by Brian Trent
The Wastes.
In Keiko’s nanonics, the woman said, “A member of my crew has sustained life-threatening injuries after a Stillness attack on our trading post, one hundred and fifteen miles downstream from Babylon Arcology. I have information not only on the attack itself, but on two antimatter-tipped missiles the terrorists had in their possession. There may be a connection with the Lunar disaster being reported. I am prepared to cooperate fully with your authorities, in return for immediate medical attention to my wounded passenger.”
Keiko nodded. “I can arrange that. Where are you now?”
A GPS map overlaid the woman’s face. A green circle indicated the ship’s position on the Hudson, moving swiftly upstream towards Babylon.
Keiko noticed the speed of the approach. “You need to slow down. Our missile battery will automatically fire on unapproved vessels.”
“I apologize, but we lost four people in the Stillness attack, and the only survivor is near death. I estimate she has twenty, perhaps thirty minutes to live.”
Keiko swallowed anxiously. “Do you have a cryostorage onboard?”
“No.”
For an instant, Keiko appreciated the vast divide that had sprung up since the advent of the arcologies. The disparities weren’t simply economic. People were dying out there in the Wastelands. Permadeath. They died and never recovered. There were no regen centers out there, and modern medical supplies – which could too easily be converted to weapons in the wrong hands – were prohibited. Four people had just been killed, and the world would never, ever see them again.
Keiko felt the pathos rise in her chest. Prometheus will change all this someday, she thought. We will succeed where the Republic and IPC have failed.
“I’ll get an Anzu out to you,” she said. “It should be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Please lock onto my transponder. I’ll continue closing the distance.”
“Be careful not to go beyond Driscoll Beacon,” Keiko warned, and she threw on her uniform and dashed out the door. A flick of her fingers opened a channel to Babylon’s airbase on Level 500. She instructed the first available pilot to warm up engines for immediate takeoff.
Keiko took the security escalator, hopping up three steps at a time. Through the western glass wall, the sky was pink, with dark-bellied blue clouds moving like monster jellyfish, trailing tendrils above a cityscape that could have been a holo in a fish tank.
This all could be an Outland trap, Keiko thought.
“You should reach us well before Driscoll,” the woman said, still talking in her head.
“Show me the patient,” Keiko persisted, suspecting treachery. “Who is it?”
“Me,” the woman said.
And the image changed to show the same red-haired woman on a gurney, IV lines and pressure bandages applied to her brutalized body. She was spattered with blood as scarlet as her hair.
* * *
The Anzu tilted as it flew above the river.
“We were talking to the ship’s AI,” Keiko was saying. “The damn thing must top the Turing chart. It used an image of its injured crew, impersonated her, negotiated for treatment, all while working to treat her wounds.”
The pilot looked offended. “Fucking Avalon should be scorched from the planet.”
Keiko said nothing. She gazed out the vehicle’s western window, where the sun was setting. A surreal conflagration of neon orange and angry violet dominated the horizon. She imagined these were flames engulfing the infamous AI city of Europe, casting down this last great threat to mankind in a cookout’s bonfire.
AI research was thoroughly controlled by the IPC and enforced by its Turing cops. It was formal policy that machines were to be tools only; unthinking, unactualized, never permitted to evolve beyond the parameters of the Turing chart. And the IPC didn’t fuck around. They had executed and deleted backup Saves of anyone who broke that law. It had taken civilization more than a century to climb out of worldwide destruction following the Final War. The IPC was not about to let anything endanger humanity again. The Turing cops operated as an unspoken fourth lobe of the Republic.
Yet there was a glaring exception.
And its name was Avalon.
It had begun as a human city in Romania during the Warlord Century. Fortified and barricaded, run by a local despot, the city was always at war with its equally brutal neighbors, clawing for every resource in the steaming ruins of a shattered planet. Dynasties rose and fell like waves in a choppy surf, and few – until the meteoric rise of Apollo the Great – ever held onto power for long. Such was the case with Avalon. After a few decades of strength, it succumbed to someone’s biogengineered plague. A Red Deather, reducing the citizenry to a squirting, hemorrhaging mass. The city was a ghost town in a week, and the world promptly forgot them.
