Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  Better to deal with Ky Xuan Nguyen. He, at least, seemed to have no special love for tradition or the authority of the police.

  She finished the last of the noodles, then lingered over the coffee. It seemed proper to be terrified at her situation, but somehow she wasn’t. In truth she felt oddly calm and determined. With a swift tap of her fingers, she summoned Kathang’s salamander icon. To deal successfully with Nguyen, she must first understand what she had gotten herself into—and that meant reviewing everything the ROSA had gathered on the fall of the module, and the life cycle of LOVs.

  Ela read the articles and listened to the newscasts—and it wasn’t long before she learned a grim truth: Her LOVs had been made dependent on certain rare chemicals, special amino acids. Kathang explained that amino acids were the building blocks of proteins. There were many different kinds, but those needed by the LOVs were not commonly found in nature. Without an artificial source of these select opines, any escaped LOVs would surely die within a few days, at most.

  Ela felt a flush that could not be explained away by the day’s rising heat. Trembling, she hurried to the shower room to look in the little mirror. Any hint of luminescence from the LOVs was drowned out in the diffuse early sunshine pouring through a scarred plastic skylight. She could not tell if they were alive or dead, but when she scratched at the cluster’s edge, a slim crust broke away. Her eyes widened as seven tiny, perfect spots of blood oozed into existence where the LOVs had been. She looked at her fingernail, and could just make out the glassy disks, trapped like dirt at the nail’s end. “Oh no.” Cupping her hand over her finger to block out the light, she examined the stray LOVs. No trace of a blue-green glow could be seen.

  Had they died? Had all her LOVs died?

  The mirror was hung on a hook, so she lifted it off and hurried with it into the relative darkness of the hallway, closing the shower-room door to block off the light. She held the mirror up to her temple. To her relief she could still make out a soft blue-green glow across most of the cluster.

  But it was only a matter of time before these LOVs failed too. How long?

  It might be hours. It might be minutes.

  She returned the mirror to its proper place, thinking hard. She could hear Mrs. Dao outside, talking to the chickens. From somewhere nearby, there arose the squeals of children playing. Then Kathang whispered that another message had just arrived from the IBC.

  Ela’s gaze shifted to the little icon of wing-footed Mercury.

  She stared at it, thinking of how the routing of messages was completely anonymous. An address gave no hint of its owner’s location. That was why she had not shut down her mailer.

  It occurred to her that Dr. Virgil Copeland would have had no reason to shut down his mailer either, not if he was still at large. He wanted to see the LOVs survive, didn’t he? That’s why he’d run away. If he was still free, she could write to him. She could send him a message requesting his advice. Yes. That was the thing to do, for who would know better how to keep her LOVs alive?

  chapter

  13

  FORTY MINUTES AFTER Panwar’s death in the lightless utility tunnel, Virgil Copeland stood on a floating dock made of plastic lumber, feeling it bob and shiver beneath his feet. He had walked out of the tunnel into the gale winds and driving rain of a kona storm. In just a few seconds he’d been soaked to the skin, but at least the runoff had given him a chance to wash the blood from his hands and face. A forgotten cash card rediscovered in his pocket had gone to buy an anonymous rain slicker that let him slip past the traffic cams guarding the waterfront.

  His ROSA had interfaced effortlessly with the stolen farsights. Virgil had not found the transition quite so easy. The Heroes were dark and heavy, and he could not help thinking of the two cops, and of Panwar, who had worn them last. But when Iris produced a map of the new marina, Virgil followed it dutifully through a maze of floating docks, to a boat slip far out in the harbor. Only now, as he saw what was tied up at the slip, did he wonder if the ROSA’s link might be corrupted after all. Was it possible Iris had made a mistake?

  He crouched on the dock, rain dripping off his hood as he stared at the little vessel. If it was a vessel. It did not look like any boat Virgil had ever seen. Its low, covered hull was gracefully contoured, tapering at both bow and stern, a mere fifteen feet long and delicately slender. There was no open deck, no elevated cabin. Its dorsal surface rose only a few inches above the waterline. Its color was dark, metallic blue.

