Back in 1999, one of those loopholes woke up out of a nap that had kept it busy the last few thousand years and went on a rampage across the densely populated delta on the border between India and Bangladesh. It was something like a vampire—okay, like a parametabolic hematovore, to be technical— but vastly more powerful. It only lasted a few days, but it created literal megadeaths that we had to cover up. We did, of course, because we do that. Destroying it took the heaviest weapons in our arsenal at the time, missiles augmented with technology derived from theories that we won’t be letting out for decades, if ever. We’ve since replaced and improved them, but it’s bad to have to do things that require you to spend a few months subverting thirty-odd nations’ intelligence services and all the major and many of the minor media corporations. Better to spot the trouble in advance and fix it before it becomes a story. That’s where Project Sunburst comes in. The awakened thing left behind a very distinctive set of markers in various spectra, and the theorists in my unit think that we can scan for them even under a substantial amount of human civilization and inanimate earth. My job is to make it happen.
When this network of satellite-mounted telescopes goes live, we’ll be able to scan the whole planet every few months, so we can track not just the state of the world in single moments but do comparisons over time. I suspect that we could have seen that Indian entity beginning to wake up if we’d known what to look for. I’ve been running some calibration tests and already spotted a few similar targets, and I hope that field teams get out to examine them soon. Today, assuming the monkeys get their act together, I’ll do some more testing:
I’ve got the okay to hook up a full sensorium rig and spin a set of satellites around to do astronomical probing. I like looking at the universe, but that’s not the point. The point is to see whether assumptions that have (so far) held up when looking across a few dozen kilometers of fairly dense atmosphere at a target whose general properties we already know pretty well generate any bugs when we look much further away. Small errors become big when you let them accumulate long enough: it’s why things break down over time. Since we prefer not to run that risk, we try to push hard as quickly as possible, in this case by looking out as far as possible.
I would never tell my subordinates this—my superiors already know it or can if they want to— but I live for these moments when I can move beyond the wreckage that is my body. The very essence of this organization is mind over everything: flesh, matter at large, entropy, everything. The agglomeration of agendas and institutions that comprise Iteration X comes together here, with the determination that what we think must triumph over whatever would keep us from thinking clearly and from acting on our conclusions. There is nowhere else in the world better to be than right here for those of us looking to get thought out of flesh. For now it’s temporary and draining, but the day’s coming when it’ll be permanent and easy, and then I can get on with the rest of my existence.
Getting a piece of gear as complex as these telescope controls always takes longer, even when you budget the time for it to take longer. Tracing down mysterious conflicts in hardware and software, rerunning rests to make sure power and data flow as they should, running other tests to make sure I can unhook myself when it’s done and don’t leave fried bits of frontal lobe on the synaptic probes... tedium. It’s not conceptually any different from the preparations an Iron or Bronze Age blacksmith went through at his forge, just lots more things to go wrong. Lunch goes by. Dinner goes by, too. The work I’m doing doesn’t require a night sky, but I’ve got one anyway by the time everything passes final muster.
The popular image of cutting-edge cybernetic gear owes a lot to bad sci-fi movies, and most of the rest to relatively good ones. In fact, this kind of thing is all pretty pragmatic. It doesn’t look wildly different from the server farm at any large business’s network office, with lots of computing units strung together by tagged cords and cables. The genius of it all is in the software here and the hardware we’ve been putting into orbit for the last two years, stowed away with publicly identified communications satellites. The most distinctive feature is a metal helmet that looks like it belongs in some comic book. It has four-dozen wires running into the operations console, just above the keyboard racks, and enough insulation on the outer layers that it can actually pick up the operator’s neuroelectrical activity. Contrary to widespread folklore, the human brain is a very weak power source, and without the insulation the signal would be totally lost in ambient hum.
I park my wheelchair in front of the keyboards, and fold them up out of the way. I prefer to use the chord keyboards mounted on the chair, and plug them in. Then I take the helmet and settle it on my head, adjusting it in response to small lights and tones that tell me when each lead is getting a clear signal. This all takes some more time; for some reason it seems like the parietal and temporal leads just don’t all want to cooperate. I put my neck through a series of stretching exercises to pull it into a new alignment, and at last everything’s ready to go. I push the last buttons to engage the system...
... and I’m huge.
My senses are spread out across nineteen thousand kilometers. (19, 229. 372 and growing slightly as the widest-spread satellites move into the upper reaches of their orbits. ) I’m ever so slightly aware of the delays created by the speed of light: I can’t move my whole “body” at once, and need to allow time for things to change in response to my commands. And of course I don’t have a single body at all, but separate pieces of physical host scattered around the world, at distances from eighty-one to 3105 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. I could tell you just what deviation there is from median sea level beneath each of them, too, but you don’t care and my processors factor all that in. Turning the satellites is a little like moving my eyes and a little like moving my fingers. We used to map things more closely to traditional body movements but found that false assumptions created their own problems. It’s better to treat it as something unfamiliar, since it is.
