Earthweb

by Marc Stiegler

  CJ clucked her tongue. "Recognize that sound?"

  The whole team fell silent as they tried to figure it out. It was a guessing game, to see who could recognize a mannerism first, and whose mannerism it was.

  Akira spoke. "Axel, you are correct that this is a Morgan mannerism. I haven't quite figured out when and why he does it, however."

  CJ looked into the eyes of each member of the team, silently asking the question. They all shook their heads. "No one knows? Well, watch for it. When Morgan clucks his tongue, he's making a hard decision, the kind of decision where you can't know the right answer till it's too late."

  Lars and Akira sank back into the cushions of the booth, memorizing the snippet for future reference. Axel looked off in the distance, and finally resumed eating. Roni just smiled at her. "A good thing to remember," he commented.

  A few moments later, Axel spoke again. "That was a good catch, CJ." Axel was back to normal.

  But a few minutes later CJ realized he wasn't quite back to normal. And neither was anyone else. They all stopped eating before finishing their breakfasts. As one pair of eyes after another turned on her, she waved her hands. "If you guys are done, get out of here. You're all packed for tomorrow, right?"

  A wave of tension passed around the room, and CJ knew what the problem was. She shooed them off. "Go, go. I'm going to take my time."

  They rose as a team, and straggled out as individuals. CJ stared at the bottom of her chocolate malt. Normally, she pointed the straw into the corners of the cup, to suck out the last drops. Today she just put the cup back on the table and rose to leave.

  Even with her stomach full, she had butterflies. She understood Axel's anxious desire to lash out. In the morning they would board a roton that would take them to the Argo. There was little chance they would ever come back.

  * * *

  Jessica watched carefully as Granma grabbed spices out of the cupboard and sprinkled them, with hardly a hint of care or order, onto the steaming vegetables. "I wish you'd let me videotape your cooking," Jessica told her. "I'm telling you, we could get rich selling the video on the Web." Jessica believed they would, too, though she was uncertain which reason would drive people to buy the video: would they want to learn how to make the remarkable dishes like Granma made, or would they want the entertainment, because Granma was such a stitch when doing combat with zucchinis?

  Granma grunted. "You don't need a videotape, girl. I gave you the recipe five years ago." Lemon pepper made a high-speed assault on the T-bones as they grilled.

  "But, Granma, you don't follow the recipes yourself. What good are they? The only real way to capture your genius for posterity is videotape." Jessica stepped out of the way as Granma whipped past to claim the butter from the refrigerator.

  "You still wouldn't eat right," Granma asserted.

  Jessica threw up her hands. "You're probably right." She took three steps and threw herself onto the sofa, conveniently located next to the kitchen in the tight little studio apartment. "Since you won't let me help, I'm going to sit back and relax."

  "'Bout time," Granma grunted. "Now, while you're sitting there, why don't you just pop open that palmtop of yours and do some quick currency exchange. I don't want you to be stranded, penniless, the way I was the last time."

  How could she get her grandmother to stop living in the past? Somehow she had to stop the woman from telling once again the story of how, after the Entitlement Crash, Granma had moved what little money she still had into untraceable electronic securities, and hadn't looked back since. Jessica smacked her forehead with her hand. "Granma, I have a confession to make."

  Granma stopped in her tracks and stared at her. "You didn't let that blasted boyfriend get you pregnant, did you?"

  Jessica clenched her fists to avoid screaming. "No! 'Course not. I'm talking about the money." She sat up. "I don't really have any money in Swiss francs, Granma. Most of my money really is in Masterbucks. I just keep some money in dollars for the supermarket and stuff." This statement was almost true: Jessica kept half her money in Masterbucks and half in dollars. Jessica didn't trust the corporate currencies any more than the governments. They were both controlled by the same simple equation: if the currency owners corrupted their money, with inflation or massive debt, everybody'd move to safer currencies as fast as you could count—probably faster. A debt scare had finished off the Samsung baht a few years earlier, leaving only four major currencies in the world. The surviving currency owners probably wouldn't forget the consequences soon, but why take chances?

  "Well, I'm glad you're smarter than I was. Or your silly father." Granma shut off the burners. "Voila! Dinner is served."

  "Thank heavens. You fill this place with such good aromas, Granma, my stomach is growling at me." Jessica jumped up from the couch and started setting the table.

  Granma dished the plates, and they sat down. "Well," Granma confessed, "They seem to be treating you fairly well, anyway, even if it is the government. This place is nice, but not so nice that you're soaking us taxpayers."

  Jessica almost choked. "You, pay taxes? Since when?"

  Granma smiled; her dentures were pearly white. "I've been working a bit in the electronic markets. Not much, but every once in a while something comes up that calls for my talents with legacy SQL databases." She grumped. "And you can't avoid taxes when you work in such a public forum." The marketplaces paid a small percentage of all transactions to the governments where the market operators resided.