  Virgil decided it must be some kind of submersible. To Iris he whispered, “Identify?”

  The ROSA responded in its soft female voice, “This is a racing-class submersible known as a marathon shell. It has a passenger capacity of one to two. More?”

  A submersible. That explained its bizarre appearance, but not its size. It was so small. There was something surreal in its diminutive measures, as if the marathon had been made for a petite species from some other world. Now it was here: a jewel-like spaceship at rest upon the water.

  He stood up, his raincoat snapping in the driving wind. Do it, he thought. Get aboard. There was nowhere else to go.

  Halfway along the marathon’s curved dorsal hull, a round hatch rose in a hydrodynamic mound three inches high. As Virgil stepped onto the sub’s back, the hatch opened. He peered inside at a brightly lit interior so tiny there hardly seemed room to turn around. Claustrophobia stirred inside him, until he reminded himself that Panwar had chosen this vessel. Virgil resolved to trust that choice.

  Pulling the rain slicker close around him, he dropped through the hatch, landing in a narrow oval of open floor. He had to crouch to keep from hitting his head against the ceiling. At that point the cabin’s height was a mere four and a half feet—but the ceiling grew even lower as the cabin tapered toward the bow. A large armchair just fit between the rounded walls. It could be spun to face a bank of flowscreens on the bow console, or the two tiny doors that formed the cabin’s aft wall. Virgil opened one of the doors to discover a toilet cubical. The second concealed a crawl space packed with food and emergency equipment.

  Overhead, the hatch snicked shut. Virgil stared at it, willing away a sense of entrapment. Then his gaze sought the tiny Greek goddess on his screen. “Iris? Have you interfaced with the resident ROSA?”

  “Affirmed.” Iris’s voice issued now from the marathon’s audio system. “This vessel is fully automated.”

  Virgil breathed a silent prayer of thanks to Panwar. Then he doffed the Heroes. “Let’s go then.”

  “Destination?” Iris asked.

  Panwar had already decided that. “Where the debris fell. The Mekong.”

  He pulled off the rain slicker and dropped it on the floor. Then he stripped off his wet shirt and rummaged in the closets until he found a blanket. He wrapped himself in it. “Iris, can you make it warmer in here?”

  “Raising temperature to eighty degrees.”

  He curled up in the armchair while Iris activated the bow console’s flowscreens.

  The two central screens presented views outside the marathon, one above water, one below. A third screen detailed the vessel’s position on a map of the harbor, while the last one displayed the ship’s technical specs and present status. Virgil frowned over the specs. Apparently the marathon was propelled not by a screw, but by twin propulsion foils designed to work the water in a complex paddling motion adapted from the movement of a penguin’s wings. Power came from a small bank of fuel cells, so engine noise was almost nil.

  Motion drew his gaze to one of the central screens. He watched the mooring hooks uncouple and retract from the rain-drenched dock. Then he watched the dock slip away. He felt numb and cold and wildly grateful that for now at least everything depended on Iris’s skill, and not at all on him.

  The vessel remained on the surface as it glided away from the marina and into a chaos of windblown swells, two or three feet high at the harbor entrance. As soon as the last buoy was past, the silicon agent that piloted the marathon took
the submersible under, extinguishing the view of the shore and the receding city—along with Virgil’s link to Iris. He stared for a long time at the blank blue screens before he finally fell asleep.

  HE AWOKE at midnight to find the blue screens had gone black. His first thought was that he could not possibly be alone. The IBC must be near, in a boat or plane or another submersible, closing in on him. Panic bloomed in his mind, rising whole from some forgotten nightmare.

  He grabbed the Heroes and slipped them on. “Iris! Where are we? What’s happening out there?”

  A ROSA answered, but it was not Iris. Not exactly. The rhythm of the voice was wrong, and the icon that represented it on his farsights was only a faded outline of the lovely Greek goddess usually resident there. “This is an Iris shell, interfaced with the resident ROSA.”

