“I see it’s all conditional,” Santino grumbled.
“I see it’s all evolutionary,” Mako said, pointing the marker at his friend. “Math is the universal language of explanations, not absolutes. Saying math is situational imposes limits on how and when terms can be used.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Santino shouted. Mako jabbed the marker at the closed bathroom door, and Santino lowered his voice. “You’re arguing philosophy, not math! If math is to have practical value, it needs restrictions. You can’t put a space shuttle on the moon using dinosaurs.”
“Said the man who forgets where rocket fuel comes from,” Rachel grumbled.
“Precisely!” Mako said, his colors lighting up with praise for Rachel.
“Come on, Mako, that was a joke!”
“Doesn’t mean you aren’t right. Math is conceptual, not conditional. Pieces of rules can be moved around, but within the set parameters of a specific set of circumstances, the rules can only be used to explain themselves.
“That’s why they’re useful,” he continued, looking straight at Santino with blue intent. “They explain concepts, not situations. You can’t use math to explain anything general.”
“Guys, please.” Rachel started stabbing at the weak spot on the juice carton with the plastic straw. “Mechanism. Murder. Motive.”
“All related,” Mako said.
“What Mako and I both agree on,” Santino said, “is the Mechanism predated what was known about applied advanced mathematics by fifteen hundred years. Any new information in that inscription could be invaluable.”
“Like...urh!” Her straw bent sideways and split down the center. She threw it in the general direction of the trash can, and pushed the silver pouch away from her. “Like the name of the person who made it?”
“That, or new mathematical formulae,” Santino said.
“There is no such thing as new—”
“Some of us think that there are better ways to verify old mathematical problems.” Santino’s words ran over Mako’s. “And the inscription on the Mechanism could provide insight into these methods.”
“That, we also agree on,” Mako said. “There are huge gaping holes in our knowledge. The Mechanism uses Babylonian math, not Greek, and—”
“—there are nearly as many different types of math as there are languages, because math is not universal—”
“This is like watching your parents argue when you’re too young to understand it,” Rachel said. “I’m not getting anything out of this.”
“Right.” Mako resigned himself in a purple-gray sigh. “Okay… What we’re talking about is missing knowledge. Information changes everything. When we were first activated, how did you know you could talk to machines?”
“It was obvious,” Rachel replied. “The damn things never shut up.”
Mako nodded. “And how did you know you could control them?”
“I…” Rachel paused and thought back to the chaos of those first few weeks. She had lost her eyesight just days before full activation, and juggling two life-changing events at the same time had left her memories in a muddle. “Someone told me? I don’t remember.”
“What if you hadn’t been told?” he asked her. “Would you have figured it out on your own?”
“Yeah, no doubt. Machines are noisy as hell. At some point, I would have snapped and told one of them to be quiet.”
“Okay,” Mako said. “Now, what if machines weren’t noisy? What if they didn’t impact your daily life at all? Would you have still discovered you could control them?”
“Hm.” Rachel leaned against the table. She ran her finger along the rough chronology of the line Mako had drawn on its surface. Millions and millions of years… “Good question. I really don’t know.”
“We probably would have,” Mako said. “Someone would have tripped over it, given enough time. But you’re right—machines are everywhere, and they never shut up. Learning we could control them was…” he snapped his fingers. “Bang. Easy. Done.
“There’s no way we’ve reached the limits of what we can do,” he said. “The EMF is part of every single experience we have as sentient beings. As we acquire new information, we expand our abilities.”
“Actually, Rachel, you might be the best example of this. You know, when you figured out your eyes didn’t have…to…” Santino’s voice trailed off. Her Southwestern turquoise was wrapped within grays, with voids where nothing could be seen, his emotions tiptoeing around the topic of her blindness.
She nodded, quick and hard, to shut him up. “I get it.”
“We’re still learning,” Mako said. “There are holes in our knowledge. The potential applications for what we can do are remarkable, but until we get the information we need to patch those holes, we’re just a bunch of kids with neat party tricks.”
“Take me, for example. I can block the EMF, and…” He looked down towards Rachel. “May I? It’ll help prove my point.”
She nodded again, and braced herself against what was coming.
When she wanted to block the EMF, she pulled frequencies together into a tight weave. She usually imagined the EMF as strands of thread as she worked, selecting and drawing the best of these threads into themselves to form a light, flexible barrier. Practice had made perfect: at first, she had been unable to see clearly within the shelter of her shield, but now she could use most of her usual visual frequencies while also keeping out the busy chatter of machines. And she could always feel the collective, no matter which frequencies she used, or how tightly she drew them together.
Mako’s abilities were one of a kind. The Agents were limitless, uncontrollable… Except when Mako stepped in. He could wrap an Agent in his mind and set them down beside him. He was OACET’s ultimate designated driver; on more than one occasion, Mako had been the one to break up a bar fight and keep an Agent from making a huge mistake involving someone’s credit score.
His shield slammed around her like a steel prison. The steady presence of the collective that she could always feel in the back of her mind ceased to exist, and the dark came crashing down.
