“I breached the Chantilly facility, Gary. Can you really be surprised that I was able to enter your playhouse?”
The rest of the ride passes in silence.
“So,” I say. “This is Evil Wizard Central, huh?”
The door slams behind me. My ocular shuts down, and within seconds, a surge of pressure rises up from my spine to my brain and then resolves into a stabbing headache right behind my eyes.
“By the way,” says Tariq. “Do you have any critical implants? Anything, for instance, that would kill you if it were suddenly disconnected from the networks?”
“Aaaah!” I say. “No! I mean, I don’t think so. Why?”
“No reason.” He leads us into a room off the main hall, where Anders and Elise are sitting on cushions beside a low wooden table. They’re eating what looks like chocolate and peanut butter on flatbread. I’m suddenly famished.
“Where is the abomination?” Tariq asks.
“Out in the kitchen with Aaliyah,” says Anders. “I think he’s negotiating with her. Well, he’s negotiating, anyway. She seems to mostly be screaming curse words.”
“Hey Anders,” I say. “Think I could get a scoop of that?”
“Sure.” Anders picks up a flatbread and digs up a generous dollop of the chocolate. He hands it to me, and I cram it into my mouth. It takes me a second or two to realize that this is not chocolate. It’s some kind of bean paste, and it is very, very spicy. My eyes go wide, and I put a hand to my mouth. Anders laughs, and hands me a cup of lukewarm tea. I choke down the flatbread, swish the tea around my mouth and swallow that too, but the burn is getting steadily worse. I cough twice, and Anders hands me another cup. I drink that as well, then take a couple of deep breaths.
“Thanks, pal.”
“No problem.”
He’s still laughing.
“Anyway,” Anders says, “it’s good to see that you guys are okay. I was a little worried about you when we got separated in the riot.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks for your concern, but we’re good. Charity took excellent care of me.”
Anders looks at Charity.
“What about you? You look a little out of it.”
Charity shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “I’m fine. Just processing, I guess.”
“Okay, guys,” says a voice from the kitchen. “I think we’re good. Come on in.”
“Is that Doug?” I ask.
“It’s complicated,” says Anders.
They get to their feet, and Tariq leads us out of the sitting room and into the hall.
“Come,” he says to Elise. “Come and see the mystical font that is the source of the Gift of the Moon.”
We follow him down the darkened hallway, and into the dimly lit kitchen. The walls are hung with plants and herbs, both growing and in the process of being dried, and the smell of them together is sweet and cloying. A table on one wall holds a massive mortar and pestle, and a collection of teapots rings the room on a shelf just below the ceiling.
And there, in the center of the room, sits 12.5 million dollars’ worth of Siemens Mark Seven nano-fabricator.
18. ANDERS
We stand in silence in a rough half circle around the fabricator.
“So,” Elise says. “No magical mushrooms, huh?”
“I am afraid not,” says Tariq. He waves vaguely at the plants lining the walls. “Some of these were probably in the tea she gave you. Some may even have had temporary psychotropic effects—the transformation can very painful at first, and an anesthetic is helpful—but the active ingredient was a stew of self-replicating nano-machines. These have been steadily remodeling your nervous system since the moment you swallowed them.”
“Remodeling my nervous system?”
“Augmenting may be a better word, but yes. Internally, you now have more in common with our friend the abomination than with an ancestral human.”
“And you?”
“Yes, Elise. I am the same.”
Elise takes a moment to let that soak in. When she speaks again, she sounds close to tears.
“So everything Aaliyah said was bullshit? The stories, the mother tongue . . . all of it?”
Tariq sighs.
“As with any religion, there are aspects which are clearly truth, aspects which are clearly myth, and aspects which are more or less uncertain. I looked into these issues when I was younger, and first began to doubt. The so-called mother tongue is a grammatically consistent and complete language. It bears some similarities to ancient African tongues. Is it truly the language of the mother-of-all? Who is to say? The stories, the myths—these are things passed to us from our mother. Do they truly stretch back over three thousand generations? Perhaps they do. Or, perhaps they were devised thirty years ago from whole cloth. How are we to know?”
“I’m having some trouble with this,” says Gary. “Nano-fabricators are as tightly controlled as nuclear piles, and almost as expensive. How the hell do you have one in your kitchen?”
Tariq smiles.
“Now you touch upon one of the true mysteries of the faith.”
“Look,” says Inchy. “I’m sure this is all very interesting, but can we do what we came here to do? You’ve got the files, Anders?”
“I do,” I say. I pull a pinkie-sized case from my hip pocket, open it, and pull out a pin drive.
“Look at you!” Charity says. “When did you pocket that?”
“I’ve been carrying it around for a while. I was kind of planning on looking the files over on my office system at JHU.”
They’re all staring at me now.
“Yes,” I say. “I am an idiot. Can we move on?”
