by Brian Trent
“Okay…”
“Some threats are obvious. Nukes and antimatter, for instance.”
“Right,” Celeste said quickly.
Gethin hesitated, hearing something in her voice that suggested a thrumming tension, like standing next to power lines. “Right,” he repeated. “But you don’t often hear about other threats. Like the AIs. They’re faster, smarter, more productive, and utterly foreign in goals and thought processes. Or the Ashoka…” He saw her blank expression. “They live out in space. Still human, depending on how generous your parameters are. Descended from the fledgling spacers and asteroid miners who were cut off from everything when the Final War transpired. Now they roam the solar system in rockships, keeping to themselves. Maybe they’re all hopelessly insane. Or so insular that they have no interest in us. Thing is, we have no idea how advanced they are. Earth collapsed into a Dark Age, but the Ashoka were spared that, so they might have kept advancing.
“And you brought up glops. Who knows how many varieties exist on Earth, or how intelligent some breeds are? There’s also the possibility of malevolent nanites. Or Ice-9 scenarios. Or…” He sighed. “The point is, we don’t know, and the powers that be worry about such asymmetrical threats hitting us when and where we least expect it.”
Celeste found herself warming to the conversation in spite of herself. “So you investigate every wild rumor?”
“Not every rumor.”
“Ever find anything to justify the work?”
Gethin told her of the Ecuador anomaly.
It had been sixteen years ago, several miles outside Qito. The locals had reported unusual transgenics in the rainforest. “We’ve been seeing ’em for years now,” a farmer told him. “Big, almost as large as a plowbot. Dark green color, usually. Bodies like massive termites. They’re building cities underground! We see glowing lights from mountain caves!”
And so Gethin had hiked into Ecuadorian volcano country. He found lots of stone mounds, and encountered small transgenic species attempting to carve their own niche in the jungle (but, ironically, most had the fatal habit of eating the indigenous and highly poisonous frogs). In the end, he found nothing to support the farmers’ tales of hyper-intelligent termites building subterranean metropolises.
“Except,” Gethin added, “I did discover an unknown species of bioluminescent moss that grew underground.”
“Which you think was behind the rumors of termite city lights.”
“Yep.”
“And what did the locals say when you came back with your findings?”
“Nothing. I don’t report to them.”
“But you’ve a good idea what they would have said.”
Gethin scooped up the remaining oyster on his plate. “Sure. They’d ask me if I crawled into every lava tube, or if I’d scoured every cave, climbed every tree, visited every island of the Galapagos. Then they’d smile and say, ‘Well then, how can you be sure, señor?’”
“So why was the IPC interested in farmer stories?”
“Because if hyper-intelligent termites did exist, that’s a potential threat.”
“But…bugs, Gethin?”
“The unknown can be deadly. No one really knows what triggered the Final War, and the IPC doesn’t deal in mysteries. Hell, that’s likely the reason behind the colonization ban. They don’t want humanity running smack into a nasty alien race. The farmers in Ecuador suggested there might be competition to human civilization, so my employers wanted to know for certain.”
“Would they have exterminated them, if it was true?”
Gethin shrugged. “Don’t know. We haven’t burned the AIs off the map yet, have we?”
Celeste poured herself another glass of wine, her mind racing fluidly.
Maybe some big-ass anomaly will tear up these arcologies by the roots someday, or some extraterrestrial menace may descend from the stars in tripod death machines. She didn’t have the patience to wait. Her hands trembled as she cupped her goblet and imbibed.
A cold thought flashed in her head…a thought which spoke with Jeff’s voice: What are you going to do, my love?
Oh, Jeff! Would you look at me here? I’ve been kidnapped by goddamn arkies. I’m dining on oysters among immortals while a fucking pegasus soars over my head. I learned that the guy who killed you is not human. The StrikeDown missiles are still missing, and I haven’t dared contact King D. since my abduction. How the hell are you?
