Three Days in April

by Edward Ashton

  Randgrid:

  Sauron’s Eye:

  I close my eyes and reach, in the same way I reached for the drones over the harbor. My point of view shifts, and I find myself looking into Terry’s kitchen. Terry and her avatar both look back at me. Terry can’t see me, but the avatar’s jaw sags open, and I suspect that she can. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m seeing through Dimitri’s ocular. It takes me another moment to realize that I don’t have to be a passive observer here. I can make him see me as well. My view shifts again, and I’m looking down at him. His eyes go wide.

  “Elise?”

  “Hello, Dimitri. You have to come with me now.”

  Sauron’s Eye said I should talk to him, but I don’t think this is the time for talking. I reach into him, into the servos running through his muscles. I take them away from him, and pull him to his feet.

  “Wait,” he says, but there’s no time for that. I flood his system with adrenaline, and spin up the actuators in his legs. The crowbar is coming. We step to Terry and lift her, clutch her struggling to our chest. Her fists hammer against our back as we climb into the open window frame, and leap.

  21. GARY

  I’m trying to think of a way to get a little alone time with Charity when Elise perks up and looks around. I look at Charity. Charity looks at me. Elise climbs to her feet.

  “Hey,” I say. “You okay?”

  Elise starts down the steps at a run.

  “Elise? Where are you—­”

  She climbs into the white van in the driveway and slams the door. The engine turns over, revs once. The van backs out of the driveway and accelerates away.

  “So,” says Charity. “Looks like Elise has joined the Evil Wizard club, huh?”

  “So it would seem,” I say. “Where do you think she’s off to?”

  Charity shrugs.

  “Dunno. There’re a lot of bonfires out there. Maybe she needs to go dance around one.”

  I laugh.

  “They do that naked, right?”

  She gives me a sideways look.

  “So I’m told.”

  We sit together, watching the glow on the undersides of the clouds, and listening to the distant pops of gunfire. I haven’t had any luck finding useful feeds, but it looks from here like Baltimore is having problems. Towson seems to be pretty quiet, though.

  “Have they burned Portland yet?”

  I look over at Charity. She’s staring off into the distance, her face as serious as I’ve seen it.

  “No,” I say. “Not that I’ve heard, anyway. A lot of communication leaked out of there before NatSec shut it down.” I reach over and take her hand. She glances at me without turning her head, but doesn’t pull away. “You see what’s going on tonight. If they do a burn now, I’m guessing the UnAltered are going to make this look like a garden party. “

  “Well, that’s the truth,” she says. “Bad enough they’ve got some confirmation now that there were probably survivors in Hagerstown when they dropped the bombs. I have no idea how Dey’s gonna try to pass that one off.”

  Off to the south, an arrow-­straight bolt of lightning lances down, followed almost instantly by a flashbulb pop of red reflecting off the clouds.

  “Crowbar?” I say.

  “Yeah. A big one.”

  She pulls away, leans forward, and rests her face in her hands. I count seconds until the thunderclap rolls over us. Six miles, give or take.

  “Hey,” I say. “You remember earlier? In my bolt-­hole?”

  She turns her head far enough to peer at me with one eye.

  “You mean when you came out of the bathroom and showed Tariq your chubby?”

  I grimace.

  “Yeah, then. If Tariq hadn’t shown up, we were definitely gonna do it, right?”

  She sighs, and covers her face again.

  “Yes, Gary. We were definitely gonna do it.”

  A series of pops sounds closer now. It could be firecrackers, but I’m betting it’s not.

  “We still could, right?”

  She sits up, leans her head back, then turns to face me.

  “Yes, Gary. We still could. Although I have to say, this whole thing you’re doing right now? Not improving your odds.”

  “Right. Got it.”

  We sit in silence for a while longer. My eyelids are drooping, and it occurs to me that even with the nap I took earlier, I’ve had a really, really long day. I’m just starting to drift off, when the growl of the van’s engine announces Elise’s return.

  She’s brought Terry with her, and someone else. It takes me a moment to place his face.

  “Hey,” I say. “What did you bring him here for?”

  “He’s a friend of Terry’s,” says Elise. “He was in trouble. I had to help him.”

  She leads Dimitri up onto the porch by the hand. The right side of his face is purple. He’s limping badly, and blood is seeping through his clothes in a half dozen places. Terry follows them. She’s not as bad off as Dimitri, but she looks like someone took a baseball bat to her as well. I turn to Charity. She’s staring at Dimitri, her mouth set in a thin, hard line. He shakes his head twice, and his eyes come into focus. He looks me in the face, then Charity.

  His jaw sags open, and he drops to his knees. His voice comes out as barely more than a whisper.

  “Saria?”

  Charity drops her head back into her hands.

  “Hello, Dimitri.”

  22. ANDERS

  I step out onto the porch, and quickly realize that I’ve missed some important developments while my nanos were cooking. Terry is there, leaning against the railing and looking like she just lost a fistfight with a polar bear. There’s a man there as well, on his knees in front of Charity. He looks to be worse off than Terry, if that’s possible, to the point that it takes me a long moment to recognize him as Dimitri—­which is weird, because while I’ve only met him once before, he was actively killing someone at the time, which I consider to be pretty memorable.

  “Wait,” Terry says, then turns and spits blood and phlegm over the railing. “This is Saria? Your Saria?”

  I touch her hand. She flinches away, then leans gingerly into me and pulls my arm around her shoulder.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I got thrown out of a third-­story window,” Terry says. “Don’t ask.”

