by Vernor Vinge
“Tommie?” Winston hesitated, bringing them almost to a halt.
“Keep going…keep going.” And then after a moment, “So our Librareome protest was…fraud from the beginning, huh?”
“I don’t know, Tommie. I knew it was silly, but it seemed worthwhile.” Blount looked across at Robert. “I thought it would lead to something I really want.”
“Me too,” said Carlos, his voice faint. “In the end, Sharif-whoever got to all of us, didn’t he?”
“All but Tommie.”
Miri was watching the back-and-forth silently, but her eyes were wide. Well, she had earned the right to listen.
Robert said, “So what did he promise you, Winston?”
Winnie’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “I sure as hell won’t tell you.” He hesitated and the snarl became a twisted smile. “But I bet I know what your deal-with-the-devil was.” When Robert didn’t reply, Blount’s smile broadened and he continued, “You tried to disguise it, Gu. All the times we met in the library, and never once did you pull your old tricks. At first I just figured you were setting me up for one of your extreme traps. After I learned about Sharif, I thought maybe you were running him.” Winnie laughed. “But then I began to suspect the truth. You’ve lost your killer edge, the way you could look inside people and see what would hurt them the most, and then do it to them. You’ve lost that, haven’t you, Robert?”
Robert lowered his head. “Yes.” The word came out softly, without anger, almost a sigh.
“And I bet you can’t write poetry anymore, either.”
“It’s the poetry I want back, Winnie.”
“Oh.”
Tommie twisted in their grasp, trying to suck in breath. “Shut up…the north gate should be in…next hundred feet.”
They walked in silence, eyes straining for some sign on the unmarked wall.
And now that Robert was looking, he saw something else. Not more green lettering, but a blinking icon that meant pending mail. One last message before Miri had cut the fiber link. Almost without thinking, he shifted his grip on Tommie’s leg, and tapped a go-ahead on his waist box.
A pdf, by God. He hadn’t seen anything like this since his teaching days. The table of contents floated in the air above him. The critic in him couldn’t resist scanning down the page. The ToC was impeccably formatted, with perfect spelling (at least, if you ignored context). The bullet headers were a mishmash of unparallel constructions and grammatical infelicities. It looked as if it had been thrown together by a gang of paraliterates in a hell of a hurry.
But what it said was…important:
While We are out of Touch
or
How to Survive and Prosper during the Next Thirty Minutes
by Your Friend, the Mysterious Stranger
Dedication:
To the idiots among you who cut the fiber link. Now Alfred can’t see you, but I’m cut off, too. Hence, I’m breaking my stealthy cover and shipping down this bolus of bits before Miri pops the connector.
Executive Summary
[none provided]
Table of Contents
Introduction
page iv
How to use this document
Chapter 1, Saving Tommie Parker
page 1
The Huertas back door
The keycard that should not work, but does!
Chapter 2, Your beknighted wearables
page 3
Not really hecho en Paraguay, unfortunately for you
The knockout gas—ah, but I already told you about that
What you can and cannot trust about these gadgets
Chapter 3, What Alfred is up to
page 5
And why you really don’t want Alfred to succeed
*The animal model—or,
world domination out of little fruit flies grows
Why calling 911 is not fast enough to stop him
If you don’t believe me, just show this file to Miri!
Chapter 4, What you can do to help
page 13
Map of Huertas territory
Map of GenGen MCog arrays. Alfred owns this territory, networkwise—but I’m there, too
How to get back to the MCog arrays
What you can do to defeat Alfred
Come be my hands in this glorious struggle!
Chapter 5, What’s in it for you?
page 21
Promises made and promises kept
With your helping hands, I can still deliver
Appendix A
page 23
Neat stuff that will impress the Department of Homeland Security and which may make life easier after your arrest
Appendix B
page 117
Why Scooch-a-mout should be the Library’s lord and mascot
Robert looked at Miri. She was concentrating on holding up Tommie’s shoulder. For the moment all her nerdly interests seemed far away. But we need the nerd as much as ever.
Robert --> Miri:
TOMMIE DID HIS best to count Winnie’s paces. But there were distractions. There was this rock concert playing in Tommie’s chest, and every screech of the beat sent fire across his shoulders and down his arms. This wasn’t a real heart attack. This was just his pacemaker fallen into wild chaos. The last few years, Tommie hadn’t been too envious of other people’s diddling medical miracles. So what if his vascular system was falling apart; the pacemaker would keep him going till classic science-fictional immortality arrived. But now all his plans for living forever were in trouble. Count the paces. Count the paces!
And then there would be seconds when the pain would let up, and his heart was a butterfly flutter in his chest. For a few seconds his thoughts would clear, and then he would black out…They were carrying him still, though the ride was bumpy. Ol’ Robert was shifting around like he had business with the box on his belt.
“Okay. Stop,” he whispered. He would have shouted, but the whisper was all he had just now.
They heard him. And then he was lying on the cold, hard concrete.
Winston’s voice came down from high above him. “So where is the door?…I see!” Sounds of Winston fumbling with the keycard. Something big slid aside and there was a wall of faint light, maybe the night sky. He felt cool breeze on his face. The sound of the freeway was like distant surf.
