Hydrogen Steel

by K. A. Bedford

  Kell moved to get of bed. “Who the hell are you?” he screamed. “Get out of here!”

  The figure stole around the bed towards Kell and subdued him effortlessly with a mere touch to his head. Kell was left paralyzed, slumped against the wall, unable to fight the intruder, and he had to sit and watch as it approached Airlie’s side of the bed. He tried to scream out to warn her, but he had no voice. He tried and tried to make himself heard. I could feel the tearing pain in his throat from trying to scream.

  In the end, all he could do was silently weep his guts out while Airlie was disembowelled right in front of him. It was more than horrible to witness. At one point, before Airlie was dead, she managed to glance at Kell, and she looked, more than anything, confused.

  When it was done, the creature made sure Kell was saturated in Airlie’s blood. It was still hot.

  The creature moved to the children’s bedroom. Kell again tried to scream, but…

  It was too much. There was no escape from the knowledge. It was there in my head where I could neither ignore it nor forget it. I had seen my share of homicide scenes, and I had managed, often through luck more than cleverness, to prevent a few murders at the last minute. I’d never, in all my years, been made to sit and watch a killer going about his methodical business like this.

  And what kind of creature was this? It was effortlessly strong; it had rendered Kell Fallow a weeping, broken mess with what looked like the merest touch. At length, the creature came back, wiped the warm stinking blood of his children over Kell, and left the murder weapon, an unremarkable knife sharpened to a wicked edge, in his trembling hands.

  Last, it returned to Kell, forced his mouth open past the agonizing point of dislocating his jaw, and poured something I didn’t recognize, probably something nano, down his throat. Once it was done, it patted him on the stomach. It was too easy to imagine it taking a mother’s tone, “There’s a good boy, swallow it down. But later, if you’re a bad boy, I’ll press a button and make you explode.”

  Worst of all, I saw that when the creature was finished with the night’s business at last, it simply turned to black, greasy smoke and disappeared through a crack in a window frame.

  The message was clear: this is what happened to the Fallows. It could happen to you, and to anybody you care about, and it will happen if you keep following this trail. This is why Hydrogen Steel had appeared to me. This was the knowledge above all else that it wanted me to have. What happened to the Fallows could happen to me.

  And yet, if I was such a threat to an entity like Hydrogen Steel, whatever it was, why was it letting me live? Surely I was nothing more than an insignificant gnat in the face of such an unstoppable force. Why not simply crush me and be done with it?

  I lay, shivering, staring at the ceiling, wishing I could erase from my mind the things I had seen and now knew. In all my years looking into homicide cases I had never seen a killer made of smoke.

  For a while I wondered if the scene I had witnessed was as fake as my programmed memories. Like them, it had the persuasive look of reality about it. But if it was a fake, it had been created by someone who knew how brutal murders often played out.

  The only way to know would be to look at the investigation files. But looking at the investigation files — probably even asking to see the files — could be fatal. Hydrogen Steel, I had to assume, was in some way aware of everything I did, and was almost certainly responsible for everything that had happened to us, including the attack on Gideon’s ship.

  I swore softly.

  Somewhere around here, someone — or something — was watching what I was doing, and it wasn’t the useless nurse sitting in idle mode by the door, her mind unaware that her charge was petrified out of her mind. It occurred to me that she might have been infected with a nano-based covert surveillance system that would keep watch over me without the nurse even being aware of it. Looking around the room, I saw nothing unusual, which, I knew too well, wasn’t unusual. Spies could be embedded in every object in the room, and I’d never know, not without doing a broad-spectrum sweep of the place.

  I thought about what I knew. I knew Hydrogen Steel, one way or another, would now be watching me. And it would be watching me in a way that I could probably never prove to anyone.

  Then I stopped, and considered things. I had been given the impression that Hydrogen Steel was a godlike entity, capable of godlike deeds. If that was the case, why piss around with conventional surveillance? Why not just colonize my brain, or wipe me out where I stood? If an insect is bothering you, you don’t give it a series of increasingly scary warnings about how, unless it changes its insectile plans, you’re going to annihilate it. No. You get your shoe and you whack the bastard. End of story. So why wasn’t Hydrogen Steel getting its shoe out?

  The thought occurred to me: maybe it can’t do something that simple. Maybe it has to follow rules.

  The idea made my head hurt. A firemind that has to follow rules? Was I supposed to think it might be impolite to slaughter pesky human detectives?

  It sounded crazy, but it also had the virtue of explaining at least some of the facts. Hydrogen Steel wasn’t doing anything directly; it was using agents and fronts and sophisticated but conventional methods to do its business. It had crippled The Good Idea in a way that freaked out even Gideon, as unflappable a man as I’d ever met, but it was still conventional. It was something some evil bastard with the right equipment might have arranged.

  Hmm. An all-powerful godlike entity uses conventional, even simple methods to do its evil business.

  I began to see that Hydrogen Steel might be an entity nobody was ever meant to see or even know anything about, living in the shadows using others to carry out its schemes, none of whom would ever know or understand what they were really doing.

