Standing Wave

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Acton hears his helmet battlecom squawktalking, breaking the morning quiet suddenly. He walks swiftly down the rocks, toward the leaf-filled gorge, listening to the battlecom echoing among the rhyolite walls. He is almost to the source of the sound when, some distance over the tree-lined slopes, he sees two of his men patrolling. Acton speaks into his sub voc’s private log, shakily at first.

  “It would be so easy to wave my arms now and shout, ‘Hey! It’s me! You’re superior officer!’” he says. “Their not-so-smart armor will screen it out, though. They can’t be expecting to come upon their captain naked like this. Not programmed for it.”

  Acton watches the two patrolling troopers coming in above the trees.

  “Lieutenant! Look!” Acton hears a voice say over the battlecom in Acton’s own nearby helmet. “A cultist—and naked at that!”

  “Let’s burn the faggot, Private Reese,” Dalken says. “Cover me. I’m going in.”

  Acton sees them coming, but does not flee.

  “I am a heretic now,” he says into the sub voc. “I can never go back.”

  Acton stands up straight and waits for Dalken. The Lieutenant opens fire as he comes flying into the gorge. A round takes Acton in the shoulder and he falls, tumbling, bouncing, bone-breaking off tree trunks and boulders, to the bottom of the drainage. Dazed, bleeding, unable to walk or even stand, he sprawls in a leaf-strewn gully.

  Dalken lands in a whirlwind of leaves.

  “Damn it, Lieutenant!” Acton cries out painfully, over the scraping of fractured ribs. The morning-after bliss hangover from his vision is burned away by pain. “Can’t you see it’s me?”

  Slowly, Dalken raises the visor on his helmet.

  “Thank God!” Acton says. “That’s right, Lieutenant—it’s me. Will Acton. Your captain.”

  Dalken stares at him carefully.

  “No,” he says. “You’re not the Captain. You can’t fool me with your illusions, heretic. You’re an abomination in the eyes of God.”

  Dalken steps back, slapping down his visor. Images flash up of Brutus and Caesar, Judas and Jesus, Cortes and Montezuma. Barefooted and garbed in a robe embroidered with devils and flames, a Roman robe, an Aztec robe, Giordano Bruno steps toward the great pyre prepared for him. Dalken presses a stud. A stream of fire surges out. Acton sees only a stream of butterflies and moths, floating toward him forever.

  When Reese lands, he sees Dalken standing beside a corpse-shaped mound of ashes.

  “Another starry-eyed pagan up in smoke, eh Lieutenant?”

  “That’s right, Private,” Dalken says, subdued. “Let’s find the Captain and report this. He of all people would want to know.”

  They fly out, generating dual whirlwinds of leaves. The camera focuses in on leaves blowing away, revealing the voice-activated sub voc, its small red recording light flashing off at last.

  Brandi stopped the film. She knew there was more, much more to learn—about this history, about her mother, about that Project out of the past. How much of it was true? How authentic was it? Was all that sub voc stuff, all those supposedly recorded sub-vocalizations, were they real? How could her mother have gotten access to all that? So many questions....

  Yet, turning it over in her mind, she found at last that, for all she still had to learn, she had already seen more than enough, for now.

  * * * *

  Mei-Ling remained seated on the sandbar and watched as Vasili Landau and Gopal Mulla strode up beside her.

  “Hello, Mei-Ling,” Landau said stiffly.

  “Hi, Vas,” Mei-Ling said, without looking up. She had never much liked the lean, iron-haired Russian. He was just too professional about everything. “How goes it at Interpol?”

  “Less interesting, since you left,” Landau said. “You know Gopal Mulla here?”

  Mei-Ling looked up and shook Mulla’s dark hand, using it also to help pull herself up off the sand. She brushed off her dress.

  “Still advising Corporate Presidium?” Mei-Ling asked Mulla.

  “Somebody’s got to do it,” Mulla said with a shrug and a small smile. Mei-Ling had been acquainted with the somewhat pear-shaped man long enough to know that his amiable nature almost perfectly concealed an intellect of considerable power and intensity.

  “CP science advisor might as well be someone who knows something about science, right?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “That’s always been my reasoning, yes,” Mulla said, his smile broadening. “What’s this you’re working on?”

