by John Barnes
He lay sideways on his bed, chained to a furniture bracket, with two guards always watching him.
He really missed Kim.
He wished he’d been more suspicious, more paranoid—maybe just more angry—back when it could do some good, but had to admit that the too-trusting, too-open way he had walked into this had always been his whole approach to life.
He could see now what Rog had been trying so hard to tell him. If your biggest worry was that the other side might stop talking to you… well, sooner or later, if there was one genuinely malicious force in the world, you’d meet it, and something like this would happen. Once I made myself into John Samuelson, The Man Who Can Always Get a Deal, I was doomed to come out and meet these guys, even though Rog and everybody who really knew anything told me that it smelled bad and they didn’t want to do it.
He hated feeling like a fool, but it was still no excuse for despair. I’ve done my best, even if I was wrong. Somebody had to take the chance that they were telling the truth when they said they wanted to talk, and they wanted to make peace. You don’t make peace with people who aren’t dangerous in the first place; that’s not peacemaking, that’s just negotiation.
And now that it turns out it didn’t work, I guess someone else will have to make the lying, treacherous fuckers pay for that. Wish I could be there to see that.
Wish I could help.
They had kicked him for looking too closely at his handcuffs, and for looking around the room, and for wiping his face with his sleeve, and for sitting up. Since those were the rules, he’d purposely made a couple of fiddling, fumbling gropes at his cuffs and at the brackets they were attached to, taken the kicks, and let himself subside on his bunk, against the wall, face resting on the window, and pretended to cry uncontrollably—it hadn’t taken much pretending.
With his face on the window, he tried to look like he was finally without hope, overwhelmed by the shock.
“Hang on to your advantage,” he’d been told, over and over, way back when he took the classes in negotiation. “Whatever they don’t know about you, that’s an advantage.” Right now his one advantage, and it wasn’t much of one, was that they didn’t know he was still looking for something he could do.
The water below was featureless. Time hunched, lurched, and hobbled, mocking him with its slowness; if any sort of chance came along, he didn’t want to have to jump into it with stiff and unmoving muscles. He did what he could to ease the muscles without visibly moving. He whimpered and blubbered whenever he had to move a larger muscle, hoping that would make him look broken.
He was hungry and thirsty and really needed to take a crap, but he was afraid that if he asked for anything, they’d decide he was conscious enough to worry about, and they would move him away from this little airliner window, the only real source of hope in his life. Actually, there’s not much life left; weird that I still want hope.
Christ, as long as I’m asking for the impossible, I’d like one more time to hold Kim. Thirty-one years together, and I won’t be able to say good-bye.
HALF AN HOUR LATER. CRESTON, WYOMING. ABOUT 10:00 A.M. MST. OCTOBER 28.
Thinking the word eggs all morning made Jason remember that if there was one thing they did well here in the high country, it was breakfast.
The old F-150 roared over the rise; a few miles ahead, he could see a town. Obviously the powers in the universe were trying to help out.
At a truck stop with four semis in the parking lot, Jason backed the old pickup in against the building, putting the expired plate toward a blank wall where it was unlikely anyone would look, right in the shadow of a big Fruehauf trailer. He got out, stretched, yawned. Ugly little dump of a gravel parking lot and concrete-block building, a human zit on the face of the mountains—not a poem idea, he decided.
Inside: country music, Fox on the television, dead animals on the wall. But the eggs, fried potatoes, and French toast were as great as Jason had expected, and as in anyplace that does a busy morning trade, the coffee was this-minute fresh.
The truckers were all at a table together, and Jason figured out, listening to them casually, that two of them had regular routes through here, and the other two passed through now and then and preferred to convoy with friends who knew where the treacherous downgrades, blind curves, and intolerant deputies were.
It was weird, Jason thought. Out here, people worked outside in all weather, and you’d think that would put them in touch with the Earth. Yet they all lived at the end of a long line of trucks and roads, everything dependent on petroleum and metal from thousands of miles away, and their loyalty went to the trucks and the roads. The Big System had a hook into everything.
