Better Angels

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Dreamed it up? They would soon see how real that dream was—Dr. Schwarzbrucke especially.

  “...underwater is clearly some sort of descent into himself,” Marin’s notes continued, “into his unconscious. The mandala-city is a vision of the self as a unified whole. In that city are the many inhabitants, the sources of Michael Dalke’s voices, the siren singers seducing his unified self into dispersing, to flowing into and becoming just another one of the many voices. The Self, to remain unified, must keep those siren-singing psychoid processes organized within itself, under its control.

  “In Michael Dalke’s case, their splitting alternately into angels of aid and demons of disintegration is part of the classic psychomachia encountered in the formation and development of the overall Self. Dalke’s trauma, the lack of an adequate timeframe for his grieving process, the crystal memory installation, the hasty formation of his new machine-interactive role—these all understandably loosened his control over those autonomous psychoid processes that live in each of us.

  “I advised Michael to tighten his control, to side with the angels and the aid they offered—and against the disintegration the demons posed. I advised him to make use of that aid. To get a grip on his own reins and put those aspects of his personality to work for him, pulling together as a team under his command. If he does do so, the situation will settle down fairly quickly and his dreams of the ‘machine elves’, as he referred to them, will cease.”

  Ha! So much for Marin’s predictive abilities, Mike thought. The “dreams” had not ceased at all, though he had made great use of the elfish netizens’ aid. At first he was surprised at how readily he was able to use them, but when he thought about it he realized that people had been treating their computers as desktop or palmtop oracles for years: Got a question? Ask the net. Mike had just carried that tendency to its logical extreme

  From out of their Deep Background, the netizens of the Culture had—as he had commanded them—put together for him the masses of evidence solidly linking the Mongrel Clones to police corruption in southern Oregon and northern California. With the netizens’ help Mike had gathered all the supporting documentation he needed: bank transaction records, telephone records, newspaper reports, internal memos from organizations ranging from local police and sheriff’s offices to the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement and the federal DEA. Only having such information at hand had enabled him to create the narrative outlining the Blue Badge Conspiracy.

  Now, the netizens’ work would enable him to send all that information first to the appropriate authorities and then to the media—in order to initiate the investigation, to get the wheels of justice grinding more quickly.

  Send it, he commanded his agents in the infosphere. And it was sent.

  In the media over the next several days Mike watched happily as, with a little help from his netizen friends, he managed to give those old purblind doomsters, Chance and Justice, a set of loaded dice, with which they promptly began rolling sevens and elevens.

  “Yesterday,” said the FBI director at his NetSpan news conference, “the FBI, DEA, DOJ, California DOJ and BNE, major Oregon and California news outlets, and national wire services all received, from an anonymous tipster a carefully indexed and cross-referenced seven hundred page document. The tipster document details a pattern of kickbacks, payoffs, and long-standing illegal association and cooperation between law enforcement in southern Oregon and the Mongrel Clones Motorcycle Club, now revealed to be the West Coast’s largest producers and purveyors of the Schedule Three Controlled Substance known as Blue Spike. We are happy to have the opportunity to bring swiftly to an end this criminal partnership which grew and festered under the CSA regime.”

  Mike almost laughed at that. The collaboration between the Mongrel Clones and corrupt law enforcers had a history that long predated the CSA regime—and many of the same people castigating the CSA now had served in government during its reign. What the hell, though? Go ahead and make political hay out of it. Why should he care—so long as it was his will they were ultimately working?

  Watching the news reports, Mike took a personal pleasure in seeing spike labs being broken up. He was especially pleased at seeing a particular sheriff’s deputy being marched away in handcuffs by agents of the FBI’s government corruption unit.

  “The document that came streaming out of faxes and spamming across net sites two days ago,” said a NewsNet talking head, “includes a thorough narrative and extensive supporting materials. Together these outline the history, nature, and extent of police corruption brought about by the Mongrel Clones’ suborning of local law enforcement in Oregon.”