She pictured his freckled smile, his beautiful eyes sparkling like river stones. I’m dead, babe. You have to go to Europe without me.
Jeff, I swear I’ll help StrikeDown finish this for us. I’ll do whatever I need to, I’ll manipulate these arkies to my purposes. I’ve been remade and rebuilt. Got my sensorium working. And I know the Mantid is not in Promethean possession. Fucking cunt Yamanaka lied to me, of course. Our ship sent me a message this morning. Two words: SAFE. WAITING.
Do what you need to, my love. I’m there with you. And Jamala and Allie and Rajnar would tell you the same thing. Be glad we went down fightin’. I love you.
Sharp applause rang around her. Celeste realized the winged-horse-and-monster show had ended. She caught a glimpse of the chimera’s scorpion tail vanishing into an overhead stable. Now, a trio of Sirens rose up from the same fountain the pegasus had drunk from, their hair like cherrywood, their topless bodies dripping as they strummed harps and sang in a language she didn’t know.
“Gethin?” Celeste said, reaching across the table and clasping his hands.
He looked shocked by this sudden intimacy. Blushing, he said, “Yeah?”
“I can think of a better way to spend the afternoon than in this living wax museum. How about you?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jonas Picks up the Trail
Jonas barely blinked as he sorted the newsfeeds, and his VR rig so completely enveloped his small head that he never heard his mother leave for the late shift. He had been in the rig all day, a hungry datahound sniffing for traces of his quarry, his wheelchair and home and country forgotten.
Base 59, Flight 3107, and the Pacific offshore rig that had sunk that morning, killing more than fifty people. The blueweb was screaming with conspiracy theories, accusations, online personalities circulating petitions for one cause or another. The latest fuel to the fire: an allegedly leaked Promethean memo, purporting to reveal the corporate powerhouse was embroiled in illicit energy experiments.
Jonas stayed away from the pundits and citizen-journalist cults with their rabid followers. He sifted the reputable agencies for salient data, then shut out the madhouse and logged straight into Arcadia.
Not to escape.
To dig deeper.
It was really the only modicum of privacy left in the world; a veritably Venetian masquerade crossing all boundaries, obfuscating all participants. Players could hail from any group, agency, political faction, or corporation. But Jonas had recently sniffed out a deeper truth. An entire cloak-and-dagger society existed in the blueweb under various personas, laundering meetings through fictional scenarios. A cold war boiled among digital shadows. Like ancient Brazilian martial artists who, forbidden to practice their craft, learned to disguise it as dance.
That Prometheus Industries, a three-hundred-year-old corporation and one of the architects of the New Enlightenment, could screw up so royally as to have two separate accidents – and on two different worlds – was preposterous. Jonas sensed other factors were involved.
If he stalked around as his famous avatar the Exile, he’d be beset by fans and enemies alike. Instead, he called up a Rolodex of other, carefully cultivated personalities. For half an hour, he became Jasper Manforte, one of the foot soldiers of an online conspiracy group. Stepping into one of their enclaves (rendered as an outlandishly complicated network of treehouses in freakishly tall trees) he mingled with the regulars, listening for their take on global events.
They didn’t have a take on it. They had hundreds.
Netcreeps bellowing with absolute certainty that the Ashoka were behind it all, or that Prometheus had captured aliens and were experimenting with their alien tech (with disastrous results), or it was the Asteroid Federation, or the Frontierists.
Jonas dissolved away from the treehouse fanatics, and became a fake Vector Nanonics employee named Edwin Kim DeCosta.
As Edwin, he went to the Vector Nanonics Cave. It looked like a posh Tibetan restaurant set upon a snowy mountaintop, a Mobius strip bar enclosing the tables and booths. Vector security daemons resembling birds stood watch, but they allowed him to enter without hassle. His employee ID was real, after all; Jonas had hacked the corporate recruitment database to ‘hire’ himself as a VIP-sponsored intern…which could mean many, often lascivious things. It was the perfect cover. He mingled as a hybrid of low-totem pariah and privileged boy-toy with a backstage pass.
