METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  He could find secure bandwidth there, and take the temperature of events back in Seattle.

  Bashar slipped off the trail and moved deeper among the pines along a narrow cobblestone path. The trees were straighter here than in their native California, protected from the winds by Seatac’s Valley Ridge just to their west. Their needles carpeted the ground, interspersed with an engineered hardy, low-moisture moss that a lot of the trees in this region contracted to have laid down. It reduced the feral competition for sunlight and soil resources by keeping the ground cover tight and hampering seedlings of whatever species,including their own, but plants in general seemed to take a different view of their progeny than animals did.

  The result was a forest far cleaner than the wild ever produced, one that smelled of pinesap and old needles. Data ghosts flickered as well from a handful of virteo projectors, and at least one text stream so old school it would have been archaic in the days of Bashar’s youth.

  He sat down on an artfully careless piece of basalt. Many of the groves and forests had adapted to a philosophy that translated to humans as resembling Zen Buddhism. For all he knew, the rock symbolized universal transubstantiation.

  Right now, it symbolized a place to put his tired butt.

  “Hello,” he said calmly. “Thank you for the grant of shelter to me.”

  They didn’t talk much, the trees, but it almost always paid to be polite.

  Bashar flexed the muscles of his face in a specific order. An embedded ultra-low power data transceiver powered by a combination of his body heat and piezoelectric charging as his muscles moved began to hunt for friendly turked signals within the same three hundred-centimeter radius as his implanted microearbuds. All his gear was battery-free, so as not to show up on most sensors. This was the electronic equivalent of know-your-neighbor security, without the disposable convenience of his single-use phones.

  Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon accepted the connection. His optics flared briefly, then cycled through a disorienting sequence of images of daylight, darkness and fuzzy logic models of organic molecules. Esters, he thought, but chemistry wasn’t exactly Bashar’s long suit. At least, not chemistry that didn’t involve explosives, propellants or fuels.

  That was a tree’s way of saying hello. Or more to the point, several hundred trees’ way of saying hello.

  His communication wizard requested a cloaked ping out to a persistent data pipe. The rewilded I-5 corridor had a strong quantum fiber backbone running underneath the one-lane walkway, with shunts and repeaters every few hundred meters or so. That was how both the tourists and the permanent residents talked to the wider world around them. Infrastructure was pervasive, even deep in the wilderness.

  Price. There would always be a price.

  An electric green text stream floated into his sensorium via his optic nerves, complete with a blinking block cursor. The trees were being very retro. A package walks south, their message read.

  Now? But the natural entities were known to be indirect in many of their dealings. He’d wanted to talk, this was a conversation. They had something to tell him.

  So Bashar went along with it. “Fair enough.” He could carry it himself or turk it, depending on how far south the package needed to walk. Turking was effective but slow, sort of the land-based equivalent of the gyre-runners that cruised the oceanic currents. Hand to hand, person to person, the package might move a few hundred meters one day and dozens of kilometers the next. Or it might sit by the side of the trail in a cache for weeks. It would get there, through the peer-to-peer osmosis that was turking.

  Furthermore, today, in this place, there was probably a good reason for him to take this assignment. “Destination?”

  California Suisun Bay.

  Whoops. That was over seven hundred miles as the feet wandered. Not at all what he had in mind.

  It was a weird destination in any case. Bashar was pretty sure Suisun Bay was long gone. Just a shallow water feature of Greater San Pablo Bay in these degenerate days, but he wasn’t going to argue with Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon. Besides, the package would presumably be tagged with an address that would make sense to the locals once it got there.

  “You want me to see something south of here?” Bashar asked.

  See what is before you. The grove flashed images of a forest fire, of people fleeing a city.

  It was worried about something. Very worried.

  “I don’t expect to go to California personally, but I’ll get it there.”

  Nobody turked in a hurry. But people usually turked for a reason. And Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon wanted him headed south.

  Your proposal is acceptable.

  With those words, he found his own data tendrils insinuating into the I-5 corridor carrier signal. In accepting the package, he’d paid the grove’s price for anonymous access into the datastream. Insofar as Bashar could tell from the inside, he was embedded in a feed of archive weather-and-climate data. That was good enough for him.

  He pinged his wife. Voice wouldn’t cut it here, too much traceable bandwidth required, but he needed to talk to her again about darwin and what was happening to him now. That Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon would hear everything seemed a fairly low-risk trade, given the degree of anonymity the grove was granting him.

  Trees were good secret keepers. For the most part, they simply didn’t care at all.

  Charity’s ack came back as scrolling text wrapped in Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon’s crazy retro interface.

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  The world’s oldest security operative smiled.

  * * *

  From greenwiki:

  Lightbull. Alleged cover identity of a long-term conspiracy to achieve world domination, much in the tradition of the Illuminati or the Bilderberg Group. This strain of theorizing is notable mostly for its intermingling with soft and hard Green history, including a putative role in the unsolved bombing of Cascadiopolis.

