EMPIRE: Resistance

by Richard F. Weyand

  “The thought is if some group of people has a long-term campaign against the Empire, those are the most likely suspects. We’re looking for the ones that don’t fit. Why is that person in this sensitive position? That sort of thing. I don’t know what you’ll find, so I can’t give you more detail than that.

  “Have at it, people. And remember. Set a pace you can maintain. This isn’t a quickie.”

  Darden waved goodbye, and the simulation emptied in seconds.

  “This one’s a challenge,” Matthew Houseman said to his group, sitting around their normal table in the Zoo.

  “What? Find maybe two, two and a half billion specific people in a population of two and a half quadrillion, spread across half a million planets. Nah. Easy,” Rick Pender said with sarcasm.

  “No, that’s not right,” Lois Costas said. “There’s a hundred and twenty-eight people total, right?”

  “Right,” Houseman said.

  “So they’re only on a hundred and twenty-eight planets, max, when we start,” Costas said. “Why include planets that don’t have anybody of interest on them?”

  “Well, they are going to move around,” Denise Coutard said.

  “Yes, and then we add that planet to the mix,” Costas said. “But people emigrate from their home planets much less often than you might think.”

  “Harry’s probably working on extracting birth records across multiple planetary formats,” Wang Minwei said. “This is important for him to know.”

  Wang disappeared to another section of the Zoo – it simply wouldn’t do to take the seconds to walk over there – and everybody laughed. He popped back and nodded to Houseman.

  “We probably also need to ask the Navy to use their big database engine again.”

  “Got it,” Wang said, and popped out again to reappear seconds later.

  “OK, good,” Houseman said. “Limiting the planets of interest should make things a lot easier. Good one, Lois. What else?”

  “Taking off from what Lois said,” Lucia Martelli said, “people don’t emigrate from their home planet very often. But those people may be of the most interest. If someone is an operative for some conspiracy, he might change planets to carry out some assignment or place himself to be the most help to the conspiracy. Not the ringleaders. I think they’d stay put. But an operative would be more likely to move, I would think.”

  “I think that’s right,” Costas said.

  “OK. So let’s make sure we don’t let those émigrés go,” Houseman said. “We want to make sure we track them down. What else?”

  “I think this could be set up as a massively parallel operation,” Wang said. “Whenever we get a new descendant, we create an entry and dish out a scrape on them, tagging all that to their entry as we go. It’s going to bog down as it branches, but computation resources isn’t a problem.”

  “I think that’s right, Matt,” Pender said. “You normally try to avoid that sort of thing, but, given the timeframe and the resources, that’s probably faster than trying to simplify it.”

  “All right,” Houseman said. “Good start everybody. Let’s post all this so all the groups can use those insights, and then get started on structuring some queries.”

  Lina Schneider addressed her people in Investigations on Friday afternoon as well.

  “In addition to everything else we have going on at the moment, we just got a big assignment from Their Majesties. Find all the bank accounts held in aliases.”

  That got a groan from the investigators.

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I said.”

  That got some chuckles.

  “But the only ones of interest are the ones with large funds in them, so that makes it much easier. Now I know the Zoo is going to grab the big Navy computers for their new problem, which is even bigger. I could arm wrestle Olivia for it, I suppose, but I think they need them more than we do. So we’re going to have to work smart.

  “One advantage we have there is we can use the big Imperial Bank computers, particularly over the weekend. I’ve already talked to them about it. So let’s see if we can’t get this all set up and running before we leave, and it can cook all weekend.

  “In terms of working smart, I think we want to tier this problem. Let’s sort out all the bank accounts by amount on deposit, by orders of magnitude, and just drop anything with less than ten million credits in it. There’s big money behind this conspiracy, and we need to find it. Because if we can find it, Their Majesties can impound it.

  “So let’s tier out the big accounts and then start scraping on the account holders. As soon as we get a couple of solid hits indicating the account holder is a real person, we can mark it and drop the scrape. That ought to get us most of the way there. It’ll be a good place to start Monday morning, anyway, if we can have that run over the weekend.”

  On Saturday morning, Ardmore had a mail from Pitney waiting in his inbound queue. It had a large attachment, a Department operative’s interview with Oleg Scharansky. Ardmore was up early, and he watched the interview before breakfast.

  Q: What’s your name and position?

  A: Oleg Scharansky. I’m the senior vice president of research for NanoHealth.

  Q: NanoHealth makes health maintenance nanites?

  A: Yes. We design and manufacture them.

  Q: Does your premium health nanite package have a kill function?

  A: No, not exactly. That’s not how they work.

  Q: Explain.

  A: Nanites are stupid actuators. They don’t have high-level functions. When people think of their nanites, they think of them like a computer inside their body that can do things. It has menus and functions and options. But the nanites don’t have any of that. The VR system provides the high-level functions.

  Q: Keep going.

  A: Think of a house with a lot of controls. There’s an intelligent actuator that can open and shut this door. Another one for that door. Another one on each window. There’s one that senses rain on the roof. Another that senses the outside temperature. Another that senses wind speed. Another that can tell whether or not you’re home.

