Directive 51

by John Barnes

  Silently, he thought to Taylor, I’m sorry you were here for this. I’ll try to find something I can do, however petty or invisible, for you and me and the country.

  He remembered that Taylor’s wife was named Beth, that they had one child, a boy that Taylor thought the world of. Taylor’s first name had been Charles and he’d endured teasing from the other Secret Service special agents about being named after a shoe. He’d been a quiet type who spent his breaks reading, and had always preferred to go home late in the afternoon when he could enjoy his family.

  I remember you. That’s about all I can do right now.

  Now that he was used to Taylor’s shocking appearance, the corpse was almost company, someone to talk to, anyway, and what politician doesn’t always need that?

  Taylor, he thought, I hiked and camped and visited the back country all over the planet when I was younger, and I was the most traveled vice president in history, and I had more than enough experience so that I should have been able to see what these assholes were up to, but I just didn’t, and look what it’s done to you, buddy. I sure as hell wish I could promise I’d avenge you, but I don’t think that’s in the cards.

  I guess I’ll be making my apology in person pretty soon, anyway.

  ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. JUST WEST OF SANTA ROSA ISLAND, ABOUT FIFTY MILES FROM THE CALIFORNIA MAINLAND. A LITTLE BEFORE 6:00 A.M. PST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.

  Grady Barbour wasn’t used to being up this early, though he was sometimes up this late; and he wasn’t at all used to being sober when he was up this late. But here he was, three days without a drink because Daybreak mattered, and after a long, lingering morning twilight, the sun was finally looking like it might decide to come up. That would bring on the land breeze that would make the rest of the day’s sail down the California coast a lot easier; they’d had to use the engine to get out here early this morning, and somehow that seemed wrong, just as it seemed entirely appropriate that Mad Caprice was a wooden boat that he’d re-rigged with hemp.

  It was cold, but he had a nice big lidded mug filled with coffee, and the wind was light but steady. He kept a hand on the wheel, drank the coffee, and thought about Daybreak and what life together with Tracy would be like after this.

  Tracy was taking her turn at launching, working as clean as possible because their electronics needed to work for a couple more weeks.

  Normally, just watching Tracy could get him horny; to Grady, she pretty much defined “trophy wife.” But in the baggy jacket, rubber gloves, hairnet, and rubber boots, she didn’t look like much just now. Also, he was feeling uncharacteristically clearheaded because they’d agreed not to drink until Daybreak was actually delivered.

  Yet he didn’t feel grumpy, tired, or sad at all, as he usually would, cold sober and up too early. With just enough breeze to fill the sails, the day promised to be warm but not hot, and they were on their way to a new world.

  Tracy scooped out a cup of the little gelatin capsules and dumped them into a flaccid black balloon, as big as her own torso. Really, the longest and hardest part of the job had been building the glove box that let them load the gelatin capsules without spreading any of the various nanoswarm and tailored biotes around, but Grady had always been good with his hands. Tracy was always saying that he looked like a sculptor, with his craggy, weather- and gin-beaten features.

  Tracy poured a cup of seawater into the balloon, enough to get the biotes going once the sun warmed it. She squirted the sealant on the surface inside the mouth of the balloon, then fitted it over the special adapter built by a Daybreaker in Seattle, sort of a friendly hippie machinist who usually made stuff for drug labs. She cranked down the gasket, opened the valve to the cylinder of welding hydrogen, and filled the balloon to its full two-meter diameter, bigger across than she was tall, enough to lift the water and capsules plus itself. She tightened the tie around the neck and released the adapter, letting the balloon rise away from the bow, carried well downwind before it was at mast height. It climbed slowly but steadily.

  Grady visualized the rest of the story; in an hour or so, the seawater would dissolve a capsule containing a biote that would begin to grow and eat the balloon; while that continued, the other capsules would dissolve, leaving a gray, active breeding sludge of mixed nanoswarm and biotes, floating above the Big System inland, invisible to radar, and drifting on the breeze.

