After that, he toured her through the main transformer room, turning off the lights and pointing out the faint electric blue glow.
“I can feel my ovaries frying in here,” Kari said nervously. “Let’s move on, shall we?”
Don pointed out the elevator shaft and long stairway rising a thousand feet through the mountain to the surface. Looking up into its darkness with him, Kari said she hoped she’d never have to climb it. Don pointed out the kitchen, break room, and rest rooms, then stepped her past his makeshift bedroom near the backup battery room.
In the power station control room, he pulled up the computer representations and remote monitors and showed her the complex system of dams, tunnels, pipes, lakes, forebays, powerhouses, penstocks, and tailraces, of which their current underground location was a part.
At last he led her into his own “control room,” the high-tech Faerie which Barakian and the Kitchener Foundation had put at his disposal. Seeing the facility through Kari’s eyes—watching her become alternately paranoid and bedazzled by what he showed her—was more fun than he’d expected.
Don had barely finished the tour of his new and secret home when the silence in heaven changed all their plans. He had just switched on the holographic representations of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. They had donned virtuality gear, though they hadn’t switched it on yet. The two of them were going over the Dossi painting, overlaid with its two captions and four corner-symbols—when it happened.
Without warning, the systems in Don’s most secret lair paused, then began to glitch as if under command of a new master. The computer-controlled monitors and holojectors zoomed in on the Dossi painting’s labyrinth and highlighted it. The several airbender and flashbar Sun Yat-sen Memorial Halls currently active in Don’s holographic representations started rotating of their own accord, their motion synching up with the pattern highlighted on the labyrinth graffito.
“What’s this supposed to mean?” Karuna asked, looking at him as if he were responsible for the hubbub.
“I don’t know,” Don said, glancing at a series of images that had come up on a nearby screen. He recognized them as Pythagorean—ten arranged as a triangular number. A pentagon enclosing a five-pointed star enclosing a pentagon enclosing another five-pointed star ad infinitum. A plethora of golden section illustrations—all culminating in the ever-lengthening decimal string of pi. “I’m not doing it.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Karuna said, frowning.
They watched as YHVH rapidly ran through the ten permutations of the name of God, then transformed into a nine-spoked wheel centered around the tenth word, tiferet, at its hub. They stared as that wheel morphed into a tree with the word malchut at its root—before that too paused at the mathematical infinitudes represented by aleph.
“The last time you were thrown for a loop like this was when Kwok’s holo-cast crashed our party.”
“I think this is crashing more than our little party here,” Don said, watching ideograms appear—some of which he recognized as being from the I Ching, as if, now, Kabbalah had morphed into a Chinese counterpart. Then the imagery settled without settling, into the Riccian version of the yao ideogram, morphing and shifting endlessly among its variant readings and emphases.
“Look!” Don said, checking channel after channel of video input. “This is from a commercial satellite feed, and on another channel—here. And another. And another. It’s everywhere.” Again and again, every feed was interspersed with the image of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Turning from the public sphere, however, they found their private control-room virtualities similarly usurped, with images out of cloud chamber physics, demonstrations of biomolecular and quantum sources, metamorphosing at last into the image of an endlessly twisting X.
“So is this like what happened with Kwok?” she asked, nervousness creeping into her voice. “And with Medea?”
“Much more so,” Don said, then he paused, struck by an idea. “Wait! Medea! I’ve seen something like this before. When I visited Crash Village. Medea’s agentware was working on some sort of superproblem. I couldn’t figure it out at the time. A lot of what I’m seeing now looks like what I saw then.”
“What kind of problem?”
“I don’t know. Something big.”
“I’m going to need more than that,” Karuna said, activating her virtuality gear. Don followed suit and found himself staring at the figure of a game-burdened mule. This figure was then rendered in three dimensions and examined from all perspectives, then the virtuals moved on to a lakeside village and its storm-threatened church.
“I only have theories,” Don said, desperately trying to think it all the way through. The Sun Yat-sen Hall holos had mercifully stopped turning, he noticed. Even the cascade of imagery in their control-room monitors had for the moment stopped, which helped him concentrate better. Yes, what was the problem Medea’s agentware was working on? he mused. What problem would be big enough to require so much computational power?
Might Medea have been following a similar path, working on some aspect of the same problem he had been tackling here, under the mountain? But if Don was working for Kitchener, then who was Medea working for?
Suddenly all sound, from all the computing equipment, stopped. Ceased utterly.
Then, like a golden key slotting into a silent lock dark as a black hole, a grating noise sounded—a music perhaps only angels or demons could hear or play, and so loud that Don and Karuna plastered their hands to their ears, then scrambled for the controls to damp down the volume.
No sooner had the sequence of pulsating tones ceased than a torrent of imagery flooded at them in a blinding cascade of light. They tore off their virtuality gear, turned and looked away, closing their eyes for fear they would go blind. Still the incredible light shone about them, like the flash of a nuclear detonation, permeating everything before guttering out, the strange music sounding once more, then fading away.
They stared at each other in stunned silence as the ordinary sounds of the control room resumed.
“If Medea was already working on this stuff,” Kari said slowly, “then I think you’d better bring her in on this. Now.”
