by Tony Daniel
The Jeep did not answer. He revved his engine impatiently.
[All right, all right. I guess you want directions to where you’re to drop the shit, huh?]
The Jeep revved his engine louder.
[A rose garden. The warden’s gone 404. He should never have allowed such a thing. Distracts the meat from their work is what it does. Well, nothing I can do about it, I guess. Here’s a map. Now don’t get touchy; there’s nothing but a schematic of where you’re going coming your way. Just a cue sheet of how to get to her. Can’t give you a map of the whole place. Security reasons, you know.]
Her.
The guard fed the schematic to the outer edge of the Jeep’s pellicle, and he snatched it up.
Her. This was the way to Li. First right. Straight ahead past the biomass tanks. Left, then a left again. Physics building.
The Jeep turned on his lights. He drove forward into the compound. Nothing happened. He rolled along the path into the structures. There were the biomass tanks. Left.
All was quiet. There were no windows. Perhaps people were awake and working inside, perhaps they slept. Each building had only one door. All of them were closed.
Left again.
The Jeep rolled to a stop in front of the closed door to the physics building.
He waited for a minute. Two. Nothing happened.
Now what?
Li might or might not know he was there. Another minute passed. Time to do something.
The Jeep honked his horn. He honked it again, three times.
After another minute, the door opened.
Li was standing in the transom. She wore a white shift, a nightgown, and was clutching the thermos bottle she often brought to the parking spot on the bluff. Li rubbed her eyes. Amazed disbelief or just sleep? Neither. The Jeep had never been close enough to another human being to develop the talent—not until now. But he could read Li’s expressions.
Happiness.
He opened the passenger-side door, and Li climbed inside. She closed the door.
“I’m so glad you came,” she said.
The laboratory compound exploded into lights and alarms. Grist-mil swarmed.
“I guess my infinite do-loop wasn’t infinite enough,” said Li. “The section ward found a way out.” She laughed. “I think we’d better go.”
The Jeep needed no further urging.
He jerked into reverse, speeding backwards while Li fumbled around looking for something. Right. The seat belt. It was still there. He’d kept it operational, of course, more out of habit than need. Until now. Li just managed to click the buckle into place when the Jeep slammed on his brakes, turned his wheel hard, and spun into a perfect 180, exiting facing forward.
The turn was not exactly routine, but he’d performed enough spins to be able to execute one with little thought. In the midst of turning, the Jeep set his attention to another task. Releasing BigCanada into the compound’s grist-mil substrate.
“I made something for you,” Li said, shaking the thermos bottle on her lap. “I’ll show it to you later.”
The Jeep heard the words, but filed them away. Nothing to do with the information right then. BigCanada was expanded and dynamic, hissing and snapping at the containment protocols. The grist-mil within the earth below him swarmed up the Jeep’s tires, attempting to blast the Kevlar belts back to carbon and silicon, swarming along the axle, building microscopic tethers across the wheel well, attempting to latch on to the Jeep’s chassis with what were, at the molecular level, tiny grappling hooks. The Jeep released BigCanada from her year of confinement.
The laboratory grist-mil security algorithm didn’t have a chance, at least not in the short term. BigCanada at first dug her claws, figuratively speaking, into the Jeep’s pellicle; he’d expected that, and his defenses were up. She still managed to get an outrider to one of his hydrogen cells and converted the electrodes to a zinc gunk. But it was only one cell of many. His power was only minimally reduced, and he could make repairs later. Then BigCanada came in contact with the grist-mil—her old enemy, the same sort of program that had tried to exterminate her before. True to her vicious, angry nature—formed over years of flight and fighting those who would wipe the grist clean of her—she attacked without mercy.
The Jeep did not stay around to observe the consequences—although he could picture what the results would be if the lab’s security algorithm didn’t find a way to contain BigCanada. The valley she’d owned in Nova Scotia—really a dry gully in rocky barrens not far from the sea—had been furiously organized into patterns of broken spirals, imperfect tessellations, and three-dimensional representations of chaos fractals cut off in the middle of their flowering. The virus lichen had squeezed the rock into form and held it there, contained within a thin but unbreakable film. She’d made the landscape into a vast representation of pain, hurt, and bewilderment, only incidentally blasting away all life in the process—except, of course, the lichen-brush with which she painted her anguish.
BigCanada had subverted the grist in the area as completely as she had the lichen, overrunning whatever maintenance or recognizance programming might be latent within the local substrate and sending out a spoof signal that all was well. This was what all bugs tried to do when they got loose, but BigCanada was particularly good at it—she was nearing free-convert status in her ability. And the truth was, no one paid much attention to what happened in the wilds of Canada these days.
She was containable, once her opponent figured out—as the Jeep had—her fatal flaw, left over from her days of fleeing through the Met. Her self-replications—whether for use in a massed “denial of service” attack or in an outrider attempting to flank a defender’s defenses—were stripped-down versions of herself, more like clone children than actual copies. They lacked the original virus’s full memory load, and with the memory went judgment.
