Binary Storm

by Christopher Hinz

  She glanced at Nick. Even her tears and tonight’s events hadn’t softened his antagonism toward the woman he viewed as a traitorous servitor.

  Olinda brought her emotions under control. Wiping the moisture from her cheeks, she got to her feet.

  “I’m all right now,” she said.

  Bel caught Nick’s eye. He read her silent message and grudgingly offered Olinda his condolences.

  “I’m sorry about your husband.”

  They turned toward the stairs as voices sounded from above. The scram unit was entering the house. As the soldiers rushed down the steps, Bel heard the distant sounds of fireworks.

  The new year was upon them.

  Part Three

  Storm

  Forty-Nine

  Bel waited in the end booth of the Hollywood Hurrah, one of the so-called epoch cafés springing up like wild grass in Philly-sec and elsewhere. Her lunch date was running late. To say that she’d been shocked to get that morning’s cryptic message from Olinda Shining was an understatement.

  It was early December, 2096, nearly a year after that terrifying night of the Ektor Fang imposter. That was the last time she’d seen Olinda, who within hours had resigned her officer’s commission as a major in the DOD and disappeared.

  It had been a vanishing act based on necessity. By noon of New Year’s Day, Nick had been picking up chatter from his CIs that the Royal Caste had put out a contract on Olinda’s life. Open to all Paratwa, it offered a large bounty for her capture or a lesser amount for confirmation of her death. Going off the grid had been her only chance of surviving the myriad of assassins likely to have been hunting her.

  Bel always figured that Olinda would have had a decent chance of evading them, that her counterintelligence skills would give her the edge needed to stay hidden. And because the Royals had made no open moves against Bel or Nick, presumably Olinda hadn’t been captured and forced to divulge information about her human contacts. Still, until she’d messaged late yesterday about wanting to meet, such assumptions had remained hypothetical.

  Bel glanced around the crowded downtown restaurant. The Hollywood Hurrah was populated mainly by a trendy and youthful business crowd. Each epoch café featured a different twenty-first century time period and theme. This one’s claim to fame was a staff of lifelike mech servers crafted into imitations of actors and actresses who’d been popular in Nick’s original era.

  Glowing nametags flashed holo streams of biographical data for each star and highlights from their entertainment appearances played on flexible belly screens. Bel wasn’t a history buff, at least not when it came to entertainers. Jennifer Lawrence, Samuel L Jackson and Meryl Streep meant nothing to her.

  Outside, Philly-sec was again decorated for the holidays and shoppers were out in force. Shitsnow was falling, dusting the pedestrian-only street and sidewalks with a layer of glistening brown. The flakes were darker and somehow even more sinister than last winter.

  By almost every environmental and social indicator, 2096 had been the worst year on record. Increased pollution had produced insanely high ToFo levels. Biodiversity was plunging, with nearly a million additional species having been wiped out. Severe escalation of global warming had occurred and, along with it, further losses of coastal communities as oceans rose, as well as the increased destruction of vital natural resources. Every one of the major geoengineering projects aimed at halting atmospheric degradation that had come online in the past few months had been deemed a failure.

  The list of things going wrong with the world seemed endless. There was increasing religious fervor and a spiking murder rate. Virtual reality escapism had reached an all-time high, with millions suffering from the addiction. A significant percentage of them were dying of starvation, dehydration or VR stroke after attempting 24/7 immersion in artificial environments.

  And it wasn’t just the ecosphere and the social order under siege. Many institutions were failing as well, both governmental and corporate. Nuclear and biological terrorism were on the upswing. Last month alone fourteen urban areas had suffered nukings or deliberately released plagues. In the less stable nations, ruthless dictatorships were coming to power and overwhelming democratic institutions.

  The year had begun with the largest mass suicide ever by doomers. It had occurred on New Year’s Day in the UK, engulfing an estimated three thousand five hundred souls and torching an entire British town. Even more ominously, a number of secured cities, including massive Mumbai-sec, had been overrun by unsec hordes. In India alone, there’d been more than a million casualties from the still-raging civil war between the haves and have-nots.