  Virgil nodded his understanding. Iris ran on a high-security server in Texas. Normally it communicated with his farsights through a pulsed link, but with the marathon submerged, it could not link at all, so it had left behind a shell—essentially a shallow mask of its personality that the marathon’s onboard ROSA could wear to make him feel “comfortable” until he could again link with his own software.

  The hybrid ROSA provided him a weather report, and an approximate position reading that meant nothing to him because he was not familiar with latitude-longitude measures. After some discussion, he understood the marathon had traversed several hundred miles as he slept.

  “Have there been any communications?” he demanded. “Or any vessels in apparent pursuit?”

  The ROSA denied it.

  Had he eluded the IBC then? Had Panwar’s plan truly worked?

  Not for Panwar.

  Dammit! Randall Panwar had let himself die. For the LOVs! For Virgil’s LOVs. How goddamned stupid could a man be? If Virgil had only known how badly hurt Panwar had been, he would have never, never let him leave the LOV project suite. They would both be in prison now, but they would both be alive. Panwar had used the LOVs to mask his pain, to give him a chemical strength his body could not sustain. Momentum had carried him forward. Now he was dead. They were. Panwar and Gabrielle.

  Virgil took a deep breath, striving to quell a rising panic. He willed himself to be calm … and calmness came, like a wave flowing over him, a gentle inundation.

  He got up to use the toilet, to wash his face. He had to stoop to keep from knocking his head against the ceiling. In one of the cabinets he found a stack of neatly folded clothes. He pulled out a pair of white-cotton pants and a soft white sweater. They were sized to Panwar, so the arms and legs were too long by inches, but when he rolled them up, they were wearable. Next he used the steaming hot water from the bathroom tap to make a cup of instant coffee. Cup in hand, he sat down in the chair again, turning to face the flowscreens at the cabin’s bow end.

  Think.

  Sure, but where to start?

  Family, he supposed. If they were still talking to him.

  With a tap of his fingers, he skimmed his queue of stored messages, glancing over the 213 missives Iris had judged worthy of his attention. At the top of the list were multiple notes from his parents. Even more sobering, there were notes from Panwar’s parents too. Virgil could not bring himself to read any of them just yet. For his own parents he prepared a brief, typed message, explaining that he was unhurt and that he would contact them when he could. He marked a copy for his mother and one for his father. It would upload the next time the marathon had an active link. For Panwar’s parents he started to write a description of their son’s death; but then he decided against it. Anything he wrote could be used in court, and the law could be a twisted thing.

  He supposed he should try to get a lawyer.

  He entered that on a fresh list of things to do. Then he prepared an insipid note for Panwar’s parents expressing his sorrow and condolences, though all the time he was thinking Your son was so goddamned stupid he let himself die!

  After that there were notes from friends, notices from the IBC, threats from the Honolulu police, offers of counsel from EquaSys, financial proposals from news agencies, and a slew of personal communications from biotech professionals, most writing to condemn him, but a few offering covert aid.

  Virgil looked them over, but he didn’t respond to any of them. After an hour he cached the queue and sat back to think. E-3’s sudden transformation haunted him. Its development had taken an exponential step forward during the hours before its fall … those hours following its long interaction with Gabrielle. In that time it had somehow gained an emotional awareness that allowed sentience to blossom across the links between its component LOVs.

  But how to explain the presence of the mutated LOVs parasitizing the Hammer’s fiber-optic lines? Those LOVs must have developed over a period of months, long before E-3’s “awakening.” He had never suspected; he couldn’t even guess how it might have happened.

  He touched the glassy specks of the LOVs on his forehead. They were a remnant population, thirty-six individuals, while it had taken millions of LOVs to create Epsilon-3. And his LOVs were of a much earlier generation.

  Nevertheless …

  Might it be possible to re-create what had existed so briefly? To rebuild the LOV population until a new colony could be established? That’s what Panwar and Gabrielle would have done, he had no doubt of it, if one of them were here in his place.

