Macronome

by Howard Pierce

  Lori spoke up quickly on this. “We should get him to this Paradox place too. He knows a lot and he has some pure talent we want on our side. We don’t want him as an enemy. He is invisible to them now, so he should be able to get out a lot easier than Jerzy.” In her mind she was picturing the four human donkeys.

  Andrzej weighed her words and seemed to come to agreement in his head. “Okay. That seems right. You all right with that, Danni?”

  Danni nodded yes.

  “So, it’s your job, Lori, to tell him how and why to get there. Morley and I will be busy.”

  “Right you are, Andrzej. We are going to give new meaning to the term ‘failure to comply.’ How many days can Serendipity keep us invisible?” Morley was looking at Lori and Danni.

  The two women exchanged a prolonged gaze before Lori answered. “Maybe five to seven days. At least until that Thursday deadline.”

  “That should be plenty of time. Danni, you had better introduce Lori to Paradox, so she can figure out how to shepherd Mr. Blume there. Are you sure you are up to the trip? Even though it’s close, I’d avoid a stop in Telluride.”

  Danni seemed to gain strength as she sat forward in her chair. “Don’t worry about us Morley. We will have so many avatars spinning across the planet that no one will see any of us. We will drop into Paradox as ‘blessed’ agricultural equipment. You guys just get yourselves back before Thursday.”

  Under Strange Skies

  He had been told to arrive by foot, with only a small pack, in the guise of a pilgrim. So that is what he did. Programming the drone to drop him at a campsite two miles inside Colorado, he had watched his descent path glide through the glowing border line, dropping from east to the west, and light like a butterfly upon the small flat patch of sand carved out of the steep hillside. A seeker now, walking the narrow path out of the scrub bush and down to the ancient highway below. Unshaven for three days, he let the red dust swirl around and coat him as the drone departed.

  Walking steadily down the steep escarpment, he studied the road before him and the orderly panorama below. He estimated about three miles of switchbacks down to the floor of a narrow and mechanically verdant valley. Other mountains rose up again to the north and west, forming both a protected box canyon and thousands of acres of watershed for the currently small river running down the middle of the narrow, flat-bottom land.

  He counted thirty irrigation circles scattered on both sides of the river, differing shades of green, two circle sizes. Where there was no irrigation, only desert—high desert. The only other sign of civilization, besides the irrigation and the road, was a small cluster of buildings scattered around two long industrial-like structures that glinted with photovoltaics. His trek would bring him to a bridge that crossed the river and led into the dead center of the little village. It was a very large concrete arch that seemed oversized for the river and the small encampment. The road went on forever after that, straight down the valley to the east.

  He began to relax and enjoy the walk. The air was clear and warm the view spectacular yet reassuring—crisp mountain slopes straight ahead and a faint haze surrounding the buildings below. He was far from the chill of Krakow and, he hoped (as Lori Norton had promised him) far from the reach of whomever had hired him. Sevier Blume. Even the name felt right. He decided he would keep it.

  During the first few legs of his escape, he had tried to make some progress on deriving the identity of his employer and the fate of Angela Brodonski. But the net seemed to resist him, and his tools seemed dull. Then, as he waited in a transfer station below the streets of Zurich, a message from the same Lori Norton informed him that his employer had probably been TIC and that Mrs. Brodonski had been killed by contractors working for TIC. What the fuck had he gotten into?

  Ricocheting across the planet, on his way to a strange retreat they called Paradox, he hoped what was left of Skramble and Hyde knew what they were doing. In his heart, he knew he had struck near to the core of Serendipity, but he couldn’t tell how much real damage he had caused. In retrospect, he was mortified that he had attacked so blindly and with so little real understanding of his target. He vowed to never be so certain of anything ever again, but for now, he decided to continue to do what he was told and hope for the best.