  Vengeance is mine, saith the Horde, Mike thought, scanning report after report on the Blue Badge arrests.

  “Though the machineries of criminal prosecution may at times seem large and slow,” said a prosecuting attorney from Klamath Falls, speaking on one of the many All Crime—All the Time channels, “this bolt of paper and electronic text has jumpstarted us to immediate action. Justice demands that we see this matter through to a decisive conclusion, and we will.”

  On every channel and newsite and holovision net he searched, the story was the same:

  “In exchange for considerable bribes,” said a reporter for the Modus Operandi crime show, “local police officials established a tradition going all the way back to the production of methamphetamine in the eighties and nineties. So long as the Clones marketed their wares only over the border in California, police and sheriff’s departments in rural southern Oregon looked the other way or even provided cover for Clone criminal activity. As a result, the Mongrel Clones eventually coordinated a growing empire of clandestine deepwoods drug labs which, until recently, specialized primarily in that most prized of the new-generation designer drugs, Blue Spike.”

  “—euphoric and blissful high,” said an NHK reporter, “Blue Spike can, with immoderate use, produce a list of side-effects that reads like news of a Great Brain Wreck—including aphasia, agraphia....”

  The highly media-conscious president of the newly resurrected United States of America weighed in on the subject too, Mike found:

  “To the anonymous tipster or tipsters who provided this information,” President Carlson said, “we offer our heartfelt thanks.”

  “Isn’t it true, Mister President,” asked an investigative reporter whose many years in the press corps had not softened his edgy style, “that the initial tipster document really didn’t unearth all that much new material? That its value lies instead in its synthesis and gathering of evidence that was already available?”

  “Well,” the President aw-shucksed, “it was enough to connect the dots and paint the big picture for investigators, and that’s good enough for me.”

  Even before his initial suspicions had been confirmed—and long before he dictated to his netizen emanuenses the narrative they attached to the evidence packet—Mike already had an inkling of the hard truth. With much belated hindsight, he pieced together the fact that the Mongrel Clones and the Law had such a long-established relationship, one into which Mike had inadvertently trespassed in his naive assumption that the good guys were on one side of the fence and the bad guys were on the other.

  Edward “Big Ed” Hilbert, Martin “Mac” McCurdy, and Wayne Davis were the ones who had broken into his trailer. When Mike had turned in their names to the sheriff’s office, the deputy on duty had thanked him profusely and assured him that action would be taken. No doubt it was, as Mike learned with the help of the netizens: Telephone records for the appropriate time and date indicated that the deputy had promptly picked up the phone and called Ed Hilbert as soon as Mike left. Hilbert, as it turned out, was an enforcer for the Clones. No record existed of what the deputy might have told Hilbert but, given the severe consequences he suffered as a result of his petty theft report, Mike easily made an educated guess about the nature of that conversation.

  Many things the netizens brought him, however, he had not suspected. The simila
rity, for one, of some of Blue Spike’s side effects to the brain damage Mike himself had suffered. For another, there was the otherwise inexplicable fact that his assailants, after battering his skull with shotgun butts, had apparently also put in the emergency call to the police and paramedics. Then there were hints that a portion of CMD’s positive cashflow was somehow linked to the Oregon Blue Spike trade. Stereochemical analyses also revealed unexpected similarities between the structure of Schwarzbrucke’s crystal memory chips and that of the Blue Spike euphoriant. Most intriguing of all, however, was the discovery that, in his “wild youth” in Crescent City, Richard Schwarzbrucke had once been arrested for “possession with intent to distribute” methamphetamine.

  The threads linking all these were too speculative to include in his tipster narrative, but for Mike they clinched the link between Schwarzbrucke and the Clones, convincing him that Schwarzbrucke had at one time been a crankster chemist in the Clones’ employ—a backwoods brewmeister who, with a little help from his old friends and their money, had eventually gone legit and big-time.

