Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  “The vid that will establish a revolution,” Nguyen said as he reached for the sunroof . “Ms. Suvanatat is an artist. She has forwarded the cries of every wounded child to the world, along with our response.” Then he lofted himself through the roof, leaving Virgil to hunt about for the gun, and an extra box of ammunition.

  AFTERWARD, when a caravan of medics had arrived from Soc Trang and a triage tent had been set up, Virgil took a bottle of drinking water and a clean rag, and wandered off, until the lights and the noise felt remote behind him. He crouched beside a sluggish stream flowing through an irrigation ditch. His rib cage ached and his face stung. He wished there was an open bunk to crash in. His self-pity felt oddly heartening. This was the Virgil he knew.

  Who was that madman he’d been earlier tonight?

  He had already watched the record of his exploits, but he reviewed it again on the screen of his farsights, and as the seconds ticked past and the scene played, all he could think was: I should not have been able to do that. He had not even been aware of Ela crouched in the sunroof beside him, but she must have been there; she had recorded from that point of view. She had collected his profile as he gazed ahead at the helicopter. Calm, poised. His LOVs glittering like faint hot stars in a distant stellar cluster. The view panned forward to the fleeing helicopter as he took aim and fired: six quick shots and the tail rotor shattered. He had never before used a gun. “I shouldn’t have been able to do that,” he whispered.

  Yet he had done it, and he couldn’t remember being afraid. (He was afraid now.) He couldn’t remember experiencing any doubts. (No shortage at the moment.) Maybe it had all happened too fast for fear and doubt to kick in? Maybe it had been an adrenaline high, inspired by the pain and terror of the wounded Roi Nuoc children, and he’d just gotten lucky with the gun. Beginner’s luck … if you could call it that. The pilot and his two crew had all died when the airship hit and burned to the waterline, mired in a newly planted paddy. In blunt truth, Virgil had killed three people. Add Gabrielle and Panwar to the body count, and Virgil figured he could be fairly described as a serial killer.

  He heard footsteps approaching from behind him; quickly he bent to wet his rag with a splash of bottled drinking water. He daubed at his face. Blood came away, most of it dark, hard, and old, but some liquid, fresh. The footsteps paused behind him. Nguyen spoke, his voice gentle like the singing crickets that filled the weeds beyond the irrigation ditch. “You were amazing,” he said. “I couldn’t believe you did it.”

  Virgil couldn’t say anything to that. “How are the kids?” he asked.

  “Seven will need the hospital. They’ll be evacuated tonight on a government airship.”

  “Government … ?”

  “Hanoi is outraged.”

  “Have you won, then?”

  Nguyen’s voice took on an icy edge. “Do you think I set it up this way?”

  “No! Of course not. That’s not—”

  “I lost my head when the kids started going down. That’s never happened to me before. Never. I didn’t plan it this way.”

  “I believe you.”

  “It’s worked out though,” he added. “It looks like it will work out … for a while, anyway.” He crouched beside Virgil. “The medics are not so busy now. Come back to the tent. Let them look at your face.”

  “I think it’s shrapnel from the tail rotor. I didn’t feel it at the time.”

  “I’m not surprised. You were like a madman too, a man possessed. I’ve heard of such things. I’ve never seen it … or felt it.”

  Virgil told him then of his suspicions. “I think it was the LOVs that kept me steady, focused, with only the necessary emotions to do the job. I couldn’t have done that a year ago. Not if it was my own family being gunned down. I would have frozen. I would have thought too hard, or been too scared, and I would have missed.”

  “No one ever knows for sure how they’ll react under pressure—”

  “I know. That wasn’t me holding the gun. Or … it was a me I haven’t met before.”

  Nguyen’s chuckle was soft. “It was, I think, the ‘you’ you are becoming. Ela says the LOVs are supposed to make you smarter. Do they make you braver too?”