  “A wave maze,” Mei-Ling explained. “Analog design, but it functions digitally. Waves and particles and non-linear dynamics, that sort of thing.”

  Mulla nodded his head, continuing to examine the structure carefully, trying to puzzle out its full function as he watched Mei-Ling jot down notes in her wave log. Landau ignored it and pushed on.

  “We have a maze of another sort for you,” he said. “Don’t know who the minotaur is yet, but we could certainly use your clue of thread to guide us around in there.”

  Mei-Ling glanced at the lean Russian.

  “I’m not in that business any more, remember?” she said as levelly as she could. “Haven’t been, since the Jeffersynth case.”

  Mulla glanced meaningfully at Landau, as if they’d both already discussed this possibility.

  “That would be too bad,” Landau said, kicking slightly at the sand with the toe of his dress shoe. “You’re our best teletracer and systems psychoanalyst. What you did in your very first investigation, at Sedona, during that whole Myrrhisticinean mess, that was just fantastic work. Who knows how many lives you saved?”

  “Ancient history, now,” Mei-Ling said, irritated. “You’ve had our friend ‘Phelonious Manqué’ on ice for years.”

  “Though not his employer—Dr. Vang,” Landau said, glancing at Mulla, who opened out his hands as if in apology. Mei-Ling knew well that Interpol’s and CP’s agendas diverged radically, there.

  “Not Dr. Vang,” Mei-Ling agreed. “Maybe never, for Dr. Vang. Not likely you’ll be bringing him in, either. Right, Gopal?”

  “Ka Vang has some very powerful friends,” was all Gopal would say.

  “Tetragrammaton is still making God into a four-letter word, Mei-Ling,” Landau said, and paused. “We think they might have been involved in this ‘Light’ thing that happened some weeks back. Earth and the orbital habitat came to the brink of war before that matter resolved itself.”

  “I hadn’t heard,” Mei-Ling said, her recording of today’s wave log finished. “I’m rather isolated here. I’ve tried to keep it that way.”

  “You wouldn’t have heard about a lot of this yet, not over the usual media,” Gopal said. “It’s all still classified.”

  “Really,” Mei-Ling said, breaking down the wave maze. “What makes you think Tetragrammaton was involved?”

  “Real-time A-life Technopredators,” Landau replied. “RATs. Based on the same protocols Manqué developed at Sedona. Confirmed by Manqué himself.”

  “Any chance old Phelonious might have regenerated them and set them lose on his own?” Mei-Ling asked, curious despite herself.

  “Not possible,” Mulla said, helping her gather the pieces of the maze. “He’s resourceful, but his cell is completely field-damped and he has no access to electronic devices of any sort.”

  “How about Vang?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “No,” Landau said. “That’s all been checked. Neither Para-Logics nor Crystal Memory Dynamics nor any of the interlocking directorates he serves on were involved. Everything traced back to the orbital habitat and Jiro Ansel Yamaguchi.”

  “And Yamaguchi had already been dead for months when the Light happened,” Mulla said, handing the maze pieces over to her.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Mei-Ling said, beginning to step off from the sandbar toward the shore and the hill climb.

  “Why don’t you let us give you a ride back to Fionnphort, at least?” Mulla asked. “We do have this nice hydrofoil at our disposal—”
>
  Mei-Ling smirked.

  “How could I possibly turn down such a fancy ride to the dance? All right. Let’s go—at least to Fionnphort.”

  They boarded the cutter, Mei-Ling’s maze pieces in the large canvas bag she always carried them in, still in her hands despite Mulla’s gentlemanly offer to carry it all. She stood in the bow with the two men as the cutter turned tightly about and headed away from the sandbar. In an instant it was past the back of the rocky outcropping and into the main channel between Iona and Mull.

  “Anything else special about this Yamaguchi person?” Mei-Ling asked as the sea spray began to kick up. “I mean, besides the fact that he seems to have remained active after death?”

  That knowing look passed again between Landau and Mulla.

  “He may have been a Medusa Blue baby,” Landau said into the wind. “No conclusive proof, but his medical records indicate the possibility that he might have been exposed to KL 235 in utero, as part of the ‘uterotonic’ experiments. He had some of the signs.”

