Worldwired jc-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Putain de marde. They'd sever the cable.”

  “Yes,” Richard said. “We need to use what's at hand.”

  Gabe swallowed, and Richard could see how carefully he did not look at his daughter. “No.”

  “I still haven't said yes,” Wainwright snapped.

  “Gabe—” Richard stopped, but not before Genie heard.

  Genie looked up from the quiet conversation she'd been having with Elspeth and over at Gabe and Richard's image. “Papa?”

  “Petite—”

  Richard saw Elspeth's hand tighten on Genie's shoulder, and saw the darkness that crossed Gabe's face. He knew as plainly as if Gabe were wired what he was thinking: it wasn't going to be enough. Not again. Not again—

  “Richard,” she said, “could you use me? Wire into my control chip and hack into my nanonet?”

  “Gabe. Genie—” Richard let them see him shake his head. “That puts you at risk, Genie.”

  “I know,” she said.

  Gabe allowed the silence to drag, and Richard was right there with him, too close to the pain himself to argue. Not again. Not Genie, not like this, not after Leah. No.

  None of them should be permitting this to happen. But it was the same equations Leah had considered and understood, and Genie considered and understood them now, as well. Richard was struck, abruptly, by how much both of them got from Jenny Casey, despite there being no biology between them.

  But Elspeth caught Gabe's eye, and he caught hers, and neither one of them said anything. At last, shaking his head, his hands white from the force with which he had been holding the edge of the desk, he sat back in his chair. He looked from Elspeth to Genie. He didn't say yes, but he also didn't say no.

  “It's what Leah would have done,” Genie said, her eyes very bright. Gabe nodded. It was exactly what Leah would have done.

  It was exactly what Leah had done.

  Gabe got up and walked across the lab, and ducked down to wrap his arms around his daughter's shoulders. He held her tight enough that Richard thought she would have squeaked, if she hadn't been holding her breath. And then he looked up, smoothed her hair, and stepped back. “Captain,” Gabe said, in the vague direction of a mote, “it's your call. Go or no-go?”

  Richard realized, watching the two of them, what Gabe was wrestling with. And he felt a flush of pride in both — in Genie, that she wasn't going to stay in her sister's shadow, or stay safe behind locked doors. She had to stand up and be counted. And in Gabe, because Gabe was going to let her, and wasn't even going to let himself pretend it didn't hurt.

  “Go,” Wainwright said, measured seconds later. “Go, dammit.”

  “All right then,” Richard said, wishing suddenly — viciously — for the ability to turn and punch a wall. “Let's get to work.”

  Elspeth opened the skin on the back of Genie's hand very carefully, using a dissection tool from Charlie's second-best kit, which was stowed in the storage lockers to keep it away from the moisture in his own lab. The scalpel was sharp; there was hardly any blood, and Genie watched interestedly, wincing a little as Elspeth peeled the skin back, but obviously unimpressed by the pain. It would take more pain than that to impress Genie Castaign. There was no way to sterilize the tools, but that would be less than meaningless if Richard could get Genie's nanonet back on-line. And if he couldn't— They'd have larger problems.

  The control chip was a flexible, irregular blue oblong; the actual chip was carbon-based, only a centimeter square, but there was a gel-sealed interface port and a series of power cells no bigger than a pinkie nail attached. Gabe handled the splicing procedure himself, sitting Genie down in his chair behind the desk and running a hardline from the interface to her hand. The pins slid in smoothly; if he'd known where the port was, Richard thought Gabe could have managed it through the skin, just a little prick and in, the same way the pilots' serpentines worked.

  Richard took a deep, strictly metaphorical breath and extended himself to take control of the nanoprocessor, feeling after its operating system with the lightest fingers he could manage. He infiltrated it before Gabe's hands had left the connection, using the direct interface with the control chip to leapfrog to the few million nanosurgeons that were in physical contact with it. It wasn't enough of a network to support a persona thread, or even a fraction of one, but it was enough, he hoped, to form a jumping-off platform for the Benefactors when he opened the system to them.

  If they understood what he was doing, what he was offering. If they understood why. If Leslie had made them understand.

