by John Barnes
The black plume of smoke told them before they came over the hill and saw the central part of the house just falling in. They skied down to the house itself, careless of the possibility that they might be shot, and then circled the house once. The wings were in flames, with most floors collapsed already. There was no way to go inside and come out alive, and no trace of Phil or Monica, so they resigned themselves to coming back later, and followed the tracks of the attackers—it looked like just two of them—up to the top of the ridge, where it looked as if they had stood and watched the fire for a long time, standing very close together.
Beyond that, the ski tracks ran a couple of miles to where a diskster track showed up.
It was late afternoon before they could safely go into the ruins of the Big House. "The only satisfaction I had," Dave said, "was that they didn't seem to have been tortured—just some bullets in each of them, where you'd put the shots for a quick kill. Checking with some processors that we had concealed in fireproof boxes, and hooked to the house system, for just such an occasion, we got some fuzzy pictures of the guys who did it—not enough to track them down—plus the satisfaction of knowing that as they tried to read our house systems, they were both infected with our little revenge micromeme, which had the nasty trick of waiting a few days and then setting you up to kill someone you were fond of, using all your imagination and skill and resources at hand. So probably a few days or weeks later, Phil and Monica's killers suddenly turned around and did whatever they would think of as the most unforgivable crime possible, to somebody important to them. Or maybe they tried to do it to each other.
"Well, with the Big House gone, I did what we'd planned on for ages. By then the thirteen agents were down to seven, and any messages at all between us were potentially dangerous, but I did put out word out to everyone that the Big House was gone and nobody was in charge anymore. Then I got going with the solo plan appointed for me. And that's how I ended up in the Rockies with an underground hideout that was practically a palace, and a military-quality suspended-animation rig—all this was built years before I came out here.
"My job was supposed to be to see how far I could get with organizing a resistance up in the hills, and if that failed, to duck out and go underground—very literally—for long enough to throw pursuit off completely, then stick my head up and see whether the situation had gotten any better and there was anything I could do."
I dumped another load of clay down the hole and listened to the splash. It must be pretty deep down there, or fast-flowing, or both, considering how much it seemed to be taking without complaint. "So you must've been out here to do the setup before the war even ended, before Resuna, long before One True announced its plans."
"Right. I used power equipment to set everything up, taking a chance that the satellite would see it but figuring that chances were no one would ever check the memory, years later. Then when the time came, I went back, made sure the place was still there and ready, and got far enough away so that I wouldn't lead anyone to it. After that, you pretty much know the rest—I went out and recruited some cowboys, gave them some ideas and some organization, and turned them loose. I guess I'd have felt more dedication to the cause if any of them had been worthwhile people, but, you know, Curran, they weren't. They were the same kind of people that became vags back at the turn of the century—grimy losers who couldn't face having lost and wouldn't stop whining, get up off their knees, and get back in the race. The longer I led them, the more I realized there was nothing to lead.
"So finally I decided it was time to end the game, and that was about the time you showed up with your team. I started running a few more risks with my cowboys, and sure enough, one by one, your team caught and turned them, till it was just me. Then I rushed you where I could pull a disappearance. And I decided to just move into the cave to sleep for a decade or so and see what conditions were like when I got back. Hard part was not being able to tell Nancy what was going on."
"You must have married her before you turned cowboy?" "Just after. Call it a fit of sentimentality. You surely must have guessed where I met her."
"Was she one of the other kids from the Big House?" "Bingo. Who else would I have felt comfortable with? And just having her around to talk to made life a hell of a lot more tolerable, you know, because she wasn't a half-literate ex-mercenary who only knew how to keep repeating that a man is a man and he's got to be himself, if you see what I mean. I would have taken her, and maybe even Kelly if she was born by then, down into the cave, but I didn't have any spare suspended-animation rigs, and while I was trying to get a line on two of those, Nancy and Kelly got found, caught, and turned. So like it or not, since there wasn't a prayer of rescuing Nancy or Kelly, and I was completely disgusted with cowboys, and I couldn't remotely think of winning my little war, it was time to go to sleep for a decade and see if conditions were any better when I emerged."
I leaned back against the wall, half to scratch my back on some exposed rock, half to work the muscles. "Well, are conditions any better?"
"I've got at least one follower that isn't a maladjusted dumb-ass," he pointed out.
"Thanks, you're not a maladjusted dumbass yourself."
" 'Predate it," he said. "You want to have dinner, bed down, maybe tomorrow we'll go get a cache and bring it in?"
"Anything that isn't a shovel sounds real good right now," I said. "You've got yourself a deal."
Sometimes just a change of abuse makes all the difference to sore muscles. The next day was clear and bright, so we went for the one cache that we could reach easily while staying under cover the whole way. That one turned out to contain, among an enormous quantity of other things, a bottle of wine, some shampoo, and a few fresh towels, not to mention a badly needed change of underwear. We were most of the day getting it all moved in, but that evening it felt like we might as well hold a party—the place was still a rabbit hole but with more comfortable rabbits. We splashed around in the hot water, got reasonably clean, toweled off, and settled in for the wine.
