METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  He caught the toss. Obvious enough as a reference to darwin. “Find any interesting finches?”

  “Oh, yes.” Charity checked her security filters, dialed up the encoding. The line squealed a moment before the audible tone that indicated deeper encryption. Both their voices would flatten now, picking up latency ghosts and losing the nuance of emotion. “I’ve been thinking. Are we pulling on opposite ends of the same thread? I think maybe your tree friends believe that the people behind the island plagues and the people behind Lightbull are one and the same.”

  “Lots of things are possible,” he replied.

  She couldn’t hear his inflection, not over the quantum-encrypted line that currently burned up bandwidth like a kilometers-long, electrons-wide bonfire, but Charity knew Bashar well enough to fill in what was missing from their connection.

  “Yes,” Charity said. “But there’s a common m.o. of deep secrecy here, with dead end threading. And there’s maybe a common set of goals. If you’re a zero-pop hard Green with a reductionist agenda, the island plagues make sense as test runs for a bid to take the biosphere back to pre-human in a fairly constrained amount of time. Cascadiopolis was a demonstration project of the compromise version of that hard Green agenda. Radicals hate their squishy allies a lot more than they hate their implacable enemies.”

  “What about Tygre Tygre?” her husband asked, skipping ahead half a dozen steps down the logic trail.

  “I haven’t the least idea. You knew him. I didn’t. But if you’re right about the deep origins of Lightbull, isn’t possible they have their own dissenters?”

  “Everybody has dissenters. Says so right here in the big handbook of movement security.”

  Even through the flattened line, she could catch the humor in his voice.

  “There’s more,” Charity said, suddenly reluctant to push her intuition forward.

  “More what?”

  Always a practical man, her husband.

  Charity continued: “I think maybe we’ve all been played. Played hard, from the beginning. If Lightbull has a planning baseline that runs beyond decades, to centuries or more, that’s not inconceivable.”

  “Paranoid, are we?”

  “You lived through the last century. Tell me another series of worldwide economic and technical collapses isn’t something to be paranoid about.”

  “Our hard Green friends would say that just proves their point. Human culture is unsustainable beyond a certain threshold.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” Bashar said. Then, slowly: “When is zero-population not suicide?”

  “Never?” she hazarded.

  “Not after a certain point, no. Not never. Think, Charity. Green Space. The habitats they’ve been building up there in high orbit.”

  “They?” Charity snorted. “We, Bashar. J. Appleseed funded a lot of that directly, and funneled much of the rest. And if we’ve all been played since before day one, maybe that was part of the plan.”

  “They’ve got two great, big rocks up there,” he said, “and how much headcount?”

  “Bashar, there are people working in orbit who were born in space. Young people, admittedly.”

  “What, ten thousand at least?”

  Charity pulled some data threads. “Current estimate of human presence in space is approximately seventeen thousand, four hundred permanent residents in orbit, another eleven hundred on the Moon. Plus as many as five thousand transients at any given time.”

  She could practically hear Bashar thinking before he spoke again: “We’ve brought back plant and animal species here on Earth from a few cloned cells harvested out of museums. A genetic reservoir of over twenty thousand people is enough to preserve our species in good health. It’s not like Homo sapiens has all that much genetic variation to start with.”

  The species was weirdly single-threaded, from a genomic perspective.

  “So this is all directed from space?” Charity wondered how that worked.

  “Or at least reliant on orbital resources, yes.” Bashar sounded impatient. As usual, he was out ahead of her. “I’m more curious about how all this was directed from deep in the past. Zero-population rewilding isn’t exactly a staple of classical thought.”

  “Agendas change,” she reminded her husband. “Ours certainly has over the years.”

  “Yes, but this agenda … It’s world-spanning, with a very long time base. You don’t shift that easily.” He fell silent a moment. Then: “How soon?”

  “How soon what?”

