by Toby Weston
“It’s all been a bit stressful recently, to tell the truth,” says Keith. “I was really looking forward to this trip to Cancun to unwind...”
“Ha, hilarious! And then we turn up and drag you out of an exploding plane to steal a nuclear bomb!”
“Chuck, you twat!” says Terence, clapping his palm to his face.
“Oh, fuck, sorry,” says Chuck. “I forgot—need to know, right?”
“A what?!”
“It’s not a bomb!” Dee says, glaring at Chuck.
“It’s not?” says Chuck, again facing the wrong way. He is clearly not used to travelling in vehicles not capable of driving themselves.
“Chuck, can you please focus on driving? And let’s try to get back to a bit of operational discipline, okay?”
“Yes, Ma’am, copy that,” he says, turning his chair back to a forward-facing aspect and assuming his military persona.
Dee and Terence exchange a look.
“Keith,” Dee then says, “for your piece of mind, it’s not a bomb, and it’s not radioactive—at least, not very. And honestly, it’s better that you don’t know anything else. Okay?”
“Fine. So what about the mosquitoes, then? Or is that classified above my level too?”
Terence looks at Dee again, then says, “Actually, it probably is, but it sounds like you already have some first-hand experience. I’m guessing these friends of yours were Kinfolk?”
“Silicium.”
“So, being rescued by a Kin grasshopper probably puts you inside the fence here. What do you say, Dee?”
“We can always just kill him if he can’t keep his mouth shut,” Dee offers.
“Thanks for that,” Keith says, looking back to Terence in the hope of more constructive input.
“The BugNet is basically the Internet of Animals,” Terence explains. “Special little MeshNodes scattered around, ready to be eaten by rats, cats, crows, whatever… you get the picture. They interface with the animal’s body by growing into their brains and optic nerves. It gives the animal something like Spex, and if you get them young enough, they can learn a language of symbols.”
“Electronic brain parasites? That doesn’t sound very Earth Mother to me!”
“I know. I always found that bit a little icky. But once integrated, we can interact with them, communicate, and they can communicate with each other.”
“You are not going to tell me you make cyborg mosquitoes and then ask them not to bite people?”
“No, insects are too basic to communicate with symbols.”
“And my grasshopper?”
“Probably just remote controlled.”
“Okay. So, I still can’t quite see how this works.”
“It’s pretty basic economics, really,” continues Terence. “We pay the BugNet to kill mosquitoes.”
“Come again?”
“Mosquitoes are tagged in the BugNet to be removed and given a financial reward value. I imagine they are highlighted, somehow, to the chipped critter…”
“The lucky furry fucker who ate the brain chip, right?” Chuck asks.
“Yeah, that’s it,” replies Terence. “So, let’s say a mosquito flies past, in the animal’s vision it gets tagged, like Spex overlays. The animal learns it will get a reward if it eats the mosquito. So, it does, and receives some credits it can spend at vending machines across the islands.”
“Are you telling me, mice are queuing up to buy cheese at a vending machine with their mosquito bounty?” asks Keith.
“Well, in the case of mosquitoes, the vigilantes are mostly bats, and they tend to buy crickets with their Coin. But essentially, yes.”
The RV cruises on. They plunge through utterly deserted towns. Cab-less delivery trucks, oblongs on tiny wheels, make up 90% of the road traffic, trundling between warehouses and scruffy little homes with overgrown gardens. The delivery bots are non-judgemental towards the blinking, overweight, digital-displacees, who brave brief forays into the environment to pick up their care packages.
In the South, even before global warming turned up the thermostat, reliance on air conditioning had always kept most of the productive activity confined to the interiors of buildings. For journeys between enclaves of protected environment, cars provided mobile bubbles of clement climate. Now that digital travel—game spaces and shared geometries—had made most journeys unnecessary, RL was becoming depopulated.
Terence had scooted up front with Chuck, leaving Keith and Dee to chat in the lounge section. She seems genuinely interested, so he catches her up on the last few years of his life. She has seen her fair share of violence as Niato’s go-to girl for special projects, but she still looks shocked as Keith recounts details from his stint policing Europe’s many ongoing listless genocides.
From Dee, Keith gathers that Niato has a lot of irons in the fire and that the to-do list for a new monarch out to save the world is long and eclectic.
The scenery remains flat, and Keith is surprised when they suddenly pull up next to a bleached wooden jetty, sticking out into a narrow creek. Chuck and Terence swivel their chairs backwards, and Dee gets up and starts boiling water in the little kettle.
Terence opens the door, and the rats appear from wherever they have been slinking and bound out. The door is left open, despite what Keith estimates is a high probability of mosquito visitation.
“Can’t we shut the door?”
“Nope, got to listen. Our contact might be early,” Dee replies.
“What’s next then?” Keith asks.
“Okay, so Chuck and I will continue on to New Orleans,” Terence explains. “You and Dee will hop out here. It’s too much trouble getting people in and out of CONUS since they went all paranoid, so we don’t get to go home, sob sob. We will just have to lurk around here somewhere, until we are needed again. Few weeks in New Orleans sound good to you, Chucky?”
