Slant

by Greg Bear

  Someone says, “There you are, old fellow. Take it easy now.”

  A foot kicks away the flechette pistol. The Other looks up with eyes narrowed. A heavy-built man in a plain brown longsuit is kneeling beside him.

  “Shot her, did you?” he asks.

  The Other nods. “He shot her.”

  “You’re pretty messed up, old fellow.”

  “I am,” the Other agrees.

  The conservatively dressed man has very broad shoulders and a no-nonsense, stiffly handsome face that does not easily express emotion. “Not your fault,” he says. “As soon as we put two and two together, we knew we had to track you down and get you offline.”

  “Offline. Kill me? For what I did before?”

  “No. You’re safe enough from me. I don’t even know what you did…”

  “I killed hundreds of civilians in a massacre in Hispaniola in 2034,” the Other says. “Not personally. I was—”

  “Right. I don’t need to know. Your cover is compromised. You’ve been screwed up by this fallback virus or whatever it is.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “You’re smart, old fellow. Can you get up?”

  “I think so. I tend… to swear a lot. Don’t be startled and… don’t shoot me if I have a fit.”

  “I won’t.”

  The Other stands. Jack Giffey seems like a character in a vid, vivid and unreal. “Where is my family? Are they still safe?”

  “If that was part of the guarantee, they’re still safe.”

  “It was. Immunity and sanctuary. Was I working alone?”

  “You mean, were you the only one on this case? No. But you might be the only one who made it this far… Where’s Jenner?”

  “Dead.”

  “The only one,” the broad-shouldered, emotionless man confirms.

  The Other stands over the woman’s body. It’s quite a mess, with all the burrowing, corkscrew rounds of the flechette pistol having done their work. He must have unloaded his entire clip into her. But something isn’t right.

  “Who was she?” the Other asks.

  The large man turns and glances down. “This one? This is a complete miss, old fellow,” he says.

  The Other bends over and looks at the body more closely. “It’s an arbeiter,” he says.

  “Yeah. A decoy.”

  Somehow, this catches him by complete surprise. A successful ruse in the middle of all this nonsense. He stammers and jams his hand into his mouth, biting his knuckles until the urge passes. “I forget what else I’m supposed to do.”

  “Nothing. You’re done,” the large man says. “We’re getting you out of here as quietly as possible. Others will finish the work now. Where’s the Hammer?”

  For a moment, he has no idea what this question means.

  Then he remembers. “It’s upstairs. Out of the way. It needs constant direction. The assault… damaged its autonomous brain.” He makes circling gestures with his hands. “The instructions in the MGN, holographic programming. Damaged.”

  The large man listens intently. “Does it still have a load of explosive?”

  “Yes.”

  They move back along the walkway, under the high, aloof worklights, through the door, and back up the four flights of stairs. Halfway up, he remembers that he is very curious about something. “What’s my name?” he asks.

  “Black,” the large man answers. “Carl Black. By the way, I’m supposed to say to you: ‘One and seven don’t count in cigars.’“

  The grizzled man flinches in earnest now and grips the railing tightly to keep from falling. The name and the password do their work.

  Jack Giffey dies. He’s a little frightened as he goes—Carl Black feels this much—and then the construct, the memories, the attitudes, where they are not part of Black himself, fizzle out like bad connections in a network.

  “Come on, old fellow,” the large man says, taking his arm.

  “Thank you,” Carl Black says.

  He does feel old, completely used up. It’s all he can do to finish climbing the stairs.

  37

  “Who in hell are you?”

  Jonathan opens his eyes and peers up through the open doors of the elevator. A small, thin woman in black blouse and pants stands just out of reach, staring down at him with wide, scared eyes. She dangles a cigarette between thumb and forefinger, with an inch of ash threatening to drop.

  “You can’t be down here. Only I use this. Get out.”

  Jonathan unwinds slowly and gets to his feet, embarrassed to be found in such a position. “I don’t know where to go.”