BigCanada relied on destabilizing her opponents—guerrilla tactics of surprise, informational “noise,” and berserker vehemence, but the math was simple. Any fully sentient convert could beat any partially sentient code in a stable set of circumstances. It was similar to the math of another era in warfare, when horse cavalry attacked a squared company of bayonet-wielding infantry. No matter how frightening and loud the horse charge, no matter how sharp the sabers of the cavaliers, the infantry—provided they remained stalwart—always triumphed, often without a single casualty.
The Jeep had simply “squared up” and systematically dealt with BigCanada’s replications from the weakest to the strongest, finally isolating the virus herself in her den, pulling her out by the prime numbers of her nose, throwing her into a burlap bag of whole numbers, and squeezing her into quiescence with archiving programs he’d picked up from an old computer in an abandoned garage where he’d once parked overnight. The computer was ancient, and contained within it a simple algorithm for file compression that had long been lost to the modern era. BigCanada had been completely surprised when he’d introduced the archiving program into her containment bag, expecting the familiar shackling routines of the Met. She’d shriveled down with barely a whimper.
As soon as the Jeep crossed the sand/soil line he again assumed his “bear” pellicle and rolled on and away.
“You did something nasty to the grist back there,” Li said. “It could hurt the people inside.”
That was true. The Jeep could feel remorse, but mostly for opportunities lost acquiring skills or fuel. He supposed he was capable of feeling guilt, but this wasn’t the time to do so, when survival was at stake: the survival of the only person he’d ever wanted as a driver.
There was pursuit from the compound, however. Trucks rolled out from outlying buildings filled with biological aspects—men and women in the red-and-gold uniform of the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division. If they were even minimally proficient, they could follow him. There was very little the Jeep could do to cover his tracks if he wished to travel at maximum speed. In any case, he had a single destination in mind: the
parking space. He was headed there along the trail that Li had often walked to visit him. It was not wide enough for him to pass in some places, and he had to crush underbrush and snap saplings, sure telltales of his passage, as he rolled quickly along.
“It might work, at least for a while,” Li said. “Eventually they’ll figure out that something’s strange and keep going up the trail, no matter how much their intuition is telling them not to. That’s what happened with me.”
But it was a temporary solution, and so the Jeep barreled onward and upward, turning down the long-forgotten (except by him) road to Norrie State Park, and up the track that led to his parking spot on the bluff.
There the Jeep came to a scruffy stop on the leafy ground. A half-moon was high in a sky full of stars. Below, the Hudson River glinted silver amidst dark cliffs and forests. It was October, and a chilly wind blew from the west, hinting of an approaching storm front. The Jeep monitored the pursuers. Like a school of fish nearing a shoal, they parted when the trail reached the “protected” area of the parking space, with one group turning back and the others taking off in several wrong directions. For the moment, he and Li were safe.
“This is what I was talking about before,” Li said. “The process McHood and I discovered. It’s mixed in with my tea.”
The Jeep let out his clutch and settled into a neutral gear. He turned his interior cabin heater on low. He remained alert. He’d never tested the parking space’s peculiar properties so directly before.
Li held up the bottle she was clutching.
“Pandora’s thermos bottle,” she said. “All it takes is a thermos. In fact, any container would work, even a paper bag. The paradox is what keeps it confined. Them. The universe is information. Inside this bottle is…well, it’s gravitons. And tea, of course. But each graviton represents— is —a nontrivial event that will happen in the future.” Li smiled. “I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this, I’m afraid. The thing is, I’m going to open this bottle up, but only with your permission.”
One of the trucks that pursued them was circling back to the path. Someone was beginning to have doubts. As Li had said, it might only be a matter of time until they were discovered and flushed.
“When I open the thermos, everything’s going to change for you. I’m not sure what will happen, but we’ll leave here. We’ll leave Earth. All you’ve ever known. The only familiar thing is going to be me. I’ll be there, wherever we’re going. I promise.”
Li put her left hand on the thermos bottle’s plug top.
“So, my one true friend, what will it be?”
There was no way to tell the woman that this was all moot. He’d made the decision on the day he’d allowed her to climb inside his cabin. She was worthy to be his driver.
The Jeep opened his glove box and extended his cup holder.
Li smiled. “All right, then,” she said.
She screwed open the top on the thermos bottle and opened it up. The smoky odor of Lapsang souchong tea filled the cabin.
And, just as Li had said it would, everything changed.
Two
Leo Sherman looked at his father ruefully. Somehow, even though he’d traveled over a billion miles to reach the man, he felt like he was letting the Old Crow down once again by arriving in so unceremonious a manner. Of course there was no way his father could recognize him in the all-encompassing getup of Private Aschenbach. This fact gave Leo no comfort whatsoever.
Sherman cleared his throat and glared down at Leo—Leo was sitting in a hard metal chair in the brig of the Boomerang —and harrumphed his throat clear.
“Soldier, I have exactly no time to waste,” his father said in his familiar growl—the growl that had preceded various groundings, allowance withholding, room confinements, and dozens of other punishments during Leo’s rambunctious youth. “So if you are wasting my time, I will see that you are shipped back down to the surface of the planet forthwith and given over to the muck that’s taken over down there. Do you understand what that means?”