“Can you break it?” Mako’s voice rumbled across her body.
She pushed, hard, her mind pressing against every part of his barrier. Then, when she had made no progress, she started to test for weaknesses. She found there were no seams to Mako’s shield, no points where separate frequencies had been joined. He had forged them into a whole. Where she wove frequencies together, he created a single impenetrable, impermeable alloy.
“No,” she said. “And I’m trying.”
He let his shield drop, and Rachel’s world came back in a wave of color and shared minds.
“See? Every time we discover a new party trick, we expand our understanding of what we can do. But why am I the only one who can do this particular trick?” Mako asked. “I can’t teach the others how to block our access—I haven’t even been able to develop methods to test how I do it.”
“It is a good trick,” Rachel admitted. Even Patrick Mulcahy with his iron will couldn’t force his way past Mako. Together, the two of them had finally answered that age-old question of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object, which was black out, regain consciousness, laugh, vomit, laugh again, and then head off in search of beer to kill the headaches.
“This is a hole in our knowledge we need to patch, the sooner the better,” Mako said. “There’s nothing else out there that can block our access to the EMF. Just me. The telecommunications industry has been working on blocking us since we went public, but they’re making no progress. If Santino and I can figure out how I do it, our problems would be over.”
Rachel started laughing. The very idea that their problems could ever be over…
“Think about it,” Mako said. “People are scared of us because we can control machines. But if there are OACET-specific security protocols, then we won’t be able to access them.”
“Update the firewalls to
keep Agents out,” Santino said, “And people will have lost most of their ammunition against you.”
“Except I’ll still be able to see through walls, or be accused of mind reading, or go out-of-body into a secure area…”
“Most ammunition,” Santino repeated. “There’ll always be those folks unhappy with OACET, but somebody’s always going to be unhappy about something.”
Not able to talk to machines? Interesting…
It wouldn’t be the end of the world for Rachel. She thought back over the last couple of weeks and, with the exception of Lulu, couldn’t remember the last time she had interacted directly with a machine. Some of the others might miss the constant chatter of the digital ecosystem in their heads, but her?
She realized she was smiling.
Mako grinned back at her. “Right? Okay, I’ll admit it might not fix everything, but it’d be a good start. All we need to do is find out what’s unique about me, and then we can start to develop what I can do as a security protocol.”
“This all ties back into what we’re saying about the Mechanism, too,” Santino said. “A little bit of information can change everything. It might reframe our entire perspective.”
“Or,” hedged Mako, “help us to better understand something we already think we know.”
And there’s our motive, Rachel realized.
Any private collector who wanted the information on the fragment could have simply sent an anonymous email to the Greek embassy and attached a copy of the photograph. That would have gotten the procedural wheels turning. Months later, the information on the fragment would have been released, joining the rest of the data on the Antikythera Mechanism within the public domain.
Time-consuming, maybe, but cheap and easy. And zero chance that your hired cat burglar would be caught in the process. It was certainly the best option.
Unless you wanted to keep that information a secret.
TEN
“I shouldn’t be here.”
Rachel slipped her arm around Bell’s waist. The girl was shaking like a leaf, and sickly yellow through and through. “Yes, you should. You wear that dress better than I do. I’ll cry if you don’t show it off.”
Rachel wasn’t kidding. Bell was wearing a little gold number that Rachel had found at the back of her closet. Rachel didn’t remember buying it. Based on the dates on the price tags, she had been deep in her third year of life as a brainwashed cyborg at the time of purchase. Why she had splurged on an expensive Flapper-style dress was anybody’s guess, but she was glad of it. She had coaxed Bell into trying it on, and the dress had turned from clumsy beads and folds into something straight off of a catwalk. Bell’s hair with its bright green highlights had been tucked up under a matching headband, and the curls that had slipped loose helped call attention to the polished gold of her lipstick and eyeshadow.
It wasn’t a conventional type of beauty, but on Bell, it was stunning. Phil had nearly driven off the road trying to sneak peeks at her in the rearview mirror.
Bell had seemed happy enough with her appearance while getting dressed, but now, as the South Portico of the White House loomed in front of them, she had started to balk.
“Come on,” Rachel said, prodding her towards the sidewalk. Jason and Phil, deep in conversation in a private link, hadn’t noticed that the women had fallen behind. “Besides, Zia will be here. Nobody’s going to notice you anyhow.”
Sad but true: Santino’s girlfriend was the Platonic ideal of the blond bombshell. She had curves upon curves, extraordinary blue eyes, and degrees in astrophysics and engineering technology from MIT. Before she had been recruited to OACET, Zia had planned to be one of the first humans on Mars, and that was quite possibly because leaving planet Earth would be the only way she would ever get any peace.
Rachel steered Bell towards the doors to the Diplomatic Reception Room. Once they had caught up to the men, she unfastened the girl from her arm and transferred her to Jason’s, trying not to laugh at the mental image of passing him a nervous hummingbird. Then, Phil took Rachel’s arm, and together they crossed into the White House.