  Even the best evidence for Lightbull is indirect, having been described as “a string of words.” Tauroctony. Mexico City. Tygre Tygre. A dead satellite and a pair of orbital kinetic bombings. Devotees of the theory have drawn a crooked line back through Enlightenment conspiracies and the Eastern Roman Empire and Mithraic mysteries back to Minoan Crete. For those who believe, much of history comes down to who was on the wrong side of the Battle of Salamis, and who survived the eruption of Thera. The underlying questions of what any secret society of such age would want to accomplish in the modern world is not usually answered. Like almost all conspiracy theories, Lightbull is a heady compound of wishful thinking, paranoia and outright fantasy.

  * * *

  ii: Some people would rather that you die for their beliefs than that they re-examine those beliefs

  Charity Oxham hated her nasal oxygen concentrator. Her every breath reeked of a curious combination of slightly musty plastic and that strange, fresh smell of O2.

  Bashar had commented once—just once—that she lived now the way William Silas Crown had died. “In a small room wallpapered by medicine,” were his exact words. Colorful as her partner of almost four decades always was. She smiled in fond memory of the old bastard.

  And old didn’t even begin to cut it, when talking about Bashar.

  She’d long ago passed through jealousy at his extended good health and lack of senescence. Even now, barely seventy herself, Charity had seen most of her friends and family long dead. Except for Samira and Bashar, she had almost no one left. And Bashar had been legally dead for the third time this past decade. That he called her up periodically, and interfaced data with her quite regularly, was no substitute for his warm-bodied company.

  At least someone was still out doing good in the world.

  Her current project, likely her last, was to make additional effort to run down the old Lightbull leads. That was a set of threads Bashar had picked up back around the time the two of them had first met. He’d been following them ever since, as time and new evidence permitted.


  Charity finally realized the increased medical bleating was a reminder to breathe. She sucked down another noseful of oxygen and its olfactory discontents. The stuff very nearly made her high. Which was either a blessing or a sin, she couldn’t be sure which.

  Malik, the human nurse on this shift, cracked open the sealed door to her room and stuck his head in. “You can’t be doing that, lady.” His teeth shoaled within his quick, mobile smile, bright in the dark skin of his face. His accent was warm and liquid and curious, some mysterious regionalism that had arisen since she was young. “Woman needs air to live.”

  “Woman needs peace and quiet to live, too,” Charity grumped, but she didn’t mean it. And she knew that Malik knew that as well. “Any papermail?”

  “Nothing hard copy since those chocolates turked in last week from your daughter.”

  Samira barely talked to Charity any more. A grown woman, that was her own business, but it saddened her mother’s heart. The girl had been born angry and she’d probably die angry. Admittedly, the relationship between herself and Bashar hadn’t exactly been a comfort to their daughter in her youth. Still, Samira had only been scrambled on one black ops raid that Charity could remember now.

  Arranging for baby sitters had been a stone bitch.

  “You enjoy ‘em, Malik?” Charity had been strictly off sweets for years thanks to her long-surrendered pancreas, something Samira knew perfectly well.

  He mocked a pout. “Niranjana ate half the box, then left the rest in the staff room.”

  Charity snickered. She’d known some first sergeants like that, back in the day. Way back in the day. “She’s the charge nurse, I guess she can do what she wants.”

  “Some secrets tell themselves.” Malik winked. “Some never get told at all. Don’t forget to breathe.”

  “Breath is life.” Charity wondered who she was quoting.

  * * *

  Bashar’s darwin file made a nice contrast to tweaking the long-dead threads of Lightbull. Why her husband concerned himself with viral reservoirs of fatal plagues was the kind of question Charity had given up asking decades ago. Bashar was interested in everything, and had never been much for offering any of his own secrets in return. Not even to her. She was convinced that he’d lived so long as much out of sheer bloody-mindedness and preternaturally good security as out of whatever medtech Crown’s legacy had left him with.

  Despite Malik’s parting words, that meant more secrets kept. A lot of them. And a lot of those for reasons even Bashar might not be certain of anymore.

  Her right hand shook, tremula again, so that the microthin data tablet wavered in her grip like waves on the ocean. Being old was frustrating. Most of what she wanted to do she couldn’t, and the rest took three or four times longer than it had any right to. Charity gulped down another noseful of oxygen before the monitors went off once more. Malik was a good kid, but he had an entire ward to watch, not just her.

  Everything hurt, not much worked right, and the smell.… Gah. She was living in the future. Surely they could get better disinfectants.

  Her husband’s notes within the darwin file were as cryptic as ever. The attachments and outside references were more verbose in painting a picture of the island plagues. The phenomenon itself wasn’t hard to understand. The mystery was all, and always, in the causation.

  Bashar was clearly convinced of human agency. Just as clearly, he was angrily baffled as to motive.

  She had to laugh out loud at that. Sometimes Bashar was so simple. “A century and a half since the Trinity atomic bomb test, and you have to wonder why someone would come up with a new way to kill?” she asked the empty room.

  The machines around her bore Charity no answer. Silent witnesses to her decline, they offered scarce comforts at the best of times.

