Slant

by Eikeltje

  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 knowin its

  3.

  G FI E G B E A I

  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 hell-crowned,

  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 nor 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

  Daniels takes Mary's hand and examines it solicitously, bur 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."

  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

  / s L A N T 323

  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 partials 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 design, 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,

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  GRG BEAR

  necessary self along with it. The mimicry has failed disastrously. She feels as

  if she is drowning in alien rivers.

  Jill withdraws, barely keeping her renewed self in order. Roddy still seems

  unaware, focused on the task at hand within Omphalos. She has never experienced

  anything like this. Her early desire to refer to Roddy for self-improvement,

  and for the improvement of her "offspring," seems hopelessly

  naYve.

  Roddy is nothing like Jill. He is
not even of her species.

  And where is Nathan? What is he doing?

  4O

  "It's in my contract that nobody interferes," Seefa Schnee tells Jonathan. She

  lights up another cigarette. "I work alone. If I need any advice, I ask for it."

  "Very convenient," Jonathan says.

  "And this is a hell of a time to have visitors," she concludes, staring at him.

  He has followed her into a circular room filled with ancient flat-screen readouts.

  Thick optical cables snake over the floor between banks of networked teraflops

  computers, pre-INDA, perhaps as much as thirty or forty years old. Cut-rate, Jonathan thinks. He's beginning to wonder if Omphalos is some huge Ponzi

  scheme, a complete sham--but he still can't believe Marcus was playing him

  that falsely.

  I Something shifts behind Jonathan. His neck hairs prickle. He turns and

  sees a warbeiter, a slender Ferret, step silently forward with guns pointed

  directly at him. It stops and shivers on its peals.

  "Shoot him, damn you," Seefa Schnee calls from across the garden plot.

  Bur the warbeiter refuses.

  "Shit," Schnee says. "Roddy marked you. He thought you were a green,

  like Marcus."

  Jonathan stares at the Ferret, and the machine returns his gaze with three

  eyes in parallel bands across its upper thorax. It does not seem forbidden to

  shoot, merely indecisive.

  "Someone shunted a mains current through Roddy's external memory

  store," Schnee says, her sudden burst of anger deflated. "He's still recovering.

  I can't talk to him." She pauses, looking curiously at the man and the warbeiter,

  then adds, "Here's your chance. You're green. Get back to Marcus and leave

  the building." She's holding something in check: her twitching and expostulating

  have subsided.

  "What about you?" Jonathan asks.

  / s L A N T 325

  Schnee says. She drags ferociously on her cigarette, then fastens her large black

  eyes directly on him. For the barest moment, Jonathan sees something sympathetic,

  even feminine, in Seefa Schnee, bur her face wrinkles and the moment

  passes without a trace. She whirls on the Ferret. "Get out, you stupid puppy!

  I don't need you. You're released. Go do something useful."

  The warbeiter hums quietly. For a moment, it seems reluctant to leave

  Jonathan. Then, with blinding speed and astonishing grace, it reverses on its

  peds and exits the chamber.

  Chloe. After not being able to see her face for hours, an image of his wife

  flashes up from memory. Perhaps he can learn something that will bring her back to him. At the very least, for the love they have shared, however rugged

  at times, and for their life together, he owes her this much. Jonathan says,

  "Show me what you did."

  "No reason to show you pico shit," Schnee screeches. "You, or Marcus. I

  don't owe yoanything!"

  "You did what Marcus told you," Jonathan says.

  "Marcus Reilly never told me anything. I worked under the instructions of

  the board of governors."

  "But you improvised, didn't you? You didn't follow their orders exactly, did you?" Jonathan asks, remembering Marcus's comment that things were

  happening prematurely.

  Schnee's lips begin to writhe again, then her arm twitches. With a look of

  relief, she allows herself to act on the suppressed impulse, and lifts her hand

  to her lips. She kisses the backs of her fingers. Once executed, the movement

  seems entirely natural and unremarkable for her. "I had a certain discretion,"

  she says.

  "You jumped the gun. You lets things loose early." Jonathan feels a bright,

  hard flame of invention, burning parallel with his anger. "I represent the board.

  You've failed us miserably." Jonathan doubts very much that the board's members

  spent any time in Schnee's workshop. That would have been benath them.

  "You're a liar," Schnee says doubtfully.

  "You... and Roddy... have been cut off from the outside for too long.

