by John Barnes
The fates were on her side, and she sailed through the rental-car process and was on the highway, heading north, in no time. Locally, the FBI was in an office park up on the mesa to the north. The road rose through the sort of craggy rock, distant sea, and scattered palm, sage, and pine landscape that makes visitors say, Now, this is California. She had her iScribe talking through the car’s sound system, reading her all the stuff Arnie Yang and his team had put together overnight.
A message from David Carlucci, the local FBI chief, said that Ysabel Roth had arrived in Tijuana in a Mexican Army APC—the last running vehicle from the convoy she’d started out in, the others having succumbed to brown and green saline gunk, tentatively identified as soluble chlorides, around their wiring and electronics. A helicopter—carefully wiped down and sprayed with oil internally—had been dispatched to pick Roth up, and would bring her into Montgomery Airfield, near the FBI office, within an hour and a half.
Bambi’s rental car was a nice little Chrysler sedan that handled well on the big, swooping curves of the California four-lane that Bambi had thought must be the best driving in the world when she had learned on it. Since then she had driven on four continents, and now she knew it was the best driving in the world.
No one else out on Aero Drive, perfect weather, beautiful day, and an immensely important case in front of her; it was enough to make her heart sing over the drone of Arnie talking about the affinity group structure resembling New Age book discussions and political activist “flash demo” response nets. She should be more serious, but… well. Look at this morning! For the pure pleasure of it, she swooped across the empty lanes, over to the righthand lane, and downshifted to swing back.
The car pulled hard to the right, toward the rocky wall beyond the shoulder; she heard the harsh scream of a wheel motor loaded far beyond capacity. She fought the wheel, trying to pull the nose back to the left, into her lane.
A loud boom shook the car; she spun out, broadside to the lanes. The four motors de-synched, and the rear passenger-side motor went out completely; she fought for control as the electronic differential tried to counter-spin so hard that she thought the car might roll. It bucked and jolted, and the engine clamped and died as the generator failed to disengage.
Unfortunately, there was still plenty of power in the batteries and capacitors. The car slid backward into the oncoming lane.
Bambi jammed on the brakes to regain control; the ABS shuddered and the car vibrated with the regeneration moans in the remaining motors. The little Chrysler finally stopped sideways on the wrong side of the road, and then leaped about fifteen feet backward, impelled by the front motors, as some electronic control fired too late or at random. The rear bumper slammed into the guardrail so hard that the trunk flew open. She yanked the key to cut the power, slammed on the parking brake, and jumped out, afraid that the car might head over the brink and down the steep slope.
The car held still, but there were arcs and sputters—the quick-acceleration capacitors must be breaching. She clicked the key control, and the hood flipped open. The heavy emergency discharge cable, like a fat black rubber snake, with two thick insulated handles at its neck, flopped onto the pavement. Carefully, she took it by the handles and looked around for a ground post.
God bless California’s damn-the-expense safety-crazed legislature, she thought. However much Daddy rumbles and grumbles about taxes. The guardrail was a modern one, with grounding posts every hundred feet or so; she dragged the cable to the rail, pumped the buttons to open the locking slot, fitted it over the metal edge, and checked to make sure she had continuity. She clamped onto the rail, walked a few steps up the road, made sure she wasn’t touching the rail or any conductor that touched it, and pushed the connect button on the hand control.
A flurry of bangs like rifle shots. Flashes under the hood like welding arcs. Reek of ozone. Up the road, a seagull sitting on a guardrail post squalled and flapped into the air. Sorry, fella, glad I didn’t roast you.
Bambi looked down at her hand control; the small screen said FULLY DISCHARGED.
Very gingerly, she reached into the ruptured trunk and dragged her suit carrier through the broken opening, then reclaimed her laptop and iScribe from the passenger seat. The car’s front end was a foot inside the shoulder, so it was no longer in traffic, and it sure wasn’t going anywhere. Bambi looked out over the steep hillside, between the high hills, down to the Pacific on the horizon. “Shit, shit, shit.”
