Brian D'Amato

Brian D'Amato Page 80

by In the Courts of the Sun

  I moved three squares east, farther into the future, to November. Data swirled by, names, addresses, social security numbers, military service records, occupations, investments, domain names, postal codes, arrest records, supposedly expunged juvenile arrest records, lists of corporate employees, lists of government employees, professional associations, unions, guilds, social clubs, secret societies, church memberships, magazine subscriptions, Google alerts, vehicle registrations, telephone records, prescription purchases, even paintball teams, an un-untanglable snarl of cross-references like a scalpful of matted, dreadlocked hair. I moved. LEON sifted the data, evaluated it, discarded all but .00001 percent of it, and moved.

  Nothing. Fine. I moved again, into December. Another load of bits started to come in. I waited. The Net was slow today. Some new kind of Trojan worm had been closing down servers, not just locals but the routing stations on the T3 lines. People said it was the kind of thing only the U.S. government could manage to do. Either that, I thought, or just a clever twelve-year-old with a keyboard and a dream. LEON processed the whole thing, rating each bit of data by the likelihood of its intersecting with the hypothesized doomster. He moved. I moved. Another 3 × 1012 bits. Uncomplainingly, LEON sifted through it. This time he checked it against known millenarianist religions and doomsday cults. There were a lot of them—the end of the world’s always been popular—and Taro had insisted we set up the system to check against them every few moves. Still, my guess was that our suspect would be an independent, or at most someone only on the edge of one of the movements. He might be an ethnic Muslim or an ex-Jehovah’s Witness or even a holdout from the Order of the Solar Temple or whatever, but even if he were, I’d give five to one he wouldn’t be a very active member. He’d be a loner. And not some Oswald-style patsy either. A real loner.

  LEON moved. Damn. Nothing.

  Hmm.

  Okay. Slow down. Breathe.

  Narrow it down. Suppose he’s been bragging. Even just a little. I moved back a bit, into what we’d been calling the Bigmouth Space. It was a galaxy of hosted services, networking sites, and any other likely online communities, plus a little over a trillion cached e-mails, text messages, computer-transcribed phone calls, and whatnot. It was a monster, 2 × 1013 bits as of this millisecond. Take that, LEON babe.

  He did. He cross-referenced everything we’d done so far with the whole load, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Flickr, MySpace, Blogger, Technorati, and a hundred other lesser darknesses, active, cached, and abandoned. God dog, I thought. Imagine that they once called it the Information Superhighway. Information Superfund site, more like. World’s biggest and smelliest dump. The Staten Island landfill of the mind. LEON dealt with it, though. Esta bien.

  Trim it down again. I moved into a space called “Shibboleths.” It was basically lists of giveaway words (“Rapture Day,” “Dajjal,” “chillism,” “Abaddon,” “Kali Yug”), giveaway phrases (“I have a bomb,” “I hate all humanity,” “The world must be destroyed”), and things that reminded LEON’s increasingly insightful autodidactic engines of giveaway words and/or phrases. I told him to keep checking misspellings but that it was okay to ignore unlikely languages. Take a few seconds off. You’ve earned it.

  LEON thought. LEON moved.

  Huh.

  Ten thousand four hundred forty.

  That is, as of now—it was the Game’s three hundred eighty-fifth move—I, or maybe I should say “LEON and I,” had identified ten thousand four hundred and forty potential doomsters.

  Of course, we’d discounted a lot. Our baby might have gotten tossed out with the bilgewater. Still, I thought, I’d go three to one that our guy’s in there.

  Not bad. Just roll with that for now. Okay.

  I moved. LEON moved. The wire was still way high overhead, but it was getting closer to the ground. Eight skulls. I lost a skull. Seven skulls. Not in Alaska. Hah. Now we’re getting somewhere. Hmm. Not California—

  HAH!

  Not in the U.S.

  He’s Canadian.

  And playing odds again, he’s still in Canada. And just guts-wise I’m betting on BC or Alberta. Leave out the North Side for now. Yeah. I’m gonna nail you, you maple-sugar-assed snowback fuck.

  I moved. It was as though I was standing somewhere around Vancouver, and it was December 10, eleven days before 4 Ahau, and I was looking around in the fog, and I couldn’t see much, but still, there was a feeling the fog was burning off, that things would get clearer. LEON moved. Okay. Not there, I thought. There. No. Not there. Not there. Not this. Not that. I flipped through the profiles. A lot of them were just names, with maybe a few associated handles from social-networking sites. Some of them were just handles without names. Some were just user IDs. Check ’em anyway, I thought. Don’t be a choosy beggar. Okay. There. Not there. Not him. Not him. Now it felt like I could almost touch the wire again, except now the wire was flipping this way and that way, slipping away from me in the storm. There. I grabbed at it. Irrelevant bits dropped away like snowflakes melting in midair. Missed. Come on. Move. I moved. Okay. Things really were getting clearer. Or rather … hmm. They weren’t clearer in terms of shapes but just in terms of the light, the light… .