The Fox yakkers on the television made the point, over and over, that the World Series was the most exciting in a decade and the election was the dullest since ’96. Last time people were this bored at an election, Jason thought, my parents were barely old enough to vote.
The Pirates underdog miracle team was tied three games to three against the ever-loathsome Angels. The Bucs had come fighting back after being down three to one. Game Seven tonight in Anaheim was going to be a game. Jason smiled to himself. Also the last night baseball game, ever, and the last one televised.
The election was dull in comparison. The truckers were all agreeing with the talking heads on Fox that Roger Pendano was going to be re-elected, and Will Norcross didn’t have a prayer (or rather prayers were all he had).
Four years ago, Jason had taken a semester off to ring doorbells for Pendano, and later he’d met Beth at a Pendano for President rally. He still liked the corrupt old oily preppy, even though he was just as much a part of the Big System as that right-wing Jesus-boy Norcross.
Still, even with a landslide in the making, Roger Pendano had apparently not wanted to jeopardize his massive victory and had really fastened the muzzle on John Samuelson, his much-more-liberal vice president. Now, that was a shame; Samuelson sometimes said something that needed saying. But Samuelson hadn’t even been seen in public for almost two weeks—whoever heard of a disappearing vice president just before an election?
Maybe Daybreak would make enough difference so that Samuelson could be president next time—without all the Big-System media and technobullshit distortion, it might be worth electing a president again.
The right-wing hairdos were now working up a harrumphing rage because some people wouldn’t vote for Norcross because he was openly Pentecostal. Jason shook his head; since when was it unusual for anyone in Congress to gibber like a nut in public at the direction of unseen forces?
The waitress topped up Jason’s coffee, following his glance to the TV. “Politics. Gah.”
“Yeah,” Jason said.
Back in the parking lot, he opened his passenger-side door, pulled his gloves on, extracted a few eggs from a box in the back, and considered where he might plant a few before moving on. Truckers were protective and observant about their rigs, but maybe on that yellow illuminated—
“Hey, there, hippie-dude, what’ja got there?”
He looked up to see the truckers; the question came from a slim little man with protruding ears, a mop of black curly hair sticking out from around his strap cap, giant sideburns, and big brown eyes, who resembled a leprechaun going to a costume party as a trucker.
Jason gave Leprechaun the warm grin that had gotten him through a lot of college classes when he hadn’t done the reading. “Well, it’s pretty dumb, and I don’t really know how to explain it,” he temporized. Then his eye fell on the deer whistle on the hood of the nearest cab. Hah! “I was just going to go inside and ask you whether you wanted one of these,” he said, holding two eggs out so they could see. “Don’t touch them, they’ll give your fingers the itch the way fiberglass will. My stupid dad thinks he’s an inventor, and he’s created this wind-resistance cutter. Supposedly you put it on your hood and it sends, like, radio waves forward that harmonize the sound vibrations in the wind stream and make the air flow real smooth over t
he car, which reduces wind resistance so much, supposedly, you get some extra miles to the gallon. I think. I gotta admit, I don’t understand Dad three-quarters of the time even when he’s not talking about physics.”
He caressed one of the little eggs with a gloved finger and let himself sound as if he were trying to hide his pride. There’s the ticket. Good old Dad. Genius inventor. I’m his amiable dimwit hippie son. Got it. “It’s solar-powered, so it has to be somewhere the sun gets to, but that way it doesn’t draw any power from the rest of the vehicle. Dad says it’s an idea from Nikola Tesla, who was this scientist dude that, like, studied air and electricity. So he sent me out to give away a bunch of them ’cause he can’t get the big companies interested. The one on the hood of my truck doesn’t do much for my gas mileage, though.”
“On the hood of your truck?” another guy, a square-built older type, asked.
