A girl answered my knock. A twenty-something blonde English white girl wearing cut-offs and a T-shirt about two sizes too big. She shook my hand and looked me in the eye and said that she was Mara, told me Dan was in the bedroom, asked if I wanted coffee or beer.
“Tea would be nice.”
She was pretty, in the anonymous kind of way of the children of wealthy people in the West. I believed her to be one of the birds of passage Dan picked up in the bars where extreme tourists and backpackers struggled to reconcile their Lonely Planet apps with reality and boasted to each other about the gear they were carrying, the hikes they were planning, and the places they’d already ticked off during their global Children’s Crusade.
The living room was cluttered with coils of nylon rope, the orange tube of a Scott tent, rolled sleeping bags. Two brand-new backpacks leaned against the couch. A high-end slate sat on the kitchenette counter, cabled to a small dish aerial. And there were hard copies of maps and satellite images taped to the wall beside the counter.
Dan’s voice boomed out from the bedroom. “Is that you, Krish? Come the fuck in! I’m looking at the thing you need to see!”
“I can get you tea from the vending machine. Japanese, in a can, but it’s tea,” Mara told me, and was gone.
Dan was sitting up on the unmade bed, his back against the headboard, wearing only black jockey shorts, a pair of spex, and those thin gloves that manipulate virtual objects. He flicked at something in the air with his left hand and threw a pair of spex at me underhand and told me to put them on.
“I’m fine, by the way,” I said. “Had an excellent holiday in NZ. How about you?”
“We can shoot the shit later. This is important.”
“I saw the maps,” I said. “If this is to do with that research station we spotted at the beginning of summer, I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Put the fucking spex on, Krish. Don’t judge me until you’ve seen everything.”
I put them on and found myself looking out at a trio of geodesic domes standing on a gravelly rise above a river.
“We got this off their web site,” Dan said. “It’s a little promotional thing for internal consumption. Top secret and all that.”
“Whose web site?”
“A South African biotech company called Symbiogensis. Into remediation. Did a lot of work on spoil heaps from gold mines. But that isn’t what they are doing here.”
“Why are you so … interested in them? Why do you think it’s any of your business?”
I had almost said obsessed.
He took my question literally. Either he did not hear the concern in my voice or did not care.
“Check it out,” he said, and the viewpoint swung around the domes, zoomed in on a small procession of avatars moving up the side of the valley, climbing past little pockets of green—moss gardens, tufts of tough wind-whipped grass. Climbing toward a defile cut into the slope under the cliffs. More greenery here. More avatars moving about.
“Trees,” I said.
“Yeah. Trees. Beech trees.”
They were small, the trees. Knee-high, wind-sculpted clumps standing amongst mossy boulders either side of the stream. The avatars moved amongst them. The view had the trembling granularity of an extreme long-shot, but I could see now that the avatars were carrying stacked trays of seedlings in fat plugs of soil.
I took off the spex and asked Dan where he had got the information.
In the doorway, the young woman, Mara, said, “Their security is good, but not quite good enough.”
I took the can of tea from her and said, “Perhaps you two could explain how you met.”
“He was giving a talk about the destruction caused by the settlements on the Peninsula,” the girl said. “In the Greenpeace community cloud.”
“You’re with Greenpeace?”
The girl and Dan exchanged a look. Dan said, “Not exactly. The important thing is, she came here to help me out. Because what they are doing out there is seriously bad, Krish.”
“A very bad precedent,” Mara said.
I knew what was coming, and knew what my answer was going to be. I should have walked out of there, but Dan had been my partner as well as my friend. I guess I thought I owed him. I popped the lid of the can of tea and felt it beginning to grow warm and said, “You’d better tell me everything.”
Symbiogenesis, owned by the granddaughter of an old-fashioned dot-com billionaire, was underwriting various scientific projects on the ice. This was one of them: an attempt to reintroduce Antarctic beech to the Peninsula, where it had once flourished in the last interglacial period. It was fully licensed, and clearly something of a success. Now there were plans to cultivate tracts of beech in twenty different sites, and that was why Mara had come out to Antarctica.
