“Thank you, Don! Ah, just as I thought: those millions of worldshare computers function like the vast unconscious of the Earth’s telematic noosphere….”
Don had no time to puzzle that out, but the changes occurring in the cyborgasmic lovepile were obvious. The knot unravelled, splitting into two flaming parts, blue and green, half the participants convulsing in ecstasy along the ceiling of the hellcave, the other half mirroring that passion from the cave floor. Before long they began moving toward each other again, mirror tornadoes of burning rainbow flesh twisting like skeins of yarn, dropping down and rising up, stalactite vortex and stalagmite gyre heading toward union.
The moment the stalagmite and stalactite touched, however, stalagmite and stalactite ceased to mean anything. Up and down became meaningless, too, as the resulting narrow-waisted pillar of fire detached from roof and ceiling. Now a coupled, two-headed vortex, it began to spin on a central axis, more and more rapidly, until the fiery pillar described a sphere that exploded outward in light.
Don found himself blown back, out of Medea-Indahar’s world, through Karuna’s virtual, and into his own—coming to rest once more, beside the great tilting moai head beside the Hanga Roa town wharf.
Medea really needs to work on her—his—good-byes, Don thought, shaking his head. In the next instant, that idea was pushed from his mind as he saw the tidal wave headed for the island, growing and looming before him.
Then it wasn’t.
Easter Island leapt into the sky. Don watched in disbelief as, far below him, the tsunami crashed onto the few rocks that had been left behind, consuming them, then sped again on its way, diminishing as it went.
Checking Karuna’s virtual to see that she was okay, he saw that her island, too, had been lofted into the sky—a sky from which clouds of smoke and ash and thunder were rapidly dissipating. Within moments all the threatened islands of Cybernesia were gathered around his own, floating in the ether.
“Hello, Donnie,” said a weary but cheerful Medea, tattooed and headdressed like the men of Rapa Nui in Don’s virtual, but bark-cloth–bikinied like the women. It was difficult to say whether he was a he, or a she. “Was it good for you, too?”
“I’m impressed. How did you do it?”
“I gave the NSA’s virusing system what it wanted,” Medea said with a sideways grin, “and it gave me what I wanted. Our manipulations allowed their system to be deployed in ways that extended beyond what its creators intended.”
“How so?”
“Really, Donnie—you don’t expect me to give away all my trade secrets, do you? Let’s just say I appreciate the verisimilitudes of vicissitude, the vicissitudes of verisimilitude—”
“Which means?” he asked, growing irritated with M-I’s doublespeak.
Medea-Indahar sighed loudly.
“I arranged for the virusing system to be able to find more readily the Kwok postings it wanted to eliminate in various islands of Cybernesia—if you must be so technical. In turn, it destroyed these postings, instead of destroying the islands in which the material was embedded. The Kwok materials are lost, alas. It had to have those. But a big chunk of Cybernesia was saved.”
Don nodded slowly, thinking of those rocks in his virtuality. The ones that had been obliterated by the tidal wave.
“You seem to know a lot about the way the NSA works. Insider knowledge, perhaps?”
Medea-Indahar laughed, sounding tired but happy.
“Like any good parasite, I’m neither insider nor outsider. Neither friend nor enemy. Once upon a time, however, there was a project that explored the possibility of applying reconnaissance and intelligence technologies to environmental issues.”
“So?”
“The environmental task force within the intelligence community was code-named ‘Medea,’ Donny. Figure it out for yourself.”
With that, M-I disappeared from Easter Island, leaving only laughter behind, like the Cheshire cat’s smile.
As the laughter faded, Don thought back on what he’d heard about that intelligence/environment interplay. He recalled how reconnaissance systems that track the movement of tanks through the desert also, over time, track the movement of the desert itself. And how photos of Russian missile silos inadvertently revealed snowmelt patterns across Central Asia over a period of several decades. Even the early-warning satellites designed to detect the flare-up of an ICBM as it emerged from its silo had been used to pinpoint fires in the Brazilian rainforest.
