Santino was telling her about how he and Zockinski had followed Alimoren to the postal depot when Mako’s voice knocked on her mind
“Ping Peng. Peng, ping? Mako!”
“Polo,” she replied as she opened a direct link.
“Hey!” The other Agent stepped into her head, his presence larger than life. “Heard you almost killed my cousin.”
“Almost. As gunshots go, it could have been worse. He’ll be okay.”
Relief came through the link. She concurred: there was just something comforting about second opinions. “All right,” Mako said. “You’re on your way to the mansion?”
“Yeah. Jenny said she wants to murder me in a sterile environment.”
“Good for her. Send Santino to me before you croak. I need to talk to him.”
“Roger.”
“No, no, Mako. May-ko. Roger is working with the NSA this week.”
“Shut up,” she told him, and stepped out of their link.
Santino was watching her in bemused purples. “Was I boring you, or did you get a call?”
“It was Mako,” she confirmed. “He says as long as we’re stopping by the mansion, he wants us to check in with him.”
Santino brightened. “He’s made progress on the Mechanism?”
“I guess so,” Rachel said.
He turned towards her, his attention sharpening to a bright point. “Something wrong?”
Rachel pointed to her shirt sleeves, now rolled up as many times as possible to keep the drying blood from touching her skin. “Noura’s dead, Santino. Hill got shot,” she said. “How does a Sasquatch machine fit into all of this?”
“Sasquatch machine?”
“Y’know, Bigfoot? Something that shouldn’t exist but does?”
His bemusement changed to vivid purple humor. “You think Bigfoot exists?”
“No! I—ugh.” Rachel slumped against the passenger’s side window. “The Mechanism. You and Mako keep trying to sell me on the idea that something two thousand years old is still relevant today, but I don’t see it. And people are dead because of it… I don’t know. It makes no sense to me.”
“Of Peleus’ son, Achilles, sing, O Muse, the vengeance, deep and deadly; whence to Greece unnumbered ills arose…” Santino could have kept going—unlike her, he had actually memorized the classics—but he knew his partner lived and breathed poetry and she had recognized the source as soon as he had started speaking. Instead, he grinned at her, smug in pinks.
“Unfair,” she muttered. “Unbelievably unfair. You can’t just drop the I-bomb around me.”
“The Iliad is timeless,” he said. “Love and loss, striving for fame and immortality… These themes are as relevant today as they were when it was written. If they discovered an unknown fragment of The Iliad, would you dismiss it as irrelevant crap?”
“You can’t compare a machine to the human experience.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m comparing it to the fundamentals of how the Mechanism operates. To the right people, mathematics can be as timeless as poetry.”
She glared at her partner. Santino gave her a dainty pink smile.
“Stop making me understand things,” she grumbled under her breath.
“Never.”
The OACET mansion was quiet. The usual gardeners were there; OACET had recruited heavily from wildlife management, and many of those Agents with outdoors specialties couldn’t be placed as liaisons. In the meantime, they were bringing the landscape back to life. The riot of early spring flowers was on, yellow trillium and purple crocuses spreading out in tidy clumps throughout their new beds. The gardeners cornered Santino and rushed him away, asking for his advice on a suffering cluster of Puschkinia scilloides.
Rachel meandered towards the basement, stopping to chat with various Agents as she made her way to the medical lab where Jenny was waiting. Her physical was quick: Jenny ran a diagnostic scan through Rachel’s body, applied an ophthalmoscope to her eyes, and reminded her that she was a moron with a death wish.
(Rachel agreed she was an idiot but she quibbled over the part about the death wish. If angels feared to tread somewhere, she felt they probably had a damn good reason to do so, and she respected their decision. She just wished the others who shared this mortal coil with her felt the same.)
The pile of rugs that had covered the stairs had been moved. It was a smooth climb to the west wing. Mako opened his door before she could knock. “Avery’s sleeping,” he said, gesturing towards the bathroom. “She’s finally hit that growth spurt. C’mon in.”
