Chapter 3
“Escape from Paryang”
Paryang Valley
Gangdise Shan, Tibet
People’s Republic of China
January 3, 2049
“Irwin, do you even know how to operate this thing?” Mary Duncan tightened her seat belt a little tighter as the lifter wobbled, descended slightly and then stabilized itself.
Dr. Irwin Frost checked his flight controls. “I have the profile and destination programmed in…I’m doing exactly what I saw the real pilot do two days ago. Maybe a setting is wrong—we shouldn’t talk too much either, Mary. We don’t know what might trip these halos.”
Duncan bit her lip and sank back in the seat. Frost was right. Last week, Duncan had been just fantasizing about a day long ago at Northgate University—the Autonomous Systems Lab—when ANAD was still being developed—and her halo had gone off. It was like sticking your head in a vise. The bots inside her brain had stoked the dopamine receptors around her ventral tegmentum for only a few minutes. As a result, she’d spent three days in the infirmary….and gotten a visit from a swarthy Russian named Kulagin, said to be someone from the Ruling Council itself.
“Let’s not have too many more of these episodes, Dr. Duncan,” Kulagin had warned her. “Your neural synapses can’t take it.” From the first day they had arrived at Paryang, her brain had been infested with uncountable gazillions of mechs, all working in unison, all stimulating and massaging the neural pleasure circuits, pretty much on command. Dr. Frost too. Kulagin chuckled at the prospects, envisioning the froth inside her head churning in dopamine soup, as the mechs plied their trade, working the synaptic gaps like a musical instrument. A symphony of fake agony played out on Kulagin’s face. “Sit up straight and think Red Hammer thoughts and everything will be kosher, no?”
The Russian left with a smile tickling his lips.
From that day on, Frost and Duncan had learned Lesson No. 1. When you were a prisoner of the cartel and you had the halo, you didn’t spend ten seconds thinking about anything other than what you were supposed to. Which meant they focused almost all their attention on the Project. Almost all--
Mary Duncan watched as the sere wasteland that was Tibet’s high desert rolled by beneath them. The crumpled white peaks of the Himalayas lay off to their right…the roof of the world, some called the area. It still amazed her that somehow, some way, Irwin had managed to wrangle a ride on one of the cartel’s lifters—a few days ago, they’d made a quick trip to a Red Hammer lab down in Kolkata and come back that same day—and in the process, had learned enough to commandeer a vacant lifter later and program it to take off, follow a flight profile and set them down at a destination. It helped that Kolkata was one of the programmed destinations. It also helped that Irwin had been able to finagle his way through multiple layers of security, out onto the little landing field behind the monastery and convince the guards, human and robotic, that he had a reason to be there. She’d seen a side of the doctor she’d never seen before during their imprisonment at Paryang. A hard edge and ruthlessness that she’d never noticed before, hiding underneath the avuncular exterior that made Johnny Winger always refer to the professor as “Doc.”
Somehow, they’d made it onto the lifter. Frost had input the programming details and the rotors and thrusters had spun up and the little bird had bounced into the sky as if it were a fly about to be swatted. They’d left the monastery that dominated the valley behind quickly and turned almost due south. Frost had told her they would fly low, only a few thousand meters over the desert hardpan and rolling brown hills and make the Indian-Nepal border in a few hours. After that, a straight shot into Kolkata and they could notify Quantum Corps and the authorities of what had happened to them. Frost was sure his beeper would be picked up as soon as they left Chinese airspace. If they could just avoid the radars. And the killsats. And most importantly, the halos.
They flew on in silence, only daring a few words here and there, trying to keep the focus of their thoughts on aspects of Red Hammer’s Project…a years-long effort to replace key people in business, politics, sports and entertainment, all around the world, with duplicates. Angels, most people called them. Symborg was the first step in that direction. And the Church of Assimilation which had sprung up around the robotic celebrity and created a whole mythos about going through deconstruction and merging with some greater entity that Red Hammer had given the name of the Old Ones…it continued to amaze the hardened members of the Ruling Council how gullible people were.
The latest aspect of the Project was atmosphere modification, starting with the nurseries for angels that the cartel had created in several places around the globe. Modifying the atmosphere, creating bubbles of toxic air and growing them into country-sized zones of death was a pure ransom play, nothing else. But if the Project succeeded, Red Hammer would have a clear and level playing field in which to run its criminal enterprises. Quantum Corps would be scrapped, its ANAD systems shown up to be worthless and ineffective against Red Hammer. Profits would soar. A pusher’s dream. Addiction on demand…the Halo had been the first element of that part of the plan.
Duncan and Frost both knew they had to escape, they had to get away and notify Quantum Corps and UNIFORCE as to what they were facing. When Kulagin casually mentioned over dinner one night that the halos were being upgraded and everyone’s efforts would be ‘re-doubled,’ Irwin Frost knew he had to act. If they waited any longer, they might not be able to act. The halo bots were already able to stoke dopamine and serotonin fires in a wearer’s brain on command. Pain and pleasure at the push of a button. With Kulagin’s upgrades, so Frost surmised, even free will and motivation circuits might be compromised.
“We have to go now, Mary. Tomorrow, after the upgrades from what I hear around here, it may be too late.”
So they went.
