by Sean Platt
Still, she had delicate matters to discuss today, and ruffling feathers was the wrong approach. Passive-aggressive logic was better.
“Clive.” She paused then cast her eyes around the projection. The trick of this particular connection, tunneled through The Beam via the most bulletproof protections unknown technology had to offer, would make her eyes appear to meet every one of the others’. “All of you. I was eight-two when I joined Panel. I’m still alive, despite your wishes. I know that many of you are starving for me to die so that you can fill my seat with someone more…shall we say ‘more contemporary minded’? But I’m not dead yet. There were twelve of us at the first meeting, but it was me, Noah, and Iggy who brought us together. Noah’s gone. Iggy is one of the few among you who still likes me. So you will give me the respect due your elders. I can barely move without harming myself, but my heart is still beating, and my mind is still sharp. Consider yourselves lucky to have slipped from death’s fingers. She breathes over my shoulder even now, and I don’t enjoy the rancid scent of meat on her breath.”
Spooner said nothing. In sixty-five years, he’d learned not to bluster or argue.
“Barring the kind of thing that happened to Marshall and Colin, my death may be the last time for a long while that this group will need to fill a seat,” Rachel said. “But don’t salivate too much for it. My spot is earmarked.”
“Micah doesn’t know enough of our history to join, Rachel,” said Jameson Gray.
“He can learn. He’s a sharp boy.”
“You don’t get to decide once you’re dead.”
“Why not?” said Rachel. “Based on the way you all folded on the grid change issue, it looks to me like Noah is still dictating policy from beyond the grave.”
“Noah isn’t dead,” said Alexa.
Rachel voiced an old woman’s brittle cackle. She’d specifically set that nugget out for Alexa, knowing the woman would bite. But the others all knew how flaky Alexa was, with her bullshit anthroposophic beliefs.
“Stop waiting for your messiah, Alexa,” Rachel said. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Alexa shook her head. “You’ve seen the fragmentation data yourself. He’s respawning.”
Rachel should have known better than to give Alexa a forum. She waved her hand, dismissing the issue. Others on Panel were superstitious, but Alexa was in her own league. But she’d never get majority on any of her ridiculous issues, so in Rachel’s mind, she didn’t matter.
“Iggy is the other founder. He will decide who gets my seat when I die.”
Iggy leaned into the shot. Despite countless advancements — especially those available through Xenia’s elite development arm — Iggy still had that enormous nose. Rachel wasn’t sure whether she should admire his individualistic tenacity or be perplexed. At least she had an excuse for her appearance. Nanobots couldn’t rebuild her body faster than it was falling apart, but Iggy was young. Relatively speaking, anyway.
“The seat will go to Micah,” he said.
Rachel nodded with satisfaction. “He’s a good boy. Even though he’s preparing to have me killed.”
The table — everyone except Iggy — exchanged shocked looks, but Rachel had only wanted the reaction, not the questions that would naturally follow. She barreled forward, taking advantage of her position as Panel’s unofficial head, as the eldest.
“Carter Vale,” she said. It was a statement, but the two simple words conveyed serious questions.
At the far end of the table, Aiden Purcell nodded. He was dressed in a black suit with a pink pocket square and had his hair slicked straight back as usual. For some reason, Purcell always reminded Rachel of Lucifer. She supposed it wouldn’t be long before she’d be in Hell herself, finally able to make a proper comparison.
Purcell had been added to the roster in 2063 after Marshall Oates had turned up dead, but even before that a motion was circulated to expand the body to twenty-two members specifically so he could join. Purcell’s success in mining data with the AcUity app made him an obvious addition to Panel because given his wealth of data, he seemed safest as an ally.
“The thing with Vale was unfortunate,” he said, idly turning something that looked like a matchbox over and over, his fingers long and dexterous like a spider’s legs. “I have to admit, it’s the one thing my prediction models didn’t see coming.”
“You were caught off guard.” Iggy’s voice was thick with disbelief.
Purcell shrugged. They’d covered his models during the previous meeting. He’d pushed enormous amounts of hard and soft data into an array of prediction wireframes centered on Shift’s outcome. Shift was, for Panel, an interesting sort of choreographed dance. They could pull all the strings they wanted, but only from a distance because doing so might show their hands. Shaping Shift was like molding clay while wearing oversized gloves.
“It’ll change the entire outcome,” Rachel said. “We’d predicted Enterprise would win, without interference, to a high degree of certainty, and…”
“Absolute certainty,” Purcell corrected, apparently unconcerned with his failure.
“…and now, Directorate might win.”
“Will win,” Purcell said. “With equal certainty.”
Clive turned to face the man in the fine dark suit, his pocket square fluffed as a farce of civility. “Do you even hear yourself? Absolute certainty now for something that had zero certainty just a few days ago, without your earlier models allowing so much as a point of variance to account for Vale being a wild card?”
