Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  By the time Aubry got herself hanging steadily in space, the goalkeeper had cleared the ball far downfield, and the red-and-white-clad Security strikers were threatening Celtic, the partisan, goal.

  Oh, shit. That was not good. If the Security team scored, the break in momentum would break the hypnotic “game space” the partisan v-hackers had established. The attack would be called off, and the partisans would be running for their lives, both in the virtuality and in the regular world.

  I’ll be toast, Aubry thought. In the regular world, she was halfway down the Martian cliff, but still a good eight-hundred-meter rappel length from the valley floor.

  But she had faced dire situations before over the past few years. She would have to trust that the Celtic back-field would do its job and feed her the ball again. At the moment, she was offsides, between the last defender and the goalkeeper. If the direction of play changed, a penalty would be called and Security would get the ball again. Aubry-Bastumo concentrated on correcting her current position.

  She jetted toward the arena’s curved, spinning side once more. In this virtual representation, she could see right through the translucent material that made it to a starfield beyond. Even though it was all a mass hallucination, she was still surprised to see no spectators.

  No spectators but the stars.

  Her feet connected with the cylinder wall, and she bounced back toward her own goal. With the overlay completely in charge, Aubry-Bastumo grabbed a Ranger back who flew into her path. He was a representation of Noctis Labyrinthus security algorithm, and not a true free convert and, thus, not a complete human. But even a semisentient computer program could prove to be trouble in this game, and the back was representing as a large man—maybe twice Aubry’s mass. He was jetting toward his own goal. Making use of his mass and momentum brought Aubry to a dead stop in center field. Bastumo knew what he was doing, though. Aubry let the hapless back go, and discovered that there were no defenders near her.

  Security, the Rangers, took a shot on the Celtic goal, but the keeper made a spectacular save (the keeper was Alvin himself).

  “I’m open!” Aubry screamed to her keeper.

  And reached the valley floor of Noctis Labyrinthus.

  There was a fence.

  This was the back side of the camp, set a half mile deep in a near-vertical Martian canyon. No one would expect an attack from this quarter. At least Aubry hoped so. She reached into her satchel. Her own hand bumped into the Hand of Tod, and she felt a funny little tingle. Not electricity or any other force transfer. Probably psychological.

  She drew forth a small scalpel. With the greatest care, she unsheathed it. The edge would slice a diamond in half with one thrust. Even her space-hardened fingers wouldn’t stand a chance.

  The fence yielded without protest. It was only ten centimeters thick. It did not even have repair instructions encoded within it.

  The Cryptology Division must have counted on the depth of the valley and the toxic landscape to keep out incursions.

  Of course. That was why there was no grist in the wall. It only existed to separate the grist of Silicon Valley from the general Martian nanotechnological quagmire. So long as the tight security parameters held in the virtuality, one wall was more than sufficient to prevent a breakout. Physical walls didn’t really matter. It was the virtual walls that formed the real prison. If you were a free convert and you somehow got through security, you wouldn’t have to worry about physical barriers. You would flash your programming as far into the outer- system grist hardware as you could possibly fling it. With the grist, jumping physically next door took exactly the same amount of effort as traveling a million miles. Or a billion.

  On the other side of the wall the grist of the concentration camp glistened.

  There was a square kilometer of the stuff, and crammed into that data space were half a billion people.

  Somewhere among them was Danis.

  Aubry felt the urge to cry—an urge that, in former times, would have brought water to her eyes. But, of course, her eyes remained dry. She didn’t have the plumbing for tears anymore.

  Aubry stepped through the hole she’d made in the wall—

  —But did not step out on the other side. Instead, she was caught there. Caught under the door arch, her muscles frozen.

  Shit. She’d been wrong. There was protective grist in the wall. She realized this after the wall grew back around her, incorporating her into its structure. With a frantic motion, she reached into her satchel, tried to extract the Hand of Tod.

  Not in time.

  The wall flowed over and around her. Her last sight was of the camp grist, no more than a meter away from her.

