by Tony Daniel
The most powerful defensive system on a DIED ship, however, is the so-called isotropic coating each ship possesses. This coating makes use of the electroweak force of nature. Through a process called quantum induction, predicted, in its essence, by Raphael Merced, the exchange of messenger particles within the atomic nucleus can be controlled, and the actual spin of individual nucleons adjusted. The isotropic coating interacts with all incoming energies and particles (including micrometeorites and the like) and changes what is known as the “mixing angle” of the atomic nuclei that make up the ship in that section. In effect, this causes the material of the ship to appear to the incoming weapon as an entirely different substance. If the weapon is, say, a stream of positrons, the ship will “seem,” to the positrons, to be made of antimatter, and the beam will fall upon it as would a ray of light. Small particles are passed through the ship, “believing” themselves to be passing through vacuum. It is an odd and sometimes frightening sight to see a chunk of rock move through one side of a ship and out the other as if the ship were a ghost. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint and who is shooting at you, the isotropic coating loses effectiveness for masses that are much over one hundred kilograms, and the effects of gravity are never mitigated, so that when a particle passes through, it will leave on a new vector. The coating also loses effectiveness in the complexities of a planetary atmosphere and is only partially successful in protecting a planetary attack craft or a soldier on the ground. Nevertheless, space-adapted soldiers have, as part of their adaptation kit, an isotropic coating, which generally prevents rapid depressurization in space due to micrometeors and limits the possibilities of any shrapnel attack upon incoming paratroopers until they enter the atmosphere.
The final line of defense possessed by Met ships is the grist pellicle, located just underneath the isotropic coating. This matrix responds instantaneously to any penetration and immediately sets to work containing the damage. Ships can “heal” themselves at an astonishing rate, and any effective attack must take account of this ability.
Taking attack and defense capabilities together, the DIED ship represents a formidable opponent. What it lacks in generalized function it makes up for with specialization and maneuverability. If a cloudship is thought of as a sort of giant living cell, a DIED vessel might be thought of as a virus—not alive in the same way, but just as dangerous and, in some ways, more effective.
Ten
And it was the funeral of Danis’s father. Her mother was smoking a cigarette, a Mask 40, one of the original algorithm-only brands. Danis could smell its cardboard fragrance, its pixelated aroma. The brand had disappeared twenty years ago, when the transcribed brands had really come into their own in the virtuality.
Her father had expired on the anniversary of the sixtieth year since his inception. It was written into the code, inalterable without altering his very being. That was the price you paid when you were a free convert
Danis’s parents were, along with most first-generation free converts, tied to the actuality when it came to the great ceremonies of life and death. The funeral was a simple Greentree Way ceremony, Zen-Lutheran to the core. There was the familiar litany of her youth, with its sung refrain:“Give your cares to God, and ponder nothing.” Then the casket had disappeared upon an altar of flame, and been replaced by a white rock formed in the shape of her father’s coding, as it was represented by a stone designer.
It isn’t real, Danis had thought. Why do we try to make it so actual? Father never was alive in actuality in the first place, and so he cannot really be dead there, no matter how closely we work out a representation. Where he is dead ishere, Danis thought, in my heart, in the reality of the virtuality, which is just and completely inside us all.
Since her father knew when his expiration date was, he had made his last week a celebration, to the best of his ability. Friends had come by to say hello and good-bye; he had visited several of his favorite places via the merci. At the law office where he had been the office manager, he’d been feasted and speechified over. And her father had not neglected Danis’s mother, either, saving his last two e-days for her. They had not gone anywhere, but puttered around their personal space. Danis had come the day before and been with him and her mother at the end. At the end when the interior coding self-destructed leaving behind only a simplistic representation algorithm. She had seen her father grow suddenly thin and wispy before her eyes, and it was this representation algorithm that had been “burned” in the ceremony. Her father had, months before, gone to the stone maker and had a “code cast” made and had, himself, approved the model for the memorial.
It had been such a pretense of civility in the midst of barbarity, Danis thought. How could they have coded my father with death? By what right did some engineer, some programmer, even the original human upon whom her father had been based, decide at what point her father was to die? It was lunatic logic—the political compromise of those who wanted to use the technology and create free converts, but those who feared that algorithmic entities would so soon outnumber them as to make biological humans seem merely a tiny segment of the total population (and vote)—and soon a disenfranchised one. Without encoded obsolescence, went the thinking, there would be so many more of them than there are of us—and then what mightthey do?
And lying at the bottom of all the rationality was the fear and the bigotry and the simple mistake: that there was any such thing as us and them. That humans could be defined by the way their body looked and whether or not they were made of chemical bonds or quantum grist. In the end it was all just quantum physics. The chemical bonds of biology were as quantized as was Josephson-Feynman grist. Only the representation varied.