  The genomic targeting was admittedly an angle a little more troublesome than the usual run of biowar horrors. Planetary population was down to a bit over a third of the early twenty-first century peak of almost eight billion. That had been accomplished wholesale, though, through the time honored means of famine and economic collapse. Not ethnic extermination.

  No one could have a political or religious grudge that extended to both Tongans and Icelanders at the same time. Those had been testbed populations. Bashar didn’t think otherwise, to judge from his notes. And the vectoring made no sense. How would a virus naturally migrate from the south Pacific to the north Atlantic, years apart, leaving no intermediate traces along the way? What was the vector? Epidemiology just didn’t work like that.

  This was rather like pulling the strings on Lightbull. Thinly scattered evidence displayed just enough pattern to invite the paranoid pareidolia to which the human mind was so readily suspect.

  The outbreaks must have been test efforts, with increasingly large and uncontrolled populations as the project went on. That culminated in the misnamed St. Louis flu that could have wiped out half of two continents if it hadn’t been contained.

  What if that had been the goal?

  Some secrets keep themselves, after all.

  She had to ask herself: who stood to benefit from that sort of death toll?

  Hard Greens, of course. The edge of the Green movement, on the far side of J. Appleseed and its ideological kin. Zero-population rewilding of the terrestrial biosphere wasn’t exactly a new concept. But up to now, they hadn’t run so close to the edge as to engage in genocide.

  Or had they?

  The darwin file was frustratingly similar to the Lightbull problem. There was far more physical evidence for the island plagues than there ever had or would be for Lightbull, but that didn’t lead her any closer to the truth. Just more threads that broke off and unraveled as soon as you got near them.

  It wasn’t just the sheer secrecy involved. The world was made of secrets. She and Bashar still kept more than a few of them. The problem here was the lack of agency. Causation. Motivation.

  Who benefited?

  The hard Greens hadn’t bombed Cascadiopolis all those years ago. Tygre Tygre had died, Bashar had nearly been killed. The green city movement had been shattered, only to be reborn in a hundred other places as Cascadiopolis’ shards had spread across western North America.

  Or had the hard Greens meant that all along?

  Charity felt a cold sinking in her chest. These days, the Cascadian daughter-cities ran from the Brooks Range in Alaska to Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental. They were the ultimate in soft Green power. Low-impact living in close integration with the hyperlocal climate, ecosystem and resource base. In a sense, the opposite of zero-population rewilding.

  Close cousins to the hard Greens in some ways. In others, when looked at from the hard Green perspective, the daughter-cities were traitors of the sort only someone so close could be.

  And now Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon was pushing Bashar south, farther away from the J. Appleseed manhunt and towards something. Another piece of the puzzle, and if the natural entities were getting involved, a whole different player. What did Lightbull and the hard Green movement look like to them, she wondered?

  The answer came as if from an outside voice: “One and the same.” People plotting for power over one another, but also over the biosphere. Which affected the natural entities profoundly. On a life-and-death basis.

  What if the forests and their kin were right? What if Lightbull and the hard Green movement were one and the same, or at least overlapping …

  Horror dawned on her like nuclear fire in the night.

  “How many years have we been played?” Charity asked her machines. She already knew part of the answer to her own question: All her life at the very least. Lightbull almost certainly stretched back before she was born. Years before. Decades. If only some of what Bashar believed was true, centuries, or perhaps millennia.

  Even the trees understood this.

  Her mind raced. The problem was figuring out what the hard Greens behind the island plagues meant to accomplish. Charity just couldn’t credit them
with being literally suicidal. Not in their own lifetimes. And even the most radical of activists often as not had children, and thus slowly acquired a different view of the future through the lens of their genetic propagation.

  Bashar, for example.

  She dropped him a ‘call me’ ping, then spent some time correlation mapping different configurations of the available evidence and her speculations.

  * * *

  “Hello.”

  It was Bashar. His voice was deep and mellow with age, and still made her shiver all the way down into her loins. Besides which, Charity had never in her life heard the man say “hi.”

  “You’ve got bandwidth this time,” she observed. “You don’t sound like Elmer Fudd piped through a noise filter.”

  “Hah. Let’s just say I’ve been tree hugging, and leave it at that.”

  “Hippie.”

  “Pig.”

  “Love you, too,” she said. “Besides, I was a soldier, not a cop.”

  “Fascist pig, then.” The fondness in his voice nearly brought her to tears.

  “Okay, I’ll own that.” She wondered if he would ever come in from the cold and see her again. It wasn’t like she could get out much stuck here in Chelan Heights, a Federal retirement home and high security medical facility tucked in the Cascades more or less due east of Seattle.

  “Miss you.”

  He laughed. “Get a scope. It’ll improve your aim.”

  “Chauvinist.” She stopped, reined herself in. They didn’t have time. Ten minutes, tops, for a secured line, and she’d burned the better part of the first minute on their version of ‘I love you.’ “I’ve been sailing your Beagle.”