  And then her eyes were covered, and she was encased.

  Instead of being a rescuer, she was now a part of the wall holding her mother in hell.

  Fifteen

  Li arranged her escape from Mercury with a certain amount of guilt. She was leaving Techstock alone for the first time in nearly four e-years.

  Four e-years. Had it really been that long? And she’d been nearly ten on Mercury, with her only actual trip home five years before to attend her sister’s wedding. Going home in the virtuality had always seemed to be enough. There was no logical reason why it shouldn’t be enough, after all. With a first-class merci connection, what you heard, smelled, tasted, and saw was indistinguishable from regular life. Even your sense of balance was right on. And why not? The sensations were not being routed through innumerable wires or converted into electromagnetic rays. No, they were delivered instantaneously and without degradation. Since the war began, actual travel costs had rocketed upward. The greenleaf cost of a full virtual visit on the broadest merci band was nearly nine times cheaper.

  And yet, the moment Li had learned her father was sick, her instinct had told her that she must go in person. She didn’t really care if the feeling made any logical sense or if it was a holdover from humanity’s animal past. This was family, and you followed your instincts when family was in trouble. Especially since it was her father, the man who’d pushed her so hard and sacrificed so much to be sure Li got all the opportunities possible. Papa, with his unshorn, multiply plaited pigtail that she’d played with as a child. His faint smell of spiced cologne and the ancient elixir of Aqua Velva, a fragrance that one of the saintly gurus of a thousand years ago was said to have used and which Hugo Singh had had specially encoded into the grist of his skin.

  Her papa couldn’t die. He still had fifty years in him, maybe more. No one died of lupus anymore. That was like dying of the black plague or AIDS. It was a bad dream from the antique past. Not something that killed you.

  The security for Complex B was tight, but Li knew the guarding algorithm, a free convert who had been a colleague of hers before the war. After the conflict broke out, the Department of Immunity issued new employment strictures on free converts. Only those free converts who had “mission-critical” jobs at the university were permitted to remain in their posts. Everyone else was out of a job.

  Siscal, a statistician, had been one of the unlucky ones laid off. He’d always adored his work at the university and had managed to get himself rehired by the agency that was contracted to provide security at sensitive sites. Siscal was willing to do anything that kept him in touch with his beloved institution. Li felt sorry for the free convert, but she also knew how to bribe him—with an hour’s access to the latest papers in his field, an access he’d been denied since getting fired from his teaching job.

  Siscal couldn’t copy and study the papers—his memory short-term caches were monitored at all times, and scrubbed of all offending material at the end of each of his shifts. He would have to read and try to comprehend the papers, and then erase them from his caches. Li knew Siscal would have to bring all of his resources to bear, both higher thinking and lower data processing, during his allotted hour.

  Even with most of Siscal’s resources devoted to “Multiple Regression Analysis in Bayes-Yang Emergent Operan
ts across P-100 Universes,” there were still a few autonomous systems monitoring who was and who was not in the complex. Li used her convert portion to flummox these simple systems, aware that when she did so, she was going beyond distracting the security guard to actively and directly breaking the law. She would take her punishment upon her return. She imagined that they might kick her down a pay grade or two. That would mean more regular cooking and no more ordering up an instant meal from the grist—an indulgence she could afford only once an e-week, in any case.

  After she emerged onto the surface and into Bach city proper, she caught a personal coach and gave her apartment as the destination. Once she was off, she gave a series of destinations that left her on the top tier of the city near the place the main transport tube emerged from the city and headed out for the polar lift. She worked her way over to the station on pedestrian walkways to a bus station, and used a cash card to pay the thirteen-greenleaf fee that would take her to the Hub. She had enough cash stored on the card to remain anonymous to the payment system all the way up to Johnston Bolsa. After that, she’d have to charge the trip to her bank account and hope no one was looking for her quite yet.