Don frowned and shook his head.
“I don’t want to.”
“But we may have to,” Karuna said. “This is out of our league.”
“If we do decide to bring Medea in,” Don said, considering the option, “it’ll be up to Barakian and company to determine whether we’ll be allowed to.”
ELEVEN
SEMPERIUM
CRYPTO CITY
“No, Jim,” Janis Rollwagen told her deputy director. “I can’t allow it. This latest infosphere breach has made the situation with the Chinese—and everyone else, for that matter—just too tense right now. You’re a captain, not a redshirt.”
“But—”
“But nothing,” she said as they waited for the elevator that would take them from the executive office suite on the eighth floor to the National Security Operations Center on the third. “I won’t have you gallivanting all over China. Chiefs send Indians. That’s why we sent Wang after Beech disappeared. You were the one who talked about a proportional response, after all, back when this whole thing got started.”
“But this ‘thing’ is much bigger now than when Kwok disappeared,” Brescoll said as the doors opened and they stepped into the unoccupied elevator. “Compared to this, Kwok’s holographic broadcast was limited in its distribution. If Cho’s the one responsible for this latest ‘infosphere breach,’ then he’s created something a lot more intrusive. It looks like the most widespread part of it, the Sun Yat-sen Hall imagery, was put into all those datastreams using real-time full-motion video manipulation—our own Artificial Truth technology!”
“Either that,” Rollwagen said, deadpan, “or someone’s learned to time travel.”
“If it’s Cho,” Brescoll said, nodding out of courtesy to the Director’s words but not really listening to them, “then h
e selectively removed and inserted information in databases throughout the infosphere. No one was left out. According to our preliminary Rasterfahndung screen-search runs, all the big players have been compromised.”
“Which is exactly why I don’t want you on foreign soil at the moment.”
Brescoll paused as they exited the elevator and walked toward NSOC. Checking a list of systems on his palmtop computer, he knew he wasn’t finished yet.
“Databases on EMP, on satellite hacking, on Tempest and wireless hacking, have all been particularly hard hit,” he said. “Suspicious traces left in High Energy Radio Frequency records, too, particularly those HERF areas regarding electromagnetically induced changes to DNA. Mindwar records compromised, as well, especially information on computer viruses and Trojan horses that modify video signal frequencies and waveforms to induce physiological and psychological changes.”
“I’m well aware,” Director Rollwagen said wearily, “that whoever’s behind this has pulled off an all-systems hack. But it was all soft-war stuff—no hard-war assets were actuated or manipulated, except some of the radio telescopes. That’s no reason for you to go to China. You can monitor everything from right here.”
She stabbed her finger emphatically downward, at the initials NSOC inlaid in the floor, that they happened to be passing over. Brescoll sighed. There would be no budging her on this one. Still, as they strode through the automatic glass doors and under the seals of NSA’s military wing, the reference to radio telescopes made something itch in the back of his mind.
“That’s the strangest part of it all,” he said. “At the same time images of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall flickered onto everyone’s TV sets, intense pulses of radio waves were shot into space, headed toward the constellations of the two Dippers, Eridanus, and Cancer.”
“Asinita,” Rollwagen said quietly, nodding.
“Pardon?” Brescoll asked, wondering if he had heard right, and if he should be offended. They entered the Headquarters area, which reminded him yet again of both situation room and deep-space monitoring facility.
“The Kabbalistic ass or donkey,” Rollwagen said absently as she led him on a twisting path among the floor’s target-categorized cubicles. “Giordano Bruno’s symbol for both the Holy Ignorance of the magic prophet, and for the prophet’s mystical death and rebirth. In his astral reformation of the heavens, Bruno left a few constellations empty, to be filled in sometime in the future. The empty spaces between the constellations of the two Dippers and Eridanus were to be the cosmological locus of Asinita. The constellation Cancer, the Crab, was to be its zodiacal locus. Radio pulses to those locations are a strange coincidence, if they are a coincidence.”
“Is this more of your secret-society stuff?” Brescoll asked, and not happily, as he glanced around at the desktop computer monitors. The unexpected depth of the director’s esoteric knowledge both dazzled and disturbed him.
“Some societies have used it,” Rollwagen said, “but not the ones you’re thinking of.”
Before them now, two youngish-looking techs noted Director Rollwagen’s approach and stood up, taking off their augmented reality glasses out of respect for her rank.
“Jim,” Rollwagen began, “allow me to introduce Maria Suarez and Phil Sotiropolis. They’ll be providing the tele-presence for the China mission we spoke of on the way here. Maria, Phil, this is Deputy Director Brescoll.”
As they shook hands all around, Brescoll wondered if the director had handpicked these two to keep an eye on the investigation. That suspicion on his part led to an awkward silence following the introductions.
“We’ve linked up with the M-I, Director,” Maria Suarez said, filling the void. “It’s pulled out of Tri-Border. We’ve also nearly completed the simulacrum for the California station. We’ll have it up on DIVE and holographic projections just as soon as we’re done here.”
“Good—Maria, Phil,” Rollwagen said. “We’ll let you get back to it until the deputy director needs you.”