  Virgil brushed bloody fingers across the hard specks of his embedded LOVs. “Maybe it’s different sides of the same coin? Intelligence is more than just abstract reasoning. I think so anyway. After all, why is it that thoughts sometimes fly in a creative fervor, as if God is whispering revelations into your mind, while other times it seems as if you can’t put two coherent words together. That’s mood working. Emotion. In my opinion anyway. I think ninety percent of what the LOV implants do is stabilize and focus mood.”

  “That would confound those who think of intelligence as soulless abstraction.”

  “Ha. We would have the motivation of a ROSA—none at all—if not for our emotions.”

  “And the LOVs … ?”

  “They have emotions too. Or, they can have them. I’ve felt it. When my LOVs communicated with E-3, I felt it, like a drug washing through my brain.”

  “Good?”

  “Clean,” Virgil insisted. “Frightening and awesome too, but it was a clean high. LOV asterids—the neuronal cells inside each LOV shell—were derived from human brain cells, so maybe it’s not so surprising that we can share some experiences.”

  Nguyen touched his arm. “Come back to the tent and get your wounds cleaned. We’ll discuss the LOVs more tomorrow.”

  Virgil hesitated, weighing Nguyen’s mood before asking the question that had been puzzling him since they’d first linked. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this, why you’re here. What are the Roi Nuoc to you?”

  Nguyen frowned. He glanced back, in the direction of the medical tent. “My water puppets.” He dropped a pebble into the stream trickling through the irrigation ditch. “Their performance has surprised many people.” He looked rather pleased by this. “The explanation is simple, really. The Roi Nuoc are my past. I used to be … very much like them.”

  “You?” Virgil asked, trying to imagine Ky Xuan Nguyen as a homeless kid sleeping in an alley or on the side of a country road.

  “Is it hard to believe?”

  “Yes! Or no. I don’t know.” It would fit with his dark, cynical humor. “So what happened?”

  Nguyen shrugged. “I was found to be useful, by a man whose own natural son was blessed with the intellect of a water buffalo. The family business could not be entrusted to him, so a surrogate son was required.”

  “You.”

  “He called me his son. He sent me to the finest schools, first in Hong Kong, then in the United States. When I came back I saved his little advertising empire from ruin. Was he grateful?”

  Virgil waited.

  Ky let another pebble fall with a soft plop. “He still believes it is I who should be grateful. ‘Street trash understands street trash.’ That is his explanation for my success.”

  “So you set out to do better by the Roi Nuoc.”

  “They will never have to kiss ass just to eat.”

  “And the LOVs?”

  He sighed, and then he stood up. Virgil stood with him. “I had hoped to experiment quietly for a while.”

  “But why? Why risk it at all?”

  Nguyen spread his hands. They were small hands, smooth and pale. “The world is changing. Like many others, I have begun to wonder how long we can stay competitive with our machines.”

  “You mean AI? You know, I never thought much about it until I met Mother Tiger.”

  “I think we must become something new to meet this new world. Whether or not your LOVs are the answer though, only time will tell.”

  “So … did you mean what you said about leaving Ela on the beach?”

  “Does it matter now? The past is closed to us. The only way out is forward.”

  chapter

  20

  SUMMER SLIPPED HER farsights off, banishing an endless loop of emotionally wrenching news reports from
her perception. She turned to Daniel Simkin.

  He watched her from the other side of his desk, leaning back in his tall black chair, his fingers laced behind his head, his farsights half-silver so that his eyes faded into invisibility whenever they ceased to move, like hunting cats pausing in the grass.

  She had resigned her seat on the ethics committee to work for this man.

  “I can’t believe you ordered this,” Summer said. “How could you? How could you let things go this far?”

  Even worse, to go this far and to fail …

  The Vietnamese government had been so outraged by the shootings that it had declared the protectorate a reality, designating nine square miles as a LOV reservation. LOVs were being cultured in a hundred different waterways, while the IBC’s enforcement officers had been ordered out.

  “We had to contain this threat,” Simkin said.

  “By shooting people down? By shooting children? Daniel, stop and think what you’re saying.”