“There was no variance at the time,” said Purcell.
“And yet it happened.”
“Free will is something that doesn’t factor into my models. Who has free will as a president in the NAU? It didn’t dawn on anyone to consider it.” Then, apparently having said all he had to say, Purcell kicked back in his chair.
“Vale was supposed to do as he was told,” said Rachel.
“Well, he didn’t,” Alexa snapped, apparently still smarting from Rachel’s earlier rebuke.
“Do we want to nudge things back toward Enterprise?”
“How? There’s no time. I say we let it go. It’s a shell game.”
“We can’t ratify beem if the Senate stays Directorate.”
“Senators can change their minds,” said Jameson Gray. It was true, but it rarely happened.
Clive flapped his hands, palms up, and sat forward with his elbows on the table. “I say we let it go. See what happens. It’s all biding time anyway. We have the underpinnings in place.”
Rachel shifted in her chair, wincing as her organs rearranged themselves. “Does Vale actually know about Mindbender? In terms of where it is today?”
“You’d know better than us,” said Alexa. “Why don’t you just ask our future Panel member?”
“Micah wouldn’t know what Vale knows. Only how Xenia is progressing.”
“And how is that?”
“You can ask Micah when I die.”
Several people around the table chuckled, knowing Rachel.
The truth was that progress on Mindbender had stalled, although Micah’s people at Xenia had recently reported progress in addressing a tricky issue they called “the dislocation paradigm.” There were many pieces to the puzzle. The truth was that no one, with a single possible exception, knew how Noah had managed the impossible with his own upload. And even so, it’s not like Noah West was a Mindbender success story. They’d analyzed the data, thanks in part to Purcell’s historical and ongoing analysis, and the closest analogy for Noah hitting the Beam pipeline when his body died was that of a cup of colored water being dropped into a waterfall. The dye was out there somewhere, but it’s not like you’d ever get it back into a single glass again.
“Vale doesn’t know a thing,” Purcell said. “That’s why we never could have predicted this.”
“Then what made him say it?”
“Maybe he thought he could unite the world.” Clive chuckled because of course, once upo
n a time, he’d done exactly that.
“Do you really think that was it?” Rachel said. Clive was joking, but there had been a time during Renewal when people had rallied around the idea of Mindbender the same way they’d rallied around his moon project. Giving the entire NAU a single goal to cheer for had a proven unifying effect, but only the tiniest number of people knew that work on Mindbender had continued long after the public had decided uploading minds to The Beam was impossible.
“Maybe,” said Purcell. “I’ll admit I didn’t account for a spontaneous and idiotic burst of idealism.”
Across the table, Eli Oldman’s fat, dreadlocked head turned toward Rachel. “Vale must be talking about the Mindbender story, not the actual ongoing work,” he said. “Iconic Mindbender, from when it existed as a pipe dream, like the genome project or Clive’s base. Even in the lower tiers, the technology to start attempting — emphasis on attempting — uploads is there, albeit a hell of a long way from implementation. Listen back to his Prime Statement, and you’ll see how heavily he couched the whole thing, saying how it might take forever. This must be his way of committing labs to beginning research. After that stunt, nobody will say no to reopening trials. Public opinion will insist on it.”
Alexa looked around the table. “Is there any reason we can’t just let them try? By the time they figure it out, we’ll have a half-century lead, maybe more.”
Iggy made a face. “Nah. No reason.”
“But Shift…” said Rachel.
“I want to run through the models again,” Purcell said. “Shelve it. Meet again in a few days.”
“But Vale will have to be eliminated,” said Rachel. “If he’s going to pull stunts like that, he’ll need to be removed.”
“Oh, yes. He’s entirely too far off-spec.” Eli nodded. “We’re not in a position to tolerate wiggle room right now.”
“So it’ll be handled,” said Rachel.
Alexa: “Already underway.”
“Only someone expendable,” said Rachel. “I want them conditioned.”
“Jesus, of course,” Alexa said, insulted. Panel hadn’t re-used assassins for decades. They were hired anonymously, using more filters than anyone could ever see through, then mnemonically conditioned to follow their target’s Beam signature with no conscious awareness of what they were doing. When they were close enough to the target, a second trigger prompted the assassin to strike. Then afterward, a third set of mnemonics fired off, stopping the assassin’s heart. It was a foolproof system. Only Panel and the mnemonic trainers themselves had access to the program…or even knew the technology to create sleeper soldiers existed.
“Which reminds me,” said Rachel. “York.”
“What about him?” asked Shannon Hooper.