  “Which ones, specifically?” Mei-Ling asked.

  “The extreme myopia, the extra floating pair of ribs on the cervical vertebrae, the tendency toward schizophrenia. No conclusive proof of the characteristic entopic phenomenon—the retinal backscatter pattern, the so-called ‘trans-illumination defect’.”

  “The one with the bars of light shining through the iris in rays—like wagon-wheel spokes?” she asked. Landau nodded.

  Mei-Ling saw the Fionnphort-Iona ferry moving across the channel to the monastery isle. The cutter slipped into its wake and headed in the opposite direction.

  “This ‘Light’ you mentioned,” Mei-Ling said, puzzled. “It doesn’t seem to have done any harm. For me, I’d say it’s been a good thing. Any idea what it was?”

  “Too many,” Mulla said, chagrined. “I’ve read reports from everybody—priests to physicists to psychics. Theologians who are saying—guardedly, mind you—that an ‘irenic apocalypse’ occurred. Among themselves, a number of my friends in the scientific community have been talking about ‘incidents of simultaneous hyperconsciousness’. All of those seem to have occurred at the time of the Light and had varied durations—some longer, some shorter. Lots of different manifestations.”

  “Might you tell me some examples?” Mei-Ling asked. “Or is that classified too?”

  “Not particularly, I suppose,” Mulla said, though he was obviously in no particular hurry to elaborate, either. “The variety of ways faith communities around the world have responded to it. The increased incidence of ‘visions’ in people from cultures that allow for that sort of thing. A suspected increase in occurrences of paranormal behaviors. The sudden renaissance of nonviolent direct action in mass political movements. Odd behaviors in other large-brained mammals too, mainly the higher primates and cetaceans, but even some unconfirmed reports of unusual activities among the big cephalopods.” Mulla glanced down at the water in the channel flowing past them. “Ratings for various media—new and old, interactive and not—dipped for a while too, worldwide. Whether all this has been spontaneous or induced or spontaneously induced, no one I know of has been able to say.”

  Mei-Ling watched as they pulled in toward Fionnphort’s long, diagonal boat ramp.

  “This Light, whatever it was, may not have done any harm in itself,” Landau put in, “but it seems to have angered or triggered someone or something that is doing harm. People are being killed in the infosphere. Virtual bullets through the data matrix, higher- dimensional implosions. The killings appear to be mass, distributed, and ongoing. Occurring in waves. We don’t quite know all of it yet. It seems to happen whenever users get too close to certain protected data sets. Strange, too, that you should be working with mazes. Many of the murdered users have been involved with maze problems, labyrinths, paradoxes.”

  Mei-Ling didn’t like the look in Vasili Landau’s eyes.

  “So am I a suspect now too?” she asked.

  “Only to the extent that you fit part of the scan key,” Landau said with a shrug.

  Mei-Ling knew all too well the sort of psych profile law enforcement called a “scan key” or even a “skanky”—SCANCI, Selective Criminality, Aberrancy, and Non-Conformity Index. She certainly disliked the term enough, but she hated even more the sort of mechanical reduction of human behavior for which it stood. She had once been a profiler, a teletracer, even a scan keyer herself. It had taken the Jeffersynth case, with its cult militia AI, to show her just how her own work could be used to attack individualism and consciousness. She had very definitely not approved of what her own work could be used for—and so strongly that she had gone on indefinite leave soon after.

  “Which data sets triggered off the attacks?” she asked, forcing back down her misgivings.

  “Those dealing with the Tetragrammaton conspiracy, for one,” Landau said. “As well as other materials probably somehow related to that.”

  “Not a ‘conspiracy’, Vasili,” Mulla said, trying to gentle down the other man as the three of them left the boat and walked up the long ramp toward town. “The name was originally a joke made by intelligence directors during the Cold War. A medieval English variant of a Greek word for Hebrew letters? Signifying a Biblical proper-naming of God, remember?”

  Vasili made a disgusted sound and strode up the ramp before them, a bit too fast. Mulla turned and continued to explain to Mei-Ling as they struggled to keep up with Landau.

