by Barnes, John
Dave’s gut rolled over; he’d had no direct acquaintance with memes, but he knew more than enough about them.
“If it will make you feel better,” Phil added, gently, “Monica and I have both been running that meme for four months now, and we can assure you that we’re in charge, not it. The meme is called Freecyber, and Monica developed it from my concepts.”
“What’s it do?” Prester asked. “I mean, obviously it either didn’t take you over, or if it did, it’s got you copied perfectly.”
“Well, I hope it didn’t take me over,” Phil said. “And what I run is three copies of Freecyber, all of them interacting. What Freecyber is, is an anti-meme meme. It lives in your brain and doesn’t do much unless another meme invades. Then it goes into action and disables the other meme, and eventually builds up your ability to resist another infection. It preserves individuality, if you will. And what I want you guys to do is spread it everywhere—through the territory of every existing meme.”
They had to prepare a set of false IDs, and some introductions to places where the three boys could get hired to do computer jocking, and that took the better part of the afternoon, before they were ready to have their last big meal with Phil and Monica and go to bed early so that they could slip away with a few hours of dark left to them. Within weeks, Freecybers were a new enemy all over the globe; virtually every established meme was trying to hunt them down, copy code from them, and find some way to cope with the new competitor.
<> “Well,” I Said, as we took turns smashing the hole in the inner chamber open winder, sledges battering at the now-washed-clean rock, “at least that explains where Freecybers came from and why they had so many variations so fast. But—I hope it doesn’t offend you to hear me say this—I always had the impression that the Freecybers talked a good game, but they seemed to be just as eager as any other meme to take you over.”
“That’s a pritnear perfect description of what the problem was,” Dave agreed, “and it’s one that Phil and Monica never really got solved. The idea was supposed to be that Freecybers would allow people to have a much greater liberty in their personal lives and beliefs, but to do that, the Freecybers had to be smart enough to defeat other memes, and had to have a strong empathy for the desire for freedom—and you know, that combination meant that every generation Phil released, except the last one, always figured out that any freedom the host got was freedom the meme lost—and drew the implications—and became, basically, a sympathetic, patient tyrant. And since Phil was doing it all in ultracompact neurocoding, the Freecybers left people more in command of their abilities, able to exercise initiative, invent, create, do more than just cooperate and behave, and that meant that from the moment that a copy of any version of a Freecyber happened to think of the idea of having power over people, they were more effective competitors than most other memes out there. Then the other memes would gang up against them, and pirate the neurocode from the Freecybers … and it would be another generation that failed, and Phil and Monica would have to create still another.”
For more than two years, Dave slipped in and out of roles and identities, moving around the world, sowing each new generation of Freecybers, every time in the hope that this one would be a liberator that did not degrade into a tyrant. Phil’s original system of having three Freecybers watch each other in each brain running them had to be abandoned because it took up too much space; a system in which each Freecyber watched itself in a time-lagged system replaced it. But in each new generation, the Freecyber copies became corrupted and began to seek power and control for themselves—forcing Phil and Monica to develop a new generation of Freecybers that could take on and erase or control the last generation of Freecybers.
Phil and Monica worked endlessly on the problem, going short on sleep, worried by how the conflict as a whole was going, visibly aged by the strain every time Dave made it back to the Big House for a new set of memes and some badly needed rest and contemplation. The race was growing more intense as One True pulled ahead of other memes, and as the other memes allied to fight against One True. Freecybers, as a guerrilla insurrection against all sides, were finding it harder and harder to get in or do anything, in most regions, even when they were not corrupted. The risk of getting caught was growing.
“And still I didn’t see it coming,” Dave said, as he methodically shoveled mud down the hole, the heavy loads splashing into some little pool the trickle of hot water must be making down there. The shadows from the lights up in the corners did strange things on his face; sometimes it looked like a very bitter smile, sometimes like a mask of tragedy, sometimes it was simply half there and staring madly. “I’d been working under all sorts of aliases as a mercenary, and wasn’t too bad a soldier—good enough to fake it through most outfits, most of the time, as needed. The last batch of Freecybers, though, hadn’t worked for crap against the new One True, and I’d barely gotten away with a whole uncaptured skin. So no matter what, we were in for a rough time.”
<> Weeks after it happened, one of the other kids from the Big House dropped Dave a note and let him know that One True had caught Prester and turned him; the date that was given was about right for it to be the explanation of how One True found out where the Big House was.
Dave and Joey had been coming back in to pick up the new, improved version of Freecyber, and the diskster had dropped them off, as had been necessary for the past couple of years, a few miles from the Big House, in a grove of trees. That seemed to haunt Dave, years later—that if they had just once broken protocol, and come straight in on the diskster, they might have gotten there soon enough.
The black plume of smoke told them before they came over the hill and saw the central part of the house just falling in. They skied down to the house itself, careless of the possibility that they might be shot, and then circled the house once. The wings were in flames, with most floors collapsed already. There was no way to go inside and come out alive, and no trace of Phil or Monica, so they resigned themselves to coming back later, and followed the tracks of the attackers—it looked like just two of them—up to the top of the ridge, where it looked as if they had stood and watched the fire for a long time, standing very close together.
