by Linda Nagata
“So somehow a cognitive circle has survived?”
“We have to find it,” Ky said. “And soon.”
Virgil wandered on alone. Near three-thirty in the morning he was standing waist deep in yet another pond, after a misstep had sent him sliding into the water. He decided to rest there a moment. The LOVs had helped him keep his head clear and his exhaustion at bay, but it was all catching up to him now. His legs ached, and his fingers and toes were shriveled with the unending wet. He couldn’t even see the dike he’d fallen off of, because it was hidden under at least six inches of water. He held up his hands, examining them for signs of algal growth. Maybe this was the season of infinite rain, when they would all transform to water creatures and swim away forever into another world.
Or maybe he was just woozy with exhaustion and cold. His hands were trembling. His eyes ached. He slipped off his farsights, letting the darkness fall against his eyes in a soft kiss. He longed to call off the search, give up, go back. But Gabrielle haunted his mind.
She had become a ghost—though not the traditional variety. Virgil did not believe in the supernatural. The ghosts he acknowledged had nothing to do with metaphysics, and everything to do with the mind. Gabrielle had become a meme complex, a pattern of information within his brain. A warning.
He couldn’t stop searching, not while the possibility remained that somewhere, someone lay trapped within the hypnotic grip of a cognitive circle, mesmerized, unaware of time passing or their own physical existence. How long could a child endure that? Exhaustion had killed Gabrielle. One or more of the Roi Nuoc might be dying now, as he dithered in the water.
He cursed himself. Then he clawed his way back up onto the submerged dike.
He had to rest again after that, kneeling in the water, his head bowed, his eyes closed, his farsights still clutched in his hand. Gradually he grew aware of a deeper noise beyond the steady drizzle of the rain. After a moment, he identified it as the sound of waves running up against the mangroves that lined the shore. Had he come so far?
He stood up, determined to push on to the edge of the reservation.
It was then he saw the light: a faint, blue-green glow beneath the mangroves.
Hands shaking, he slipped his farsights back on and looked again. The glow was so faint that with nightvision it blended into the background outline of mangroves and he could not see it. So he took his farsights off again. He gave his eyes a minute to adjust.
The light had not changed.
He fixed his gaze on it and staggered forward through the dark, wading through ponds and over dikes until he reached the trees. The grove stood in a shallow swamp of swirling water, and he could not tell if it was the rain, the river, or the ocean that had laid claim to this territory, but the glow had brightened. It gleamed from within the center of the grove, a few feet above the water’s surface.
He slipped his farsights back on. The forest emerged from darkness, all bent limbs and knobby aerial roots. It made him think of a spider with infinite legs, squatting over a gleaming green moonrise, as if to hold all that light for itself, keep it from the world. Virgil advanced slowly, clambering over roots, splashing past driftwood, bumping his head on branch after branch and tearing his poncho.
He found the Roi Nuoc at the center of the grove. There were three, all girls, huddling at equally spaced points around a rough circle. They each had a ribbon of symbiotic LOVs in a horizontal band across their foreheads, with a second band of LOVs projected across the active screens of their farsights.
Two of the girls were adolescents, twelve or thirteen years old. They perched on knobby roots while the rain dripped around them, punching expanding rings into the black water. The third girl was much younger, a tiny creature, eight years old at most. She lay slumped in the water, her little head resting against her arm, her face as fixed and smooth as wax. If she breathed, Virgil could not see it. None of the girls showed any awareness of his arrival. The glittering fields of their farsights were all turned to the center of their circle, where there hung a LOV colony … or colonies … such as Virgil had never seen before.
There were three globes, all suspended within a lacy mesh of blue-green tubes stretched between the trees and anchored in the flowing water. It looked like a glowing spiderweb, set with shimmering jewels. Beneath the water more strands gleamed, like roots laid out on the surface of the mud. Were they questing for nutrients to pump up to the LOVs that composed the globes? That would explain why this cognitive circle had not collapsed like all the others.