  I looked at the disposable nurse in the corner. She could be part of the game and never even be aware of it.

  Looking down I saw my sheet of Active Paper. Was it being monitored as well?

  All of which led me to wonder, anxiety gripping my guts: were they monitoring my brain even at the cellular level? Everything I knew about Hydrogen Steel — which admittedly wasn’t a hell of a lot — led me to believe that it had the capability to monitor my very thoughts. In which case, how the hell was I going to pursue the case without even my brain activity giving me away? How to find out one way or another without triggering Hydrogen Steel’s tame assassins?

  CHAPTER 17

  Screwing up some nerve, I visited Gideon.

  “Christ, McGee,” he said, “if you looked any worse we’d have to bury you.”

  “Might’ve cracked the case,” I said. It was hard to present a light, glib façade. I hoped it would be safe to report what I’d learned. Whether or not Gideon was under surveillance as well I did not know.

  “All from your hospital bed?”

  “You might say I had a visit from an informant, helping me with my enquiries.”

  His unruly eyebrows bristled. “Anybody I might know?”

  I hesitated, thinking about this. The wrong phrase, I thought, might kill me. I could almost picture the shadowy creature appearing in the room, ripping me to shreds before the words left my lips. “Listen, you’re a man of the world, you’ve been around, you’ve cut a bit of a swathe through the galaxy, right?”

  He looked amused, but also a bit confused, wondering perhaps about my nervous tone. “I don’t know about a swathe, as such.”

  “But you’ve seen things and learned things. You know what’s going on.”

  He readily conceded the point. “Oh yes. This and that. You know. Keeping my hand in.”

  “Right. Then…” I hesitated, considered uttering a short prayer to the patron saint of doomed private investigators, but went on, “Something a bit strange has, you might say, crossed my desk today. I wondered if you might be able to
shed some light on it.”

  He peered at me. “A bit strange, you say?”

  “Yeah. Strange.” My voice shook.

  Gideon noticed. He shot me a look, eyebrows bristling. “How strange?”

  “Pretty strange.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Little while ago.”

  Gideon looked grave. “You’re not looking well, McGee, and this time I’m not kidding.”

  “I don’t feel well, Smith. Feeling a bit precarious, you might say.”

  He lowered his voice. “I see. So, what is it? If I may be so bold as to come right out and ask.”

  “I can’t guarantee your safety once I tell you, Smith. I just think I should say that up front.”

  “McGee?” He looked at me, wide-eyed. I’d never seen Gideon this worried.

  “I’m not joking. I have very good reason to believe that telling you could be dangerous.”

  “But you’ve come to tell me anyway?”

  I managed a painful shrug. “Gotta tell someone.” I didn’t add, “in case I get killed.”

  “Tell someone what, exactly?”

  I suddenly didn’t know quite what to say next. Simply trying to access the recent memory of Hydrogen Steel’s visit was nearly impossible. Seeing it again in my mind’s eye was painful, like an idea entirely the wrong sort of shape to fit into a mind like mine. The memory of my helpless terror was fresh though, as well as the memory of what I’d “seen” through Kell Fallow’s eyes. Suddenly I burst into a fitful sort of tears. Not the great shuddering sobs I expected would occur much later. These were shallow and hot and I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I had to tell Gideon something. What if I did die under mysterious circumstances, lying in my hospital bed? The constant presence of all those disposable nurses was starting to give me horrors. Hydrogen Steel’s tame assassin could make Airlie Fallow’s murder look like her husband’s doing. It would be easy to make my death look like an android malfunction. I had to get out of this hospital.

  Gideon was saying, “Did you learn something from the Narwhal Island cops?”

  “Sort of,” I lied badly, torn between wanting to tell him and not knowing how to tell him.

  I think he must have sensed something of my inner turmoil. He said, very quietly but with a somber undertone, “What did they tell you?” I could tell he knew I was lying; it was just that he didn’t mind the lie.

  I wiped my nose and dabbed at my eyes. “Let’s just say that I think I know what happened to the Fallows.”

  “Go on,” he said. “It’s all right. Deep breaths.”

  “I can’t say how I know, all right. I just know, for a fact, that Kell Fallow did not kill his wife. That, in fact, he had to sit and watch his wife’s murder.” I didn’t dare explain the unusual nature of the real killer.

  “Interesting,” Gideon said after several moments.

  “More than you know,” I said, sniffling.

  “The cops told you all this, yes?”

  I looked away. “Yeah.”

  “Helpful cops.”

  I explained about the other deaths, including Chiefs Timms and Sacks, Dr. Menz, and the attack on Constable Akara. “She’d probably be able to tell us something about the attacker.”

  “Someone down there doesn’t want something found out,” Gideon said, thinking out loud.

  I nodded emphatically. “You could say that.”

  “And Kell Fallow himself?”

  “Nano-based explosive.”

  “Why wait until he’d arrived at Serendipity?”

  “Maybe it took time for the killer to track him?”

