“Opout, opout, opout.” Sweetie plucks at Brian's shirt. “Now, please?”
He raises his stick as though to hit her but only says, “Later, for fucksake.”
•
Brian chortles, bounces on his bedding. “Lines and lines of defenses, my boy. Never before was there a place like Living End, and never will there be again.
“Of course I can't use the force‐field bubble; it's too obvious a power drain. Never mind. The force‐field airlocks do the trick. I've also got my own tame plaguebot to keep the other blur superorganisms off my ass. Tame blurs, my boy. It's all in the algorithms. In here or Outside. Plus a little tinkering with force fields. Good shit, eh? But it goes deeper than that.” As though to illustrate, Brian snuggles down into his nest.
“How should I begin? I can think of a nice parallel. Once upon a time, way back in the twentieth century, the Indian military decided to stash their key command and control installation in dense forest—we still had forests then, and we still had India—well away from aerial surveillance or attack. And, sure enough, it worked. The place was invisible from the air. That's right. And a few years later deforestation had stripped away everything but a lush ring on protected land surrounding this highly classified site. They might as well have painted a giant bullseye around it and fired off flares. As the Chinese duly noticed.
“At first glance, it's same‐same with my little oasis here. But no. This spot already enjoyed heavy security measures; it was well concealed, back in the old days, from GameBoys and enemy missiles. But Living End enjoyed another line of defense. If anybody ever tried satellite monitoring, they would have been surprised to find that the station wasn't there. That it wasn't anywhere. MOM went so far as blinding all her own surveillance devices to its presence. Right down there at the source code level. Neat, eh?
“Even neater, I also fiddled with things. Now MOM herself, if she looks, doesn't see anything. Same as the way Africa was deleted from human experience, me and my hideout are right off MOM's radar. And that's still not all. I've added a bunch of virtual Living Ends to the equation. Decoys. They pop up all over the place. Some are only virtual, programmed in, others are holos—the same satellites trying to home in on me are themselves beaming the holo decoys. Their coordinates, never here of course, switch randomly from moment to moment. A giant shell game with no pea.”
Cisco is thirsty. And his eyes are drying, especially the one he can't blink. Maybe reading his mind, Sweetie leans in close and licks them, first one and then the other, although she has to hold the second one open to get at it.
“Yes, MOM is everywhere. But her sensors aren't. That's why I'm still here. And why you're here. I'm here because she can't see me, because if she could I'd be long dead and gone. And you're here because she's trying to find me. She wants to off me in the worst way. You're meant to be her eyes and ears, here in my little hideout. Besides that, you're her sting. You're here to kill me.”
Blink, blink.
“Oh, yes, you are. But no problem; I've fixed that. Now I'm going to kill you and then I'm going to lobotomize MOM. How? More about that later. For now, let's just say I've got friends in high places. So both officially and practically speaking, Living End is not here; it isn't anywhere. Now you see me and, abracadabra, now you don't.” He chortles messily and burrows deeper into his nest, snug and smug. “MOM thinks I'm part of herself. Meanwhile MOM is everywhere, infinitely redundant. With IndraNet, she's everywhere there's anything qubital. That's why you see all this antique digital shit around the joint, my boy. I don't dare go qubital, except where I'm a hundred percent certain I can engineer my way around Her Divine Fucking Omnipresence with my anonymized holotank receiver and transmitter. The Worlds are harder, and I have to move more carefully.
“So however primitive my setup may look, it works. And it's secure. Way secure. I'm invisible.”
Outside
Leary appears to be talking to himself, although from long habit he's really addressing Rexy.
Even though Rexy is dead. Not exactly dead. Just dissed, since he was never exactly alive in the first place. He was a robopet. So Leary feels silly at this grief he discovers in himself. Not so silly is the knowledge that his one connection with Sky, however unpredictable, has been severed. Now he is truly alone. Except for Muggs—coasting along aboard his magic rug—who knows more than he should and who evidently has his own plan. No sooner has one robot guide gone down than another has taken his place.
As they draw closer, Leary sees that the big dust geyser isn't moving after all.