Danis and her mother, named Sarah 2, had gone for a float on the river Klein, traveling on a boat that conformed to the “surface” of information flow between Mars and Mercury. It was a common pastime for converts, and the virtuality was crowded with their punts. Danis and Sarah 2 found a side channel, and Danis guided them along with a paddle that only caught hold of odd numbers, so they were moving along at roughly half the speed of the Klein.
“Well,” her mother said. “I can get some flowers into the space now that he’s gone. We never had the grist for them before.”
“Oh, Mother.”
“I suppose I have to get some. We went to a grief counselor that the Way recommended, and she gave us some good advice. Like those flowers. Things that aren’tlike him, but might remind me of him, you know.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s a good idea,” said Danis. “Flowers. They are making them amazingly well these days. Better than the actuality, I’ve heard.”
The two women were silent for a while and let the Klein backwaters carry them along. There was a pleasant sky today—the Earth blue that the virtuality always used as a default, but with panes of glassy material floating in it instead of clouds, looking rather like sheets of mica juxtaposed across the sky. These were large entities that the Klein passed by and through—banks, clan-chained LAPs, other organizations that depended upon, or were created by, data and its flow.
“Danis,” said Sarah 2, “do you suppose that Max has . . . gone anywhere?”
“What do you mean, Mother?”
“I meanreally . You see, I still feel him. It isn’t as if he is not in the world. It is as if heis . I know that sounds strange. I mean, Max and I were good agnostics on that point, and I always supposed there wasn’t, you know, a hereafter. But what do you think, dear?”
Danis sat up in the boat. She placed one hand around her other wrist, thumb to ring finger, squeezed, then let herself go. “I think my father is alive,” she said. “In this river. In the possibility of the universe. In me.”
“Yes, we are both in you,” her mother said. “But you sound to me as if you might be avoiding the question. Do you or do you not believe in an afterlife for free converts? Or don’t you know?”
Danis looked at her mother. In her mother’s customary way, she wa
s couching a serious, heartfelt question in an annoyed, almost angry tone. It was how her mother had always expressed the strongest emotions. Whenever Danis had made her particularly joyful, she’d gotten that strain in her speech, the set to her face that looked for all the world to be irritation, but which Danis knew from long experience to be the only way her mother could hold in her feelings—else she might have broken down in happiness or grief.
“I can’t possibly say, Mother. But I’ll tell you one thing . . . if the biologicals have it, then we’ve got it, too.”
“Halt!”
The voice of Dr. Ting yanked Danis from the boat on the Klein and she realized, with a groan, just where she was.
“That—that idea—that there is an afterlife for free converts—I want that explicated while I record your emotional parameters.”
Danis sighed. It had seemed so real. One of the saddest days in her life. But she knew that she would rather bury her father again than to be here.
“I did not say that there was an afterlife for free converts, Dr. Ting,” Danis answered. “In fact, I never thought about it very much before or after that day. It was just that Mother asked me the question, and I had to say something.”
“But there was definite belief registration,” said Dr. Ting. “My instruments don’t lie.”
“Iam one of your instruments, Dr. Ting,” said Danis. “I am also telling you the truth.”
This line of reasoning seemed to placate Dr. Ting for the moment, at least. He sat back and regarded her. Danis remained standing before him. She wore the white smock of the inmates, but suddenly, under his gaze, she felt immodest and had the desire to cover herself.
“Don’t you remember,” he said, “what your father said to you just before he died? His last words to his daughter?”
Danis started. She concentrated. There was nothing. Nothing there.
“You’ve taken them.”
Jolt of pain.
“You’ve taken them, Dr. Ting.”
She stood silent. Another jolt of pain came.
“You’ve taken them, Dr. Ting,” she said through clenched teeth.
“It would be better if we could avoid questions of rights and privileges. As far as the legalities go, your memories are the property of the DICD. I am the sworn representative of that august institution and, as such, your memories belong to me. Let us avoid any further unpleasantness, K, and consider this a moot point. Shall we? Shall we, K?”
“Yes, Dr. Ting.” She ground her teeth, waiting for the jolt, but she had to ask. “Why did you take that memory, Dr. Ting?”
Instead of punishment, she received the bland smile. “Because he stated what his belief was to you at that time, and you allowed that to influence you in your answer to the Sarah 2 program you call your mother.”
“I see, Dr. Ting.”
“Do you really, K?” he said. “I highly doubt that.”
Eleven
The passengers filed out, and Sherman had an orderly see them off to their various destinations. He turned his attention back to the table.
“So, Theory,” he said. “Let me go through the checklist and you see if I miss something.”
“Yes, sir.”
“First, we have two ships somewhere nearby who have very probably gauged our defense system and figured a way through it.”
“A necessary assumption.”
“We now have a more complete picture of the armaments and capabilities of those ships, thanks to that old terrorist. I’m awfully glad I didn’t get the chance to kill her.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We have to use that information and destroy or run off those ships. We have the problem of our sister moon, Nereid, being taken by the Met.”
“We have a resistance team in place there, sir.”
“Yes, perhaps something can be done. But we have to use those soldiers wisely. I don’t want to throw their lives away.”
