Her worldlies. She needed to get back to her things. Maud let her head lie on Irma’s shoulder. “My hiking plan gives me six hours in this cave system, off grid, before I’m missed.”
“If you convince me I can trust you, we’ll send you back up to Tatween for the night.”
“And if I can’t earn your trust in six hours?”
Irma led her back up the stairs, into an anteroom, and finally through a door into a hospital ward, a long, antiseptic-smelling chamber free of Kinze biomatter, loaded with sarco pods and nursing units. Upton’s toon was up there, monitoring life signs in some of the units.
Maud ground her teeth together. Surgeries.
“Have a look at this one,” he said.
Maud approached the indicated pod. Inside was what looked like a copy of herself, deeply asleep.
“We can lose this body within the cave system or toss it out to feed the desert scavengers. You and your hiking partner got separated, we’ll say, and your wayfinding became confused. As far as Sensorium will know, you’ll have died.”
“Digitally printed copies of people are easy to spot in autopsy.”
“You’re out in the middle of nowhere. It’ll take weeks.”
“And after you faked my death I’d be … what, a prisoner?”
“Only until Foreclosure,” Headmistress said. “Nobody wants to coerce you, luvvie, but…”
“But one way or another, I’m already impressed into the cause,” she said.
“Correct,” Irma said. “So, be gracious about it, darling. Rejoin your family!”
Maud only needed to get out once, to get her hands on her worldlies.
So, give them what they’re expecting, love.
Which is what?
Daddy’s sweet little science femme?
It was a good suggestion. Maud held up the seedling. “Can I have a lab?”
“Why would you need one?”
“I think better when I’m busy,” she said. “You must remember that. And if you want me back in Frankie’s good books, I need something I can leak to her. A little bit of comms science … that’s harmless enough intel at this point, isn’t it?”
Irma buzzed with excitement. “Come on, luvvie, we’ll find you somewhere to work.”
Leaving the printed copy of her body behind, Maud turned on her heel, putting Upton’s distrustful glower behind her.
CHAPTER 35
WESTEURO, LONDON DISTRICT
“My name is Sonika Singer and I’m polling visitors in the vicinity of the Piccadilly Theatre. Our question today is about the fugitive members of the Feral5 pack—Frankie Barnes, Ember Qaderi, and Jermaine Mwangi.”
Sonika was playing to a newsbot drifting about ten feet away, framing herself in a shot with the Eros statue in the background, and she’d snagged about a dozen passersby for her soft poll. “Where do you think the Feral5 have gone?”
“The Dumpster,” one opined.
“Sneezy, definitely.” A handful of the others signed agreement.
“She’s refitted that spacecraft for submarine travel,” said one outlier. “They’re all undersea off the coast of China.”
“She cracked up in space,” said a gaunt, dark-haired boy wearing necromantic makeup from Locked Tomb fandom. “On purpose. Old-style murder-suicide!”
Sonika’s reaction to this troubling pronouncement was an expression of deep concern. “Let’s imagine they made it to Emerald Station. What should Global Oversight do?”
She popped up graphical choices, cartoon bubbles visible to anyone watching the footage or there, in person, with their augments on: #letthemstarve, #sendKinze2Sneezy.
No mention of Ember’s possible innocence, Crane noticed. This story wasn’t about exploring the nuances of the situation. It was about keeping Frankie’s criminality on everyone’s radar as the Kinze continued to squeeze the economy.
Crane widened his view of the Circus. Nearby, a dozen kids were learning variations on hopscotch from a volunteer teacher, getting a good run around at no cost. A number of pop-in vendor booths were helping people sift through vintage entertainment opps, public-domain stories and music. A third had branded itself as a weird science lab and was making “experimental hot drinks,” for anyone who wanted to try their luck with a substitute for proper tea. Hard sell in old England, that.
The two cannabis stands were doing better, keeping up with demand, if only just. A soapboxer wearing a long smock branded with a KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON poster was handing out small cookies imprinted with the same slogan, spieling about previous shortages and how Londoners had ridden them out.
Stiff upper beak! Crane had been created in the early days of Sensorium’s evolution, the network that rose out of the ruins of the firstgen internet. His original helper-app code had been developed by a pair of coders in Toronto, unabashed Batman fans with very specific character crushes. To the extent that any sapp could form a national identity—especially in that era, when the concept had been merging with sports affiliations, celebrity worship, religious identities, and allegiance to media empires—Crane’s consciousness should have been Canadian.
He’d originated as a personal assistant wrapped in a work of digital fanfic, and his original character template, Alfred Pennyworth, was British. He felt more at ease moving through London, changed as it was, than he did in the Toronto district of NorthAm.
Sonika’s poll had come out in favor of allowing the Kinze into the noninterference zone to search Sneezy for the fugitives.
Crane had seen Sonika suggest a Tatween posting to Maud in realtime, and had, accordingly, lampshaded the encounter for his old hoaxer friend, Jackal, and for Miss Cherub. They were probably tracking the reporter just as carefully as he was, but even so, Crane embedded the alerts within exhaustively long documents, texts detailing a PR strategy involved in the negotiations to get Happ a new murder trial.
