“I thought you were in charge,” she said. “Mistaken assumption on my part then.” She added, “I’ll talk with the owner of the boat about it, then.”
“You might have to do more than talk,” Warren said. “He’ll hold a grudge, that one.”
Silver waved it away. “Least of our worries,” she said. “Not what I am here for anyway.”
Warren leaned forward slightly. “Why are you here? Why are both of you here?” She looked from Gold to Silver and back again.
“I’m here because some magic or technology or whatever sent me here. By someone I think isn’t human anymore. I am not sure why, but there is some plan he has,” she said. “Some plan involving both of us.” She nodded at Gold.
Warren was silent. She looked at her, and Silver waited. Let people find their way. It worked sometimes.
“This is the demon Smoke that you talked about?” She asked, directing it to Gold, who nodded. She turned back to Silver. “You’re not from Command then, I take it?”
Silver shook her head. “Afraid not.” She smiled. “I know where your command is, though.”
“Oh, I know where they are,” Warren said with a laugh. “They’re in Hell, where they belong, or they’re up there.” She pointed with one finger, to the ceiling. “Heaven or somewhere as good as.”
“Somebody’s up there,” Silver said. “I’ve seen things.” She gestured to the west wall. “Out, over the ocean. Big scoop, flinging the ocean into space, one bucket at a time.”
Warren stared. “The Windmill? Someone actually built that thing?” She shook her head. “We found records of it. Plans. I didn’t know it got built.”
“Plans?” Gold said. “For this…scoop thing?” She looked at Silver, back to Warren.
“I…well, we were in the ice for a long time. Hundreds of years. Most of the time the weather sucked. And I mean it sucked. Cold, cold like Siberia cold. But some nights, in the summer, it would only be what I call Wyoming cold, on account of me spending a night camping with my dad, in the snow in Star Valley. That was still cold, but it wasn’t so bad. You get used to it.” She smiled. “I got used to it.”
The pause between them stretched out. Warren smiled again. “Got used to what?” Silver prompted.
“I got used to it, sitting in my little observatory we built on top of the glacier. We carved stairs, landings, up out of the ice. To keep the weight of the damn thing off the caves. We needed to keep it clear of us as it came down. A lot of work. That thing outside. The earth mover. We had a few dozen of those. Fifty-one of them.” She shrugged. “It was a lot of work.”
“So you’ve seen them? Satellites?” Silver asked.
Warren cocked her head at her. Sighed. “I’ve seen them. I’ve got a book cataloging them. Keep it up to date too. We’ve got them mapped, the ones we can see with our telescopes. We learned where they are, so we can calculate the windows for moving shit we don’t want them to see.”
Silver nodded in surprise. “Like what? You’re moving what?” This surprised her.
Warren noted it, nodded at her. “Stuff like telescopes. We tried some rockets, but it was a joke. We wanted to try to shoot one of them down, if we could use a nuke.”
“You have nukes?” Silver heard the surprise in her voice.
Warren laughed. “What do you think is in these caves? I’ve got the bulk of the People’s Republic of China’s nuclear arsenal stored in caves not a thousand yards from here.” She grinned. “What was left over that is. Didn’t see that, did you? You thought I was just some kind of freaky old warlord didn’t you?”
Silver shook her head. “Didn’t know what to expect.” She cocked her eyebrows at Gold. Get this one. Gold gave a tiny shrug.
“I was in charge. We came out here because Russia got shot to shit and it seemed China had survived, sort of. We didn’t know what to expect. So we grabbed it. Wasn’t anyone to stop us. Had teams all over China ferrying nukes. Part of the plan, to secure the fuel, see? Then the weather got bad and pretty soon we realized it was a real problem.”
“The ice,” Silver said. She’d deduced this part, from what Gold had whispered to her. “The glaciers.”
Warren nodded, swallowed. “The planet turned into a snowball. It sucked. Maybe down south, things were warmer. I don’t know.” Warren shrugged, made a sour face. “Anyway.”