  “How soon until Lightbull releases the final plague? Assuming Lightbull and darwin are one and the same, like you seem to believe.”

  You believe it, too, she thought, before replying, “If we stipulate that the prerequisite is a self-sustaining population in space, their state of readiness been achieved.”

  “How many of the folks in orbit know about this?”

  Charity could practically hear Bashar point at the sky. “I haven’t a clue.”

  “I’m going to find out. Thank you, dear.”

  “I love you,” she told her husband.

  “I love you, too.” Uncharacteristically, Bashar added, “Remember that.”

  She watched her own monitors a while after the connection dropped, fading into stochastic bursts of electrical energy. Everything descended into clouds of unknowing eventually.

  Sometimes she was glad she was old and sick and almost dying. The idea of trying to stop the island plagues from going global sounded absolutely overwhelming. Charity considered drawing on some of her own resources, whether to call in favors decades old.

  Not yet. Not until she knew precisely what it was that Bashar intended to do.

  * * *

  From Green Space and Your World, Pyloric Publishing, 2081:

  If you watch the skies at the right time of night, you may see the glimmer of Orbital Zero being constructed. That is your future, right there, in the sky high above you. Paid for by concerned citizens the world over, Green Space Operations is building that future one launch at a time, one pair of hands at a time.

  Soon you’ll be able to visit. Gardens in the sky. Microgravity swimming pools. Asteroids brought to Earth for their wealth, so that we can mine cold rocks from the beginning of creation instead of continuing to disturb our planet’s natural environment. It will all come together by the time you’re old enough to work your passage into orbit and take up a gainful trade with the rest of us building the future.

  Are you ready to learn more? Good. In the first chapter, we’ll talk about the GSO launches, how our heavy lift vehicles work, and the environmental remediation that Green Space puts into effect every time we push a launch into the sky.

  * * *

  iii: Sometimes the dead were easier to deal with than the living

  What went on in orbit had never interested Bashar too much. When he was a kid, NASA had been dying on the vine, victim of the American conservative anti-science fixation. The Russians and the Chinese had done their thing, of course, until they’d run out of money and motivation. Eventually, space had gone strictly commercial and military. Both of which Bashar had always considered to be cultural perversions.

  But now …

  Maybe he’d been wrong all along.

  He walked further south along the I-5 corridor, turking the package for Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon. It was small, about twice the size of a deck of cards, sealed in resin, which probably carried the grove’s DNA as a signature. Thankfully, stabilizer had been oversprayed so the thing didn’t stick to his fingers.

  Walking, Bashar kept his eyes open for whatever the grove might have been directing him toward. All his eyes, not just the meatware in his face.

  Occasional undirected movement made for good security, and exercise always helped his thinking. The weather was a bit brisk for late spring, and something was in bloom that scented the wind with unsubtle perfume. Bashar was pretty sure given his conversation with Charity that he’d wind up back in Seattle s
oon. That was all the more reason to be out of town right now. Let J. Appleseed’s squads hunt him where he wasn’t, if their orders had gone beyond the foundation’s own premises. By the time he got back, they’d be looking somewhere else.

  The foundation’s play against him was a problem, too. Something had already been in the wind at J. Appleseed from the darwin file. The same accrual of evidence that had brought Bashar in from the street must be pushing them toward their trigger point. Certainly the orbital allies were ready.

  His enemies list was much, much longer than his friends list. For the most part, Bashar preferred things that way. He could ration his trust accordingly, and make reasonable assumptions about where everyone else stood. But it rendered the old motivation/method/opportunity triad a tad less useful when most everyone had motivation to spare.

  There were still people on the inside he could talk to. Starting and ending with his daughter. But to reach out to J. Appleseed right now … Not without a strike force at his back, and some notion of how to stop their plague release. If that was what was really going on.

  He shouldn’t have let himself fade out like he had this past decade and more. It was just that being dead was so convenient. Not that Bashar had ever paid taxes in his life, but death cut down on the mail, too. He got a lot more done when people weren’t looking for him, asking him to do things.