Yet the city’s story was only beginning. A piece of security software left running at the local Warlord’s HQ began to improve itself, or so the story went. It initiated a linkup with other AIs in the dead city: hotels, libraries, manufacturing plants, powergrids, and the automated defenses. It shared with them its own improved code. It grew exponentially. It rebuilt the city.
To the outside world, it was still a ghost town, but rumors began to spread. People said it was haunted. Marauders steered clear, because those who didn’t had a way of disappearing.
It wasn’t until Apollo the Great unified Europe again that people discovered what had been happening in Romania.
Avalon.
The AIs called their city Avalon.
Afterwards, Earth Republic didn’t know what to do with them. Exterminating a city was no longer in vogue, and the AIs had done nothing wrong, after all. It was even argued that they had assisted the unification with their dependable trade routes and fledgling airfleet. People finally decided to let the AIs be.
Sort of.
In 114 NE, Avalon began a series of space launches. That couldn’t be permitted. The IPC Congress went berserk, moving swiftly to forbid further launches by passing the Earthbound Protocol in several rushed pieces of legislation. Then people waited, wringing their hands, worried of Avalon’s reaction.
Avalon’s reaction surprised everyone.
In an emailed message, they said they understood the concern and agreed to never again make any launches into space without the expressed approval of their human friends. Of course, by this time the AIs had succeeded in establishing a tiny offshoot colony on Luna: Camelot.
The IPC expected trouble from Camelot. And no trouble came. In the subsequent two centuries, Avalon and Camelot kept strictly to themselves. They traded where they were permitted to. They maintained a non-voting presence in the Republic in the form of a digital emissary named Guinevere.
And that was it. Except for people who were certain that the AIs were plotting something nefarious.
People like Keiko.
Her pilot grumbled. “Give those metal bastards an inch, they’ll take over the skies and every frontier.”
Keiko smirked. “Earthbound Protocol not good enough, eh?”
“Good enough is a mile-high scrap heap,” he said, and patched into the GPS feed, barking commands to the onboard console.
The strange Outland ship appeared as a blip on her screen. Keiko shook her head.
“I’m thinking it might be playing us,” she said. “Programmed maternal instincts. Fished the news, found the report on the Lunar incident, and invented a tie-in just so we’ll treat the girl.”
“Yeah. But if there really are antimatter missiles…”
“I know,” she said grimly.
They spotted the ship right away on the Hudson, a V-shaped wake pluming behind it. Keiko’s first impression was that it was a damn odd craft. A requirement of Prometheus Security was to be familiar with some eighty ‘families’ of aircraft, and every few years a new species or genus was added t
o the taxonomic ranks: antebellum models still relying on solid propellants; Warlord-era mechcraft; national airforces; Republic Enforcers; IPC airships. The Wastes consistently proved to be a jungle of unknown specimens: sewn-together Frankensteins of whatever the barbarians could get their hands on, or new designs hatched in unknown factories.
The Mantid was a cryptozoological wonder. It appeared as a blue-black insect with wings folded up tight. It wasn’t large – no bigger than a Lunarbus – though it gave the distinct impression of being heavy. Nonetheless, it was tearing through the water at speeds only possible by nanomaterials. Maybe it was from Avalon. Great stars!
Keiko kept all this to herself as she tried matching it to known ship designs. The pilot wasn’t so subtle.
“Hot damn, what the fuck is that!?”
“That’s our friendly AI contactee.”
“Looks like a katydid!”
“Hail it.”
A half instant later the Mantid’s female voice came over the loudspeakers. “I have you on sensors. Killing engines now.”
What are you? Keiko wanted to ask. Instead, she said, “Will you come with us to Babylon Bay? If we can save your pilot, she’ll be wanting her ride back.”
“Of course.”
The pilot exchanged looks with her. He nodded his approval.
“Please open your emergency hatch,” Keiko said.