Jason looked at the hood, and said, “Dammit. Third one that’s fallen off. I told Dad they wouldn’t stay on with Liquid Nails.”
Leprechaun-trucker snorted. “D’you think your dad’s really a genius with no common sense? Or is he just a guy who’s got so little common sense he don’t realize he ain’t a genius?”
Jason let himself grin broadly. “Well, we lived on his patent money most of the time I was growing up, but the company that paid him didn’t make any of his gadgets; it was some oil company that said ‘the market wasn’t right yet’ for energy-saving gadgets.”
“Damn,” the big beefy older trucker said. “Of course they said that; why would an oil company want anyone to save energy?”
“Yeah, I guess. So the patents ran out, the money dried up, and we had to move out to the boondocks to find a place cheap enough for Dad to keep working on his gadgets. Nowadays, the little bit he makes just lets him buy more parts for the next gadget. Doesn’t sound like a lot of common sense, does it?”
Leprechaun said, “No, it don’t sound like common sense, but I been following Tesla stuff for twenty years on the web, and your dad might just be a genius. Even if he don’t know that Liquid Nails won’t stick a piece of slick glass to a rusty old truck hood.”
“Well,” Jason said, “I’m supposed to offer one to anyone with a vehicle, and Dad said the bigger the vehicle, the more fuel it would save. They’re solar-powered, they work anywhere on the front of the vehicle where the sun gets in enough to charge it. Maybe we could put one on your grille? I’d hate to screw up the paint job on your hood.”
Leprechaun-trucker was beaming. “Let’s give it a try. If it don’t work, it weighs what, a couple ounces? And you can’t beat free for a price. I’ll even spring for some of that Superstick High-Temp they sell inside; that keeps trim on a truck, oughta keep one of these on the grille.”
After he’d equipped all four trucks with an egg on each grille, Jason also gave an egg carton with six more in it for his new Tesla-freak buddy Leprechaun to give to other truckers. “Handle them with gloves only,” he said. “You can trust me that you don’t want to know how much you’re gonna itch—or how much it will spread to anything you touch with your hands—if you don’t. And remember, whether it works or not, we’d sure appreciate a note at three w’s dot tesla hyphen waveflow, dot org, about whatever you observe.”
“Will do,” the short trucker said, pulling out a ballpoint pen to write it on his hand. Jason spelled it out carefully; there was no such site as far as he knew, but well before Leprechaun might try it, there’d be no web.
To keep it convincing, Jason was visibly at work, scraping at the rust on the hood of the F-150 to better attach a black egg, as the truckers pulled out. The moment the last truck vanished over the rise, he tossed the egg up onto the flat roof of the little diner, figuring there’d be plenty of sun, and with things like the air-conditioning, satellite antenna, and gadgets inside, there ought to be enough stray electromagnetic fields around as well.
Then he sloshed Liquid-Plumr over the place on the hood where the black egg had briefly rested. The truck had to make another 250 miles, even a POS this old had an electronic distributor and fuel injection, and with so much ground to cover, Jason couldn’t afford excessive irony.
ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. JUST AFTER 1:00 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.
Edwards, the liaison from FBI, looked around the DoF’s main meeting room, as if seeking support from his dozen other law-enforcement, security, and military colleagues, folded his arms, and asked, “And you didn’t have crypto resources to find out about this sooner?”
Arnie looked as embarrassed as Heather felt. She said, “The only thing we could get was assistance from the Amateur Crypto Section at NSA.”
Susan Adler from NSA nodded. “It’s as much our neglect as yours. OFTA asked for more help all the time, and Dr. Plekhanov several times told us that you needed it badly.”
Edwards, a tall, thin, bald man with a crooked nose, who tended to look like Popeye on a bad day, said, “Well, that’s probably enough recrimination right there. Just another case of you can’t watch everything. But… thousands of people doing minor sabotage?”
