Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  His kind? thought Li. I suppose we’ve persecuted regular rats—but never sentient rats. What can he mean by that comment?

  “We’re free converts, you know,” said the rat commander, as if in answer to Li’s question. “Bugs and viruses, as a matter of fact. Programs you wanted to eliminate. Instead, we escaped and found our way into bodies.” He held his hairy arm up for all the passengers to see. “Not bad, eh?” He looked directly at a female passenger who’d obviously enhanced her physiognomy to look like Dala Ray, a merci melodrama star whom Li recognized as one of her father’s favorites. “What do you think, miss?”

  “Horrible,” the woman whispered. “Awful, awful rat.” She broke into tears. The commander turned from her in disdain. While he’d been speaking, the soldier with the grist infuser had been making his way down the line of passengers touching it to each forearm. Li’s turn came.

  The needle on the device physically penetrated her, but numbed the area before going in. After the needle came out, the pricked skin stung a bit, but otherwise the procedure hurt a lot less than the full scan she’d received from the Department of Immunity.

  Then the raid was over. Everyone was allowed to climb back into the beads. As quickly as the partisans had appeared, they were gone.

  Scurrying off, Li thought, through the cracks and crevices of the Met.

  She and the others waited for the streamer to start up again, which it presently did. Soon they were on their way down the Vas once again. The bead grist, Li discovered once again, was wholly cut off from her, as was all information or communication to the outside world. After two hours of travel, the streamer lurched to a stop once more. The doors opened.

  A phalanx of norm regulators met the passengers. Beside the regulators were row upon row of the menacing Department of Immunity sweepers.

  “Passengers will prepare for decontamination and interrogation,” said a loud override voice inside Li’s ear. “Debark immediately with your hands in the air. Any deviation from my orders will result in immediate disintegration.”

  Li realized she wasn’t going to be seeing her parents any time soon. Maybe never.

  Nineteen

  The partisans had defeated Noctis Labyrinthus security. They were in.

  Of course we won , Alvin told Aubry through the grist. It was virtual pelota. We’re free converts. Nobody’s better than we are at that.

  Can you get me out of this wall? Aubry thought to the team leader, trying to put urgency in her communication.

  You’re the one with the key.

  Oh, yeah.

  Even though she was physically buried in a wall, the Hand of Tod was in her grasp. She let her awareness travel down her arm, sensing her fingertips. She traveled farther.

  Into the Hand.

  As Tod had once said to her: “Nothing you can do but do what you do when you do it, then do what you do after that until you don’t.”

  She issued a command. Decrypt.

  Security had been beaten in a fair match.

  The wall around her dissolved as if it were so much moraba. It flowed away so suddenly that Aubry stumbled forward, over to the other side. She steadied herself, then stood up straight and looked around.

  She stood at the edge of a mountain of grist in granular form. It rose up like one of the great sand dunes of the Earth’s Sahara. But there on Mars, the gravity was lower and the angle of repose therefore greater. The incline of the dune was set at an incredible angle. Strips of alluvial grist undulated in fingers to Aubry’s left and right for as far as she could see. It was all the ancient red of Mars’s soil before the moraba had come, but it shone as if it were sprinkled with black diamond flecks.

  Aubry knew the actual physical dimensions of the camp’s grist—a little over a square kilometer—but knowing had not prepared her for how imposing it would seem. How draining. Aubry could almost feel it trying to suck information from her. To pull her in and never let her go.

  There was something very nasty about that grist.

  She shuddered. Enough of that. It was the people behind this place who were evil, not the place itself.

  Sure. That was the rational way to think about it.

  Yet she still had a powerful urge to turn her back and get the hell out of here. She fought off the feeling and applied herself to what she’d come for.

  It was fairly simple. Nothing technical involved. But it did require the ability to move in the regular world where there was no grist.

  And that was the real reason she’d been included on the team. That, and the fact that she was the legitimate heir to the Hand of Tod.