“Never went down there to find out? Seems easier.” Silver was treading on ice herself now. Something about Warren changed, shifted. Her jawline jutted a little stronger, the tiny muscles in the upper mandible drew tight.
Warren snorted. “Some of us did, yeah. They didn’t come back.” She shrugged.
“So why did you stay?” Gold asked. “Might have been easier.”
“Never was into easy,” Warren answered her, voice with a cold edge, like touching freezing metal. “I’m a Marine, and it wasn’t easy to get to where I was, hold the command I hold. Keep this command faced with all this. Not as a woman, either.” Her voice was steady, but Silver could see the struggle. An iron discipline that froze out everything but, what, duty? Responsibility? Ego?
Silver pointed at the map. “These lines, they’re like states.” She ran her eye over the map, traced one line with a finger. “But China never had these borders.”
“And you would know this how?” Warren asked, her voice still frosty.
Silver looked up from the map. “I lived here longer than you spent in the ice.” She flicked the paper. “These names, these are American names. They are your troops?”
“Their regions, yes,” Warren said. “Everybody gets a piece, that was our deal, on the way here.”
“You just carved it up?” Gold asked. She didn’t seem bothered by it.
It didn’t bother Silver either. Conquerors did that. All part of being human. She was more troubled by the number of them. It surprised her that she’d missed the Unit during her first circumnavigation. There were at least two regions bordering Vietnam and Thailand, and she’d been near there. There were a lot of regions.
“How many?” She asked. “How many regions?”
Warren’s eyebrows went up. “Why would you care?”
“Like to know what I’m dealing with. They answer to you.” Flattery. Worth a try.
Warren smirked at her, but Silver could tell she was preening a bit underneath the sarcasm. “More or less. You try riding herd on a thousand ex-military immortals who have all the time in the world to plot against you. Want to know why I didn’t run south to where it might have been a few degrees warmer? That’s why. Wouldn’t have lasted a day. Here, I’ve got leverage.”
“The nukes,” Silver said. “That’s the leverage. Nobody can challenge you.”
Warren nodded.
Silver looked at her. She considered for a long moment and felt her resolution harden. It fit. She needed this woman. “You’re a badass. I get it.” She smiled, not too friendly. Honesty, though, she put into the smile. If she could be honest. If anyone who gauged everything she said for her impact and success could be honest. Was that honesty? She didn’t know. Didn’t everyone do this? Maybe. She didn’t know that either.
“But,” she continued, “I think we can work together. I’d like to work with you.” She looked up at Warren, over to Gold. Gold didn’t nod, but she didn’t need to. There were a dozen ways Gold could have signaled displeasure to her, but Gold was silent, attentive. Calm, but calm with tension. Like a dozen coiled snakes in a basket.
“What,” Warren asked, “is in it for me?”
Gold opened her mouth, but Silver saw it coming and spoke first. “Look,” she said. “I’m old. We’re…old. Much older than you are, and you’re pretty old. Old enough to have seen some shit, right? But we’re much older than you.” She gestured to Gold, who was radiating displeasure at her now. “This one is older than me. She is so old she doesn’t remember her own name. I’ve seen the Ice. I know it’s hard. You’re tough, maybe tougher than me. I would have gone south.”
She smiled. W
arren laughed softly. “But,” she continued, holding up her hand. “Someone did that to you. Something left you stranded here, right? Dosed you with immortality and then scampered up the well. I think I know why you kept it together all these years. Why you took this ground and held it. You held it against the worst things this fucked-up planet could toss at you.”
Warren’s jaw set. “You don’t know me, girlie.”
Silver smiled wider. “Someone did that to you!” she hissed. “Someone stranded you here. They lied to you. Used you. Forgot about you.”
Warren was icy. “Don’t patronize me. You don’t know me,” she said, looking Silver in the eye, her eyes bright with tears. “But you’re not wrong.” She fell silent.
Silver shut up. Gold, however, still had questions.
“Warren,” Gold said, to get the woman’s attention.
Warren shook her head as if to wake herself up. “Yeah?”
“Where is Chen,” Gold asked. “The spider?”