They’d discussed the re-emergence of Stephen York at the last meeting. More than thirty years ago, the group had voted on the best way to handle the partner Noah West had left behind when he’d died. At first, Panel had been split on the issue, half willing to give Quark’s reins to York and half wanting him erased. But at the time, Noah’s death and memory had been fresh, and the ghost of his disapproval hung over the group like a cloud. Eventually, after some rather heated debate, they’d agreed to meet somewhere in the middle and use Quark’s firewalling technology to lock York’s mind and release him into the population. It had felt like a bad compromise to Rachel then, but now, with Vale sending the word “Mindbender” back into the zeitgeist, she had to admit that Noah’s arguments about York’s importance were right all along.
“Xenia has been taking its time on Mindbender, but this new snarl means they’re going to need to push harder to stay far ahead,” she said.
Most of the heads around the table nodded.
“Of course,” said Iggy. “But what does that have to do with York?”
Eli looked at Rachel. “Hell,” he said.
Iggy turned to Eli, puzzled.
“What?” said Purcell from farther down the table.
Eli shook his head. “She wants York to help with Mindbender. That’s it, isn’t it, Rachel?”
Rachel nodded slowly. York’s timing in popping back up now was almost serendipitous. The group had been planning to capture and re-firewall him, but leaving him uncorked, if he could be handled safely, would be even better. It might, in fact, be the only possible way to make Mindbender a reality — something that, thanks to Carter Vale, had now become essential.
“Who else knows more about The Beam?” Rachel went on. “Xenia keeps hitting a wall. They say they’re making progress, but I can tell bullshit when I hear it, and can read Micah like a book. If we want to clear the roadblocks on Mindbender, we’re going to need York’s help.”
“Well,” said Clive. “Then I guess it’s a goddamn good thing we didn’t have him killed.” He looked at Kendrick Hayes, who’d been very pro-assassination at the time.
Eli was still shaking his head.
“What is it?” said Iggy, looking at Eli.
“Fucking Noah. We kept asking him why he wouldn’t give up on that firewall project as it ran over budget, but it’s like he knew. He knew we wouldn’t just let York take over at Quark, and he knew we’d want to kill him. He knew that couldn’t be allowed because York had important things in his head that might be required, like they are now. So he gave us the solution, gift wrapped, ready when we needed it.”
Rachel looked at the video wall, feeling a renewed sense of urgency as she listened to Eli talk about Noah, Noah’s foresight, and his own apparent agreement that York was needed. The clock was ticking, and thanks to Carter Vale, it was now chugging along at double time. The notion had been plaguing her since the Prime Statements, insistent like an unscratchable itch. She hadn’t wanted to gather Panel to discuss this, but with Mindbender out of the box and the York situation being what it was, there had really been no other choice.
“We have to bring him in,” she said. “York. We have to find him and bring him to Quark.”
“We know how to find him,” said Eli, nodding.
“Now.”
Eli looked at Rachel. Several other heads, hearing her tone, turned to do the same.
“No problem,” said Eli.
“Where is he?” said Rachel.
“He’s moved off-grid.”
“So he can’t access The Beam via a hard line.”
“Not unless he goes out to find an access point. Why?”
“Who can we send out with rovers to triangulate on him?”
Again, the group met Rachel’s gaze for a moment before responding. Finally, Morgan Marconi said, “What’s the rush, Rachel?”
Rachel watched the people around the table, drumming mental fingers and trying to decide what to say. She knew something the others didn’t — something she’d learned long ago. Panel as a whole had decided to firewall York’s mind, but before that decision had been reached, a splinter within the group had set plans into motion that could not be stopped. Firewalling had obscured York’s ID from the system before any damage could be done, but now his ID was back out there. Panel had seen it already, through an obscured, protected connection within the city — but once the rest of The Beam saw York’s ID too, those old plans would once again begin to tick inexorably into motion. And because the plans had been paused midstream, chances were excellent they didn’t have much further to tick before something exploded.
“What is it?” said Clive. “Is there a problem with York?”
Rachel nodded, the weight of years heavy on her shoulders.
“There’s an assassin after him,” she said.
The people onscreen began to shuffle. Rachel heard muttered questions, all said with varying degrees of indignation: Who? What? When? Why?
Iggy was still watching Rachel. “We have access to all the known assassins,” he said. “We can snoop out a job targeting his ID and stop it.”
Rachel was shaking her head. “No, we can’t. The person after York is a mnemonic agent. A sleeper.”
All
of the discussion around the table stopped.
“I have good reason to believe the first sequence was already triggered,” she rushed on. “If that’s true, the sleeper will already be close to him. Already in position. Already homed in.” She swallowed, her old throat dry. “Already trusted.”
Clive looked at Iggy. Iggy looked at Alexa. Alexa looked at Eli.
“So why isn’t he dead already?” said Clive.
It was Eli who answered. “Because he’s been masked. Now he’s off-grid. He hasn’t, in fact, even logged in from an open connection since he came out from behind the firewall.”
“What does that mean?” said Iggy.
“It means that as soon as he touches the open Beam,” Eli answered, “he’s dead.”
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