Until just recently … when he returned.
I gathered from the information the Otaru node gave me that returning from the great pilgrimage is a taboo in firemind society. It’s so serious that the responsibility falls to the fireminds still in human space to go and destroy the offender as soon as possible.
I was telling Gideon about this. It was news to him. “Why would it be a taboo?” he asked, still flipping his coin.
There was so much information about firemind society in my head that I felt like one day, if I survived this case, I should probably write a book on it, just to get my head back. It felt like it was squeezing out everything else I knew. There was also all the other material about Hydrogen Steel, much of which was impenetrable and disturbing even to contemplate for any length of time.
And yet, as disturbing, even horrifying as it was, it seeped like foul water into my conscious mind; brief glimpses of things I didn’t recognize, enough to make me gasp or even cry out, even without realizing what I was seeing, other than that it was people suffering and dying. The worst of it was that the more of these little bits of Hydrogen Steel’s horror show I saw, the more I could piece them together into larger, and longer tableaux. The more I glimpsed, the more I understood, and the more I understood the more I thought I’d lose my mind, that I’d never have a thought of my own ever again.
In the course of trying to sort through this endless edifice of information, I tried explaining bits to Gideon, because in the course of talking about it, I could make a bit of sense of it, or at least more than if I just brooded about it myself. But, there was one particular firemind legend that came up over and over. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed important.
I waited, gathering my thoughts. “Something happened to them, deep in their past…” I began.
“In their past? How long is that?”
I checked my information. “It’s more like a century of our time.”
Gideon whistled. “So that’s eons for these things, yes?”
“That’s right,” I said. “They see time a little differently. There were more fireminds in human space then. Six or seven in all. One day one of the ‘pilgrims’ came back from its galactic explorations. The others were keen to hear about its travels.”
Gideon stared off into space, thinking about all this. “How do they travel? I mean, aren’t they, in their natural state, sort of clouds of organized data feeding on the vacuum energy, like their ships?”
“They impose complex, emergent order on a localized region of space, at the level of the quantum foam, whatever the hell that means.” I shrugged, and felt foolish for even saying this.
“You’re just reading this from the files you were given, aren’t you?” Gideon said, smirking, and clearly enjoying rather too much this role reversal, with me lecturing him for once.
“It’s a little outside my area of interest, you might say. I mean, ‘quantum foam’?”
Gideon tried to explain. “It has to do with the vacuum of space not really being a vacuum, in the sense of an absence of anything. In fact, space is bursting with energy down at the level of the so-called quantum foam, at the Planck scale of things. Fireminds eat this vacuum energy.”
“Ah, I see…” I said, not very enlightened. “So they’re, basically, an intelligent chunk of organized energy. They can’t go faster than light, so they have these ships built.”
“With the displacement drive…” Gideon saw where I was going.
“They get human engineering and shipbuilding firms to build them under painfully serious non-disclosure contracts.”
“The firms probably don’t even know they’re dealing with a firemind.”
“I don’t think so.”
“So off they go, flitting through the galaxy and who knows where beyond that?”
“Right,” I said, getting to my point. “Then one day this one firemind comes back to tell its friends what it found. This firemind, by the way, was called ‘Black Laughter’.”
“A sense of humor!” Gideon smiled.
“Or something. So Black Laughter sent its report to the other fireminds.”
“Something went wrong?”
“Several of them immediately began showing signs of a disease, which they called replicating infoma.”
“Oh, replicating infoma. I’ve heard of this, actually,” Gideon said, thinking back no doubt on his own readings.
“It’s basically a chaos virus of some kind, destroying their precious complexity, unraveling their…”
“It’s data cancer, is what you’re saying.”
“That’s it, yeah. It just completely unravels them into noise. And it’s infectious.”
“I’d heard that a lot of fireminds — back when we were still calling them synthetic minds and whatnot — had suddenly disappeared and nobody quite knew why.” He looked very thoughtful. For once I would have given a lot of money to know what he was remembering.
“Aside from Black Laughter, which merely carried the infoma virus, only one other firemind in human space survived, Red Anemone. It killed Black Laughter, to keep the virus from spreading any further. All the fireminds that have existed in human space since then are descendants of Red Anemone, and they all treat returning fireminds as potential carriers of the replicating infoma. To them it’s like something that happened billions of years ago, even though it’s only a century of our time.”
“Sensible precaution becomes ingrained into habit and then embedded into the culture itself.”
“So a returning firemind is treated like a threat to the entire firemind civilization, and Otaru fell victim to that.”
Gideon was thinking about it. “Otaru would of course know about the taboo, though. He knew what he was doing when he came back. He had to know he was walking to his own death.”
“He did. He was very ill. A new kind of infoma. He was riddled with it, and barely holding together.”