Then he recognizes it. A giant Golden Arches. Except it isn't golden, it's gray. Twenty years before, it would have held particles that turned ambient light into a gold‐red‐blue‐silver double rainbow. Now it's nothing but dust frozen in place by the force field. Funny thing. Where was the field generator, and how has it managed to survive?
“Gosh almighty,” Leary says. “Now I'm thinking of hamburgers. Not your McDonald's hamburgers. No, I'm talking big, juicy burgers charred on a grill and heaped with mustard and fresh vegetables. A pickled jalapeno pepper on top.”
Cheeseburger? Did you…cheeseburger? Have we got… for you. Sputtering audio and shadowy forms. Bits of people, a happy‐face, a fistful of burger. Burger…cheese…geez… The first five notes of “Shave and a haircut, two bits.” Then all goes still once more. It's a clapped‐out dreckad, even sillier than the original version.
How had the holo and field generators survived the events of these past years?
For an empty wasteland, Outside is full of surprises. For one thing, the fleyes, maybe along with the cockroaches, could well be the only things around to witness the end of the world. And the dreckads will still be trying to sell popcorn to anything that moves.
There's more. Leary has been experiencing strange internal phenomena. Auditory hallucinations, for example. Right now he feels feverish. And tired. Like that time the medibots had to fix all the broken bones in his left fist. But there's nothing wrong with him that he's aware of, so maybe it isn't the medibots. He doesn't even want to think about what kind of viruses have been lying around out here waiting for a nice juicy host to present itself. Whatever. He can do no more than trust the medibots in this matter.
And he's annoyed by something in his peripheral vision. He experiments with looking askance, as the Kid likes to put it. Whatever this is, it isn't out there in the world; it isn't a bit of mondoland creeping up or flitting in airborne. It's inside his head. Chalk one up for the paranoids. Leary recalls an Eddie Eight rant: “Sometimes they program your medibots to self‐assemble as GPSs. That's if they want to know where you are. They can also do blood clots, if they only want you dead.” And could “they” do WalkAbouts? You'd go nuts if you listened to that sort of stuff.
But now there's something else afoot, right there on the edge of his periphery. Even through the blur lenses, Leary glimpses something in motion. And this thing, at least, is outside his head. Off to his right at two o'clock. There! A tight formation of three smallish, red‐bodied dragonflies are darting their quick aerial transpositions.
Muggs is spellbound. He moves past Leary, inching in for a closer look, then jumping back as a dust tendril lashes out from a dune to diss one of the insects. Its two wingmen disappear almost as abruptly, but Leary has seen them flit smack into the next dune. Not dissed, he believes; just camouflaged, the same dodge he and the 'pets have been using. Maybe the dragonflies can't fly while wrapped in dust. He peers at the place they vanished, checking for a sign. He crouches to look closer, and the surface of the dune ripples. A breeze lifts a shiny gossamer wing and floats it away in the warm, late afternoon light to where an equally gossamer tendril whips out from the dust and the wing disappears. A couple more whip up at Leary. His blur mantle takes the hits in stride; all he feels are something like mild electric shocks.
Muggs, all of twenty‐five centimeters tall, does his best to crowd in front of Leary. “Watch it!” the 'pet tells him. “Watch
the pendant, for fucksake.”
Leary stares at Muggs. Then he looks all around for the ventriloquist before turning back to the 'pet. “Darn it, Brian. Is there any place you aren't?”
“Just call me Chicken Man,” Muggs says, and heads northwards.
“Okay, Chicken Man, I've got a question for you. Where's the Kid?”
“Safe and sound, my friend,” Muggs calls back. “But he can't come to the phone right now; he's kind of tied up, you could say. So you'll take care of that locket, if you know what's good for the boy.”
“And you'll take good care of the Kid, if you know what's good for you.” As Leary sets off after Muggs, the dunes on either side seem to shrug, ever so slightly. This might only be a trick of the light, but Leary walks faster.
•
“Where the heck did those dragonflies come from?” Leary says to Rexy, who is no longer here, not expecting an answer. Certainly not expecting the voice inside his head.