It seemed that she was a member of some radical green splinter group that was campaigning against the kind of interventions practiced by Symbiogenesis. Who believed that damage to ecosystems caused by the effects of global warming should be allowed to heal naturally. Whatever naturally meant, these days. Dan had hooked up with her in the cloud. It was a perfect match: a chance at some action coupled with his hatred of what was being done to his beloved wilderness.
I drank my tea and listened while they took turns to justify themselves.
“She didn’t want you to know about it,” Dan said. “But I didn’t want you to feel left out.”
I ignored him and told Mara, “I will not tell anyone about your plan. But I do not want anything to do with it.”
“If you’re worried about being caught,” Dan said, “don’t be. You’ll drop us two klicks away. We’ll hike down into the valley. Infiltrate. Do what needs to be done, hike back out. We’ll neutralize the comms and any cameras. No one will know anything about it until it’s over.”
“And the people working there?”
“There are only two of them. We’ll tie them up, but not so tight they won’t be able to wriggle free in a couple of hours.”
“We aren’t planning to hurt anyone,” Mara said. “Just stop something that is damaging this unique wilderness.”
Dan said, “I’ve always been straight with you, Krish. And I’m being straight with you now. It’s an easy op against a soft target. Minimal risk, maximum return.”
“But that is not why you’re telling me this, is it?” I said. “You want me to tell you you are doing the right thing. Well, you aren’t.”
Things went downhill from there, until, with a dull inevitability, Mara produced a hornet-yellow taser.
Dan made a show of regret that might have been genuine. I was too angry to care. I was handcuffed to the pipes in the bathroom, and Dan fussed with pillows to try to make me comfortable and told me that the maid would find me in the morning, and I could tell the police anything I liked, then, because the op would be over.
“I was not planning to tell the police anything,” I said. I said a lot of other things, too. Telling him it was incredibly naïve to think that you could roll back the clock and make things come out the way they had once been, that we had to find a way of living with the consequences of the warming and all the other damage caused by the West’s reckless adventures in global capitalism, that our little business was no better than Symbiogenesis’s, that he was fooling himself if he thought he was trying to make good for helping wealthy tourists intrude on the pristine wilderness because there was no such thing as a pristine wilderness anywhere, anymore.
He squatted in the doorway, pretending to listen to me while I talked. At the end, he said, “Remember that penguin? It’s like that.”
A little later they were gone. When the noise from the pool party died down I made an attempt to shout for help but no one came until the early hours of the morning. It was not the maid. It was the police.
* * *
TWO DETECTIVES INTERVIEWED me. An Argentinian woman and a Russian man, both wearing the grey uniforms of the Antarctic Authority, both very polite. I told them everything
I knew. It was not much. They told me that there had been a problem at the Symbiogenesis research station, but it was resolved now. When I asked if Dan was all right, they said the situation was still ongoing.
“We will release a statement to the press soon,” the woman said. “Meanwhile, please do not talk to anyone.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Have you done something wrong?” the Russian detective said. “If so, we could consider arresting you.”
“Your friend caused some trouble, but it’s under control,” the woman said. “We’re searching for him now.”
“We hope to bring him in very soon, for his own safety,” the man said. “Perhaps you can help.”
They named two men, asked if I knew them. They showed me photographs. I recognized Mara, no one else. They asked me if anyone else had been involved. They wanted to know if Dan had mentioned a plan to hide somewhere in the back country afterward. And so on, and so forth, questions I could not begin to answer.
The Russian man escorted me out of the building. As I went down the stairs outside, I saw Mara coming up. She was wearing an orange boiler suit and was handcuffed to a uniformed policewoman and made a point of not looking at me as we passed.