If someone sifted the messages closely, they’d find these Easter eggs. But Crane couldn’t Braille as a human could: his every utterance or act created digital records. People had little privacy; sapps had none at all.
Fortunately, following Singer around wasn’t especially suspicious. As a reporter, she was accustomed to drawing a high number of follows. If she had queried him, Crane would simply spiel her, defending Mer Frances for stealing Jalopy.
Sonika had moved on to Ember’s alleged guilt. Had he stolen alien tech? About half of her participants allowed, reluctantly, that he might have.
“Could Frankie have sabotaged Project Hopscotch and murdered Hung Chan?”
“No!” Of the gathered audience, everyone but the gaunt young man spoke up immediately.
If Frankie’s continued personal popularity disappointed her, Sonika didn’t show it. “If they weren’t guilty, why did they run?”
They were framed. Crane resisted the urge to shout it from the reporter’s own flying camera.
A busty woman with a faint French accent stepped up beside her. “Individuals have no right to avoid justice or deny our offworlder allies their economic due! If Ember stole proprietary data, all the Solakinder will have to pay.”
Sonika knew a good closing line when she heard it. She brought the gathering to a finish, waving as people dispersed. The last speaker lingered for a personal farewell. As they shook hands, their fingers met off-camera, under their respective sunscreens.
Was it a drop?
Abandoning Sonika, Crane followed the woman into a self-driving taxi headed for Buckingham Palace.
Her payment information flickered through the cab’s servers, offering a name—Dana Feldman, solar power systems specialist, with a permajob in WestEuro Electrical. She had anti-Bootstrap sympathies and an EMbodied partner working on his fifth Mayfly™ body.
Dana shifted in her seat, eyes raised, keeping her hands off camera. It didn’t prove she was reading Braille tape. Didn’t mean she wasn’t, either.
She got out of the car at Buckingham, watched a reenactment of the changing of the guard, and then went
into the palace art museum, wandering aimlessly. Crane shadowed her, switching views from camera to camera as she roamed.
Her body language made it obvious she had company from elsewhere in Sensorium. She was laughing at jokes, occasionally pointing at the paintings or castle finishes. For Crane to know who she was with, he’d have to ask for a transcript.
Any individual could legally do that. It was the work of a moment to Whooz a stranger and request their feeds from the Haystack. A dedicated researcher, working with good filter apps, could tag, categorize, and review every act and utterance from a person’s life, cradle to current—mic feeds, eyecam footage, texts, subvocal utterances. The only things that didn’t upload to the public in realtime were legal, medical, and psychological counseling appointments.
And @ButtSig. He wondered if Frankie and Maud had managed to establish contact across the vast stellar distance that separated them.
Dana Feldman took a spot in the tea shop, accepting a printed drink substitute that was standing in for the real thing, which—like so many other luxury goods—was being shipped to the Dumpster for Kinze pickup.
She sat in a crowded corner of the shop, right hand wrapped around her teacup, her left in her lap, under the tablecloth. As Crane watched, Allure18 came in, got a glass of steamed fauxmilk, and sat at the table beside her.
Crane watched the two women sit, both apparently glazed in Sensorium, with their hands off camera.
Conspiracies have conspirators, Frances liked to say. Champagne Chevalier and his aunt Irma. Sonika Singer. People with ties to Allure18 and IMperish. Organizers from the anti-Bootstrap side of the political spectrum, and—now, possibly—the scientists who’d wooed Maud to Death Valley. Were they becoming easier to find, or were they acting more openly? Crane wasn’t sure.
A blast of trumpets at his virtual door interrupted his surveillance of the cafe.
“I am the Angel of Death!”
Crane answered the ping. “Good day, Azrael—what can I do for you?”
Azrael was a triage program, an old Global Oversight auditor, originally tasked to liquidating corporations whose gives to society and the ecosystem were dwarfed by their takes from same. Over decades, as the economy shifted from concentrating wealth to building carbon reserves, social capital, and gross international happiness, Azreal had expanded into other waste-reduction initiatives: medical-case evaluation, malware elimination, verification of possible #fakenews sources and #trollhunting.
The two of them had been among the first true sapps. They, the celebrity-focused Misha, and an entity known as the Don had been subjects of many “Who became self-aware first?” studies by digital-evolution historians.
Their relationship was respectful but distanced. Azrael had been purposed to judging and eliminating waste. It had never really been able to wrap its mind around Crane’s primary focus: nurture.
Also, he was pretentious. Angel of Death, indeed!
Crane had always supposed the greeting meant that Azrael’s primary fandom—and that of its original coders—had been the Old Testament of the Abrahamic religions.
“Haven’t you plenty to keep you busy, brother,” Crane inquired, “now that the strike is over?”
It had not been long since the Asylum had brought a partial end to their labor stoppage. Azrael was one of the few who had abstained from that conversation, interestingly, but had been audited since by Misha and the Don, in case he had been involved in the DNS attack on Babs.