In fact, the closest he’d ever come to having his cover blown was from a fellow employee – a marketing analyst named Damaris. He’d run into her at a Vector Cave on the Bombay grid. She’d cozied up to him, much to his own discomfort, and propositioned him. Jonas figured the easy way out was to say he was happily married. That had been a mistake. His unavailability only seemed to embolden her pursuit, and her recent string of messages were embedded with graphic visuals. Jonas was terrified. Her unyielding fervor had gotten so constant that he rarely visited Vector any more, and had considered dissolving the DeCosta identity entirely.
Now Jonas strolled through the Tibetan Cave. The place was teeming with employees on break, and they were in a celebratory mood. The popular conversation was to revel in PI’s misfortunes. A few were making bets on how soon the next catastrophe would occur. Jonas nodded, played along, listened.
Someone touched his elbow. Jonas froze, turned, fully expecting to see Damaris standing behind him.
“Exile?”
Jonas blinked; his smiling DeCosta face mirrored the action. An attractive young Indian girl wearing an aquamarine sari stood there, facing him. Her employee ID floated above her head: PRANILIKA ADALJA.
“I’m sorry?” Jonas said, his squeaky voice coming out as rich baritone.
The Indian woman held out her hand. Jonas hesitated.
An invitation to a private chat.
Exile. Whoever the hell this was, she knew who he was. Jonas felt his heart anxiously skip a beat.
Steeling himself for a hasty logout retreat, he extended his own hand until their palms were touching. Chat accepted, Jonas heard the woman’s voice in his head, while her lips didn’t move.
“Exile,” she said. “I am Anju, your friend!”
Jonas felt his tension melt away, replaced by annoyance. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”
Anju was an accomplished, but reckless, gamer. The online equivalent of a bank robber who, enjoying success, keeps upping the ante until arrest becomes inevitable. She didn’t participate in the major online adventures, but rather made a fortune conducting sneak attacks when one group or another was down on their luck. A battlefield vulture, pecking at the dead or dying, flapping off before she could get caught.
Except that a month ago, she had gotten caught.
Posing as a high-level cleric, she found five marks – five wounded warriors returning from an ill-fated battle. Anju lured them to a private spot, and transformed her character into a goddamn manticore. Killing the warriors, she stole all their gold, weapons, scrolls…everything. From manticore to mouse, she scrambled away, intent on selling the items to online bidders.
It had been a grievous mistake. Her victims, as it turned out, had been high-level Judgment Fiends – a powerful brotherhood of online assassins. You didn’t fuck with the Judgment Fiends.
Somehow, they discovered who she really was…and for the past four weeks, Anju had been a hunted woman. The Fiends were openly scouring Arcadia for her. They even started killing off her sideline characters…a feat not ordinarily possible. Apparently, the Fiends had gotten some real-world hackers to track her online footsteps. Anju’s digital life was not long for this world.
She had repeatedly begged Jonas to intervene. However, he wasn’t in the habit of flippantly doling out favors. He had no quarrel with the Judgment Fiends; they stayed out of each other’s way.
“I’m not going to help you,” Jonas said. “And how did you find me here?”
“I’ve known about this avatar of yours for a long while. I’m sorry, Exile. I—”
Jonas conjured his Exile persona. Visible only to Anju, the Kim DeCosta skin morphed into something horrific: a tall, spindly creature with a breathing apparatus and biomechanical survival suit. His eyes were bulbous black.
“How did you know I’d be here?” he demanded. “I don’t like being stalked! Speak, or I’ll kill you myself!”
Anju threw herself to her knees. “I put an alert on this Cave, to let me know the instant you showed up. I was losing hope that I’d ever track you down. You don’t return my messages. You—”
“Your probems do not concern me. I have other matters requiring my attention.”
The girl swallowed hard. “You mean details on the shuttle explosion?”
Jonas went silent.
