by Barnes, John
8.
It took a while to get leave. I had not expected how easy it would be to drive across the country — but then most of the people who did things connected with the highways were young enough to survive. Only the major cities had had to use mass graves, and the only places that had really collapsed were ones with a lot of people past forty: Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit, and Sun Belt places like Miami or Phoenix.
For the rest, a couple of backhoe operators and a few people who had already gotten over the disease could toss the bodies in, so that if a town of twenty thousand lost two thousand people in two hundred days, they only had to dig ten extra holes per day. You could even keep the graves marked and allow people to hold graveside services if they wanted them.
I made good time, and when I got to my home town, sure enough, Gwenny, Daddy, and Mama were already gone. I might have figured it would be that way.
I walked over that river bridge one more time, and something gleaming in the stream caught my eye. It seems like a vivid, accurate memory. Just possibly a Boy Scout knife. Just possibly I climbed down the bank, stripped to the waist, and dove for it, bringing that knife up like a trophy only to get chewed out by a policeman, as I stood there in the hot July sun, shivering with the cold of the river.
Just as possibly I saw a Scout knife in a shop, had a fit of sentimentality, and bought it. For that matter maybe I just needed a pen knife and bought a Boy Scout knife without thinking, not even in that town, but a year or two later. I can’t trust my memory.
I don’t know about the matchbook, either. Maybe I went into Gwenny’s, found the diner under new ownership, and picked up an old matchbook, because they were trying to get rid of them. Maybe I had carried one of those matchbooks for all of the ten years since I’d left.
Maybe I left a flower on Mama’s grave, but several documents on the werp say I dreamed that, later, a recurring dream that wouldn’t leave me alone for weeks and months. Of course you can dream a memory as easily as remember a dream.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t creep into the emergency burial ground at night, find the right numbered marker, pull down my pants, and take a crap on my father’s grave, a huge, wet, sour-smelling one that left my butt smeared with shit, despite my best efforts with the paper towel I had brought, till I could get back to the hotel and clean it off in the shower.
Pretty sure I didn’t.
2
Its Hour Come Round at Last
1.
It’s the fifth day and I’ve got all kinds of crap recorded, but when I read it or play it back, it doesn’t seem to be what I intended it to be. And I already have a sense that I was at least dimly aware of lying while I was doing it.
I changed the truth. Sometimes I maybe made something up to fill in a gap and forgot to say that’s what I was doing, and sometimes I left something embarrassing out. I don’t know. It’s already getting hard to keep straight and I’ve only been awake for less than a week.
I guess now I don’t blame myself for the mess that was in my werp when I woke up. And I sure as hell wish I’d been able to write as well as Sadi could talk, or something, because I look and I find it took me a whole afternoon to write: “Then the man came out from the KGB with Harris and he said go back to the car so Harris did. He told me about the AIDS vaccination and the memories and the long life, and then he left. I don’t know what he looked like, I don’t think I ever remembered, I don’t think there was much to remember. Later I heard Harris was dead and I kind of wondered.” And then the story shows up three more times, different each time I talked it into the werp, and it’s not any better in any of those versions. I can already see where in fifteen years there’ll be another mess to get through but I don’t know how to do any better.
I keep thinking about that ad. “I haven’t seen weather like this since I was a kid in Ohio.” Password the Organization assigned to me in the first envelope I ever found in that cabinet. I think. Or maybe sent to me on a secure channel scramble. Or something like that. Or something else. But anyway it’s definitely my old Organization password.
Somebody knew I’d be waking up on Mars right around now. I checked and the ad started to run two months ago. The documents in my werp don’t show that I knew so precisely when I would transit. Somebody knows me better than I know myself, but they don’t know exactly where I am, and they want me to call them.
Maybe “exactly where I am” is the only information I have that they don’t. In that case I shouldn’t give that up.
I watch some stories on the werp, drink some orange juice, and read over a lot of what I have written and recorded in the last few days, checking new documents against older documents, fixing them up, which makes them sort of lumpy and awkward, but I don’t care about that much, even though some of it might be confusing later.
Later I’m sitting and looking out the window. Maybe today I will figure out the pressure suit and go outside. Seems like a lot of bother just to breathe air that smells stale and too warm. Getting back into city air was always a treat in all my long years as an ecoprospector. Was I one? I check the werp, and yes, I was, for more than twenty years in two different i.d.‘s.
I have to assume I did my best to tell the truth to the werp. If I didn’t at least do that much, there’s no hope.
I am standing by the window. It’s a change from sitting.
The waves roll across the water and onto the beach. Air pressure’s clear up to a kilo per centimeter squared, and temperature here on the equator has reached 6 Celsius. The air out there isn’t breathable for us — too much carbon dioxide and not enough oxygen — but it’s getting there.
A motion catches my eye. I look to see what it is, and the oncoming bug seems to come straight at my face like an arrow. Involuntarily I flinch away, then laugh. Stupid reaction. Thick glass.
The bug flips up sideways, big wings spread wide in the thin air, and air-brakes its way to the window.