Aeolian plankton parachute in from the stratosphere, often long after they were first swept up by winds and thermals. Historical examples include Krakatoa, recolonized only a few years after a nineteenth‐century eruption all but annihilated the island, and Japan, which started to see plants and insects appearing soon after the whole country was sterilized back in the '20s. More information is available.
Whoa. Once again Leary finds himself looking all around for the source of the voice. “Darn it,” Leary says. “Who is this?”
The response is immediate: Subvocalize.
Leary looks over at Muggs who, in much the way Rexy used to do, is watching him intently. Leary subvocalizes: Who is this?
Muggs steps all around to look, since his neck isn't fully articulated, and gazes back at Leary with new interest. “What did you say?” he asks.
“Nothing.” Leary remains impassive in face of the 'pet's avid scrutiny. He subvocalizes some more: Gosh‐darn it. He's straining a seven‐decade‐old resolve—out of respect for the sensibilities of his first wife, good old Nance, and now out of respect for her memory—to refrain from bad language. Even gosh‐friggin'‐darn it doesn't do the job. Clearly, he's now in possession of a WalkAbout. How can that be? He subvocalizes this query, and the answer is scrolling before he's finished.
Medibots use new algorithms to assemble the come‐and‐go WalkAbout 1.0. This beta version provides the quality and range of functions typical of a hard WalkAbout implant plus audio features and stealth technology that can elude almost any anti‐bugging device.
Enough. Leary remembers to subvocalize. Who is this, anyway?
His WalkAbout opts for blatant evasiveness:
The medibots are able to assemble, disassemble and reassemble as needed, while continuing to perform their standard clinical functions. Congratulations, citizen, upon your new empowerment. Refer to “Come‐and‐go WalkAbout 1.0 FAQS” if you have any questions.
Darn it all to heck. This is Sky, right?
Briansday
“That's right,” Brian says. “I'm right off MOM's radar.”
Cisco becomes aware of the background twitter only after it stops. The dark recesses above, as though in awe of Brian's claim, have gone silent. Then a jarring concussion—WHUMP—is followed by much renewed twittering and dark flutter.
The external monitor, partly obscured by frenzied bats, gives them a view from half a meter above ground level, out past one of Leary's knees, at least till Muggs steps around him for a better look.
Brian appears calmer than the bats. “For fucksake!” he says. “She's using bunkerbusters.”
On the screen, Leary says, “Whoa! That's a bunkerbuster.”
Rabbit wheels Brian over to his other set of ruts, parks him in front of the monitor for a closer look at proceedings. Muggs' focus swings back and forth between Living End and a point in the distance where a mushroom cloud rises from the wastelands. They're also getting a dramatic satray show in the same general vicinity.
“She has no idea.” Brian laughs, a shade hysterically. “No clue where I am. She's just plinking away in the dark. So let's calm down, okay? Not you, Rabbit. You get those data loded.”
THUMP. A second concussion brings debris raining down from the dark. Rabbit mutters and step‐steps, holds the parasol over Brian against cave‐ins. Yet a third bomb falls near enough to get Brian's chair squeaking. “Wow, wow, wow,” Brian says. “That was too close for comfort. But these hits are flukes. They must be. MOM has no idea. Anyway, even if the satellites find us, this place is impregnable. Unless they score a direct hit with a bunkerbuster.”
Rabbit rocks even faster. “We must hide,” he says. “We're late; too late.”
“Know what happens then?” says Brian. “With a direct hit?”
Blink, blink.
“Ka‐blooy. The thing sucks our air out in a flash. And you know all about suffocation, don't you? Never mind. The blast would incinerate everything inside the cave before we could suffocate. Small consolation, though.”
The surrounding bedrock conveys yet another concussion, though this bomb has fallen much farther away. Brian rocks in place and mutters as the burns on the screen also wander several kilometers away into the wastes to raise their fiery hell elsewhere.
He laughs, says, “But she has no idea.”
•
“Whoa!” Brian stabs with his stick. “Check it out. She can't touch me. You're all she's got. You and Leary. And now look. Here you are, right in my headquarters. My hideout. And it doesn't make any difference. From MOM's point of view, you're nowhere, my boy.
