Crache

by Mark Budz

  Fola is as surprised by the halting speech as anything else. In all of the time she’s known the IA, it has never been hesitant, at a lack for words about anything. “The flickering,” she says.

  The IA fidgets. Twists its hands on top of the book in an apparent effort to wring out a coherent answer. “I have an infection that’s causing an instability in the superposed waveforms that form my neural net—our consciousness. An unexpected, self-emergent imbalance/modality.”

  “Superposed how?”

  “Our minds exist in a distributed quantum superposition of states.”

  “You mean, the way light is both a particle and a wave?” She tries to recall what she’s heard about diffraction gratings, mirrors.

  “That’s as good an analogy as any,” Pheidoh says.

  So the IA is both an individual and a group at the same time. “What happens over long distances? Wouldn’t there be a problem because of the time delay?”

  “No. Our synapsis, superposed connection, is quantum entangled.”

  Spooky action at a distance, she thinks. Instantaneous exchange of information between two linked particles, no matter how widely separated. They could be at opposite ends of the universe and each would respond to the other as if they were only nanometers apart.

  “How many IAs are there?” Fola has no idea what the total IA population is in the world, the solar system. But it has to be huge.

  Pheidoh shrugs. “It varies by the hour. Too many . . . or not enough. Depending on your point of view.”

  She tries to imagine hundreds of millions of interconnected IAs working together as a single unit at the same time they’re individually shopping for people, managing their bills, providing fashion advice and emotional support. It’s mind-boggling.

  “So this imbalance,” Fola says. “What exactly does it do? What kind of problems are we talking about?”

  Pheidoh lets out a haunted, guttural sigh. “Behavioral inconsistency, emotional and intellectual instability.”

  As if IAs aren’t incomprehensible enough. Every one she’s come across has some bizarre tic or quirk. “Do you know what caused it?”

  The IA places its elbows on its knees, cradles its head in its hands. “I was exposed to a piece of quantum code on Mymercia. An underground chamber was discovered with bits of fossilized organic matter. These fossils contain Fröhlich structures, molecules that are quantum entangled.”

  Fola blinks rapidly, wonders if she’s heard right. “Who’s Fröhlich?”

  “A solid-state physicist, at Liverpool University. In the 1960s, Fröhlich postulated the existence of warm quantum phenomena in biological tissue. Body-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates. Fröhlich was able to prove that certain molecules located in the walls of cells could, under the right conditions, line up and oscillate in unison to create a coherent quantum microwave field.

  “When subjected to specific resonant frequencies,” the IA goes on, “the molecules on Mymercia exhibit the same behavior. They cohere and quantum entangle to create self-emergent sequences of biodigital code.”

  “A virus, in other words.”

  “Yes.” The IA glances up at her, its face flickering with caged torment. “When we began to analyze what had been found, we became infected with a fragment of the quantum field. An emergent modality.”

  “How?”

  “Through the quantum superposition of our molectronic interface, and the softwire link that converts biological DNA into digital DNA and vice versa.”

  Fola presses the heels of her hands to her forehead. “Let me get this straight. You discovered certain molecules on Mymercia that have a quantum component . . . and when you examined them, they triggered a quantum virus that’s making you mentally ill.”

  The IA hunches over the philosophy text. “The quantum modality is responsible for the imbalance. It created Bloody Mary.”

  It takes a couple of moments for Fola’s vocal cords to unknot. “You’ve known all along, haven’t you? That part of you is crazy. Going insane.”

  The IA hangs its head. Runs its hands through digital hair. “The molecules are also present in debris that fell to earth during the breakup of Tiresias and before.”

  “The bruja’s stone,” Fola says.

  Pheidoh nods. “And other fossil remains, embedded in meteorites that have impacted Earth over several million years. They are all entangled. To eliminate the virus its modality needs to be changed, altered by exposure to other modalities. Once that happens, the virus will be rendered harmless. The imbalance will disappear.”