  Here I am, Mother, Aubry thought. I’m going to become your gate out of here.

  She bent down and touched the Hand to the concentration-camp grist.

  The camp defaulted to a representation in the virtuality as just that—long lines of sad, gray barracks under a slate gray sky. Aubry found herself standing at the edge of a work yard. On one side of the yard was a large pile of sand.

  Wonder what they want with so much sand? Aubry thought.

  The team of partisan free converts, lodged in the grist of her satchel, flowed over and, without hesitation, began unlocking every door they could find. With the “pelota” virus in place, the partisans now had the key to every door and barrier in the camp. The mission was to isolate the human convert guards and set free as many of the prisoners as possible in the time they had.

  How much time did they have? A matter of minutes. The Department of Immunity must already know that something had gone massively wrong in Noctis Labyrinthus. They would soon be marshaling their response. The partisans could not withstand a full onslaught of DI forces, either in the virtuality or in the physical world. They must be in and out as quickly as possible.

  And that limited the number of prisoners who could be liberated. Because the only way out was through the commutative grist doorway that Aubry carried in her satchel. The prisoners must flow through her into that grist and then flash to safety into outer-system grist. At least the hope was they would get to safety. It had been arranged with a Republic intermediary on Jupiter called Antinomian. Her bona fides were impeccable, according to the v-hacks. Logan36 had known her since she came to the Met on an exchange program when she was a young student, and he claimed to trust her completely.

  Even assuming Antinomian was on the up-and-up, and a grist haven was waiting in the outer system, there was a bandwidth limit to how many free converts could migrate at once. It came out to something like a thousand people per second. There were an estimated 500 million incarcerated in the camp. It was obvious that most would not escape during this raid.

  And yet Aubry still passionately believed her Danis might be among the escapees. At least it was a chance she could give to her mother.

  It seemed to take forever for the first of the prisoners to arrive, herded by Gerta Lum, who was serving as the “sweeper” on the incursion team, assigned to get as many prisoners out as soon as possible.

  They were moving incredibly slowly. In the virtuality, they manifested as emaciated, scarecrowlike figures, trimmed down to nothing but their most basic algorithms—and even beyond. There was a vacancy in the eyes that bespoke of irretrievable loss of information. Great holes in memories. Lost functions. Things that could not be regained, no matter how data-rich the environment to which they escaped. They queued up expertly at Gerta’s urging. Aubry realized that most of them believed this to be some sort of sadistic drill put on by their captors.

  “This is real,” Aubry shouted to them. “You’re getting out! Now come on!”

  She stretched out her arms in the virtuality.

  Come to me!

  Laughing hysterically, one prisoner did just that. He ran full tilt into her chest—and disappeared within.

  Through it, actually.

  That was the way it was supposed to work, of course. He’d been flashed to the secret, grist-laden safe haven in the outer system. Or had not. In any case, he was gone.

/>   The other prisoners hesitated. Behind the front line, a huge crowd began to build.

  “I know you’re afraid this is a trick,” said Aubry. “But what do you have to lose?”

  Her logic was impeccable, and logic could cut to the heart of a free convert in a way that no emotional urging ever could.

  A female prisoner took a run at Aubry. She, too, disappeared. Another man. He, too, was gone.

  A critical tipping point was reached. The others—by then lined up thousands deep—surged toward her en masse. Aubry trembled, but kept her arms spread wide.

  Come to me, dammit! That’s what I’m here for.

  The wave of bodies reached her, moved through her. So much information. So much bandwidth. But the partisan v-hacks had anticipated this. That was why she had two kilograms of precious pure grist in her satchel. That much grist made a mighty big hole in the virtuality to jump through.

  “Come on! Come on!” she yelled. Wave upon wave passed through her, through her magic bag of grist, and to freedom.

  Internal bookkeeping kept a click count. One thousand. Ten thousand.

