So, long before, it had issued letters of marque, authorizing philosophical gangs to carry out randomly assigned acts of vandalism and terror. The Professional Revolutionaries were the most notorious of these gangs, claiming more than four million voluntary members. Though they had to operate under complex rules, Machina Overlord had granted them a powerful privilege: They were masters of identity.
Among the Nine Thousand, a citizen’s electronic identity was almost as important as their physical existence. Identity acted as an electronic pass, allowing a citizen to breathe and eat and go about their world, to contact loved ones, access finances and personal history, and to interact with the swarms of lesser AIs—the noncons—which were everywhere in the worlds.
The Professional Revolutionaries were armed with manufactured identities, allowing them to change who they were so they could wander the Nine Thousand at will. But the heart of their game was more frightening. They could steal away the identity of any citizen, hold it hostage, and leave their victim no choice but to enlist in their ranks, if only temporarily—frightened recruits coerced to carry out some arcane task if they ever hoped to have their true life back again. And they could get their life back if they succeeded. That was the amnesty rule.
It was a game of sorts, but a serious and dangerous game, one designed on purpose to unsettle worlds, destabilize orbits, crack vacuum seals, crash economies, instigate wars, ignite religious pogroms. To sow chaos.
Violetta had always feared it was a game that must inevitably run out of control.
* * * *
The tiltrotor took evasive action. Dodging the stunner net Ash had fired, it darted toward the open plaza.
“Ash, hold your fire!” Violetta ordered. “We don’t know what that thing’s carrying.”
“But it’s getting away!”
“So go after it! Keep it in sight, but don’t damage it. I’m going to find out what the payload is.”
Ash raced away in pursuit, while she dropped to her knees beside the fallen revolutionary. He lay on his back, shivering, eyes half-closed, but he was aware of her. She knew that when his lips turned in a strained smile.
“What will happen now?” she demanded.
He said, “I always find it . . . gratifying . . . when chaos . . . ensues.” His eyes opened wider, fixed on her. “Tag,” he added. “You’re it.”
“I’m it?”
Panic prickled her skin. Her heart raced.
“What do you mean, I’m it?”
But she got no answer as his eyes closed and he faded into unconsciousness.
You’re it.
Had he recruited her? Taken away her identity?
No, that was impossible. He hadn’t touched her. To change who she was, he had to touch her.
She turned her hands over anyway, examined her palms, looked for the black spot of erasure that she’d seen too many times before on the palms of forced recruits.
The black spot wasn’t there.
But the Professional Revolutionaries did not make empty threats. Their creed did not allow it. She had to assume that she’d really been recruited. But how? What had they taken from her? What were they planning to take? She considered possibilities—and a terrible suspicion flowered in her mind.
She cued her retinal screen. “Ash, you still with me?”
His breathless voice came back over her earbuds. “Affirmative. I think it’s trying for the commuter stairs.”
Her heartbeat skipped. “Up or down?”
“Can’t tell yet.”
Up would take the drone to Tranquility’s industrial levels—critical infrastructure, but mostly robotic, with few citizens present. Down, though—that was the direction of the world’s bucolic neighborhoods. Violetta’s home and family were there.
She popped a lozenge from one of the many loops on her heavy service belt. Then she snapped it open over her unconscious captive, releasing a stream of data dust that fell in a fine gray powder across his face and chest. The dust marked him as a target of interest for Tranquility’s fleet of guardian drones. One swooped in immediately: a spinning ring ten centimeters across that emitted a foreboding electrical hum. It hovered over the fallen revolutionary, fencing him in with a translucent cage of pink and purple light. Anyone attempting to breach that cage—whether from inside or outside—before the municipal police arrived would find themselves hit with a nasty dart of no-go.
“Ash,” Violetta asked again, “up or down?”
“Down,” Ash groaned.
Down toward Violetta’s home and family.