  Now, you can set up the house so that, when you’re home, if the weather is nice – the temperature is in a certain range, it’s not raining, and the wind isn’t blowing really hard – the windows will all open. But the actuators don’t do that. The window actuators don’t know if it’s raining or not. They don’t know the temperature. They don’t know if the wind is blowing. They don’t have that information, and they don’t know how to make that decision.

  There’s a computer somewhere in the house that makes those decisions. It gets the temperature, the wind, the rain, runs your program, decides whether to open the windows or not, and then either does or doesn’t send commands to the window actuators. That’s what the VR system does.

  Do you get that part?

  Q: Sure.

  A: OK. So, for example, the contraceptive nanites know how to prevent pregnancy. They come with that as the default operation. If you inject them into someone without VR, that’s what they’ll do. But to turn them off, so you can become pregnant, that requires connection to a VR system somewhere. To read the input back from them and see if you’ve ovulated, to see if you’re pregnant, or to see if you’re carrying twins, say, the nanites just report what they each know how to report, and the VR system decides what that means.

  Q: So the VR connection is really the key to everything? That’s the only reason health nanites work?

  A: Yes. Exactly. Everybody thinks of their nanites like some computer, but they’re not. They also think of them as if the nanites were all the same, and they’re not. Each package has lots of different kinds of nanites in it.

  Q: Like window actuators, and door actuators, and temperature sensors, and all that.

  A: Exactly.

  Q: So how does the kill function work?

  A: What you call the kill function is possible because there is an extra command certain nanites in the premium he
alth maintenance package will respond to. It amounts to ‘break the window’ or ‘set fire to the roof.’ Do something that is distinctly not healthy for the host. If they all do their part of it, the body is overwhelmed under the combined impact, and the person dies. It usually looks like a cardiac arrest, because stopping the generation and transmission of the electrical signal to cause the heart to beat the next time is the easiest interference with the person staying alive. That electrical signal is actually pretty sensitive.

  Q: Do the nanites in the basic health maintenance package have that extra command?

  A: No.

  Q: So if someone flushes all their nanites, and loads the basic health maintenance package, the kill command won’t work?

  A: That’s right. If they run a search-and-destroy package to kill all the nanites currently in their system, and then load the basic health maintenance package, they’re safe from this interference.

  Q: So who put the extra command in the premium nanites?

  A: I don’t know.

  Q: You don’t know?

  A: No. I have no clue.

  Q: You know all this and you kept it quiet. Why?

  A: I was a senior researcher. I was looking into new commands for nanites, and new nanites to include in a package. New actuator functions, right? And I tripped over this extra command I couldn’t figure out. I took it to my boss, who was the previous vice president of research. He said he would look into it. OK, so I go back to work on new nanites, right?

  Q: OK. Then what?

  A: I get a call from someone. At home. He tells me I keep my mouth shut, or bad things might happen. To me. To my family. If I keep my mouth shut, good things can happen for me. I tell him I’m not interested. He says he’ll give me a couple days to think about it.

  The next day, my thirteen-year-old daughter was out with friends of hers. A group of friends. They went to the zoo and some shopping downtown. They get off the bus in the neighborhood, and, as they’re walking along the sidewalk back to one of the kids’ houses, a shot rings out and a groundcar parked ahead of them on the street takes off.

  The girl walking next to my daughter falls down dead. They shot her in the head.

  Q: Fuck!

  A: Yeah. The next day, I get a call from the same guy. He says, Terrible what happened yesterday. Why, it could just as easily have been your daughter. Then he asks me if I’ve reconsidered. So yeah, I took the deal. Wouldn’t you?

  Q: Yeah, I probably would. What did the cops do?

  A: Nothing. Random act of violence. No clues. The VR address of the guy who called me didn’t exist. Nothing to be done.

  Q: Shit.

  A: Yeah. After I took the deal, there was this other bank account. In a fake name. What do you call that?

  Q: An alias.

  A: Yes, that’s it. So there’s a new bank account for me, in an alias. Money would just show up in it. It piled up. When the VP of research retired, lo and behold, I’m named the new VP of research.

  Q: The CEO does that, right? So he’s in on it?

  A: I assume so. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just know to keep my mouth shut if I don’t want my family murdered.

  Q: Back to the nanites. Is there a way to fix the premium nanite package?

  A: In situ? No. You have to flush them and load something without the extra command. Oh, over time they would wear out and be refreshed with booster shots, but the only real way to get rid of the extra command in a person is to flush and reload.

  In engineering? Yes. We could build the current premium nanite package without the extra command. It would take some work, because we have to hand build the prototype stock that gets copied for the production items, and there’s a bunch of different nanite types in that package. It’s not difficult, just laborious. But it’s what we do.

  There was a note from Pitney along with the interview. He had confirmed from police records that, fifteen years ago, a thirteen-year-old girl had been shot to death in the neighborhood Scharansky was living in at the time. No clues, no evidence, no leads. Random act of violence.