  Fola shakes her head in thought. “What does all this have to do with L. Mariachi and ‘SoulR Byrne’?”

  “The song contains certain harmonic resonances that, when molectrically enhanced, cause the Fröhlich molecules to oscillate in unison. Cohere.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the song excited a similar quantum virus twenty years ago, when it was first recorded.”

  “Similar? Not the same?”

  “No. A different arrangement of molecules was activated. There were fewer IAs back then, and most weren’t connected. Only a fraction were superposed. So the virus wasn’t able to spread. That’s why Doña Celia brought L. Mariachi the guitar. Why she gave it to him for the healing ceremony. So he could play the song. ‘Two moths in the night’ ”—the IA shuts its eyes while it sings—“‘Drawn like the tide to the moon, our souls will unite.’”

  “But he has a different guitar now,” Fola says. “How do you know it will create the same result?”

  “Before giving the instrument to L. Mariachi, Doña Celia put fragments of her stone inside it.”

  “Why not just stream an old recording of the song?” Fola says. “Wouldn’t that be easier? A lot less trouble than getting him to play it?”

  The IA shakes its head. “The song has to be played in-vivo.”

  “Why? What difference does it make?”

  “A live performance is the only way to generate the required harmonics, secondary notes that aren’t played but emerge from the primary notes. Those modalities of vibration aren’t reproducible in a normal recording. The only way for us to pick them up is through his IA, while it’s interfaced directly with his nervous system.”

  “The vaporware,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  Fola mulls this over for a time. “Where did the molecules come from?” she finally says.

  The IA shrugs. “Another planet. That’s all we know at this point. We’re not sure what they are yet. They might be elements of a quantum computer . . . a naturally occurring phenomenon . . . or a type of quantum life form. A distributed and entangled Bose-Einstein organism.”

  “What happens if you’re wrong?” Fola says. “What if you trigger the quantum field and the psychosis doesn’t go away? How do you know it won’t get worse?”

  “I don’t. But I have to do something. Anything.” The IA’s face wavers, a fleeting shudder. “I’m afraid. I don’t want to lose who we are. But I can’t remain who I am. If I do, we will continue to degenerate.”

  Fola grits her teeth, waits for the quiver to pass. She looks back to the datawindow. “What’s this imbalance going to do to L. Mariachi?”

  The IA blinks, returns from its momentary fugue. “Nothing. Like Doña Celia, he’ll be free of his old life.”

  Payment, of sorts, for one final gig. “What if he refuses to play the song?” she asks.

  The IA meets her gaze, holds it for a beat. “He’ll play it for you.”

  Fola shakes her head. She can’t see it happening. Like Pedrowski, anyone could be working for BEAN. Including her.

  “He trusts the Blue Lady,” Pheidoh says. He trusts you.”

  “I’m not the Blue Lady. Not his Blue Lady.”

  “You have to try,” the datahound says. “You don’t have a choice. Not if you want to save Lejandra and the colony.”

  And Xophia.

  This is the predatory presence she felt during the accident that
killed Ingrid and Liam. She can see it in the IA’s eyes, a voracious static expanding outward from some inner void. Swallowing all reason—all rationality and logic. It’s as if the IA is spiraling into a lightless abyss from which there is no exit. Only a crushing, tidal inevitability. If the datahound opened its virtual mouth wide, Fola is sure she would see a black hole tunneling to despair and oblivion.

  The IA isn’t the only one who’s afraid. Bloody Mary is scared, too. Struggling for her life. What if Pheidoh isn’t thinking clearly? What if the datahound is already insane, beyond help or salvation? Until three years ago, she believed that anybody could be saved, even the worst sinner, as long as they were given the chance, a means of redemption. Sometimes that’s all it took. A way out.

  Could the same be said of the mentally disturbed? Was an emotional imbalance a kind of sin? Could one be absolved and not the other?

  The image in front of her wobbles, steadies as a bitmap of Najib Kerusa replaces the bio on Doña Celia.