I power up the fabricator, give it a few seconds to come fully online, and then insert the drive into one of the input ports. This model has a really nice user interface—very intuitive, very easy to work with. An index of available configurations pops up on the control screen.
“So what do we think?” I ask. “Run them all? Or just the one I think is interesting?”
“We’re not trying to brew up a batch of BrainBump,” says Gary. “Just run the last one.”
I select the fifth file on the list. The system takes thirty seconds to check feedstock supplies, then reports back all green. I look around.
“How much do we want to generate?”
“We’re kind of in a hurry here,” says Inchy. “Get us enough to interrogate.”
I fix the quantity at 0.05 millimol, and set it to run.
“So,” Gary says. “How long do we have to wait?”
“Dunno,” I say. “Somewhere between five minutes and an hour and a half?”
Charity scowls.
“Seriously? Didn’t this take like twenty seconds on Gary’s system?”
I shrug.
“Well, sure. That was an emulator. It wasn’t really doing anything. We’re actually building itty-bitty machines here. It’ll ding when it’s done.”
“What, like a microwave oven?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“So what do we do in the meantime?” Gary asks. “Anyone up for some SpaceLab?”
“Sorry,” says Elise. “Entertainment isn’t really a priority in this house. No vids, no music, no books that I’ve been able to find.”
Gary looks at Charity. She raises one eyebrow.
“It’s a nice night,” he says. “I’m gonna go out on the porch and reestablish communication with the real world. Call me when this thing is finished. Charity? Would you care to join me on the veranda?”
She giggles.
“Why sir,” she says, “I would be delighted.”
She offers her arm. He takes it, and they go.
“I think I’ll join them,” says Elise. “Tariq?”
He s
hakes his head.
“I must see to Aaliyah. I suspect she has found this all very upsetting.”
I look at Inchy. Inchy looks at me.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says.
The others file out, and I’m left alone with the world’s creepiest house plants, my friend’s animatronic corpse, and a machine that’s probably cooking up the end of the world. I lean back against the sink. Inchy hops up onto a cutting block that stands between him and the fabricator.
“Well,” I say. “It hasn’t crashed yet. I guess that’s a good sign.”
Inchy smiles.
“Good being a relative term.”
“Well, yeah. Good in the sense that maybe we’re going to find out why the world is going crazy. Not so good in the sense that this machine is probably brewing a sample of the stuff that killed almost a hundred thousand people over the past three days.”
We both take a moment to let that sink in.
“So,” Inchy says finally. “If it turns out you’re right, what, exactly, is your plan?”
“You mean if this thing finishes running, and there’s something in the sample other than a bunch of temperature-sensitive buckyballs with serotonin molecules inside them?”
“Is that what this file is supposed to make?”
I nod.
“Yeah. It’s one of the main ingredients in BrainBump, apparently—a little molecular cage tagged onto a transport protein. It jumps into your bloodstream and crosses the blood-brain barrier. When it hits thirty-six Celsius, it pops open and releases the serotonin.”
“Which then?”
“Makes you slightly less unhappy than you were before.”
“Ah. Chemical modulation of your emotional state. That’s a big thing with you corporeal types, huh?”
I nod.
“Yeah, it is. Unfortunately, so is finding new and innovative ways to kill each other. My guess is that in this particular case we’ve accomplished that with crypted machine code that interacts directly with the Siemens hardware.”
“To do what?”
I shrug.
“To make it make something else instead, I’m assuming. Or maybe something else as well.”
“Right,” Inchy says. “So this thing finishes, we look at what squirts out, and it’s cages full of cyanide instead of serotonin. What do you do then?”
I think about that for a minute.
“Well,” I say. “It couldn’t just be the same kind of cages filled with cyanide. That would kill anyone who drank it within a few minutes, not all at once on cue.”
He shakes his head. He’s really getting better at acting like a human.
“You’re avoiding, Anders. Whatever it is, what do you do about it?”
I sigh, and run my hands back through my hair.
“I’m avoiding because I have no idea. Contact NatSec? Tell them what we’ve learned? They just tried to drop a crowbar on me. I’m not sure that would go over well. I’m not sure what they could do about things either—other than shut down BrainBump production, I guess.”
“Sort of the definition of shutting the barn door after the horse is gone, huh?”
“I’d say so. Evidence is that the biological half-life of this stuff is more like weeks than hours. Unless they can get rid of the people who know what the trigger is and how to invoke it, we’re pretty much screwed.”
“Well,” Inchy says. “NatSec is actually pretty good at finding people and disappearing them.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess that’s true.”
We sit in silence, and listen to the fabricator hum. Tariq left the kitchen through the back door and up a flight of stairs. Muffled voices come down through the ceiling now, but I can’t make out individual words. Inchy sits with his arms crossed, and his chin resting almost on his chest.
“You know,” he says. “I have a friend who might be able to help us.”
He hops down off the cutting block and comes to stand beside me.