  The bus shot up and above Bach and into the full solar day. Li lowered the third eyelid shield that all residents acquired when they bought a Mercury adaptation kit for their pellicles. Even with the shading in place, Bach glistened below her, and Li remembered how impressed she’d been with the sight when she’d first arrived—now nearly ten years ago.

  The city was two cities within one. Metallic New Frankfurt formed the base, gleaming with a dull silver glint like an enormous conglomeration of pyrite crystals. Threaded within New Frankfurt, a net of pearls set in a crown, was the soft gleam of residential Calay. The higher Li got, the more Bach seemed a sumptuous artifact rather than a city—an artifact that would make a fitting gift for an emperor. And so it was, of course, for it was the center of government for the Met’s Interlocking Directorate, and the home of Director Amés.

  The transfer at the Hub proved easy enough, and the lift to Johnston Bolsa went smoothly. Then came the test. Li used her convert to connect with the pithway reservation system. She had previously cashed in some war bonds (taking quite a financial hit, her convert reminded her), and her account was bulging with leaves, relative to its normal levels. The money was quickly depleted as she paid premium price for immediate departure on a public bead. At least the transfer went through, Li thought. Now to find out if she could get into the bead.

  She negotiated the walkway toward the bolsa’s central axis, and the centrifugal “gravity” rapidly decreased. She grabbed a handrail strap and allowed her floating body to be pulled along to the bead boarding area. With a twist and a turn, a mechanical porter shoved her inside. Within minutes, the door slid shut.

  She was going to make it. She was going to get off Mercury.

  Her transport bead moved noiselessly into the pithway. The only way to tell there was motion was Li’s gentle motion rearward until her feet came to rest on the “floor.” As her speed increased, the acceleration “gravity” would build to Earth-normal levels, and she’d spend most of her trip feeling heavier than she had in years. It was a small price to pay to be going home. After a couple of hours, Li began to relax. She was speeding out the Dedo now, on her way to the Venus transfer station and points on the Vas cable beyond. To Akali Dal, her home.

  She resisted the urge to while away her trip by entering the merci. Some instinct told her she should avoid the virtuality as much as possible. She used old-fashioned retinal projection to call up a journal article she’d been meaning to read. Within minutes, though, the equations began running together incomprehensibly in her mind, and she blanked out the magazine and put on some music instead. Li’s taste ran to twenty-ninth-century classical. She loved almost every piece from the free-convert renaissance. She chose Halbrock’s Sunspot Concerto, closed her eyes, and drifted away to the rhythmic surge and flow of violins and oboes mimicking the radio signature of the solar wind. The lights dimmed down as the bead cabin sensed that Li was falling asleep.

  She awoke with a start to find that she was floating in space. Her bead was stopped, and a blaring virtual siren cut through the overrides of her convert. The siren seemed to lodge in Li’s head and reverberate there, as if her very skull were a bell that had been struck.

  “Checkpoint Cesium,” the siren blared. “All bead passengers prepare identification protocols for review.”

  She inquired of the bead grist what was going on, but it replied that access was denied to the information. She tried deopaquing the window, but the bead’s grist did not respond. Since “gravity” was returning, but not from forward acceleration, she could only surmise that the streamer was being diverted away from the central pith tubes outward to some portion of the Met cable, or perhaps even into a bolsa. The grist would not report her exact position on the Dedo, either, although she’d been traveling for most of a day, so she supposed she must be nearing Venus.

  The doors opened, and the passengers of the streamers were ordered out. Li had no baggage, but those with bags were made to carry them along. Each person was being walked through a scanning corridor. Some were told to stand for long minutes. The regulators in charge seemed to be in no hurry to speed the process along.

  When Li was third in line, an override voice in her inner ear informed her to prepare for a complete system scan—aspect, convert, and pellicle.

  Once again she felt the “dragged-through-glass” scrape as the corridor’s scanning algorithms worked over her pellicle. A siren rang out twice, and the door at the opposite end of the corridor opened. Li stumbled out. She stood in line with other passengers, who all looked rather shell-shocked after their trips down the corridor. Each was passing through a final scanning arch.