It might have started from dragonfly stock, or maybe grasshopper; I’m no expert. For all I know it’s a honeybee or a butterfly, heavily genaltered. But the body looks more like a dragonfly’s than anything else. The wings are big and gauzy, with a jointed “rib” so they can furl like a bird’s, and huge in proportion to the body. I see tissue heaving back and forth inside the big holes that stud its body. A science program on the werp said that Marsform bugs can “scavenge the five percent free oxygen and two percent free methane from the atmosphere comfortably, metabolizing them internally as a primary energy source.”
Marsform. That’s the word for what this bug is. Adjective or noun, meaning “genaltered Earth organism created as part of the terraformation project.” Another part of my memory whispers that there’s another word floating around out there, “Moonform.” Are they terraforming Earth’s moon too, then?
I am fascinated, watching the bug. It sits, breathing-holes heaving and whatever’s inside them squirming, on the glass, for long minutes, and I stare at it. I want to move to see if it will react, but the only reaction it could have would be to fly away, and I don’t want that. And though its ruby red compound eyes point toward where I stand, a neglected cup of cold coffee in my hand, I have no way of knowing whether or not it sees me, whether the glass is even transparent to it.
Finally it flies away. I check via werp. Yes, Marsform is a word, has been for a long time. Yes, Moonforms are now developing and the first ones are beginning to spread out over the face of Luna, where the first rains have already fallen for a decade or so. The moon is the colonies’ major base against Resuna. Yes, Resuna’s Earth. No, Resuna’s not a new name for Earth. It’s all very confusing. Just the name Resuna invites too many puzzles.
I find myself drifting through, thinking about words that came along in all those years. Marsform and Moonform, PSCs and dolebirds, vags and tagrats, supras, One True, MAM … I start to ask the werp, and somehow every definition seems to bring up Sadi. What I remember more than anything else is this: my parents were useless. G
wenny was in it for what she could get. The little teenage pussies were useless, and the Army buddies, and the KGB. I had two friends, maybe, this Alice girl that I’m trying to track down in the werp, and Sadi.
So I think about Resuna and I remember when Sadi and I first heard of it. Sadi was scared to death of memes, hated them, every so often he’d start crying about our having killed the Hughsons, the couple that had run the Freecyber movement, because “Honest to Jesus, Josh, Hughson was the last hope maybe we all had, and I shot him. I let One True get his basic ideas. And it’s turned the Freecybers that were supposed to protect us and liberate us into Resuna.”
So I was always slow, I guess, so I asked him again what it was, and he said, “You know how superfast computers are MPPs, massively parallel processors?”
“I’d forgotten what it stands for, but yeah, I know they work by doing a lot of stuff at the same time. Millions or billions of little computers dividing the problem up between them and pretending to be one big computer.”
“Well, years ago they found out that any algorithm a serial computer can do, a massively parallel one can do using cellular automata. You know what those are?”
“Sadi, I do electronics. Or I used to. Sure. All those little computers have a simple program that doesn’t do much in just one of them, but by passing results to each other they produce an effect. Like people doing the wave in a stadium; the program is just ‘stand up when your neighbor does, and then sit down’ but you get these big complex patterns moving through the stadium. Or like ant colonies; the individual ants don’t know much, the queen doesn’t know much, but the colony pulls in food and fights wars and all. Satisfied? I know this stuff.”
“Easy, Paladin,” he said. “You’ll break your toy.”
I looked down to see I was almost crushing the white knight between my fingers. “Guess I’m more upset than I thought I was,” I said. “Or maybe I don’t want to know what you’re explaining. So that’s what Resuna is? One identical personality for everyone, human or AI, on Earth, that will add up to One True?”
“You’ve got it all right,” he said. “Every other meme you can at least destroy, locally, by killing a carrier, and every other meme requires a long time to download, you have to get tricked into talking to it for hours in realtime. But Resuna is so simple, it’ll spread like a bad cold in an airport. And the more it copies, the bigger and stronger One True gets.”
I remember dropping the knight. I had been doing magic tricks and sleights of hand with it for so long, so unconsciously, that I hadn’t dropped it or even fumbled it in years. I guess I was realizing how close to the end of it all we were getting. Not long after that the thing in our tent — no, I don’t remember the thing in our tent. I check the werp, seeing what’s there, and I find two different confessions from Sadi that he killed me, three confessions from me that I killed him.
I sigh, stare at the screen, think that maybe I’ll look into that Alice problem next. Who was she, what happened to her, why did she matter to me? I’m sort of hoping that story will have just one ending.
I look at my list of mystery words and I didn’t mean to, I was going to do something else, anything else, but I spend the afternoon going through the documents on the werp yet again, and talking into it again, and even typing though I know now that my writing’s even worse than my talking. It comes out badly, always badly.
2.
Got back from my long leave. I’d seen enough graves. Things were getting back to normal.
The Pentagon had decided that Russia was still Soviet even if it wasn’t Communist anymore, and that the Unaffiliated Republics didn’t look as unaffiliated as they first had — especially after the coups that added Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Romania to the Free Soviet Association. Lots of panicking and running around in circles screaming among the brass and at the State Department, I guess. Down at my level, it just meant that we would be moving “forward” — closer to Russia — and that meant the base outside Prague.
