser has specific and detailed knowledge of these MARTOP bots falling to Earth from space…and maybe even infiltrating Solnet and Worldnet.”

  Within the hour, Patrice had vidconned in Evan Metcalf, still at Gateway Station, with what the trace mapping had uncovered. Anson Leeds, the US Cyber Corps investigator was also on the circuit, from Herndon, Virginia.

  Patrice filled them in on the details, squirting transcripts of the trace mapping to all parties.

  Leeds was tight-lipped. “This fits in with what we’re seeing on the Net. Glitches and anomalies all over the place. If these were worms or viruses or malware, they’re operating like nothing I’ve ever seen before.” Leeds told them of the theories circulating around Cyber Corps of some kind of sentience growing inside the Net. “Few of us really believe that, but there are techs down in CyberLab who swear by it. Now, this—“ he shrugged. “It makes CyberLab’s ideas look tame now.”

  Metcalf tried to get his head around all that was happening. “Bots from outer space, infiltrating the Net. And we’ve got samples here at Gateway. I’ll send you what our lab has found…these bots have configs and capabilities beyond anything anyone has ever seen.”

  Leeds had made up his mind. “Valerie, UNSAC and the Secretary-General need to know about this. If we can corroborate the lab results from Gateway, with trace mapping from your work and what we’re finding on the Net, we’ll have something to work with. Remediation efforts for cleaning up the Net need to be authorized and begun right away. “

  “And we’ll have to find a way of blocking this infall of bots…maybe they’re coming from that source on Europa…the one General Winger dealt with so long ago.”

  The three of them agreed to meet again in twenty-four hours. Valerie Patrice shut down the link and sat at her desk, staring out the window at the mansard roof of the Luxembourg Gardens a few blocks away, lit up with colored spotlights at night. Tourist drones flitted by, circling like vultures over central Paris. Some things never change, she thought.

  Bots from outer space, infesting the Net. It sounded like a bad science fiction movie. Patrice rubbed her eyes, trying to keep her head from spinning. God, I need a drink. Some kind of sentience growing inside the Net. Angels popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain, everywhere. Normals disappearing. Assimilationists around every corner… your neighbors, your own family suspect. And among all the nightmare images that kept coming unwelcome to her aching head, the face of Symborg kept recurring, Symborg at rallies, Symborg on the Net, on vids and slates and tablets and wristpads everywhere, multiplying like a bacterial infection, consuming everything and everyone in some kind of cataclysmic exponential overdrive…like a Big Bang right here on Earth.

  Valerie Patrice reached into the bottom drawer of her desk and felt around for the tiny bottle. This was one evening that seemed well suited to a few dozen pulls on that vodka she had been trying to quit.