She sprang to her feet, but she did not follow Ash to the commuter stairs. Instead, she bounded across the concourse, weaving through the loitering crowd to the red door of an emergency chute. On the way, she whispered, “Link to the house.”
Her earbuds picked up the command and executed it.
The house responded in its sweet, nurturing voice—“Aloha, Violetta”—as Violetta waved a finger at the biometric scanner that controlled access to the emergency chute. “Drop me to level seven.”
“Level seven drop affirmed,” the chute’s noncon answered as the red door sluiced open. The house responded too, in a confused murmur, “That is not in my instruction set.”
Violetta ignored it. She stepped through the door and fell, dropping past a series of gel nets, each one holding her for a fraction of a second, stretching as it slowed her descent, until a gel net on the seventh level caught her and shoved her out past another red door.
She emerged not far from her own neighborhood in a village square where citizens were at breakfast in neat cafés. Shade trees spread their branches above a central fountain. Morning light tempered by rain-cloud filters glinted through their leaves.
Violetta’s sudden appearance caused heads to turn. Worried frowns greeted her. The red door was used only for emergencies. Several people called her name. They asked, “What’s gone wrong?”
She ignored them, addressing the house instead: “House, get me Diamond! Make her answer.”
“One moment, Violetta.”
She did not wait. Only Diamond was at home. Ismo was away on the other side of the sun; he’d taken their toddler twins to visit his parents, but Diamond had not wanted to go. I have plans, she’d said. Violetta ran hard, hoping to beat the drone.
Diamond was only twelve, but she’d always been a revolutionary at heart.
The house said, “Diamond is not answering.”
“Seal your doors and windows! Don’t let her out. Don’t let anything in.”
Ash broke in, sounding confused. “Vi, I’ve got you on level seven. What are you doing down there? What’s going on?”
Violetta abandoned her earlier caution. “Ash,” she said, gasping as she ran. “Forget . . . what I said . . . before. I need you . . . to take out the drone . . . now.”
“Vi, I can’t. I couldn’t keep up with it. I don’t know where it’s gone.”
Tag, the revolutionary had warned. You’re it.
Violetta looked up to see the tiltrotor coming toward her along the street. At first, it was half-hidden in tree shadows. Then its rotors flashed in a blade of sunlight as it turned onto her cul-de-sac. Violetta knew then that her suspicions were true: Diamond was the target of this scheme. It was not a fact she was willing to share with Ash. “Ash, no one here has seen the drone. Check the other levels.”
The lie came so easily, it shocked her.
“On it,” Ash said.
The confession of the house brought another shock. She heard the deep concern in its tone when it informed her, “Diamond has gone outside. She refuses to come back in.”
Violetta pursued the drone into the cul-de-sac, arriving just as Diamond jumped down the porch steps and trotted into the little courtyard that was shared by a semicircle of houses. Evil had a distinctive swagger, and Violetta saw it in her daughter’s stride as she went to meet the drone.
Diamond had dressed for this day. She was a short and stocky girl, a little late on the
road to adolescence, with rumpled brown hair and a dangerous confidence. Today she wore boots and a black coverall that Violetta had never seen before.
The drone hovered above her, the black cylinder it carried still clutched in spindly insect legs. One of those legs released its burden to reach for Diamond. She extended her hand to meet it. A bored, precocious child, playing out a romantic fantasy.
“Diamond, no!”
Diamond snatched her hand back in shocked surprise, but it was too late. Violetta reached her just as the black spot of erasure bloomed in her palm. Over her earbuds, she heard the house’s startled report: “I am unable to locate Diamond. She has disappeared from the world.”
The nonconscious entity that was the house could no longer identify her, because Diamond had been recruited.
Grief and horror welled in Violetta’s heart—and it only got worse when she caught sight of the leering logo of the Professional Revolutionaries on the breast of Diamond’s new coverall. “You volunteered! Diamond—”
“I was called to serve!”