Maybe there was a point to Medea-Indahar’s contortionist sexual hacking, after all.
By the time the laughter faded away completely, the islands of Cybernesia had floated down to the surface of the sea once more. Don reflected on a myth of Oceania, in which the lands of the world were created from the feathers of a great bird flying over the sea. Looking up, he saw no great bird, yet the worlds in which he lived suddenly seemed less substantial than a feather. He needed to ground his world again, but on what rock could he build?
All he could think of was what M-I had been working on that last time in Crash Village, and how that might apply to the holo-cast Kwok had sent, uncalled for and unwanted. Then and there, he vowed to follow those leads for as long as it took, to wherever they might guide him.
TRACES IN THE WORLD
KOWLOON
Check the Kwok samples for something more than physical characteristics. More than just chemical or biological. Those ashes may contain information of another sort. Data.
Fine, Marilyn Lu thought, but how?
She’d been banging her head against that for days and days. Cause of death usually fell into one of four categories: natural, accidental, suicidal, homicidal. Nothing about Kwok’s decease seemed particularly natural, yet there was no evidence that anyone had been in the room with him when he met his end. And it was awfully hard to rule out anything without body or bones to examine.
Staring vacantly at a microscope-slide cover, she realized her husband and daughter must think her insane. Coming down to the lab in the middle of the night, physically exhausted but mentally obsessed, she had left Sonny in bed and Clara asleep. She didn’t think Sonny really understood why she felt somehow responsible for Charlie Hui’s death. Clara hadn’t been particularly happy either, about all the time her mother had been spending on this case, even making a comment at dinner about getting herself a life-size cardboard cutout of Mum….
“Damn!” A slicing pain in her right thumb snapped her back to the here and now. She had sliced the tip of her thumb on the edge of the slide cover. Should have gloved up, but too late now. The bright red blood was flowing.
She snatched her hand away from the slide, but blood had already made its way onto the slide and into the sample that lay there. Trying to stanch the flow and not wanting to further contaminate the slide, she gripped her right thumb tightly with her left hand and swung away from the table, inadvertently leaving a trail of red droplets across the tabletop. Two of them fell into a watch glass containing some of the Kwok ash samples—one dead center in the gray-pink stuff, the other off toward an edge.
“Great. I’ve probably ruined this whole sample!”
As she jumped toward the nearest first-aid box, thoughts of hepatitis danced in the darker corners of her mind. In her forebrain she still hoped she would be able to salvage something from the particular sample she was working with, that she hadn’t contaminated it beyond all repair.
She opened the first-aid box one-handed, taking gauze and med-spray bottles from inside. Holding gauze in her left hand, she mopped up the blood on her right finger and palm. Once the bleeding began to slow in response to pressure, she sprayed the cut with peroxide disinfectant, then with an antibacterial/antifungal, then finally closed the wound off with a spray-on bandage.
The bandage would need only a few moments to set. She would need more time than that to face the consequences of her screwup and the prospect of having to throw away her night’s work. In avoidance mode and with the excuse of blood and pain, sh
e wandered away, not quite aimlessly.
The crime labs took up the entire floor here. Walking through the maze of rooms and corridors among the few quiet, white lab-coated techs who pulled the graveyard shift, Lu was reminded of every lab class she ever took in college. Long tabletop work spaces, with supply drawers underneath. Sinks and fume hoods. Microscopes. Burners. Calipers. Clamps. Racks for glassware. Slides. Test tubes. Pipettes. Ehrlenmeyer flasks. Distillation columns. Refrigerators for samples. Reagents in plastic and glass bottles. Biohazard plastic trash cans. Magnetic stirrers whirling in beakers. Centrifuges. Gas chromatographs. Spectrophotometers.
More specialized items, too. An active dermestid beetle colony, for stripping any remaining flesh away from recovered bone. Autopsy tables. Osteological equipment and instruments. Fine incremental measuring tools used for determining the thickness of dental enamel. X-ray machines and developing systems, mainly for odontological work. Special reagents used in tests for drugs and poisons. Infrared “sweatprint” detector/analyzers. Restriction enzymes and gel sheets, DNA polymerase and radiolabeled nucleotides, for performing Southern Blots, radioactive probes, hybridization reactions—all for deducing the variable number tandem repeats, the VNTRs, of introns composing the DNA fingerprint.