Maybe that’s when I gave up the RX-7. It was some years old when I bought it back in 1984, and it was a lot older now. I’d given it a lot of loving attention. I loved the weirdness of its Wankel engine, the way it looked. And it had carried my RADARGUY plate a long time.
I maybe figured it wouldn’t stay in any kind of condition in storage, and sold it to a guy, or I wrecked it, or it broke down for good. Hell if I can remember. Or rattier I remember two different buyers, two different wrecks, and one time a kid torched it on the street.
My stuff went into about ten crates. One of them would have had the key and book of matches, in a little jewelry box with a lock I think. Probably the knife too. Hell if I can remember that either.
“The Central European Union was always a pretty silly idea,” Sadi said, years later, just babbling about it while we were getting drunk in that doctor’s house. The Organization had a line on some guy that wouldn’t stop doing longtimer research after plenty of warnings, so they gave him to Sadi and me. We had tied up him and his family, trashed his house, serbed his wife and daughter in front of him and cut up their faces, reminding him it was all his fault, then given him a direct shot of PCP. Probably he’d be raving mad the rest of his life.
We’d also liberated a lot of good wine, and now we were drinking it while we admired those two women’s bloody underwear, nailed as trophies to the wall of our house in Kansas.
Whenever Sadi got into the second bottle he would get off on one of his explain-the-world-to-me intellectual tears. “All the CEU was was the re-creation of Austria-Hungary with the capital in a nicer town. And on top of that buying Slovenia from Yugoslavia, and Lithuania from the Free Soviet Association, bankrupted it before it began. It was one of those stupid ideas only politicians could come up with.”
I was drunk at the time, and I didn’t argue with him. If I had, he’d have made fun of my argument. He always said I argued stupidly, like a kid, always “but I like this” or “but it doesn’t look like that” and never used logic. Sometimes we’d shout at each other about that.
So I didn’t tell him why I didn’t agree, but my reason was true all the same. I liked living in the CEU for those five years, and especially I liked living in Prague where the capital was. One of the best places I’ve ever lived really.
The spirit of the CEU was sort of like old-fashioned American city politics: pave streets, collect garbage, divide spoils, believe nothing. Without the threat of the FSA, they’d never have come together; with it, they just barely did, and got up the guts to ask for American help.
Although officially the Organization no longer existed, it had a lot of fingers deep into the FSA, and just about as many fingers into the CEU leadership. From our standpoint it didn’t matter a rat’s ass who won. We were in it for ourselves, by ourselves.
That still sounds so much tougher than life was. The CEU, from Poland down to Slovenia, was a place where you could afford about anything you liked if you had hard currency, especially if you could spend your whole paycheck like I did (knowing my Organization pay was piling up). I had a small house in the Nove Mesto, which came complete with Maja, a fat blonde girl who did the dishes and laundry, swept out, tidied up, and stayed the night (for a little extra) whenever I wanted some ass.
In 1996 I barely paid any attention to JFKJr getting elected, just enough to get all the jokes — most servicemen pronounced it “Juh Fuck Jer.” Far as I could see he only got elected because who else would anyone recognize that had survived mutAIDS? And maybe it was a lingering effect of Mama and Grandpa’s influence, but it sure seemed to me that one white law-school grad in a suit was a lot like another, and it didn’t much matter which one was the President. The big event for me that year was deciding to bail from the Army and start being a private contractor, which meant doing the same work for twice the pay and most of the same benefits, not to mention getting access to a lot more material for the Organization since now I could work on all kinds of additional projects.
It also mean
t I was under a lot less restriction on how I led my life, and so usually any party was at my house. I guaranteed dope, pills, coke, whatever, and plenty of young women, and got people used to the idea that I was always shooting pictures — they were still used to film, it didn’t occur to them that a wireless digital camera makes a lot more than one print if you want it to. I would tack up the pictures that rolled out of the printer on the bulletin board right away, and most people forgot to take theirs home, forgot they had ever existed.
Since you never knew who might get promoted, or what might come in handy, every couple of weeks I’d label the pictures stored on my hard disk with who was in them, date, and whatever other information — “That’s Captain Gerry Clemson and the girl’s fifteen” — and send it off by Internet to an address in Iran.
In the fall of 1999, the election of 2000 was shaping up to be a lot more interesting than the previous one, and that afternoon there was to be a big news special on the Armed Forces Flashchannel, a “Meet the Candidates” thing, where the six Republicans and four Democrats that had announced after Kennedy was indicted would all be talking about themselves. What with mutAIDS and most of the Senate being in their thirties, it was a race between people you’d never heard of, and what with better information tech, the one thing you were sure to know about them was the dirt. I had just bought a flashchannel set and everyone wanted to play with it. So I had a pretty good party over at my place. I expected to get some pictures and get some people talking about stuff they weren’t supposed to.
What everyone liked about flashchannel in those early days was that you could call up a commentary in the inset screen, so that you could juxtapose a senator making his pitch with a couple claiming he’d molested their children, or with footage of bands playing and troops marching, depending on how you felt about it. Later on people started to claim flashchannel was “better” news or “more complete” — the original sales pitch was “news the way you want to see it.”