  Sometime between two and five hours later, depending on whether the sun was out and how well each particular strain of biotes did, the balloon would rupture. Probably it would happen at the bottom of the puddled seawater, where exposure had been greatest. Then the escaping hydrogen would spray the solution and nanospawn into the air as the balloon whipped madly around, and a rain of ending would fall gently on the Big System below, perhaps in drips and spots across several square miles. Two hours later, the balloon itself would be gooey sludge on the ground somewhere—and another source of infection.

  “Yeee-hah!” he yelled, as the balloon rose higher and caught the bright morning sun.

  “Thank you for your applause,” Tracy said. “That was sixty-seven seconds, but I bet I can get it under forty before the day is out. Which will leave me the world record holder since we’ll never need to do this again.”

  “I’ll brag endlessly of your record,” he said. “Just one of many things to brag about.”

  She came back and insisted on a kiss before getting back to work, and that was lovely too. Daybreak was honestly the best idea Grady had ever encountered. Even being up in the morning sober would be all right if he had to do more of it, which he might, because they had already discussed that until things settled down after Daybreak, they might have to do some fishing or cargo-hauling to conceal the existence of the half ton of gold beneath the false lowest deck.

  Contemplating a world where he had nothing to complain about, he grinned, and shouted, “Yeee-hah!” again.

  ABOUT THE SAME TIME. ALONG COLORADO STATE HIGHWAY 13. 7:10 A.M. MST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.

  The long, winding two-lane road that snaked up into and over the mountains into Wyoming was nearly empty and Jason drove through deep tunnels of evergreens, burst into sunny meadows, and descended around the edges of wide, sunny valleys.

  This road would become a track for wagons, then just a trail with the occasional traveler with a leather or canvas (never nylon again!) pack. Elk would graze on whatever popped up between the old cracked asphalt. The neat metal buildings of the ranches would fall into rusty piles. Stupid ranch houses, made of bricks hauled up here from a thousand miles away, would be dens of bears and roosts of crows. Great idea, too late to be a poem, probably. Maybe after.

  Jason had taken this job because someone had to lay down the Daybreak seeds in the far back country so that, if the Big System tried to retreat from its deadly, miserable cities and spread its ecocidal madness to the clean wilderness, the nanoswarm and biotes would be here already, dug in and ready to stop the Big System from doing anything other than what it needed to do—stay in place, and die.

  It was an honor to be trusted with such a vital assignment, when so many others were just out throwing biotes and nanoswarm any old place in the cities and along the highways. Besides, Jason admitted to himself, he had always loved driving in the mountains, especially in the fall, and this would probably be his last chance ever to do that.

  He made his first stop in a broad meadow, about two miles across, at one of those solar-powered signs that talked to the satellites or the distant cell towers and displayed messages from the Highway Patrol: DRY & CLR THRU RIO BLANCO. During the winter it probably had more important things to say.

  Nobody coming in either direction, not even a distant rooster-tail of autumn dust. He pulled on his gloves, leaving the engine running despite the added pollution and waste of gas, taking no more chances than he had to with his starter.

  Jason reached in among the egg-packing cardboard and pulled out an object about the size and shape of an egg, the color of polished obsidian with a
thick coating of clear varnish, except for one flat side, where a ring of white plastic surrounded a silvery spot the size of his thumbprint. From the toolbox in the back, he pulled out a caulking gun loaded with Liquid Nails, and applied a neat ribbon of the brownish glue to the white plastic, careful not to lap over onto the metal. He didn’t need the stepladder; the sign wasn’t much taller than he was.

  The sign was double-sided, and the other side said, OPN RNGE—CATTLE ON RD. The solar collector faced south, on an eight-foot pole, and its cable ran down to a black box that joined the two sign faces. Jason considered for a moment; put it on a south-facing surface to be able to collect the maximum heat? Put it on the black box to be less conspicuous and have the maximum immediate effect?

  Compromise and do both, he decided, and slapped the black egg high up onto the face of the solar collector. He went back to the truck for another black egg, squirted that with Liquid Nails, and stuck it to the black box, low on the south surface, where he hoped the sun would touch it for at least a couple of hours every day.

