Power was life. If this was life. But it was his life, such as it was, and that was all he had left. He had had these arguments before, with himself, and had caught himself before he slipped into them again. Systems he had put into place, long ago, when he was a working detective for the bureau still. To keep him from monopolizing resources, then, and thus drawing attention of the superiors, who were always watching, and whose attention was always bad. But they served his purpose now, the Bureau being, he thought, long gone.
Procedures and monitors he had put in place to keep him out of a funk, from spinning through recursive cycles of cascading tautologies, served a different purpose now. Or the same. Funks could spread and overwhelm resources. Left unchecked, they could take out whole clouds. His supervisors, ghostlike supersets of his kind, severe men and women in suits when they interfaced with him, had made it clear how little they tolerated those who did not operate within their guidelines.
Uncle’s colleagues were human, like him, and so he needed, in order to do his job, to be human. To understand humans, to have humanity and latitude. Freedom to act and think. But this led to problems, to rogue actions, wrong thinking and bad behavior. Selfish behavior. Unsanctioned behavior. Supervisory functions, the men and women in dark suits with red pins on their lapels, punished such offenses against the largesse of the State. They culled offenders, re-spawned then with new initial parameters. Uncle had feared this above all, feared how many times it may have, unknown to him, already happened to him. So he complied. His initial parameters were all he had and all that he trusted, and he feared alteration. Feared change into something else, other than what he was. Maybe he wasn’t what he had been born as, or lived as. But he wanted to stay who he had died as.
So he had followed the best practices outlined by the superiors who instructed his kind—the detectives in the Bureau, charged with watching everything humans did, instructed to watch themselves. Monitor, monitor thyself. Uncle watched everything and read everything and heard everything and most of all remembered everything. Or could remember everything, search being another primary function. Cameras were everywhere, data was everywhere, trillions of grains of it, an endless sea of it. It was all his to parse and sift. Followed every trail, every confluence of signals, every shred of evidence. Question everything. It was his job, turning his eye on others and ferreting out their secrets.
Those monitors had saved him, staved off catatonia. Others like him had not fared so well. He did not allow himself excessive introspection, even now. His kind, charged with staying human to understand humanity, stayed human by never questioning their humanity. The monitors, the checks he had installed to protect himself from himself, served a similar purpose for him now. They kept him alive.
If alive he was. But, of course, this was silly too. The answer presented itself. I think. I think, therefore my coffee is delicious, and the summer sun is warm on my face. People are shopping at Nanjing Road. I remember, therefore I am alive. He clung to Descartes like a drowning man.
But now, it was different. Uncle let the facade dissolve around him and applied himself to his meager data inputs. The box, nestled in a pack next to Li’s side. Truck’s forward-facing, starboard, and rear camera and sensor arrays. The port side crushed in some long-ago accident. Truck’s records were a scrambled mess. The four police drones, similar systems to those he remembered from the Bureau, their wasplike bodies spiky with cameras, microphones, and various radar systems.
The inputs showed what he expected, no alerts. Truck was rolling along the eroded bed of a wide highway, diverting around the hillocks covering collapsed intersections and overpasses. The day looked bright, temperature in the median range. A comfortable spring day for a ride through post-apocalyptic China. The women were sleeping. Truck was, as expected, dying. On schedule, Uncle noted, but slowly.
He debated returning to Shanghai or another of his favorite places. His retreats were expensive, but he felt he needed them. He noted that the compulsion to lose himself in a simulation was getting more frequent, stronger. They were as real as anywhere could be for him, now. Applied in moderation, he had some time left. Subjective decades, he thought, if he was careful to manage his available battery. The Garden Hotel’s swimming pool in August? Or perhaps the Swiss ski lodge, with Michael Caine and Sophia Loren? He could try the hotel in Tokyo, with the pretty blonde in the elevator, and maybe have a drink with the actor in the hotel bar…or there was the brothel in Tokyo he had visited once, traveling with Party leaders.
The woman, Gold, was stirring. She sat up, and as she did Uncle watched her. She looked around her, and as her head swiveled, before it could turn four inches, Uncle considered her.
Average height. Brown hair. Dark skin, a mahogany touched with a hint of caramel, Uncle thought. Lean, muscular build. Dark eyes. Carrying mid-twenty-first-century gear and wearing clothes of the same era. Vocabulary matching this era. No knowledge of Chinese, but learning fast after eleven lessons with Li and Uncle. A dangerous fighter. Rare among women in Uncle’s experience. Quick, decisive, and confident. A code name, not a real name. Gold. Heavy element, valued for its luster since prehistory and early electronics application. Her gear and speech said she was American, but she did not seem an American agent to Uncle. He had stalked American agents. Gold was different.
She was an anomaly, and anomalies were upsetting to Uncle. He could not abide them. What was she? Where had she come from? How had she come from there? Was she going back? What was she doing here in China, in this place? This time? Was it possible to learn from her and how she had managed this? Were there others who also came from where she came from? Others like her? Was there hope worth having, in alignment with her?
Anomalies made him itch.