“Hah. She's just fishing. Look at that. The satellites are moving off already. In a thousand years, the way they're going, they could maybe destroy the PlagueBot, but they'd still be looking for me.”
Only a few bats remain on the wing, and Brian has ceased his wheelchair dance. He sits there looking thoughtful, brandishing his stick at a couple of daredevil cockroaches that have broken ranks to streak the assembly.
“MOM seems to be getting luckier,” he says. “However, I didn't get where I am today by believing in luck, did I? She must still have a local vector on me, even though Smoke and Rexy are both gone. So tell me, my boy.” Brian turns to Cisco. “How is she zeroing in on me; what else has she got up her sleeve, eh? Or maybe I should ask what else you've got up your sleeve. Tell me you've never heard of a WalkAbout HIID. A special privilege for alpha pilots? Yes, indeedy. That might explain a few things.
“I hope it isn't too late. But I don't think so. She hasn't found her range; she needs at least two vectors.”
Rabbit moves Brian back to where he can poke at Sweetie with his stick. “Yo, Sweetie. Wake up. We've got another treasure hunt for you.”
Sweetie's eyes open. She giggles, drools a bit.
Brian wheels close enough to speak into Cisco's left shoulder and says something very strange indeed: “Yo, MOMMY. Yo, yo. Hey, Sky. You listening? I hear that alpha pilots get a WalkAbout. A real perk. Reserved exclusively for the biggest‐bandwidth mallsters. Have you heard that? That they get to mainline the Lode even in mondoland? A direct link, maybe only incidentally a homing device as well.
“Sweetie? Find the HIID. Find it and remove it.”
Sweetie wants to make great game of looking, but everybody knows the HIID implant is usually installed in the left shoulder.
“Get on with it, pussycake. Just take it out, okay?”
•
“Good enough,” Brian says. “Now run a debugger over him, Rabbit; let's make sure he doesn't have anything else up his sleeve, eh?”
Sweetie must have done real damage, more than was necessary to remove the HIID. Cisco senses a medibot uproar, non‐localized but unmistakeable. He's flushed and feverish. They say you can't feel a thing. But, in the same way he could hear the assemblers back in ESUSA, he can sense medibots swarming to damage‐control stations.
“All this shit you're experiencing now? MOM has to be loving it. Yeah? Right up to where we removed your HIID and shut off her feed.
From her point of view, it's like we've poked out another eye. My guess is she'll be going nuts about now.”
He has a sense of the medibots at work, but on an unprecedented scale. His whole system is reacting. And it's funny because, even though he can't see it, his shoulder still feels like it's all ripped up. So what are the medibots doing?
Testing. A voice, inside his head. Testing.
Request Lode access. ID confirmation. He subvocalizes it.
Specify target ID.
Cisco Smith. Citizen ZEZQ112.
Cisco Smith requests ID confirmation for Cisco Smith. Confirm.
It's a WalkAbout. Unless he's been carrying a spare he never suspected, one that eluded Rabbit's debugger, the medibots have indeed been busy. Will the wonders of nanotech never cease? Medibots moonlighting as assemblers. Organizing themselves as an HIID, dodging and weaving in a smoke‐and‐mirrors circus like the game Brian's says he's been playing with MOM.
Brian says he's happy to enjoy some privacy again. “You were the poisoned bait, my boy. And who knows what Leary's carrying. Although I do know Leary, and he'd never let them install a WalkAbout, even supposing he qualified for one, which he doesn't.”
Cisco subvocalizes a report: Brian is sometimes blinded to possibilities by both his arrogance and a pretty bureaucratic mindset for a rogue nihilist. His gig as MOM may explain that.
Cisco checks out his trojan WalkAbout, gazing askance at the scroll at the same time he listens to the familiar details of his identity. The voice function is something new. Another anomaly: the Worlds UnLtd logo, so familiar he had rarely noticed it, is missing.
Brian is ebullient. “It's too late for Rexy. Smoke's gone as well. Now we've taken your HIID. So all of Sky's, and Leary's, best‐laid plans are so much dust.
“Of course you have no idea what I'm talking about. They didn't keep you in the loop, did they? Maybe it's time I bring you up to speed.”
MOM Page 21