  “Orbit,” he told the stand of Japanese maples he was currently passing through. Feral ornamentals, it looked like, almost certainly without any corporate structure to their natural entity yet, so no answer would be forthcoming. “Why take it to orbit?”

  Charity had the right of things. Orbit was all about a genetic reservoir. The ultimate island, in a sense. If their speculation had any basis, Lightbull had built a virtual ark high overhead, and was now in the process of permanently exporting the problem of human existence from the terrestrial biosphere.

  The why mattered, but not so much as the how, let alone the when.

  The when gnawed at him.

  As he walked, Bashar began to methodically retune his data traps, changing the keywords to include some new concepts. There were security trapdoors out there almost as old as he was. And he had friends in the virtual world.

  He wondered what the hard Greens intended for the infrastructure after the zero-population level had been achieved. A lot of the biosphere was online now in the form of natural entities, instantiated as legal and economic actors in their own right. Was the plan for a post-human infosphere, automated systems and species agents interacting over time? Somebody still had to site the repeaters and repair storm damage, after all. Even if the storms themselves paid their own bills, they didn’t have opposable thumbs.

  There were some powerful, genuinely green entities who might not be so pleased at all with this plan. Even sleepy bystanders such as Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon would probably have a thing or two to say about subtracting humans from the world completely.

  Hence him turking this package.

  Could trees get bored, he wondered.

  * * *

  The trees had sent him south for a reason. Bashar found someone who might be his contact amid the ruins of an overpass down around what used to be the town of Federal Way. An androgynous teen sunbathed nude, no visible genitalia to speak of, their groin sort of like that of an old-fashioned toy doll. He was both old enough and old-fashioned enough to be uncomfortable with androgynes.

  They stirred from their rest as soon as he ambled into sight. The kid’s tall bike was parked casually enough, lying on one side amid some black-eyed Susans, but the artfully distressed frame members had the sheen of nanotech over their rust-and-mud patina.

  No modern primitive this one, he thought.

  “Yo.” The kid shrugged into their t-shirt. Oversized and threadbare to the point of being more mesh than cloth, it was screenprinted with a pixelated image of the twen-cen actor Peter Lorre in a jacket and bow tie.

  “You looking for me?” Bashar asked. Sometimes it paid to be blunt. And to be honest, he was tired of messing around in the woods.

  The kid tugged on a pair of biking shorts and some toe shoes, picked up a hardbook—actual paper—then skittered down the rotten concrete to meet him. “Might be.” They flashed the book like a gang sign.

  Bashar controlled his reaction. It was A Symmetry Framed. Written by him, decades ago. The soft Green bible, some people had called it. That book had been the J. Appleseed Foundation’s calling card much longer than this … child … had been alive.

  Symmetry was either his greatest work or his greatest mistake, depending on how he thought about things.

  “I got a package needs turking south.” He hefted the evidence in his left hand. “Sent by a friend.”

  The kid shrugged. “Who’s got friends? Turkin’s easy. Life is hard.”

  “Truth,” Bashar acknowledged. “You got anything for me? I’m headed north.”

  “You just came from north, moonshadow,” the kid pointed out.

  That was probably as much explicit recognition as he would get. “And now I’m headed back north.”

  Standing up their bike, they extended a hand. That close, the teen smelled of marijuana and machine oil. “No. West.”

  Bashar paused as he handed over the grove’s package. “What?”

  “Go west, young man.”

  Close to a century of security work, he knew a touch when he heard one. This was what Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon had sent him south for. “What’s west?”

  The teen shrugged. “People you ought to meet. Friends of Mr. Cairo.”

  Who? Bashar tugged his chin, thinking. “Friends. Does anyone have friends these days?”

