Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

  “—crazy fools—” said Lena.

  “—from doing anything too destructive.”

  “Yeah,” said Juan, nodding. “Who do you think that remote guy is, the one who’s walking with them?”

  “What?” Juan was a mostly clueless kid, but sometimes he was accidentally very sharp. Miri played back her last images of Robert and Mr. Rivera. Those pics were fragmentary, but Juan was right. The two were looking at a consistent location that drifted along with them—and granting it a certain amount of open space. So. A private presence.

  Juan said, “I’ll bet they’re seeing Zulfi Sharif.”

  “I’ll bet you’re right.” Not for the first time tonight, she tried to bring up her Sharif control. Still no response.

  So do something! “C’mon, Juan.” She walked her bike out onto Gilman Drive, crossing the lanes slowly enough not to get a ticket.

  Xiu and Lena drifted along. “Traffic is heavy,” said Lena.

  “It’s the belief-circles clash. People are attending in person.” The gaming buzz had come out of the blue, but Miri could not imagine that it was coincidence. Setting this up must have involved deep coordination. Even though the clash was still just rumor, there was a huge turnout. The cars around them were dropping off passengers. People were laughing and shouting and talking, and walking toward the library. The sidewalks on the other side of Gilman Drive were all but empty.

  She reached the far curb and looked back. “Come on, Juan!”

  Now the sky above the library was twisting violet, a very nice fractal effect from some art co-op in northern China. She glanced at network status…It wasn’t just automobile traffic that was heavy. She could see network trunks lighting up all over California. There were millions of viewpoints being exported from UCSD’s campus. There were hundreds of thousands of virtual participants. As Juan caught up with her, she said, “It’s a whirlwind. Like a big game first-day.”

  The boy nodded, but he wasn’t paying attention. “Look what I found in the street.”

  The gadget was half crushed. Metal fibers hung from one side.

  She waved for him to drop it. “Roadkill. So?” If a node lost connectivity and then got into the street—well, something that small would get run over.

  “I think it’s still online, but I can’t get a catalog match.”

  Miri looked closer. There was spiky flickering, but no response. “It’s pingless wreckage, Juan.”

  Juan shrugged, then dropped the gadget into his bike bag. He had a blank look. He was still searching. “It looks like a Cisco 33, but—”

  Fortunately, Orozco had not distracted everyone. Lena said, “Miri. I’ve found Robert and the Rivera fellow.” There was a pause while Lena got the camera ID. There! Robert and Rivera were crossing the roadway a quarter mile west of them.

  “We’re on it, Lena!”

  IN ROBERT’S TIME, this side of Gilman Drive had been Quonset huts. In later years, classic University of California concrete had housed the medical school. Now there was Pilchner Hall, which like almost everything else on campus looked as temporary as the old Quonsets.

  The Mysterious Stranger led Robert and Carlos into the building. Real light followed them in concentrated pools, while farther down the hall the view was virtual. There might have been other people in the building, but the Stranger avoided them. He headed down a stairway, into a warren of tiny rooms. In places the floor was dusty. Elsewhere it was polished clean, or covered with streaky scrape marks. “Heh,” said the Stranger, pointing at the scrapes. “Tommie has been at work. This whole floor has been rearranged for tonight. And there are parts that just won’t show on the university’s security plan.”

  Their path was now a trek through the maze. Finally, the Mysterious Stranger stopped at a closed door. He paused and spoke soberly. “As you may know, Professor Parker is not fully on board. For the sake of your various goals, I suggest you be careful not to enlighten him.”

  Robert and Carlos nodded.

  The Mysterious Stranger turned and mimed knocking on the plastic door. His hand sounded like a hammer pounding heavy wood. After a moment, the door opened and Winston Blount peered out. “Hello, Carlos.” His gaze passed less favorably over Robert and the Stranger. He waved them in.