She popped the hood. Wads of something that looked like spiky snow around the battery, the generator, the capacitors, the front wheel motors, and the cyberrack. With her phone, she shot and narrated a couple minutes of video and sent it to Jim Browder’s mail; he’d know where to forward it.
She phoned Dave Carlucci, the local agent in charge.
He said, “Don’t worry about anything. You’re only a mile and a half away right now, and I’ll just drive out and retrieve you myself; we’ve got a biohazard car with a sealed engine compartment that I’ll be using all morning to retrieve stranded people. You’re not only not late, you’ll be one of the first ones here. And we won’t be starting even close to on time. The helicopter on its way to pick up Roth was forced down.”
“Nanoswarm?”
“Probably the tailored decay bacteria. The crew reported that the engine oil had turned into something that looked like lime Jell-O, smelled like fermented maple syrup, and functioned more like glue than oil; gave them a very dramatic engine seize-up. So the federales are just going to drive Roth up here themselves, since they’ve got one car that seems to be immune to everything for the moment, knock on wood. Everything’s going to start late and it’s all going to be a mess; welcome to the brave new world.”
Carlucci suggested that she walk up the road to an overlook point where there were benches and a drinking fountain, since it might take him a while. She dug out her walking shoes from her suit carrier—normally she favored something with more drama, which she liked to think was all that remained of the spectacularly spoiled wealthy teenage airhead she had once been. With her feet strapped into all-too-practical shoes, the walk was almost nice, too; she waved off a couple of cars that pulled over to offer rides.
While walking, she called up the rental car place and told them the car was probably totaled.
“No surprise,” the rental car guy said. “I hope this was the government’s money and not yours.”
“It is, but it’s my ass that has to get home eventually.”
“I understand. We’ll try to come up with some way to help you out with that, though it might not turn out to be a car. I’ll call you as soon as I know.”
“Unless the phones die.”
“Yeah. Hadn’t even thought about that yet. You have anywhere to go if you’re stranded?”
“If I had to, I could walk from here to my dad’s house.” Which is an ugly extravagant fortress that you probably see every day, now that he’s built it and moved in. “Hope you’re okay too.”
“Well, except for probably not having a job. Jeez. I used to party with these eco-hippie dudes who’d get all mystical talking about how someday there would be Daybreak and things would be great. I’d like to punch a few of them, I think.”
“Officially, citizens should not take vigilante action.”
“And unofficially?”
“Break something that they’d need a modern high-tech prosthetic for.” She appreciated his laugh. “Thanks for trying.”
She’d had a drink of cool water, found a bench with just enough shade, and done more meditative breathing than she’d done in years by the time Carlucci turned up in the biohazard truck.
Bambi asked, “So what’s the deal with Ysabel Roth?”
“She’s just crossed the border. The Bureau people in Washington have authorized me to offer immunity from prosecution, as long as she’s willing to turn over the bigger fish.”
They turned into the parking lot. Bambi said, “Our number one expert, Dr. Yang, thin
ks there’s no such thing as higher-ups, leadership, or any of that in Daybreak. It’s a brave new pond, and all the fish are equal.”
“Well, then Roth is real, real screwed—but then, so are we.”
ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:00 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
In the private party room of an Italian sub shop about two blocks from St. Elizabeth’s, Heather cleared a chair and Lenny rolled into the space; she sat next to him. Cam was huddled up at the end of the table with Graham Weisbrod, Arnie, Allie, and Jim Browder; unofficially, he’d told all the DoF people, earlier, that although as a conservative Republican he had thought the Department of the Future was a boondoggle, now he couldn’t live without it. Graham Weisbrod had cheerfully pointed out that they were just doing for the government as a whole what Mark Garren did for the Pentagon—and no secretary of defense in living memory would have tried to function without someone like the DoDDUSP.
