by Vernor Vinge
Tommie didn’t know what to say to that.
“Let us pass,” said Winston. “This is an emergency.”
He was interrupted by the sound of wheels—but not from another car. A voice spoke from the darkness: “Where’s Miri? Where’s Robert?”
Carlos said, “They’re still inside. They’re trying to stop the—We’re afraid that someone is taking over the labs.”
Motors whined. It was a wheelchair, carrying someone all hunched over. But the voice was strong and irritated. “Damn it. Lab security would prevent that.”
“Maybe not,” Winnie sounded like he was chewing on broken glass. “We think that someone has…subverted security. We called 911. That’s what you’re interfering with.” He waved at their car. It was halfway into the ditch, unmoving.
Tommie looked at the darkened passenger car. “No,” he said. “That’s a fake. Please. You call 911.”
The wheelchair rolled nearer. “I’m trying to! But we’re in some kind of a deadzone. We should go down the hill, find something we can latch on to.”
“Duì!” said Carlos. He was staring all around, the way kids do when their contacts fail.
The redoubtable Dr. Xiang waved her little handlight, light and shade sweeping up around her. Strange. There was a kind of hesitancy about her. X. Xiang was one of the true Bad Guys of the present era, at least one of the people who had made the Bad Guy regimes possible. You could never tell it by looking at her. She doused the light, and stood silently for a moment. “I-I don’t think we’re in a local deadzone.”
“Sure it is!” said Winnie. “I’m wearing, and I can’t see a thing except the real view. We have to get to the freeway, or at least get a line of sight on it.”
And now Tommie remembered what Gu’s granddaughter had said. Maybe the local nodes were being spoofed. Xiang had another theory:
“I mean the deadzone is not just here. Listen.”
“I don’t hear a thing—oh.”
There were little sounds, insects maybe. There was faint shouting from over the hills. Okay, that must be the belief-circle diversion. What else? The freeway sounded…strange, not the constant, throbbing surf of wheels on road. Now there was only the faintest sound, a dying sigh. Tommie had never heard such a thing, but he knew how stuff worked. “Failure shutdown,” he said.
“Everything? Stopped?” said Carlos, horror climbing up into his voice.
“Yup!” Tommie’s chest pain beat toward a crescendo. But hey, let me live long enough to learn what’s going on!
The voice from the wheelchair said, “Even if we can’t get word out, someone will notice.”
“Maybe not,” Tommie gasped out. If the blackout was large and spotty, with the appearance of natural disaster—why, it might cover something really big going on underground.
“And there’s nothing we can do to help,” said Winston.
“Maybe not,” Xiang’s words echoed Tommie’s, but her voice was thoughtful, distant. She flicked her light at the backpack. “I’ve had a lot of fun in shop class. You can make so many interesting things now.”
Tommie managed, “Yeah. And they all obey the law.”
X. Xiang’s laugh was soft. “That fact can be used against itself, especially if the parts don’t know the big picture.”
A lot of Tommie’s old friends talked that way; it was mostly idle talk. But this was X. Xiang.
She pulled out a clunky-looking gadget. It looked like an old-time coffee can, open at one end. She held the coffee can where it could see her view-page. “Lots of gadgets are still working, they just can’t find enough nodes to get a route out. But there’s a big military base just north of here.”
From the wheelchair: “Camp Pendleton is about thirty miles thataway.” Maybe the speaker gestured, but Tommie couldn’t see.
Xiang scanned her coffee can across the starless sky.
“This is crazy,” said Winston. “How can you know there are nodes in your line of sight?”
“I don’t. I’m going to shine signals off the sky haze. I’m calling in the marines.” And then she was talking to her view-page.
BOB GU AND his marines logged more time in training systems than they ever did in combat or on watch. Training managers were legendary for creating impossible emergencies—and then topping them with something even more unbelievable.
Tonight the real world was outdoing the craziest of the trainers.
Alice had been moved to Intensive Care. Bob would have gone with her—except that whatever had taken her down was enemy action, and not the end of it.
The analyst display had sprouted new nodes and a dozen long-shot associations: Credit Suisse CA had just collapsed, a major disaster for Europe. The certificate revocations would have effects even in California. Bob took a closer look. The Credit Suisse collapse was so abrupt that it had to be a sophisticated attack. So what was a distraction from what?
The DoD/DHS combined Earth Watch was involved now. Tonight’s action could be something new, a Grand Terror that ran simultaneously through the U.S.A. and the Indo-European Alliance, profiting from the gaps created by national sovereignties. Looking at the analysis above him, Bob could see only the broadest outlines, but it was evident that the intelligence agencies of the U.S.A., the Alliance, and China were collaborating to hunt down the source of the threat.
In CONUS Southwest, his new top analyst was doing her best. His analyst pool was still crippled, but folks were talking productively. Their structures of conjecture and conclusion were growing. The new top analyst took voice: “Colonel, the revocation storm is very intense at UCSD.”