  The room was a triangular wedge trapped between slanting walls. A concrete caisson took up most of the floor space. Tommie Parker sat on the floor beside a handcart that was filled with plastic bags and backpacks. “Hiya, guys. You’re right on time.” He glanced at his laptop. “You’ll be pleased to know that press and police did not notice your arrival. At the moment we’re standing in a room that doesn’t even exist. This—” he slapped the caisson “—is still visible to the university, but it will happily lie about what we’re doing.”

  Robert edged round the blocky structure. “I remember this,” In the 1970s, the caisson had been out-of-doors, covered with a wooden lid. He looked over the edge. Yes, just as before: iron ladder rungs marched downward into darkness.

  Tommie stood up. He had his laptop in a sling that left the keyboard and display accessible, but also freed him to move about. In his own way, Tommie Parker had arrived at wearable computing.

  Tommie reached into the handcart and lifted out two plastic bags. “Time to leave your Epiphanies behind, guys. I’ve got new clothes for you.”

  “You really meant it,” said Rivera.

  “Yup. Your old clothes will help me fake your location. Meantime the real you will be with me, and using far better equipment.”

  “Not laptops, I hope,” said Winnie, giving Parker’s laptop sling a doubtful look. But he and the others shed shirts and pants and shoes. They still had their contact lenses, but now there was nothing to drive them. The real lighting was bright enough, but without external sound and vision, the room felt like a coffin.

  Tommie seemed genuinely embarrassed by all the naked flab. But not for long. He pulled open one of the plastic bags and passed around pants and shirts. They looked like plain gray fabric, working clothes. Carlos held his new shirt up to the light and peered at the weave. He folded it between his hands and rubbed the sides together. “These clothes are dumb.”

  “Yup. No infrared microlasers, no processor nodes. Just the good cotton as God meant us to wear it.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry, I have processors.”

  “I was joking about laptops, Tommie.”

  Tommie shook his head. “No, not laptops, either. I have Hurd boxes.”

  Huh? Without his wearable, Robert was stumped.

  Carlos looked just as blank, but then some errant natural memory must have popped up: “Oh! Hurd OS! But isn’t that obsolete?”

  Tommie was rummaging in the second plastic bag. He did not look up. “Not obsolete. Just illegal…Ah, here they are. Genuine Hecho en Paraguay.” He handed each of his co-conspirators a black plastic box about the size and shape of a paperback book. There was a real keypad on one side and a metallic clip on the other. “Just snap it on your waistband. Make sure the metal tab is actually touching your skin.”

  Robert’s new pants were too short, and the shirt fit like a tent. He slipped the criminal computer on his waistband and felt the cold touch of metal on his skin. He could see a faint overlay now. It was a picture of a keypad, and when his hand rested on the box at his waist, he saw markers corresponding to his fingertips. What a pitiful interface.

  “Don’t cover the box with your shirt, Carlos. All the comm ports are on it.”

  Winnie: “You mean we have to turn in just the right direction to make a connection?”

  “Yup. While we’re below, our only external routing will be through my laptop. And my laptop’s only uplink will be through this.” Tommie held up something that looked like a prayer wheel. He gave it a little spin. There was a glint in the air, sliding along a thread too fine to see, to a connector Tommie held in his other hand. He turned and plugged that into a box on the handcart. “Check it out.”

  Robert pulle
d his shirt back from his waistband, and turned so the box had a clear view of Tommie’s laptop. Nothing. He entered a simple command, and now he could see through the walls again! North of Gilman Drive, there were even more people heading toward the library. Indoors…he drifted back up the hallway. Still deserted. No! There was a fellow walking purposefully down toward their “secret” room. Then he lost the viewpoint.

  “Hey, Tommie—”

  “What?”

  The Stranger’s voice sounded in Robert’s ear. The audio was as bad as his old view-page, but he clearly heard: “You didn’t see a thing, my man.”

  “I—” Robert swallowed. “Your fiber link is working fine, Tommie.”

  “Good, good.” Parker walked among them, making sure that everyone could receive and transmit. “Okay. You’re all equipped. That was the fun part. Now here’s the pack-mule part.” He pointed at the backpacks in the handcart.