  Scharansky’s daughter was now twenty-eight years old.

  A Change Of Plans

  Travis Geary read the Imperial Palace announcement about the existence of a hack into the premium health maintenance nanites and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He didn’t have premium nanites, of course. His family was lower middle-class, and the upgraded nanites were very expensive. He had Imperial standard nanites like most everyone else he knew.

  But who the hell would use people’s nanites to kill them? Was that a hack someone found into the existing nanites, or was the capability actually built into them from the start? It was depraved. What sort of devil did you have to be to commit an outrage like that?

  These questions were running through his mind when Nathan Benton came over from his parents’ house next door.

  “Hey, Travis. The Imperial Palace just released an address by the Empress on tax reform. It’s in full VR. Wanna watch together?”

  “Sure, Nate.”

  Other than the annual Greeting from the Throne, Geary couldn’t remember any Imperial address in his lifetime. Not in the last decade, at least. So this was a rare event, indeed. It would be interesting to see what the Empress had to say, especially so close on the heels of the coronation just a week ago.

  Their chairs this time were directly in front of the Throne. Without the sector governors going up to pledge their obedience, there was no reason to be displaced to the side. They could have watched the coronation from the same spot, but it was disconcerting to have people walk right through you while watching an event in VR.

  The Empress was seated on the Throne as for the coronation, with the Emperor standing to the right and slightly behind her. She was dressed as for the coronation, in the white gauzy dress, barefoot, and wearing the circlet of the Kings of Sintar with the Star of Humanity on her forehead and the crown jewels of Sintar across her breast. She was, as before, a vision.

  Geary let her rich, clear voice wash over him, watching her face, paying scant attention to what she was actually saying. The Empire finally had a ruler – rulers, he should say – akin to the great Emperors and Empresses of old. Young, vibrant, smart, beautiful. You could have great hopes for the future under such a leader.

  “Oh, crap,” Benton said.

  “Huh? What?”

  “They tried to kill her. Didn’t you listen to what she said?”

  “No,” Geary admitted. “I kind of got sucked in just by her presence.”

  “Let me run it again from the top. Pay attention, Travis. Geez.”

  “OK. OK.”

  Geary listened this time. Ten percent flat tax. OK. Food, beverages, housing exempt. OK. Then it felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.

  “... There are those who are opposed to our reforms. Who have enjoyed advantage at the cost of the common people. Those people tried to kill me last Friday, right after the coronation. Were it not for the speedy reactions of my beloved husband and Emperor, and of the Imperial doctors, I would have died a week ago today from a nanite attack....”

  Nanite attack! On the Empress? They finally had rulers in the mold of those long-ago greats, and someone was trying to kill them? Someone obviously wanted the Empire in decline. Was working against those who would lift it back up to its previous heights and beyond.

  Geary’s worldview came apart and reassembled itself differently. His previous goals seemed selfish and small. There were bigger fish to fry, as the saying went.

  “Nate?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Didn’t you tell me the Imperial Marine Academy still had openings?”

  “Yeah. A week or so back they sent me a message. They won’t relax their standards to fill the openings, but they were encouraging us to recruit our friends and– Wait. What are you saying? Are you interested now?”

  “Yes. I’m going to ask the Imperial scholarship people to transfer my scholarship to the Imperi
al Marine Academy on Center.”

  “Hey, I’m not complaining. That’ll be great. But why?”

  “Because the Empire needs help – she needs help – and I won’t stand by and watch these vultures tear it down.”

  Saturday morning, Geary found his parents at the kitchen table talking over coffee after breakfast.

  “Mom, Dad, we need to talk.”

  “Sure, Travis. What’s up?” David Geary asked.

  How should he handle this? Ease in or jump in? Jump in.

  “I’m going to ask the Imperial scholarship people to transfer my scholarship to the Imperial Marine Academy on Center.”

  “But, Travis. Why?” Jennifer Geary asked.

  “Mom, someone’s trying to bring down the Empire. We finally have smart, young leaders, like during the Golden Age. They’re changing policies back to what they were. What they should be. And someone doesn’t like that. The nanites hack. The assassination attempt on the Empress. Someone – some group of someones – is trying to bring down the Empire, and I find I can’t stand by and let it happen.”

  “But what can you do about it? The Empire’s so huge.”

  “Exactly what one man can do. Nothing more, but nothing less.”

  “Oh, Travis. What about your plans?”

  “They seem small and selfish to me now, Mom. But I’m not closing anything off. I can still get the history degree at the Marine Academy. It’s on the same campus. It’s the same courses, for that matter. But I’ll graduate an officer.”

  Jennifer Geary was crying now.

  “I just don’t understand. I want you to be safe, Travis. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I’ll be safe, Mom. As safe as anyone can be in interesting times.”

  “Oh, Travis.”

  Jennifer Geary got up and ran from the room. Travis Geary started to get up, but his father put a hand on his arm.