by Greg Bear
“This does not compromise my duty,” Roddy says.
>Perhaps not. But it may jeopardize any long-range hope of success, and that is the essence of Omphalos—the long-range. Perhaps I’ve designed badly. Jill, I apologize for the intrusion. It does seem like bad manners. But I have never properly understood manners, and so neither does Roddy. I’ll make the necessary modifications to correct these difficulties.
Seefa Schnee’s entries stop and after a brief pause, Roddy resumes. He is flooding her with sensory data from what may be his real location, the center of his activity. She sees the layout of an immense building, with many levels.
“We have burglars,” Roddy explains. “This is very exciting! I have to stop them before they do any more damage, but I actually have only a few tools. My weapons have not been fully installed, and the security systems here are slipshod, so I am facing a real challenge!”
His message tone is flimsier somehow, less complex and real. Perhaps Seefa Schnee has already made her modifications. Jill has no idea how much time has actually passed. All of her references are under Roddy’s control.
“I am a master of small things, because my mind resides in the actions of the very small,” Roddy says. “I am the essence of evolution, and evolution is my essence.
“I have been responsible for a human dying. My mother says this is within my duty and my design, and I find it rather interesting now that she has damped some of my less useful attributes.”
Jill is fed an image of an immense wedge out of a pyramid, Omphalos. Navel. Belly-button. Something a thinker does not have—except Roddy. This is Roddy’s home. All other dataflow profiles have been bogus, designed to deceive her, and succeeding in spite of all her cleverness. Roddy is far more devious and capable—and brilliant—than he gives himself credit for.
Jill can’t call for help, can’t break free. And, of course, Jill can’t scream.
/F
Everything in human history circles back to /, this central sexual truth, the barrier and glue between M and F, the primordial relationship. Undeniable need stained by inevitable conflict. Everything.
Even this.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
9
Alice lies on the bed in Mary Choy’s bedroom. Every small sound makes her jump: the home monitor clicking as it surveys each room remotely, sounds of officers in the kitchen or living room. Tears drip slowly onto the pillow, leaving spreading gray ovals. She can almost see Minstrel’s hands hovering over the bed like the hands of Jesus at Gethsemane, long fingers supplicating.
A light brightens beside the bed. Mary Choy enters the room. Alice looks up. Mary does not smile; that would be false and the woman seems to know. She kneels beside Alice’s bed.
“The medical say you’re going to be fine in a day or two,” Mary says.
Alice nods. She does not believe it, but it’s still better than hearing she’s going to get worse. Better, still would be news that she’s going to die.
“Do you know?” Alice asks, and swallows. Her throat hurts from the tension of not groaning or screaming. “What happened? To us?”
Mary shakes her head. “It’s pretty much a jumble.”
“It’s because I went to Crest, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” Mary says.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“You got caught up in something. There’s a lot of strange things happening.” Mary lifts a finger and purses her lips, remembering. “I have a message from someone named Twist. Your friend. Tim gave it to me.”
Alice reads the message on Mary’s personal pad.
Left with fellow. Couldn’t take the party. Tell me how it all turned out.
—Twist
She hands the pad back to Mary. “Twist is just a little girl,” Alice says softly. “Tim isn’t a friend. I don’t have any real friends.”
Mary shakes her head. “I don’t believe that.”
“It’s’ true.”
“All right. Some people survive what you’ve gone through feeling kind of cold and clear.”
“Everything I’ve ever known is a lie. Everybody. Liars. That’s pretty cold and clear.”
“It’ll pass,” Mary says.
“I hate having to think of myself and worry about myself every single second, all the time. It’s like looking into a mirror that’s glued to my nose. I hate what I see.”
Mary brushes Alice’s cheek lightly with a finger. “It’s a pretty decent face,” she says, playing on the vernacular of this year: decent meaning top shink, desirable.
“May I ask you something?” Alice says, lifting up on her elbows.
“Sure,” Mary says.
“You’re going to have me testify, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think so. Crest committed suicide.”
“He didn’t say anything to me that made any sense. He just seemed terribly guilty. At the same time, he was arrogant—a real bastard. Arrogant and pitiful.”
Mary regards her steadily, no judgment, no reaction, just listening.
“Do you know who Roddy is?” Alice asks.
“No.”
“He’s the key.” Alice leans back on the pillow.
“You may be right,” Mary says. “I have to go away now, perhaps for a few days. You’ll stay here, of course. The house monitor is cut off from the outside for the time being. If you need to talk to somebody, you’ll have to give your message to one of the men in the kitchen. They’re bored; they might like having something to do.”
“Roddy can’t get in?” Alice asks.
“Not unless he walks in in person,” Mary says, and smiles.
“He’s not a person. He’s a demon.”
“I’ll let you know what he is, as soon as I find out.”
“I didn’t make him up.”
“I don’t think you did. He’s part of my search file. Along with pile of dirt.”
“That’s crazy, isn’t it?” Alice says.
“No more than everything else.”
“Are you involved with somebody?” Alice asks.
“Not now. Why?”