  He leaned forward. Now his pale hands rested on the desk. “What I’m saying, Summer, is that we were not aggressive enough. We failed to contain this threat, and now thousands of people are at risk of being infected. The entire ecosystem could be contaminated. We already know the LOVs are adaptable. The mutant strain on the Hammer proved that. But we have no idea what their limits might be, or how far they could spread.”

  “They won’t spread far without no-oct. Even the aberrant LOVs on the Hammer required it. The forensic report shows far more no-oct being consumed than could be accounted for by the known colonies. Even Copeland commented on the discrepancy in his notes.”

  “How hard do you think it would be to reengineer that limit, Summer? Maybe it’s already been done. A lack of no-oct hasn’t contained the LOVs so far. They’re getting away from us—and that puts the pressure on you and your team.”

  She had taken a leave of absence to supervise an IBC team flown in expressly to work with her. “I can’t come up with a designer virus overnight! And if I said I could, you’d be a fool to use it. This situation requires a highly toxic agent that will eradicate every LOV out there, but at the same time it has to be LOV-specific, incapable of harming any other life-form—”

  “Can you do it?”

  Summer gazed at him, at the glistening blond stubble of his beard, at the poised set of his veiled eyes, feeling as if she were looking ahead through time. Escalation was in his nature. If she didn’t do it, he would use other means to regain control …

  “Yes. I can do it. The LOVs are an artificial life-form, with peculiar characteristics. If we make a virus to attack those peculiar traits, everything else will be safe. But it will take time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Seven, maybe eight weeks.”

  He nodded as if she had proved his point. “Until then, the LOVs will have to be contained by other methods.”

  “Not by violence.” She could still feel the horror that had gripped her when the children started to fall. Her fingers twitched, sending a hash of meaningless signals to her farsights where they lay in her lap. She watched light flare across the screen as her ROSA sought feedback from her absent eyes. Say it! she chided herself.

  “I’d like to hire Dr. Nash Chou. Make him part of the team. We worked together on the original LOV project, and he was Dr. Copeland’s supervisor—”

  Simkin shook his head. “Nash Chou is already occupied. He’s become a consultant for the United Nations, hired to ‘monitor’ the situation. He’s on his way to the delta as we speak.”

  Summer stared down at her farsights, only slowly remembering to slip them on. She told herself she was not jealous. “Maybe we should move our lab there too. It would make the testing phase easier.”

  Simkin leaned back again in his tall black chair, lacing his hands across his hard belly. “No. Security’s impossible. I want you to stay here in Honolulu. Your work’s too important to risk.”

  chapter

  21

  “NO-OCT,” KY Xuan Nguyen said the next afternoon, as he joined Virgil on a mat spread in the shade of a banyan tree. “That is the question we must answer.”

  Virgil nodded: All other questions would become moot without no-oct.

  “Where do we get it?” Nguyen asked. “How do we manufacture it? Without no-oct this venture will reach a quick conclusion … as will our own lives as free men.”

  The three government soldiers keeping Virgil company had fallen silent at Nguyen’s arrival. Virgil glanced at them. Two women and a boy with a startlingly youthful face. All of them wore camouflage uniforms, their automatic weapons nested across their laps. None spoke English, but Mother Tiger translated their conversation for Virgil, and evidently they had a ROSA to translate what Virgil said to them. They had complained heartily about their farsights, which could access only their own military network. “No entertainment programs,” the younger woman groused. “Is it possible to die of boredom?”

  “I never feel bored anymore,” Virgil had mused. It was true. With his farsights and the emotional leverage of the LOVs, his mind seemed always to be occupied. He had been studying a map Mother Tiger had prepared, showing the coastal farmlands, with every pool and waterway and farmer’s house marked in three dimensions, with scrolling functions to display the ground-based view. Twenty-four bright red dots marked the exact points where LOVs had been released last night. Thin blue, fluid arrows indicated currents where any existed. Rosy halos around the drop points estimated the possible spread. Twenty-two of the sites were in ponds or rice paddies. The other two were in irrigation ditches. Government scientists were surveying all the waterways downstream.

