Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  Darkness, as she opens the connection, and emptiness like a flat black sea, and there, the barest possible suggestions of shape, like islands over dark water, rushing closer, revealed as dense massifs of seething glyphs whose heights fill her eyes as the fugue hits.

  But somehow she’d forgotten that there’s work to do, a digital lock she needs urgently to open. The lock is intricate, and at first glance impenetrable, but she sets her will against it and its layers start to peel away, for all the world like a flower opening, and she finds it comes naturally, as though she knew the lock well, which gives her pause, and then she realizes she’s dismantling her own implant’s security, at which Cloudbreaker, which has been intent on her, gives up and sinks back down into its roiling hallucinations.

  She lets the fugue fade until she’s once again aware of her body and of the sun on her face; she keeps her eyes closed, compels herself to breathe deeply until her heart slows. She remembers the last time she connected directly to Cloudbreaker—in theory, doing so gives her more control—and the aftermath, lying on the grass, staring blankly up into the void, feeling like a fragment of the machine’s hurtling dream, and for the benefit of her future selves she’d said, “It’s very important that you never do this again.” She reminds herself that Cloudbreaker is just an artifact in software, not a malignant spirit, and is by its nature an opener of doors.

  Legally grey, Cloudbreaker, and of no known state, its owners hiding behind layers of darknets and blinds, though Philip, obsessed with the secret systems of the world, and sometimes reckless, once tried to learn their names. Nominally for testing computer security, which is how she’s twice come to work with it, it’s more often used by the most technically sophisticated thieves.

  She’d been surprised when Iliou suggested using Cloudbreaker against W&P, as she’d thought only specialists were aware of its existence, but had thought maybe that’s just the kind of thing the rich know about now. “Maybe you can find what’s left of Constantin, and erase it,” Iliou had said. “In any case we’ll know what Cromwell really wants.” She’d recalled a line from Plutarch: “Let no one call himself rich who can’t afford his own army.”

  She finds she wants to just lie there in the sun—the consequences of what she’s about to do are unforeseeable, but likely to be extreme, and she’s already feeling shaky, but then she remembers what Iliou’s paying for each second of Cloudbreaker’s time and makes herself reconnect.

  Ever mercurial, it’s already lost interest in her, and ignores her until she opens the gate that’s been keeping it from the net and points it at W&P. As it explodes outward she finds herself imagining its relief even though she knows it’s just a program.

  Cloudbreaker’s attack is like an obliterating wave. Water and Power’s defenses waver, hold, and there’s the slightest sense of anticlimax but the next assaults are closing fast and she feels the elation preceding cataclysm.

  Impact, and chaos—for a moment she’s disoriented, and the ragged hole in W&P’s perimeter is closing but they’re already swarming through, which puts her on the wrong side of many laws but she’s happy to have taken the initiative.

  A security AI manifests and in the same beat Cloudbreaker swallows it whole, like something out of a nature documentary and somehow as hideous, but there are more of them, hundreds, thousands appearing out of nowhere, which is more resistance than she’d expected, in fact it’s absurd, for fuck’s sake it’s not the Pentagon, and things are already getting out of control.

  W&P’s data is there, the pending short sells and minute shifts in the energy markets and all the keystrokes of the employees below the level of VP and there’s a blank space and a resistance that draws her attention, a core of denser security which Cloudbreaker eviscerates at her command and then she’s into Cromwell’s private archive.

  Constantin, she thinks, saluting him in her mind as she flashes through the files but there’s no mention of him, just decades worth of financial records and contracts, and the absence of reference is surprisingly painful, a little like losing him again, but there’s another blank, a core within the core, and though Cloudbreaker is hard-pressed she compels it to ignore its assailants and dissolve this final barrier.

  “I hold the keys to the kingdom of life and death” is the phrase that captures her attention, is in fact the full text of the first message sent to Cromwell by an anonymous stranger from a secured offshore server, the kind of setup favored by terrorists and drug traffickers, and attached to it were a digitized genome and the catalog number for a genetically standard laboratory mosquito.

  “The genome is for a retrovirus,” wrote Andy Simoni, W&P staff scientist. “It’s obviously engineered, but I don’t recognize the style of design.” Later he wrote, “The natural lifespan of this mosquito is about two days but the ones I infected just hit a week and still aren’t getting old. Also, as I discovered, they can regenerate lost tissue—wings, legs and in one case most of a thorax—a capacity heretofore unobserved in the dipterids. I haven’t been able to figure out how the retrovirus works, but many of the mosquitoes’ cells have new organelles, or things like organelles, whose function remains opaque. Also, I tried the virus on some mosquitoes of the same species as, but genetically distinct from, the first batch, and they all died within a minute.”

  Cromwell emailed to the stranger: “You have my attention in its entirety. What can we do for each other?”

  The security AIs are mobbing Cloudbreaker—she thinks of white blood cells swarming a bacterium. Chunks of Cloudbreaker’s substance break off and dissolve into nothing, which seems to enrage it, its counterattacks coming so fast they look like static.