  He crossed over the river and walked along the straight wide dirt track into the commune, piercing the curious cluster between the two most frontward buildings. Matching two-story squares, built of yellowish sandstone blocks and refractive windows, and capped by four triangular photovoltaic roof facets that were pitched and guttered for maximum water capture. All was quiet. He could see the tracks of large transport vehicles in the sand and a rutted turnaround area behind the northern building. The trucks must pull into it and then back up around onto the main road. There, they would be positioned to reverse in between two large commercial sheds that felt like the heart of the compound. Each shed was close to 100 meters long with several loading docks poking in towards the center roadway. Eight structures of various sizes arrayed around the long sheds, guarding them on the approach side.

  He stood and waited under strange skies, hung with fine dust that refracted the sunlight up through the first 100 meters. He could feel the late morning heat and clear blue above the haze. He waited patiently, standing alone in the center of the inner courtyard.

  Presently, a figure dressed in light grey shirt and shorts emerged from the covered doorway at the back of the northern sentinel building. Stepping out of the shadows and coming towards him, the person first resolved into a woman’s figure of curves and flow, and then into the face of Lori Norton from the video stream, dark skin and hair but eyes of light blue. She reminded him of a Siberian dog he had once known.

  “Good morning, Sevier Blume. I’m glad you made it through all the transport changes. You are safe here. Welcome to Paradox.”

  She brought him back into the building, which seemed to hold a warren of old-style office rooms. A man dressed in the same grey outfit had scanned and confirmed his biometrics and then taken his dash away for scanning and registration. While Lori sat and waited, a woman in a jumpsuit of the same grey material brought him to a holospace area on the second floor, where he was asked to move and talk in various ways while his physical being was sampled, captured, and stored. Delivered back to Lori, he found his dash configured for a private comm channel, Serendipity2, and a small stack of grey clothing waiting for him on his chair.

  “Feels a bit like a prison doesn’t it? Let me show you to your cell, and then we can talk. I only got here a couple of days ago myself.” Lori led him across the compound grounds to a building she called “the dorm.” In a small second floor bedroom, he dropped his new clothes on the table.

  “Get cleaned up, and then meet me over there in the dining hall.” Lori pointed out the window to the other entryway building near the bridge. “There is a shower room down the hall with everything you need. And put on one of your new grey outfits there. We all wear the uniform, always. I’ll explain why when we talk.”

  When she left, Sevier opened his dash and a wall screen lit up behind him. He checked the nets and they were full and fast, but he could tell he was running through some manner of diversion proxy. Still it seemed robust and minimally invasive with a layer of static and obfuscation, insulating him from triangulation and discovery. Putting on grey shorts and shirt, he looked at himself in a door-hung mirror. Pale white extremities and face. He used the sun spray and put on a grey hat that had been on the top of the clothing pile.

  Out the window, he could see a few grey-clad figures moving intermittently across the compound. They seemed to be migrating towards the dining hall building, so it must be lunch time. He was hungry and ready to talk with Lori.

  “We are all here as votaries, and now that you are joining us, you are a votary as well. I just became one the other day. It’s fine.” Lori took a bite of her salad and looked at him for a react
ion.

  “I don’t know what a votary is, but I’m sure I’m not one.” Sevier wanted to get out from under any illusion that he was going to follow whatever weird cult he had fallen into here, even as he was marveling at the perfect balance of tastes and textures in their salad.

  “I thought you told us, in your first stream contact, that you were done with being so sure about things you didn’t really understand.”

  “Touché.” Sevier tried to estimate her age. She looked to be in her early to mid-twenties, but she talked like someone a good deal older. “So what kind of cult do we have here anyway? And what’s in those big sheds?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem to be a cult in the traditional sense. I haven’t run into any gods or crazy prime directives. As best as I can tell, to all the world this is just one highly efficient truck farm. They produce and ship tons of engineered and amped up veggies. Hence, the great salad.” Lori took another bite and mimed orgasmic delight. “You’re about to get a tour from the head farmer, and I’m going to tag along since I’m just getting settled here myself.”