  Oanh had used this map during the night, organizing cadres of Roi Nuoc to collect crown galls and press them into the mud at every drop site. Soldiers had been scattered all over the farms by that time, but they made no move to interfere. They were a youthful force, most of them barely twenty and proud of the stand their government had taken. They were also surprisingly sympathetic to the Roi Nuoc. Most of the civilian population despised these strange children, but the soldiers understood them. They were like them in many ways. Gazing through their farsights, they saw the present, but they saw it colored in alien hues back-scattered from a future looming just out of sight.

  “No-oct,” Nguyen said, arresting Virgil’s attention once again. “The supplies you brought will soon be gone, and the weeds too, are a temporary source. We must have a steady source of no-oct, or the LOVs will soon die.”

  Virgil felt the soldiers’ tension as they listened to Nguyen, trying to eye him without staring. They feared him, obviously, but awe and respect could be seen in their expressions too. This was how they might act, Virgil thought, if their president had come to sit among them.

  As if to prove his theory, the younger woman finally gathered the courage to speak. “Greetings sir,” she said in soft veneration. “Your exploits last night were truly brave.”

  Nguyen shook his head, gently refusing the praise. “A wise man can be brave,” he said. “But a foolish man pretends bravery to escape the scourge of his conscience. Last night I was a foolish man. Had I been wise, no one would have been hurt.”

  The young soldier bit her lip, nodding. “Yes Uncle. Still, it made us proud.”

  Their conversation was in Vietnamese, but Mother Tiger mimicked their voices so that in Virgil’s ears they seemed to also speak in English. He had not asked Mother Tiger to do this. The ROSA had assumed he would be interested, and of course he was.

  The ROSA fascinated him. Never before had he encountered a system so independent in its actions, so seemingly interested in the tasks it performed. According to Ky it had started as a simple redundant system, with cognitive blocks spread across many different servers so that if any one account was lost, the others would continue to run. But its redundant design had gradually evolved into a complex system with an intuitive nature that challenged Virgil’s assumption that ROSAs were tools and nothing more. Ky worried that machine int
elligence would supplant the ancient human kind. A lot of people did, but not many had a reason as close and as profound as Mother Tiger.

  “No-oct?” Nguyen repeated, for the third time now as he eyed Virgil with a bemused expression.

  Virgil grunted. “Any good lab should be able to make it.”

  “We are embargoed, Virgil.”

  “Surely there are commercial labs in this country?”

  “Assuredly. Not, however, within the nine square miles of the LOV reservation, which is the limit of our reach at the moment.”

  “Oh.”

  “Compromises were made this morning. Understandable compromises. Hanoi cannot, of course, ask the entire country to suffer with us.”

  “So … just the reservation is embargoed?”

  “Yes. Residents may exit if they wish, but they will not be allowed to return. Goods will not be allowed across the perimeter in either direction.”

  Virgil nodded. No food would be coming in then, and no clothing. No medical supplies. He noticed Nguyen watching him with expectant eyes. “And you?” Virgil asked. “Will they let you out?”

  Nguyen’s smile slid on oily cynicism. “No doubt. However, I do not think I would enjoy my reception. It would not be wise, Virgil, for either of us to leave just yet.”

  “That’s right,” the young soldier said. She tapped the rim of her farsights. “Foreign troops are just outside the border. If anyone involved in the conspiracy emerges from the reservation, they will be arrested. This includes the Roi Nuoc.”

  Nguyen nodded. Again he looked at Virgil. “No-oct?” he pressed.

  Virgil sighed. “We can culture gall tissue if we have access to a lab. Any lab at all.”

  Nguyen raised his eyebrows.

  “No lab?” Virgil asked dejectedly.

  “No lab.”

  He thought a minute. “Hey.” He looked up, an uncertain smile on his lips. “We could infect living plants with the crown gall bacterium. Oanh should know by now which species are vulnerable.”