‘Until it comes into contact with a mind?’
‘Yes.’
The Colonel suddenly changed mode. He released Geof from his stare and looked off-camera. ‘That would be quite a thing, wouldn’t it? Still, how did it get from Busan to Mexica?’
‘It didn’t have to. Kronos would only need someone to recreate the base substance.’
‘How would they know how to do that? We don’t even know what it is made of yet.’
‘But Kronos may know. If it does have a mind separate from its body, a digital mind say, then it is possible that when it appeared in Busan it also copied itself onto the Weave.’
‘Then all it needs is one person to be tricked into making it a new host.’
‘We’ve already started scanning. Some of those ingredients are on a watch list anyway,’ Geof said, ‘If anyone is trying to collect the materials, we’ll find them.’
‘Wait a minute, Geof. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I thought there was nowhere to hide on the Weave? How can Kronos be there and us not know about it?’
‘It’s easier than you might like to think. There are lots of tricks hakkas use: tunnelling, mimesis, trojans. Weavers find what they can and close the holes, but it requires constant and active counter infiltration.’
‘How can you detect Kronos then?’
‘I don’t yet, sir.’
‘And if it is on the Weave, what is it doing?’ Pinter asked.
‘I won’t be able to answer that until I can confirm it is there at all.’
‘Then find out, Geof. There has to be a connection. We need to report something or the Will will tear us all out of our seats.’
~ * ~
Geof closed communications with the Colonel, lay back in the chaise and melted. Each time he connected with it was like the first time he put on a symb. His brain felt instantly bigger and reached further and faster. All he had to do was flick a thought to the chaise and an immense amount of data was processed and delivered back to him.
Go through all the streams of Mexica and see if there is any mention of the Kronos ingredients. The chaise processed. While Mexica wasn’t included in the WU, it still interacted with the Weave and had its own networks that Services monitored. The chaise found some records of the materials being traded, but nothing out of the ordinary, and always just one ingredient at a time.
It then highlighted a requisition order that was rejected by the Caucus; an underling had sent a missive to the governing body about a peasant, warning that there might be collusion with rival factions. Trace back on the flag of the ingredients in Mexica to the boy Gomez. Okay, now find where he got that list. The chaise ploughed through the entirety of the boy’s stream; it was only a few hours’ worth, the poor denny. Gomez had received the instructions from an ARA, a common snare used by hakkas.
He watched the conversation play out between Gomez and the girl avatar.
Okay, certify that link, where the ARA changes to a conduit. Full validation. The chaise quickly chased the link of the ARA, leading it into a call hub where it got looped on itself when the listed operator turned out to be non-existent. A facade of a datastream, small enough to get lost within the margin of error. ‘We have ourselves a hakka.’
Now to find out what a hakka would be doing giving out the Kronos recipe? Could it simply be dedication to anarchy? Or had they too been taken in by promises?
Find the hole they came through and then overlay with known MOs. The chaise began pinpointing the possible points of entry to the hub. There were many; the call hub was riddled with susceptibilities. Begin a line by line search. Something came in from somewhere. The chaise warned him this operation would take some time.
While he waited, Geof requested a complete audit of the Weave. This was a regular information set compiled hourly to monitor the health of the network and look for large-scale patterns.
He immediately noticed something odd. Pattern over time, standard collations. Statistics layered over his eyes. Filter to patterns that changed after Kronos first appeared in Busan. There were still too many factors. He changed the code to line graphs and zoomed in on the moment Kronos appeared in Busan, where a dozen lines kicked upward sharply.
From the first moment of the appearance there were natural increases in Weave traffic, as a billion streams began accessing all the information they could on the situation.
Go back further, before the appearance. Correlate with a reverse projection of the selected trends. The line graph zoomed bigger to fill his overlay, and two dotted lines, one orange and one green, lay over top, twitching angles as the data was refined. The increase in energy load of the Weave and the increased traffic did not correspond. Geof increased the resolution to a minute by minute mapping. The line showing the amount of energy it took to maintain the Weave began to climb forty-eight minutes before Kronos reached the surface.
Now tell me what that means. This the chaise could not process.
~ * ~
Geof took a break from his charts and took a fly over the planet. Gracefully he slipped from eye to eye, landing on street corners, flying through squib corridors, diving under the sea. He flew to the peninsula and saw the beast at the public viewing points, like so many millions were doing each day.
Do you ever feel lonely?
Even when you’re at home, surrounded by the ones you love?
Do you ever feel like you don’t ever really connect?
Come with us. Come find happiness.