  “Why are they called votaries then, and why the uniforms?”

  “I think it’s all tied up with an across-the-board plan to be left alone. Off-grid, un-subsidized, too small to be worth herding into some oppressive current of consumer-compliance. Did you notice the haze?”

  Sevier looked up abruptly in mid-bite. “Yeah. The haze. I did notice that and thought it didn’t quite fit. What is it? Does Skramble and Hyde own this place?”

  Lori took a slightly deeper breath as she fixed on his face. “Okay. So, it’s my job to clear this up before we go any farther. We have a term for what you are now, and you have to promise me you accept that term as a life-pledge.”

  “Votary?” Sevier had a sly grin.

  “No. ‘Beaucoup committed.’” Lori matched the grin.

  “What the fuck does ‘beaucoup’ mean?”

  “It’s old-French for ‘very, very.’ You have to be very, very committed to our cause, and to our little team.” Lori wondered how he could not know what “beaucoup” meant and then realized he was just jerking her around a bit. Men. She realized he reminded her a bit of Morley.

  “How can I be ‘beaucoup committed’ if I don’t know what your bloody cause is or who the team is, beyond a couple of stream meetings?”

  “That, Mr. Blume, is kind of the point. We just saved your ass from getting snuffed by your invisible employer, after you waded into a contract you never bothered to grok. Plus, you messed with our friend Serendipity. Now, to keep you alive, we must take you into our fold. So, you must agree to trust us before we let you start breathing freely again. Think of it like a witness protection program.” Lori had thought this part was going to be hard, but she found herself enjoying it.

  He had been meaning for days to stop moving forward and analyze all that had happened to him over the past few weeks. But he hadn’t really done it for some reason. Dangerous contract, lucky guess on where to look in a mountain of code, unthinking insertion of mal-worm, all hell breaks loose, new name, new persona, three days in Krakow, learning one of the most powerful orgs on earth probably wanted him dead as a house cleaning detail, 100,000 miles over 20 seemingly random transports, and now a grey outfit and dorm room in the high desert. He had to admit that they had probably saved his life. And at least one of them was dead. And this Lori Norton was with them, and she lived outside both the first and second world—out where he intended to stay anyway. Why start thinking deeply at this point?

  “Okay. I’m beaucoup committed. Now can you start really explaining all this?” Sevier looked around the dining hall and out the windows.

  “Good. If it’s any consolation, I came to Paradox with not much more preparation than you. My honest opinion is that we are in the best place possible for people like us.” Lori waved to a much older woman who had just entered the hall with her lunch tray. “Here comes your guide for the first part of the afternoon.”

  “What kind of people are ‘us’ in your opinion?”

  “Puzzle solvers. People who can’t avoid seeing the patterns they are being woven into.” Lori pulled out the chair next to her as the older woman picked up utensils and made her way across the room. “Let me introduce you to Bella Aire, head farmer.”

  That did it. Sevier was in love.

  They Really Love Kale

  “What you are looking at, Mr. Blume, is an unending horizon of possibilities…” Bella Aire cleared her dry throat, “…as expressed through vegetable carbohydrates and phytochemicals.”

  “Please call me Sevier.”

  Standing in the southern-most of the giant sheds, he looked across acres of raised water beds packed with flotillas of leafy greens and sprouting legumes. With various blocks of different colors and stages of development, the entire mass seemed to vibrate. But then he realized that they were all moving ever so slowly away from him, through many water tray sections, towards the other end of the shed. He felt a blush of positive pressure pushing air out from the center towards the edges.

  In front of him, at the beginning of the long march, was open water. But as he looked more closely, he saw submerged lines of sprouting seeds, somehow held in place at the very beginning of the vegetable parade. As he watched, an entire tranche of seed lines rose up out of the water to be sprayed by a fine mist from suspended injectors. He looked at Bella.