  Huh. There was a glow up ahead, a color, a brilliant light red, like the color of the lacquer on Maximón’s fingernails back in San Cristóbal Verapaz. Odd, I thought. Red’s a southeast thing. What’s it doing up here in Gray country? Was I going in the wrong direction? Maybe—

  Beep. LEON moved.

  Huh.

  Light red. Okay.

  I moved. Seven skulls. He moved. Six skulls. I hesitated. I moved. Down to five skulls. He moved. Four skulls. I started to move. No, wait. I took it back. Damn. Not thinking so straight.

  Take a breath.

  I snuck a look at the time window. It was three in the afternoon. So I’d been playing for nearly eight hours of clock time, longer than I’d ever been able to play before. On the other hand I was feeling worse than I ever had before. Symptoms included disequilibrium, depressed heart rate, and difficulty remembering my own name. I held on to the edges of the keyboard, as though it could be used as a flotation aid in the unlikely event of a water landing. Keep it together, Jed. It’s just the endgame.

  Somewhere the last dregs of the Steersman’s dust flared into bioavailability just before my overstimmed synapses collapsed into Alpha. I managed to wonder whether the color might be a clue to something else, a shape, an animal, something associated with the color, something I’d seen before, a number, maybe, or even a word, or a phrase.

  I moved. He moved. Three skulls, two skulls.

  A word, maybe? No, two words. Two short words. It was something I’d seen before, something that didn’t sound like it made a lot of sense, what was it, what was it …

  I moved.

  One skull—

  Hell Rot.

  [69]

  In the first window an eight-hundred-mile cold front, represented as a choleric yellow against the royal-blue Gulf of Alaska, rolled west at twelve miles per hour. According to the accompanying text panel the front would reach the coast of British Columbia at about 5:30 A.M. PST, fifty minutes from now. Dawn would be at 5:22 A.M., twenty-one minutes after the scheduled assault time. In the second window, an unenhanced view from a KH-13 Ikon reconnaissance satellite, you could see the dark Strait of Georgia on the left, the orange sodium lights of Vancouver with the dark river running up through them, and then on the right the long tail of white lights along the Trans-Canada Highway, heading east in a wide U alongside the Fraser river. At the end of the tail, at the far right of the screen, you could just see a smudge of lights marking the town of Chilliwack. The text panel listed a few key facts: that Vancouver was the second-largest biotechnology center in North America and the fastest-growing one in Canada, that it was consistently rated among the top four major cities worldwide in standard of living, that its citizens’ average IQ was estimated to be a robust 98, and—maybe contradictorily but, to us, relevantly—that it also had the highest suicide rate per capita of any majo
r city in the Western Hemisphere.

  The third window showed about two square miles of Chilliwack. It didn’t look all that menacing. There were two street grids, one north-south and another in the northwest quadrant rotated twenty degrees clockwise. On the south side the streets got longer and curvier, which told you they were the better and newer residential blocks. The east side was an older residential zone, also with big houses but with closer, smaller blocks, short on the north-south axis and long on the east-west one. Marguerite Avenue ran east to west in the center of the area, and 820 Marguerite was in the center of the block. This window’s accompanying text noted that Chilliwack was a community of over seventy-eight thousand, that although the town’s economy was primarily agricultural, many of its residents worked in the big city, sixty miles to the west, putting up with the long commute as a lifestyle trade-off, that the town’s median income was forty-eight thousand dollars Canadian, and that the birth rate was 9.8 per 1,000 and the death rate was 7 per 1,000 per year. Soon to be 0 and 1,000, respectively, I thought.

  “Why didn’t they pick him up when he was out of the house?” A2 whispered in my right ear. She’d just come in.

  “He hasn’t been outside in four days,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, now they think he’s got the Goat in there someplace. That’s why they moved it up to today.”

  She said, “Oh,” again. She sat down next to me and looked up at the video wall. We were all in a big conference room at the temporary convention facility near the Hyperbowl—“we” meaning Taro, Dr. Lisuarte, Larry Boyle, Tony Sic, Taro’s interns, Michael Weiner, who was bulking up the chair on my left, me, and almost everybody else involved with the Parcheesi Project except for Marena, who, for some reason I didn’t understand, was watching from her house in Colorado. The whole thing had a such a gemütlich feeling that I could almost imagine that we were just a bunch of undergrads spontaneously gathering in the rec room to watch a presidential election or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But y’aren’t, Blanche, I thought. Y’aren’t.

  “That’s the second tanker coming in,” Laurence Boyle said. He pointed to the next window, #4, with a blue laser dot. It showed a real-time night-vision satellite view of about four blocks, with the Czerwick home at the center. You could see that the house had two gables, that there was a two-car garage with a flat roof added on, and that there was a pretty big deck in the long, narrow backyard. The roof, unfortunately, was made of copper-plated metal alloy, which made it hard to get an infrared reading from above. The tanker Boyle had pointed out looked like a can of Red Bull, sliding in without headlights behind its parked twin on Emerald Street, two blocks south of Marguerite.