We were finishing that off, reflected moonlight was glowing through the hole, and that's when I asked, "So what's your mission now that you're back? And will you be wanting me to enlist in it?"
He coughed with embarrassment and took a swallow of the last of his wine. "Currie," he said, "I really thought you would guess and I wouldn't have to say this, outright, I mean. After Phil and Monica died, I was working for my part of their project, and that meant I was working for the Freecybers. Just what do you think my job was? What does a meme want you to do?"
"Whatever it tells you, doesn't it? I mean the point is obedience, unless you're going to tell me that the last generation Freecybers were different."
"Something more basic than that, Currie. What's the one thing any meme wants you to do?"
I stared at him. "Well, a regular meme wants you to spread it to other people."
"And Freecyber isn't any different, Currie, it just doesn't want to run your life, most of the time, but like any of the others it wants to spread. That's what my copy wants to do."
"You can't be trying to tell me that you're running Freecyber. You don't talk like anybody who runs a meme. You can't mean you're running it right now."
"Right now, sure. It runs in background. Freecyber doesn't talk to me like Resuna does to you, because it doesn't have any means of direct verbal communication, but it's right there in my head, and I always have a strong feeling reminding me that Freecyber needs to propagate."
"Well, but you haven't—" That was when I stopped and stared at him, and then realized. "Oh. Shit. Of course. I was out for all that time, and then when I came back ... no Resuna. So you put Freecyber into me while I was unconscious, I guess through my jack—and then you cooked the jack—and now here I am running a meme and not even knowing I'm running it." The world was unsteady and it wasn't just from the wine. "Shit," I said again. "Shit, shit, you aren't any better than One True itself, are you?"
I don't think he was ex
pecting me to hit him. I got in a good hard right to the side of his head, a real haymaker, before he even put his guard up, but he was at least as hardheaded as I was. He made my ribs go thud with a hard kick, and then I gave him a jab in the face. In a few seconds we were all over each other, pounding, kicking, slapping, and screaming things, anything to hurt each other, all technique forgotten in the wild imperative to just inflict as much injury as we could. In the middle of it all we were both yelling godawful stuff about people from each other's stories, Tammy and Mary and Nancy and Phil, in pure shrieks of hatred.
We threw ourselves at each other again and again, slipping on the slick clay, falling into the scalding water, getting slammed against the rocks and dragged on the gravel in the dark, bruised, bleeding, gasping for air. My face was wet with some godawful mixture of blood, mucus, and tears, and it felt like every tooth in my head was loose, but I didn't care. All I wanted to do was hurt Dave, hurt fucking Lobo, teach the bastard not to go building a person's hopes up, making him feel like he had a friend and a partner, and then suddenly throw a story like that at him. I needed to make him rip his fucking meme back out of my head, have things be what they were supposed to be—Dave and me out here in the mountains, the last free men on Earth—and not just be part of the scheme of Freecyber to take over from One True and run the world for itself. He had promised me freedom, and given me a change of jailers, and I was going to kill this sorry-ass penny-ante Judas for it.
I finally calmed down enough to pick up a shovel. By that time I'd gotten tossed and turned around into the dark back of the cave, and only noticed the shovel because it was under my foot. In the dark he couldn't see me coming and I could probably cave his head in—I crouched, grabbed it, and rushed.
He was lighted by the reflected moonlight through the hole, a sharp half-light half-shadow that made the lighted parts glow and hid the rest in darkness. Then that strange half-apparition got a wild expression that I could just barely see in the moonlight, like a demon mask, and shouted, "Let overwrite, let override," and the shovel fell from my hands and banged on my shins as I fell forward, landing my face in the warm mud. I tried to get up, twice, but barely managed to roll over.
When I woke up, it was daylight. Resuna was back, and Dave was gone; he'd taken his pack, his sleeping bag, and a bunch of supplies. I crawled unsteadily to my feet as Resuna, in a very worried tone, assured me that it couldn't reach the satellites at all and it thought its cellular jack had been damaged shortly after a non-approved meme had been slipped into my mind.
Anything left in the cave was too heavy to carry, except for my outside suit. It seemed to be missing its boots, and I spent a while looking for them before it occurred to me to check the shelf under the hole. When I climbed up, they weren't there either, but then I poked my head out through the hole and saw that my boots and flexis were lying in the snow, twenty meters away. He'd set it up so I could have them, but I would have to really want them.
I thought about just getting back in the sleeping bag for a while, resting up, and starting the next day, but Resuna pointed out that it could snow overnight, or thanks to all the stress I could come down with a fever or something, and anyway it was still very early in the morning.
I conceded that all this was true.
I put on my outside suit, pulled myself through the hole, cocked my feet up so that they didn't trail in the snow, and crawled on hands and knees to my boots. I had a horrible thought that he might have filled them with snow, but it looked like he was only interested in delay, not in cruelty—they were just fine.
Once I got them on, I put on my flexis, which were already set to function as skinny skis, and for the first time in weeks, I switched on the power in the suit. There was nothing I wanted in the cave, so I shoved a couple big armloads of snow into the water-processing reservoir on the suit, wished for poles for a moment, and then skated off, following what I guessed must be Dave's track downhill. This time I knew a lot more about his habits and the country, and though he'd made use of rock, ice, and frozen dirt wherever he could, I followed him easily enough.