Beyond that, the ski tracks ran a couple of miles to where a diskster track showed up.
It was late afternoon before they could safely go into the ruins of the Big House. “The only satisfaction I had,” Dave said, “was that they didn’t seem to have been tortured—just some bullets in each of them, where you’d put the shots for a quick kill. Checking with some processors that we had concealed in fireproof boxes, and hooked to the house system, for just such an occasion, we got some fuzzy pictures of the guys who did it—not enough to track them down—plus the satisfaction of knowing that as they tried to read our house systems, they were both infected with our little revenge micromeme, which had the nasty trick of waiting a few days and then setting you up to kill someone you were fond of, using all your imagination and skill and resources at hand. So probably a few days or weeks later, Phil and Monica’s killers suddenly turned around and did whatever they would think of as the most unforgivable crime possible, to somebody important to them. Or maybe they tried to do it to each other.
“Well, with the Big House gone, I did what we’d planned on for ages. By then the thirteen agents were down to seven, and any messages at all between us were potentially dangerous, but I did put out word out to everyone that the Big House was gone and nobody was in charge anymore. Then I got going with the solo plan appointed for me. And that’s how I ended up in the Rockies with an underground hideout that was practically a palace, and a military-quality suspended-animation rig—all this was built years before I came out here.
“My job was supposed to be to see how far I could get with organizing a resistance up in the hills, and if that failed, to duck out and go underground—very literally—for long enough to throw pursuit off completely, then stick my head up and see whether the situation had gotten a
ny better and there was anything I could do.”
I dumped another load of clay down the hole and listened to the splash. It must be pretty deep down there, or fast-flowing, or both, considering how much it seemed to be taking without complaint. “So you must’ve been out here to do the setup before the war even ended, before Resuna, long before One True announced its plans.”
“Right. I used power equipment to set everything up, taking a chance that the satellite would see it but figuring that chances were no one would ever check the memory, years later. Then when the time came, I went back, made sure the place was still there and ready, and got far enough away so that I wouldn’t lead anyone to it. After that, you pretty much know the rest—I went out and recruited some cowboys, gave them some ideas and some organization, and turned them loose. I guess I’d have felt more dedication to the cause if any of them had been worthwhile people, but, you know, Curran, they weren’t. They were the same kind of people that became vags back at the turn of the century—grimy losers who couldn’t face having lost and wouldn’t stop whining, get up off their knees, and get back in the race. The longer I led them, the more I realized there was nothing to lead.
“So finally I decided it was time to end the game, and that was about the time you showed up with your team. I started running a few more risks with my cowboys, and sure enough, one by one, your team caught and turned them, till it was just me. Then I rushed you where I could pull a disappearance. And I decided to just move into the cave to sleep for a decade or so and see what conditions were like when I got back. Hard part was not being able to tell Nancy what was going on.”
“You must have married her before you turned cowboy?” “Just after. Call it a fit of sentimentality. You surely must have guessed where I met her.”
“Was she one of the other kids from the Big House?” “Bingo. Who else would I have felt comfortable with? And just having her around to talk to made life a hell of a lot more tolerable, you know, because she wasn’t a half-literate ex-mercenary who only knew how to keep repeating that a man is a man and he’s got to be himself, if you see what I mean. I would have taken her, and maybe even Kelly if she was born by then, down into the cave, but I didn’t have any spare suspended-animation rigs, and while I was trying to get a line on two of those, Nancy and Kelly got found, caught, and turned. So like it or not, since there wasn’t a prayer of rescuing Nancy or Kelly, and I was completely disgusted with cowboys, and I couldn’t remotely think of winning my little war, it was time to go to sleep for a decade and see if conditions were any better when I emerged.”
I leaned back against the wall, half to scratch my back on some exposed rock, half to work the muscles. “Well, are conditions any better?”
“I’ve got at least one follower that isn’t a maladjusted dumbass,” he pointed out.
“Thanks, you’re not a maladjusted dumbass yourself.”
” ‘Predate it,” he said. “You want to have dinner, bed down, maybe tomorrow we’ll go get a cache and bring it in?”
“Anything that isn’t a shovel sounds real good right now,” I said. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
Sometimes just a change of abuse makes all the difference to sore muscles. The next day was clear and bright, so we went for the one cache that we could reach easily while staying under cover the whole way. That one turned out to contain, among an enormous quantity of other things, a bottle of wine, some shampoo, and a few fresh towels, not to mention a badly needed change of underwear. We were most of the day getting it all moved in, but that evening it felt like we might as well hold a party—the place was still a rabbit hole but with more comfortable rabbits. We splashed around in the hot water, got reasonably clean, toweled off, and settled in for the wine.
We were finishing that off, reflected moonlight was glowing through the hole, and that’s when I asked, “So what’s your mission now that you’re back? And will you be wanting me to enlist in it?”