  Robert’s pack weighed something like forty pounds. Carlos’s looked about the same. Tommie and Winnie had smaller packs. Even so, Blount struggled with his load. Winnie’s like an old man. Yeah, Reed Weber’s heavenly minefield. Robert looked away before Winnie could take offense. He shrugged his own pack into a more comfortable position and complained, “I thought this was the future, Tommie. Where’s the miniaturization? Or at least the automatic freight handlers?”

  “Where we’re going, the infrastructure ain’t friendly, Robert.” Tommie glanced at his laptop’s display. “Hello, Mr. Sharif. Okay, it looks like we’re all ready to go.” He bowed them toward the dark hole in the middle of the room. “After you, gentlemen.”

  22

  THE BICYCLE ATTACK

  Alfred waited a decent time before entering the room. No sense in making noise that Rabbit’s stooges might hear.

  “What did I tell you, Doc! We’re in. We’re in!” Rabbit danced a merry jig around the caisson. The optical fiber that was giving Rabbit such joy was invisibly thin except when the light caught it just right.

  Vaz nodded. He had a different communications success to celebrate; he had reestablished his milnet link across the Pacific.

  Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz: U.S. Homeland Security looks calm, Alfred. Alfred watched the stats streaming by. They were from the Alliance’s listening posts. The national-security scene was indeed calm, even though the library disturbance had brought crowds to the UCSD campus. Rabbit had created the perfect paradoxical distraction. Almost perfect; the affair was growing too large.

  Vaz knelt beside the box that marked the termination point of Thomas Parker’s fiber link. The box was a scamful bridge. On one side, it accepted the uncertified data streams from Parker’s criminal computers. On the other, it was a “good citizen,” running under the government-required Secure Hardware Environment. It hid Parker’s data in innocent packages wrapped in all the licenses and permissions needed to survive on the SHE of the Internet. Altogether it was not as secure as Vaz’s milnet, but it would suffice for most regions of the contingency tree.

  Alfred tweaked the box, and now he was getting Parker’s video direct. At last, he was truly a Local Honcho.

  The video from Parker’s laptop bounced around without a bit of program control. But Vaz recognized the equipment in the walls, and some of the physical signage. Rabbit’s stooges had breached bio-lab security. Even more impressive, the delicate game of fooling the lab’s automatic security was a continuing success.

  “How far are they from Goal A?” Alfred asked Rabbit. In fact, that was the site of his private research program. He would pretend to inspect it along with the others.

  “Almost there.” Rabbit waved airily. “They’ll start dropping off equipment in less than ten minutes. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Alfred looked out through his surface viewpoints. “Most of my mobiles are trapped on the north side of Gilman Drive.” In conventional combat, his bots would have simply seized the local infrastructure and come storming across. Instead, they were balked by the human and automobile traffic along the roadway. At least one had been struck by an auto.

  Rabbit spread its paws in mock sympathy. At least it didn’t bring out another carrot. “You can’t have everything. Hacek and Scoochi fans have done everything we could pray for: The human staff is out of the labs. The riot is sucking in the local comm resources. It’ll be a regular black hole by the time it peaks. And it all looks totally innocent. Don’t tell me you could mask this operation any better.”

  Vaz let that brag go unanswered. He’d come to realize that irritation was the kindliest emotion he could feel for Rabbit. He sat with his back to the concrete caisson and tracked ongoing developments. He could see that the Department of Homeland Security people were watching closely, but they were watching the wrong places. Analyst consensus was that Rabbit had tuned things to match DHS paranoia perfectly. Maybe Alice Gong had been taken down, but undetected by Alliance monitors? Underground, Rabbit’s stooges had almost reached Goal A. In ten minutes the “investigation” of that site would begin. In another half hour, he could begin to report his doctored results…and after that it was simply a matter of getting out and letting the stooges be captured. Things were going so smoothly, he could have stayed back in Mumbai. Not that he was complaining!

  Analyst red flag. Someone reviewing stale video had noticed something. Alfred brought up the flag report. It was a ten-second snippet from one of his mobiles on the north side of Gilman Drive: Two children with bicycles. They were standing by the roadway and looking at something that might have been a crushed mech. Those are the two I saw earlier. Queries spread outward: Who were the children? Was the mobile one of Alfred’s?