One by one I feel the satellites come fully under my control. The smallest are less than half a meter across and weigh only a few grams, while the largest are the size of a car and weigh tons. Each has its role in the Sunburst scheme of things: best frequencies, best for varying atmospheric conditions, suitability for operating without identification in particular orbits. I say “identification” because it’s nearly impossible to actually hide anything in orbit. A whole lot of amateur and professional astronomers scour the skies every night, looking for everything from comets to quasars. An international effort focuses specifically on orbital debris, to allow for better route planning by commercial satellite operators. They know we’re here, they just don’t know what we are, any more than they know for sure about the hundreds of governmental satellites with covert missions, the dropped tools left behind by astronauts, the pieces of moon surface blown toward earth by meteor grazes, and all the rest. As long as we keep the “what” our secret, all’s well.
The lenses and filters that make our scans possible click into place. At first I look down at my planet in visible light, then in the frequencies that flank it, then in harmonics extending further and further away from visible, and finally with the noetic and polydimensional factors that the world at large doesn’t know about. Everything’s working. I hold my breath as I give the commands to spin the satellites around to start looking away from the universe. Nothing compares to it. I see the earth, then the atmosphere, then the solar wind in its multi-billion-year struggle with the Van Allen Belts, and on out to the Moon. From my angle(s), it’s impossible to see the settlements my cohorts operate, which is just as it should be. Neither the permanent settlements on the far side nor the fully automated mining operations in south polar craters can be seen from any angle anywhere near the home world. I could see some of the mining gear’s emissions in remote frequencies if their shielding was weak, but it’s all strong and the lunarscape looks lifeless, just as it should.
One of the things I
’m checking out is tracking errors as the focus changes, so I push the pace of zooming more and more. Public databases provide the data my input aggregators translate into overlays: this is what’s expected. Data from Iteration X’s own operations and others conducted elsewhere in the Technocratic Union get overlaid on that, showing me what’s expected even though esoteric. Whatever doesn’t match those gets flagged for my attention. A novice observer would panic at this point, because there’s a whole lot that isn’t as it should be: an asteroid abnormally hot on its faces away from the sun, unregistered cometary tracks, magnetic fluctuations that don’t match with terrestrial observations, you name it. Did I mention the universe is a messy place? If the data precisely match your theory, you know you’ve done your observing wrong. I mark anomalies outside the patterns I’m looking for and toss them to the Farside crews for further study, and keep tracking.
For no particular reason, I send my collective gaze staring up out of the ecliptic, away from the planets and into the parts of the sky over the North Pole. More of the same there at first, until quite suddenly familiar patterns emerge. There’s the distinctive combination of signatures that I saw in the aftermath of the Bangladesh incident. Out in space. What the hell is anything that responds like a vampire doing out in space? I stare at it more intently, bringing more and more of the available sensors to bear, and a semi-conscious part of my mind initiates the request for additional resources to be put under my temporary control. Alarm bells will be ringing in Sunburst allocation offices in a few minutes.
In the meantime... well. The human eye is a selfish thing. We see ourselves in everything from three-prong electrical outlets to clouds to the grilles of cars. Put a couple of dots and line close together, and we make a face out of it. I’m not immune from the phenomenon just because I have a hate/hate relationship with the human form. So I’m not particularly surprised to see this central reddish mass looking very much like a terrestrial eye. That’s just my own animal nature at work. I hope.
As it unfolds, I realize what I’m looking at. There’ve been scattered reports for several years now of something that drifts into the edges of our perceptual fields, almost always either emerging from or disappearing into eclipse behind a planet, an Oort Cloud body, or something else solid and reliable. The thing doesn’t follow a reliable course, at least not when plotted in terms of four-dimensional space-time. Obviously it’s moving in and out of the local continuum. Notes on the edges of my vision piped in from trans-convention archives explain that the Void Engineers have had no luck working out an overall pattern for its movements, and that several expeditions (they’re cagey about the details, but then I’d lie to them about my failures, too) just disappeared or failed to make any close approaches. So if I’d kept up better with briefings, I wouldn’t be as surprised as I was just a moment ago.
Damn if the thing doesn’t look like an eye. And then it gets worse. The swirls of what I understand are nebular gas form massive lids that open, and between them is a dust clot that’s just too much like a pupil for comfort. It stares at me—
discontinuity I’m suddenly aware only of my own body. I’m back in the lab. The gear’s all hooked up, but I can’t make it work. Data will come in just fine for the HUDs inside the helmet, and the keyboards hum with tactile cues, but I’m shut off from sensory engagement or command of the satellites. I’m stuck at a level of command that we gave up half a century ago, and that even the mundane cutting edge is leaving behind.
I hope we get it fixed soon.