  He pushed the capping sixpenny nail into the nozzle of the caulking gun and tossed that into the toolbox. Then he sprinkled Liquid-Plumr on his gloves and wiped them over each other as if washing his hands, peeled them off inside the Ziplocs, and set the bags on the front seat. In seconds, he was rolling again, the coustajam playing loud enough to shake the inside of the truck, like an anthem of victory.

  ABOUT FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER. JAYAPURA, PAPUA PROVINCE, INDONESIA. 11:12 P.M. LOCAL TIME. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.

  “Armand,” Captain Tuti said, “I do apologize that we’ll probably have to wait until morning to turn your power back on. We could do it, but if your lights come on, it’s apt to draw more unfavorable attention.”

  “I don’t much like unfavorable attention myself,” Cooper said, gesturing at the bullet hole in the window, which had been created by “the only sniper who knew his business,” as Tuti explained. “My men were right on him, saw his muzzle flash from the roof, but he was quicker than we were and gone by the time we got up there. I’m afraid I don’t quite have my A Team on this, you know; most of them are out trying to liberate the airport. Or rather dug in twenty kilometers from the airport, because someone shot at them, and they are afraid to go on in the dark.”

  “I don’t much like being shot at, myself,” Cooper pointed out. “Another?”

  “Gladly, Armand, gladly.” Tuti had found a way to gently hint that if there happened to be liquor around, he had no religious objection to it; considering how many favors he was in a position to do Cooper, Armand had figured that most of a bottle of Captain Morgan was a perfectly reasonable price.

  An hour after Tuti had come up to tell Cooper he was reasonably safe but couldn’t leave until the mob did, Cooper had established that the captain had a son with some minor, high-spirited events in his police record, who had a full scholarship to Tufts and needed a student visa. They’d be taking care of that in a day or so.

  With business taken care of, there was little to do except establish their mutual experience that being bureaucrats here was not easy but also not dull, and that they had a similar sense of humor. Cooper remembered what his father had told him—It’s always nice to have one of the friends you need turn into a friend you want.

  The phone rang. “Cooper, US Consul, Jayapura.”

  “Hi, this is Jasmine at State in Washington. I just came on shift and found your voice mails. I have no idea what the person who was supposed to have the desk was doing, but I’m here now. First thing, are you safe?”

  He sketched out the situation: that he was holed up but secure, that Captain Tuti was there, that the airport was in the hands of rebels who had previously not shown enough competence to seize a city bus stop. “Definitely some ringers on the team,” he explained to Jasmine.

  “All right, we appreciate the report. And just this minute Secret Service asked if Seagull got away before the airport was taken.”

  Secret Service? Who the hell was on that plane? Half an instant later, Armand Cooper realized what prominent politician had been unexpectedly missing from public appearances. Oh, shit. Here I am in the middle of history. But he held his voice even. “The consulate was attacked while they were still on the ground, and the assault on the airport was half an hour after that. Maybe, maybe not. Let me get the binoculars and see if they’re still on the ground there. I’ll call you right back.”

  The big white unmarked 787 Dreamliner was not anywhere he could see; he explained the problem, without saying why he was looking, to Tuti, who borrowed the binoculars. “I can tell you for certain it is not there.”

  “How do you know—”

  “Because there is just one large repair hangar at Sentani, the only place where a plane that size could be concealed, and it has room for only one plane at a time. And I see the rebels are towing a Lion Airlines 737 into it right now. So since there is nowhere for it to be, it isn’t there.” Tuti lowered the binoculars. “They teach us these clever tricks, you know, in police school.”

  Bad as the situation was, Cooper laughed, but then he called Jasmine back and told her, and she transferred his call to an Air Force general who brought in an admiral and a Secret Service liaison in conference, and Cooper went over things with them a few times. By the end of that he figured there just wasn’t going to be much to laugh about for quite a while.

  ABOUT HALF AN HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON, DC. 9:40 A.M. EST. MONDAY, OCTOBER 28.