  I stood up to get a look over Tony Sic’s head at window #5. It had a nice telephoto shot from a radio tower five blocks downtown, with a good view of the whole 800 block from about a 45° angle. From here you could see that the house was a roughly four-bedroom job, with just enough styling to identify itself as Colonial. There were four steps up to the door, going up sideways to a little sort of porch with an overhang, and that would slow the team down a second or so. But the place wasn’t huge—the development had been built in 1988, just before the McMansion era—and the ERT captain had estimated they could clear it in less than eight seconds. The houses on either side were a little different but mainly the same. There were a few middle-aged maple trees in the front yards. They weren’t in leaf yet. Everything looked pretty normal. The definition of normal, even. I could’ve told you, I thought. Everybody’s known for decades that suburbs were a bad idea, but they kept building them anyway, and now look where the Seven-Headed Beast’s coming from.

  Ma and Pa—at thirty-six Madison Czerwick still lived with his parents—were almost certainly in the master bedroom on the second floor, and there was somebody, probably the little brother, in a room in the back. Madison—with whom we were all now on a first-name basis—was most likely in his room. All other readings were showing what they called a “pattern consistent with overnight sleep.” That is, there were no televisions or task lights on in the ground or second floors. There hadn’t been any mouse movements on any computers for over an hour. Telephones, PDAs, and other Net-enabled gadgets were inactive. Power draw was inconclusive, meaning that something, but nothing huge, might be running in the basement. Probably, everyone was nestled all snug in their beds. While visions of genocide danced in their heads. Head.

  “They’re talking about moving back five minutes,” Ana’s voice said over the communal speaker. You could hear voices hubbubbing in her background. “To set up the hoses.”

  “Thanks, Miss Vergara,” Boyle said. Miss, huh? On any other day I and everyone else would have snickered. Today no one did. Ana—who was turning out to be less of a grunt, and more of a player, than I guess I’d realized—was one of thirty or so guests in the trailer of a poshly converted semi ten blocks away from 820.

  “Okay, there they are,” Ana said. Her cursor slid onto window #5, wiggling around a four-person crew who were now attaching long white hoses to the back of the two chrome tankers. They laid the hoses down in two neat paths to within fifty feet of 820, leaving a few hundred feet of slack at each end. There was a pause. Then someone turned a valve, and each hose inflated up to just before the slack section, where I guess there was another valve. You could already see water vapor condensing around the hoses. They were full of liquid nitrogen, which, we hoped, would hold in the Goat.

  On their first day of investigation the detectives had found that Madison had been “one step removed” from access to a breeding population of a “purpose-raised” strain of Brucella abortus. By the end of their second day they’d confirmed that his Internet activity, especially the haplotype maps he’d downloaded, indicated he was actively tweaking their DNA. Brucella are a venerable and trusty bacteria, something you’d get from, say, delivering a baby water buffalo or drinking raw goat’s milk with Zorba the Greek. Over the years it had been called Malta fever, goat fever, contagious abortion, Bang’s disease, or any of a hundred other names. We were just calling it the Goat. Compared to the Disney World virus, the symptoms weren’t anything fancy: sudden sweat that smells like wet hay, muscle pains, fainting, and, of course, death. Which is pretty scary, especially the sweating part. Better be sure to pick up an organic deodorant crystal on the way to oblivion.

  The Goat’s main claim to infamy was that it had been the first bacillus ever weaponized by the U.S. government. In 1953 they’d tested it on animals, using the same grapefruit-sized bomblets they later used for anthrax. The air force had chosen it because, unlike most bacilli, it could survive airborne for hours and, even more excitingly, could penetrate intact human skin, so that even if you were wearing NBC gas masks and rotating them in sealed off-gassing booths, if you had a patch of pink showing somewhere, you were toast-to-be.

  Even so, by the 1970s, what was left of those strains had been decommisioned and stored in two igloos at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. And by the 1980s it was supposedly all destroyed. But somebody’d been kidding around with it since then, either to develop defenses against it or to sell it or, probably, both.

  In the sixteen months since he was downsized from his job at CellCraft’s Vancouver facility, Madison had greatly improved the Goat. The Czerwick Strain—at least, as the CDC had projected it based on data they’d grabbed remotely from Madison’s hard drive—now had the usual trendy features like ultrafast reproduction, disinfectant resistance, asymptomatic infection, and a precision nanochronometer. But the most notable upgrade was what they called vector flexibility. The classic Brucellis strains can jump from some types of animals to humans, and possibly from humans back to animals. But most animals either don’t get them at all or because of lifespan or lifestyle aren’t suitable vectors for human transmission.

 

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