  Virgil closed his eyes, feeling the sweet addiction of their shared curiosity. The LOVs had been a communal obsession, the faith that held the three of them together. He could still feel the weight of Panwar’s hand, clawlike on his shirt; he could hear his fragile voice, imploring Virgil to go on: No one else is going to care.

  Virgil bowed his head, knowing he did care, very deeply. The three of them had created something new to the world, a thinking being unprecedented in history, an intelligence that was not human. What could it have taught them about themselves?

  He still wanted to know. Deeper though, in the dark terrain at the base of his mind, was a need to prove that Gabrielle’s and Panwar’s lives—and, perhaps, his own—had not been for nothing.

  He raised his head, gazing again at the blank flowscreens. “What’s our depth?”

  The voice that was not quite Iris’s answered: “Sixteen fathoms.”

  Virgil sighed over the meaningless nautical measure. “In feet … ?”

  “Approximately one hundred feet.”

  “Is it possible to get a working link without surfacing?”

  To his surprise, the ROSA replied with a qualified yes. First the boat ascended to a running depth of sixteen feet below the surface. Then an antenna was released: a vacuum-filled metallic balloon on the end of a long, lightweight cable. The marathon slowed, leaving the balloon bobbing several feet above the swells.

  Button cameras on the balloon gathered up shards of reflected moonlight. The boat’s ROSA enhanced the dark image, unveiling a heavy sea torn with whitecaps, and a wind-driven roof of broken clouds. No other vessels were in sight.

  On Virgil’s farsights, Iris’s faded icon blossomed with three-dimensional color as the ROSA renewed its link. The revitalized Greek goddess held a scroll in her hand. She made as if to hand it to him. Four hundred twenty-nine messages, Iris murmured. Sixteen representative news clips.

  He watched the news first. As he did, he felt Panwar’s ghost move inside him, a memory complex possessing the persona of his friend. “I told you so.”

  Indeed. The breaking story of the hour proved the prescience of Panwar’s gamble. The EquaSys LOVs had survived. Video was shown of fragmented and disintegrating LOV colonies cloistered within the ruined lockdown. Virgil watched in grim silence as divers destroyed them with chlorine. He saw it as nothing less than an act of genocide.

  A press conference followed, featuring IBC chief Daniel Simkin, a colorless man with pale skin, pale hair, and icy eyes. He began by assuring the world that samples were being continuously drawn from across the crash site and tested for the presence of survi
ving LOVs. None had been found so far, but the area would continue to be monitored for six months.

  Overkill, Virgil thought. The LOVs would die within days without nopaline supplements. Politically, though, a six-month vigil would play well.

  Simkin finished his prepared remarks and started taking questions from reporters. The first wanted details on Virgil’s whereabouts. “Dr. Virgil Copeland is the last remaining source of these LOVs. Do investigators believe him to still be within Honolulu? Or has the LOV contagion spread to other parts of the world?”

  Simkin regarded the woman with a look of distaste. “We want to be very clear on this fact: The LOVs are not a contagious life-form. They cannot be spread from one person to another except by willful intervention, and even then they will quickly die without a strict diet of nutritional supplements. As to Dr. Copeland’s whereabouts, I’m not able to comment at this time.”

  The next two questions involved damage aboard the Hammer and reparations for the families of Vietnamese fishermen believed to have been killed in the impact.

  “One more question,” Simkin said, indicating a young man with a long ponytail of chestnut hair tied behind his neck, dressed in a collarless shirt and jacket dyed in natural colors.

  The young reporter spoke in a confident voice, “Were you aware that a lawsuit has just been filed in federal court by a coalition of scientists, seeking to have any remaining LOVs declared an endangered species; and if so, what are your feelings on this?”

  Virgil leaned forward, his heart pounding in unexpected hope. But Simkin’s smile was slight, and condescending. “This is an inevitable development. Fringe groups will always rise to defend any cause, but in this case such a lawsuit is without merit, and I firmly believe the federal courts will quickly reach the same conclusion.