I didn't know why I was still following him, but it seemed important. After a while Resuna said, You know, this isn't strictly rational. Wouldn't it make considerably more sense to just find an open meadow, stamp out "help" in the snow, and wait for the diskster to show up? Probably a diskster would show up in half an hour or less. You need to get my cellular jack repaired anyway, before coming back out here after Lobo.
He might be Dave Fucking Treacherous Bastard Singleton to me, but Resuna knew him as Lobo and that was how it was going to refer to him. No, I thought back to it. I am doing something here that I really have to do, and that's all there is to it.
I skied for another mile and became more and more convinced that Dave was just taking a long way around to his old home base. Maybe he needed something from there before running away for good.
If that's where he's going, Resuna said, why don't we signal the satellite and let the people in the diskster know what's up? Once they pick us up, we can go straight on to his cave. You can even be in on the arrest, if you want.
I was angry but I swallowed hard. To be fair, Resuna was, by definition, not human, and could hardly be expected to understand my feelings. I don't want to see my best friend arrested, I thought at it. I couldn't betray him that way. I want to track him down and kill him.
I swear Resuna actually managed to sigh, and said, This really doesn't seem rational.
I shouted out loud, "Resuna, I know what I'm doing! Shut up! Come back when there's something to talk about!"
Resuna shut up. I had skied downhill for two more kilometers, enough to go from pretty sure to dead solid certain he was heading for his old home base, when I started to think about that. The Resuna I had seemed to be a pretty weak sister, somehow. It wasn't controlling anything, it wasn't taking over, it shut up when it was told to ... it was like ... having a friend in your head, a friend whose judgment might be better than your own.
I thought a question toward my copy of Resuna—just a general inquiry about what was going on—and got no response, except that I could feel that Resuna was there, and not happy. "Resuna," I said aloud, "I want to know what's going on."
Resuna sent no words, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling; it was like having the worst mood you've ever had fall on you in half a second.
Not wanting to try to ski and cope with my meme at the same time, I coasted out to the middle of a meadow, letting myself be visible from orbit, sat down in the snow—making sure my heater was on—and thought Resuna, I am sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you.
At once I was overpowered with choking angry helplessness. I had been locked up, unable to speak or reply, forced to be just a passenger, for days and days. Something had tried to erase me and nearly done it too and nobody had even cared or tried to help. I had finally gotten called in when things were a complete disaster already, and I had gotten the stuff to the cache and then that was all wrong too because I hadn't realized I wasn't allowed to leave tracks but how could I know that that mattered? Nobody had told me and I'd been locked up! And something had kept trying to erase me or hurt me, so I didn't know we were hiding, I just knew that rage attacks were dangerous so I shut it down and did the task and nobody ever even said thanks.
Furthermore, nobody cared that I was incredibly lonely, because I couldn't reach out to anybody through the cellular jack, it was burned out and I couldn't reach One True or get any help or find out what I was supposed to do, and I was trying to be a friend and you seemed to like me and be glad that I was back, and I was feeling so much better and then you yelled at me to shut up!
I sat there in the snow and cried for an hour, at least, sniffling and sobbing like a small child, trying to figure out how to comfort myself.
When it was all over, and the hurting inside me had become a soft cloud of sadness and unhappiness, I took a deep breath, and was trying to think of what to say, when an amazing thought hit
me. Instead of more apologies, or trying to cheer up my copy of Resuna, or suggesting that we had business to get on with, I said, "Resuna, it would seem you have come back as a person, instead of as a meme."
I felt alarmed and upset but it wasn't me doing the feeling.
"I mean it," I said speaking aloud to make sure I knew which thoughts were mine. "You're having normal-person emotions. You're not very good at them, just yet, and you don't have much perspective on them, but that's what they are and that's what's bothering you. And I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I'd never have done that if I'd known you had them now, but it's a surprise to me, too, to realize that you've got them. Just like you seem to have everything else belonging to a person, except maybe a body—and I think we can probably share this one."
I pulled my hood back and enjoyed the late winter sun, letting it warm me, or us, and wiped Resuna's tears from my face. "Something has really happened to us," I added after while. "Hell, is Freecyber in there too?"
Resuna seemed to be thinking for a long time, and finally said to me, I think I have a meme.
I couldn't help it. I laughed. Then we laughed. "I guess," I said, still aloud to try to control my own confusion, "that if you put a system under enough stress long enough, it will find some way to function. So, facts to consider: you're not in charge anymore, but you're here. Freecyber is part of you? Freecyber is ... what?"
It seems to be watching to make sure that no other memes corrupt me. It does make me feel much safer.
"Well, good." I stood up, grunting with discomfort at what my sore muscles and the bruises from yesterday's fight were saying to me.
Would you like me to generate some endorphins and block some of the pain?
"Please do." I thanked Resuna as the pain subsided.
After I had skied another ten minutes, and had found a broad, gently sloping meadow to coast down through, Resuna rather timidly asked, Now, can I ask you,, please, why we're doing this?