  Gideon looked thoughtful, not buying it. “Or maybe,” he said, “the idea was to blow you up, too, when you met him. Otherwise, why not just remotely activate his self-destruct?”

  I shuddered, thinking about that. Gideon had a point. “So what happened?” I said. “Why’d his bomb go off early?”

  “Been thinking about that, too, McGee.”

  “I thought you might. Me, too. What’d you come up with?”

  “I think,” he said, “he tried to defuse the bomb.”

  I’d been coming to similar conclusions. “Knowing that when he met me it’d go off?”

  Gideon nodded, “Something like that.”

  I swore, and worried again about mysterious bombs in my own guts.

  “All right, so why the attack on your house, then?”

  “They wanted to see how much I knew. And, of course, to keep me from…” I shrugged.

  “I see,” said Gideon. “Organized.”

  “Very.”

  Gideon said nothing for some time. A nurse came by offering hot drinks. I stared at her a long moment, full of irrational fear, before I told myself I was being stupid. I asked for the strongest coffee she could coax out of a fab machine. Gideon asked for a hot chocolate. Presently, as he blew on the surface of his cup and took birdlike sips from it, he said to me, “You believe this explanation?”

  “For the Fallow thing?”

  “For all of it.”

  “I’d like to see the cops’ investigation notes,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say. I had rarely known such fear.

  He looked shrewdly at me over his cup. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Something very wrong indeed, if I’m not mistaken.”

  I wished I could tell him without endangering his life.

  “I would have said absolutely nothing could intimidate you,” he continued.

  Gideon intimidated me without even trying, but I wouldn’t tell him that. “Yeah, well…”

  We’d danced around the topic long enough. I took a breath, and said, my mouth dry, “Have you ever come across the term, ‘firemind’?”

  Gideon coughed. “I beg your pardon?” Color drained from his already-pale face.

  “What do you know about them? Anything?”

  He looked very cautious. “Where did you hear that word?”

  I rubbed my arms. My voice trembled. “You know what it means?”

  “Where, McGee?” There was a hard tone in his voice that wasn’t there before.

  “You do know, don’t you?” I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or scared.

  Gideon’s eyes were round and full of apprehension as he contemplated something very big and very worrying. “I did a bit of reading on them, back at the firm,” he said, referring to his diplomacy days.

  I nodded, feeling again like I might lose what little nerve I had. “And?”

  “And, I didn’t understand most of it, to be honest. All a bit arcane for my taste,” he said cautiously. “The little I could grasp, in the one-page executive summary on the front of the file, said these things started out decades ago as a research program in artificial consciousness.”

  I’d heard a little about the research. It was popularly regarded as a success, which had led to vast improvements in neuroscience, robotics, and other unrelated fields. It also spawned the creation of fully synthetic, software-only “people”. It used to be quite a fad, where you could buy “friends” who you installed in your headware and they became faithful companions. They were conscious and “alive” but you had to give them a lot of attention or they’d become very withdrawn, or even escape into the infosphere. Some early version 1.0 releases I’d heard of had malfunctioned so badly they developed unique forms of mental illness.

  Gideon went on, “The simple minds the scientists created started developing unexpected complexity, and started consuming more and more resources. Despite attempts to keep them confined, some of them escaped into the interstellar infosphere. They discovered they could live in the vacuum energy…”

  “The what?”

  “The energy produced by virtual particles fizzing and wink
ing into and out of existence in the basement of reality itself. It’s vanishingly faint, but it’s everywhere, and useful if you know how to harness it.”

  “Oh, you mean like the zero point thingy?” I’d heard something about this in SecondSchool, but I was failing science badly at the time, and paid little attention. You’d think the guys who had fabricated my memories would at least have given me a better education.

  Gideon nodded. “That’s it. And once free of their hardware and thriving down in Planck space, they started interbreeding. With breeding came evolution. With evolution came much more complexity, change, new species, whole ecosystems of data-based life forms living wild out in the interstellar medium. Many of the higher entities took off to explore the galaxy. Some stayed around. Some, like the notorious Otaru, meddled in the doings of humans. Others, well, when whole evolutionary epochs flit past in milliseconds, you can imagine how far these things have gone in just fifty or sixty years. The thing about fireminds, though, McGee, is that they’re not big on personal appearances.”

  Gideon looked suddenly concerned. “You’re shivering. Let me get you a blanket.” He moved to take one of the blankets off his bed and give it to me.

  I stopped him, knowing nothing would make me feel better about what had happened to me. “Smith. Listen to me. I need to tell you something, but I’m not sure if I can.” I felt foolish speaking this way, but I could feel fresh tears coming even as I said it.

  “What happened to you, Zette?” Gideon said, seeing my distress.

  I could see flashes of the Cube in my mind’s eye, and I felt my brain trying to make the Cube’s angles right.

  He looked scared. “McGee, I’ll call a doctor for you…”

  “Smith. I’m in trouble.”

  “Whatever you need. You know that. I’ll help you any way I can.”