  Where was her mother? Aubry had a passive detector in her own pellicle that was supposed to notice her mother’s presence, but there were just too many free converts moving too quickly. The detector’s register was soon overwhelmed by the massive influx of persona signatures passing through. By the time it dumped and recalibrated, another ten thousand had passed by, unexamined. The algorithm—robust, but necessarily downsized for the raid—loaded up, then had to recalibrate once again. Aubry had brought one large-scale individual-detection algorithm into the prison in her satchel grist. It was designed exclusively to find any trace of Alethea Nightshade.

  So, in trying to recognize Danis, there would be ten thousand person dropouts. Aubry’s mother could be in one of those missed moments.

  There were so many, many people. It was almost beyond comprehension. And the free converts queued up to escape were only a fraction of the number who had been rounded up and incarcerated in the camp.

  The alarm horns began to scream. Still, the prisoners kept coming. Alvin ran back from his final point foray to Aubry’s side. It was impossible for a free convert to be breathless, but he was moving so quickly that it took a good microsecond for his thoughts to catch up with him to the point he was able to speak.

  “Saw a schematic in the quadrant control room,” he said. “We’ve held back every attempt they made to flush us in the virtual. They’re about to launch a physical attack. From Phobos.”

  “What do you think it’ll be?”

  “Fastest and deadliest thing they can get together,” Alvin replied. “Probably catapult a rock shower.”

  “That’ll wipe anyone in the camp grist where it strikes.”

  “They’re planning on killing these people, anyway,” Alvin replied grimly. “In any case, it’s time for you to get out of here. We can hold them off in the virtuality until you get clear, I’m pretty sure. They’re using old-fashioned worm-routers to break through to us. Very predictable, but they’ll eventually work…doesn’t matter. You’ve got to go.”

  While they were talking, another city’s worth of people had escaped through Aubry’s bag.

  “Can’t I stay a little longer?”

  “You’ll be killed when the rocks fall in,” said Alvin. “You don’t stand a chance unless you can get out of the canyon.”

  Aubry knew Alvin was telling the truth. She had done all she could to save her mother. She had saved thousands of lives. But to leave the others behind…it should not be. None of this should be. The camp. The twisted mind behind it.

  Why did Amés hate free converts so much?

  Of course Aubry knew the logical answer. He was trying to consolidate the Met into one mind. The ability of free converts to proliferate—limited by law at the moment, but not limited by any scientific or mathematical principle—was a direct challenge to him.

  But logic had no part of what was going on in Silicon Valley. This was madness.

  No, not even that, Aubry thought. It goes beyond madness. It’s evil. Pure evil.

  If she wanted to fight the evil, she would have to live beyond this day. So there was no choice. Time to get the hell out of hell.

  “What about the Alethea Nightshade personality?” Aubry asked. “Did we locate it?”

  “We won’t know until we calibrate all the data,” said Alvin. “The theory is that her personality is spread out, attached as riders on millions of other free-convert programs. All we really hoped to find here was a key—a code, something like that—that would call the various parts of her to reintegrate. A trigger of some sort.”

  And you sacrificed finding my mother for some “trigger,” Aubry thought. But she said nothing. She’d understood the score going in.

  As had the v-hack free-convert team.

  These brave souls would be staying. There was no room for them in Aubry’s satchel, now that it contained the enormous amount of data trails left behind as the prisoners fled. That information must be analyzed for clues to bringing back Alethea Nightshade.

  And, incidentally, for traces of Aubry’s mother.

  The v-hack team had all made backup copies of themselves (completely illegal in the Met, of course; but, then again, so was revolutionary insurrection). It was only Aubry who would be leaving.

  “How much time do I have?” Aubry asked Alvin.

  “No time,” he said.

  “Just a few more seconds. We could save thousands of lives!”

  “I’m shutting you down,” said Alvin. “But you have to exit the virtual immediately when I do.” He gestured toward the mob lining up to be transported out. “They’ll mob you when the gate closes. You’ll be clawed to ribbons.”