  “Protein mist to trigger the desired expression. That tells the seeds what kind of plant to become. We just switched over from spinach to broccoli. Let’s head down towards the harvest end.”

  Bella stepped on to a moving walkway and Sevier and Lori followed suit.

  “Don’t the seeds already know what they are supposed to be?” Lori hadn’t had the in-depth tour yet either. Her few days in Paradox had been busy with more immediate issues.

  “No. We start with an undifferentiated packet seed bred for accelerant growth and resistance to disease, and then we massage it with a targeted protein memory layer. The seed wakes up and remembers to be a cabbage.” Bella swept her hand from the beginning to the end of the production line. “We speed up the lifecycle with timed nutrients and, voila, the tastiest broccoli you ever ate. Hold on.”

  The walkway sped up, and they overtook a large patch of red that turned out to be tomatoes, held in place a perfect inch apart, floating along under radiant light panels that traveled suspended four feet above them. Bella slowed the walkway down momentarily, looking critically at the bobbing red orbs and sticking her hand out under the nearest light panel. “Whiny little bastards. If you don’t give them 5000k they sulk.”

  “So, these are all clones?” Sevier was just beginning to appreciate the incredible density of produce held in the slow-moving river.

  “No.” Bella’s reaction was brusque. A defensive mother. “Not clones. All along the early stages they get bathed with nutrient currents and high frequency harmonics that produce randomization. Every one of them experiences a different sequence of micro-environments during cellular development. They may start from the same seed line, but the chaos of molecular life crashes in on them from the get-go. Tokyo calls it chimerism.”

  The walkway resumed its full speed, and Bella strode ahead towards the far end of the line. Sevier looked at Lori and whispered, “Wound a little tight for a horticulturist.”

  As they caught up with her near the end, Bella brought the walkway to a stop and waved a greeting to a man standing inside the work area, suspended on a platform above the parade. He appeared to be operating something with a hand controller. “We are shipping kale right now.”

  A suspended robotic arm was moving towards them, running above the finish line of kale heads that were hitting clear water at the end of the massive tray-river. Every second it sucked four heads up from their watery home and into clear paper bags that rolled onto a conveyor belt. Sevier followed the line of the movi
ng belt over his head. It led out to a waiting truck that was backed up tight against one of the loading docks. Two grey-clad votaries cut the bottoms, laid the heads on racks, and slid the racks in place as they were filled.

  Bella addressed them stiffly, clearly still offended about the clone remark. “So that’s what we do here at Paradox. We grow stuff out in the irrigation circles as well, but there is no comparison for productivity or quality. Mostly it goes to feed animals in this part of the state.” She looked up at a multi-display on the wall. “I think Tokyo is expecting you downstairs. You know the way, Lori, right?”

  Again, positive pressure and an airlock, as Lori led them across the truck-way to the other long shed. There was a large stamped metal sign that read “Building 1” on the outside. After some form of irradiation within the airlock, they found themselves stepping onto a nearly identical hydroponic factory floor. Broad rows of vegetables trooping towards a mechanical horizon.

  But in here, there was a large work space just beyond the entry walkway. It was marked off from the rest of the entry area by a square of clean-room irradiation curtains—bluish flickering walls of light surrounding lab benches and a very large work table that looked like it was designed to support heavy machinery. Lori continued to lead, with Sevier close behind, pausing briefly to make sure that the building’s systems had recognized Sevier, and then stepping through the nearest shimmering wall. He hesitated, but then followed suit, feeling the creepy tingle over his skin as bacteria, good and bad, were neutralized. Every hair on his body had been individually charged with static, and as Lori turned towards him, he saw her halo of frizzy black hair had doubled in volume. Her eyelash hairs stood out with an intensity that seemed to vibrate. She reached out and pushed an old-fashioned mechanical servo-button on the wall, and again Sevier felt a wind of air pressure gusting up from the floor and across his face. The massive work table began to rise out of the floor.