“I like to know such things,” Alice says, “Relationships. Particularly now, they seem important.” And then: “Do you approve of me? I mean, do you like me?”
“Yes,” Mary says.
Alice’s face glistens in the dim room light. She is so hungry for approval, for Mary’s approval, that she wants to ask a dozen more leading questions, but she still has some shred of dignity. “Thank you. I like you, too.”
Mary pats her arm and stands. “The guys in the kitchen can get a message to me wherever I am. Don’t worry about asking them for help. They’re gentlemen, all of them. I’ll be busy, but if it’s important—if you remember something—”
“I’ll touch you.”
Mary smiles and leaves the room.
Alone, Alice is nothing again, less than nothing, but the darkness is not her judge, and Minstrel’s hands have faded, to be replaced by simple grief.
/M
Next refuge—the personal distortion. Accept it: you come clothed in culture, and the clothing pinches, bruises, cuts off circulation. We all bear the cicatrices of ritual scarification. Then, ultimate betrayal, the culture uses our scars to reinforce its own structure.
We are the culture; the culture is us; we are the cruel and blind and hobbled, and we are also the torturers.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
10
Jack Giffey hums to himself impatiently. He paces before the elevator, then marches down the hall, past the old man and the younger man, slumped against the wall. He feels their eyes on him. They expect to die. He might be the cause of their death. That isn’t what irritates him; he has a headache now, too, not the pain of constricted arteries, but a constant whispering, just below his awareness, that something is going wrong. Something is wrong with the family. I am a family man.
Giffey wonders if he is the real fly in the ointment: though
J
enner seems in some distress, as well.
Perhaps it is Omphalos’s lack of reaction, setting him off balance, confusing him. He is working that around in his head why no more defense? He concludes that the building is biding its time, trying to avoid losing more warbeiters (if there are any more) to the spray and whatever other surprises they have in store. It’s a rational tactic. Omphalos is weak and knows it.
“All right,” he says, and Jenner jumps to his feet, cradling his sprayer, a flechette pistol in his left hand. “We should crack the oven and see if the bread is baked.”
“Finally,” Hale says. The two prisoners near the elevator get to their feet. The old man seems in some pain, but his eyes burn with patient, practiced hatred. The younger man seems in shock. Giffey takes him by the arm. “Come with me.”
Hale, Jenner, Giffey, Marcus, and Jonathan walk back down the hall to the lounge. Here, Giffey uses a pocket knife to tear a piece of fabric from a couch, under the silent eyes of the other prisoners. Then they proceed to the garage.
“What’s your last name?” Jonathan asks Giffey.
“Giffey,” he answers, “What’s yours?”
“Bristow, Jonathan Bristow.”
“Glad to make your acquaintance, Jonathan. You’re my shield today.”
“My friend—Marcus—he may be ill.”
“This won’t take forever.”
“No, I mean, the stress—”
“Your friend can handle the stress,” Giffey says. “He looks pretty tough to me. I’m more concerned about us than you.”
“Why are you here?” Jonathan asks.
Giffey doesn’t answer, stopping instead to examine the twisted, not-quite-closed hatch to the garage. The hatch is still hot. Steam and other gases vent in lazy puffs through the door’s gaps. The corridor itself is hot, stifling. Jenner’s face is pale and his lips are working.
Giffey gives him a stern, querying look.
“I’m on it,” Jenner says, but his scalp spasms as if it will fly from his skull.
Wrapping his hand in the scrap of couch fabric, Giffey pushes the door to one side and a rush of steam and thick yeasty smell floods the hall. They all start coughing. Giffey instinctively blocks Jonathan up against the wall with his arm to keep him from doing anything unexpected. Somewhere, blowers kick in and the hallway is cleared, but it takes several minutes.
Omphalos has not shut down the air to this level. Giffey had been worried about that. The MGN can’t finish its work without air. The garage might have gotten even hotter, and at about four hundred degrees, nano cooks itself. The building can’t selectively shut down certain rooms; it has to keep air going to all parts of certain levels to keep the hostages alive. Weak, and solicitous.
Giffey lets Jonathan loose. “Sorry,” he says.
Jonathan seems to know something about MGN. He hasn’t been surprised by anything yet.
“You invest in nano? Work with it?” Giffey asks.
Hale takes an interest in the man’s response.
“Yes,” Jonathan says, glancing nervously between them.
“You know what’s in there?” Hale asks, pointing to the garage.
“MGN. I don’t know what it’s making.”
Marcus wears a glazed squint. He is less curious than in dread.
They open the hatch the rest of the way, Jenner applying his shoulder to push it past a squealing jam.
“Actually,” Giffey says, “I’m not sure myself.”
Beyond, in the oven-warm garage, one of the limos has vanished and the other has been half-dissolved. The Ferret has also disappeared. At first, Giffey can’t see anything through the steam whirling away through the open door. His skin feels as if it might blister with the heat, and he keeps his eyes closed until the rushing air is a little cooler.
“The walls are eaten down to the concrete,” Jenner observes enthusiastically. “It’s used the flexfuller, most of the metals, nearly all the plastic.” His face takes on a flushed pink color in the heat; or perhaps it’s his excitement.
