Lou took it, sliding it deep into her pocket. “I’ll get this to someone. Is there anything else you remember that I should know? Did you learn where Jude or Mathew went?”
“No. To the city. Seacouver I think. North. They have weapons.”
“More nukes?”
“No. But big things they can brace over their shoulders and fire. And rifles that fire fast. And more. I never got to see it all. But they’ve been saving ammunition and testing a little from time to time. Jude wants to blow up a court. Why would he want to do that?”
Lou hurt at the loss and sadness in the girl’s voice. She would hug her, except then she’d crush the baby. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry the world’s not that good.”
“You’ve always treated me well. You’re the only one who ever has.”
“I hope that’s not true.” The girl’s wristlet burned in her pocket. Maybe Shuska could pry its secrets free.
She had to call Coryn.
Julianna needed to know.
Everyone needed to know.
Lou shook with the need to do something, anything, to move the information to others who could do more with it. She took Paulette’s hand in hers. “Unless something happens to me, don’t tell anyone else about this. Then tell my people. Shuska or Matchiko, or even the priest—Pablo. Not your people. They might know, or they might not care, or they might hurt you for knowing.”
Paulette nodded. “I understand.” The baby squirmed, and she comforted him by patting his back.
“So go home. I’ll take care of this.”
“Okay. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Can I come talk to you some day?”
Lou smiled “At the farm? How will you get there?”
“I’ll walk.”
“Will you be safe?”
“I think so.”
“Be sure.”
“Okay. I gotta go now.”
“I know. Take care. You’re always welcome.” She paused. “Thank you.”
Paulette offered a small, tremulous smile. Tears shone in her eyes.
Lou watched as she and Jude pushed through the door and out into the night. She clenched her fists, drew in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and tried not to imagine what could happen if nukes went off in the cities.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Coryn and Imke followed Namina to the main city EOC. Every screen they passed on their way showed breathless news. They had to thread through so many people and robots they almost lost each other, and once Coryn’s foot got stomped on.
Outside of the main city EOC they joined a large group standing in line, waiting to be vetted into the room. Security staff used wands and small pricks of blood that flowed into tiny white tubular containers that turned black when they were full. After that, there was a five-minute wait in a pressing crowd while a small square machine on a shelf examined the blood. Namina merely watched.
Apparently robots were easier to identify than humans.
Coryn asked Namina, “What is the machine looking for?”
“Nanobots you don’t have a prescription for. Pathogens.”
“Not just DNA?”
“It’s not allowed to.”
“Oh.”
Imke looked irritated. “I already have a diplomatic security clearance.”
“That’s not enough for this EOC.”
Imke tapped their foot and crossed their arms, and then blew out a deep breath and adopted a more relaxed stance that looked entirely forced.
A young woman with five long black braids came up and requested their AR glasses. She set them on a belt that ran through a machine and then handed them back with an insipid smile. Coryn half-expected to be asked to strip next. But the woman waved them toward the door. “Go on in.”
When Namina opened the door, Coryn gasped. The room was huge—ten times the size of the ballroom they were using for Julianna’s EOC. Colorful displays hung on all of the walls and in the air, a richness of information that dazzled her. People in multicolored vests hurried throughout the room. Nonhumanoid robots scooted along the floor carrying everything from food and coffee to paper maps and what looked like special communications gear.
Coryn stepped in. Just above her head, a display shimmered, drawing her attention. There were seven lines of data on it, all of them accompanied by arrows:
Ports
Cybersecurity
Utilities
Medical
Data
Partners
Media
Imke’s eyes followed the “Partners” line, which led to a map of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. They led Coryn toward the board, their eyes fixed on the bright colors and their grip tight on her wrist.
A location blob for Seacouver glowed in a variety of colors, mostly sick yellows with a few greens and a few reds. Chicago was mostly green, with one dark red spot to the south. Flagstaff was a swirl of crimson, burgundy, and rust. Coryn began to look down the coast, but a tug on her arm made her turn to Namina, who looked quite stern. “You are not cleared for the whole room. If you don’t arrive in the liaison area in the next five minutes you might set off an alarm.”
Coryn tugged on Imke, managing to register that Portland Metro was yellow and green and Spokane a swirl of blue and green before she turned and had to quickly sidestep a waist-high robot.
There were two other people already in the liaison area, both of them wearing their AR rigs and sitting quietly, looking through them. A tall, square-shouldered robot with a design that merely nodded at humanoid features watched over them. Namina introduced it as the liaison check-in-bot. He wore a red uniform and didn’t appear to have been programmed with any sense of humor whatsoever. He led them to the far two seats and went back to his place.
Namina stood behind them, one hand on the back of each of their chairs. It felt as if she were guarding them.
Coryn stared at the swirling bits of data, some of it in three dimensions and so crystal clear it looked like she could walk right into it. Namina nudged her and made a gesture for her to drop into augmented reality.
She pulled her glasses up from around her neck, and her fingers reflexively clutched the seat of her chair.