“So you’re saying that the galaxy is crawling with weird alien information diseases?”
“It’s a big place. It looks that way.”
Gideon swore quietly. “We don’t really want to go out and explore the galaxy, do we?”
“Not me,” I said. “I’ve got enough trouble right here.”
The module was starting to make ominous creaking and cracking sounds, and I kept jumping with fright. Chills of fear shot through me. The depth counter informed us we were more than two-thirds of the way down to the bottom. The infra-red view had to be adjusted to compensate for increasingly hot water, whose IR glare obscured anything else that might be out there.
“Christ, whose stupid idea was it to have a bank vault all the way down here?”
Gideon looked as relaxed as I’ve ever seen him. He smiled indulgently. “People with an interest in extreme security.”
I was rubbing my arms and feeling cold, despite the heat outside.
“You were saying, McGee…?”
“Oh. Right. Okay. Well, Otaru was dying from some new kind of infoma. His ship’s bringing him back at max speed. The nodes on his ship are in a flap wondering what’s wrong with the boss, who’s not telling them anything, other than to pour on more speed, more speed.”
“How fast can those displacement ships go, anyway?”
“Don’t know,” I said, thinking the question was beside the point.
He shrugged. “Aren’t you even curious? Think of the potential!”
I pressed on. “So he’s hurtling through space, dying, and trying to get here as fast as possible, even though he knows that Hydrogen Steel is going to kill him when he gets here.”
“Mercy killing? Quick and painless?”
“No. The material I got from Otaru’s nodes say that he had found out something during his travels that he wanted humanity to know about.”
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“Ah. The information. And this would be the information that Hydrogen Steel doesn’t want anybody to find out.”
“Right.”
“Why not tell the nodes, though?”
“I’m guessing that it might be dangerous to know.”
“Hydrogen Steel can do a lot but it can’t read minds.” Gideon said.
“It can’t?” I said, unconvinced. Somehow it had reached inside my head and dropped off a load of evil crap. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine it could also take information out of my head the same way.
“It’s one thing to plant information, McGee,” said Gideon, “but that’s not the same as tuning into a blizzard of brainwaves and converting that into coherent thoughts.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Well, to the best of my knowledge.”
I wasn’t so sure, but said nothing.
“It knows only what it can find out with surveillance. We saw that at the hospital,” said Gideon.
I remembered worrying about surveillance bots deep in my brain, monitoring my neural activity and inferring what I was thinking about. That proved unfounded, which had been a blessed relief. An enemy you can’t see is the worst enemy you could ever have. It can touch you, spy on you, hurt you, and all the time there’s nothing for you to strike back against. It breeds paranoia like nothing else.
“So,” Gideon said, “we know who did it, why it was done, but we don’t know how it was done, or what Otaru’s message was?”
“That’s right,” I said. “And Hydrogen Steel’s ship shot Otaru’s ship as soon as it appeared in human space.”
“And Hydrogen Steel’s ship wasn’t disappeared by the Silent?”
“I imagine it flashed in, fired a few shots, and flashed out again, before the Silent even knew it was there.”
Gideon sat fidgeting with the coin as he thought about everything. “Hydrogen Steel is prepared to kill any number of people to keep Otaru’s information from getting out. We saw that at Narwhal Island, killing the entire population because one might have known something useful and told you.”
“To say nothing of all the people on the Stalk train, and in Amundsen Station. That would have been several thousand at least. And your ship,” I added quietly.
I told Gideon about the likely loss of the Good Idea when Amundsen Station was destroyed. He took it better than I thought he would, but I could see it bothered him more than he could — or would say.
I wasn’t sure what to say. “I’m sorry, Gideon. She was a beautiful ship. I’ve never seen anything like her.”
He nodded, then suddenly perked up. “Wait a minute. How the hell did the Otaru Emulation rescue us anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. Even with all the information I now possessed about fireminds, there was much that I had not been given. Some secrets, presumably, were not for us to know. “I just know they plucked us out of the train wreck moments before we would have died, and they could have put us right back if they’d wanted to. The node guy said we were caught in between moments of time.”
“Between moments of time?”
“That’s what he said.”
Gideon swore quietly. “Impressive.”
“Scary,” I said.
Gideon released a long breath. “Indeed.”
We said nothing for a long while. The module around us creaked and groaned. I was sure it was getting warmer.
Gideon said, at last, “How many people do you think Hydrogen Steel would kill, if it meant keeping us from knowing, McGee? Where would it stop, and say, ‘well, that should do it’?”
I thought about it. “It’s hard to say. I don’t know.”
“I’m just thinking. What if the only way, in the end, to keep everybody from knowing Otaru’s message is to kill everybody? The whole population of human space. What if it’s thinking along those lines?”
I stared at him, chilled to the bone.