Like everyone else, I found out what had happened on the news. Dan, Mara, and two other men had landed on the bluffs above the station in the middle of an early snowstorm, had knocked out its satellite dish and taken its two staff prisoner. They had trashed the trees planted in the valley and inside the domes, opened the servers with a hard hack, and taken control of the avatars. Most of the avatars had been marched into the lake, but one had been sent off down the valley, carrying a single tree seedling. Dan’s friends had videoed everything, uploaded it to comrades scattered around the world, who had compiled short movies of the action. None of them showed the arrival of the police: it seemed that the station had a layer of security Dan and his friends had not known about. Mara and the two men had been arrested; Dan had managed to get away, and by the time the police had realized he was missing and had put their ’copter in the air to search for him he could have been anywhere.
One of the stories Dan liked to tell was how he had been caught in a storm that had blown up when he had been out alone, up in one of the valleys off the Beardsmore Glacier. He had been only a kilometer from safety, but the storm was such an absolute whiteout and the winds were so severe that he had decided to dig in rather than try to make it back. His companions had found him the next day, as the storm began to blow itself out. He had excavated a shallow trench and covered it with his tent, and snow had packed up over it to form a cozy shelter. He had been asleep when they had found him.
I spent days and weeks expecting to hear from him. He could have been dead. He could have been anywhere.
Then, one day early in spring, there was an item of local news about misbehaving avatars. Several had marched to the docks and jumped into the water. Half a dozen were found running in circles around the fountain in the square in front of the port authority building. Two were found entwined in a jackhammer parody of lovemaking on the steps of the police station. One was found six kilometers beyond the town limits, marching toward the mountains.
It could have been Dan; it could have been some of Mara’s friends; it could have been ordinary pranksters. But just yesterday, I saw a news item about the disappearance of a party of avatars that had been following in the footsteps of Scott’s doomed expedition, part of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of the explorer and his companions.
I wonder when and where they will turn up. I wonder if Dan will surface, to take the credit. And I can’t help thinking of that stubborn doomed penguin.
BRICKS, STICKS, STRAW
Gwyneth Jones
Gwyneth Jones lives in Brighton, United Kingdom, with her husband, three goldfish, and two cats called Ginger and Milo. She likes old movies, practices yoga, and has done some extreme tourism in her time. She is the author of many fantasy, horror, and thriller novels for teenagers, using the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded SF and fantasy novels for adults. She’s won two World Fantasy Awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and others. Her latest SF project (a labor of love, now completed) has been preparing and publishing e-editions of some backlist novels (The Bold as Love series, Divine Endurance, Flowerdust, Escape Plans, and Kairos).
“Bricks, Sticks, Straw” was published in Edge of Infinity, the second story in this book from that anthology. Operators on Earth lose contact with their virtual personas on a moon of Jupiter during a solar flare. Each of the copies persist, though, and develop independence.
1
THE MEDICI REMOTE Presence team came into the lab, Sophie and Josh side by side, Laxmi tigerish and alert close behind; Cha, wandering in at the rear, dignified and dreamy as befitted the senior citizen. They took their places, logged on, and each was immediately faced with an unfamiliar legal document. The cool, windowless room, with its stunning, high-definition wall screens displaying vistas of the four outermost moons of Jupiter—the playground where the remote devices were gambolling and gathering data—remained silent, until the doors bounced open again, admitting Bob Irons, their none-too-beloved Project Line Manager, and a sleekly-suited woman they didn’t know.
“You’re probably wondering what that thing on your screens is all about,” said Bob, sunnily. “Okay, as you know, we’re expecting a solar storm today—”
“But why does that mean I have to sign a massive waiver document?” demanded Sophie. “Am I supposed to read all this? What’s the Agency think is going to happen?”
“Look, don’t worry, don’t worry at all! A Coronal Mass Ejection is not going to leap across the system, climb into our wiring and fry your brains!”