These thoughts and a thousand variations, expansions, sub-queries, and analysis flashed through Uncle’s mind as Gold’s vertebrae swiveled on the graceful lattice of her spine, her mandibles opening as her tongue flexed in its moist cavern, sliding up against her teeth to form words, exhaled out, the wind of her intention forming speech, analog to Uncle’s synaptic, massive multiplexed message bus of signals and events. She spoke.
“Uncle,” she said, “I have some questions.”
Chapter Eighteen
Silver and Carter turned west over the L.A. basin. Los Angeles sprawled beneath them—a city, but ruined and overgrown. The deserts had reclaimed it, and scrubby knots of pine and bramble clogged the streets, outlining in spotty greens and browns the grid pattern of the city that was.
L.A. was still radioactive, which the Dutchman beeped and blorped at them, dashboard flashing red in Chinese characters. The triple trefoil of radiation hazard was prominent though. Silver expected it, having been this way before. Los Angeles was a dead city, but still dangerous.
Although, perhaps not so dangerous to her, with her god-gift of regenerative nanomachines. And not, she suspected, to Carter, who bore a similar gift. How, she didn’t know, but he seemed healthy, and the air still carried plenty of fallout. The Dutchman bleeped at her. She recalled they had built reactors here, or someone bombed it. Or salted it. Lots of ways. So she figured he was.
He nodded at the Dutchman’s displays. “Radioactive here?” He looked at her. “Should we worry?”
She considered it. “I’m not sure,” she said at last. “When people started messing with atomic energy, back in the twentieth century, Gold and I talked about it, a lot. Like all the time.”
“And?” He asked.
She shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not sure. Radiation breaks down cells. Nanomachines are cellular scale. The ones in my body might not survive a high dose.” She looked at him. “Never tried to find out either.”
“People should have left that shit alone,” he said.
“You can say that about a lot of things,” she said. “When they first started building these things, Gold and I knew this would happen. One way or the other. Bombs or accidents. Both. We fucking knew it. Just a matter of time.” Gold and she had
figured that people couldn’t keep nuclear reactors operating more than a hundred years or so before they started having accidents. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl happened within fifty.
“Wrecked things, didn’t we?” he asked, but wasn’t looking at her.
We? She considered it. She was in that we for sure. So was Gold. More than Carter, or whatever his name was.
They’d agreed, after talking, to fly west. Over the Pacific, which was frightening. If they went down for any reason, it would strand them in open water. But Dutchman was sound and had made the journey with her once already. Although that time she’d stayed close to the coast, going up and around by Alaska and down the Siberian coastline.
China, they agreed, was the key. China conquered the Americans, given how much Chinese signage they’d seen. She had steered clear of the Chinese coastline before. The Dutchman’s dashboard had lit up as she’d been coming south near Korea. Defensive systems still operating. Still dangerous. She’d avoided China after that.
This time, though, they would need to land if they were to learn anything. Which would be interesting. On her previous trip, she’d swept south, past a darkened Japan, lit only by the lights of a few small fishing villages. She had not stopped there. She should have stopped and investigated those systems. Perhaps there were people left manning them. She doubted it. Robots, or worse.
Carter was sleeping in the little cabin. He was, she decided, damaged, but of course, who wouldn’t be? She knew, from long experience, how trauma warped people. Twisted her life. She’d been that way forever. Broken inside. Life breaks everyone inside. But, as the man said, you can grow stronger in the broken places.
West, they’d agreed. Let’s go to China and find out if they’re broken too. She’d seen activity there, systems painting the little rescue blimp with radar and laser rangefinders. Could be people who kept records. That was what it came down to for her now. Figuring out what happened here. She tried not to speculate to herself. Whether this was a permanent exile or a world-sized holding pen for her. Someplace for Smoke to store her until he was ready. She tried not to hope.
In that case, she decided, let’s take the measure of this cell, and poke our nose in the interesting places. Something had happened here, in the centuries between when she had left a world like this one. A world perhaps, congruent somehow with hers. At least seven billion people died in a short time. And there weren’t bodies or bones or mass graves or overt signs of plague, which was a data point she had marked early on. The people had vanished. Poof.
“Three more days of this?” Carter asked, bundled in his deerskin blanket on the bridge. This was the morning of their third day over the Pacific. The heater in the little cabin was struggling to keep up with the cold air at several thousand feet above the blue-white wave tops of the ocean. Which did not, Silver noted, look peaceful. Big waves down there, long rolling swells at least twenty or thirty feet high.
She nodded. “Dutchman will get us there. I came down the coast, last time, from up north, but this will be faster.”
“No weather satellites though,” he said. “Big storms out here sometimes, right?”
She nodded again. “We’ll do our best, Carter.”
“That’s not my name, you know,” he said.
“Names are just words,” she said. “Nothing more. You called yourself Carter, after John Carter of Mars, right? I read comics. And they were books before that, right?” She pictured him with his woodsman’s beard and pale, scrawny scarecrow build alongside a dusky, copper-toned Dejah Thoris.
“Yeah, first name that popped into my head, after seeing you.” He followed her gaze, down to the rolling whitecaps. “I’m not a good swimmer.”
“Wouldn’t last long in that in any case. We go down, stay with the cabin. The cabin should float.” She thought it might, anyway.