The Anzu hovered like a dragonfly. The Mantid’s hatch slid aside and Keiko rappelled into the blue gullet of the machine.
With the line still hooked to her, Keiko’s first thought was that the ship’s pilot was already dead: the woman’s body looked like it had been dunked in blood, and crimson pools gathered beneath the gurney that held her. Mechanical arms flowered out of the ceiling, securing medbands. A plastic breathing mask, outfitted with a respirator, was fit to her mouth like a jellyfish. A biometric readout blipped on the wall. Weak heartbeat, low blood pressure. A holomap of wounds.
In a flash, Keiko’s concern about this being a trap vanished. Her only thought now was how this was relevant to Prometheus.
Any report of antimatter missiles was serious business. For the most part such weapons were gone from Earth. The only antimatter weapons legally permitted were on IPC battleships that patrolled Sol. But there was little doubt that some terrestrial caches still existed in the forgotten places of the world. The merest chance of a Wasteland faction getting their hands on such relics was a major concern of all powers.
Besides, Keiko mused, if Prometheus could help recover such missiles, it would make for great PR to counter all the negative press…regardless of whether this situation was connected to the Lunar incident.
Some parts of the Mantid’s story had been verified too. Fincher had said that PI satellites over the area had confirmed an unusual low-yield explosion near a local trading post.
At any rate, Keiko was glad to have something to do. All possibilities had to be explored, she thought. It was a common sentiment of her ex-husband.
She rolled the woman’s gurney to the lift cable, secured it, sent it up. Her own pilot brought the patient aboard and returned the line to her.
Keiko clutched the line in one hand and hesitated. “Thank you,” she said aloud, feeling slightly foolish.
“Take care of her,” the ship’s voice implored. Was she imagining it, or did the vessel sound worried?
Or is it selecting ‘WORRIED’ off its menu of options to better manipulate me?
“You will accompany us?” Keiko asked.
“Of course.”
Keiko grabbed the cable and was lifted back to the chopper. The Mantid followed at a distance.
However, somewhere between the pickup point and Babylon Bay, it vanished from view and all sensors.
Chapter Nine
Descent to Caves and Babylon
Gethin was nervous about taking another shuttle.
After leaving Tycho Hospital, he climbed aboard an IPC transport and was suddenly descending the gravity-well to Earth. His homeworld was a blue immensity on the viewscreen. Gethin swallowed, overcome by the terrible beauty of cloud spirals and gargantuan continents. The planet was so big! Mars was a toddler world by comparison; you could stand midway up Olympus and see the redworld’s curvature.
The shuttle shivered like a moth bearing down on a rich, mesmerizing sapphire light.
He was the sole passenger aboard. Government officials and emergency transports were the only craft allowed into brightworld space right now. Gethin sat in a wetware-enabled chair, the power supply connecting into a triangular wetport above his tailbone. Wetports served numerous functions, but right now Gethin was interested in recharging his depleted nanonics.
Shuttle accidents are rare, he told himself.
It was small comfort. Gethin wondered if he was about to wake up in Wyndham Save again, faced with new receipts for actions he couldn’t remember: the purchase of a hooded jumpsuit, the Night Train ticket and meal, and have to go through everything again.
The shuttle’s violent turbulence didn’t help matters. Gethin drank water and wished it was a sharp, strong brandy. He tried not to think of the monumental forces besieging the craft. IPC transports were state-of-the-art, not needing to dock at local space elevators, so it was all the way down Earth’s gravity-well like a goddamned meteor. As the shuttle lanced the atmosphere, fiery plumes burst over the glasstic windows like blood spurting from an entry wound.
His resurrection’s side effects were still a problem too. His body had begun to ache in a hundred different places. Joints, calves, and shoulders. His neck felt like pins were being driven up into his skull.
“I’m never leaving Earth again,” Gethin muttered.
“Our ETA to Babylon arcology is 2030,” the pilot informed him. “It’s seventy-four degrees in New York, high humidity, and a bitch of a downpour!”
“Thank you!”