  “Nobody. Give you this for free, though: Saw someone take a dirt nap today. Went down the hard way. Shooter was a cyranoid, working for someone else. Heavy stuff, not a local spat.” They flipped Symmetry into a messenger bag with a grin, tucking the package after it. “Man like you, would know what it all meant.”

  So much for his cover.

  Who knew what the grove had told this kid, or who this kid really worked for? For a moment, Bashar wondered if he was seeing a cyranoid right now—had the kid done the killing themself, on behalf of some distant puppet master? But that much bandwidth would have stood out like a flare this far into the sticks. And the kid had none of the peripheral oddities of a human-hosted avatar. “Mind the road,” Bashar finally said.

  “And watch your wheels.” With that, the kid kicked up on top of a shattered concrete pillar to mount his tall bike, then headed south, whistling tunelessly. Bashar watched a while but received no backward glances.

  Killings in the woods. And a cyranoid wouldn’t be operating out here without consent and assistance from the natural entities. It was hard to imagine Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon hiring contract killers, but depending on how badly the grove and its peers wanted to protect the infrastructure that gave them civil rights and economic power, one human life was just a small step.

  What did he know, at least at the moment?

  Bashar knew he had to head west. The trees had all but told him that. He supposed he was working for them now. But the only thing around here besides dope growers and survivalists who liked to go shopping less than once a year was Schaadt’s Shack, a roadhouse that had a good reputation as neutral territory. For the most part, you didn’t get far off the I-5 corridor without specific business in hand and someone’s permission to do that business. Schaadt’s Shack was an exception. People who would shoot each other on sight out in the hills would sit down to drink together in a place like that. Peer pressure, a weapons check, and a small stable of fearsome bouncers kept the bar in business on those terms.

  He walked. The trees were worried. Bashar was worried. Friends of Mr. Cairo? What did that mean?

  It was less than thirty minutes on foot from the corridor trail to his destination. People liked their drinking convenient.

  So far as Bashar could tell, the place had been originally built
as a tiltwall shopping mall. How it survived the comprehensive rewilding movement of the middle of the last century was anybody’s guess. The outer walls were covered with layers of granite stacked like a riprap breakwater. The roof was a medieval classic, hand-logged Douglas fir beams supporting honest-to-god slate tiles. Bashar wouldn’t have hesitated to airdrop a cargo load onto it.

  The tamped clay apron in front even held a few vehicles. Unusual in these parts. He slacked his pace and scanned. A couple of small battered hovercraft that would run slow and fat on dense, long range fuel cells. The usual assortment of bikes and seggers. An honest-to-God Hummer body, though this one was crowded with an alcohol-fueled boiler and wouldn’t drive much faster than he could run. Not that he could run with a couple of metric tons of cargo on his back.

  And strangely enough, a rather peculiar helicopter. Something very new. Insectile airframe, rotors folded politely, bristling with enough stingers of one kind or another to melt everything else in the yard and punch more than a few holes in Schaadt’s Jack-the-giant-killer slate roof in the process.

  Finding such a machine out here was like finding a silenced carbon fiber pistol in a child’s toy box.

  Somebody took their drinking seriously.

  Precisely who had taken a dirt nap and how they had been killed became much more interesting questions to Bashar.

  He paged his own alerts. Nothing with any meaningful priority sought his attention. Whatever this was, it likely wasn’t here for him.

  Right. Cairo’s ride, he’d bet, whoever Mr. Cairo was. “You’re not the only bad ass in the world,” Bashar reminded himself out loud.

  He was here for this killer chopper and whoever had flown in on it. Still, he made a wide circle around the helo as he approached the front door.

  * * *

  From greenwiki:

  Mining Packages. While many people are familiar with Orbital Zero as an effort to ensure long-term human space habitation, the real economic driver was always the Luna-Lagrange Consortium’s Project Precious. Two separate efforts, both successful, were made to capture and tow two asteroids known to contain significant quantities of high value and precious metals into high Earth orbit for intensive mining and mineral recovery.