“I wasn’t worrying,” said Laxmi. “I’m not stupid. I just think e-signatures are so stupid and crap, so open to abuse. If you ever want something as archaic as a handwritten signature, then I want something as archaic as a piece of paper—”
The sleek-suited stranger beamed all over her face, as if the purpose of her life had just been glorified, swept across the room and deposited a paper version of the document on Laxmi’s desk, duly docketed, and bristling with tabs to mark the places where signature or initialling was required—
“This is Mavra, by the way,” said Bob, airily. “She’s from Legal, she knows her stuff, she’s here to answer any questions. Now the point is, that though your brains are not going to get fried, there’s a chance, even a likelihood, that some rover hardware brain-frying will occur today, a long, long way from here, and the software agents involved in running the guidance systems housed therein could be argued, in some unlikely dispute, as remaining, despite the standard inclusive term of employment creative rights waivers you’ve all signed, er, as remaining, inextricably, your, er, property.”
“Like a cell line,” mused Laxmi, leafing pages, and looking to be the only Remote Presence who was going to make any attempt to review the Terms and Conditions.
“And they might get, hypothetically, irreversibly destroyed this morning!” added Bob.
Cha nodded to himself, sighed, and embarked on the e-signing.
“And we could say it was the Agency’s fault,” Lax pursued her train of thought, “for not protecting them. And take you to court, separately or collectively, for—”
“Nothing is going to get destroyed!” exclaimed Bob. “I mean literally nothing, because it’s not going to happen, but even if it were, even if it did, that would be nonsense!”
“I’m messing with you,” said Lax, kindly, and looked for a pen.
Their Mission was in grave peril, and there was nothing, not a single solitary thing, that the Combined Global Space Agency back on Earth could do about it. The Medici itself, and the four Remote Presence devices, should be able to shut down safely, go into hibernation mode and survive. That’s what everybody hoped would happen. But the o
minous predictions, unlike most solar-storm panics, had been growing strongly instead of fading away, and it would be far worse, away out there where there was no mitigation. The stars, so to speak, were aligned in the most depressing way possible.
“That man is such a fool,” remarked Laxmi, when Bob and Marva had departed.
Sophie nodded. Laxmi could be abrasive, but the four of them were always allies against the idiocies of management. Josh and Cha had already gone to work. The women followed, in their separate ways; with the familiar hesitation, the tingling thrill of uncertainty and excitement. A significant time lag being insurmountable, you never knew quite what you would find when you caught up with the other ‘you’.
The loss of signal came at 11.31am, UTC/GMT +1. The Remote Presence team had been joined by that time by a silent crowd—about as many anxious Space Agency workers as could fit into the lab, in fact. They could afford to rubberneck, they didn’t have anything else to do. Everything that could be shut down, had been shut town. Planet Earth was escaping lightly, despite the way things had looked. The lights had not gone out all over Europe, or even all over Canada. For the Medici, it seemed death had been instantaneous. As had been expected.
Josh pulled off his gloves and helmet. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” he said. “And what strength I have’s mine own. Which is most faint…”
Laxmi shook her head. “It’s a shame and a pity. I hope they didn’t suffer.”
2
BRICKS WAS A memory palace.
Sophie was an array, spread over a two square kilometre area on the outward hemisphere of Callisto. The array collected data, recording the stretching and squeezing of Jupiter’s hollow-hearted outermost moon, and tracing the interaction between gravity waves and seismology in the Jovian system; this gigantic, natural laboratory of cosmic forces.
She did not feel herself to be anywhere, either in the software that carried her consciousness or in the hardware she served. That was fine, but she needed a home, a place to rest, and the home was Bricks, a one-storey wood-framed beach house among shifting dunes, on the shore of a silent ocean. No grasses grew, no shells gathered along the tide—although there were tides, and taking note of them was a vital concern. No clouds drifted above, no birds flew. But it felt like a real place. When the wind roared; which it did, and made her fearful—although she was almost indestructible, she’d recreated herself plenty of times, with no serious ill-effects—it made her think, uneasily, that nobody would build a house on such unstable ground, so close to a high water mark, back on Earth.
Year’s Best SF 18 Page 42
