Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

  Okay, just shift the weight back, push off into a low sitting posture. Easy…

  But now there were other screams, and the sounds of people running.

  Smale --> Huynh: Help us, Tim!

  Huynh glanced through a camera on the other end of the forklift: The robot that had been the Greater Scooch-a-mout was still standing by the library, but now its center of gravity was absurdly high and someone had overridden all its safeties, to push against the nearest pillar. The mech’s foot pads were grinding into the concrete cladding of the terrace. There was the sound of motors on emergency burn, but in an off/on/off rhythm that sounded almost musical. The robot looked like a child trying to prop up a teetering bookcase.

  Huynh turned the camera to look up and up…at the sixth floor overhang, almost directly overhead. There were gaps in the concrete, and places where the floors tilted and swayed. It was a building that had the smarts to stabilize itself, even to move a little. But now that intelligence was cut off from location information. Like Timothy Huynh’s forklift, the library was doing its best to remain standing…and on its own vast scale, it was failing.

  31

  BOB CONTEMPLATES NUCLEAR CARPET-BOMBING

  Bob coasted across the UCSD campus, his landing dart now as slow and quiet as the network munitions that were raining out of the sky. This was a classic network-superiority assault, absent significant defenses. There were many many things to do and only seconds to do them, but for these few moments he had a paradoxical sense of security. There weren’t many places in the modern world where a human could be as self-sufficient—if only temporarily—as when in command of such an assault. Bob Gu’s expeditionary group had its own network, its own power supplies, its own sensors. Even if all his remote analysts were to disappear, his marines would still be in business.

  At the moment, thousands of assault nodes were nestling into trees and bushes, fastening themselves to vehicles and ledges and the sides of buildings. Even before they touched down, they asserted primacy over what civilian network hardware still functioned. That takeover was almost complete. He already had access to almost all the embedded controllers in the area. In combat, those local systems were often unsalvageable. Here, there were a few seconds of intense interrogation, DHS authority was asserted, and he had control. The cars and wearables, the medicals, the viewpoints and financials and police systems, they were all responding. Police and rescue workers were reconnecting via the combat net. Already he could hear their voices picking up the operation. With just a little luck, there would be no loss of life, just a very bad and strange network outage. He would leave the combat net in place, just as in a foreign operation. Over the coming days it would be replaced—not by administrative forces but by the gradual reassertion of the civil system.

  None of that was really important. “The labs. Have they responded?”

  “Yes, sir,” came Patrick Westin’s reply. He was on the ground with the first squad, near the GenGen main entrance. “We have access to the labs’ backup security. It’s agreeing with the primary, claims the underground is secure, no sign of perver—”

  Civilian status alarm: Building Failure. The letters streamed across a corner of Bob’s view. The university library was going down. In combat bad things happen, but tonight the cause looked like stupidity plus bad luck—first the rioters making their library “dance,” then network outage destroying its smarts. Whatever the reason, people would end up just as dead.

  Bob threw the problem to his reserve squad, which just now was four hundred meters up, coming down with assorted hardware…including the rescue lances. He was vaguely aware of the lance canisters popping their fins, turning to point down into the library. There was the flash of a hundred tiny rockets, and as many hardened nodes were rammed downward through the concrete and steel of the elderly building. Inside, action would be faster than any human attention, the composite flechettes guiding themselves between walls, doing their best to minimize damage to old-style wired utilities. Once in place, they would displace the control codes of the dead building system, and attempt to contact the stability servos. Waves of compute and recompute flickered from the squad’s status board. Success depended on just what had survived and how fast it could engage the marines’ localizer mesh.

  But rescue was not the mission. His attention was on Patrick Westin—

  “Understood,” Gu said. “Make it clear to biotech management and automation: They are to stand down and seal off the labs. Nothing goes in or out.”

  “Warn and embargo. Yes, sir.”