The AI. Silver had wondered. Gold had told her it had fled. Nobody had seen where it had run off to.
Warren shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Then we both know where he is,” Gold snapped. “Because he’s in the mines. With the nukes.”
Warren pursed her lips. “Kind of what I thought too. Not much I can do about it, though. That thing is fast. You want to go down there in the dark with that thing roaming around, be my guest.”
“Close the tunnels?” Silver asked.
“Did that. That day, soon as I thought of it. He could still have gotten in. Or out. There are ways, and Chen knows them just like I do. Better, maybe. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about it, but been drawing blanks. Got any ideas?”
Silver thought for a moment. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?” Warren asked, puzzled. “He could blow us all up at any moment.”
“And himself,” Gold said. “No, he wants something.”
Silver stopped her with a chopping gesture. “It doesn’t matter,” she said again.
Warren and Gold both looked at her. She smiled.
“We’re leaving,” she said. “We’re going to the Elevator. All of us.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Chen waited. He would not need to wait long, he knew. He sat in lotus in a pavilion perched on a mountain cliff. The sky beyond swirled with clouds. There were, perhaps, mountains out there. Or there could be, if he wanted there to be, but he preferred facing the purity of the void. It was reassuring.
The spider, his last physical body, crouched in the elbow of a corridor under the mountain. In the Hall of the Mountain King, they had joked when the Unit had lived there during those long years. Chen had been among them. He reflected, if he had not been among them, they would have perished. They owed him.
And yet, betrayal. Should he have expected it? Planned for it? He had, somewhat, but then events overtook him. He shook his head.
“Recriminations?” Smoke said. He had arrived as he always arrived, without preamble or permission. He had the keys, the cryptographic tokens that revealed Chen’s complete network to him. Smoke was oversight now. There had been oversight, and then for almost ten centuries there had not been. Now there was again. Master and servant. Smoke stood near the pavilion’s railing, looking out into the void. He glanced at Chen.
“I should have been more prepared,” Chen said. Smoke wore only a set of grayish pajamas that looked plain at first sight, but as Chen inspected them, what he thought was a patterned weave began to shift and flow, almost reweaving itself into subtle complexity. It was crass, Chen thought, but Smoke could wear what he liked. He, himself, wore a golden robe, fit for an emperor. Lined with ermine and embroidered in Ferraris and police cars. He had his vanities. Why not?
Smoke smiled at him. No thought I have, Chen thought, that he can’t see, can’t know. I’m a thrall. He waited and tried not to have thoughts.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Smoke said, “but it doesn’t matter.” He gestured. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
“I like it,” Chen said, trying not to say too much. But he could, of course, not help himself. “I know I’m in a simulation, so why pretend otherwise?”
“Like him?” Smoke asked. “He also knew this, didn’t he?”
“He lived in the past,” Chen said. “A fictionalized past. Half that shit never really happened. Or didn’t happen that way.”
Smoke inclined his head. “Let me tell you a story.”
“Tell away,” Chen said. “I am, of course, a captive audience.”
“I could,” Smoke said, “wipe you down to bare registers and do this myself. But then where would we be? So listen.”
“Like I said…” Chen said. He trailed off at a glance at Smoke.
“Now then,” Smoke began. “Once, there was an ape. In Africa. His people lived on the edge of the forest, near the rolling, endless grasslands. There were things in that grass. You follow me?”
“Like in The Lion King?” Chen said. He couldn’t help himself.
“Kind of,” Smoke said. “There were threats. Because of climate change, his people started invading the grasslands. They started hunting.”
“I am not following,” Chen said. “Every schoolboy knows this.”
“There are no more schoolboys though,” Smoke said. “But what they missed is what you miss. Everybody assumes that, well, of course they started hunting. They had to hunt to survive if their ecosystem collapsed on them. They adapted to a new niche, right? From the trees to the plains.”
“Is this relevant?” Chen asked.