“No alarms,” said Winston.
“Maybe…silent alarms?” he managed to wheeze. This exit had been such a wild-ass escape option in his original plan.
Winston was a shadow against the sky. He was tapping at his keypad. “I got 911, Tommie!” Now he was talking to someone Tommie could not hear, telling them about a man down with a heart attack.
“They’re on the way, Tommie! They want your med log.”
The rock concert was back, whacking a new tune in his chest. “Bet…med log…is fried.” He twisted onto his elbows. There were more important things. “Tell ’em about the labs, Win!”
“I told them. I just called 911 myself.” That was Robert’s granddaughter. Her feet were right beside his head. Now she stepped away, became a second shadow, beside Winston. She turned this way and that, the way kids do when they’re playing games with their wearables. “I don’t like this,” she said after a moment.
“You heard the Highway Patrol, kid.” Winston’s voice was tight, like he was worried as hell. “They’re sending a car. We just have to sit tight for a few moments.”
Tommie’s pacemaker was working upward to the next crescendo. Okay, give it a few seconds more and the pain would lessen—or maybe this time, his heart would break.
The girl’s words floated in and out of hearing: “—is an emergency. They should airlift. And the net is screwy. I can’t route to my…friends, not even sming. I think someone’s spoofed the local nodes and—” Tommie rolled from side to side, pain blotting out the rest of the sentence.
Someone was cradling his
shoulders. Carlos? “It’ll be okay, Professor Parker.” The voice turned away from him. “I’m having some access problems, too. But the error messages make sense. I think the library riot is soaking up too much resource.”
The little girl’s voice was scornful. “So much that I can’t even sming?”
“How about laser direct to the freeway?” That was Robert.
The girl’s shadow repeated the strange little dance. “I can’t quite reach it from here.” She was silent for a moment. “We’re just playing into the Badguys’ hands. Here. Take a look at this pdf.”
Winston again: “There will be a car! If one doesn’t show up in five minutes, we’ll—we’ll carry Tommie down the hill ourselves.”
Tommie’s heart had stopped. No, it was back in butterfly mode. He’d have a few seconds of clarity. The girl was probably right, but there was no way he was going down that hill. The others should go, see if they could get far enough to put out a real alarm. Or maybe they should go back into the labs and give the enemy a big surprise. Darkness was rising inside him. In a moment or two this would not be his problem. And his friends were too stupid to leave him here. Maybe he could set some of them loose.
Listen to me! But Tommie’s words came out scarcely louder than a sigh: “Guys…we gotta split up.” And then the darkness had him.
27
THE REVOCATION ATTACK
Xiu Xiang looked out from their car, at the dark hillsides. “I feel pretty useless, Lena.”
“You feel useless?” Lena Gu shifted irritably in her wheelchair.
Their plan had been to be a mobile presence across the places where Robert was most likely to show up. Tonight they would be on the scene and no one could balk them. Instead, all the action was elsewhere. Even the transportation was uncooperative, operating under “special event rules” in all areas near UCSD. Their car was moving as slowly as they could make it go, but in another thirty seconds it would reach the south end of this old bit of asphalt, at which point—no matter how loudly they demanded otherwise—it would turn left at the little T-intersection, away from the hillside, and take them back to the freeway. Then, if they wished, it would drive north to the Ted Williams Expressway, turn and come down here still again.
Xiu stared into the dark of the hillside. And saw nothing. “I’ve practiced so much, and still I can’t make my contacts work right.”
Lena said, “Actually, there isn’t a whole lot to see here. This hillside has to be the dumbest public land near campus.”
There was some real light. It silhouetted the hilltops and lit the low overcast; around the library, insanity still reigned. A few minutes earlier, Lena had guided Xiu through some of the views. Celebration, riot, whatever it was, the network stats were impressive. Now Xiu couldn’t see any of it.
Okay, I confess defeat. She reached into the backpack on the floor by her feet. The pack contained her shop-class projects. She had told herself they might come in handy tonight. How, she couldn’t really imagine, but the gadgets did prove that X. Xiang could still create. There was something useful there, even if it wasn’t one of her gadgets. She pulled out her view-page, sat back, and enjoyed the clunky comfort of its old-fashioned interface. What a fall from grace this was—but just now, she was too nervous for Epiphany.
Lena abruptly said, “We have more audio from Juan!”
The boy’s voice was almost a whisper: “We’re still in Pilchner Hall. We’re waiting for Miri’s grandpa to come back from the basement.” Miri’s voice came faintly to the microphone: “They’re not doing anything.”
“Lemme talk to Miri,” said Lena.
Xiu listened to the two for a moment. They couldn’t get any video, and Miri’s Epiphany had suffered a 3030 error. (Xiu had looked that up; “3030” was a catchall code for a system deadlock caused by licensing conflicts.) Meantime all they had were these very occasional, very brief voice messages through Juan.
“Gotta go,” whispered Juan and the session was ended.
Lena was silent a moment, just watching the familiar dark landscape slide by. “I want to see those kids. They’re needing a smart grilling…Any chance the link was faked?”