“The conspiracy theorists must be up on their roofs and howling at the moon. Washington is one of the few cities where all the cars are running, and most of the tinfoil hat brigade can’t get online to scare each other about that,” Heather observed.
Arnie turned away from the little group at the top of the table and grinned at her. “The few who can get online are making up in creativity what they lack in numbers. New paranoid Daybreak craziness is breeding with old paranoid conspiracy craziness like muskrats downstream from a Viagra plant.”
“You spent a while working on that metaphor,” Lenny commented.
“Guilty,” Arnie said. “Amusing myself in the shower this morning.” Cameron was nodding, and the others were taking seats; apparently his “meeting before the meeting before the meeting” had concluded successfully. Cam said, “It’s not just lunatics that are having crazy thoughts today—and the crazy thoughts aren’t necessarily wrong.” The prearranged food came then, and as everyone ate, Cam reminded them to take any leftovers home and eat them soon—“No telling how much longer your kitchen will function.”
That the warning was given so casually—with everyone just nodding and continuing to eat—told Heather more than anything else how much things were slipping.
They ate quickly. Cam stood. “All right, everyone, thanks for coming. I just wanted to have a quick talk before we present the findings-and-recs this afternoon to the Acting President and the Republican candidate, because that discussion could go off track, so I want to make sure we all stick close to the message.”
Besides the senior people from DoF and OFTA, and Lenny from NSA, Edwards was there from FBI, and Colonel Green from Cyber Command, along with the usual handful of quiet people in uniforms or black suits.
“The quick outline is this,” Cam said. “We have a vital issue that we need to explain briefly to the top-level people, which is potentially extremely distracting, and we must not allow them to be distracted. So with all the speed I can muster, and in language as much like English as Dr. Yang can muster”—even Arnie and Allison laughed—“we’re going to tell you what the issue is, what the sides are, why it doesn’t matter right now, and what we need to focus on. Then everyone will pull together this afternoon to keep focus where it needs to be. Clear?”
Everyone was nodding vigorously, and Cam said, “All right, first what I think, then what Arnie thinks, then Dr. Weisbrod will tell you why it doesn’t matter who’s right. As for me, here’s what I see from the extensive Daybreak decrypts, especially once we found the messages of the il’Alb cell in eastern Afghanistan that ran the Bell group in DC, the rebel raid on Sentani airport, and the seizure of Air Force Two. I see elaborate and sophisticated development of communications, information sharing, and so forth between the global Daybreak organization and il’Alb; at the least, the cell that put together the Air Force Two attack knew when Daybreak would be. To me it just looks too big and complex to be run by anything smaller than a national government. We also have clear-cut interpenetration between il’Alb and ISI, which implicates at least a part of the Pakistani government, and some overlaps with Saudi and Syrian intelligence.
“As I interpret this, we have been attacked by at least one foreign power—probably Pakistan, possibly Saudi Arabia—with a direct assault on the highest levels of our government, and widespread general sabotage carried out by a few fifth columnists and many dupes. Therefore, we are in the opening stages of a military-terror campaign aimed to bring down the United States and probably the West in general. The attack on Air Force Two was supported by domestic saboteurs, not unlike the way an invasion might be supported by rebels or a resistance movement. We are at war with a single, coherent enemy who has hit us with a carefully planned and executed deliberate military attack. We just don’t know who it is, yet.
“And with that, Arnie is going to spin out one of the wildest stories I have ever heard in my life, but I do believe you all have the right to hear it before you reject it.”
Arnie Yang nodded. “I feel handicapped by not being able to whip out the charts and graphs and give you all homework, so let me just explain it this way. Cameron’s interpretation of the material was only possible because he was able to pick out a few hundred needles in a haystack that had, oh, around six billion strands of hay. And the reason he could pick them out was because he was looking for them, and because he had search algorithms that were provided by my methods. So, in effect, he found his conclusion by looking through my telescope. I just want to tell you what my telescope has to say.