Scientific police work had always interested her. This was where science hit the street, very often in matters of life and death. The materials normally dealt with in the labs were almost exclusively physical, chemical, and biological.
In working on Jaron Kwok’s remains, however, the traditional armamentarium of science seemed to have failed her.
Under the microscopes available to her, Kwok’s ashes remained the same random junk, only larger. In hopes of finding some kind of pattern, she had sent a small sample out for testing under a scanning electron microscope—equipment they did not, alas, possess here in Criminalistics. She had yet to receive a report on the sample.
All the other tests on the ash had yielded ambiguous results. The gas chromatograph and spectrophotometer tests showed peaks resembling the chemical composition of organics, even readings of sugars, phosphate groups, and nitrogenous bases suspiciously close to nucleotides. But other peaks suggested inorganics, including gold and rare earths.
Lu had also run samples through standard DNA-fingerprinting techniques. For her trouble she got back a new mystery, and nothing that resembled a standard fingerprint.
Most of the stuff she had recovered from the Kwok site was much harder to denature than ordinary DNA. The map of restriction enzyme action didn’t match any known set of nucleotides. Gel electrophoresis in both agarose and polyacrylamide gel, with both ethidium bromide and radioactive markers, likewise yielded results all over the map. The Kwok samples hybridized strangely, if at all, and with low, weird homologies. The patterns of VNTRs—if that’s what they were—looked like nothing she had ever seen.
Lu Mei-lin found herself standing at the doorway to the Dermatoglyphics Lab. When she had first started in forensics work, people still called it the Fingerprint Lab. But since the fingers, palms, and soles of the feet were all marked with friction ridges, the all-encompassing “Dermatoglyphics” was more accurate.
Lately she had spent a good deal of time looking at the dermatoglyphic evidence from Kwok’s suite—some palm-prints, but most of it good fingerprints. She had studied those fingerprints so often she felt she could identify them from memory.
Stepping inside the lab, she saw that someone had pinned to the far wall two poster-sized graphics displaying fingerprint images. The left one illustrated the human sexual dimorphism inherent to fingerprint ridge breadth. The poster on the right, though, showed a pair of differing thumbprints, each with curiously identical DNA profiles below.
According to a caption, the poster fingerprints had been taken from identical twins whose DNA sequences were indistinguishable. Despite a good deal of similarity, however, the twins’ fingerprints weren’t at all the same, and could be readily distinguished one from the other by nearly anyone with fingerprinting expertise. Even within that small space of the womb there had been enough differences to influence these genetically identical twins to develop in subtly different ways—and the influences had continued long after birth.
Mei-lin stared at her own thumbs. The top of one was capped with dull white spraybandage.
Every fingerprint left traces in the world, sweat and amino acids lingering in the shape of the print. But the world also left traces in every fingerprint, too. And the top of my right thumbprint, Mei-lin thought, will always have a thin trace of scar tissue—just because my lab technique was so sloppy.
Having spent enough time in the labyrinths of her fingerprints, she put her hands down and turned to leave, thinking she was at last ready to face this evening’s small but bloody catastrophe.
Walking back into her lab, she turned her attention to cleaning up after her absentminded clumsiness. As she was picking up the watch glass to throw into a biohazard bin, she stopped and stared. A nonidentical pair of spirals—like oversized fingerprints, or tiny tabletop galaxies—had formed where the drops of her blood had been absorbed by the grayish stuff of Kwok’s remains.
Odd that the blood should dry in such a specific pattern, she thought. And the smaller droplet, which had originally fallen toward the rim of the watch glass, had moved. It had started out well clear of the sample, but now it was closer to the center.
She looked down at the spoiled slide and its cover, on which she had cut her finger. Whether from whim or intuition, she placed the slide under the microscope.