  The secret efforts of the Royal Caste to render the planet unlivable were almost certainly responsible for much of the mayhem. Yet Bel realized that they couldn’t be blamed for every calamity, nor for the overall mess humans had made of their home.

  There’d been too many centuries of the profit-progress cycle, too many technologies created not to bring about a better world but simply to satisfy greed and thus maximize economic disparity. The ideal of striving to improve the human condition had been smothered beneath technolust and avarice.

  The world is disintegrating. That zeitgeist now dominated the culture at nearly every level. It explained the rise of these epoch cafés. Intense fascination with past eras was a byproduct of the widespread belief that the world had no future. Even E-Tech’s most optimistic projections indicated that Earth had reached a tipping point, that its cataclysmic failure as a sustainable habitat was inevitable.

  In Bel’s role as director, she was forced to keep up appearances. She maintained a positive attitude, gave optimistic speeches about E-Tech’s principles and promoted the idea of the planet’s ultimate salvation. But privately, she suspected the end was near.

  Her most important efforts increasingly focused on the Colonies. In the past year alone, hundreds of thousands of settlers had passed the rigorous immigration tests and had begun a new way of life far from Earth and its woes. The massive space cylinders now represented humanity’s most viable future.

  She sighed. Dwelling on the state of the world was depressing, and such thoughts coursed through her all too often these days. Trying to distract herself, she gazed out the window. She spotted one of her bodyguards huddled under the café’s portico. Bel hadn’t told her security detail that today’s lunch was anything out of the ordinary, listing it simply as a meeting with an old friend. But she really didn’t know what to expect. Could the Olinda Shining who’d contacted her to set up the lunch meeting be an imposter, their encounter some sort of trap set by the Royals?

  “She’s already fifteen minutes late,” Sosoome grumbled from under the table. “How long are we going to wait?”

  “Be patient.”

  Bel had called Nick immediately after getting Olinda’s lunch invite. He’d insisted she borrow his mech for the public encounter as an added precaution in the event of a worse-case scenario. And if things were on the level, Sosoome’s AV scrambler would counter any attempts to eavesdrop on what could be a highly sensitive conversation.

  “I’m bored,” Sosoome said. “None of these servers are exactly my type.”

  “You’re not here for sex.”

  “In the larger context, everyone is always here for sex. Anyway, if I had my pick of doing it with any of them, it would be Christian Bale over at table seven. But that Shailene Woodley is pretty hot too.”

  “Just behave yourself,” Bel warned, not for the first time since their arrival. “I don’t want any interruptions with Olinda.”

  “Me? Interrupt?”

  “That goes for snide comments as well. Remember, Nick gave me the override code to mute your vocal function.”

  Sosoome rolled onto his back and glared up at her.

  Bel’s attention shifted to a stranger entering the café, a fortyish blond woman in a bulky trench coat. The woman scanned the crowd, spotted Bel and strode toward her.

  “I think she’s here,” Bel whispered.
>
  The woman sat down across from her and opened the coat. Bel was surprised to see a slumbering baby girl harnessed to her chest in a sealed carrier, which provided a steady stream of clean air. Pollution-free breathing was especially vital for infants.

  Bel glanced down at Sosoome. The mech flashed a message.

  REMOTE DNA ANALYIS MATCHES PREVIOUS SAMPLING FOR OLINDA SHINING. ACTIVE FACIAL WIPE. NO DETECTABLE WEAPONS.

  The woman checked a ToFo wristband. Apparently satisfied the café’s air was pure enough, she peeled open the carrier and lifted out the baby. The little girl yawned and started to awaken.

  “She’s beautiful,” Bel said. “What’s her name?”

  “Ektora. We use other names in public, of course. But my sensors picked up your mech and its AV scrambler. So today we can keep it real.” She smiled faintly. “Of course, I have to keep this facial wipe active pretty much all the time.”