  “All right.” Aubry nodded sadly. “I understand.”

  “Then prepare yourself, and good luck,” Alvin said.

  “Good luck to you,” she said to Alvin.

  “We’ll take a few of those DI bastards with us when we self-destruct—any that are in full virtual representation within the compound,” Alvin replied with a grim smile. “Shutting down in 3, 2, 1…”

  Alvin quickly sent the deactivation code through.

  And, with a sob, Aubry pulled the Hand of Tod away from the grist of Silicon Valley.

  She was back in the regular world. Before her was the huge pile of seemingly innocuous grist.

  Aubry’s honed instincts allowed no emotion to interfere…yet. Time to get the hell out of Dodge, Aubry thought. Those fighter’s instincts took over. She sprang through the hole in the containment wall and raced back to the cliff, without sparing a glance upward. If she could see the falling meteor show, it would be too late for her anyway.

  When she reached the base of the cliff, she positioned herself, back to the wall.

  Ready.

  She leaned forward. The microfilament held her taut.

  Set.

  Get me out of here!

  Her pellicle activated the line. Billions of tiny block- and-tackle devices rolled in the line, pulling her upward. At the top, spent line was converted back to the moraba from which it came. Aubry shot upward at several hundred miles per hour. The upward velocity was intentionally slowed before she reached the top of the cliff, but she was still going so fast that she rocketed up over the edge like a breaking wave and tumbled down a good two hundred meters from the cliff’s edge, where she settled. Only her space-adapted body allowed her to survive the crash without breaking every bone in her body—something she would have done in even Mars’s weaker than e-normal gravity. She had released herself from the line while in flight, or else she might have suffered decapitation if she’d become tangled in it when she settled.

  Aubry stood up, but was immediately thrown from her feet again as the meteor launch from Phobos streaked in at Martian supersonic speed.

  It seemed to Aubry as if she was suddenly staring into a wall of flames. The Noctis Labyrinthus canyon exploded from the tremendous impact.
Huge plumes of burning dust shot upward, directed by the canyon walls into the pink sky. Even in the thin Martian atmosphere, the sound was beyond deafening. In another second, the flames became so intense that not even Aubry’s adapted eyes could protect her vision, and she turned away.

  She fled toward her escape hatch, where Bin___128A, her comrade partisan, was waiting. Jill, who was physically on the other side of the valley— out of the valley by then, Aubry prayed—had another escape method in place.

  Bin___128A had been stationed as a backup for Aubry, and as a cleanup man in case something horrible went wrong. The means of escape literally was a hatch that led below the surface to a series of subsoil tunnels. The tunnel complex had been used by FUSE, the Martian revolutionary group that had been destroyed by the old Met army, before the Department of Immunity had expelled that same army into the outer solar system. The place was in the DIED database, but the partisans had changed the layout in several ways, the most important of which was a single tunnel that led straight down to a spot under the permafrost water table of the planet—a depth to which e-m detectors could not reach. At that point, the tunnel branched north and ran for many kilometers until it gradually sloped upward and emerged at an innocuous-looking surface hopper recharging station. The attendant there, a creaky old man who must be the last holdout for a FUSE victory, was in league with the partisans. He had a hopper standing by to take Aubry and Bin to the polar lift, and from there she would make her way back up to the Met.

  When she reached the portal to the tunnel complex, Bin___128A was waiting. His ratlike brown nose was quivering.

  “So,” Bin said through the merci back channel, “ready to bug back to space?”

  “Just a second,” Aubry answered.

  “Okay, but let’s get out of here soon,” said Bin with a shudder. “Planets give me the creeps.”

  Aubry turned around for a final look behind her. There was still an eerie green glow arising from the slit in the ground that marked the precipitous drop into Noctis Labyrinthus.

  Pure, basic grist usually burns white-hot like magnesium, Aubry thought. Probably the burning moraba mixed in gave the green tint to the flames.