  Ugly answers came back.

  Rabbit didn’t have access to the Indo-European analysts, but suddenly the creature sat up and gave an admiring whistle. “Well, I’ll be dipped! We’ve got company, Doc.”

  MIRI LEFT HER bike in the rack outside Pilchner Hall. Juan insisted on bringing his fancy foldup into the building. When Miri pointed out the absurdity of this, the boy just shrugged. “My bike is special.”

  Lena and Xiu were no longer visible, but Lena’s voice followed them through the wide-open doors. “There should be better security, Miri. I don’t like this.”

  “It’s the emergency overload behavior, Lena. Unoccupied rooms stay locked. The others are open.”

  Lena said, “And we can’t see you anymore.”

  The sudden drop in data was very strange, but Miri wasn’t going to say that. Instead: “I bet high-rate forwarding isn’t supported except for around the library.”

  Xiu said, “Yes, we still have spectacular views from there.”

  The main corridors in Pilchner Hall had searchable viewpoints. There were glimpses of Robert’s recent passage. That was enough to guide them downstairs. But now there were places where Juan and Miri could talk only to each other.

  “It’s like a haunted house.” Juan’s voice was hushed. His hand reached out and grasped hers; she didn’t shake him loose. She needed him to keep cool. Certainly losing connectivity in the middle of an office building was an eerie thing.

  They came around a corner, and there was a glimmer of connectivity, enough for sming:

  Miri --> Miri Gang: I think we’re getting close.

  Lena --> Miri Gang: First we lost video. Now we can barely talk. Get out of there.

  Miri --> Miri Gang: It’s just temporary. I’m sure wikiBell is shifting extra coverage into place. How bad could an entertainment riot get?

  Miri imagined Lena was having a similar discussion with Dr. Xiang in a certain car driving around the north side of campus. Grandmother seemed truly anxious.

  Xiu --> Miri Gang: I agree with Miri. But give Lena and me regular reports.

  Lena --> Miri Gang: Yes! Even if that means you have to backtrack. Where is Robert now?

  Miri --> Miri Gang: Real close. I can ping him direct.

  The twisty hallway was brightly lit, just what you’d
expect during a network brownout. Juan’s bike coasted along almost silently, all folded up into portability mode. He only had to give it a push every so often. Their footsteps and the faint snicking of its tires were the only sounds. They took another corner. The hall was narrower, with intersections every few feet. This was one of those temporary makeovers that crazy architects-for-a-day liked to do.

  For a few dozen feet they had high-rate connectivity. Ads and announcements appeared on the walls; someone’s medical research project loomed like a monster on the left. She gave Lena and Xiu a continuous video as they turned another corner—and lost all outside connectivity.

  Juan slowed, drew Miri to a stop. “This place is really dead.”

  “Yeah,” said Miri. They walked forward a few more paces. Except for her point-to-point link with Juan, she might as well have been on the far side of the moon. And there was another corner ahead. She pulled Juan forward.

  Around the corner, the corridor ended at a closed door. “I can’t ping your grandpa anymore, Miri.”

  Miri looked at the map she had cached. “This has to be where they are, Juan. If we can’t get through, we’ll just pound on the door.” Suddenly she didn’t care too much about embarrassing Robert and his friends. This was too strange.

  But then the door opened and a man in dark clothes stepped out. He might have been a janitor, or a professor. Either way, he didn’t look friendly. “May I help you?” he said.

  “HOW DID THEY find us?”

  Rabbit a made warning gesture. “Not out loud, Doc,” it hissed. “They might actually hear you.” It seemed to look over Alfred’s shoulder. “I’d say they’re following the girl’s grandfather.”

  Vaz glanced at the heap of clothes that lay by the caisson. He sminged back, voice format: “Those clothes are still transmitting?”

  “Well, of course. To the outside, it looks like the old guys are just sitting around, maybe playing cards. I’m faking everything, even their medicals.”

  Alfred realized he was grinding his teeth.