“Is your friend the sort of person who drops crowbars on people?”
He shrugs.
“Sometimes. Usually only on people who deserve it, though. But this is important, isn’t it? I mean, you can’t just keep it to yourselves, can you?”
I look at him. His voice is starting to sound more and more like Doug’s, and it’s beginning to creep me out.
Good God, I can’t believe that’s the part of this that I find creepy.
“You know,” I say. “You don’t sound much like you think you’re a part of this.”
“Well,” he says. “I’m not really, am I? We Silico-Americans have a vested interest in you folks not completely destroying each other, obviously, but this really isn’t our war, is it?”
I shrug.
“Maybe not.”
We stand together for a while, and watch the telltales on the control screen dance.
“Your friend,” I say finally. “He’s NatSec?”
“He’s a she, actually,” Inchy says. “And yes, she’s definitely got some NatSec ties. Honestly, is there anywhere else you could take something like this?”
“No,” I say. “Probably not. But you have to understand, NatSec operatives—those guys don’t deal in personal loyalty. If you bring a NatSec agent into this, and she comes to the conclusion that dissolving all of us in a vat of lye is in the national interest, that’s probably what she’s going to do.”
Inchy smiles.
“Nah, she and I are close. I’m pretty sure she’d be willing to go the extra mile for me. Maybe dig me a nice shallow grave down by the railroad tracks.”
I laugh.
“Is that even a threat for you? I mean, do you even care if something awful happens to Doug’s body?”
“Sure,” he says. “Wouldn’t you be concerned if someone was threatening to destroy your vacation home?”
“Thanks,” I say. “That puts things in perspective. So if things go south, you have to go back to wherever you were before Doug shat himself to death. That’s rough. What about me? Vat of lye?”
“Yeah, probably.”
We stand in silence together as the fabricator run winds down, and one by one the progress indicators flip to green. After a while, my attention starts to wander. This has been the longest day of my life, and I’m starting to drift off when the fabricator dings.
“Look at that,” Inchy says. “Dinner’s ready.”
19. TERRY
The taxi drops me off in front of my building in the gathering darkness. I pay the driver with a handful of rumpled bills and step onto the sidewalk. The street is deserted, but I can hear what sounds like sporadic gunfire in the distance. I’m about to start up the steps when Dimitri materializes from the shadows in the entryway.
“Terry,” he says. “You should not have contacted me.”
I take a moment to find my voice, and to let my pulse settle back down to just terrified.
“Dimitri,” I say finally. “What the hell? Are you trying to kill me?”
Oops. Poor choice of words.
Dimitri takes a step forward, and I get a look at his face. His right eye is swollen nearly shut. I can see dried blood on his chin, and more on the side of his neck.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “What happened to you?”
He shakes his head.
“It has been a difficult day,” he says. “It seems that certain elements within NatSec have lost faith in me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Did you get a severance package?”
He laughs, but there’s no humor in it.
“They have tried to sever me twice in the last few hours. So far, they have not quite succeeded.”
I reach up to touch the side of his face. He catches my hand and pushes it away.
“What happened?” I ask.
He sighs.
“There was a serious security breach this afternoon, at one of our facilities in Northern Virginia. It seems that it was enabled through the use of my personal credentials.”
I look away.
“So they think that you . . .”
“That does not matter,” he says. “My actions or inactions do not matter. The security of my credentials is my responsibility. The penalty for losing control of them is no different than that for committing the breach itself.”
“You’re not talking about getting docked vacation days, are you?”
He smiles thinly.
“No, Terry. I am not.”
I step up beside him, and press my hand to the palm-lock beside the door. The lock disengages with an audible click, and the door swings open. As I step inside, I look back and say, “I’m starting to think that calling you wasn’t my best-ever idea.”
He follows me into the entry hall. The door snicks closed behind him.
“No,” he says. “We are safe for now. For reasons that I do not fully understand, Sauron’s Eye has not abandoned me. She controls NatSec’s electronic eyes, and its biological ones are all occupied with preventing the nation from descending into chaos at the moment. As long as this situation holds, I am invisible.”
“I can’t believe you came,” I say. “If I had known what was happening to you . . .”
“It is nothing,” he says. “The behavior of your avatar, if it is as you have described it, is disturbing to say the least.”
He turns away.
“And in any case,” he says softly, “I truly have nowhere else to be.”
The door to my apartment is unlatched. Dimitri pushes it open. The interior beyond where the light from the hallway spills in is midnight-dark.
“House,” I say. “Lights, please.”
The lights do not come on, and I wonder if maybe the power has failed. Dimitri steps into my front hall. I follow him. The door swings closed behind us, and I’m abruptly blind. I reach out for Dimitri, catch his sleeve and step closer. I’m about to ask if he has a flashlight when House speaks.
“Hello, Dimitri. You look terrible. What happened to your head?”
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