  Mike hoped the numerous agencies investigating the Blue Badge Conspiracy would also see the connection, but he and his netizens kept digging nonetheless. The days lengthened into weeks and then months. At last Mike realized that, despite its many successes, his tipster work had failed, in the end, to result in the arrest and prosecution of the four men most responsible for his injuries.

  Just another political scandal—was that all he’d succeeded in creating? Merely giving everyone something to talk about besides the weather for a while? Politics and the weather was all that most conversations consisted of, out there, anyway. Not about justice and how to get it—his single great and overriding concern.

  Politics had failed him in his quest for justice. How about the weather?

  It was an odd thought, a joke at first, a riff on the powers of chaos—yet it kept coming back to him. Particularly the description of weather disasters as “acts of God.” Intrigued, he sent his netizen agents throughout the infosphere to gather more for him to learn about the weather and its manipulation.

  From their oracular pronouncements he learned that even an ordinary thunderstorm spans some twenty orders of magnitude: from ten-to-thirteen kilometer (the scale where atomic phenomena initiate the electrification of the stormcloud), to tens or hundreds of kilometers (the scale describing the air motion of the full thundercloud), to the tens of thousands of kilometers (the scale describing the storm’s place in the global electric circuit of the entire atmosphere—and beyond, to incident radiation, the Van Allen belts, near-space phenomena).

  Weather fronts were fundamentally chaotic systems. Pumping more heat into a chaotic meteorological system caused it to generate more dissipative structures—hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms. The whirlwind, the structure built by things falling apart, was only a part of it, however. Bifurcation points, far-from-equilibrium conditions, chaotically evolving topologies—these, he discovered, underlay every deep effort at meteorological understanding, whether the phenomenon under study was the role of graupel particles in storm electrification, or the occurrence of golf ball-sized hail in Texas; funnel clouds in Missouri, or hurricanes in Hawai’i; high winds in England, or El Niño movements in the Pacific; flooding in the Netherlands, or monsoons in the Bay of Bengal, drought-induced range fires in Australia, or early snows in the Caucasus. They were chaotic shapeshifters all.

  Weather was like the lives of the observers who studied it: litanies of sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, synergies, cascades, multiplier effects—all unpredictable, all possessing a story and a meaning only after the fact. What meaning would the “observers” place, after the fact, on the storm he was planning on creating? Just an unprecedented weather front that struck the coast near the California-Oregon border, perhaps? The only one way to find out would be to make that weather happen.

  Impatiently, Mike waited for a propitious time. Through his agents in the infosphere he learned of Schwarzbrucke’s planned trip home to Crescent City. As the awaited time arrived, the Culture netizens accessed real-time flight plans and air traffic control ETAs indicating when Schwarzbrucke’s CMD corporate helicopter would be on the ground in Crescent City. Satellite fly-by feeds confirmed the CMD corporate head’s arrival. With the virtually perfect transparency of his infosphere access, Mike knew the exact instant when Schwarzbrucke placed a call from his limo to his estranged wife and daughters, explaining that he wouldn’t be able to see the girls that weekend because something had come up and he had to hold a business meeting at the Crescent City house.

  At Mike’s command, his intelligent agents located full wiring diagrams and architectural plans for Schwarzbrucke’s Crescent City estate. For the netizens of the Culture—creatures for whom information was as omnipresent as air, and manipulating that information as easy as breathing—the Schwarzbrucke estate was a ready playground. A smart house, it was full of tech toys: electronic door locks, closed circuit security cameras, microphone and radio feeds. Motion sensors galore. Fully alarmed. Lights and entertainment consoles remotely programmable. Diesel-fueled backup generators, with the fuel tanks discreetly hidden out of sight on the hill behind the house.

  The household computer logged Schwarzbrucke’s arrival at the security gate, giving Mike a firm fix on Schwarzbrucke’s whereabouts. As he began to shape the unfolding of events, Mike found himself feeling more and more like a conductor leading an orchestra performing the musical signature of time and existence itself. Deep in the Culture, Mike was the eye in a vast storm of activity, a shining riot of tiny angels flashing about him like ball lightning, an electronic brainstorm in virtuality that would soon manifest itself as an electrical storm in physical reality as well.