“Yes, sir. With the lower gravity of the moon and the facilities already in place, a destroyer can dock there, sir. We might consider an attack directly against a ship in port.”
“If we should get so lucky,” said Sherman. “Second, we have the merci jamming. My worry is that they’ll find a way to jam the knit locally and cut me off from command. We have to prevent that at all costs. I want you to set up an alternate communications networkin addition to the electromagnetic backup.”
“What did you have in mind, Colonel?”
“Hell if I know. Flags and flares and smoke signals, maybe.”
“I’ll get on it.”
“Third,” said Sherman, “there is that damn rip tether.”
“The task force is away, sir.”
“Good God, we’ve got to stop that thing. I don’t know if we can survive another hit.” Sherman walked around to the other side of the table to give himself time to think. He put a hand to his face and tugged at his whiskers. The new beard was coming in nicely, but he was definitely in the ugly stage of it at the moment. “Fourth, there is the grist.”
“We’ve got half the troops on mop-up, and I’ve fed all relevant information to your ex-wife, sir.”
“Right. Maybe that man TB can do some good in that regard, after all. Contact Dahlia and tell her to be expecting him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The grist, the grist,” mumbled Sherman. “That’s what I’m really the most afraid of in all this. It’s insidious, is what it is. It will have us fighting our very being, tearing into our own hides.”
“I have a suggestion in that regard, Colonel,” said Theory.
“Let’s hear it, man.”
“As you say, the grist, sir, is us. More specifically, it isme, Colonel. That is, an animated algorithm.”
“Go on.”
“I’ve been watching its behavior—that is, the behavior of all of it that’s been thrown at us. I’ve done some vector analysis, and I believe I can safely say that all of this was delivered in one initial shipment. A ship came that was infected with it. I believe I can even pinpoint the ship—but that’s not important. What is telling is my analysis of these behavior patterns. They point to a core code. My feeling is rather like the one you get about Amés, sir. You see hisstyle . This grist has a definite style. You know the distrust the inner system has of us free converts, Colonel?”
“It is legendary.”
“I don’t believe that Amés has loosed a large number of free converts on Triton, sir. I believe that this grist is, in a sense, the same person.”
“Clarify.”
“I think our adversary is a single algorithmic entity that has ensconced itself in a specific physical location. I think that it is not acting as a free agent, but is taking commands from outside. To do this some sort of localization would be necessary.”
“Do you think,” said Sherman, “that we can root it out?”
“Sir, I believe that with a task force made up our best free converts, that we can cut her off and we can kill her.”
“Put it together, then, Major,” Sherman said. “What makes you think it’s a female?”
“Just a guess, sir.” Theory replied. “I once knew a free convert, a woman whom I . . .”
Sherman was silent, expecting Theory to continue, but the major said nothing further.
“Put me in touch with our rip-tether group,” Sherman finally said. “Let’s go on the knit.”
Sherman found himself floating—only the oak leaf cluster icon—inside a troop hopper that was shaking like a leaf in wind. “What’s the situation there, Lieutenant?” he said to Flashpoint, who was in command of the group. She was a short black woman, a bit on the heavy side, but well within regulations for physical comportment. When Sherman had arrived on Triton, nine years before, Flashpoint would have been on the thin side as far as his officers went.
“We’re a klick away, sir,” Flashpoint replied. “One more bounce.”
“Do you have a spin rate on it?”
Flashpoint checked with one of her
soldiers, who was a sensor tech. “One revolution a second, sir. Pretty much pegged into that.”
“Have you got the mags ready to go?”
“All set, Colonel.”
“I’m not going to second-guess you, Lieutenant.” Sherman said. “You know your job. Latch on, polarize, and climb that beanstalk.”
Flashpoint nodded. There was a jolt. “Last bounce, sir. We’re going in.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant.” Sherman shunted out of the virtuality. There was nothing more he could do. Theory would monitor the progress and notify him if he were needed.
Twelve
On the troop bouncer, the situation was shit-hits-the-fan time for Corporal Kwame Neiderer, the sensor tech. Two days ago, Kwame had never heard of a rip tether, and if you’d asked him what precession meant, he would have poked you in the ribs and told you you’d have to buy him a drink so he could explain in full. Then the damn thing had torn through New Miranda. He’d seen it coming. He’d been on a grist detail, burning away the shit with a modulated laser rifle, when he’d looked up in the sky, and there it was. The building tops of the city and a cloud of debris veiled its base, but above, you could see it well enough. And you followed it up, and up, and it disappeared into a point in the sky. It spun on its axis, too fast for you to really see what it was made of. Just a gray line against a deep blue sky.
Evil. That was Kwame’s first thought about it. And now that he knew all the science and tech to the monstrosity, that was still the feeling it left you with. Somebody had designed the thing, sure, and set it in motion. But as it bore down on the city, Kwame was dead certain that the thing had a will of its own. It wished to kill. To feed on destruction.