“Think she’ll be okay?” Phil asked her.
“Honestly? I’m not sure if she’s ready for a night like this,” Rachel replied.
“Who is?” Phil glanced around, his colors swimming in raw yellow-white energy as he took in the splendor of the reception parlor. “I never thought I’d be here. Ever!”
A small cough at her elbow brought her down to earth, and she went through the rituals of security and coat checks with a Secret Service agent. She hoped he’d be rotated off duty soon; nobody wanted to work through their own party.
And then they were inside.
The Diplomatic Reception Room was lit by crystal sconces and firelight, with several small tables strategically located for partygoers who wanted to drop into quiet conversation over hors d’oeuvres. The oval room was decorated with painted wallpaper, scenes of early American life playing out above the wainscoting. Much of the antique Colonial furniture which lived in the room had been removed to make space, with fancy but practical reproduction loveseats brought in to line the walls.
The four of them were fashionably late. The other guests already milled about in their finery. Bell’s colors slowly slid from a terrified yellow to an uneasy orange as she shot quick glances about the room; Rachel flipped frequencies to see another young woman about Bell’s age, dressed in vivid blues with long braided hair to match. A scan of the adjacent China Room showed a buffet, the silver chafing dishes overflowing with a dozen delicacies. The smells of fresh bread and bacon floated through the open door.
Yup, she thought, as her scans hit on Santino, Zockinski, and Hill, looming over the prime rib carving station like lions at a kill.
She brought her scans back to her normal range. Phil was still radiating eager energy beside her. His hand on her arm burned, and he was taking up more space in her head than usual.
“Calm down,” she told him. She scanned the structure until she found the nearest concrete, and ran her mind through her favorite grounding medium before she passed a sense of serene composure back across their link. “It’s just a party.”
“It’s a party at the White House!”
“The President isn’t here. It’s a party with a few politicians who had nothing better to do on a Monday night. You’ve been to dozens of these.”
She felt him run his own scans across the building. His scope and range weren’t as developed as her own, but she had a professional interest in watching how he worked. Phil focused on the structure instead of the people within, taking in the splendor of the place as he moved from room to room.
“Scanning the White House is totally illegal,” she said with a mental grin.
“Like you haven’t done it,” Phil replied.
“Damn straight. My first time here, I was tripping over myself.”
They began to mingle. Phil was the perfect gentleman, willing to meet and greet whoever crossed their paths. Between the two of them, they knew a goodly number of the other guests, and were happy to talk shop with those from the MPD or the Secret Service. Phil worked with the MPD’s bomb unit, and was always happy to spin a tale about the city’s latest close call. Tonight, it was pipe bombs: Phil had the crowd in stitches over the problems of downloading plans and building bombs without knowing precisely what to do with them after you made them.
“…he decided the best place to store them was in the trunk of his car! That way, they’re out of the house, right? So, there’s this huge box of pipe bombs sitting over the gas tank, and I’m on the phone with this traffic cop who really wishes he had called in sick…”
“Rachel!”
It was a joyful voice, close to sunlight. Rachel stepped away from the group from the MPD to find two women, one with a core color of violet, the other a classic polished bronze, moving towards her.
Rachel reached out and seized the feeling of concrete, hard, as Zia came in for a hug and a quick kiss
on the cheek. She had grabbed the concrete in time: Santino’s girlfriend felt nothing but Rachel’s clear sense of self, peppered with happiness at seeing her friend. She was even able to tell Zia, quite truthfully, “You look fantastic!”
Like Rachel, the other woman was wearing the traditional little black dress, but that’s where the comparisons ended. Where Rachel’s dress was a layer of lace over a silk shell, Zia’s was thick brushed cotton, with sleeves so long they draped down to her fingers. It was simple and modest, and she wore it without jewelry. On anyone else, it’d be downright frumpy; on Zia, it did nothing but call attention to her natural beauty.
“Thank you,” Zia said aloud. Then, in the link, “You’ve met Kristen?”
“Zockinski’s wife?” Rachel said. “Yes, last summer.”
The third woman turned an uncertain orange, and Rachel and Zia flushed in shared embarrassment at their minor social flub. The two Agents immediately dropped into the conversational safety net offered by the thrill of being at the White House—can you believe we’re really here?—and helped steer Kristen Zockinski’s colors back to a safe, stable blue before she insisted that the two Agents come with her to help pry her husband off of the buffet.
Rachel declined in favor of keeping all of her fingers, and wandered towards the open door to the Map Room. The ladies’ restroom was concealed towards the back, and the Secret Service had left the room itself open for party overflow. Twin to the China Room located on the other side of the oval Diplomatic Room, the Map Room held additional chairs and couches, and—
Oh! There’s Maddie Peguero.
The archivists were keeping to themselves in a corner of the Map Room, a tight cluster of scholars whose jobs had no overlap with those in law enforcement. Peguero glanced up from her plate full of crêpes and spotted Rachel, and her colors began to twine around themselves in yellow and red barbed wire.
State Machine Page 14