What she saw on the slide made her catch her breath. The blood-spoiled sample didn’t look at all like jumbled junk anymore. A fine-grained, subtle form of order had appeared there, but how fine grained and how orderly her microscope didn’t have the resolution to show her.
She really wanted to see those electron micrographs. Now.
The microscope was efficient enough to register the presence of movement, though. The longer she watched the jittering on the slide, the more rhythmic it seemed to become. She wondered if it was some kind of chemical reaction. Like the rhythmic oscillations of Belousov-Zhabotinskii reactions, only faster. The longer she peered at the oscillations, however, the less they looked chemical. Something about the movement reminded her of the flagella of cells beating in unison, or the workings of an ensemble of interconnected machines.
She leaned back from the ’scope, rubbing her eyes. When she looked again, though, the vision of microsmic activity hadn’t gone away. It was almost hypnotically intriguing to watch, but finally she turned away again so she could think. Or try to.
Cho had said Kwok’s ashes might contain data. Information. But this stuff wasn’t behaving like data. Some sort of activity was occurring under that microscope. Not information, but the processing of information. Like something performed by a mechanism, or innumerable tiny mechanisms.
Nanotech? No—too chaotic for that. Biotech? No, not quite. What was the word she’d heard? In Kwok’s holo-cast—the one Ben Cho steered her to?
Slow down, she told herself. Get some kind of proof, confirm some repeatability. Make sure this isn’t a late-night delusion brought on by too much stress and too little sleep. Blood agar plates. Yes! Streak out the specimens and see if this stuff does on them what it was doing on her blood.
She stood up and headed to a refrigerator. Grabbing several short stacks of Petri dishes containing different types of growth media, she realized she had never before tried to culture anything from the ashes of a dead man.
First time for everything.
She popped dish covers and streaked small amounts of Kwok’s ashes onto the different media surfaces. Once she had finished streaking the specimens, she sealed the dishes with plastic film and shuttled them to shelves in incubators. Her task completed, she looked once more at the odd goings-on under the microscope.
Despite the strangeness of it, she was tempted to shout out about her discovery. She restrained herself only because
she realized she needed to seal the luckily contaminated slide and watch glass in plastic film—and quickly, just in case whatever was happening on them had any tendency to spread or aerosolize.
Before, she’d been worried about contaminating the stuff on the slide and watch glass, but now she was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t start worrying about that stuff contaminating her—and everything else. She hoped it hadn’t done so already.
She paused for a moment, wanting to share her find with someone, but with whom? Her husband and daughter wouldn’t understand. Nor would the low-wage night techs. Not even that new girl, Patsy Hon—the one who kept her hair pulled back dominatrix-tight, so tight it looked painful. Patsy was astoundingly diligent, very quick and efficient—but painfully shy.
What about Ben Cho? How could she send word to him, though? If this stuff was hush-hush, his government and hers might both be listening in.
She would think of a way. Maybe a message tube would work. Meanwhile, the electron micrographs might come back, supporting her discovery.
Certainly Ben Cho, of all people, would want to know.
MEETING WITH WIZARDS
CRYPTO CITY
Reaching H/O’s eighth floor, Deputy Director Brescoll walked to the end of the hallway housing the executive suite and strode in, nodding to the woman behind the reception desk. On the walls hung framed pictures of NSA’s most important worldwide listening posts: nondescript government and military buildings surrounded by satellite-dish chalices, by mushroom puffball and geodesic golf ball domes hiding eavesdropping antennas.
“Doctors Beech, Lingenfelter, and Wang are waiting for you.”
“Thank you, Katie. I was expecting them.”
As he entered the antique-oak ambience of his office, the three doctors stood. Shaking hands with them, then moving behind his heavy desk to sit down, Brescoll realized he’d almost be shocked to encounter any of the three without the other two. He’d always seen them as a group—the Three Musketeers overseeing the Kwok investigation. Given their high-flown academic credentials, however, maybe Musketeers wasn’t quite right. Three Wizards, perhaps?
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