Looking ahead of her, the same places that had been utterly confusing made her mouth drop open. The entire EOC appeared to be suspended over the city, as if it floated on a platform above the dome. She felt unmoored. The imagery was so good that she pushed down with her feet, searching for the floor. When she found it, her stomach stopped spinning. She knew augmented reality, had spent years making it her friend, and this was so far beyond anything she’d experienced that she needed the literal toehold in the real world to center.
She’d never seen graphics rendered so realistically on such a vast field. The outlines of the real tables and chairs and doors and even people all moved through her field of vision, but they had been dulled to see-through shadows. She let go of her chair and leaned forward, fascinated. Her glasses responded the way they always had, but the places they showed her filled her with awe. Eye blinks moved her fast, the vision so real she felt as if her body moved with it. She could move between EOCs and between locations in Seacouver with the whispered beginning of words.
These were the things she knew or was being prompted for in this place, like the shelter EOC or West Seattle. What would render for words she didn’t know?
A whisper in her ear. Namina. “Turn around.”
She did, drawing in a breath and fighting sudden vertigo at the unexpected. The wall behind them had been transformed, as if she were looking through a clear window with fine lines of metal threading through it at three-inch intervals. Just enough disturbance to keep her from trying to walk through the now nearly-invisible wall and right into what must be another room in a different building. North of them? The map under it flowed seamlessly into the one she had just been watching, and she recognized two of the Canadian Vancouver’s iconic buildings. The Spear of Hope rose straight up next to blocky Pearson Tower. She figured o
ut how to zoom in and look over the squat top of the Pearson building and see that hothouses still produced bright red tomatoes.
She pulled her glasses up and leaned down to Imke. “Go into AR.”
Imke pointed. “We’re about to get some work to do.”
Bitter disappointment washed through Coryn. There was so much she hadn’t yet really seen in here! But sure enough, the liaison-bot was leading a tall woman over to them. She wore a red vest with the words Corporate Liaison in capital letters on it. She handed Coryn a small envelope. “Please take this to Eloise.”
“What is it?”
Her voice was just barely to the good side of condescending. “It’s sealed.”
Coryn stiffened. “Very well.”
Namina led them out. They were checked for security again, their glasses scanned again. At least there was no line, and no real wait this time. As the door-minder-bot handed them back their glasses, it said, “All records of your time here have been permanently erased.”
A brief and bitter disappointment shocked Coryn. The magic she had just experienced had been ripped from her. No wonder Blessing had warned her. Thinking of him helped her center. If any day was a good day to die . . .
Coryn held her tongue until they left the building, and then she couldn’t help herself. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “Oh my gosh. So good. I’ve never seen AR like that. You should look, Imke. Maybe the cities can be knit together like that. Oh—sorry. The EOCs are together. Not ours. But all through Seacouver.” She realized she probably didn’t make much sense to someone who hadn’t felt the AR, so she tried to be a little more understandable. “They have a view from above, way above. The whole city on a fly through. It looks live. Where did they get that view? Are they using drones?”
Namina looked over at her, almost scolding. Her large dark eyes had narrowed and her jaw tightened just like some of Coryn’s teachers might have done once. “If I were a human, I’d be amused. Settle down for a moment. Think about all that data being knit together. How safe can that be?”
Imke answered immediately. “Not very.”
A soft shushing alarm warned them to step to the side of the hallway and let a string of three robot cars through, trailing the aromas of coffee and fruit. “Your glasses should be safe enough as they don’t broadcast anything,” said Namina, ignoring the interruption with the imperturbability of someone who didn’t need to eat. “But I wouldn’t take any serious electronics in there with you.”
“What about our wristlets?” asked Coryn.
“I should have warned you to turn them off. As liaisons you’ll be targets of anything trying to get out of there.”
Coryn wandered how much of a target Namina might be. She’d seen ecobots hacked, and city systems, but thankfully never companions. Namina was theoretically hand-coded by Julianna’s staff.
But did that really mean anything? For the fiftieth time in the last month, she swore to try and follow the cybersecurity news better. Security always felt like it mattered greatly, but she couldn’t grasp the details beyond normal precautions. The invisible threats posed by hackers felt like dangerous gnats she could neither see nor understand.
As if to underscore Namina’s caution, Eloise took the small envelope and handed it right over to the technology security team and asked for a scan before she even tried to read the messages on the small data seed the envelope carried. “What did you think?” Eloise asked.
“Amazing.”
Eloise smiled. “Best I’ve ever seen. But I asked Namina to fill you in on the dangers. I presume she did.”
“Yes.”
“Okay—eat, and I’ll read this. If I have something to send back I’ll have it ready in ten minutes.” With that, she turned back to the security people.
Imke pulled Coryn over to the coffee and poured two cups. They took a sip before they led her into a quiet corner. This EOC had far fewer gimmicks, but it had at least as many people swirling among and between each other as they pursued their different, connected missions. Imke stood so close that their shoulder touched Coryn’s, creating a small point of tantalizing heat. “We have something like that in Chicago. Eloise has a point. It’s got cybersecurity, everything the city does has that. But I heard a presentation once about the dangers in EOCs. They aren’t as hardened as public safety dispatch or utilities, and the last attack here got to the utilities.”