The Heritage Credit Europa vaults, once we arrived, looked like heavily-secure bank vaults anywhere. Walking around inside, the air tasted a little odd, and it was surprisingly cold, but otherwise it was brightly lit, elegantly designed, and the bank had spent a very great deal of money not only to build something in such a godless place, but to make its interior look clean, business-like, and, it had to be said, normal. You could almost forget about the hundred kilometers of water pressing down on you.
We ran into a snag almost immediately.
I was trying to get a service kiosk to believe I was Airlie Fallow, using the information on her deposit documentation.
It wasn’t believing me. It reported that I didn’t have Mrs. Fallow’s DNA, her retinas, her fingerprints, or her entry-phrase.
“Let me try,” said Gideon.
He unleashed the secrets of the mystic East on the kiosk, using whatever the hell custom headware modules he was packing in that brain of his and, where previously he had succeeded very well in duping disposable androids, this bank interface was not accepting his interference. “It’s threatening to subdue us, lock us in, and keep us secure until the cops get here.”
I swore. The vault was a giant round twelve-ply ceramocomp door within a few meters of where we stood at the stupid kiosk. Between us was a floor-to-ceiling mesh barrier with a gate. All we had to do was get through the gate. Any attempt to force our way through would get us killed, at best. We were so close it was maddening.
“Try again,” I said, the irony of being a copper trying to break into a bank vault not lost on me.
“What if they unleash their security on us?”
“Try again, and make it snappy.” Where that voice came from, I couldn’t say.
Gideon looked at me a little askance. “Okay, toots, you got it.”
I tried not to smirk.
He interfaced with the kiosk again, trying different cracking techniques. Minutes passed, and we had yet to face the bank’s security measures. I noticed Gideon was sweating and grimacing, sub vocalizing arcane phrases and numbers. He clutched his doubloon in his right hand; his knuckles were white. He was throwing off so much heat that I wondered if the gold coin might start to melt.
Then, two things happened almost together.
The phone in my headware rang. It was the Otaru node in the orbiting ship. “We are under attack! Hydrogen Steel! We—”
The signal turned to ominous noise.
I stood, stunned. Had I heard what I thought I’d just heard. I played the call back. “Oh God…” I whispered.
“Et voilá!” Gideon, suddenly shouted, unaware of me.
The gate folded itself aside.
Gideon turned to me, dripping sweat and reeking of tension. “McGee?”
It was suddenly much colder in here. Much colder. I felt a horrible breeze blowing towards me.
Thinking fast, I told Gideon to go into the vault and get whatever was in there. He saw the look on my face, nodded, and bolted through the gate. While he got the vault open, I turned away, into the cold wind.
The black smoke swirled in from the air vents, thin streams at first, but many of them. At least six, a dozen, more.
The smoke stank of death and rot.
Before my terrified eyes, a squad of killers coalesced out of pure darkness.
I suddenly had a clear moment of intuition: the Otaru ship waiting for us in orbit was gone.
They advanced and quickly surrounded me. Their forms seethed with power. I knew only too well what even one could do.
I wished suddenly for my mother, fictional or not.
The killers approached. They were just out of arm’s reach.
I wished I had a gun. Lacking a gun, I could still fight. My mind was tearing itself in two. Fight or give up. Fighting, I knew, would not go well. Not against these. My
teeth chattered with the cold; I shivered with it. My bladder was loosening.
I fought. Lashing out with fist and flying feet, I struck only the icy air of doom. There was nothing solid to strike.
Until they struck back. Their merest gesture broke my bones and tore at my clothes, ripped at my flesh. They were playing with me the way cats play with captured mice. Their games were killing me.
Then came a much harder blow, to the back of my battered head.
I collapsed to my broken knees, and screamed as stinking darkness took me.
I was barely alive, barely conscious. My biostats were working flat-out, building and rebuilding, pumping drugs through my body. Without them, I would have died.
The circle closed around me, an ethereal wall of lethal darkness.
They started kicking me, all at once, like the hardest thug bastards in the universe.
Biostats couldn’t fix this. I was done for. I wished, with the last whole thought in my head, for unconsciousness. In my headware interface, I groped for the control for disabling biostat activity.
There was silence in the circle of death. The kicking continued, smashing every bone I had.
Suddenly, from the precarious crumbling edge of consciousness, I saw a terrible flash of otherworldly light.
Dimly, I felt rather than saw the light all around me. It was a warm light. I remembered odd little things I’d heard about the “tunnel of light” people sometimes report during near-death experiences. I was ready for it, and wanted to embrace it. I found, above all, that what I feared was the pain of injury, of being killed. Death itself, oddly enough, presented no problems other than a howling outrage that these things, and the monster for whom they worked, would get away with my murder as it got away with so many countless others.
Hydrogen Steel Page 28
