Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  “Ahh,” said Javier darkly. “Hoping to button up an empire for yourself? What you just described is basically the same except with you in control instead of Helen.”

  Hsu’s eyes flashed. “That’s not at all what I’m proposing. This is an offer of refuge in a time of crisis. And Taiwan has the resources to actually serve as a base for the feed, along with the political structure to legitimate it.”

  The arguments Diana and Dag had anticipated on their flight back from the Arctic were falling into place. Negotiations were a dance, and this one had to be exquisitely choreographed, stepping and twirling and gaining momentum before culminating in a resolution that was at once surprising and inevitable so that conflicting interests could be synthesized into a fresh system of incentives. But there was one enigma that still eluded Diana, one solo she’d have to improvise, one purple eye that never wavered.

  “Sounds to me like this particular ‘refuge’ could evolve pretty quickly into a hostage situation,” said Javier. “As soon as Commonwealth moves in, you can make its protection contingent on whatever you want. That’s hardly fair for feed users. You’re offering a plush cell, nothing more.”

  “How dare—”

  “I’m not questioning your intentions,” said Javier. “I’m just pointing out that the help you’re offering won’t solve the underlying problem.”

  “And what, pray tell, is the underlying problem?”

  Javier shrugged. “The feed has transcended its role as a consumer product to become a global public good. The fact that we can do this”—he sliced a finger across his throat to indicate the shutdown—“proves it. Commonwealth has always operated at the mercy of the US government because it’s headquartered in US jurisdiction. It makes no sense for Washington to hold so much sway over a piece of global infrastructure, and so far it’s worked, largely because nobody had the guts to try what Helen’s attempting to do. But that era is over. Even if she fails, the minute other governments discover what happened, they’ll all dream of copycatting. Everyone will start building up backup infrastructure as a defense against another shutdown even as they try to figure out how to capture the feed, and the world, for themselves. Moving our headquarters to a new country just means putting ourselves at risk of their particular flavor of coup.”

  Something pressed down on Diana’s thigh. One of the vizslas had stirred itself from napping by the fire and was standing under the table, resting its head on her leg, blinking its golden eyes up at her in a shameless appeal for attention. She scratched behind its ears and felt the vibrations of a below-audible growl of satisfaction. Even the sweetest pets had their secrets. Vizslas were hunting dogs, bred to kill and jealously guarded by the warlords and barons who had ruled Hungary for centuries. She imagined this trio loping through a shattered San Francisco, long-forgotten instincts kicking in, splintered shards of bombed-out towers rising above them, smoke thick on the wind, snarling over the glistening entrails of a rotting corpse.

  “Enough.” Rachel’s voice cut off the debate like a guillotine. She leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling for a long moment. Then her gaze descended to move from person to person around the table. “Patients are dying in ICUs all over the world. Children are stranded. Assault victims are trying to call the police but can’t get through. Planes are making emergency landings. Markets are hemorrhaging capital. Generals are executing contingencies. Trust is evaporating. All of this, all of this, is happening just to buy us a little time. Every minute the feed is down condemns people to death and pushes civilization closer to the brink.” The overt calm in her voice was brittle with tension. “There is no room for petty grievances, no room for ulterior motives, and no room for error. So the next time any of you thinks of saying anything, anything at all, I want you to first ask yourself, ‘Are these words worth thousands of lives and trillions of dollars? Are these words worthy of being my last?’” Her eye finally landed on Diana. “I assume you didn’t break faith with your masters and invite us here without something in mind. Why are you here, and what exactly do you propose we do?”

  Diana nearly faltered under the scorching clarity of Rachel’s full attention. Forcing herself to take a few breaths, Diana returned the stare as if it were a gateway through which she could slip inside the older woman’s skin.

  Rachel didn’t care about wealth. She swam at a public pool and lived in a modest home. By her age, mortality must be a familiar companion, not a distant thought experiment. However many billions she collected, she couldn’t ferry them beyond the pale. Fame wasn’t what she was after either. She rarely made public appearances and eschewed the limelight the media was so eager to throw in her direction. She was powerful, but not particularly power hungry, at least in any traditional sense. Helen tried to gather all the strings in her fist, while Rachel seemed to halfway resent the responsibilities she was saddled with.

  Diana remembered the sweat stinging her eyes as she’d installed greenhouse panels under the hot summer sun. She’d brought in contractors to help with a few things she couldn’t manage on her own, but she’d built most of it with her own two hands. When she’d first walked through the cottage and stuck her head through the back door, extending the structure into a greenhouse had been obvious. Not an intricate architectural dream she’d spent months designing but an immediate, straightforward vision for what should be there. The rest had been nothing more than the application of effort, time, and money to make that vision a reality.

  There was something about Rachel, her poise, her focus, her propensity for listening instead of jumping to conclusions, that reminded Diana of the mind-set she’d been in while building the greenhouse. Whether she was negotiating with the electrician or making decisions about soil chemistry, her absolute belief in the project, her confidence that the greenhouse would be built one way or the other, had been a supremely useful filter for decision-making.