He coughed with embarrassment and took a swallow of the last of his wine. “Currie,” he said, “I really thought you would guess and I wouldn’t have to say this, outright, I mean. After Phil and Monica died, I was working for my part of their project, and that meant I was working for the Freecybers. Just what do you think my job was? What does a meme want you to do?”
“Whatever it tells you, doesn’t it? I mean the point is obedience, unless you’re going to tell me that the last generation Freecybers were different.”
“Something more basic than that, Currie. What’s the one thing any meme wants you to do?”
I stared at him. “Well, a regular meme wants you to spread it to other people.”
“And Freecyber isn’t any different, Currie, it just doesn’t want to run your life, most of the time, but like any of the others it wants to spread. That’s what my copy wants to do.”
“You can’t be trying to tell me that you’re running Freecyber. You don’t talk like anybody who runs a meme. You can’t mean you’re running it right now.”
“Right now, sure. It runs in background. Freecyber doesn’t talk to me like Resuna does to you, because it doesn’t have any means of direct verbal communication, but it’s right there in my head, and I always have a strong feeling reminding me that Freecyber needs to propagate.”
“Well, but you haven’t—” That was when I stopped and stared at him, and then realized. “Oh. Shit. Of course. I was out for all that time, and then when I came back … no Resuna. So you put Freecyber into me while I was unconscious, I guess through my jack—and then you cooked the jack—and now here I am running a meme and not even knowing I’m running it.” The world was unsteady and it wasn’t just from the wine. “Shit,” I said again. “Shit, shit, you aren’t any better than One True itself, are you?”
I don’t think he was expecting me to hit him. I got in a good hard right to the side of his head, a real haymaker, before he even put his guard up, but he was at least as hardheaded as I was. He made my ribs go thud with a hard kick, and then I gave him a jab in the face. In a few seconds we were all over each other, pounding, kicking, slapping, and screaming things, anything to hurt each other, all technique forgotten in the wild imperative to just inflict as much injury as we could. In the middle of it all we were both yelling godawful stuff about people from each other’s stories, Tammy and Mary and Nancy and Phil, in pure shrieks of hatred.
We threw ourselves at each other again and again, slipping on the slick clay, falling into the scalding water, getting slammed against the rocks and dragged on the gravel in the dark, bruised, bleeding, gasping for air. My face was wet with some godawful mixture of blood, mucus, and tears, and it felt like every tooth in my head was loose, but I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was hurt Dave, hurt fucking Lobo, teach the bastard not to go building a person’s hopes up, making him feel like he had a friend and a partner, and then suddenly throw a story like that at him. I needed to make him rip his fucking meme back out of my head, have things be what they were supposed to be—Dave and me out here in the mountains, the last free men on Earth—and not just be part of the scheme of Freecyber to take over from One True and run the world for itself. He had promised me freedom, and given me a change of jailers, and I was going to kill this sorry-ass penny-ante Judas for it.
I finally calmed down enough to pick up a shovel. By that time I’d gotten tossed and turned around into the dark back of the cave, and only noticed the shovel because it was under my foot. In the dark he couldn’t see me coming and I could probably cave his head in—I crouched, grabbed it, and rushed.
He was lighted by the reflected moonlight through the hole, a sharp half-light half-shadow that made the lighted parts glow and hid the rest in darkness. Then that strange half-apparition got a wild expression that I could just barely see in the moonlight, like a demon mask, and shouted, “Let overwrite, let override,” and the shovel fell from my hands and banged on my shins as I fell forward, landing my face in the warm mud. I tried to get up, twice, but barely managed to roll over.
When I woke up, it was daylight. Resuna was back, and Dave was gone; he’d taken his pack, his sleeping bag, and a bunch of supplies. I crawled unsteadily to my feet as Resuna, in a very worried tone, assured me that it couldn’t reach the satellites at all and it thought its cellular jack had been damaged shortly after a non-approved meme had been slipped into my mind.
Anything left in the cave was too heavy to carry, except for my outside suit. It seemed to be missing its boots, and I spent a while looking for them before it occurred to me to check the shelf under the hole. When I climbed up, they weren’t there either, but then I poked my head out through the hole and saw that my boots and flexis were lying in the snow, twenty meters away. He’d set it up so I could have them, but I would have to really want them.
I thought about just getting back in the sleeping bag for a while, resting up, and starting the next day, but Resuna pointed out that it could snow overnight, or thanks to all the stress I could come down with a fever or something, and anyway it was still very early in the morning.
I conceded that all this was true.
I put on my outside suit, pulled myself through the hole, cocked my feet up so that they didn’t trail in the snow, and crawled on hands and knees to my boots. I had a horrible thought that he might have filled them with snow, but it looked like he was only interested in delay, not in cruelty—they were just fine.
Once I got them on, I put on my flexis, which were already set to function as skinny skis, and for the first time in weeks, I switched on the power in the suit. There was nothing I wanted in the cave, so I shoved a couple big armloads of snow into the water-processing reservoir on the suit, wished for poles for a moment, and then skated off, following what I guessed must be Dave’s track downhill. This time I knew a lot more about his habits and the country, and though he’d made use of rock, ice, and frozen dirt wherever he could, I followed him easily enough.