“If the whole thing had been coordinated, led, put together by some single guiding intelligence, there are at least fifty different indices and measures that would show an idea pump in the system—and they don’t.”
“Review ‘idea pump’ for us new people?” Colonel Green asked.
“Something that just repeats itself over and over, pumping an idea out into the conversation. Like a TV commercial, or a sacred text, or a politician staying on message, or a spambot. If there’s an idea pump in a communication system, it’s highly detectable, by lots of methods: If we trace chains of repeated ideas backward, they all go back to a small group of places; the same ideas keep coming back as if no discussion had happened; the same ideas come disproportionately out of one small part of the system; whenever conflicting ideas run into each other, the one from the idea pump wins by sheer volume of repetition. There’re lots of ways to measure and count all that.
“Well, not only is there no idea pump in Daybreak, Daybreak has an elaborate, localized system of ideas that first paralyzes idea pumps and then takes them over. Daybreak captures whatever gets near it; for example, I can show you a few thousand small businesses that thought the Daybreak network was going to be their channel into the green market, and instead they became suppliers and safe houses for Daybreakers, often going broke while doing Daybreak stuff that didn’t make them any money. One reason why coustajam stalled out in the last couple years and didn’t take over pop music, like a lot of people thought it would, is that so many of their most talented composers, performers, and bands were putting all their time and effort into Daybreak.
“So I think if an outside force like il’Alb were exerting central control over Daybreak, there’d be at least some evidence that there was a center or some control. I think Daybreak itself was a giant system artifact, a message that doesn’t originate in any one place in the system but is produced by the system as a whole. And I think it was one with a genius for recruiting and suborning other ideas and organizations it ran into.”
“Uh, hold it, a message that recruits and takes things over?”
Arnie shrugged. “Ever had a friend go through a religious conversion? Or develop an addiction? Or get hired into an organization with a tight, obsessive culture? It’s still your friend but don’t you feel, sometimes, that you’re not really arguing with him, but with his Catholicism? Or ‘that’s not really her, that’s her alcoholism’? Or ‘I miss my friend, I wish IBMGUY would shut up and let him talk’? Complex ideas contain instructions on what
to do for contingencies—like computer games. Ever notice that the game seemed to be playing against you, or leading you in some direction? Ever known anyone to be led into a new life by Jesus, or have his life changed by a book? Ideas do things all the time; we try to pretend they don’t because when they do, they make us nervous.
“I know Cam thinks a thought requires a thinker, but that’s just wrong. The really big, complex thoughts—like, oh, say, a movie, or a religion, or a philosophy—are much too big to fit into one head, and yet they are thought all the time. In fact I’d say nothing big enough to be important comes from an individual; nobody ever made up a worldview all by himself on a desert island. Important ideas all grow and form in thousands or millions of heads, often over more than one lifetime.
“But you don’t have to go that far with me to see what happened with Daybreak.
“Daybreak was more or less like a cluster of obsessive self-reinforcing thoughts that kept recopying and refining and becoming sharper and clearer while getting more detached from reality, in much the same way that, oh, for example, some of you might be unable to stop wondering whether a coworker doesn’t like you, or a persistent high-school memory might come back to you over and over. That can happen just as easily—maybe more easily—in a group in conversation, as it can in a mind in private thought. Haven’t we all been in a conversation that turned into an idée fixe, where no matter what you tried to change the subject to, everyone ended up talking about the same thing?”
“Marijuana helps induce that effect,” Edwards pointed out.
“It does, to some extent; so does ecstasy, either the drug or the religious experience. There’s a great play where a lunatic came to think he was God because he realized every time he prayed, he was talking to himself. After a while the voice of the conversation can sound like the meaning of the universe. As long as it’s only for a few hours after midnight in a dorm room or a bar, it didn’t matter very much.