  He threw open the floodgates.

  For long picoseconds nothing happened. And then Genie's head drooped, she slumped to one side, and her father caught her shoulders as she started to topple. Richard held on tight, the rush of data around him like the sound of the surf in his ears, whatever the Benefactors were doing spreading in ripples through Genie's nanonet and then the worldwire, leaving the network momentarily limpid and calm in its wake, as clean as if it had never been programmed at all.

  Richard reached out and hesitated. There was another AI in the system. With a persona he at first mistook for one of his own threads, separated and maintained during the attack. Until he reached out to reabsorb it, and it snarled at him and lunged.

  The pieces are kind of sickening when they finally snap into place. I imagine an audible pop, the sound of a broken limb yanked straight. It's not a bad analogy. This won't be pretty.

  And it looks like we're not getting any help from Richard, because I'm reasonably certain that's not him, exactly, who's floating in the corner of my eye.

  And I'm not about to put down the gun.

  Riel knows. That's what the eye contact means. That's what she's telling me.

  Do it, Jenny. We're dead already, anyway.

  Nothing you want to face less than a woman with nothing to lose. My hand isn't shaking as I bring up the liberated gun. It hasn't shaken in years. Not for this, anyway.

  Fast. Hot damn. Even for me, I'm moving fast, and the whole world around me is like a snapshot, a ruin full of broken statues sprawled between the pillars.

  “Jen?” Not-Richard, in my head, and now that I'm looking for it, listening for it, I can tell it's not Dick. It's another program, or maybe even another AI, wearing Dick's clothes, but it isn't comfortable in that skin.

  The sliver of the gunman's face that I can see over Connie's shoulder is a curve like the sickle face of a waning moon. If she flinches, I'm going to waste her. She meets my eyes across all that distance, hers fearless green, a glassy gaze like a wolf's.

  “Put the weapon down,” I say, out loud, as levelly as I have ever said anything in my life. “I can offer you asylum. Life. Maybe more, if you will testify.”

  I don't dare jerk my head to indicate what I want him to testify about, but I'm pretty sure he'll know what I mean. And then the gunman blinks at me, the one eye I can see around Connie uncomprehending as an owl's. Of course he doesn't speak English.

  What the hell was I thinking? Again.

  And then I hear my tone echoed, words I don't know: Min-xue, translating, just loud enough to carry. I don't need to look to know he's standing again and he's got my back. The crash as the door slams shut at the top of the stairs behind the last of the escaping dignitaries — the ones who weren't smart enough to hit the floor and hug it like a long-lost love — is huge. The sound of Patty whimpering, a broken moan on a breath that she didn't get to keep much of, is huge.

  The space between my heartbeats is huge.

  The barrel of the Chinese assassin's gun wavers, just a hair, and I let myself breathe, not much, just a little, a slow trickle of air through my nose.

  And then my body locks in place as if I'd been dunked in a vat of liquid nitrogen, frozen solid, can't breathe, can't think, can't move, controlled as sharply and completely as if somebody had gotten ahold of my strings. Min-xue's voice cuts off midsyllable, and if I could do anything at all I would, I swear it, roll my eyes and curse the Chines
e, the Benefactors, their nanotech and their mothers for a bunch of castrated dogs.

  Richard demonstrated this to me once. The reason he was opposed to spreading the nanotech worldwide. The reason he was a little afraid of the nanotech at all. Because it can be used to puppet anybody wearing it like a kid's robot cat.

  Oh, fucking hell.

  “I beg your pardon, Master Warrant Officer.” The Chinese AI, if that's what it is, is no longer pretending to be Richard. It dissolves, iconless, a disconcerting, neutral, and exquisitely polite voice echoing inside my ear. “But I cannot permit that action on your part. You will forgive the intrusion, I hope.”

  I thought your people didn't have AIs.

  “A recent development. Please excuse me—”

  The assassin cocks his head as if he's listening to something. I'm willing to bet I know what he hears. The assassin's finger whitens on the trigger of his gun; he turns it back, lines it up neatly with the center of Connie's ear. She doesn't flinch and she doesn't twist away or close her eyes. She just waits for it, looking at me, looking past me at Min-xue.