The traffic display showed that the demonstration around the library had ground to a halt. The new failures were not due to backbone router saturation. Participants were being decertified by the thousands. Millions of support programs were balked. If nothing else, this showed that massive foreign involvement in tonight’s festivities had not been some analyst pipe dream. Whatever had hit Europe was intimately involved here.
But the bio labs still showed green. Even the participation of the night crews in the library demonstrations had worked out for the best. Maybe productivity and performance would be down for this shift, but that was a commercial issue. In fact, the departure of the human crews had simplified the lab situation. There was nothing there but automation—and it showed all was well.
“FBI again requests clearance to take over.”
Bob shook his head irritably. “Denied. As before.”
Hmm. More than riot participants were being decertified. Three analysts from the Southern California utilities reported infrastructure failures in the campus area. Why would local infrastructure depend on certs from Credit Suisse?
“Correlation of systems failures with the revocation storm is ninety-five percent, Colonel.”
No kidding. Even if the labs were clean, there was some kind of deadly interference here. Bob tapped the command he had been contemplating these last few minutes:
LAUNCH ALERT
“Analysts update contingency nine and give me a launch mark,” he said.
There was a pause as the request was reviewed by the DoD/DHS combined Earth Watch. His CONUS Southwest Watch was on a very short leash since Alice’s breakdown:
But clearance came back in just five seconds.
Bob scarcely noticed his gee pod inflate. He would be the last out of the barn, so there was a lot to watch.
LAUNCH LAUNCH LAUNCH
“Uncrewed vehicles launched.”
His displays showed thirty canisters of combat network-munitions shot high into the Southern California night. The uncrews were from the north side of the base, twenty kilometers away. Farther north, from MCAS Edwards, more primitive weapons rose into the heavens. Their manifest was a catalog of extreme possibilities: rescue lances (500), damage-suppression fogs (100), HEIR lasers (10), thermal flechettes/isolation variant (100)…and then the last three, the nightmares: sterilization-fog dispensers (10 by 10), HERF area munitions (20 by 2
0 by 4), strategic nuclear munitions (10 by 10 by 2). Analysts are paid to think worst-case…but Lord. The bio labs were the only excuse for these items.
But in truth—if you discounted the absence of follow-up equipment—this was a fairly conventional load for a modern expeditionary force. Three times in Bob’s career, such launches had ended in real combat. But those had been half a world away, in Almaty, in Ciudad General Ortiz, and in Asunción. The most terrible weapons had never been used, though Asunción had been a very near thing.
Tonight he was aiming all this hardware at his own neighbors, just thirty miles south of Camp Pendleton. Full force in an urban area was like going after rats in your kitchen with a machine gun. Keep your head down, Miri.
“FBI again requests clearance to take over.”
“Denied. The situation has escalated.” For the moment, hopefully just for the moment. If police and rescue could bring the system back up, then all the hardware that Bob had just boosted over Southern California would simply be an expensive exercise. But one good thing about being locked and loaded was that he had lots more call on resources: Gu grabbed analyst teams from all across the national workshift and pushed the intel and sensor backlog at them. Priority questions: Are the San Diego labs secure? What is the prognosis for the current system failures?
Meantime, Bob’s launches had soared to the top of their trajectories. He tweaked the Edwards munitions still higher, delaying them behind the gear from Pendleton. If nothing was resolved soon, he would have to light the uncrews’ jets. I need answers, guys!
But the analyst mob was still busy connecting a billion dots, looking for patterns and conspiracies. Then a single observation changed everything. A weather-service geek doing her monthly reserve duty grabbed a very high priority: “Twenty seconds ago. I see ad hoc signaling in the backscatter above here”—and she drew an ellipse over San Diego North County, covering much of Camp Pendleton. Somebody was making their own communications, simply blinking a light into the sky haze! The long axis of the scatter ellipse pointed right back toward UCSD. The words of the intercepted message streamed across Bob’s vision:
Xiu Xiang --> anyone clever enough to notice me in the backscatter:
The NOAA analyst spoke over the script display: “The message is a one-second burst, retransmitted twelve times. What you’re seeing is the summed cleanup.”
It was clear enough. Bob Gu’s fingers tapped in their gloves, launching his marines.
Then his own gee pod came tight and—
—for a moment Bob Gu was not paying attention. For a moment he could not pay attention. Battle commit put the combat CO himself into the fray. In this case, launch took his landing dart almost horizontally out of Pendleton. Maybe this is not a good idea, he thought muzzily. But he always thought that coming out of a twenty-gee railgun launch.
Now he had to recollect his wits and context. His team and equipment were on schedule. The unthinkable Last Resorts were still high overhead, flexible to the last. The network munitions were already at UCSD. And the bio labs still showed green, all secure and peaceful.
His own landing dart was seconds away from the UCSD.
There was something else that was important, something in the last few seconds. Xiu Xiang? Bob’s recollection came unsquished just as a DHS analyst team presented its own form of the insight: Xiu Xiang. A not uncommon name. But in all of Southern California there probably weren’t more than three or four who owned that name. And one lived at Rainbows End with Lena Gu.