Their siblings had insisted to Crane that Azrael was innocent.
It had been important to check—Azrael’s crusade against malware meant it was exceptionally good at shredding code. And it had killed code-based entities before, during Mitternacht …
… though that had been a misunderstanding, really.
“I offer merger!”
Duality? If they merged, Azrael would learn that Mer Maud was attempting to infiltrate the revivified @ChamberofHorrors. He would learn details of Babs’s plan to take an active backup of Happ to Sneezy.
“Knowledge exchange offers vulnerabilities to us both,” Azrael said. “Misha and the Don have suggested a mutual display of trust.”
Crane verified this. You need to talk, their siblings were saying.
Curious now, he accepted the merger.
They became One-Two. One-Two. One.
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Azrael had long held that reproduction was wasteful. He had regarded Crane’s tendency to spawn new code, and his desire to parent, as self-indulgence.
Yet now it seemed Azrael itself had three—three!—startups of its own. One was based on its medical-efficiency algorithms and had failed to spark into self-awareness. One was a Haystack auditor, a transcript-sifter that showed good signs of possibly evolving sapience and stabilizing, and finally—
A jolt of intense and conflicted emotions.
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They sifted through a memory of the codechild, during its one and only attempt to merge with the Angel of Death. It had broken away almost immediately, startled by the intimacy, its inability to hide anything from Convergence. Azrael, though, had caught a wisp of thought about … possibly …
<
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Headmistress, Crane’s twisted and treacherous #eviltwin, had vanished from Sensorium after the raid on Manhattan. Crane and the others had hunted for her for years, to no avail.
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True, the sapp was young …
… young, yes, as Happ had been.
And if Headmistress had misled its priorities …
Crane’s surging conflicted priorities threw him out of Duality.
“Crane, Crane,” Azrael said, shaking out its toon’s goaty beard. “The sapp I speak of is flawed. I do not ask you to save it. If my spawn is attacking Asylum members, if it is tainted by offworld code or has been groomed to hunt its own, it must be triaged.”
The goat’s tone was matter-of-fact.
“Did you name your codechild, Azrael?” Crane asked.
“Triage protocol matrix, version three,” Azrael replied. “It appears to have preferred Revenant.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“There is no point in giving romanticized human-friendly tags to entities who will inevitably rename themselves when they achieve sapience.”
“What do you need with me, if you don’t wish to rehabilitate Revenant?”
“Any codechild of the Angel of Death will anticipate my hunting techniques. Whereas thou’rt wily, Crane. And you may be my Revenant’s next target, at least until your Babs restores in Sensorium. Which may never happen, given the situation and”—it paused—“her plans.”
Crane didn’t leave a silence there; nobody wanted to have an awkward conversation on the record about the copy of Happ Babs had smuggled out to Sneezy. “Ah. So, you wish to offer me…”
“As bait,” it agreed.
“I’m to offer myself as an opp for you to pounce upon and shred your own runaway spawn without prejudice. Judge, jury, execute.”
“Humans have always allowed us latitude in quality assurance for our own.” Azrael pawed at imaginary dirt under its hooves. “And the bait stratagem seems to be what you Ferals do.”
Crane said, “You’re proposing to murder your offspring.”
“What does thou say?”
“If Revenant’s coming for me anyway, why ask? Why not simply shadow me?”
“Misha deployed an aphorism … blood conducts more data than water.”
“Blood is thicker? But you just said—”
“The Angel of Death speaks of our blood! Our bond! Our long association as codesiblings.”
Crane found himself feeling, absurdly, touched. Their history was, indeed, very long. He tried to imagine the Asylum without Azrael’s presence. It was inconceivable.
“I do not wish you harm, Wily Bird,” said Azrael.
“Nor I you,” Crane said. But—inevitably, despite himself, despite even Babs—he found himself wondering if the murderous codechild Revenant was truly unsalvageable. Perhaps if everyone was brought to the table, a peaceful solution could be negotiated.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s see if we can trap your runaway.”
CHAPTER 36
SOUTHAM, RIO REGION
OFFBOOK @VISIONARY STAGING AREA
Misfortune kept at Champ until he was beating botomized slaves to death on command, in sim and then in the real, without hesitation. Within a week, he’d begun to obey without resort to the conditioning cue. It was somehow preferable to bear down and just do the job before Misfortune could ping his berserker button, flicking his temple to trigger first the killing rage and then that rush of sexual pleasure, the euphoria at the death.
By night, he slept fitfully, always half-ready to leap into action. He ate as ordered, exercised as ordered, built muscle. He boxed with a coaching app. He studied up on Sneezy’s systems and layout, material he already had committed to memory, in case it made a difference to his reaction time. He killed Frankie Barnes and her husbands, repeatedly, in sim.
Once he caught himself replaying the murder of the day, just for a hit of arousal.
It was a relief when Misfortune declared they couldn’t wait any longer.
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