Two of the old chalkboards had been repurposed. Rachel recognized the fragment from the Mechanism, sketched out in Mako’s messy hand. Santino was sitting in his customary place beside the computer array, reading over the data spindling off of an ancient dot matrix printer.
“How’s it coming?” Rachel asked them, settling into one of Mako’s rickety old kitchen chairs.
“A friend at the Smithsonian has been helping with the translation,” Mako said. “She loves the level of detail in your scans. She wants to see if you can go to Greece with their team when they examine the rest of the device. You’ve created more accurate images of the inscriptions than any—”
“No,” Rachel insisted. She still wasn’t fully free of her headaches, and the prolonged scans from the other night still set her skull to pounding if she thought about them. “Sorry.”
“Had to ask,” Mako said. “She’ll say it’s a huge loss, you know. Much of the original inscription still can’t be read. You might be their best bet for deciphering more of the text.”
“Ask me again when my head’s stopped pounding from the first round of scans,” Rachel said.
“Fair enough,” Mako said. “Thus far, nothing that’s been translated is too dramatic. We’ve known the inscriptions on the back were an instruction manual for the Mechanism. The writing on the piece you’ve found is more of the same.”
“Anything of interest?” Santino asked.
“The Mechanism applies a deterministic system—” Mako began.
“No. I’m not doing this again.” Rachel cut him off as quickly as she could. “Not after the day I’ve had. What have you found? Simple, small words, please.”
“Sure,” Mako said, not at all bothered by her request. “We’ve known for years that the Mechanism doesn’t allow for random variables. It plots the movement of the sun, the moon, and the five planets the Greeks knew about at the time of its construction. Normal, predictable events,” he said, and added, “It’s got a function to predict eclipses, another for the Olympics, and it can be adjusted to account for leap years.”
He paused. “The section you recovered? The inscriptions suggest the Mechanism was also used in horoscopic astronomy.”
“Nice!” Santino said.
Rachel glared at her partner. There was some gray within his conversational colors, at odds with his show of excitement.
He noticed, and shrugged. “It’s what I expected, but I had hoped it was something more… I don’t know. Dramatic? A solution to an ancient mathematical proof, I guess.”
“This is still incredibly significant,” Mako said. “No one’s ever been able to nail down exactly when the Mechanism was created. Greek astrology was in a transitional phase around the same time, so anthropologists will be able to date when, and maybe where, it was built. It’s a good step towards learning who created it, too.”
“Still, I’d hoped it was something more esoteric,” Santino said.
“Yeah, me too. But it’s definitely not nothing. This is a cultural—”
“Wait,” Rachel said. “Astrology, as in lions and tigers and bears in the sky?”
“No tigers, and Leo is a part of the Ursa Major family,” Santino said. “But yeah.”
Rachel pulled her arms over her face. Her sense of loss was so sad and sudden that Mako dropped into the chair beside her and wrapped her in his overlarge arms. “Penguin?”
“Astrology,” Rachel said, incre
dulous. “I know people are killed for the dumbest reasons, but… Astrology!”
“It’s not nothing,” Santino said, as he folded up the computer printouts for later reading. “This can help shed light on an important aspect of Greek culture. Many ancient Greeks believed in astrology. They felt it let their gods communicate with them.”
“Right!” Mako said brightly. “People’ve always died for religion. This is nothing new.”
“People die because of stupid shit all the time,” she said. “And it’s always pointless.”
The two men couldn’t think of a good reply to that.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t want to go to Greece with the Smithsonian team?” Santino asked, trying to break her mood. “It’ll be months before the details are finalized. Your headache will be long gone by then.”
Rachel shook her head. “Can’t do it. We’re still banned from traveling outside the country. Besides, I’m too busy here. Have them make a few more OACET Agents who specialize in law enforcement, and then maybe I’ll get a vacation.”
There was a quick blaze of color between Mako and Santino. “What?” she asked, unable to place the streak of excited yellow-white lightning.