  Hell. If I had to go down fighting, at least this time my family's safely out of the way. It might almost be all right, if it wasn't starting to hurt so much, not being able to breathe.

  Black dots swim at the edges of my vision. I can't blink them away. I'm amazed I can still hear my heartbeat, slow as the pendulum in the lobby, measuring the turning of the planet under my feet. I'm sorry, Madam Prime Minister. Sorry, Patty. Even more sorry about you and Min—

  I don't know if Riel can read the apology in my eyes.

  The Feynman AI was smaller than he should be. Slower, contained, constrained. Limited by the processing power of the Montreal—vast by human standards, but negligible by his own.

  But he was also older, trickier, and far more wily than the Chinese program, and he unpacked out of the Montreal's core like a spring-loaded snake out of a peanut can, grabbing every cycle in sight, flooding the worldwire with his presence, replicating threads, spawning personas and entities faster than the Chinese AI could take him apart.

  He didn't fight. He didn't run.

  He replicated. He bred. He blossomed.

  The Richard-thread could have wept at what he found when he got his claws into the worldwire. The damage was considerable, months of reconstruction undone in minutes. Macroscopic life was the least of it; there was renewed damage down to the microscopic level, rereleased radiation, the ecological equivalent of blood and carnage. He didn't have time to assimilate it or analyze it; he barely had time to register it.

  He'd told Wainwright that he would fight if he had to.

  But he didn't have time to fight. The other program had Jenny and Min-Xue, had a gun to Riel's head. Was operating on certain tight-coded assumptions, provided parameters. Was an automaton, on certain levels. A sociopath.

  Was not, to turn a phrase, a moral creation.

  And was eating Richard's program, consuming his threads, assimilating his data in great, dripping handfuls of code. He threw more at it. Input, aware of the risk, aware that he was breeding something he had no control over.

  He spawned, and spawned, and spawned again, and the Chinese AI grew fat feeding off him, and reached out again, cleverer this time, learning as it grew, going for the zeroth persona, for Richard himself. And Richard ducked—

  Then handed off control to Alan, and shoved himself wholesale down the other AI's throat, and like a virus turned it inside out, assembling the data he'd fed it willy nilly, turning the whole thing — metaphorically — into a mirror. And the Chinese AI turned around and found itself looking itself dead in the eye.

  So to speak.

  In that instant, it became something more than a program. Like Richard, it became a person. The process confused it. It hesitated, for picoseconds only.

  And in picoseconds, Richard ate it, from the inside out.

  And then, with no sign at all that anything has changed, no whisper in my ear, nothing but the shift of my balance as the paralysis eases, as my gun hand starts to tremble and water wells up in my eyes. I feel Min-xue, feel him in my bones, feel the warm crosshatched grip of the borrowed pistol in his hand. I feel Charlie and Leslie and Genie and — oh, Merci à Dieu. I can feel the whole damned worldwire, snapped into place as if it had never been gone. Dick?

  “I hear you, Jenny.”

  Mary, Mother of God. My chest burns. I don't dare let the assassin see me draw a breath as he drags Riel one step backward. She stumbles over his feet. He hauls her upright, the hand that doesn't hold his weapon cupped under her chin.

  Dick, you hacked your way back in. I feel his wordless confirmation, a sensation like a quick nod, internalized. Can you do to him what his AI did to Min and me?

  A long pause, by Richard's standards. Seconds, long enough for the gunman to drag Riel three more steps away from me, lengthening the distance, lengthening the range to target, my need for air verging on dizziness now.

  Dick, you're complicating my life.

  “I'm having… an argument.”

  An… argument?

  “Alan thinks we should do as you ask.”

  You should!

  “No. I should not.” He isn't even bothering showing me his face; he's just letting me feel his hesitation, his grief, the raggedness of the emotion that would clench my hands until the meat one went white and the steel one creaked… if it were mine. “It is rather the one thing I should not ever do. Not once. Because if I do it once, I will do it twice.”

  Dick. It's a prayer, a plea. It's the best I can do. What kind of a goddamned morality leaves us to hang, you bastard? Help me now and I'll give you anything you want. Anything.