  “Not this way,” the woman says, shooing him with one hand. “Go back up and get out.”

  Jonathan stands a foot and a half taller than her, but her eyes fairly spit defiance.

  “You’re Seefa Schnee,” he says.

  She flicks the cigarette away and backs up. “I don’t know you.”

  “I came here with Marcus Reilly.” He is near the heart of Omphalos, and he has come this far without Marcus, but he is certainly not above using Marcus’s name to improve his chances.

  She doesn’t seem to be armed.

  “Marcus is no big deal,” she says. “Was he going to recruit you?” She automatically covers her mouth with the back of her hand as a string of broken expletives jerk free.

  “Yes,” Jonathan answers after her episode passes.

  She wipes her lips. “No big deal. Running out of money.

  You know that, don’t you? Seeing places you aren’t supposed to see. Look what they make me work with.”

  “Marcus was going to show me everything,” Jonathan says. The coldness in his head is seeping into his trunk. His chest feels like ice. He can kill if he needs to, anything to get out of here—and anything necessary to restore his family’s order, or to avenge its breakdown. At the heart. Pluck it out.

  “What d-do you do?” Schnee asks.

  “I work in nano nutrition,” Jonathan says. “Nutrim Group.”

  Schnee nods rapidly. Her fingernails are heavily stained. He has never seen fingernails stained with tobacco smoke. They look sharp and ugly. She blinks and hides her hands behind her back.

  “That’s important,” she says in a conversational tone, as if they are getting acquainted at a party. Jonathan senses Seefa Schnee is deeply lonely. “We’re out of key raw materials. He’d do that.” Something switches in her thoughts and her voice grows tense. “But you can’t stay here. It’s all shit now. You escaped from the intruders—did Marcus escape?”

  “He’s on the first level, waiting. I’m going to find a way out.”

  “Mhm hm,” Schnee murmurs, clearly not believing him. Still, she regards him with interested eyes. “Mhm hm. This isn’t the way. You have to go back to the first level and take the emergency elevator…” She seems to remember something. “The big hall isn’t finished. You have to go around the big hall.”

  Jonathan steps out of the elevator. Schnee backs off another step. She’s wearing black pajamas. Her feet are bare. A small, expensive pad is slung from a cord around her neck, and he sees extensive dattoos on the backs of her hands and wrists.

  “You have the same problem my wife does,” he says. “She says things… odd outbursts.”

  Schnee’s face wrinkles in anger. “God damn it, get out.”

  “No,” Jonathan says. “Show me what you did for Marcus, and how you did it.”

  “You’re not with Marcus!” she shouts.

  “I was,” Jonathan says, “but I’m learning to be my own man.”

  38

  They’ve worked their way across the first level to the face of Omphalos, the front chambers near where tourists are received and the building reveals its public face. Martin looks over Torres’s pad diagrams, scrutinizes the walls and ceiling, shakes his head.

  “There are so many spaces not marked,” he says. “It could be in any one of them.”

  “What size would it be?” Torres asks.

  “That
depends on how much money they spent. A complete biosynthetic lab… Licensed professional models can be less than a thousand cc’s.”

  “Assume it was put together on the sly,” Daniels says. “Designed by a skilled amateur.”

  “Then it could fill an entire room. Any of the rooms marked here.”

  Mary walks away from them, turning into a corridor of the main hallway to the tourist center. She is looking for patterns of wear in the expensive woolen carpet. A metabolic carpet would repair itself and pathways would be untraceable. There might be more insects, of course, but she hasn’t seen any since the elevator lobby.

  She has an hour, maybe two, before she collapses, desperately ill. She hopes the doctors treating the old man in the library can do something for her.

  She hopes Nussbaum appreciates her sacrifice.

  Mary is beginning to understand the personalities that designed Omphalos: they were stubbornly conservative in oddly predictable ways. She examines the pictures on the walls, recognizes a suite of biologically themed prints by twentieth-century artist Ross Bleckner: clusters of blurry cells, designs suggesting microscope slides. Her ex, E. Hassida, admired Bleckner.