“Fifty kilometers to the border,” Frost announced in a low monotone. One popular notion about the halos was that you talked in monotones and didn’t get too excited about anything.
Duncan looked out the porthole. “Pretty desolate down there. A few villages. Smoke from cooking fires. Saw a herd of something a few minutes back…Irwin, do you really think we can stop the cartel? I mean, these angel assemblers are basically ANAD clones…but they replicate and fold like crazy.”
“It’s all in the algorithms, Mary…the configs…they’re doing things in code I never thought possible—“ Frost stopped in mid-sentence, aware of a faint buzz inside his head, realizing after it was already too late that he’d tripped the halo, broached a forbidden subject, elevated neural activity and synaptic cascades in places he shouldn’t have and now…now…it was like going over a waterfall, there was no stopping it….
“Irwin…Irwin…what’s wrong…you need to let that controller go…you’re putting us into a turn…Irwin—“
He was fighting it, she could see that, with his face turning blue and his eyes scrunched up—the pain had to be excruciating...a gazillion hot needles all jabbing into your skull at the same time. His fingers had been forced to grasp the control stick, though his hands shook with uncontrollable tremors and his fingers flexed as he fought against the commands tumbling through his cerebral cortex. A force greater than any man’s willpower was already exercising contractile fibers against his will and slowly, but surely squeezing his fingers onto the control stick.
The lifter rocked and wobbled and began to descend at an alarming rate.
“Irwin--!”
“I can’t fight it, Mary! It’s—my hands…arrrggghh--“
Duncan winced as a bone cracked loudly, and she nearly fainted when the bone ripped through the skin of his index finger in a way no bone was ever meant to move. His face was white and sweat poured down his cheeks.
Despite the halo, Frost gripped the controls with white-hot knuckles. “It’s trying to make me turn us around!” he said. “But…so far…so far…I’ve got—“
Frost took a peek at the map. “We’re off course…going east-southeast…looks like…” a vibration rattled his voice into tremors, “looks like one two five degrees. That’s not Nepal or India ahead—“
“Myanmar,” Duncan noticed from the map and murmured out loud.
Frost fought for many minutes against the commands of his halo, and the lifter mirrored the struggle, at first following one heading, then jerking back to another heading, then hunting for yet a new heading. Through it all, Frost’s hands and arms jerked in spasms as he struggled against the Red Hammer bot swarm infesting his head. His face was a grimace, pale and shiny with sweat.
Mary Duncan knew he had to be in one hell of a lot of pain.
“Anything I can do--?”
At that moment, they passed over the granitic limestone humps of the Kachin Hills, into Myanmar. A green canopy lay before them, divided by the sinuous ribbon of a muddy river. The map said Irrawaddy.
Doc Frost made one last effort to wrest his hands and arms back under control, but the halo was too strong. Weak from the struggle, his whole body trembling, his wrists blue from the strain of working the controls against the contractions his halo dictated, Frost finally passed out. He slumped in his seat.
Mary Duncan gasped, tried reaching for the stick but it was already too late. They were in a terminal plunge. All she could do was watch the terrain streak by at an ever-increasing blurry speed…and pray.
Below the lifter, the great river made its sluggish way down toward the Andaman Sea, hundreds of kilometers to the south. Lined with dense banks of mangrove stands, the flyer screamed a hundred meters over a raft of teak logs lashed together, barging its way downriver to some port they couldn’t see. Beyond the mangrove tops, the hills were covered with golden mounds—stupa for deceased Buddhists-- looking like rows of stone anthills as they sank ever closer to the ground.
In the last seconds of their descent, Mary Duncan was able to wrest enough of the stick out from under the prostrate body of Doc Frost and lean hard on it, hard to the left.
The underbelly of the lifter snagged the tops of a mangrove stand and cartwheeled hard left, then sank spinning nose-first toward the river banks, before finally plowing into shallow river water just offshore. As the lifter skimmed the top of the water, sending up a plume of spray in all directions, she felt the flyer gain lift for a few meters once more, before burying its nose into the water. The craft plowed head-on into the teak log raft and groaned to a halt, with a screech of metal bending.
Seconds later, the lifter, by now holed in multiple places belowdecks, began taking on muddy water, filling the cabin and flight deck in seconds. The craft upended nose first and began steadily sinking into the muddy river bottom.
Mary Duncan was knocked unconscious for a few moments by the impact and the spin. Doc Frost was thrown clear of his seat and slammed against the forward windscreen. Although she didn’t know it, the moment of impact had re-activated the beeper that Quantum Corps had implanted in Frost’s shoulder months ago. Faint and intermittent, the locator signal shot skyward and was soon picked up by UNIFORCE satellite orbiting overhead.
Meanwhile, Mary Duncan clawed her way back to some semblance of consciousness. The gurgle of water rising at her ankles got her moving. With every ounce of strength she had left, she wrestled Doc Frost from being pinned at the shattered windscreen and dragged and muscled him out the back of the cockpit. A jagged hole, filling with water and now thrashing with fish, greeted them.
Duncan took a series of deep breaths and, with one arm tucked under Frost’s shoulder, ducked them both head first through the hole, now completely underwater.
Nanotroopers Episode 9: Demonios of Via Verde Page 7