  Her time is short so she skips through the negotiations to where they settle on terms and sees the stranger wants a dozen high-end fabricators from Metafacient Inc., that famously innovative failure—its fabs, capable of printing matter with atomic precision, were the best thing going for prototyping exotic materials and artificial cells, but had been too expensive to find a market, and only thirty-odd were ever made before the company folded. They mostly ended up in the research labs of the military and the tech majors, and are dear even by Cromwell’s standards, when they can be had at all—she sees Biotechnica, which apparently has three in its Bay Area R&D complex, has repeatedly declined Cromwell’s tenders—and then she starts to wonder if it’s all a practical joke when the stranger instructs Cromwell to drop the fabs into the ocean twenty miles west of San Francisco in what’s now three days’ time. She thinks of the Doge of Venice, how every year he threw a gold ring into the waves to wed his city to the sea.

  The stranger’s other demand is six months’ worth of human memory recorded through an Ars Memoria implant, and somewhere under the sun Irina is smiling at having justified the last few seconds’ felonies.

  In exchange, the stranger undertakes to do for Cromwell what it did for the mosquitoes, after which they’re never to speak again.

  They’d settled on terms at four p.m. on a Sunday but that night around four a.m. Cromwell wrote, “I know we have an agreement, but I need you to make a retrovirus for one other person. Failing that, I’d take a cure for Kubota’s syndrome. You can have what you like for it. I’ll give you cities. Nations, if you want them.” She doubts whether even Cromwell could deliver nations, unless they’re small, bankrupt, and marginal, but she’s read about Kubota’s, a rare hereditary disease of the nerves, invariably fatal in midlife, which Magda has, according to her medical records, but in any case the stranger doesn’t reply.

  Among the records of labs and chairs funded are the plans for a university Cromwell will found in Magda’s honor upon her death. He’s hired architects, bought up thousands of acres in the plains of central Canada. Delicately phrased correspondence with his attorneys suggests he hasn’t told her. Her cenotaph will be at the center of the campus, a sort of Hellenistic ziggurat, its torches whipping in the wind; it speaks to her of desolation of spirit raised to an imperial intensity.

  Cloudbrea
ker is thrashing, close to failure now—she sees it touch an arbitrage AI, the same one from her last visit and still connected to something off in the net, the connection slipping under W&P’s firewall, and she wonders if W&P ever noticed. She expects Cloudbreaker to destroy it but instead they form a link, start exchanging data.

  A dozen counter-intrusions systems lock onto her and she wastes a precious fraction of a second disemboweling them though she knows her time is ending and then she finds another email from Andy Simoni with the subject “Mnemosyne”:

  “Akemi’s become a part of the texture of things. By which I mean, I found an image of glowing pillars of smoke in the nighttime LA sky, as seen through her eyes, drawn on the wall of an alley in San Francisco—the match is exact down to the details of foveation.

  “How did I find it? We’re sending her memories off god knows where, so I wondered if they’d turn up somewhere out in the world. I used a large quantity of your money to rent servers to do image searches for everything she’s seen since surgery. This drawing was the first hit, but I focused the search and found more. They were all by this graffiti artist who goes by ‘LEdERER.’ He’s of the favelas, keeps the company of thieves and is paranoid enough that I couldn’t invade his privacy without putting him on alert.”

  There are images from Akemi’s memories—some she recognizes from LEdERER’s show. Cromwell’s made archival prints of four of them and used them to decorate his outer offices. There’s a link to a mission report from Hiro, apparently Cromwell’s security chief, about his attempt to rendition LEdERER, how a street fighter named Kern got to him first and took the phone, which has its own file, but she’s distracted by the interrogation video of a vaguely street-looking girl named Kayla who looks hunted and forlorn as she slouches on her chair in a sterile-looking room. Someone off-screen asks where they can find Kern and she says, “You absolutely promise you just want to talk to him? Please tell the truth. It’s important to me.”

  Shuddering motion that must be Cloudbreaker’s death throes and she braces for a hard exit but Cloudbreaker is still there, whole and somehow replete-looking, and all the security AIs have vanished. She looks a fraction of a second into the past, sees it swallowing them whole, and for a moment she’s bemused—had it been drawing them in all along?—but all that’s important is that now she has this wholly unexpected time.

  Cloudbreaker brushes against her implant.

  She finds the stranger’s most recent email, sent three days ago, in fact while she was in her debrief at W&P. It reads: “I’m changing the terms. Akemi Aalto will no longer do. We need Irina Sunden.”

  Cloudbreaker is scrabbling at her implant, though by now it should know better—her implant’s security is so dense a direct assault is pointless—and as she thinks this her implant’s security collapses.

  The first thing Cloudbreaker does is disable the off switch of her implant’s wireless and she opens her eyes onto hard light on the rooftops, the swallows diving through the air as it siphons off copies of her memories.

  She clasps her forehead in her palms despite the gesture’s obvious futility as memories of her mid-thirties are copied off into the ether, and she wonders if this is what being raped is like, and if there’s nothing she can do except wait for it to be done, but then she remembers the router in the tower, her sole present point of connection to the net.

  She runs up the tower’s stairs toward the router as Cloudbreaker takes copies of the years after college.