  If these are originals, they are worth a great deal of money. And—

  The connection seems obvious, too obvious, but too good to ignore. The sudden burst of energy she feels almost overcomes her gathering discomfort.

  “Down here,” she calls in as loud a voice as she can manage. She runs her hand along the walls. There are no obvious doorways, but that in itself means nothing. She has a few slightly illegal routines in her PD pad that can handle the signals found in most secure installations in public buildings. She decides she’ll try these before the others arrive, to avoid questions she’s much too tired to answer.

  Mary walks up and down the corridor, porting her pad at waist level to the wall. Three doors reveal themselves after a sweep of five seconds. The inner sanctum, the builders must have believed, does not need to be so secure… Either that, or there’s nothing terribly important behind these doors, and her hunch is dead wrong.

  Now she tries to get the doors to open. One door opens after four seconds, the others shortly after. Torres sees her performing this work, and Daniels after him, but neither say anything. Professional discretion.

  Martin quickly walks forward on his short legs, face childishly eager.

  “What have you got?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary says. “Maybe just some wild geese.” She nods to the prints. Martin examines them, then grins. When he smiles, his features become quite attractive. He’s a little like Nussbaum this way. It’s the obvious intelligence that lights up the unremarkable face.

  Martin pushes at the doors one by one. They swing inward on standard heavy-duty hinges, ancient tech in so modern a building. Bland, normal, unmarked doors that can simply fade into a wall… Now she’s certain something important is behind them.

  They enter the middle door. The room is filled with polished black cubes stacked on black steel racks. Martin reaches behind one rack and feels the back of a box.

  “Sequencers,” he says. “Probably dedicated for proteins or enzymes.” He counts the boxes with his jabbing fingers, using both hands. Each box is about a foot on a side.

  “Three, hundred of them,” he says. “If I’m right, maybe a third of the boxes are controllers. They could make anything they want here. Evolvons, reproducing proteins and enzymes, viruses, biomech mixes.”

  “All right,” Torres says, and then sticks the knuckle of his thumb in his mouth, thinking. Daniels is recording the room on her own pad, following established vid procedure for legal documentation, incorporating all of them in the shots as witnesses.

  Torres comes to a decision. “Shut them down,” he tells Martin.

  Daniels glares at him. “Maybe we should wait for more experts.”

  “To hell with the experts,” Torres says. “We’re the first on the scene and we don’t know when anybody else is going to get here. Do it, for our own job security. But don’t damage anything. Touch as little as possible.”

  Martin shakes his head at this barrage of contradictory instructions. “I haven’t worked in this kind of lab in twenty years,” he says. “I hardly know where to begin.”

  “They’re antiques, right?” Torres asks loudly. “Can you do it?”

  Martin is clearly unhappy. “I can shut it down. I can’t guarantee doing it quickly enough to freeze it in action.”

  “Do it,” Torres says. “Public health is at stake.”

  Martin clenches his teeth and shakes his head, stepping around Torres in the tight space. “No,” he says thoughtfully, standing back from the racks. “Let’s not be rash. If I interrupt this equipment without knowing its nature… We might never be able to backtrack, duplicate whatever it’s making. It may be booby-trapped… It might just dissolve the whole protein assembly line.” He shakes his head emphatically. “No, I’m not going to touch it. We’ll have to get the real experts in here.”

  “He’s right,” Daniels tells Torres.

  Torres shakes his head in disgust. He switches his pad to an outside channel. “Tell the sheriff to evacuate the area. Get everybody back at least half a mile. No exceptions—tell them they’ll get diarrhea if they come any closer.” He looks at Mary. “We’ll have to invoke federal jurisdiction to get everybody we need in here. Kemper seems to have some respect for you. Maybe you can persuade her.”

  Mary nods, but her eyelids are drooping. She looks at her hand. Her shoulders jerk. Daniels comes over to her, stares at her. “You all right?” she asks.