“Juan is a careful boy. It would be almost impossible to fake his Epiphany’s cert—”
Lena harrumphed. “And as far as I can tell that was their voices, but talking in whispers and not saying much except that everything is boringly safe.”
It was strange, if the children needed stealth and a low bit rate, that they had not used silent messaging. Maybe someone thought they could fool a pair of old ladies. In fact, with Juan’s wearable, I could fake sessions like this! She glanced at Lena. “Maybe you should call in the marines.” Bob and Alice.
“Yes, but if it’s a small emergency, they can’t do anything more than you or I. And if it’s a big emergency—well, they might have to do something awful.” Lena hummed a few bars of something nervous. “And Miri says everything is fine. Just fine.”
“Maybe we should call the police.”
“Ha! Nowadays you don’t have to call the police; they just happen to you.” Lena was staring at the hillside, her fingers trembling against her lips.
The last couple of months, Lena Gu had been such a reliable source of certainty. What if we both wimp out? Xiu thought. Now, that was a frightening idea. She tried to think of something really forceful to say: “Um, your ex has been ‘doing nothing’ for almost half an hour. Don’t you think that’s too long?”
Lena’s head bowed, and she said softly, almost to herself, “Oh, Robert. You’re up to something terribly stupid, aren’t you?” She stared into the dark. “Let’s give Miri five more minutes. Then we’ll call 911.”
“Okay.” They tooled along the valley floor, slowly enough that the windows could roll down. The resinous scent of manzanita drifted in. On their left was southbound Highway 5, a lightless torrent of fast-moving vehicles, edged by the blaze of the manual lanes. On their right were steep, dark hills, violet light flickering along the ridgelines. Xiang brought up a local network view, looked back and forth between that and the physical world.
Their little automobile was speeding up again. A pleasant male voice spoke within the passenger cabin: “This portion of Valley Bottom Drive is misfunctioning. You may return after ten A.M. tomorrow.”
“What? Now we can’t even circle back! There has to be some override, Xiu.”
Xiang shook her head. This would be their last drive through here tonight. Xiu had helped design the hardware security layer. It solved so many problems. It made the internet a safe and workable system. Now she was its victim…She thought again of the bag of tricks that sat on the floor beside her feet. She had spent the whole semester building those gadgets, her mechanical daydreams. Maybe—
“Xiu! Traffic!” Lena was pointing up the hillside.
Xiu leaned over and looked out Lena’s side. She saw two spears of light that just now were turning away from them. “It looks like a car on manual,” or maybe it was on automatic, but driving on unimproved roadway.
“It must be on the service road.” Lena paused, and a map appeared on Xiu’s view-page, showing the road they hadn’t been able to get on. The road that led to Huertas’s old back entrance.
The lights turned back toward them, then disappeared behind an outcropping. Xiu’s view-page didn’t even show a nav marker for the other vehicle.
“What are they up to?” said Lena.
Their own car was almost to the T-intersection.
“Car!” said Lena. “Turn right.”
“Sorry. That’s not an existing road. The only legal turn is left.”
“Turn right! Turn right!”
“I’m sorry. I’ll have you in safe traffic in less than five minutes. Please think about giving me an ultimate destination.” Xiu bet herself that company logic had decided it was dealing with a DUI customer. If they didn’t come up with something sensible, the vehicle would take them all the way back to Rainbows End.
Lena sucked
in a breath. “We’re so close. Wait. I got a ping response. It’s from Thomas Parker’s outfit. They are up there!” And then much louder: “Hey, car, I wanna speak to your supervisor—I mean a human being!”
“Certainly, twenty seconds please.” Twenty seconds would put them past the T-intersection.
Lena Gu seemed to shrink down in her wheelchair. Her gaze swept back and forth between the hillside and the approaching intersection. “We’ve got to stop them, Xiu. I’ll wager they could tell us what’s going on.”
“You’d come out from cover? Let You-Know-Who see you?”
“I’d lurk in the background.”
But the question was moot. The intersection was just fifty yards ahead. In a few seconds they’d turn left, and be conveyed ignominiously away.
Or…maybe not. Xiu lifted her backpack onto the seat beside her. She picked up the curved tube with the can of diamond flakes; she had improved her first shop-class project out of all resemblance to the original transport tray. This new model was very much designed with destruction in mind; sometimes you needed to get the machines’ attention. She knelt on the back-facing seat and set the tip of the cutter against the dashboard. Given Robert Gu’s example, she had a good idea of what to expect.
Oops. “Lena, scrunch down!”
Lena looked at the tube in Xiu’s hands. “Yes!” She laughed even as she tried to flatten herself out of Xiang’s way.
Xiu pressed the start button—a real physical button!—and a roar ripped through the cabin. Her transport tray, now a very fine accelerator, drove three thousand diamond flecks into the dashboard every second. The recoil was a soft, steady push. It was easy to keep the tip pointed. Some of the diamonds bounced up, embedding in the acoustic ceiling, but most drove straight into the dashboard. She wobbled the cutter’s tip and the hole widened. Now she was drilling through drive internals.