  You've lost all sense of responsibility."

  This seems to infuriate Schnee. "How dare you tell me that! You know what

  you asked me to do!"

  "To knock out the crutches, and bring down all the cripples, all the misfits,

  all the weaklings and incompetents. All at once."

  Schnee watches him with large-eyed fascination, as if he is a snake. Again

  she kisses the back of her hand, and then rubs it against her chin.

  "What about yourself?" Jonathan asks. "Did you exclude yourself?"

  "My infirmities are deliberate," she says. Her shoulders square off, then

  slump again, and her head jerks to one side. "I messed with my own head to

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  fifty years. And I added something to what the board asked for." A little smile.

  "Humanitarian gesture. Everybody's going to be a little smarter because of

  me. I give rhem my own little advantage in the fight. Think of it as my mark."

  Jonathan's mind becomes very still and very quiet. He doesn't find it difficult

  to imagine killing her. Her, first. Marcus next. Then, one by one, all the

  others, al/the Aristos.

  "You gave everyone Tourette syndrome," Jonathan says softly. "Just to show

  them it was you."

  "Like Tourette, but different. Subtle imbalances. A tweak in the receptors.

  Let loose the imp of the perverse. They'll all think a little faster, a little more

  queerly. Thoughts and impulses they'd usually ignore will suddenly be acted

  upon. Creative impulses... And they'll carry the distinguishing behaviors, as

  a sign."

  "Like you. Your mark." Jonathan advances a slow step at a time. Schnee

  walks across the room with quick hollow footfalls and opens a door on the

  opposite side.

  "Like me," she says. "I'm not blind, and I'm not inhuman, whatever you

  think. You, the board, you're the monsters. You don't deserve to win. So I did

  what I could to screw you up. Plain and simple." Her eyes glaze. "Muhfihfuh

  shih kikh fuh."

  She closes the door behind her, but it does not have a lock.

  Jonathan opens the door and steps into the next chamber, very large and

  high and brightly lighted.

  Jonathan closes the door. It latches. Schnee is donning thick overalls, rubber

  boots, and a beekeeper's hat. Behind her, rising eighty feet or more, is a build-

  g within a building. Five open levels hang suspended from cables anchored

  the concrete and flexfuller walls and ceiling of the larger chamber. Cables

  meander across the floor to the first level. All the levels are open above waist~

  high walls. He smells water and soil and something musty, primordial: not

  the yeasty smell of nano, but something pleasant and anciently familiar.

  The scent of rich soil, an immense sunlit garden, a farm.

  Green tendrils and leaves lean out over the low walls of all five levels. He

  swats at an insect flying past and knocks a wasp out of the air. It crawls along

  the floor, stunned, then takes off again, but does not try to sting him.

  "It's gone far enough," Schnee says. "It's time to shut it down and start

  over. Roddy's had his day and he's screwed up. He's embarrassed me. Bad

  patterns, bad examples. That's me. My fault. But I've made my point. I've

  done what I said I could do."

  Jonathan watches her. S
chnee flips her middle finger at him, three times,

  her jaw thrusting aggressively, and then she kisses the back of her hand and

  marches into a small framework elevator that rises alongside the five suspended

  floors. Through the protective bars of the cage, she shouts down to Jonathan,

  "I deserve a lot better vn, In,,, I I ...... .... T a ....

  /

  SLANT 327

  This seems to break a dam, and she pours forth a long, shrieking cadence

  of obscenities. No word by itself, or even all taken together, seems to have any

  meaning; sexual and social obscenities and insults, barked, shouted, burst from

  this small woman with a sound like a loudly snapping, crackling fire.

  Jonathan feels confused and cold, out of his depth once more, all his former

  confidence proved irrational. He's trying to absorb her confession, understand

  her complicity. The woman may be trying to keep some shred of dignity in

  the middle of a monumental blunder; or maybe she's just telling the truth.

  And he was almost part of it. He was ready to join with Marcus and the

  Aristos. He took the oath.

  He can't believe the sickness. In him, in them all. Defeated, utterly worthless.

  He turns back to the door. Then he stops and slowly reverses, peering up

  at Schnee. She is getting off on the third level.

  Maybe he can undo what he almost acquiesced to, allowed himself to become

  a part of. The cage of the elevator descends to the ground floor at the touch of

  a button. He enters the cage.

  Jonathan, by instinct and to damp his fear, is automatically working out