  Olinda sat the baby on the table facing forward and gripped her midsection for support. Ektora Shining gazed around curiously at her surroundings before settling her attention on Bel.

  “About four months old, right?” Bel said, extending a hand to allow Ektora to grasp her finger.

  “Just about. Sometimes I don’t know what I would have done after losing Ektor if this little princess hadn’t been on the way.”

  Olinda’s words touched a nerve. Gradually over the past year, Bel’s biological clock had kicked into overdrive. She managed to repress the desire during the day by keeping busy. But often at night she dreamed of babies, dreamed of cradling an infant in her arms.

  “Are you and Nick still together?” Olinda asked.

  “We are.”

  “Still clandestine?”

  “Uh huh. I’ve offered to change the status quo, even proposed marriage a couple of times. But Nick… he has some issues with that level of commitment. Probably best that we keep things private anyway. We already have a complicated professional relationship.”

  “Marrying the boss. That’s usually problematic.”

  “Among other things.”

  Bel had raised the subject of having a baby with Nick on more than a few occasions. Sensitive to his reluctance, she’d even offered to take full legal and ethical responsibility for raising the child. But he remained dead set against the idea of getting her pregnant. Lately, even just broaching the subject had led to arguments between them.

  His stated reason for refusing wasn’t entirely irrational. “With Armageddon right around the corner,” he’d say, “it’s crazy to bring a child into this world.”

  Not long ago, Bel had held a similar view. But whatever hormonal changes were pushing her toward motherhood refused to succumb to such a rational interpretation. She’d also countered Nick’s argument by pointing out that throughout history, the species had created new life under even the most adverse and horrendous conditions. It was the nature of humans to reproduce, no matter how dire their existences.

  Nick wouldn’t discuss his real reasons for not wanting to make a baby. It was obvious to Bel that they were based on his early relationship with his son and the tremendous guilt that still gnawed at him for having abandoned Weldon at a critical juncture of boyhood. Nick refused to risk enduring such pains again by fathering another child.

  Bel could get pregnant without him, of course. She’d toyed with the idea of various other forms of insemination. But having a baby that wasn’t his could become an obstacle between them somewhere down the line. Besides, she was still crazy about Nick. She wanted the baby to be his biological offspring.

  Ektora made a cute bubbling sound with her lips and drew Bel’s attention back to the table.

  “So, is motherhood treating you well?”

  “It most certainly is,” Olinda said, breaking into a wide smile. “Pretty amazing, actually.”

  “What else have you been doing with yourself?”

  “You mean besides trying to avoid being assassinated, or captured and tortured?”

  “Uh huh, besides those things.”

  “Keeping busy. Trying to maintain a fairly low profile, of course.”

  “Nick says you’re still a top target for the Royals.”

  “I’ve sort of lost track of the black market for assassinations. What’s the reward on me up to these days?”

  “Twenty million if you’re taken alive, one fifth of that if you’re…”

  Bel trailed off. There was no need to finish the sentence.

  In both scenarios, the numbers on Olinda represented one of the most substantial of the illicit bounties. Still, it was nothing compared to the amounts being offered for Gillian and the team, which now had more than twenty Paratwa kills to its credit.

  “The Ash Ock still don’t know exactly what I learned about them through Ektor,” Olinda said. “That’s why they want me so badly, particularly alive. An interrogation to determine what sort of damage my intel might have caused, or could cause in the future if I haven’t yet passed along everything I know. There’s also the more mundane reason, of course: old-fashioned vengeance. Make an example of me to other Paratwa and servitors, a warning of what will happen to anyone who crosses them.

  “Anyway, as to what else I’ve been doing, it mostly boils down to using my counterintelligence skills as a freelance consultant. I help various civilian clients protect themselves from corporate espionage, internal criminal activities, those sorts of things. I shy away from businesses that have strong military connections, anything that might put Ektora and me at risk.”

  “Sounds lucrative?”