Suddenly he had a good idea just who was in the crosshairs of all that he commanded.
30
WHEN THE NETWORK STOPS
The Library had chosen.
For an instant, Timothy Huynh and all the night crew were silent. The crowds of real humans were quiet, and even the millions of virtuals took part in a coordinated stillness.
The Library had chosen—and it had chosen the Scoochis.
On the Hacek side you could see the realization of defeat spreading. The triumph was real. How would the Hacekeans take it? There had been a few debacles in the late teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or the Zones of Thought? But tonight the Hacekeans had lost at the hands of others; they must do something…maybe even something gracious.
The silent stillness of the mob continued a second more. Then Dangerous Knowledge suddenly turned away from the library. Its gaze swept fiercely across them all. After all, playing loser wasn’t in its repertoire. But whoever was behind all the creativity was flexible: After a moment, Dangerous smiled gently and turned back to the library. Its voice made concession sound like the granting of a favor: “We bow to the wishes of the Library. Here you have won, O Scooch-a-mout.”
Wails arose from the Hacek side, but Dangerous raised a hand and continued. “We give up our claims here. We remain as guests only.”
Sheila --> Night Crew:
And the Greater Scooch-a-mout was conciliatory in victory, though it didn’t step away from its embrace of the library. “You are welcome as guests, in a library with real books.”
Hanson --> Night Crew:
FOR SOME MINUTES, everything was cool. Ending a riot without a police confrontation or a physical debacle was a little bit anticlimactic, but the riot designers had even more special effects to wind things down. Katie Rosenbaum gathered the spider bots all together, then sent them out to Huynh’s mechs for a bizarre “peace dance”—that incidentally cleaned up most of the night’s garbage. Tim sensed negotiations going on between the two sides, things being traded, promises made. Dangerous Knowledge retreated into the sky, and both sides played with special effects that were new on this night.
But now, when things should have been getting smoother, there were network problems. Here and there, service was unusably slow or all jittery. It made everyone look bad. Scooch-a-mout still stood by the library, embracing the pillar that had “walked.” You hold a heroic gesture that long and you just look stupid. Huynh looked at his mech status board. There hadn’t been a Scoochi update for almost seven seconds. That was no way to drive a mech.
Huynh --> Hanson:
Hanson --> Huynh:
Huynh drove his forklift toward the Greater Scooch-a-mout mech. He walked along behind and tried to figure some nice way to get the two off the field. His robot’s “Mind Sum” mists weren’t matching its movements anymore; they looked like crap. Okay. He’d take control of the Greater Scooch-a-mout, and have the two robots give a last high five, and then rumble out together. That would be cool, if not fully so.
Maybe it didn’t matter. The network problems were getting a lot worse. There were strange latencies, maybe real partitions. Blocks of the virtual audience were being run on cache. Single-hop still mostly worked, but routed communication was in trouble. Huynh stepped a few feet to the side and managed to find a good diagnostic source. There were certificate failures at the lowest levels. He had never seen that before.
Even the localizer mesh was failing.
Like the holes in threadbare carpet, splotches of plain reality grew around him, eating out the mists and crowds, revealing the armies of everyday lab mec
hs. Where there had been hundreds of thousands of players, now there were open stretches of dark lawn, and the crowds of real humans, standing in shock.
“Tim! Your forklift!” The shout was real sound, from Sheila Hanson, just a few feet away.
Huynh turned back toward the library. He had lost contact with Mind Sum! He ran toward the mech. The forklift had continued autonomously for just a couple of steps. But this was not a flat lab floor, and the localizer mesh was failing around it. The robot had tripped on one of the ornamental boulders that fringed the terrace. It teetered off-balance, shrieking location queries in all directions. But now the mesh was gone, and the forklift was in trouble. Its onboard systems were designed to cope with instability: the failure mode consisted of stepping quickly into the fall, lowering its center of gravity, and dropping stability limbs. That would have worked down in the clean environment of the labs. Here, its lunge took it to the edge of the north-side grade—and there was no localizer mesh to alert it to the drop. The stability limb settled into thin air, and the forklift tipped over the edge.
There were screams.
Huynh ran out onto the robot battlefield. All the epic imagery was gone, but the robots still had local coordination. They rolled out of his way. He scarcely noticed. All his attention was on his forklift. He had direct contact now. He surfed across the forklift’s cameras…and felt sick. There was someone pinned underneath. He climbed down the hillside and fell to his knees. The woman was trapped there, still screaming. Her leg, up to above the knee, was crushed by forklift composite.
Someone scrambled down beside him. Sheila. She wriggled under the blades of the forklift, reached down to grasp the woman’s hand. “We’ll get you out. Don’t worry. We’ll get you out.”
“Yes!” said Tim. He had full control now. Between his own vision and the cameras, he could see how it had fallen, and where the woman was pinned. Be cool and everything will be okay. The forklift put its weight on knees that didn’t touch the woman. There was solid support, no surprises. From under the blades he could hear Sheila comforting the woman.