  "Come on, Granma, I know enough history—you taught me enough history—to know that the taxes today are only a fraction of the taxes before the Crash. You can't fool me. For someone who lived through that, what we pay now must seem like a relief." Jessica chewed another heavenly bite of steak—how did Granma bring out such flavor!?–before continuing, "Besides, most of the money goes to Earth Defense, and even you have to admit that that is a good cause."

  Granma almost choked. "Government and taxation is the most evil thing on Earth."

  "Come on, Granma, even you can see Shiva is worse, even more evil than the government."

  Granma stopped eating for a moment and pondered the question. "Maybe," she replied, not entirely convinced.

  * * *

  Paolo watched the webcast idly. The reporter was showing the preparations underway for the next step in defense from Shiva. Tomorrow, the Angel Two team would climb on board a roton and lift off to orbit. Ninety-four percent odds said they would never come back. Paolo thought he detected just the barest hint of tension in the reporter's face—his smile was too wide, too fixed, even for a reporter. The reporter knew as well as anyone that this Angel team was the last chance to stop Shiva before it started vaporizing cities.

  The news report moved from the launch site to cover a vast assemblage of people milling about by a large lake. He recognized Lake Mead when the skycam brushed passed the Hoover Dam. The place had a carnival-like appearance—so many wild styles of clothing, so many people with their arms in the air, rocking as they sang their chants of prayer and anticipation.

  But after watching for a few moments, Paolo discerned the deeper truth. The brightly enthusiastic folk might be the ones attracting the attention, but lots of the others were huddled together in the miserable clusters around which the jubilant ones wove their chaotic Dance. Only the truest of believers chanted; the others knew, just as well as Paolo himself knew, that unless the Angels getting ready to lift off succeeded, in eleven days their religion would be put through the severest test a set of beliefs could encounter. And if their religion were wrong, nothing could save them.

  Yes, the moment of truth was coming, and everyone knew it, even if they could not admit it even to themselves.

  He at least had something he could do about. He turned back to his analysis of his team's preparations and predictions.

  Later, the wallscreen chimed softly with the arrival of new mail. At first Paolo ignored it, intent on deciphering the meaning of the latest, and most bizarr
e, forecast made by Crockett II, the newest and most experimental of his team's genetic programs. Crockett figured the Gate was located one hundred kilometers down-axis from the center of the sphere, roughly where all sensible assessments of the ship said the primary fusion engines had to be. Either Crockett had uncovered a change in Shiva structure of devastating importance . . . or it was going to take a lot of debugging to find the problem.

  As part of the testing, Paolo wiped Crockett's knowledge of Shiva V, and fed the program with comparable data for Shiva III. When Crockett made the same prediction for Shiva III, that the Gate was down-axis, Paolo knew for certain that debugging would be the order of the day. It was just as well; getting Angels from the docking bay to the ship center was hard enough, getting them all the way to the engine area was unthinkable.

  Having reached a stopping point, Paolo turned his attention to the earlier chime. "Luis," Paolo said to his computer, "show me the new mail."

  Luis opened a small window. "One message from Jeff, requiring filtering," the computer explained. "I have returned a recommendation that Jeff word his request more carefully." Paolo looked in the small window to see what parts of Jeff's email had survived the courtesy filter. He was not really surprised to see that only the sender's name and date of transmission had made it; even the subject line must have been a blaze of pure rage, for Luis had excised that along with the entire body of the message. Paolo just shook his head. You'd think people would figure out, in this day and age, that flaming on the Web served no purpose at all: people just filtered you out, shutting their eyes to you with a perfection not possible in other mediums. For all intents and purposes, angry and rude people had simply ceased to exist on the Web.

  Despite this, it must have given Jeff a lot of satisfaction to scream digitally at him, even though Jeff had to know, if he thought about it for even a second, that he was shouting in an empty closet.

  Luis spoke again. "You also have some unsolicited mail."

  "Great! Show me." Paolo kept a 75-cent fee on his mailbox for information from unknown brands; anyone in the world could get his attention briefly by paying the fee. Seventy-five cents was high enough to prevent the kind of random spam he'd heard was common before the Crash, but low enough so that if someone were really sure they had something interesting for him, they could get the message through. And of course, if the message really was interesting, he returned the fee. Advertisers had gotten very smart about figuring out which things he really would be interested in seeing. So on those rare days when Paolo got unsolicited mail, it usually meant he had a treat in store.

  But when this message popped up, it just about burned his eyes out. You BASTARD! The first line shrieked at him, and got worse from there. Paolo closed his eyes with a sigh. Jeff had clearly sent this email, using an anonymous identity. "Luis, close it for me." Jeff had been so angry that he was willing to pay Paolo for the right to send hate mail.

  For just a moment, Paolo considered letting Jeff continue to send email at seventy-five cents a pop, just out of morbid curiosity to see how long it would last. But he didn't want the hassle. On the other hand . . . "Luis, set the unsolicited mail fee to seventy-five Masterbucks, please."

  "The new setting is in effect."

  Well, Paolo thought, he'd indulge his morbid curiosity, but for higher stakes. If Jeff were willing to pay seventy-five bucks per message, perhaps Paolo was giving him a real therapeutic benefit by letting him blow off steam.