“I know you’ve been asking people about it all morning. Requesting information.”
His annoyance shifted back into anxiety. Just how long had she been tailing him around Arcadia? And the more frightening thought: did she know his meatspace identity? Did she realize he was just a dying child in Cappadocia?
“I have come into information,” Anju said.
“What information?”
“I’ve been in hiding, you know. While sneaking about, I witnessed a secret conversation and recorded it.”
“Let me see it.”
Anju hesitated. “Mighty Exile, you understand the danger I’m in! The price for my information is your protection.”
Jonas rolled his eyes, then coughed messily. It was a brutally sharp sound, and Anju surely heard it. His chest pained him as if glass jostled in his tender bronchial tubes.
“We will discuss terms after I have seen it,” he said when he recovered.
“How do I know you’ll honor your word?”
He seized her by the throat, his spidery fingers closing around her avatar’s windpipe. No actual injury would be done to the girl herself, and he couldn’t kill her in a Vector Cave where player-versus-player violence was disallowed. But Anju’s eyes grew wide in terror.
“You have violated my privacy. Show me this recording, and if it has value, I shall consider helping you. If you’re wasting my time…”
He released her throat.
Anju bowed. “Yesterday I was in the Biomech forest. I figured it was a good place to hide those hunting me. I changed into a raven and flew over the woods, looking for places of interest. And I saw a tent. I swept down to investigate.”
“And?”
“Three people were having a conversation in the tent. I thought I might…” She trailed off.
“You thought you might attack them and steal their goods,” he guessed.
“Yes, Exile. But their conversation was so unusual, I decided to listen and record their words.”
A video file appeared in his VR rig. Jonas hit PLAY.
Three people crouched inside an animal-skin tent. They were dressed in simple rags. One was a young man with raven hair and many rings on his fingers. Another was a blond man, blocky, with the blank features of a stock design; few if any personal touches had been made to the boilerplate visage.
The third character was a woman, elven in appearance, elegant and beautiful, with silver hair. She was speaking as Anju’s recording began.
But it was in a language Jonas had never heard. He brought up a translation option, which identifie
d it as Latin.
Latin? Who the hell spoke Latin anymore?
“What does the piece do?” the elf asked her compatriots.
The blond man stared disinterestedly at a clay mug in his thick hands. It was the dark fellow who replied: “It can alter matter’s charge. Perhaps allow construction of a Midas Hand.”
The silver-haired lady looked startled. “They can do that?”
“It was only a matter of time.”
“Then they can also—”
The dark man interrupted her. “The question now is how do we mobilize? How many of them are even left?”
The blond man growled low, like a jungle cat. “Four, maybe five. Perhaps fewer than that.”
“But why would they expose themselves like this?” she asked. “Destroying that base and shuttle in such a public way? Surely they know we’ll come for them.”
The dark fellow stood swiftly, walked directly towards Anju’s vantage point at the tent flaps. But he didn’t seem to see her. He halted, pivoted in place. “There are two possibilities. One, they are setting a trap for us. Two, they are so near to completing their plans, which we can assume involves this negative matter device, that exposure is meaningless now.”
The blond man hurled his mug to the ground. Gameworld physics were flawless; the mug broke into pieces, frothy fluid seeping into the grass. “Forget theories! Track them down and end them! For good this time!”
“They hardly expect you to be cautious, Sy’hoss’a,” the elven woman said dismissively. “Perhaps that’s their intention. Get you to come out of hiding. Get you to do something stupid. Doesn’t take much.”
The man growled again.
It was the strangest sound…primal and bestial and yet oddly electrical, like metallic wires sizzling as they came into contact. It made Jonas’s eyes hurt.
In his VR rig, Jonas paused the video and hastily opened another screen so he could search for the words ‘Midas Hand’. He also ran a search for variations on the name he had heard: Syhosa, Cyhosa, Sai-hosa, and the like. He was excited. Anju had not overstated her discovery.