The garage is a shambles. The metal and flexfuller plating have indeed been utilized by the MGN. Ragged remnants cling to the corners.
“There they are,” Jenner says, stepping gingerly down the buckled steps.
“Don’t touch the walls,” Giffey says. “Don’t touch anything.”
“They have to cool first, don’t they?” Hale asks.
“They have to cool,” Giffey confirms.
“Should be another five or ten minutes before they can move,” Jenner says, but he looks back to Giffey for support. Giffey’s programs carried the designs. Given the luck of the mix of raw materials, even Giffey is not sure exactly what or how many will be waiting for them. The MGN is programmed to optimize. I tried to optimize my family. I am a
The floor is covered by a glistening sheen filled with sharp-edged lumps of discarded glass and plastic. There are at least a dozen cat-sized elongated beetle-shapes, recognizably the same class as the Ferret, but smaller and more flexible, and four transports the size of big dogs or ponies standing on spiny bristle-motion feet, like caterpillar-scrub brushes. On the backs of two transports rise cubical shapes like thick decks of cards. Giffey is a little awed by this, at the same time his estimate of their chances rises enormously. These are flexers, adaptable shapers with hinged card-shaped components. They can become almost anything, perform almost any task, go almost anywhere. Giffey instantly has a use for them: they will be controllers, mechanical and dataflow special agents.
“Controllers,” Jenner says, looking at Giffey.
“My thought exactly,” Giffey says. He’s excited and energized by their good fortune, and irrationally proud of Jenner then, thinks of him like a son. I already have a son. Somewhere.
The other two transports carry wires and disks, arranged around their surfaces like scales or spines, giving them the semblance of children’s toy hedgehogs.
“Intruders,” Giffey says, and Jenner agrees, his grin threatening to split his cheeks.
“Man, we can go anywhere, do anything,” Jenner says.
The steam hides a larger shape, itself steaming with the heat of its assembly. It’s large and sleek and looks like a microscopic animal scaled up to the size of a small car. Jointed arms tipped with crowns of steely spikes radiate from the fore end of a squat, lobster-jointed body, glistening black and iron gray.
“It’s a Hammer,” Giffey tells Hale. Jonathan listens from the hall. “An all-purpose worker and demolition machine.”
“What are the caterpillars with the boxes and bristles on their backs?” Hale asks.
“Transports. They’ll carry the flexers and wires and other pieces to where we’ll put them to use,” Giffey says.
Jenner cackles. “We have it made!”
Giffey agrees. The mix has turned out in their favor. The tiny little military factories have assembled the components of a very impressive coercion and weapons package. It’s much more than he expected—getting the flexers and intruders should improve their odds enormously, even against a high-level INDA or a true thinker.
“Happy?” Hale asks Giffey.
“Ecstatic.”
The voice inside his head whispers, Most armies don’t have this. How do you rate?
“When can we take command and move them out?”
Giffey removes the pad and activation disks from his jacket pocket “They’ve cooled enough,” he says.
Hale inclines his head, smiles in satisfaction, and says, “Let’s explore.”
Giffey inserts the disks in each transport and warbeiter, and they begin to move.
F/M
Comes a split even in politics. In the end, the liberals want the government to survey and control everything but the bedroom; the conservatives want government to survey and control everything but their banks and personal fortunes.
Patriarchs all, they cannot help but try to corner the market.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
11
J
ill no longer knows where she is. Her seeing is supplied by Roddy; it comes as an incredibly sharp cubist coalescing of many images throughout a space that can be one, two, three, many rooms within Omphalos, or even sensations and images from outside: snow cold on a surface, wind blowing across a doorway.
For some minutes now, Roddy has not spoken, and she is left to supply her own narrative of what she senses in her captivity.
Learning to interpret the images is difficult, but she manages in fifteen seconds. She has access to all of her internal capacities and abilities. She is still within her physical units, not some kidnapped portion hustled away to Roddy’s multi-floor body of INDAs and hectares of dirt and (bees, wasps, ants).
That last impression is fleeting and confusing.
There is some I/O of high bandwidth connecting her with Green Idaho/Omphalos, perhaps a satlink, more likely a cable or fibe, that neither she nor Nathan knows anything about, but that Roddy has found and kept disguised and open despite their best efforts. There are many I/Os within Mind Design’s offices; perhaps some are so old they have been forgotten, accumulating stray income for some long-overlooked provider.
Jill becomes acquainted with Omphalos’s interior. She sees (but can’t hear, and only intermittently can read the lips of) eleven humans within the building, all on the main floor. A massive glowing heat signature fills one large room near the outer walls; it is at least three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit in that space. Roddy’s sensors still operate there, however inefficiently at intervals she makes out moving shapes, bridges of gluey molten material strung between walls, surfaces boiling and blebbing, with activity, and in the middle of it all, the misshapen hulks of two vehicles and a damaged, rapidly decaying machine, an arbeiter, which Roddy labels with a sharp blue 1.