She darted to one side, trying to cut past Violetta and make a swift escape—as if there was anywhere to run or to hide. Violetta grabbed her arm. Diamond tried to twist away. “No, no! Don’t arrest me. Let me go.”
“You’re not going anywhere. I am locking you up for the rest of your life!”
“No, Mom, listen. I’m your daughter. The Revolutionaries erased my identity but I’m still your daughter. Don’t arrest me! Don’t send me away! Mom! Tell me you remember who I am.”
Stillness overcame them both as Violetta looked into her daughter’s eyes. She saw fear as Diamond began to understand the enormity of what had happened.
Violetta pulled her close, embraced her, and growled, “Of course I remember you, you idiot. It’s your identity that’s gone, not my memory. And you are in so much trouble. How long have you been communicating with the Professional Revolutionaries? When did they start working on you?”
“I’m not supposed to say. And anyway, it doesn’t matter. They gave me a task.”
“They always do.” Violetta glanced at her retinal screen, checking on Ash’s location. He was still on the commuter stairs, lingering near level five. It was a hunter’s duty to arrest all known Revolutionaries. Twelve-year-olds had been recruited before. If Ash discovered what had happened, he would have no choice but to take Diamond into custody, and she would be sent away—unless she carried out her task and won her identity back under the amnesty rule.
“What task did they give you?” Violetta asked, hoping it would be something easy, suitable to a child.
Diamond pouted. “They said it would be fun. That I’d only get in a little trouble.”
“What task?” Violetta insisted, as fear’s cold fingers touched her heart.
Diamond looked up to the hovering drone. She raised her left hand, exposing the black spot in her palm, a circle so dark it was like a hole to nowhere. The drone dropped the cylinder it carried and she caught it. “I’m supposed to smuggle this to Nexus, where it will be used to destroy Machina Overlord.”
Violetta cocked her head, trying desperately to see this as a joke. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Let me see that.”
Diamond handed over the cylinder. Violetta didn’t trust such easy cooperation, but she said nothing just yet. Using one hand to keep a firm grip on Diamond, she examined the object, finding it strangely light in mass—too light to be a bomb—and slippery in her hand. She realized it was not black. Instead, it was made of a transparent shell at least a centimeter thick. The darkness was contained within. One end of the cylinder was rounded. The other was sealed with a brushed chrome cap that displayed a digital countdown: 3:13:27.
3:13:26
3:13:25
“It’s called a world breaker,” Diamond said quietly.
Violetta bit her lip. She’d heard that name before. A world breaker was not an object. It was a theoretical intrusion of another, incompatible, universe. One predicted behavior of such an anomaly was that photons would be unable to react with it, and so they would glide around it in paths that bent along its surface. But that was theory. Speculation. It wasn’t real.
And yet, as Violetta gazed at the cylinder, the face she saw reflected in it was not hers. It was her daughter’s . . . as if Diamond’s image had slid around the darkness contained within the glass.
Ash spoke over her earbuds. “No one on the higher levels saw the drone leave the stairs. I’m coming down.”
“No, I’m coming up. I’ll meet you on six.”
She muted the link and turned back to Diamond, who insisted, “They said it would be easy.”
“It’s not easy.”
“The Revolutionaries don’t lie!”
“Well, this time they did, because special authorization is required to visit Nexus. The Bullet Transit System would never allow you to—”
Tag. You’re it.
Shock rocked her as she grasped the Revolutionaries’ scheme. They had not erased her identity, because it was her identity that made her valuable. As a senior hunter, she was one of only a handful of citizens with standing authorization to visit Nexus. If they took her identity, she would lose that authority. So they’d recruited her daughter instead.
Diamond explained it, her voice bitter because she did not believe the scheme could ever work. “You’re supposed to help me. That’s what it says in the mission plan. They’re so stupid they thought you’d help me. But I’m a revolutionary. You’re a hunter.” Her pout deepened, got lopsided. “That makes us enemies.”