  The router is bolted into place so as she tears it off the wall as Cloudbreaker takes the memory of her first trip to the Mayo, her diffidence and discomfort and how her batteries of detailed and perfectly informed questions eroded first her surgeon’s patience and then his self-regard.

  The power cord is screwed into the router and she wastes two seconds trying to yank it out and is starting to think she’ll spend the next few minutes running through the villa searching desperately for a screwdriver when it occurs to her that the router is hanging from the cord in her hands, so she swings it through a wide arc into the wall, really putting her hips into it, and on the second swing, as Cloudbreaker takes the memory of her dinner with Philip, the router shatters into tiny pieces that bounce off the walls and sting her face and hands, and, as though exorcised, Cloudbreaker is gone.

  She leans against the wall, slumps to the floor, turns off her wireless.

  38

  Thought Purely

  In the morning Thales searches for his brothers over the groomed sand of the hotel’s crowded beach. They hadn’t come back to the suite the night before but for them this is hardly unusual behavior and even behind his sunglasses the day is too bright, though the sunbathers are like shadows and the container ship on the horizon is a patch of darkness on a blaze of clouds. He almost trips on a girl lying prone on a towel, awkwardly untying her bikini top, and once he’d have found some reason to linger, he thinks, but now he looks down at her and just sees the curvature of skin stretched over layers of fat and muscle and the striations and eczema on the backs of her thighs.

  He spots Helio, not twenty yards away, heading for the waves, longboard under his arm. Whatever his brothers’ faults, their family loyalty is unwavering and they’re sure to take his part. He labors over the sand and seizes Helio’s shoulder and then recoils, because it’s a stranger who turns to him, his face a mask of blank inquiry. “Sorry!” blurts Thales, so taken aback he speaks in Portuguese, and as the stranger turns back to the surf he tells himself that out here under the sun behind his polarized glasses it’s only natural to mistake one body for another.

  He stands there sweating through his shirt and scanning the beach though he now feels certain that his brothers aren’t there and in lieu of whatever sense of abandonment or desolation he just wants to know what’s happening. If pure thought led anywhere but in circles he’d have solved the problem long since so it’s therefore time to act, but what is there to do, and who is there to ask, and then he remembers the ragged woman who’d accosted him on the hotel patio, how she’d said she found him by staking out the clinic, and the force of her conviction that both she and he were somehow victims, so he heads up the beach toward the hotel’s garage.

  * * *

  It’s already evening and he’s been dozing in the town car for hours, dimly aware of the rush of traffic, the gathering darkness, the few lights visible over the clinic’s wall across the street. He programmed the car to alert him if another Mitsui Talos comes within fifty meters but even so he startles when it announces, “Target in proximity.” Through the darkened window he sees the same filthy town car that had followed him to the St. Mark, and he holds his breath as it crawls by the clinic like it’s looking for something and then as it speeds away he tells his car to follow.

  39

  Lost Coast

  There’s nothing on the coast but the hotel’s ruin, though the tsunamis are ten years past. The shoreline must have changed when the water came, because now the waves break on the hotel’s west wing. There’s a swimming pool with breakers rolling over it; in the moments of the water’s stillness Kern sees patches of aquamarine tile under the green weed and fragments of coral, and there, in the middle, the hotel’s logo, a mermaid with a conch at her lips.

  The tide is out, so he goes exploring among the dripping, recently flooded rooms. Tide pools, stark shadow, the resonance of water rushing, anemones, purple-shelled crabs scuttling into the cracked masonry. The rooms nearest the sea are buried entirely in thick strata of wet sand, hot where the sun reaches it, trembling at his touch like a living thing. He imagines the old life of the hotel preserved, somehow, in this wet, labile tomb, the laughter and clink of glasses buried, compressed, becoming geology.

  It’s midday, and all the other farang are asleep. He clambers up a ruined wall to the hotel’s highest surviving eminence; nothing on the sea but a few fishing proas, nothing inland but jungle, no dust hanging over the one road in. He takes out his old cell, the one without the ghost, and sees
, with relief, that there’s still no signal. He wears a hat, because the sun is hot, and he doesn’t know how much the satellites can see. He sits there a long time in the rattle of palms, the stroke of surf.

  His discipline is in abeyance; he takes his morning runs slow, toys with his sparring partners, doesn’t punish the heavy bag. (The one point on which he is disciplined is not thinking of Kayla.) He wonders if anyone has found his room, back home, whether it would still be there if he ever got back. The favelas change fast; miss a month and you can’t find your way, would wander ever deeper into the alleys, a lost tourist disappearing.

  * * *

  He shares a room with four other fighters in the mirror image of the drowned wing. There are chunks of rotting carpet still glued to the floorboards, strips of silk wallpaper on the crumbling plaster. They have a bathroom, but its pipes are long dry; there’s a translucent plastic keg of water, mounted above the filthy tub, with a desalinator on top, and a sticker that’s supposed to turn blue if bacteria start growing. Every morning one of the trainers comes in with two big buckets of seawater, pours them into the desalinator, and takes away the last day’s white lozenge of salt. Under the keg, the water has washed away the tub’s grit, sand and accumulated hair, revealing a veined, pale marble.