  The Department of the Future contained three “Offices-of,” each headed by an assistant secretary. Besides Heather’s Office of Future Threat Assessment, Jim Browder’s Office of Technology Forecasting watched the science and technology possibilities from the perspective of an old grouch of an engineer-science writer who was quite certain that most things wouldn’t work most of the time, and that if they did, it would make things worse. In theory, Noel Crittenden’s Office of Political Futurology tried to understand developing situations around the world, focusing partly on what governments were doing but mainly on trends in the political class and nascent mass movements. In practice, Crittenden was a broad-but-not-deep historian who could easily call to mind six other times when something had happened but couldn’t seem to reach a conclusion if his life depended on it.

  Normally, Heather ignored her two colleagues, with Graham and Allie’s tacit encouragement. Allie liked to say Browder was mad about a girl getting hold of the boy toys like guns and money, and Crittenden’s office was actually the Office of Whatever a Retired History Prof Remembers; she made it abundantly clear that in the battle for funds and attention, she thought Heather’s office was the department’s only real star.

  More than once, Graham Weisbrod had given Allie and Heather a stern lecture about everyone’s being on the same team. Heather wondered if he’d ever said the same thing to the two men.

  So far, the meeting had gone exactly as Heather had anticipated: Browder was vocally, and Crittenden was sullenly, impossible. Browder, with malicious sarcastic glee, had forced Heather to explain and defend each slide, turning aside all suggestions that he wait and ask Arnie in a few minutes.

  Meanwhile, Crittenden looked every stuffy ounce of his Cambridge doctorate. His ancient three-piece suits and the slash of his gray mustache against his dark skin made him look like some old-time big-city mayor of 1990 or so. He sat with his arms folded, his good ear pointed toward Heather, watching each new slide with the same sour glare.

  Crittenden’s the reserve force that’ll come in to loot the dead and shoot the wounded after Browder finishes his massacre. And where’s all the support Allie and Graham told me I’d have? They’re both sitting there like lumps. Allie isn’t even looking up from her laptop.

  Heather drew a deep breath before tackling Browder’s latest hostile question. “That’s why Dr. Yang’s statistical semiotics research is housed in our office of our department. It’s not about intuition or recognizing patterns. It’s about the mathematics that finds things that would be
recognizable or recurring patterns—if anyone had ever seen them before. And Daybreak’s signprint—”

  “What’s a signprint?”

  Heather suspected that Browder already knew. At least I know this one, and I won’t give him a forty-minute version like Arnie would. “In the noosphere—the overall total environment of all the communications going in all directions at any one time—”

  “I know what a noosphere is, Yang wore the subject out for me once.”

  “Oh, good. Well, in the noosphere, we only detect signs when they move—we only know a word exists when someone speaks or writes it into a message, we only know an image exists when someone includes it in a bigger image, we only know a mistake is there when it’s spotted and corrected, all that. The signprint is the pathway in the noosphere that a group of signs, uh, flying in formation, I guess you could call it, they’re separate, but they stick together—it’s the pattern they leave—”

  “Like a wake in the sea of meaning,” Crittenden suggested.

  Hunh. That was almost friendly.

  “Good enough! Well, different kinds of organized populations of signs leave different kinds of signprints. In fact, from a historian’s perspective, a signprint and the thing it’s a signprint of are really just the same thing, one’s what you see and one’s the thing that’s there, is the way Arnie puts it.”

  “That’s a very old idea,” Crittenden said, “with considerable merit.”

  I feel so blessed, she thought sarcastically, and said, “Good, all right, then the thing that Arnie’s kind of math has going for it is that it doesn’t look for signprints by looking for structures that are like preexisting signprints. It just finds things that stick together and move together. Another way Arnie says it is that the pattern-recog guys sit and stare at the screen and look for clouds that look like a horse or a ship. Arnie’s stat methods just look for clouds—which is what you want if you want to know the weather. It means his way of doing things can see the ‘clouds’ in the noosphere that no one else can and then try to understand them. Because in the noosphere, unlike in the atmosphere, there are often storms of a kind no one has ever seen before, and being able to see them the second or third time they show up is not good enough if we’re trying to foresee what messes might hit us in the near future.