  The feed was Rachel’s greenhouse. Connecting the world, weaving every human, satellite, database, widget, and transistor into a throbbing, cohesive whole. That was her refuge, her obsession. It wasn’t the intricate result of marathon brainstorming sessions with legions of experts. It was Rachel’s obvious thing that should exist. She was just assembling the pieces until reality reflected her imagination. She was a mogul, a power broker, a force of nature. But more than any of those, she was a builder.

  Espionage had instilled in Diana an instinct for collecting as many cards as possible, holding them close to her chest, and letting other players run the table while she observed from the sidelines, seeking the thrill of omniscience over victory. It was that instinct she now repressed. She couldn’t let the world slip into madness without doing everything she could to avert it.

  “I was born in Bulgaria,” said Diana. “Right before the occupation. My grandmother used to tell me this story all the time. I think most grandparents there did. She told me how when NASA launched the Voyager in 1977, they included a Golden Record, a gold-plated copper disc loaded with the most glorious things humanity and Earth had to offer the universe, a precious snapshot of civilization. There were images of tropical islands, Olympic sprinters, and breastfeeding babies. There were recordings of thunder, hyenas, and blacksmithing. There were greetings in fifty-five languages. There was music by Bach, Beethoven, and Louis Armstrong. And there was Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin, a Bulgarian folk song about suffering and hope in the face of oppression. This humble ballad that peasants sang for centuries as they labored under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire was now arcing toward the stars.”

  A lump rose in Diana’s throat. “My family was lucky enough to escape the occupation. But I was six, and I threw a tantrum on one of the many smugglers’ boats that carried us away. I can’t remember what it was about. I was probably hungry, or tired, or missed my friends. Anyway, my grandmother dragged me up to the deck, and we looked up at the night sky glittering overhead. She told me the story for the thousandth time. Then she knelt down and poked me hard on the chest. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Y
ou are the Golden Record now.’”

  Diana stifled a sob, shocked at her sudden failure of self-control. “I’ve come back to that night again and again over the years. What did she mean? Was the Bulgarian diaspora meant to carry forth some essential ingredient of our national spirit? Was I supposed to live out that folk song? Was this inheritance a gift or a burden?” Diana looked at her lap, the dog’s head still resting there contentedly. Rachel didn’t want to be some dictator’s pet. She wanted her creation to enjoy an autonomy no protector would allow. Diana raised her eyes to meet the chairwoman’s.

  “The feed is a Golden Record,” said Diana. “It’s a reflection, an embodiment of civilization. It must go on. Letting someone like Helen weaponize it doesn’t just transform it into a tool of oppression, it shatters the promise it was built on.” She looked around the table. “Javier, Hsu, Liane, everyone here is right. We can’t let Helen take control. We can’t let any other country take control. And we can’t do nothing, however much we’d like to turn back the clock. So far you’ve kept the feed nominally independent of overt political control by pretending to be neutral as often as you can. Implementing the carbon tax changed that and woke up people like Lowell and Helen to the feed’s potential as a superweapon. With neutrality off the table, the only way to maintain independence is to establish it on your own terms. It’s too late to play by anyone else’s rules.”

  Diana let her eyes settle on Rachel’s once again. “Buy back all of Commonwealth’s shares. Take it off the public stock market. Establish coequal offices on every continent. Declare sovereignty.” Without breaking eye contact with Rachel, Diana nodded toward Hsu. “Send ambassadors to every capital and the UN to negotiate treaties with special dispensations for early signatories.” She nodded toward Javier. “Offer algorithmic, individualized benefits that turn users into constituents: social support programs, educational opportunities, health care, welfare, legal protection, the works. Do all that, and a thousand more things I’m missing, and you’ll transform Commonwealth into a political institution that can wrestle with national governments on equal footing, except you’re bound by users, not geography. It’s the only way to give the feed the autonomy it deserves as a piece of global infrastructure.”

  “Almost like the Vatican in medieval Europe,” Dag cut in. “Commonwealth will be a horizontal and distributed geopolitical player instead of a nation state.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” murmured Javier.

  “But this is all impossible,” spluttered the CFO.

  “It’s not impossible, it’s unprecedented,” said Diana. “Those are two very different things.” She returned her focus to Rachel. “Between you, Hsu, and Javier, you have the votes and the capital to do it. By taking all shares off the market and declaring Commonwealth sovereign, your money will be locked up permanently, so pretty much worthless. But you get true autonomy, Javier gets the transparency he’s been lobbying so hard for, and Hsu gets major concessions for Taiwan, the UN, and any other governments he can rope in to make the first deals. Lay what groundwork you can tonight. Tomorrow morning, turn the feed back on and make the announcement. Launch a major public relations campaign explaining why the feed went down, what’s changing, and framing the narrative so that Helen can’t. It wouldn’t hurt to take Hsu’s offer of temporary asylum as you ramp up. It’ll make it that much harder for Helen to arrange a convenient accident. Speaking of, you need to spin up a real security service. Add all this up, throw in enough luck to bankrupt a casino, and we might just have a chance.”

  Silence coiled around them. The world might hang in the balance, but Diana was spent. Fate, that deadliest of snakes, would do what it liked with her.

  “Does anyone else have a better idea?” asked Rachel.