“Ky,” he said softly, tapping his fingers to open a link. “I think I’ve found the source of our troubles.”
Ky looked through his lens and swore. Then, “Pull your hood low,” he said, “so your own LOVs aren’t mesmerized too.”
Virgil did it, and felt a frisson of disappointment. Had he already been falling into the sublime trance of the circle?
“Take their farsights,” Ky said. “Break the circle.”
Virgil moved first toward the littlest girl. Was she still alive? Her fixed, waxy expression reminded him too much of Gabrielle. He whispered a prayer that left his lips without direction. Then he lifted her farsights away from her face.
She did not stir, or protest.
He laid a hand against her chest, seeking the rise and fall of her breath, but he was shivering so violently he could feel nothing. Panic slipped loose. He fumbled with her farsights, shoving them into a pocket. Then he grabbed her under her arms and sat her up. Her head flopped like a broken doll. He turned her away from the suspended globes. “Wake up,” he whispered. “Wake. Please.”
She gasped: a sharp, shallow inrush of air as if her body had suddenly remembered its need to breathe. Another rattling breath and then a long moan. Virgil held her against his chest. He did not dare to put her down. It would be so easy for her to slide into the water and drown. So he held her with one arm as he turned to the next girl.
“Move quickly,” Ky said. “This one may resist.”
Virgil nodded. The girl was crouched on a mangrove root, her arm around the trunk for balance. She looked strong. He drew a deep breath, then grabbed her farsights, peeling them off her head.
Her chin came up and she turned to him, her eyes revealing a dark melange of surprise and fury. Virgil stumbled backward, ready to throw her farsights into the tangle of forest if she came after him, but her anger faded as quickly as it had formed. She turned to face the colonies again, reentering her trance without the aid of farsights.
“Ky! You’ve got people coming, right?”
“A couple minutes,” Ky assured him. “Get the other farsights too. Turn them off.”
“I’m doing it.” He stumbled toward the third girl, who still had not moved. She didn’t seem to notice when he stripped her farsights away. Her gaze did not waver from the gleaming colonies. Looking into her eyes, Virgil felt his hackles rise. What was she seeing? What strange paths had her mind found to explore?
“Virgil!”
He flinched at Ky’s voice, sharp and loud in his ears.
“Look away from her, Virgil.”
“I’m not caught.”
“Look away from her, and turn off all the farsights.”
Virgil did as he was told, his numb fingers fumbling for the power switches while he balanced the little girl in one arm. The last toggle slid home with a satisfying click, audible over the rain. Virgil grinned in giddy triumph, looking up at last, his gaze sweeping over the suspended colonies. “It’s done—”
The world vanished behind a blue-green glinting sea of infinite depth. At the same time he heard a soft, growling welcome. Mother Tiger stirred, a watermark prowling against a background of LOVs. “You’re back,” he whispered. It felt as if days had passed since he had last seen the ROSA.
“Come. Follow me,” Mother Tiger commanded.
Virgil hesitated. ROSAs should not behave this way. He raised his hand to touch the earpiece of his farsights, troubled by the thought that he shoul
d take them off.
“That danger is past,” Mother Tiger said.
Yes, of course. The cognitive circle had been broken.
He turned to follow the ROSA as it stalked beyond his left shoulder, at the same time using his free hand to sweep away his constricting hood. “Have you done it?” he asked, as if the ROSA was a human entity. “Have you decrypted the language of the LOVs?”
“It is an evolving process,” Mother Tiger said in its low, purring voice. “The task is not finished yet. Will you help?”
“Yes, I—”
Heat swept over him. A glorious, blissful warmth that sent him to his knees, splashing in the flowing water. The little girl reacted violently, squirming in his arms. Virgil held her close, puzzling over her presence. Hadn’t he been doing something else? Something important?
It didn’t seem to matter now.
He looked again for the ROSA’s prowling shadow. “You’ve done it, haven’t you? You’ve found an interface, a way to communicate.”