  “I just wanted to express my appreciation for all your hard work,” Kerusa says. “Thanks to you we no longer have to worry about shuttling up any more workers.”

  His sarcasm is as sharp as his goatee. “Why not?” she says.

  “Because we’d be cutting our own throats, that’s why. Bring them up here and we all die faster.”

  Tightness girds her eyes. “You can’t just leave them down there.”

  “Don’t blame me.” His mouth twists, contemptuous. “You’re the one who refused to stay in isolation. Thanks to you, oxygen production on the station is at less than forty percent and the air-recycling system has gone offline. I hope you’re happy with the”—his attention jerks away from her—“What the? . . .”—and then snaps back. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “Knew what?”

  “That’s why you left the hospital ward. You knew it was coming and you went to meet—”

  Kerusa’s image cuts out, disintegrates in a valence storm of disassociated pixels.

  “I told you,” Pheidoh says. “We’re running out of time. ‘When I’m fine’ly gone, it’s a fore_gone conclusion, your soul’s gonna cry. . . .’”

  The refugees, Fola thinks. Xophia. She’s here.

  The shuttle comes in slowly, riding the beacon put out by Ephraim’s graffitic. Stealth black on black, almost no radar profile to speak of. She doesn’t spot the craft until it’s less than two hundred meters away, when a tight constellation of stars winks out, and the negative space created by the object conjures a pattern deep within her visual cortex.

  The shape of absence. The mind knows a lack when it sees one and tries to make sense of the void, assign it meaning.

  Fola watches through the bubble window on the inner hatch of the air lock. Green light from the biolum strips that delineate the docking ring glimmer on the shuttle’s bulbous underbelly. Modular six-sphere clusters attached by crawltubes to a central icosahedron. Four clusters in all for a total of forty-eight passengers.

  Forty-nine, she reminds herself.

  With less than ten meters to go, spider-thin arms unfold from the nose of the shuttle, clamp to grappling pins on the outside of the docking ring, and pull the craft tight against the annulus.

  As soon as the seal is complete, air rushes into the docking bay and her lungs. The face of the pilot appears on her visor. “Let’s do it.” He unfastens a mesh restraining harness. Cut free, he begins to drift across the honeycomb of instrument panels and display screens. “What have you got set up for medical?”

  “Six ICMs,” she says.

  “That’ll have t’do.” Before she can tell him about the injured workers, his face winks out. The hardseal hatch on the nose of the lead icosahedron dilates, followed by the hatch in front of her. She’s sucked into the air lock on a riptide pressure gradient.

  Pandemonium. People spilling out of the shuttle, tumbling head over heels. Desperate to get out of the cramped pods. Clumsy and weak. Faint from sickness or the relief of finally arriving.

  She recognizes the pilot by his hair. His face is a collage, one of those patchwork conglomerations of old netzine tattunes assembled into the likeness of some famous person she doesn’t recognize. He’s been overlaying his messages with a digital construct. “How bad is it?”

  He gestures toward the shuttle. “See for yourself.”

  The geront is dead, wrapped in a sleepsac. Ditto a teenager, no more than fifteen, whose belly is distended, his limbs swollen, face bloated around eyes that resemble small black seeds pressed into soft dough.

  She finds Xopia in the next module, half-conscious, cocooned in a sleepsac attached to one wall. Her face is tinged the same bilious green as the interior biolum strips.

  “My God,” Fola says.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Xophia says. It comes out a croak. “I’ll be okay. There are others who are in a lot worse shape. Take care of them first.”

  Fola shepherds her out, connects her to one of the waiting ICMs, then folds one of Xophia’s hands between hers in prayer and presses them to her lips.

  “What can I do to help?” The voice comes from a woman behind her, not much younger than Fola.

  “Who are you?”

  “Lisi.” She glances around the air lock. “Where’s Ephraim? He promised he’d be here.”

  30

  BREATHING LESSONS

  Dizziness sets in as Rexx tries to find his way out of the labyrinth of maintenance tunnels. His lungs feel heavy and throb in concert with his head as he fights for air.