* * *
MING XIAN
The historian Tacitus said of the Roman conquest of Britain, “They have made a desert and called it peace. ” Sometimes I think that the Uygur people did just the opposite: they made peace, and we called it a desert. Beijing and the national ministries are far, far to the east from here, and the planners do not, I think, really grasp how anyone lives here. They look at the overall data, remember great stories and novels about the Tianshan mountains and the Taklamakan desert if they’re of a literary bent, and treat the entire Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region as one vast wasteland that must be made into something useful starting from scratch. Then those of us charged with actually doing the work come here from Beijing or Shanghai or Xian, find it very little like what we’ve been trained to expect, and do the best we can to make the grand regional plans fit the realities of life lived around oases and in sheltered valleys.
I’m freshly reminded of the gap between Beijing’s dreams and the realities on the ground as I begin my semi-annual retreat. Behind me is the provincial capital of Urumqi, a typical twentieth century disaster of collapsing industry, overpopulation, and depleted natural resources. Ahead of me loom the Tianshans, some of the steepest and most forbidding mountains in the world. When I first came here, I shared the reaction of an American tourist on the same flight from Beijing: “I’ve seen paintings of mountains like these, but I thought that was just an artistic convention. ” They tower over the observer almost as if uprooted and ready to fall at any moment, but they never do. To the Politburo and subordinate planners, this is essentially unusable land, interesting only insofar as it provides roads, handy objects to use as border markers, and the occasional lucrative mine. And indeed for efforts to run a whole continent according to master plans, it’s so. The people who live here have quite a different experience.
The scientists I work with tell me that glaciers carved out the sharp-edged valleys within which Uygur villages nestle. The villagers say that the mountains fought each other with knives and carved these wounds until Heaven made them stop. I’ve never been able to speak to the mountains themselves, but in the Yin realms, the ghosts say that the valleys are the beginning of the death of the mountains, sliding down in physical form as they will eventually pass across the wall between life and death. Perhaps they are all right, in their various ways. What matters to me now is that more paths than my Party masters realize wend through steep canyons and over rugged passes to small but lush, fertile fields and groves that one could see only from straight overhead. Here people live much as they have since the collapse of the Mongol empire centuries ago, and I keep their secret.
I have an official reason for this journey. The Office of Family Planning conducts occasional surveys in an effort to find out what the autonomous peoples are actually doing with the knowledge and goods that the Han people choose to give them. Officials back home then take the data, view it with conflicting agendas, and produce plans which may or may not work, but which we in the field will be held accountable for implementing. This year’s driving concern is once again the use of Han names and language in the villages, as the Politburo would prefer that the Uygurs and other autonomous peoples become absorbed into the mass without the government being required to allow for physical assimilation. That would require mingling the races, and putting already-limited jobs at the disposal of the minorities. But if they can just start naming their babies like us and speaking like us, the authorities reason, then all will be well.
I also have an unofficial reason. When I was seventeen, I sold my soul for power, or at least I began the process of doing so. My aunt Lin goaded me into it, but the choice was nonetheless mine. There is this about the witches of the Wu Keng: they do deliver on their promises. I got the various sorts of success a teenager dreams of, and the price was one I was willing to pay. The Wu Keng way begins with abasement: servitude to the elders of the art, and the alienation of one’s self from one's old life. In me, perhaps, my aunt had made an unfortunate choice, since I was not nearly so disturbed about giving up a male existence as most of my fellow students seemed to be. There are the endless humiliations of being female in a society so thoroughly patriarchal as ours, but the existence is not itself a source of shame or humiliation for me. That may be why I eventually became such a terminal disappointment to my mentors. In time I separated myself from their order, and they did not take it kindly. Their displeasure manifested in the types of curses folklore so often—and in this
case so rightly—associates with the term witch. My continued existence as a living woman thus requires rituals I cannot safely perform in the midst of any city.
This jeep I drive has a tag identifying it as US Army property assigned to Bahrain in 1969. I wonder sometimes just how it ended up abandoned in an Urumqi parking lot two years ago, when I was looking for a replacement for my own just-expired truck. It had been well maintained, and I keep it up, so it serves me well as I move off the major roads onto tracks made for goats and ponies. For four days I head further and further back into the Tianshan hinterlands, along routes that local cartographers keep off the charts sent to Beijing. The air grows colder, but not cleaner. Even though I’ve left the cities behind, the winds still carry polluted dust off the steppes, all the way from the rotting wastelands left by the evaporating Aral Sea. Every west-facing surface gains a gray-brown coating that will last until the next rains.
I do stop in several villages and consult with the mayors and nurses I know. Resistance to the campaign for Chinese naming is just as intense as I expected. I write it all down in my personal notebook, and expect to figure out the proper selection and interpretation for the data later. I also plan to consult with my ancestors about it, as I have no wish to subject my hosts and confidants to the purges that I’m sure the government will want when it becomes clear that the Uygurs do wish to remain themselves. Out here among the peaks and crevasses, it’s tempting to just abandon it all and go off to build another identity for myself. I’ve done it twice since leaving the Wu Keng, after all, so it’s not like I don’t know how to do it. But... time for that later.
On the fifth day I leave even the goat trails, and proceed carefully across country, along a seasonal river’s dry bed, between almost vertical ridges.
World of Darkness - Time of Judgement - Mage Page 2