  A nice fat tongue of “Pacific Express” moisture was rolling in out of the west. All the forecasts called for showers, heavy at times. A good beginning, but not enough. There were ways to improve the situation, Mike thought. Ways to change the beat, pump up the heat, in order to spin off new structures. Ways to turn butterflies into bombers.

  Mike called for satellite overview. A robotanker off the coast here, with a full cargo of liquefied natural gas. Over here, an aging Aegis-class missile cruiser, highly computerized, despite its years. His elvish netizenry lived in both of them, waiting on his command.

  What was this? Big Ed Hilbert had just thumbprinted payment for gas and dinner—three orders—in the town of Gasquet on Highway 199, the main road linking Grants Pass, Oregon and Crescent City, California. Even thugs used credit prints and data needles, so Mike had long been able to keep tabs on their whereabouts electronically, when he chose. Might the three Mongrel Clones be on their way to meet with Schwarzbrucke? Could he be so lucky? Might Schwarzbrucke’s business meeting involve the three Mongrel Clones members too?

  Mike’s concentration became so focused that time shifted, dilated toward timelessness. Surrounded by a bright sphere of shining netizenry, floating at its center, Mike’s consciousness seemed to have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Time passed, but he did not note its passage. Like many another great artist, he felt that he wasn’t accomplishing all this himself—that a force or spirit much bigger than himself was working through him.

  In one part of his mind he soon enough saw the newsflash of a Navy boat missiling an automated LNG supertanker—word of the disaster just breaking as, in another part of his extended sensorium, Hilbert, McCurdy, and Davis, on thunderous vintage Harleys, pulled up to the security gate outside Schwarzbrucke’s estate. Things became more immediate now, for Mike saw and heard all that was coming to pass on the Crescent City estate—over the myriad surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and microphones of Schwarzbrucke’s own security system.

  Ascending the long driveway after being waved through, the three Clones must have been glad to have arrived at their destination. On the security cameras, the sky was already starting to spit. Judging from the mean-looking clouds building off to the wes
t, things were going to get much worse.

  Schwarzbrucke was waiting for them at the top of the drive, where they parked their antique motorcycles side by side under a tent-like awning beyond the garage. Schwarzbrucke shook the hands of each of the wind-blown men, before guiding them into the house through a side door.

  In the Deep Background, Mike through his netizens switched his focus to the internal security monitors and watched the four men walk into the den. They drank beer and scotch and made small talk while the wind and rain grew steadily stronger outside. The weather clearly made Hilbert nervous, especially when the thunder claps began and the first hail started to fall heavily outside.

  Mike had his netizen friends begin taping the meeting—audio, video, and holo:

  “Let’s cut the chat,” said Big Ed, who from the looks of him weighed at least three hundred pounds. “You didn’t bring us here for a social call. What’s this about?”

  “No, not a social call,” Schwarzbrucke said, clearly uneasy. “It’s about this Blue Badge investigation.”

  “I thought so,” said the red-bearded, piratical-looking Davis, running a fingerless-gloved hand through his beard. “It’s killing our business, Rick.”

  McCurdy, balding and red-faced to the top of his head, fixed Schwarzbrucke with a hard stare.

  “It’s that dweeb we shotgun-whipped, ain’t it?” McCurdy stated as much as asked. “What’s his name? Dave Michaels, something like that?”

  Schwarzbrucke glanced at McCurdy in surprise before nodding and answering. He had to speak up over the roar of the storm and its thunder outside.

  “Michael Dalke,” Schwarzbrucke said, then paused as a particularly close lightning strike was followed almost immediately by a deafening thunderclap. “Yes, I’m beginning to think so too, now that you mention it. I don’t know what he found out while he was playing detective up in your neck of the woods, but it seems to have been a lot more than who stole his sleeping bag.”