  Maybe the Xiang message was some bizarre fraud. Maybe, yeah. He gave Westin another squad and engaged police backup. CDC inspectors would be here from Denver in about thirty minutes and then they could contemplate making a safe entrance into the labs.

  Bob glided in a silent arc around the south side of the campus. It was time to land himself and his third squad. Where?

  If this was enemy action, there should be local honchos on the enemy side. He popped up the suspect lists. There was the usual population of foreign students. The interesting ones would be interviewed by the end of the evening. The library festivities had been almost a total surprise to the press—so why had that Bollywood contingent just happened to be in town and on-site? Surely the Indo-European Alliance wouldn’t try anything really destructive. But the European cert collapse seemed at the heart of the destruction here in San Diego. The analysts and Bob’s own intuition put the Bollywood crew at the top of his interest list.

  He stalled his dart in a clearing among the eucs, and crunched down on a litter of branches and dead leaves. The third squad dropped at twenty-meter intervals east and west from his position. There were shouts and lights from up the hill toward the library. The building was still out of plumb, but stability servos were engaged and—if nothing else failed—it should maintain a standing state. Police vehicles had come alive; direct loudspeakers were making calming announcements. If things worked out, they might even be able to disguise the fact that there had been a military response. Local public safety could pat itself on the back for heading off one of those rare but inevitable system glitches…Just ahead was the cluster of game and film people from Bollywood. They had already received a hold notice. None of them were attempting to leave. Just a few words with you, ladies and gentlemen, that’s all we want.

  GenGen said the labs were sealed tight, ready for the proper authorities—when? Ha! The CDC inspectors were ahead of schedule; somehow they had gotten superballistic transport. They’d be on the ground in ten minutes. He had support extending up the chain of command. And downward, too. Some very large, very competent groups were reworking the odds that the labs had been converted to factory-of-death mode. They agreed that the probability was less than one percent—that is, science fiction.

  Now his analyst pool was larger than Bob Gu had ever seen, perhaps fifteen percent of the analytical power of the entire U.S. intelligence community. All that support should have been comforting, yet there were places where the connectivity looked thin. Maybe that was just the way the associations flowed when a crisis was totally bizarre.

  Others thought it strange, too. He saw lots of paranoid colors. Finally someone got desperate:

  I have a sanity check. We’ve lost communication with five percent of our original threat analysts since the revocation attack began. This should be impossible. All analysts were internal to the U.S. intelligence community. If Credit Suisse certificates were necessary for any of those participants to maintain connectivity, then there was at least a design failure…and maybe the enemy had been part of Bob’s own support staff.

  There was an immediate counterargument:

  You’re mistaking loss of connectivity for loss of trustability.

  Then parts of the analyst pool got jammed in the controversy. It was the kind of deadlock that only a miracle-worker could quickly untangle—and Alice is off in some hospital ward.
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  Another alarm flashed across the lower part of his vision. His combat network lay all across campus now, and it did more than manage communication. Altogether, it was a two-thousand-meter-wide snooper-scope, and its report: GenGen’s private UP/Ex launcher has just gone hot. A counter showed sixty seconds till cargo boosted out of the labs.

  Even as USMC sensed the launch capacitor charging up, GenGen’s own network continued to assure the world that all was safely sealed.

  Something was trying to break out of GenGen.

  This is way too much like Asunción.

  Bob glanced at the nukes and death-fog dispensers and HERFs and HEIRs floating down through 10,000 meters. To the journalists, those weapons should look like random aerobots—but they gave Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., the physical power to annihilate any threat in this corner of the U.S.A.

  So what was the Minimum Sufficient Response?

  Thirty seconds till UP/Ex launch. Chaos still reigned in the land of the analysts.

  Verified contact with DoD/DHS had been lost.

  Sometimes decisions come down to one poor slob on the ground.

  32

  THE MINIMUM SUFFICIENT RESPONSE

  Mus MCog

  The Stranger’s pdf said that “Mus” was short for “Mus musculus.” Mice! The mouse arrays stretched away into the dark. If anything, the place seemed even bigger than it had the first time Robert had been here. So where to go?