The shuttle lurched and shivered. Gethin squeezed his eyes shut.
The temptation to think of Mars arose, so Gethin shooed it away and remembered London instead. Britannia itself was a mad wonderland of shard-towers, shapewheels, and Upper London Arcology positioned on massive stalks above the damper, Outlander underbelly.
The Bryces were neither underworld poor nor Upper City rich. They lived in the honeycombed interior of the stalks supporting Upper London, literally stuffed between two economic classes, Morlock and Eloi. Dad was still an Earther then, a dispatcher for the sampan fleets. Mom was a local actress making the rounds in live sensoramic productions. Alone for much of the time, a teenaged Gethin had spent sleepless nights gazing out the apartment window onto the foggy expanse of Lower City, seeing the lights glow through Britannia’s atmospheric miasma like bioluminescent algae in a milky sea. Might as well have been Venus.
The shuttle groaned around him. Plugged in, Gethin decided to make use of the wetport’s other functionalities. Against the darkness of his eyelids, he considered the lavender tabs:
MAP NOTES CONTACTS CHARGE MESSAGES WETWARE WEB CAVE SPECIAL
Gethin Bryce selected his Cave.
It took a few seconds to load. He closed his eyes, waited for the LOADING screen to pass, and then was there.
In Egypt.
Or so it was made to look. Actually, there were some six hundred different ‘skins’ that his Cave could randomly generate. A New England lighthouse island, an Arabian palace, Viking villages, turquoise Pacific paradises, alien moons, Venusian floating aerostats, space stations, Jade Walker floating islands, Ceres’ Drop Town, comet bubble towns. The randomized generator just happened to select Earth’s ancient culture of the Nile.
Gethin found himself on a palace balcony. Palm trees dotted the riverbanks. Limestone pyramids shone on the horizon. Colossal animal-headed statues filled the palace courtyard. The smell of grapevines, jasmine, and fresh olive groves tickled his sensorium.
/> There was a rectangular pool below his balcony. Gethin stepped off the balcony and let himself float down into the sun-warmed water.
Swimming on Mars had been wonderful, and he realized it was one of the few things he would miss. Its water was crisp and clean, untarnished by pollution. You also didn’t have to worry about some ravenous glop rocketing out of the depths to swallow you; that shit happened on Earth. Exterminators had practically given up on cleaning the Black Sea.
Gethin dunked his head, twisted around, and did an underwater lap. Then he rose to the surface and made lazy backstrokes, finally letting himself float amid the garish painted walls and papyrus-budded columns hemming him in.
Floating, Gethin let his mind unspool into patterns of possibility. He explored each route, each suggestion of data. He hopped from dendrite to dendrite like a spider in a predictive model web.
The IPC had snagged him because of this skill.
As a child in the London stalks, Gethin naturally gravitated towards the digital fictions of the gaming web. It was, he supposed, the ultimate outlet for old impulses of glory and violence. A young Gethin had linked into a galaxy of grim fantasy scenarios, fighting in muddy battlefields, on windblown cliffsides, in fungal dungeons and alien-infested space colonies. Valhalla in digital, dancing the berserker bloodbath only to have the enemy slain rise again and compete for scores, rank, and fame. People stayed tuned to its many dramas the way antebellum cultures had tracked soap operas, box-office openings or sport statistics. Good players received corporate endorsements.
By the age of fifteen, Gethin Bryce had been one of the best anyone had seen in fifty years. An unparalleled strategic genius, people said. A man who, had he been born a few centuries earlier, might have made one hell of a Warlord…maybe even launching the unification campaigns himself.
He tried explaining his talent to his parents. Later, he tried telling his first wife in Athens. He tried describing it to Lori. Each time proved fruitless. Ingest all available data, filter it into a mental spreadsheet, and then group the most likely strands together. Tough to be surprised when you were clutching a fistful of the most probable outcomes in your hand. His unrelenting victories in online arenas were almost supernatural. People even accused him of real-world spying on opponents, gleaning their strategies from airhound surveillance.