Arnie nodded. “Maybe not minor. The tech analysts from Dr. Browder’s office gave us a preliminary opinion that what we’re looking at is at least weaponized nanoreplicators, which the Daybreakers call nanospawn, and a mix of genetically modified organisms they call biotes. Coordinated release not just across the country but around the world.”
“We’ve had to run on borrowed resources,” Heather said. “I’ve had a request in for two full years for a cryptologist, longer than that for more science and engineering staff—”
Edwards made a sour face. “I said this is no time for recriminations. Now, when they weaponize a nanoreplicator, what do they make it do? I thought in the most sophisticated labs they’ve got, right now, they’re barely making nanotech do anything.”
Jim Browder rubbed his porcine jowls, shoving so much flesh up toward his ears it looked as if he were about to peel his face off like a bag. “Non-replicating nanotech works just fine in industry, everywhere, these days, and has since the late twenty-teens. Replicating nanotech is a stunt that hobbyists do. It’s not hard to make nanos that make copies of themselves, and it’s not hard to make nanos that do something useful, but so far it’s hard to get them to do both because for any useful, creative purpose, they’d have to communicate and work with each other, and that’s very hard. But if all you want a nanobot to do is make nitric acid whenever it senses that it’s near an electric circuit—that’s what our weapons guys were looking at. They thought it was too unreliable, it would attack our own gear, and you’d never get rid of it once you released it. But if all electric machines are the enemy, forever, I guess that’s an advantage.”
“Why nitric acid?”
“Just an example,” Browder said. “Because you could theoretically synthesize it from air and wouldn’t have to have any other material available. But depending on what they intend to attack, and what they can expect to find near it, there’s at least a hundred other possibilities: fluorine gas, or hydroxide or peroxide ions, or a bimetallic strip that works like a battery. For sabotage, you only need nanoreplicators to reproduce in clusters around something valuable, and excrete a substance that attacks it. Achieving that is down at the college sophomore lab level these days.”
Hannah Bledsoe, from DHS, tall, handsome, dignified, with a deep red dress and pearls that seemed as much a part of her as her soft curly gray hair, looked up from her laptop. “And what are the biotes? Disease organisms?”
Browder grunted. “Sort of, but not against people as much as against artificial materials. The Daybreakers’ genetic-modification stuff that we’ve decrypted so far is all devoted to modifying ordinary decay bacteria, molds, funguses, any bug that eats dead stuff, to make engineered enzymes to break down long chains of carbon.”
Edwards said, “Pretend that some of us skipped chemistry class.”
“A lot of artificial materials—most plastics, for example—and the commo
n fuels like gasoline and kerosene—have molecules that are built around a long, branching string of carbon atoms, with various other atoms attached on the side. The reason they usually don’t decay is because the carbon-carbon bond is fairly strong, and where there’s a long string of them, there’s not much—at least not much that a living thing naturally makes—that will attack the chain and break it into pieces small enough to digest. Basically the biotes are molds or yeasts, bacteria or maybe viruses, that turn synthetic materials and liquid fuels into sugars, fats, proteins—food that rots and spoils.”
“My god,” Bledsoe said, “and that’s what’s loose out there? But how did they get the technical expertise?”
“They don’t have to be tech wizards,” Arnie Yang put in. “Nowadays a process is no sooner understood than it’s automated. The guys who wrote the first computer viruses back in the eighties were pretty smart, but they created scripts for them, and now any eleven-year-old script-kiddie with a bootleg kit can write a virus that will steal your password, e-mail him your credit-card numbers, and fill your hard drive with porn.
“Once they had computers big enough to do molecular simulations and cheap enough for the public—like about the time the ApplePi came out a few years ago—it was really more just a matter of who wanted to do genetic engineering. Sure, it seems like it’s big news, and true, even ten years ago, biohacking was still all guesswork. But that’s just because people don’t keep track. Last year a kid biohacked a completely synthetic RNA prion for his Science Talent Search project—and only got second place because there was something more innovative going on.”