“I understand completely,” Leo replied. He was about to add “Dad,” but thought better of it. He could deal with all that later.
“Then out with it.”
Leo smiled. “This is going to be kind of weird, General. You’d better stand back.”
Two security officers stepped forward to intercept any move Leo might make toward their commander. Even Leo’s rescuer/captor, Neiderer, stood on edge, ready to deal with any attack.
“Don’t worry,” Leo said. “I didn’t say it would be dangerous ; I only said it would be weird. Especially for me.”
Without further explanation, Leo extended his left arm and reached for his left elbow. Delivering his payload was a two-step process. First, he must become himself again. And then he would carry out his more important task. With the fingers of his right hand, Leo probed around the funny bone, actually a ligament, in the back of his elbow. The capsule that contained him—all he was and had ever been—was lodged next to that tendon. It would only seem a nodule to anyone, a bit of scar tissue in the muscle. And without Leo’s specific pellicle code word, that is exactly how the capsule would act. But not this time. Leo grasped the capsule through his skin and held it between his right thumb and forefinger.
“Calico-tanned-Arapaho-man,” Leo murmured to himself. Alvin and the hacks had let him come up with the magical “open sesame” phrase himself.
He squeezed the capsule as hard as he could.
Throughout his body, quantum-entangled particles were observed, their uncertainties at an end, their destinies resolved. Leo looked down at his arm. It seemed to vibrate and shimmer for an instant. The glow was from the energy released in the transformation process. He glanced at his legs. They were three inches shorter. Which was right.
He certainly was much stockier in real life, too. Good. He was tired of masquerading as a skinny drink of water.
In his lap, he was holding the urn that had previously resided in his chest cavity. It gleamed a dull golden brown. No one had been able to determine what sort of material it was made of. Some variant on Kevlar, Alvin had guessed. No way of knowing without a thorough analysis. And as C, the master spy who gave it to Leo, had said, that would have been a very bad idea for the analyst.
General Sherman took a step back.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered. “Leo.”
“Good to see you, Dad.”
“I want an immediate scan,” Sherman said to no one in particular—which meant he was probably speaking to one of the free-convert soldiers. Leo had long stopped thinking it strange when his father barked an order into the empty air.
“It’s me,” Leo said. “More or less.”
“Yes,” Sherman said, still glaring dubiously at his son. “That’s what they’re telling me. Down to the DNA.”
“And this is for you,” Leo said, nodding toward the urn. He dare not lift it. The guards would probably blast off his head the instant he made such a move.
“You’ve brought me the remains of a dead man?” Sherman said.
In other words—you’ve wasted all this time and energy on a complete fuck-up, Leo thought. Not this time, you Old Crow.
“There’s a living man,” Leo said, “in here. At least I think so. The only one who can find out for certain is you .”
Sherman blinked, blinked again. More free-convert communications.
“This thing is strongly encrypted, and it could seriously hurt anybody who tried to crack it without authorization,” Leo said. “You— General , is it now?—have that authorization. The man who gave it to me told me that all you had to do was rub it three times. Like Aladdin’s lamp.”
“Funny,” Sherman growled.
“He seemed to have a droll sense of humor,” Leo said. “Not unlike your own.”
Sherman reached over and pulled up the other chair that was in the brig. It rasped as he dragged it across the floor. He sat down across from Leo.
“There’s nothing I cou
ld ask you that would prove you’re who you seem to be. Hell, you might even be Leo, taken over by some kind of nasty Department of Immunity protocol.”
“Or my whole story might be true.”
“Yes,” Sherman said. He leaned forward. “Is it?”
Leo sighed. “Hell, Dad, you never fucking believed anything I told you anyway. Why should this be any different?”
Sherman sat back. His shoulders began to shake. For a moment, Leo was utterly bewildered. What was happening? Was the old man going crazy? And then he realized his father was laughing heartily. Not something you saw every day. Or every decade, for that matter.
“It’s my goddamn son, all right,” Sherman said to the room.
“Oh yeah?” Leo said. “I thought you only had one son, and he was dead.” His words came out softly—not sarcastically, as he’d intended.
Sherman smiled. Another rare sighting. Just as well, thought Leo. It was kind of gruesome and carnivorous.
“I guess I was mistaken,” his father replied.
Then, without another word, the Old Crow reached over and rubbed the urn three times, as if he were polishing it.
Nothing happened.
Sherman was about to rub the urn for a fourth time when there was a tiny whirring sound. A stamp-sized plate slid to the side, revealing a small gold plaque previously concealed beneath the urn’s facing. Sherman took the urn from Leo, tilted it up, and examined the plaque.
“Very amusing,” he said.
He turned the urn around so that Leo could read the plaque. In swirling, engraved script two words could be discerned on its surface.
DOWNLOAD ME
Three
“You’re older than I,” said Cloudship Lebedev. “Maybe you can tell me if that is what I think it is.”
“Well,” Cloudship Tacitus said. “Well.” There was one second of silence from the old cloudship. Two. Finally, he spoke. “I can say without qualification that there truly is something new under the sun. Or orbiting it, in this case. What the hell is that?”