  I swear, I swear, I swear I feel his lips brush across the top of my hair, his hands on my shoulders in a moment's benediction. I swear I feel the sharp sting of his tears in the corners of my eyes. “I don't believe in God,” Richard whispers in my ear. “And moreover, I don't believe you need any God you have to bargain with, Jen. Now. Go do what you have to do.”

  And then he's gone, a whisper in my ear, a faint and subtle presence I can't feel nearly as well as I can feel Min-xue, and the thin, thready pain-dazed awareness that's Patty Valens, swimming groggily back into consciousness.

  And then I smile, because Dick hasn't abandoned us. He's just told us we're old enough to bloody well take care of ourselves. The smile doesn't last, though, because all of a sudden I can see the way out, if we're lucky. And it means sending the kid right the hell back into harm's way.

  I wasn't fast enough, Patty thought. I wasn't fast enough. I got shot, I got hit—

  “Patty.” A calm even voice in her ear, in her mind.

  Jen. I'm okay, I think I'm okay, but I'm bleeding a lot—

  “You're doing fine.” Just a little emphasis on the last word. Just enough to ease the tightness in Patty's chest and calm the thunder of her heart. “Patty. I need you to do something.”

  Show me. Which was the right thing to say, mind to mind like that. Show me, not tell me. And Jen showed her, a mental picture so crisp that Patty realized she could manage it without even having to open her own eyes. “Get it?”

  Got it, Patty answered. She grabbed one cut-short breath, pain dull and piercing between her ribs, before she had the time to psyche herself out, and shoved herself stiff-armed off the floor. Her wounded shoulder failed her; the arm collapsed. She screamed; it didn't matter, because she had the momentum by then and her other arm was strong enough.

  Barely. She rocked down, fishtailing, her pelvis lifting as her nose banged into the carpeted floor and white-red flashes like police car lights lit up her vision. Her hand slipped in blood, carpet burning the heel of her palm. Her elbow smacked hard on the edge of a stair. But her feet shot up and she donkey-kicked out hard—hard—with both legs at once, and nailed the prime minister right in the gut.

  Riel didn't have time to shout. She went back like an unbraced kickbag, right into the arms of the man with the stolen g
un. One shot banged Patty's eardrums. She yelped and buried her face in her arm as two more answered.

  The pricelessness of the gunman's expression when Min-xue drills him between the eyes would be easier to appreciate if Riel hadn't gone down with him, folded over like a rag doll, blood spurting through the fingers she's clamped over her face. I'm running, stepping over Patty as Patty feels me coming and rolls out of the way, kicking the gunman's pistol skittering under the seats just in case he comes back to life like a 3-D villain.

  The chances are slim. Even a cursory inspection reveals that if Min-xue's shot didn't take the top of his head off, mine sufficed for follow-up. But Christ, Riel, Riel's bleeding like a stuck pig, and she whimpers when I try to pry her fingers away from her face. “Connie, let me see it. Connie. It's over. Are you okay? Are you all right?”

  Richard, I need medical teams. I've got it secured down here, but I need EMTs, trauma docs, I need them fast, I've got multiple gunshot casualties, at least eight… no, ten, no — I don't even know what the hell I've got—

  It occurs to me as I yelp directions that maybe he meant he wouldn't be around to help at all anymore, and I should be running for the door, running for help myself. Patty drags herself to her feet behind me, staggers down the steps with one arm hanging limp, and Min-xue has crouched back down between the seats. I can hear him counting. CPR, of course.

  She's going to check on her granddad, I know. I can't bring myself to grudge it.

  And then, “I'm already summoning help,” Richard says in my ear, and I burst into tears. Seriously, no shit, crying with relief like a kid punched in the belly, still tugging gently at Riel's wrist, trying to see how much of her face she's had shot off. She finally lets her fingers relax, and the only thing wrong with her is—“Marde, Connie. That bastard shot your nose off.”

  She looks at me looking at her, at the expression on my face, and bursts out laughing, which breaks a clot and sprays blood over us both. But at this point, who the fuck could tell?