“You’d think they’d be extra safe.” Coryn leaned closer to Imke, savoring the touch, doing her best to turn it into comfort she could use now rather than fire. “I mean, they’re the center of any responses.”
“They’re toys that people run drills in. The one here and the one in Portland were activated during the last attack. How long do you think it was before that? Other than for drills?”
“How do I know? I was a lost orphan girl, then I was Outside.”
Imke laughed. “Fourteen years. The last activation was for a dome weather system upgrade, and not a disaster at all. Just something that might have become one. And before that?”
“How would I know?” Coryn said again, trying not to sound irritated. “Ten years?”
“Seven,” Imke corrected her. “For a law passed in Russia that glitched the transportation system and closed all airports internationally for two weeks. All the EOCs were activated. In Seacouver, the primary emergency was a bunch of protests. Three people were trampled to death. In Chicago, we had a brief spate of shooting and lost one police officer and two robots.”
“That was the year before I was born.”
“Which is my point. And before that it was the fire that took out Leavenworth. That was a year-long activation, but the city was really running backup and support, not handling the direct incident management.”
“You know a lot about emergency management.”
Imke laughed. “That’s because I work for the mayor. Did you know you’re three hundred times more likely to die of suicide than an accident or an act of war in the city?”
Coryn winced. Did Imke know her parents had killed themselves? She searched for a change of subject and raised her empty coffee cup. “Want more?”
Imke smiled. “No time.”
Sure enough, Eloise was halfway across the crowded floor and clearly coming toward them.
‡ ‡ ‡
Each loop between EOCs took at least an hour, regardless of the posted expectation of half that. Security slowed them down. The crowded corridors took longer than usual to get through. Now it was mostly delivery-bots, as if everyone in the city had decided they needed a month’s supply of food when they usually had, at best, a day or two. Worse, Imke had been sent to Chicago’s Seacouver embassy with a message last round. So Coryn breathed a sigh of relief as Imke crossed the crowded, multicolored floor and sat beside her. “How was the embassy?” she asked.
Imke smiled. “Fine.”
So they weren’t going to give up what their messages had been, at least not here. That was okay. Coryn still hadn’t told them that Jake was so close to death. Maybe politics always included secrets.
She had become more used to the big EOC and its huge glitter map of all of the hot spots in the city. This was her sixth time, and she began to focus on details. What if she could help Lou find the -o boys? She examined routes and identified threats from and around Chelan.
At first, she thought she was misreading the data. The numbers were too low, the travel directions wrong.
She grabbed Imke’s hand, leaned close, and whispered, “Something’s wrong.”
Imke squeezed back, hard, and let go. Coryn interpreted it as a sign to wait, and returned to looking over the statistics. She turned her attention to Wenatchee, and then Spokane, her stomach souring slightly.
She spoke the numbers she saw softly, recording them to playback later.
It seemed to take longer than usual before they were let out of the room. The liaison-bot finally approached them with another package of data to take back.
Coryn slid her glasses dow
n and took the package.
As they were walking out, Namina tripped on something and bumped into her from behind, and her glasses fell to the floor. The robot picked them up and handed them to her, fumbling for a second. It took five minutes to make it to the door. They stopped to sign out, and as they did the minder-bot held its hand out for her AV glasses.
She wanted to resist. But the bot was big and quite metallic, and it looked at her with a sincere patience that demanded compliance. She handed over the glasses, and the bot sent them back through the machine with the belt. When it handed them back, it said, “Your settings have been restored to where they were on entry. There is a number to contact if anything is wrong.”
She nodded, both angry and more certain that something was, indeed, quite wrong. But she smiled and slid the glasses back around her neck, walking out after Namina and before Imke. She said nothing until they were back inside the security perimeter of Julianna’s building. She was still debating whether to try and talk to Eloise alone, which might be impossible, or to tell Namina and Imke what she thought. First, though, she had a suspicion. She turned to the robot. “What made you bump into me?”
“I chose to save your data.”
“You copied it?”
A slight smile was the only answer Namina seemed willing to provide.
Coryn let out a long sign. “Why would they erase it?”
“What do you think is wrong?”
“How do you know I think something’s wrong?”
“I have very good hearing.”
The flatness in Namina’s voice made her laugh. She was so different from Paula. Slyer. More subtle. And never like a mother. More like a slightly obnoxious spinster aunt, in spite of her exotic younger-woman’s body and tendency to wear prodigious amount of makeup for a robot. Coryn took a deep breath and gathered her thoughts. “The data they’re displaying about Chelan is off. They claim less occupancy, and they only identify a group of about five people as possible enemy combatants heading toward the city. But I know it’s three transports full. Over thirty. They list our permit—I guess they’d have to. But they say there are five people working, and there are more, and we’ve filed our updates every month. They should know we have more than five staff. Even before you include the Silversteins. Shouldn’t the EOC have perfect data? Or at least as good as ours? They should be able to see even the sat shots that I’ve been blocked from.”
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