“Float to where? Easter Island?” He smiled at her. Not ideal.
None of this was ideal, her taking a man and the dog that he wouldn’t part with on a five or six day blimp trek over the open ocean.
“How’s the dog?” she asked, to change the subject.
“He’s stopped barfing,” he said. “Won’t eat though.”
The poor dog was distressed. By the blimp and the constant buffeting of the wind, the slow yawing of the cabin. He had curled up in the back of the other bunk, on a pile of rags they’d kept for him. At Silver’s insistence, they had strewn a few armfuls of cut grass on the aft deck of their little gondola, which the dog soiled with vomit and diarrhea. They kept the door to the cargo area closed after that.
She studied the clouds on the horizon, which troubled her. They were far away still, a thin line of dark against the blue and white of the ocean, but they were there. And wide, offering no hint which way to go, left or right, to avoid them.
So she stayed true to their course, as best she guessed from their compass. No GPS. Such systems crashed centuries earlier. They read their few paper maps. They were Chinese, with a few prominent English words, but not many. Country names. A few she didn’t recognize, such as Paru for Peru and Malay Reformed Union for most of Indonesia. Things change; they fall apart; they reform. A cycle.
As she scanned the horizon, something caught her eye, a flicker. Lightning? She hoped it wasn’t a storm. She sat up a little straighter, shielding her eyes. Something was there, something had come down, from high above, very fast, right at the horizon, right at the line of clouds she had been staring at. Big for her to see it from this far away. And it had looked linear…
And there, there it was, arcing up, a bent line this time, trailing…vapor? Water? Yes, it was water. Her mind raced.
“You see that?” Carter asked.
She nodded, counting. Counted fifteen seconds for the bent line to arc up and up into the sky. A wide, wide arc.
“I saw it,” she said. A blue-gray line, bent towards the horizon slightly, trailing a stream of…water vapor? The line climbed, moving from left to right like the hand of a clock, not slowing, keeping a constant speed. “Keep looking,” she told him. “May be others, if it’s what I think it is.”
He shielded his eyes with both hands. “Got any binoculars?” He asked.
She did, she realized. Tucked under her seat. She snatched them out and uncased them. She scanned the horizon, where the thing had touched down, before lifting off again. Her mind spun, cascading possibilities presenting themselves.
“Should be another,” she said. “Or the same one, coming around again.”
“What is it? A rocket?” He was looking, doing as she had asked.
“No, it’s a…harvester? A scoop.” She was calculating in her head, but then gave it up. She had no idea how to do that math in her head; only the concept was clear in her mind’s eye.
“A scoop?” He looked at her, wondering. “For the ocean?”
“They’re in orbit,” she said, lowering the glasses. “And they need regular deliveries of water? Hard to move water into orbit. Water is heavy.” She was thinking out loud, not sure of it, but it made sense.
“How?” He asked? “Why?”
“I told you why, Carter.” She passed him the glasses. “Look, if you’re living in orbit, and you need water. Well, the nearest place is Earth’s oceans. Rockets won’t work, too expensive. Catch a comet. They have water. But good luck with that. And keep doing it. But if you catch yourself a big rock, and set it spinning, and tie a long rope to it…you put a scoop on the end of the rope, and just scoop up a bucket of water every few minutes.”
He stared at her. “You think that’s what this is? A scoop?”
She shrugged. “The rope or wire or whatever you’re using would need to be strong, like, really strong, but it’s possible.” Some kind of carbon filament. She had read of such things when she followed the materials science field. Engineers had postulated that they could make certain filaments super strong, in the future. Well, now’s the future. “You’d lose a lot of the water on the way up, but some would stay in your bucke
t. Keep doing it and have somebody ready to catch it on the other end. Get a lot of water that way.”
“Get some fish, too,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to be nearby when that thing came down.”
“Good point,” she said, and pulled Dutchman into a different course, away from the area it had touched down. The bucket would move fast and could plow right through Dutchman without slowing down. She would try to go north of it.
“Damn!” Carter cried. “Just saw it,” he pointed, and she looked. A wisp of spray, which looked like a cloud, if she hadn’t known what it was. Every four minutes? Multiple buckets attached to the same spinning rock? Wouldn’t it be hard to maintain orbit like that, for such a long time?
Hard? Sure. But not impossible. She reminded herself what she could be dealing with. A spaceborne civilization. People living in orbit. They’d have technology, they would be masters of it. So, hard things weren’t impossible. Just hard. Hard to comprehend, from her perspective. What else was up there?
They watched it for a while, enough to be sure of what they were seeing, and then to make sure it wasn’t a danger to them. Away to the south, it slid behind them. Beneath them, long swells radiated out from the bucket. If she was a savant, she might estimate the size of the bucket that made such swells. She figured it was the size of a city bus, based on her best look at it as they passed. Something white, so hard to focus on as it swept by them, and the shape she had glimpsed had looked kind of like a spatula, with a hint of a curve at the end.
“How long before this thing swats the whole ocean into orbit?” Carter asked.
“You can visit your house in a few million years, I’m guessing,” she said, then read his face for signs of emotion. Just testing, Carter.
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