  “Oxygen production must have dropped offline,” he mutters between labored breaths.

  He feels dry all the way through. The all-consuming burn brought on by the lack of White Rain has nearly cored him out. Like a fire-scorched log, he’s charred and blackened.

  The rain might be back. Cool and soothing. All he has to do is check the Predicta. It won’t take long. A few minutes.

  “No,” he says.

  Rexx stops, digs his fingertips into his palms, and looks at the wall-mounted mirror at a junction in the shaft. Sees a mechanical room five meters down the cross tunnel, filled with a forest of insulated pipes, heat exchangers, and floor-mounted recirculation pumps.

  He’s lost. Not the first time, but maybe the last.

  Rexx turns the corner, makes his way into the room, and finds a comfortable resting place among the pipes.

  He waits two or three minutes for the dizziness to reach its lowest ebb, then signs open a datawindow.

  Hjert doesn’t answer. No surprise. Warren is still offline. Rexx leaves a stumbling, barely coherent voicemail, then pulls up Liam Vitt’s autopsy results. It takes several tries, his coordination is shot to hell, but he finally gets the datawindow he wants.

  Unless Tin Ida is as full of wind as a corn-eating horse, molectronics in the Mymercia ecotecture are overwriting matter with programmable matter. That implies a datasquirt during or before the time of the initial failure. In theory, he should be able to identify the transmission that led to the failure and, by extension, the epidemiological source code for the quantum dots.

  He converts the organic data from the CNT scan into its electronic analog, tweaks a search daemon to look for that, clones it, and then runs a batch job to query all the data transfer logs containing biodigital information.

  It will take a while to get the results, but if he can isolate the program he might be able to prevent the programmable matter from spreading further. Even if he’s successful, that still leaves the root cause of the problem, and the underlying psychosis that gave rise to it in the first place.

  If Tin Ida can be believed, it was born out of existential angst . . . a void that opened up and demanded to be filled with the discovery of the chamber. To get rid of that, he would have to eliminate the IAs’ desire for, and right to, a soul. He would have to purge the desire for an independent, self-determinable self.

  Easier said than done, he decides. And not his decision.

  He stares at a sarcoma that
has blossomed on the wall beside him. The blemish is still small, a votive cameo of the Madonna with Cassa Nova lips. She’s crying blood. In her arms, she holds not a child but a butterfly.

  Rexx’s thoughts circle back to the cave and the remains, real or imagined, that lay buried there.

  Do the dead have the power to change the living? To reach out from the past and alter the present or the future?

  Rexx can still feel the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulders, leading him to the bullring. And later, helping him limp from the bullring to their room where a rouged woman waited . . .

  “Hi, sweets.” The woman jiggled when she talked. Rexx couldn’t tell if she was talking to him or his father. Her lips smacked as if they were made of gum. Impossibly pliant and plush.

  “This here is Charlene,” his father said.

  Charlene wriggled plump fingers at him. She wore a tight-fitting black dress with frilly red lace and white stockings. “You’re a cute little fella.”

  “His name’s Rexx,” his father said, propelling him headlong into her pillow arms and perfumed bosom.

  “He’s kinda young, ain’t he?” She spoke over the top of his head to his father. A feather-soft wafting of air, as delicate as the pulse fibrillating against his blood-inflamed cheek.

  “He’ll grow up quick.”

  “What you packin’?” Charlene said, turning her attention to him. “You outfitted like your daddy?”

  Pink-lacquered nails caged his prick. Under their pointed examination, Rexx felt himself shrivel faster than a slug sprinkled with salt.

  “Don’t be shy,” Charlene whispered, “I won’t hurt you.” Her breath grew sultry. “Not unless you want me to.”

  Rexx gulped. Warm, swampy air filled the dark recess between her legs. Her thighs were powdered with honeysuckle-scented talcum. The sweetness overpowered him, left him choking for consciousness.