  Li passed through the final arch. But instead of being allowed to move along with the passengers who had come before her, she heard a small beep. The regulator who was monitoring the arch looked up. He and the convert who was inhabiting the arch apparently had a quick conversation, and the regulator told Li to follow him.

  They traveled through a series of nondescript hallways—I’ll never find my way back through this, Li thought—and arrived at a tiny Department of Immunity office. Most of the space in the office was taken up by a desk and a chair. The desk was pushed forward to allow leg room for the regulator, who sat down behind it. The chair in front of the desk was backed up against the office wall, and when she sat down, Li’s knees were bumping against the front of the desk. It was impossible to stretch out or even to sit comfortably.

  “Well now,” said the regulator, placing his hands on the desk between them, “it would appear that your Confidence level is not very high, Citizen Singh.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Li replied nervously.

  “It seems you’re hiding something. Holding out. You have doubts.” The man sat back, clasped his hands behind his head. “I’m here to discuss those doubts with you. Maybe we can reach a resolution. You’d like to talk about it, wouldn’t you?”

  “I have no objection to talking,” Li said, “if I knew what it was you wanted to talk about.”

  “Getting defensive won’t help matters, I’m afraid,” said the regulator. “Interrogation can be a constructive experience, if you’ll only let it be. Now, let’s get started, shall we?”

  Li held up her hands. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Just tell me what’s bothering you,” the man replied.

  “Nothing’s bothering me.”

  “Oh, I think there is something wrong. You registered a seventeen at the arch.”

  “A seventeen? Out of what?”

  “I’m afraid that’s classified.”

  Li nodded. “But we do know that I’m a seventeen.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, okay,” Li said. “I guess I’m feeling guilty because I’m taking my first vacation in years. Maybe that’s what set off
your arch.”

  “Oh no,” said the regulator. “Personal guilt won’t rate on the Confidence scale. It has to do with you and your relationship to society, Citizen Singh. You and the law.”

  The man spoke in such a dispassionate way that Li could not tell if there was information he didn’t know or if he was trying to elicit a confession from her to some crime that he already knew she’d committed. That was, she supposed, the point of this whole process: to keep the interviewee guessing. Li decided she would play innocent.

  No, it’s not playing, she thought. I am innocent! I’m not a goddamn enemy of the state!

  “It must be the vacation,” she said. “I was at a crucial stage of some experiments, and I kind of left my research team in the lurch, I’m afraid. Some of the results might be ruined because I’m not around to oversee the final data collection.”

  The regulator let out a huff of air and leaned forward again.

  “Tell me about these experiments,” he said.

  Bingo, thought Li. He didn’t know I was AWOL. He was fishing.

  Li proceeded to describe to the regulator a complicated high-energy physics experiment that she made up whole cloth as she was going. She made sure to throw in lots of jargon, and even an equation or two. By the end of the interview, there was a discernible glaze in the man’s eyes.

  When she finished her explanation, the man sighed and motioned her to stand. He led her back down the corridor to the inspection platform. Li’s streamer was long gone, of course. She would have to catch the next one, due in two hours or so. In the meantime she was shown to a small waiting room stocked with uncomfortable, gristless chairs, where she sat among six other detainees. They all waited in silence, and no one made eye contact.

  As if we are all guilty of something, Li thought, and ashamed of ourselves.

  The next streamer finally arrived. All the occupants debarked as they had previously. There were only two empty beads on this streamer. The detainees divided up, three to a bead. Along with two other women, Li stepped into another anonymous bead. She realized that this was the first time she’d ever boarded a streamer in full gravity. Most transfer stations were in the center of cables, and were reached by access corridors where the spin acceleration gradually decreased as you drew near to the pith. The DI apparently wanted to give no streamer passenger the chance to duck out during their transfer walk and avoid the Checkpoint Cesium experience.