  Miri hesitated only a second, then ran in the direction of the loudest noises. They trotted down two aisles and over one. Yes! Here was a cabinet with doors swung wide. Pneumos were delivering white cylinders into the crystal forest on top.

  Miri skidded to a stop in front of the opened doors. Inside the cabinet were glassy racks; it was like some kind of old-time snack dispenser. The slots behind the glass were a silvery honeycomb, hundreds of perfect hexagonal cells. Hundreds of tiny faces looked out of the cabinet. Tiny faces with tiny pink eyes, on tiny furry white heads. A high-pitched chittering came through the glass.

  “They can’t move, they’re wedged in so tight,” said Miri. “Their rear ends must be plugged into little—” She paused, perhaps looking up background on her local cache? “—little sucking diapers.” For a little girl who had no interest in pets, there was a strange sadness in her voice. “It’s a standard thing really.”

  Miri tore her gaze away from the array of chittering faces. “Each of these cabinets has mice cells arranged twenty by thirty by ten. So there are nine more arrays behind this one we’re looking at. Hear the crunching noise? Smart-Aleck’s friends are wrapping up some of them for shipment.”

  “But where?” None of the mouse cells were moving.

  “That must be in back—”

  There was a sound like a goblet breaking. Colored mist floated down from the crystal forest. It barely wet his face. But Miri was standing right beside the cabinet. He reached out and drew her back. Above them, the rest of the fluidics shattered. There was the faint scent of unwashed socks. Robert moved them farther back, stepping on the broken glass. “Miri, that could be nerve gas.”

  Miri was silent for a second and then her voice piped up confidently: “They’re trying to scare us. This part of the lab isn’t designed for simple poisons.” But Robert remembered the shipping cartridges just arriving here. We were suckered into stopping at this cabinet.

  Miri slipped out from behind him and ran around the cabinet. “Ha! There is a transport tray back here.” By the time he caught up, she was hosing the tray with aerosol glue. Tiny motors whined, unable to load from the cabinet. Miri reached out, patted the almost invisible boundaries of the gel. After a moment the crunching sounds within the cabinet came to an untidy stop. “Nothing’s going out from here!”

  They stood, listening…and now the familiar sound of cargo prep came from all over the cavern.

  “How many mouse arrays are there, Miri?”

  “Eight hundred and seventeen when I cached the lab description.” She looked up at him. “But there’s no way Smart-Aleck’s friends could be using more than a few arrays. There’s too much security and too many other projects down here…” The sounds of packaging grew louder. Dozens of cabinets were playing the game of Come Stop Me. Miri stepped back and gazed into the distance. The lab was a miniature city, its alleys laid out in a rectangular grid, stretching off into the dark beyond their single streetlamp. “I’ve got a good map, but…what can we do, Robert?”

  Robert looked at her map. “I came through here with Tommie. We set down gadgets by particular cabinets.”

  “Yes! Which ones?”

  Robert looked again at the map floating in the air before him. The place was a maze, and the cabal had come in from a different direction. “I, uh—” In 2010, Robert had gotten lost in a shopping-mall parking lot. After an hour, he still couldn’t find his car; he’d ended up at mall security. That had been the first undeniable encounter with his mental decline. But the new me shouldn’t have trouble remembering! “The nearest is two rows thataway, then jog right.”

  They raced past two aisles, then over one to the right. Almost all the cabinet doors were open, their transport trays working to prep cargo. Miri waved at the pneumo tubes that branched above the cabinets. “But see, nothing is actually shipping from here. Where’s the next place?”

  And they were running again, off toward his best guess.

  Ahead of them something loomed against the ceiling. The GenGen launcher.

  Miri skittered to a stop, and began shaking her spray can. “Which one, Robert?” All the cabinets around her were behaving like suspects.

  “It’s still two more rows, then five cabinets down.”