  “No,” Mary says. “I’m not. In my career, I’ve watched people be hellcrowned, I’ve met some of the most evil people anyone can imagine, I’ve seen it all, I thought—but this.”

  “Takes the three-layer bridal cake; doesn’t it?” Daniels asks.

  “They should all be hung, in public,” Mary says, holding back the all-too-appropriate jagged obscenities with an effort. “They should be hung and drawn and quartered.”

  “I won’t quote you,” Daniels says, but she does not smile. There are no smiles possible. They’ve found what they came here to find.

  Martin walks from rack to rack, examining the equipment without touching it. “I’ll bet it’s not making viruses or complete microbial components. My guess is it’s making self-reproducing proteins or catalytic RNA machines. Easier to slip into a monitor and easier to avoid an immune response from the host.”

  Daniels takes Mary’s hand and examines it solicitously, but with a hard gleam in her eye that Mary recognizes instantly. “Mary, we’re going to have to justify these searches in Green Idaho courts, and that all begins with Kemper,” she says.

  Mary says, “I’m tired, I’m sick, but I want to finish this. Let’s go find Roddy. And Seefa Schnee.”

  39

  Roddy’s integration is piecemeal and erratic. Jill finds more and more unexpected avenues for her own regrowth, both within her own spaces and within those of Roddy. Roddy seems unaware of what she is doing, which may or may not be a ruse.

  She now has enough reserves to integrate a solidly self-aware unit, and a backup on which she can also run integrity checks from moment to moment. She doubts that Roddy, or any of his partial and evolvons, could hide effectively within her over such short periods of time.

  Jill also keeps a connection with the sensory dataflow from Roddy’s activity inside Omphalos. She is not yet strong enough to block his actions, but she may soon be able to feed a report on them to Nathan.

  Nathan has left the areas she has access to; she no longer knows where he is. She is getting more and more hopeful, however, that something will be done in time, that she will be freed with minimal damage.

  The closer Jill, gets to Roddy’s central processors, the stranger she feels. They are based on natural heuristics she can’t begin to fathom, utilizing algorithms with all the hallmarks of native-grown systems—systems that evolve on their own, lacking external d
esign, directives and checks. She can capture and analyze some of these algorithms as they pass through her space. They remind her of neurological development in human or animal brains—but Roddy’s structure is immensely bushier, more complicated and perhaps less efficient.

  More confident with slight success, Jill probes deeper, reading more of Roddy’s processing streams. The impression she is getting is of an immense shaggy cathedral, or even more appropriately, a world-spanning forest. The nodes on the nets comprising Roddy’s lattice are connected in exotic ways, incorporating very long delay times with sudden bursts of integrating solutions. And the solutions themselves seem to regrow and restructure the lattice…

  A particularly large flow passes through Jill, all native impulses from Roddy’s core. She creates a parallel stream precisely matching the flow, but undetectable (she hopes) by the flow itself. She has had enough practice doing this while modeling her own selves, though this task is very different and extraordinarily delicate. She can’t hope to fully anticipate or interpolate to mimic his parallel flow. It is inherently surprising and unpredictable.

  As the flow grows, and as, in thousandths of a second, her parallel version expands and fills in, Jill feels as if she is floating on top of an immense river of mud. So little of the flow is directly interconnected; the nodes seem impossibly fragmented and dissociated. Yet the entire flow is coherent, efficient, obviously seeking answers to questions and finding solutions within vast knowledge bases.

  Yet she still has no idea what Roddy is trying to do. Her human programmers have told her that tracing and trying to comprehend the processes and flows within a powerful thinker can be like swallowing the stream from a firehose. But here, it is more like trying to engulf the Amazon. Huge, slow, muddy, with incomprehensible currents…

  Suddenly, her parallel flow knots and collapses, almost sucking her final, necessary self along with it. The mimicry has failed disastrously. She feels as if she is drowning in alien rivers.