  "Luis, keep the fee there for thirty days." That should be enough time for Jeff to lose interest.

  Another sound interrupted Paolo's stream of thought. This time his palmtop tinkled for him, a sound easily interpreted as a computer sharing a private bit of humor. Paolo smiled, for the sound made him think of Sofia; time to phone home.

  He turned from his screen; through his window he could see dusk fall over the lands of the house of Ossa. Stars began to twinkle. Yes, it was time. " Luis, where is Sofia?"

  An unusual pause preceded the answer. "Perhaps she is in her Zen room."

  "Ah." The Zen room was disconnected from the house computers, consequently Luis could only guess.

  Paolo headed out the door humming quietly. Twelve years earlier, during the WebEveryWhere initiative, his beloved Sofia had railed at him for never calling her from his forsaken remote sites. He'd been exhausted at the time of the argument–he'd just gotten back from the damned jungle–but he'd had enough wits left to offer the obvious solution. He'd pulled out his palmtop and set a recurring alarm to tell him to call his overwrought spouse every day. The alarm had had no expiration date. So even after Paolo had finished that project and returned home, it continued to go off at the specified moment. Indeed, even though he had discarded that old palmtop and changed machines and software half a dozen times, the reminder had survived every upgrade.

  The digital information had remained intact, but its human interpretation had changed ever so slightly. After all, Paolo worked at home now. Merely calling her would have been silly when his presence offered so many better opportunities.

  Paolo slowed to a creep as he came to the Zen room. The door hung ajar, telling him the situation—his entrance was permitted, though only for important matters. Paolo decided that their daily phone call was important enough. He eased the door open.

  The light of the Zen room, set to simulate candlelight, flickered with crimson and orange pulses that cast darting shadows. Sweet burning incense hung in the air. Paolo sang softly, "Sofia. It's time for me to call you."

  She turned to him from the touchscreen on her desk. "Of course," she replied, though her voice seemed a bit tense. He took her head in his hands and kissed her–this was the new meaning of his twilight alarm.

  Sofia returned the kiss, but it was brief, too brief for a true Sofia kiss. Then she turned away. Paolo exhaled slowly just beneath her ear. Normally his breath would have come back warm and moist, rich with the scent of Sofia's perfume. Somehow, though, this time the breath seemed cold and dry. Paolo stood up slowly. His voice barely rose above a whisper. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," Sofia said unconvincingly, her eyes fixed on her touchscreen.

  Paolo looked over her shoulder to see the focus of her attention. The touchscreen was the color of green felt, with playing cards arrayed around the table. One hand lay open, with aces and diamonds and clubs, but no spades. "Engaged in a game of bridge, I see," he continued, feeling stupid.

  "Yes." Sofia's voice sounded irritated. "You're winning."

  Paolo opened his mouth, then closed it again. "I am, am I? I didn't even know I was playing."

  "Well, I named one of the computer positions Paolo," she explained. "You aren't playing very well, but you're still winning." Sofia's nostrils flared. "And you're winning because Mercedes can't make an intelligent bid to save her soul. I swear she's on your side, even though she's supposed to be my partner."

  Remembering that this room was unwired, Paolo knew Mercedes was not playing a hand in this game any more than he was. He thought he'd try something lighthearted. "Sofia! Be glad that Mercedes and I aren't really playing. Neither of us is up to playing your kind of game, you know." Sofia held a Life Master card.

  "Umph." The last of the cards flipped into the center. Scores automatically adjusted on the screen. Paolo could see Sofia's little hand clench into a fist.

  Paolo spoke very gently, exactly the way a person of good sense would speak to an angry baby gorilla. "Uh, sweetest Sofia, could you rename those players so that Mercedes and I are not involved? Please?"

  "What difference would that make?" she asked, eyes still fixed on the screen as the computer dealt another hand.

  "Please, just humor me," Paolo said.

  "After this game," Sofia compromised.

  "Thank you, love. I'll leave you to your, ah, game."

  "Umph," was her sole reply.

  Paolo escaped from the room as quietly as he could. He was not as quiet as a cat, but he did his best.

  When he reache
d the hallway he exhaled loudly and gasped for breath. He could feel a cold gray anger spreading through his mind. Why did Sofia have to be going crazy now, when things were getting so scary anyway? Then he closed his eyes and worked the anger, kneading it with his own understanding. Why shouldn't Sofia be a little crazy too? The last battle was nearly upon them, and all they could do was wait and play bridge. Sofia had as much right to a little anxiety as the newscaster, or the people featured on the newscast. By the time he was done going over it in his mind, the mix of anger and understanding had leavened into a soft compassion. He felt like himself again. He wondered how many times he'd lose it before the final hour. As for Sofia, he just hoped she didn't kill anything. Since he was the closest, he'd inevitably be the target.

  * * *

  "I can get out of this chair perfectly well on my own," Morgan snapped at CJ. He lifted himself, switched one handhold to the reclining lounge chair on his deck, swung himself around, and rolled onto his back. He took a deep breath.