  “But I thought you said—never mind.” Miri walked past two more rows. Robert followed.

  She looked up at him.

  “I…I’m not sure.” He glared over the tops of the cabinets, trying to orient on the launcher, trying to force memory.

  She hesitated and then touched his arm. “It’s okay, Robert. Sometimes, you can’t remember. But things will get better for you.”

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m sure this is right.” The pneumo tube behind the nearest had just received a shipping cartridge. Mouse boxes were rolling on board.

  “So that means, um”—and Miri’s hand slipped from his arm. She looked around and then up at him: “Where are we?”

  Maybe it hadn’t been nerve gas. Maybe it was something worse. And Miri got the bigger dose. Above the cabinet the pneumo hatch had closed. There was a pillowed thud and the cartridge sped away.

  Another cartridge pulled into the siding above the cabinet. Another batch of mice rolled to meet it. It was out of reach, But I still understand what has to be done. Robert looked down at Miri and did his best to smile and lie. “Oh, we’re just on a tour, Miri. How about it, would you like to climb on top of that cabinet?”

  She looked up past him. “I’m not a little girl, Robert. I don’t climb on other people’s property.”

  Robert nodded, and tried to hold his smile. “But Miri, this…this is just a game. And…if we can stop the white thing with your, your game gun, then we win. You want to win, right?”

  Now that brought a smile, full of pert intelligence. “Of course. Why didn’t you say it was a game. Huh. This looks like some kind of bio science lab. Nice!” She looked at where the transport was sliding the mouse boxes along. “So what do you want me to do?”

  Once she’s up there she’ll forget all over again. “I’ll tell you when you get up there.” He lifted from beneath her arms. “Reach up! Grab the edge and I’ll push.”

  Miri giggled, but she did reach up, and Robert did push. She slid through the gap beneath the siding. Her spray can was just inches from the transport tray.

  “Now what?” her voice came down to him.

  Yes, now what? You go to all the trouble to do something, and then you forget the point. Only this time, he knew the point was something very important. Robert flailed, beginning to panic, �
�Cara, I don’t know—”

  “Hey, I’m not Cara. My name is Miri!”

  Not my sister, my granddaughter. Robert stepped back from the cabinet and tried to make sense: “Just shoot the spray can at the moving things, Miri.”

  “Okay! No problem.”

  A sound that was pain spiked into his head. Over the cabinet, he had a glimpse of a strange hole that split the side of the UP/Ex launcher. Nothing to do with Miri! The thought had barely registered when he was slammed backwards.

  ARRAY ONE WAS in the GenGen launcher! The stealthed launch vehicle had a good chance of making it out of the U.S. cordon. Array Two? Alfred’s cameras showed that his strategy with the Gus was working. Somehow they had found the one Mus cabinet that really mattered, but his improvised gas attack was taking effect. The two were moving with a kind of aimless uncertainty.

  He had time to prep the second load; he could get both out!

  Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: USMC elint has detected ballistic launcher power-up in the labs! What can that be, Alfred?

  Damn USMC. Alfred’s analysts hadn’t thought American electronic intelligence would be so sensitive.

  Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri: It’s just bad luck. The GenGen launcher is cycling through its nightly calibration. That was a lie, but Alfred had his story ready. He launched a flurry of faked analysis, showering conclusions across Keiko and Günberk’s teams. After the fact, he’d blame the launch on a resurrected Rabbit.

  Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: But will the Americans believe that? She popped up some windows, her best estimate of just when and how the USMC might respond to the launch prep.

  No time for the third cartridge. The GenGen launcher was loaded, the capacitor within forty-five seconds of launch. If only the Americans would just dither a bit.

  Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri: I’m finished with cleanup. Heading for rendezvous. Alfred took a last glance around. In fact, all his checklists were finally green. Across the room, the Orozco boy was sleeping peacefully. He would remember nothing of tonight, and his personal log had been artfully corrupted.