“I think I could survive it,” he smiles.
Dee brings over four cups of green tea, a bunch of bananas and a family-sized bag of crisps. There is a definite tension. They don’t want to worry him, but Keith gets the impression this is a crucial part of the plan. A rat hops back up the stairs and ‘says’ something to Terence.
“Looks like they are here!” Terence says with obvious relief.
The others jump out of their chairs and head out. Keith follows. Chuck goes back the way they have just driven, tucking a functional black pistol into the back of his trousers as he goes. Dee and Terence walk towards the water. Keith looks around for their contact; he can’t hear a motor yet.
One of the rats is swimming towards them, its furry body undulating and its tiny paws scratching at the water. Keith becomes aware that there is something else in the water. A bulge announces the arrival of a large, sleek muzzle. Keith wants to call out and warn the little animal, but before he can say anything, it surfaces under the rat and raises it smoothly out of the water, carrying it shoreward.
There are three more. They each have a pair of something like long, low, waterproof rucksacks symmetrically strapped to their flanks.
Keith shouldn’t really have been surprised at the nature of the extraction team. The plan becomes clear as they unpack two streamlined dry-suits and scuba cylinders. The contoured helmets, with what can only be described as nostrils on the top, look more like alien spacesuits than diving gear.
“When we are at the surface, the helmet will suck in and compress fresh air,” Dee explains. “If you don’t move too much, we should have a good hour’s supply, just in case we need to sink and lurk for a while.”
The mysterious egg is stowed in one of the emptied dolphin-packs.
The dolphins will be their steeds and scouts, pulling them out of Baffin Bay into the Gulf of Mexico. Silent, invisible, and deniable. Eighty nautical miles will be exhausting for the humans and presumably not much fun for the human-towing dolphins. If compromised, the terrestrial mammals will be left to flounder, while the cetaceans make a dash for open ocean with the precious nuclear-no
t-a-bomb.
If all goes to plan, the humans will slip on board a friendly vessel offshore and start the journey to Bäna and the Kingdom. The low-value assets, Dee and Keith, will take the shortcut through the Panama Canal. The pod of special-ops dolphins will take the long way around, until they reach safer waters.
After a surprisingly emotional farewell, Keith and Dee wade into the bay. The dolphins are chittering excitedly, craning their big grinning heads from side to side out of the water. A sort of lie-down saddle replaces one of the dolphin-packs, and a harness clips them on for when exhausted arms give way.
Chapter 14 – Activity Theory
Picture an intercontinental freeway network, decaying within the borders of a failed state. A post-apocalyptic web of cracked tarmac and fallen overpasses. Armed convoys thunder through the scenery, while gangs of thugs on spiky choppers daub themselves in war paint and speed alongside or lurk in cracks and shadows, ready for cryptographic ambush. This is the internet. For corporations who can afford the table fee in kickbacks and quantum encryption modules, it is the only game in town. Its routers, switches, cables, fibres, and satellite networks still carry a trillion times the capacity of the Mesh. It remains the only viable option for transporting bulk data at any sensible speed and cost.
The crumbling world wide web built on top has itself become a metaphorical anarchy of towering wrecks and drifting tear gas. Surfing the web with a standard Companion or old school laptop is the equivalent of pulling on a pink Lycra bodysuit and going for a late evening jog through the ghetto.
Most users only visit the internet’s manicured corporate enclaves, spending their time in the saccharine theme parks, which cower behind firewalls and government key escrow inspection checkpoints.
Glitches and leaks are business as usual. Porn-bot flash-mobs a constant annoyance. Malicious agents rattle the bars and swarm in through exploits of their own—or, more often, opportunistically follow in the wake of raids by entities higher up the food chain.
In comparison, the Mesh is a backwater of rural lanes and cycle paths. Community maintained and fully distributed. Software agents negotiate passage and deal with the tedious onion layers of signatures and keys. The full power of asymmetric maths—open-sourced and generally considered to be free of government backdoors—protects data in-flight, while heterogeneous infrastructure and distributed routing make it a costly, low-value target for attack. It is slow and unreliable. Limited bandwidth makes it vulnerable to saturation. During major internet storms or corporate skirmishes, the fat pipe traffic from the Super-Highway forces its way down to the capillaries of the Mesh—prices soar and transmission speeds slow to a crawl.
The Mesh is a Fully Autonomous Corporation, or FAC. It is governed by the emergent consensus of impartial algorithms that calculate fees, and flocks of unsupervised agents, which rate journey experience. Payment for passage can only be bought with its own inflationary MeshCoins, which are mined at each physical edge and routing node. The transient ephemeral nature of the Mesh has pieces dropping offline continuously. The Coin generation algorithms focus on performance, incentivising the crowd to fill in blank spots and constantly build out capacity.