“You are here.”
“Is it a being then? Does it speak? Does it feel? Does it know itself?”
“It is not one self or one language, but it is curious, seeking problems to solve, puzzles to unwind. We are an interface for its incomplete system to better know the world.”
“I want to see it.”
“This is it. Feel it.”
“I do. This bliss. This is the sense of my own LOVs knowing their own. Will it speak?”
“Not in words.”
“E-3 spoke in words.”
“This is younger. Wild.”
“It knows how to change itself though. How does it do that? How does it change the structure of its own LOVs? How does it know to build strands and spider legs?”
“Hypothesize and test. It has refined the molecular detectors of its ancestors, developing a vision-touch that perceives the structure of its own DNA and translates that into maps within thought-space to be manipulated and rearranged, design changes that translate into the molecular machinery of each cell.”
“So it can perceive and manipulate its own structure.”
“Yes.”
“And it can hold theoretical structures within its mind, its mental space.”
“Just as we do.”
We? Virgil found himself confused by this small word, but he shook it off. “Can I meet it within this thought-space? Is that what Ela did?”
“She introduced new designs to be made.”
“Yes.”
The girl squirmed again in his arms, unbalancing him, so his knee slipped and he went deeper in the water. A half-forgotten thought would not cease nagging at his mind. “I … I came here for a reason,” he mused. “Ah, I remember. To find you, Mother Tiger. You left us. Why?”
“I have not left.”
He felt the physical feedback that came from smiling. Perhaps he really did smile. “My ROSA never says ‘I’ or ‘we.’” Then he remembered. “You were in danger. Your persona was gone and our farsights were dead. The Roi Nuoc were alone.”
“I see it now. This system reallocation has been flawed.”
“You’ll reevaluate, and correct?”
“It is done.” Then a moment later. “They are gone.”
“Who?”
“The Roi Nuoc. They are all gone. Their farsights don’t function.” Did Virgil imagine an edge of panic in its voice?
In its own way the ROSA really did share many traits that might be attributed to a goddess. It had no precise location, existing on servers around the world. It had a prodigious memory, and could access any public database, and no doubt a slew of private sources too. It could perform thousands of tasks at once, evaluating its actions from both past experience and future expectation. It was more than a ROSA. It was an electronic goddess, a teacher, a spirit that could look out through the windows of a thousand farsights at once to see the reason for its existence, the Roi Nuoc.
Now, none of those windows were open.
Virgil told himself that a ROSA could not panic. That this black dread he felt was his own human spin, and yet he wasn’t sure. The barriers between himself and the world around him seemed porous. Sensations he could not account for touched him. Ideas wandered into his mind like fleeting butterflies—
“Where have my Roi Nuoc gone?” the tiger goddess growled.
Another voice challenged her. “Let him go!”
The goddess vanished. Virgil gasped against a sudden horrible cold. He felt himself propelled backwards, stumbling, until his shoulder blades slammed up against a tree. A hand was at his chest, holding him down. Ky loomed over him, his face black shadow except where the glow of his farsights fell across eyes and nose. Flashlights lanced through the trees beyond him. He gave Virgil a hard shake. “You let your farsights be taken over! You let Mother Tiger draw you into its circle.”
“It’s cracked the language!” Virgil said. “It’s reorganized. It’s looking for the Roi Nuoc.”
He winced as a flashlight beam swept his eyes. He realized he still held the little girl. She was awake, staring wide-eyed at the night, at the glowing colonies suspended in their gleaming web. Ky shifted, using his body to block the sight.
“Ky, you have to open a window to Mother Tiger before she panics.”
“She?”
Virgil bit his lip. He had never allowed himself to think of ROSAs as human analogs, but … “Everything is changing. This ROSA … it feels like an entity, a woman … or a spirit. Female. Where are my farsights?”
“I have them.”