Geof swiped the annoying commercial away and changed into a cloaked mode. His avatar was whatever anyone looking at him would see if he wasn’t there: effectively invisible, except for his footprint... the weight of data.
He went back to his thought room, pulling back the luminous graphs of mathematical plots. He drew out one and told the chaise to begin breaking down the energy spike by node. Nodes were the billion invisible pillars of the Weave, the warp threads of the great loom. The chaise could pattern the energy demands of each distinctly.
How much does data weigh? That was a question from Ortega. Did it weigh nothing? Was it like smoke? And the answer, in real-world terms, was how much electricity had to be produced to keep it in existence.
From node to node the energy needs bounced. When contact was made the node’s traffic suddenly doubled.
It’s replicating, Geof thought.
~ * ~
Morritz had become more interested in the Kronos project since they began investigating the theory that it had escaped to the Weave in digital form. This had nothing to do with symbiots and everything to do with network theory.
‘The funny thing is that it spreads just as it seems to in the real world. Even online it acts totally blind and feels its way around,’ Morritz said.
‘But can we stop it?’ Geof asked.
‘One part at a time, perhaps, but not through automation, I don’t think. What Kronos is doing is creating a parallax network. It isn’t just on the Weave, it is making its own copy of it.’
‘Or something like that,’ Egon agreed. ‘Here, let me show you something. This is a pattern one of our boffins constructed using your data weight theory.’ A flat map of the globe highlighted different areas of the Weave in a scale of colours from clear white to alarm red. ‘We took the expected and recorded data load of every part of the Weave, and anything outside the norm is tagged as being overweight.’
‘And with this we can detect Kronos’s presence on the Weave,’ Geof concluded. At this point he began feeding preliminary data to the Prime and Colonel Pinter.
The Colonel and Egon Shelley joined them in the thought room.
‘How far has Kronos penetrated the Weave?’ Pinter asked.
‘By this estimate, about thirty per cent.’
‘And growth rate?’
‘A percentage point per day cycle.’
‘So we have seventy days until it is everywhere?’
‘Maybe less.’
‘A
nd has it made it through to any first tier circles? Services?’ Pinter asked.
‘Fortunately not. The isolation protocols must be blocking it.’
‘Good. What else have you got? Have you learnt anything useful from the samples?’
‘Quite a lot ... The Weave infection of Kronos is behaving in an analogous way to its physical form. It spreads, it grows, it absorbs. When it runs out of things it can absorb it waits. On the Weave it won’t run out of material. It will just keep building in parallel until it is everywhere.’
‘There has to be a way to stop it,’ Pinter said.
‘It’s actually not affecting anything, Colonel,’ Morritz said.
‘The Command is to deny Kronos any avenue for further expansion.’
‘It is all through the Weave.’
‘Yes, and we can’t afford for any more outbreaks,’ the Colonel said.
‘Colonel, I do not believe that Kronos is aggressive. I do not think it means us any harm,’ Geof said.
‘Why would you say that?’
‘Because it doesn’t make sense. Why would Sensei Li make something that was solely destructive?’
‘You said yourself he said it was a failure.’
‘Yes, but when a scientist says an experiment is a failure it only means it didn’t work as expected. It doesn’t mean something else didn’t happen. There has to be a reason Shen didn’t destroy it.’
‘And you have an answer, I presume?’
Geof looked at Egon, who shrugged. They had been stepping around the topic; both knew they weren’t saying things that were on their minds.
‘We have been thinking of Kronos as alive, or animal in some way. And it does seem to be like that, except it is dumb. This is a creature with the animal intelligence of an amoeba. It doesn’t think.’
Nobody spoke and Geof continued. ‘If this was a digitalis experiment, a step forward in human evolution, I can’t help but wonder how this could possibly have been close to sensei’s intentions.
‘If we look at how it acts, just growing and absorbing, working with the plants ... perhaps Shen might not have been trying to replace the human body, but replacing the environment we live in.’
They looked at each other a long time. The Colonel watched the blink and tick of his various task reports in his overlay, and then closed all the windows so he could look at the weaver without distraction.
‘And we would live inside it?’
‘Yes. In a new world, free like the Weave, and each person’s soul a stream.’
‘Are you suggesting all those people are still alive under that stuff?’ the Colonel asked.
‘Maybe not their bodies, but their minds might be.’
‘Oh, Geof ... I would like to believe that these people are still alive as much as anyone, but you have no proof.’
‘What if I could get it? What if we can communicate with it?’
‘Geof, we have tried to in every way we know how.’