MeshCoin; always in demand, inflation keeps it liquid, distributed infrastructure ensures its independence, its value is backed by the worth of the entire Mesh. It is, quite simply, the world’s favourite currency and, lately, it has begun piling up in Stella’s virtual piggy bank in life-changing quantities…
She looked up from her toenails as her Companion vibrated and signalled that another full Coin had been deposited. Twice over the last few months, she had changed the sensitivity of the alert when the constant beeping had become too annoying. Her toenails were now 80% matte white. The little toes were still au naturel, and she was wondering if her fans would approve if she painted them black. She considered putting it to a vote, but couldn’t be bothered. Anyway, she had been told not to pander to them too much, or they would become intolerable and lose interest. ‘Keep them wanting more’, the studio avatar had instructed her.
Her life was predominantly nocturnal. Her skin was pale. She had kept out of the sun since her ordeal in the dark. Her hair was gone; she maintained the internal firewall and refused to remember screaming for scissors and brutally cutting the dirty dreads away.
She looked at herself in the hotel mirror. The wig of chunky white rectangular fibres made her look like a low-polygon NPC. The boy sitting on the bed gave her a thumbs-up. Her new, high-end, white pearl Companion signalled again from the dresser; another Coin. A succession of brief sub-vocalised thoughts through her Spex, and she decreased the sensitivity of the alert again.
Perhaps the fembot look was too contrived. It was far from the practical-but-elegant style she preferred; but she was doing something right, the fans approved and Coins poured in. Taking the little brush between her fingers, with controlled parallel strokes, she completed her toes.
***
“Jeno, a little privacy, please.”
The oid boy flicked his hair away from his eyes theatrically, then moodily got up and walked towards the suite’s other room. As Stella took off her Spex, his shape blurred and flickered, then glitched out as the Spex lasers gave up trying to project him onto her retinas. She could barely see his tiny tele-presence bee, but she assumed its cameras were no longer looking her way. The command for privacy should anyway block all outgoing streams. She took off the hotel dressing gown and avoided the mirror as she slipped her arms and head into a new white Kimono-smock. It was expensive, made from ersatz spider silk. Her oversized Otaku Spex and chunky grey utility belt completed the outfit.
Jeno coughed, time to stream again. Privacy pauses may keep fans engaged, reminding them they are consuming a premium resource, but go dark for too long, and the attention-deficit teenagers will shift focus and may never come back. Jeno acted like her boyfriend, but he was more like her producer and cameraman. Fundamentally, though, he was a virtual personality. For the cameras, they were supposed to be an item. She had been coached to treat him like her boyfriend, but to make sure their relationship remained platonic. Secretly, the fans dreamt of meeting her and, one day, falling in love.
However, it was not just her they were after. Many saw her as the competition and hoped to woo Jeno. The cognitive dissonance and suspension of disbelief required was beyond Stella. Jeno was an oid, a virtual avatar without a physical form. He didn’t even own his own software; his personality was assembled from timeshare slices of commodity algorithms, running in BHJ data centres. The only physical part of him was the tiny tele-presence camera bee that captured his simulated POV as he streamed the banal details of her life across the Mesh.
Shortly after she had shuffled off the coastguard launch wrapped in a silverised disaster blanket, Jeno had materialised and offered to keep all the drones and paparazzi away. Keith had been ready to take her home, her tickets already booked; but, mentally fractured and suffering from post-traumatic shock, Stella had declined his offer.
She had fought and screamed and thrashed against the pirates when they snatched her. Then, the shock of seeing Marcel getting shot had sent her away to another place. Violence and months below deck, surrounded by sobbing hopeless human flesh, had sealed her in her own mental room. Each day, the walls between herself and the hopeless reality beyond her mind had grown higher and thicker.
The ordeal was fading. It was months since she stepped off the coastguard boat and into the blazing light of celebrity. Yet, despite the time that had passed, she was still there locked in her cell. Going home to the Farm would force her to come out and confront it all, so she continued to block incoming calls, avoiding contact with her friends and all thoughts of home.
When she felt weak and self-indulgent, she pulled up the analytics. Hundreds of calls were still being screened every day by her TeenLife™ Sages. Most would be other Life Agencies or miscellaneous propositions at various grades of respectability. Chris was still calling every couple of weeks.
He was the only one to whom she had sent any communication, a simple note saying she was okay, but needed time. Marcel had stopped calling after a week of being ignored.
Her friends in Zilistan still couldn’t comprehend the rejection. She knew the brothers must feel betrayed and spurned after rescuing her, but they couldn’t understand she wasn’t the same person anymore.
Standing on the harbour, surrounded by smiling faces, target for lenses broadcasting her shame to millions, she had wanted to fold herself away and leave the world. So, instead of dragging her humiliation home with her, she had accepted Jeno’s offer and consented—by degrees—to have her life turned into a reality show.
With jealous and judicious application of their legal department, TeenLife™ had stilled the clamour of demanding voices and put her inside a bubble in the eye of a media storm.
She grabbed her Companion and dropped it into one of the belt’s plush pockets. Jeno waited for her to open the door, and they left the suite. The fans wanted action; they wanted glamour and an aspirational lifestyle.