The two techs donned their AR glasses again and turned back to their work.
“What was that about a ‘California station’?” Brescoll asked.
“One of our sources has revealed a Kitchener Foundation project investigating the Kwok-Cho situation,” Rollwagen said. “It’s housed inside a power station in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains. We think Donald Markham, aka ‘Don Sturm’ and ‘Mister Obololos’—the Cybernesian who eluded the FBI and Homeland Security—is working there.”
“And that source is an M-I, a machine intelligence? One that’s based in Tri-Border?”
“A very advanced and independent M-I,” Rollwagen said, choosing to ignore the skepticism in Brescoll’s voice. “Usually based in Cybernesia, but no longer. And no more connected to Tri-Border now than to Tetragrammaton. Both of which it once was. It’s our window into what’s going on in that power station.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Brescoll said. “Look, if the situation’s really as tense as you say, we may have sent Wang into harm’s way.”
“Jim, although relations with the Chinese aren’t the best just now, they haven’t yet started arresting any of our people, at least not to my knowledge.”
“Point taken. But if you’re going to keep me here, there’s something I want to know. Say Cho has been treated with the Kwok binotech—that he’s ingested it, or been injected with it. Exactly how much damage can he really do?”
Rollwagen glanced around, then moved him toward an empty cubicle with a pseudoholographic monitor and control computer. She gestured to him to take one of the two chairs there, while she took the other and switched on the computer.
“If he’s responsible for this latest infosphere breach,” she said, “then at the very least he’s already become a weapon of mass disruption.”
“Agreed,” Brescoll said, “but this all seems to link Cho to Kwok’s investigation, and take us back to those long-term twin studies. What were those studies intended to accomplish? Especially the ones involving identity disorders?”
She didn’t answer right away, and he watched as the director typed in a password and began scanning through the sharenet, until she found her own terminal. She typed in further passwords that would allow her to access her private databases and files.
“Those who hold with Tetragrammaton believe the survival of our species is dependent on joining with the tech and becoming posthuman,” she said as she worked. “Right?”
“Right,” he said. “The whole ‘better angels’ thing.”
“Tetragrammaton’s research includes faster-than-light travel, conscious starships—all kinds of escape plans should our planetary ecology collapse. But what if our population keeps rising and we can’t escape to other planets before the boom-bust comes? What if we can’t get around the speed-of-light limit on space travel before we exceed the carrying capacity of our own environment? No matter how high we try to jack up that capacity with our technologies?”
Brescoll glanced over at her.
“Then we’re well and truly screwed, I suppose.”
“Unless we learn to control our breeding and greeding before that happens—yes,” she said. She brought up a report onscreen, chronicling what looked like Tetragrammaton’s various projects over the years. “Everything Tetra has done—the in utero manipulation, the implants, the mind/machine interfacing, the twin studies, the attempts to amplify paranormal powers—it’s all been for the same purpose: to make human and machine intelligence intimate enough that our brains and our machines can together be used to open a gateway into and through the fabric of space.”
Brescoll shook his head.
“But why identity disorders?”
“Certainly not for the disorders themselves,” Rollwagen said, leaning back in her chair. “Do you know what exaptation is?”
“Natural selection finding its own uses for things,” Jim said, not quite seeing the relevance. “Usually in the course of disaster.”
“Right,” she said, op
ening a graphics file to display something that looked like an anatomy diagram. “Our low larynx/ high pharynx vocal tract, capable of articulate speech, is a good example. It was already present in humans half a million years before true speech appeared.”
“Any idea what it was for?” Brescoll asked, his curiosity piqued. A living-fossil trait, like Beech’s living-fossil codes. “Some advantage in breathing?”
“Nobody knows—especially since such an arrangement makes it more likely those possessing it would choke, which would seem to be an evolutionary disadvantage. But then along comes catastrophe, and boom! That arrangement turns out to be advantageous, after all.”
“What catastrophe?”
Rollwagen found another graphics file, opened it, and ran a short 3-D movie.
“The Toba volcano,” she said, as they watched a simulation, “erupting seventy thousand years ago. Ash and snow darkening the sky for six months. Lofted sulfur dioxide, reflecting sunlight for a six-year winter. The whole nightmare wiped out such a large percentage of humanity it almost bottlenecked us to extinction. Yet, at the same time, that disaster forced us to develop true human speech, for which we’d had all the physiological components for five hundred thousand years.”
“So the disaster exapted—what? How?”
“No one knows, exactly. The best theory is that a sort of baby talk, previously restricted to the babblings of very young children, lingered to become adult language. The manipulation of words opened the door to symbolic cognition. Here, look at this.”
Brescoll leaned forward so he could read more clearly from the screen a chronology of catastrophe and the origins of language.
“In the beginning was the taste of ashes in the mouth,” he said, scanning the chronology, thinking it over as he did so, “but those who can speak can’t breathe and swallow at the same time.”
“Yes,” Rollwagen said, bringing back the flashbar loop of the Toba eruption. “Maybe Toba was the real tower of Babel, the event that pushed us from the language of silence, which everyone understood, to the confusion of tongues.”
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