‘But not on the Weave. On the Weave we are both digital forms, we have to be able to find a way to talk.’
‘Wouldn’t you get infected?’
‘I’ll return to a backup.’
‘Geof, I won’t stop you, but are you really willing to take that risk?’ Pinter asked.
‘Yes, Colonel.’
‘As you wish ... Just one thing.’
‘Yes.’
‘You should hurry.’
‘Why?’
‘Is the Prime going to attack it?’ Morritz asked.
‘Why would he do that?’ Geof asked.
Morritz shrugged. ‘Shima needs some good news or he’s finished.’
‘He wouldn’t...’ Geof looked at the Colonel.
‘The Prime is being forced into a position.’
‘But it is alive.’
‘Prove it.’
~ * ~
Takashi watched the exchange play out and sent a message to Geof Ozenbach. It was ignored, of course.
‘Fine,’ he said to himself.
Takashi to Lewis: Are your kids ready for a job?
~ * ~
When Admiral Shreet received the call, he stood from his desk and floated to the large porthole. Whenever he spoke to people on Earth he liked to be looking at the planet. It was an entrancing view. In the sun the heavy contrast of cloud, ocean and land, in the dark the void and the artificial stars of civilisation.
The orbital system crisscrossed before his eyes. Satellites, shuttles and haulers moving in straight coordinated lines. Stopping and starting like a child’s train set, very much like a train set, just without tracks.
Shreet was a straight-backed man and, like all of the orbital population, he worked hard to keep his body toned. His was an old face, singed by fire sometime in the past and made harder by the unforgiving shadows of space.
For two decades he had been the checkpoint between the World Union and greater Earth — which didn’t live with the same unity of principle. He was ambassador, sheriff and commander of the Orbital Weapons Net.
Admiral Shreet looked down at the blue orb with its lumps and brushstrokes of weather. Largely, he could stay distant from the whim of the Will. There were no rivals for his position, as no Earth-grown humans could compete with his record and experience and few of the greater-Earth population took that much interest in the WU and the doings of the earthbound. You weren’t a real roughie if you were a Citizen, and the WU only included Citizens.
He was abreast of Earth’s affairs and had adjusted the satellite coverage to focus surveillance over the Kronos outbreaks and the Cape area. Any time a target was identified, the Admiral could eviscerate it, whether an individual or group; or he could distort a large target area beyond recognition. He tried to make sure it was only a tool of last resort.
‘Admiral Shreet.’
‘Colonel Pinter. I hope you can tell me why your call feels so ominous.’
‘I presume you have been watching the mess going on with the Will.’ Shreet nodded, curtly. Of course he had. ‘Then you must be experiencing the same dilemma as the rest of us. Though your perspective may be somewhat removed.’
‘Somewhat.’
‘Tell me, Admiral. If Earth became ... intolerable, would greater Earth survive?’
‘There are contingencies for such an event. Is it coming to that?’
‘I don’t think it has to, but that isn’t actually what I’m contacting you about.’
‘Oh? Then what is it?’
‘“It” is Kronos. I woke up in a sweat when it struck me that if Kronos is on the Weave, then the weapons net might be open to usurpation too.’
‘Oh, mir, you’re right.’ Shreet paled and touched his hand to the window glass. ‘What do we do?’
‘You need to purge the whole system. Revert to backups from last month.’
‘That will take the OWN out of operation. You’ll be defenceless.’
‘Yes, so I’d urge you to do it as quickly and quietly as possible.’
‘Of course. I can do it all myself. Nobody will know.’
‘There’s another catch, Admiral.’
‘Yes?’
‘Once it’s done you won’t be able to reconnect. Not until we know it is safe.’
‘You want the OWN to be isolated from the Weave? I can’t do that.’
‘You must. You can’t risk contamination.’
‘It goes against the Command.’
‘Do you believe your job is to protect the OWN, or the people of Earth?’
‘The Weave will go mad. What justification can I give?’
‘Now there I had a thought ... how would you feel about declaring independence?’
~ * ~
He stood on the far side of the bridge. Only a short walk and a toll gate before he would be inside the strange zone: Omskya relocation zone, Sector 261. Miles Lizney was fascinated by the place the hakka had dumped Zach after chewing him up and, since no one above
seemed to care, he would have to investigate himself.
The Siberian Terminus was a unique wasteland, formed by the detonation of a nuclear weapon within a broadcast distortion field. Ten thousand kilometres of animals, trees and Örjians killed or irrevocably changed by the sting of the Scorpion. It was an explosion of forced mutations that brought many new species into existence. Nearly all of whom died.
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