  “It is. But that brings up the reason I wanted to meet. Actually, there are two reasons. But I’ll start with the selfish one.”

  Ektora frowned and suddenly looked on the verge of tears. Olinda sensed the mood change. She picked up the baby, gently rocked her.

  “I’m well-paid but the hours have been getting crazy and I’m travelling way too much. I want to spend more time with this little wonder.”

  Bel was surprised. “You’re looking for a new job? With E-Tech?”

  “If the hours are reasonably decent.”

  “There are always opportunities. In fact, right now there happens to be an opening on my staff. But it wouldn’t pay anything like what you’re accustomed to.”

  “I have a pretty solid financial cushion. It’s not about that. What’s the job?”

  “I need a new chief assistant.”

  Maria Jose was moving her family to a Respirazone in the Australian Outback. She’d told Bel that she wanted to be in a better place when God ended the world at midnight, December thirty-first, 2099. Even though the date wasn’t technically the changeover to the new century, it was being popularized by many religious and secular groups as the time of Armageddon.

  “I need someone for the position with more experience than anyone on my staff has,” Bel said. “I’ve interviewed a number of candidates but I haven’t found one with the right skill set. I’d have to set up a formal interview for you, of course. But I’m sure you’re overqualified.”

  “I’m interested,” Olinda said. “Let’s do it.”

  A tall red-haired server named Nicole Kidman arrived and asked if they were ready to order. She had an Australian accent.

  They opted for salads and spiced veggie sandwiches. Bel waited until the mech departed before asking about the other reason for the meeting. Olinda countered the question with one of her own.

  “Any progress on identifying the mole on your Board of Regents?”

  Bel hesitated. Although Sosoome’s scan proved she was speaking to the real Olinda Shining, there was still a possibility that Olinda had been turned by the Ash Ock and was a double agent sent here to elicit information.

  But her suspicion quickly dissolved. Bel had trusted her instincts about this woman from their first encounter in that locker room beneath the streets of the zoo. She wasn’t about to forsake those instincts now.

  “We’ve made no progress, at least nothing substantial. A few leads b
ut none that have led anywhere. Nick and I believe we’ve eliminated a couple of the regents as possible Codrus tways. But even in those cases we’re not a hundred percent certain.

  “We’ve tried nailing down when and where a substitution might have been made. We’ve discreetly monitored regents’ friends and relatives to see if any of them noticed unusual behavioral changes, something that might suggest a sapient supersedure had taken place. We’ve studied newsphere data and surreptitiously accessed medical records in the hopes of finding any discrepancies.”

  “I dealt with a few supersedures during my time at DOD,” Olinda said. “Med files, unfortunately, are relatively easy to fake.”

  “As we’ve learned. We’ve tried a host of other means and methods historically proven to unearth spies.”

  “What about canary traps?”

  “Uh huh, three of them as a matter of fact. In each instance, we provided slightly different versions of the same fabricated story to all fifteen regents, then scanned for any intel blowback from among known Paratwa or servitors that E-Tech Intelligence has been tracking.”

  Bel shook her head. “Nothing’s worked. We’re no closer to flushing out the mole than we were a year ago.”

  “Codrus is smart. He might not be the guiding light among the Royals but that doesn’t mean he isn’t formidable. He’d have been very careful at hiding his tracks.” Olinda smiled. “But even an Ash Ock can make mistakes.”

  Bel felt a touch of excitement. “You’ve found something.”

  “For the record, what I’m about to tell you has nothing to do with whether or not you hire me. I just received this intel yesterday and I’d already been thinking about coming to you about the job change. A fortuitous coincidence.

  “Anyway, one of my clients is the World Bank.”

  Bel knew of them. Their headquarters were in Philly-sec, less than a kilometer away from Bel’s office. E-Tech and the bank coordinated the occasional funding initiative. The bank, founded in the twentieth century, adhered to its original mission of reducing poverty by providing development funds, these days mostly to unsec regions across the globe.