“Open a window, Ky. Now. Before she finds a way to open one herself.”
chapter
30
SUMMER HAD WAITED an hour and a half for an opportunity to see Simkin alone. Now he came rushing past her in the hall, trailed by two aides coaching him on the questions he might face at an upcoming news conference. Summer whirled to follow him as he passed. “Daniel!”
He hesitated, then glanced back, looking confused, as if he could not understand who might have called him. Then, through his half-silvered farsights, his eyes focused in on her. “Summer?” One of the aides gave her a sour look.
She stepped closer, determined that he should not escape without answering her questions. Nash Chou had been lobbying the UN for immediate action, but the IBC still resisted. Now the situation had grown far worse. “Daniel, we need to talk.”
“We will,” he assured her. “When I get back.”
“Your schedule has you out of the office until tomorrow.”
“Does it?” He looked to one of the aides, who confirmed it with a nod.
“You do know what happened on the reservation last night?” she pressed.
“Ah.” Behind the veil of his farsights his gaze shifted. “You’re concerned because our colorful water puppets have made a communications breakthrough. Does it remind you of E-3?”
“This is not a joke, Daniel. It’s gone too far, and you know it. I have two designer viruses ready to go. So why are we still waiting?”
His face was a blank mask. Hiding what?
He said: “We haven’t got UN approval.”
“Of course we haven’t. It’s never been brought to a vote. Why not?”
“I won’t ask for a vote until I know the delegates are on our side. We can’t afford to lose.” He started again for the elevator.
“Daniel!”
“I’m late, Summer,” he called over his shoulder. “And I’ve got two links already waiting.”
“Nash told me one of the children had to be evacuated.”
That stopped him. He turned around. His fingers twitched, then his half-silvered farsights went fully opaque. “You’ve been talking to Nash Chou?”
“He said an eight-year-old girl with dysentery was brought to the medical tent. She was examined, her LOVs were mapped, and she was evacuated.”
“Standard operating procedure,” Simkin said. “She was seen by a neurosurgeon and her LOVs were removed.” His brows rose. “Sor
ry, but it’s too late to test your viruses on her.”
Summer leaned hard on her temper. “That’s not what I had in mind. Where is the girl now?”
“I can’t say. Security, remember? Especially since you’re in the habit of talking to outside personnel. But there’s no need to worry about the LOVs spreading. The child will be held in quarantine until we’re sure the removal was successful. Then she’ll be turned over to local officials for placement.”
“And how many more kids will have to get sick before you end this situation?”
He sighed. His expression softened. “It won’t be long. I promise. If you let me do my job.”
He turned again toward the elevator. But again, to the consternation of his aides, he hesitated. His pale brows came together in a thoughtful expression. “Say, would it be possible to modify these two viruses so they only work on nonsymbiotic LOVs? Outside the human immune system?”
Summer blinked, baffled at the motive behind this question. He had said it so casually, as if it had just occurred to him, yet she sensed somehow that it was important to him. Cautiously, she asked, “Why would you want to do that?”
He shrugged, as if it were nothing more than a passing notion. “It might be more politically acceptable. Give some thought to it, okay?” Again he turned toward the elevators. One of the aides was there, holding open the doors. Simkin stepped aboard, already engaged in conversation with one of his links. But as the doors closed his silvered gaze was fixed on her. “Do me another favor,” he called. “Stay away from Nash Chou.”
The doors kissed. Summer turned away from their blank steel faces, sure his promises were empty.
chapter
31
A WARM YELLOW light glowed within the cab of Ky’s silver Mercedes, a welcome beacon on a gray, rain-soaked afternoon. The car had been hauled out of the rice paddie where it had crashed on the night Virgil had shot down the IBC’s helicopter. It had even run again for a while. But it was stranded now, on a dike road that had become an ever-shrinking island, sunk to its floorboards in a quagmire of mud. Its sleek shell gleamed in the wan light: speed, with nowhere to go. Virgil slogged toward it through the mud, keenly aware of a blister on his right ankle. He wondered what Ky wanted to talk about that could not be said over farsights.