“Nothing,” Mako said, too quickly.
She sighed, and sent a light scan over him. Beneath his shirt, his arm was wrapped in cotton gauze, a light haze of pain red hovering near his skin. Rachel sent a deeper scan through the gauze, and found a number of tidy dime-sized excisions in his soft tissue.
“What happened?!” she demanded, reaching out to grab his hand. His embarrassment jumped across at the contact. She needed to mull over his mood before she hit on the answer. “You did this to yourself?”
“Rachel—” Santino began, but by then she had trained her scans on him. She found the same cotton gauze and small injuries on her partner’s arm, but where Mako’s were already beginning to heal, Santino’s were fresh.
She looked around the room and, yup, there they were, hidden in a cardboard box. A couple of test tubes, with pieces of Santino floating in an unknown liquid inside them.
Rachel held up her hands in surrender, and walked over to the window to get some air before she decided to murder the both of them to keep them from inventing new problems.
“Penguin—” Mako said, as he glanced towards the bathroom door.
“You’re two of the most rational, intelligent people I know,” Rachel said, keeping her voice as calm as she could manage. “At least, when you’re not drinking. Since you’re both sober, I’m sure there’s an excellent explanation for the self-mutilation.”
“We’re trying to figure out why Mako can block your access to the EM spectrum.”
“Right. Of course you are,” Rachel said, as her fingernails sank into the wood of the windowsill. “So, what? You’ve moved straight to blaming our DNA?”
“Well, we didn’t move straight to DNA sequencing,” Mako said. “If we had, I would’ve just collected mouth swabs. We’re also running conductivity tests, which is why we needed larger samples.”
“DNA is part of it, though,” Santino added. “We’re playing process-of-elimination at this point, and since OACET doesn’t have the tools for sequencing here, we’ll need to send the swabs out to a private lab—”
“Oh lord,” Rachel muttered. “Please tell me Jenny knows about this.”
Flickers of yellow-orange trepidation ran through the men’s conversational colors. “Well—” Mako began.
“Of course she doesn’t. Why would you consult a doctor before you decided to cut yourselves up?” Rachel sighed. “I suppose you want a sample from me?”
“No, no,” Mako said, but Santino had already started nodding. “That’s not necessary. We’re paying for these out-of-pocket, and we’ve got samples from a few other Agents. Santino is the control.”
“Control for… Wait. Wait. They did full genetic screenings on us before the surgery, so why would…” Rachel let herself trail off as she realized what Mako was implying. “Don’t tell me you think the implant is changing our DNA?!”
Santino went purple and began to laugh.
“Yes and no,” Mako said. “First, you have to understand that DNA isn’t a single thing. It’s made up of—”
The look she gave him would have frozen whole chickens.
“Probably, yeah,” Mako sighed. “It’s integrated into our very cells, Penguin. It’s definitely changed us. So… yeah, Santino and I think it’s made some minor epigenetic changes. I mean, look at what Avery can do.”
Rachel hadn’t felt the urge to claw out the tiny object in her head for months, but it returned anew, that same sickening terror she had experienced when she had first realized her implant wasn’t just along for the ride. She returned to her chair before the sudden surge of nausea could knock her down.
The men didn’t notice. “Mako and I will compare the other Agents’ current genetic profiles to what they were before the surgery,” Santino said. “And then against Mako’s past and current profiles. Maybe something will show up that marks him as an outlier.”
“This sounds really…” Rachel stopped herself before she said insane. “Involved.”
“Mako’s genetic makeup is just one possibility,” Santino said. “We’ll test it while we search for others.”
“Besides, this is something we’ve needed to do anyhow,” Mako said. “We don’t know what the long-term effects of the implant will be. Five, ten years from now? I might have the most splendid of brain cancers.” He rapped a superstitious knuckle on the wooden desk. “Routine screening might help us catch any changes before they cause serious cellular degradation or mutation.”