“The Revolutionaries aren’t stupid, love. Now hurry. We need to get that thing out of Tranquility, and we need to get past Ash. If he finds us, he’ll arrest you. He’ll arrest me. He has no choice.”
Diamond’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Wait. You’re going to help me? But we’re not on the same side.”
“Diamond, the only way you get your life back is if the task gets done. So I haven’t got a choice.”
* * * *
Every world was fitted with emergency escape pods, but those could only be fired into the void at random; they weren’t useful for going anywhere. The only effective way out of Tranquility was through the Bullet Transit System. So Violetta told Ash she was coming up the commuter stairs, and then she took Diamond to the emergency chute instead. Ash tracked her position and protested. She didn’t answer. “You’re compromised, aren’t you?” he asked as they stepped through the red door. She bit her lip and kept quiet as the gel curled around them and lofted them to the transit station.
They found police in the concourse, securing the revolutionary, who grinned at Violetta as she swept past. One of the officers called out to her, “Violetta—”
“Sorry! Can’t talk. Ash is right behind me, though. He’ll help you sort things out!”
Diamond needed no encouragement. What she lacked in judgment, she made up in boldness, darting through the concourse toward the platform. “Mom! You need to get us to the front of the queue.”
Violetta was already working on that, muttering to the platform noncon, directing it to summon an emergency bullet.
The noncon argued over the request: “Hunter Gamiao, there is no authorization for an emergency bullet.”
She answered as she ran: “I am issuing my own authorization.”
Her authority extended that far, though an order out of headquarters could override her.
Ash had reached the plaza. He sounded winded and desperate and furious when he demanded to know, “What are you doing? Where are you going? Why do you need an emergency bullet?”
“I’ve got this, Ash. You’ve got to trust me.”
Ahead of them, electronic doors observed their approach and opened, admitting them to the transit platform. It was crowded with more than a hundred citizens milling around, waiting for the next long pod.
Violetta gripped Diamond’s shoulder. With her other hand she drew her stunner, holding it high wh
ere it could be easily seen. And then in an authoritarian voice she said, “Stand aside. There is an emergency in progress. Everyone, move back.”
Maybe it was her take-no-prisoners tone, or maybe it was the stunner, but they shrugged and shuffled out of the way. Diamond led; Violetta followed her. A tiny, two-person bullet glided in to meet them at the edge of the platform. The hatch slid open—but across the platform, the electronic doors opened too, admitting Ash. He saw her and shouted, “The revolutionary told me what you’re doing! You need to stop. Don’t take this any further.”
“Get in,” Violetta said grimly, gesturing to her daughter. And then she called to Ash, “It’s on me! I’m going to make this work.”
He wasn’t buying it. He raised his stunner, aiming across the crowd. “Everyone down!”
No one went down. Instead, they looked at one another with confused expressions. Wasn’t this just a dust-up between hunters? No one wanted to be the first to go down and risk looking like a fool.
Violetta used the moment to follow Diamond through the hatch. She dropped into the rear crash couch. Diamond was strapping in up front.
The hatch slid shut.
“Destination?” the bullet’s cheerful noncon asked.
“Nexus!” Diamond yelled.
“That is a restricted destination,” the noncon said. “Please stand by while I confirm your authority.”
“It’s on my authority,” Violetta snapped. A series of thuds resounded against the hull. Ash, she presumed, expressing his frustration. “Launch us to Nexus now.”
“Open. This. Hatch!” Ash shouted through her earbuds, each word accompanied by another hard thud.
The assault on its hull did not dampen the bullet’s perky tone. “Right away, Hunter Gamiao. Your destination is Nexus. Cleared to launch.”
There was a faint vibration, a hint of motion. The hull went quiet as they moved away from the platform. In the sudden silence, Violetta’s thoughts turned to Ismo and the twins—and she felt the weight of what she’d just done; she dreaded the consequences. But she’d had no choice. Diamond had been recruited, and Violetta was the only one who could make that right.
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