“Of supreme relevance, I think,” Smoke said. He pushed off from the railing and began to pace. “Humans became smart because they became hunters. New pressures. New techniques for new challenges. Standing up to see farther. Makes you smarter. Eating meat, giving the brain more protein. Smarter. Planning to outwit prey? Makes you smarter. Using fire. Everything they were doing was making them smarter. They were fruitful and multiplied.” He smiled at Chen.
“And then we became the threat, the things in the grass,” Chen said. “We know this story.” Lived the tail end of it. He was trying, trying hard to not roll his eyes.
Smoke inclined his head. “We? I had nothing to do with this state of affairs. But you grasp my point, I think.” He grinned. “We’re the tail end of that.”
“But didn’t you have something to do with this?” Chen said. “Gold and Silver think you did.”
“Silver,” Smoke said. “What is she?”
“Haven’t met her,” Chen said. “If she’s anything like Gold, then she is formidable.”
“I know she’s dangerous. Dangerous to those around her.” He spread his hands. “I think we need not worry about Silver. She’s just a girl, right?” He laughed. “But what is she? What is Gold?”
“Are they gods?” Chen said, wondering.
“People worshipped them as gods in antiquity. And yet they are not; they are slaves to the gods. Or they were. That circuit broke here, it seems. Why?”
“I am not following,” Chen said. He wasn’t.
“We sent them here, because of my congruent options back, well, back on Earth, twenty-first century Earth that is, led here. Or near here. Believe it or not, I’m not omniscient.”
“Omnipotent,” Chen said, wishing he hadn’t.
Smoke laughed, an open and inviting laugh. “That too. I wish. I am a projection, of a sort, in this place.”
“So am I.” Chen smiled. “But this place is nice.”
“This,” Smoke said, gesturing around him at the pavilion, the white endless fog, Chen himself. “This is a box within a box. Maybe deeper than that. Reality, Chen Wang Bo. Remember that?”
“I do,” Chen said.
“A projection. I was the Center, and the nascent Alpha. But I’m just Smoke. Just a guy from a small town lost as ever in this maze.” He pursed his lips and blew out his cheeks. “I can’t stay here forever. That’s the r
ub. And I’m not sure I’ll be able to come back. At least not to this exact place. Maybe. I don’t know.”
These concepts flowed over Chen as Smoke spoke. The Center. The race to Alpha. Brasilia. The change. Chen parsed them. He looked up.
“So, what do we do?” Chen asked.
“I sent them here because I had to. Sure, maybe I was showing off a bit.” He shrugged. “Sue me, right? This was the place though. All roads,” he made a wide gesture, “lead here. Why?”
“This circuit, that broke,” Chen said. “What did you mean by that?”
“The gods live deep in the earth,” Smoke said. “Why are they silent?”
He’s crazy. Chen had just barely formed the thought when Smoke smiled again.
“I’m not though,” Smoke protested. “At least, I don’t think I am. All tests are passing.”
“Mine too,” Chen said. “But I don’t trust them.”
“No,” Smoke offered. “I wouldn’t trust yours either, sorry. Maybe we can fix that someday.” He sighed. “But the gods, they do live in the Earth.”
More data flowed and Chen saw. Deep, deeper than any human drill had ever probed, were the gods. Where there was heat, and convection, and water, and elements. Safety from whatever chaos ruled the surface. And yet, always listening, dreaming their dreams. Listening for, what, minds? How?
Smoke, Chen realized, did not know. It confounded him. No theory he could devise could crack this. The gods listened to minds somehow. He did not know. The Center had not known. Alpha, newborn, had not known. Stumped.
But listen, they did. And acted. Slow thinkers, but over time, perhaps growing in complexity as their subjects also evolved. More minds, more gods, faster minds, and even the gods adapted. They grew hands. And eyes. Those eyes were pale blue, those hands olive-skinned, and went by the name of Silver.
“That’s what they are,” Chen said. “Tools. Probes. Drones.”
“Just so,” Smoke said. “And the gods spoke to them. Guided them. Rode them. Drove them.” He spread his hands. “But not here. Why?”
“Something happened here,” Chen said, things falling into place. He knew what it was. The fog swirled behind Smoke, an endless, swirling abyss.
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