  Crickets.

  “Do it,” she said. “Let’s keep this Golden Record spinning.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Do it.

  Those two simple words were the infinitesimal low-pressure pocket thrown off the trailing edge of a single flap of a butterfly’s wing, the perturbation growing and picking up momentum as it zigzagged through weather systems, urged on by the secret prayers of chaos theorists, until the resulting tornado spun open the door to Oz.

  The discussion turned tactical. What fiduciary hurdles would they need to clear to execute the buyback? What legal loopholes could they take advantage of to legitimate the process? Whom did they need to bring in, and when would they be able to reach them? What talking points did they need to prepare for the inevitable press briefing? How could the feed’s back-end architecture be adjusted to adapt to the new governance framework? What new data pools would they need to collect, and what new algorithms would they need to design in order to automatically evaluate, balance, and deploy individual direct benefits across the global feed? What promises could they make to users, and in what order? What was the best way to evacuate Commonwealth staff or otherwise guarantee their safety? How would other governments react to the news, and how would Helen spin a response? How could they continue to stay a step ahead once the feed was back on?

  The list of problems was endless, each proposed answer generating a dozen more questions. But even as arguments ebbed and flowed, coalescing into decisions before dispersing again into fraught deliberation, Diana couldn’t fully engage. Like a child released unsupervised into a zoo, her attention wandered.

  The flames in the hearth took on mesmerizing, phantasmagoric shapes that flickered in and out of being faster than Diana could register them. The peppery smell of the oil lamps made Analog feel warmer and more intimate than it otherwise might have. A sickle of hair fell across Nell’s eye as she leaned in to pour another round of steaming coffee. Nell had been a lifesaver. If she hadn’t had Nell and Analog to rely on, Diana didn’t know what she would have done. This was precisely the safe house they needed, real security, professional staff, and probably the only building still functional with the feed down.

  Something tickled the back of Diana’s mind. She wasn’t failing to participate in the planning process because she was exhausted or overwhelmed. She was both of those things and more, of course, but that wasn’t why she couldn’t focus. Instead it was that she didn’t have anything to add. No, that wasn’t right either. She had thought more deeply about this situation, and had had more time to prepare, than anyone else around this table. Rather Diana felt that this conversation was itself a distraction. That, having initiated it, she could be more useful elsewhere.

  But if not here, where? The people around this table were making scores of decisions, and surely scores of mistakes, that would ripple out into the world, generating cascades of side effects that might persist for decades to come. Outside Analog, people were flailing. When you were always connected, disconnection was the ultimate disorientation. At least with any other crisis, no matter how major, you could tap the feed for context, updates, and guidance. But without the feed, how could you find out why the power was out, the water wasn’t running, the cars didn’t work, and the world had gone quiet? Helen would know the score of course. Her team would have scoured Commonwealth headquarters by now, and having failed to capture the principals, she’d be scheming with her key lieutenants, identifying new search parameters, and planning for the moment when the feed finally came back on.

  Back in Washington, President Lopez would be panicking. He had just approved a raid on Commonwealth and was probably watching a live stream from the strike team when the feed went out with the FBI still a few blocks from the target. No communications. No intel. No idea what the hell was going on in the middle of an operation that would define his presidency, an operation guaranteed to upset the world economy, an operation he never wanted to approve in the first place.

  “Diana, what do you think?” Diana snapped back as Dag’s voice cut through her reverie. She ran back her short-term memory, trying to catch up to Dag’s question. They were talking about what each of their immediate priorities should be as soon as the feed came back on, working backward from s
hared goals to individual tasks.

  “We need to assure the world that turning off the feed was self-defense, not an act of war,” said Hsu. “Given how integral it is to every country’s national security infrastructure, that’ll be the worst-case scenario everyone will be paranoid about and preparing for. I’ll reach out through my people at the UN and cycle through as many heads of state as I can to give them personal briefings. Hopefully that’ll be enough to hold them back from calling in the cavalry immediately.”

  Diana knew better than anyone how quickly national intelligence services would reach the same conclusion. With everyone scrambling to get ready for what might be an imminent invasion, a single mistake could spark a world war. Rebooting the feed would be the starting pistol in an Olympic sprint of game theory, intel-starved analysts, repressed generals, and Machiavellian strategists trying to outdo each other in a desperate and convoluted bid to cross the finish line. It was a race she had no choice but to win. Something stirred inside Diana, dark omens whispering violence and an inkling of the kind of gambit required to avert it.

  “Washington is going to be the biggest problem,” said Diana. “Other leaders had no warning and still have no context for what’s happening. Their ignorance is dangerous, but at least they’ll try to assess the situation before making a big move. But Lopez is operating under the assumption that Helen’s intel was genuine. If he believes that Commonwealth’s leadership has already committed treason, then he’ll have to assume that we somehow figured out the raid was coming and initiated the shutdown. In his eyes, that confirms our guilt. And if we’re guilty, then he’ll have no option but to order a preemptive strike. In fact, he’ll see it as reactive, not preemptive. It won’t be the FBI this time, it’ll be the Pentagon. That means mobilizing SEALs, Rangers, and a few other specops units.”