  “The term is found throughout the Western religious traditions, including apocryphal writings and the Kabbalah,” Mulla said, “but its usage in this context has nothing to do with cabals, or conspiracies, or clandestine protocols actually written by the Czarist secret police. Tetragrammaton isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a convergence of interests.”

  “You fight it your way,” Landau said over his shoulder as they came onto the gray street under the gray sky, “and I’ll fight it mine.”

  “Vas, Vas,” Mei-Ling said, unable to resist poking a little fun of her own at Landau’s high seriousness. “A paranoid conspiracy theory of history is no basis for rational political action.”

  “Perhaps not,” Landau said, turning on his heel to face them as rain began to fall on the gray stone pavement, “but it will do in a pinch. This is more than a pinch, Ms. Magnus. Dr. Mulla, in his summary of Tetragrammaton, neglected to mention that in several traditions ‘Tetragrammaton’ is the ‘Word That Ends The World.’ The ritual incantation that, once spoken and performed, destroys the universe. Is that important enough for you? Will you help us or not? People are being killed, in horrible ways—”

  “And the world is in a strange place,” Mei-Ling said, interrupting, “and all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing. Yes, yes—I agree already. I’ll help you starting now, before you begin talking about how the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Your ‘Light’ has already prepared me for this, I think. Now let’s come in out of the rain a moment, shall we? And have some tea at the inn? Then maybe we can start making our plans as if we were rational people in a rational world.”

  Mulla smiled at the stunned Landau as Mei-Ling turned, leading the three of them out of the rain and into a small darkwood pub, cozy and warm after the growing damp outdoors.

  * * * *

  When Aleck got back to his apartment, he saw that his roommate Sam was linked into their virtual console and was reading over something he’d apparently just written. Aleck wasn’t surprised. Stewart Albert Michaels—aka SAM, Sam, Sam I Am, philosopher sans credentials, sometime actor, playwright, singer, songwriter, computer consultant—had an erratic sleep and work schedule too, to say the least.

  “H’lo, Sam,” Aleck said to the oblivious, prematurely gray-haired black man at the console. “What you working on?”

  “Wha—? Oh, hi, Aleck,” Sam said, tapping at a few more keys and icons. “Just something to piss off my father.”

  Sam’s father, Roger Michaels, was the mo
gul who had invented the technology that “Frankensteined” dead actors, putting them into new roles, all computer re-generated and in-filled for 3-D. Sam despised his father’s work. “Old actors never die, they just stop getting their residuals,” and “Ripping off the past has always had a big future,” as Sam liked to describe it, when he was feeling less charitable.

  Which was why he’d gone into mediacrit at a school away from both coasts. Papa Michaels refused to put a penny toward the education his son had chosen, which was fine with Sam. It gave him the freedom of poverty and no restraints on his desire to jab away at his father’s “media-whore” successes.

  “Mind if I take a look?” Aleck asked.

  “Go right ahead,” Sam said, getting up from the console chair. “A pitch I put together for one of Roger-daddy’s production companies.”

  Aleck sat down and slipped into the virtuality gear. Music from a seventy-year old TV show began to play, phase-distorted and echoplexed to woo-woo weirdness. Graphics, fonts, scenes and characters lifted from the original footage appeared, subtly and sometimes not so subtly altered by Sam, who also did the voice-over narration:

  “Location, Location, Location”

  A proposal for Original Trek:

  The New Adventures TM

  by Stewart Albert Michaels

  Alternate universe. Space, the final real estate. James T. KirkTM, wealthy interstellar property development wizard, CEO of USS Enterprises UnLtd. Penchant for pungent cigars, loud suits, kitschy fibrous protein scalp augmentation. Mister SpockTM, his Vulcan tax accountant. Doctor McCoyTM, his personal physician and investment partner. Mister ScottTM, his general contractor. Mister SuluTM and Mister ChekhovTM, his hottest real estate “associates.” UhuraTM his management services officer. Et cetera.

  Kirk and company save universe from invasion of transdimensional trailertrash, exopthalmic ectomorphic Space Okies from Hell screaming the Pan-Galactic equivalent of “Yee-haw,” whose arrival threatens to drive down property values all over the Alpha Quadrant—