“Right,” Rachel agreed. Her nausea surged again. “Why aren’t we doing that anyhow?”
“Because OACET’s spending is tightly watched. Congress is trying to control us through controlling our operations budget. Several hundred thousand dollars for preventative genetic screening isn’t in the budget.”
“But it should be.” Santino picked up the conversation. “Congress should be looking at OACET as a major financial investment.”
Rachel picked her head up off of the table.
Santino rolled on, oblivious to her sudden shift into predator mode “Say Mako and I find a way to control what data an Agent can access, and there are no medical side effects whatsoever. Why wouldn’t everyone want one?”
Rachel moved her attention towards Mako. He sat there, smiling at her, blissfully unaware that what he and Santino had been discussing was already built into OACET’s long-term plans.
“Want what?” she asked cautiously.
“The implant!” Santino said, grinning like a maniac. “Everyone would grab it. It’s the next generation of smartphones. More utility, more capacity—”
“Minecraft in your head,” Mako added. “Major selling feature, right there.”
“—and don’t forget the collective.”
“No.” Rachel shuddered. “God, no! It’s bad enough with just us. There’s no way I’m going to add every single Verizon customer to my psyche.”
“Exactly,” Mako said. “So, we’ve got a lot of bugs to work out. Removing the communal elements of the collective is almost as important as making sure the average schmuck can’t take control of a nuke. It’s not going to happen any time soon.”
“It will happen, though,” Santino said. “Eventually. Then the really big problems will start to show up.”
“Don’t.” Rachel held up a hand. She already knew where this was headed. “Just don’t.”
The men ignored her. “The implant isn’t cheap,” Santino continued. “What was it, about ten million per item?”
“If you figure in research and development costs, yeah,” Mako said. “But production costs are still incredibly high. It’s a quantum organic computer, so you’ve got to grow each device so it’ll be compatible with its user. Not everybody will be able to afford that.”
“Barely anybody, really. Just the upper class.”
&n
bsp; “And then you’ve got a society where the wealthy are blended into their tech.”
“Not to mention each other—we might be able to downplay the connection to the link, but there’ll always be some element of collective consciousness involved. So it wouldn’t be the usual issue of the Haves and the Have-nots… This’ll be one where there’s a small group of people who are intrinsically connected to each other, and to the tech which runs the world.”
“And those outside of the new collective will be a fuck-all ginormous group of people who won’t be allowed to sit at the cool kids’ table.”
“Ever. It’ll be a whole new dimension to the usual stratified societies.”
Rachel watched the two men, amazed. What they were discussing fell outside of the usual scope of OACET’s Administrative meetings. Their colors were brilliantly yellow-white as they painted the future of the human race in broad sloppy strokes. “This is what the two of you do in your spare time?” she asked them. “Sit around and discuss how we’re going to destroy civilization?”
“Pretty much,” Mako said, shrugging. “Or maybe save it, really, if we can implement strategies to kill these problems before they get traction.”
“Wait, what?” Rachel blinked. “OACET didn’t invent the implant. Who decided we were the gatekeepers for a global societal clusterfuck?”
“OACET did.” Santino was an unpleasant combination of smug pink and jealous green. “Going public put a face on it.”
“But this is all years in the future,” Mako said. “Decades, probably. There’re so many problems to solve, and so few of us.”
“It’ll take time to do properly,” Santino agreed. “This isn’t something we can rush. We’ll just have to keep working on it,” he said. The pink faded from his colors, the purple-gray of resignation replacing it.
“Of course you will,” she muttered. This wasn’t just another technological puzzle for Santino. There would be no new implants, no new cyborgs, not until the security holes were plugged. Until that happened, her partner would forever be outside the collective. A friend, true, and the best of allies, but nothing more.
She knew it killed him.
“Fine,” she said to Mako, as she stood and started to unbutton her pants. “I volunteer, but you’re cutting up my butt. I’m not scarring up anything that’ll show in a bathing suit for this lunacy.”
State Machine Page 20