  “So,” Charity says. “I guess I should explain a few things.”

  “Hey,” says Gary. “Do you guys know each other?”

  Charity sighs.

  “You remember I said my ex-­boyfriend was with NatSec?”

  “Yeah,” Gary says, “but I thought this guy was Terry’s ex-­boyfriend.”

  “He’s not,” says Terry.

  “I don’t know what he’s been up to lately,” Charity says. “Dimitri and I haven’t seen each other in three years.”

  “We have not seen each other,” Dimitri says, “because you were dead, Saria.”

  Gary looks back and forth between them.

  “Charity?” I ask. “Why is he calling you Saria?”

  She sighs again, much more deeply.

  “Because that’s my name, Anders. Who really names their kid Charity?”

  “Chris­tians and strippers, I think,” says Gary. Charity and Dimitri both glare at him, and he shrinks back into his chair.

  “You were dead,” Dimitri says. “Why are you not dead now?”

  Charity leans back wearily, and closes her eyes.

  “Look, Dimitri. I couldn’t keep doing what we were doing. I had to get out, and you know how the company is. The only way you leave is in a box.”

&
nbsp; “How have you . . .”

  “I had some help from our mutual friend.”

  Dimitri looks down at his hands where they rest in his lap.

  “Three years, Saria. I was broken. You could not have given me a hint?”

  “No, Dimitri.” Her voice is gentle, but her face is a blank mask. “You were NatSec to the marrow. Anything you knew, the company would know. Which actually raises an interesting question.” She looks now to Elise. “Why the fuck did you bring him here?”

  “I told you, I had to,” says Elise. “He’s Terry’s friend, and he was in trouble.”

  “Have no fear,” Dimitri says. “I will not be contacting NatSec. I have been burned, Saria. I am a ghost now, like you.” He looks up into Charity’s eyes, and then climbs unsteadily to his feet. He offers her his hand. “Both dead or both alive, we are the same now. Perhaps we can be together again, in exile?”

  Through the blood and the bruises, Dimitri’s face wears the ghost of a smile. It falters, though, when Charity looks up at him.

  “Dimitri,” she says slowly. “No. We had some fun, but it was already over before I left. This whole crazy-­serious undying love thing that you do? Not. My. Bag.”

  “While you process that,” Gary says, “I would like to emphasize that this is entirely between the two of you, and that I have in no way, shape, or form stolen your girlfriend.”

  Charity scowls, and slaps the back of his head.

  “Hey,” he says. “I’m just trying to limit myself to one crowbar a day, okay?”

  Dimitri turns away. The look on his face hovers just on the border of heartbreaking and terrifying. I clear my throat.

  “Hey,” I say. “Just so everyone knows, soup’s on. Dimitri, it’s actually good that you’re here, I think. We’ve got something to show you.”

  I’m a little nervous about showing Dimitri the nano-­fabricator. Gary was right. These things are very tightly controlled, and I’m fairly confident that this one is off the books. His eyes narrow slightly when he sees it, but other than that, his face betrays nothing. I touch the screen, and call up the batch display. Terry hovers close beside me. Inchy, Tariq, and Elise are back against the far wall, and Charity stands beside Dimitri with her arms crossed over her chest. Gary edges around them to join Inchy.

  “So, here it is,” I say. “This is a real-­time view of the sample from the integrated electron microscope.” I step back, and give them a view of the screen. It shows a mass of spheres. They move randomly through the frame, occasionally bouncing off of one another. In among them, though, are other shapes. These are far fewer, larger, and more irregular.

  “See the balls?” I continue. “Those are what should have been produced. They’re temperature-­sensitive cages, with serotonin inside. Those other things, though—­they’re not supposed to be there. They look a bit like big viruses, but their mass is much higher than you’d expect from a biological. I’m guessing these are what the crypted code tacked onto the configuration file is producing.”

  “I thought we’d decided that Hagerstown couldn’t have been a virus,” Gary says.

  “I didn’t say these are viruses,” I say. “I said the protein coat we can see looks like what you’d see on a virus. That’s just the delivery mechanism. I’d be willing to bet that these things bind to cells like a virus, but what’s inside them is definitely not RNA.”

  “Okay,” Terry says. “So how do we figure out what’s inside?”

  “For that,” I say, “we need the trigger. Inchy—­can you duplicate what Terry’s avatar did with Doug’s comm system this afternoon?”

  “I think so,” says Inchy. “I mean, it seemed pretty simple. Just a carrier wave, starting at audio frequencies and rising up to a few terahertz. Want me to do it now?”

  “No,” says Gary. “I’ve got those things in my belly, right?”

  “Ah,” I say. “Good point. Any BrainBump fans should probably go out on the porch before we start this little experiment. This building is totally RF-­isolated. You should be safe out there as long as you remember to shut the door.”

  Gary scurries out and slams the door behind him.

  “Anyone else?” I ask.

  Heads shake all around.

  “Okay, Inchy,” I say. “Show us what’s behind the curtain.”

  Nothing happens at first, but then Dimitri flinches. Apparently he’s got internals that can pick up the signal Inchy’s pushing. Nobody else reacts. I keep my eyes on the screen. Nothing happens.

  “Hey Inch,” I say. “Are you sure . . .”

  But by then the irregular shapes on the screen are breaking up, and something is emerging from inside of them. Each becomes the center of an expanding star, with filaments spreading out in every direction. The spines grow rapidly, and within a few seconds I have to tap the controls to reduce magnification. I have to reduce the mag twice more before they stabilize. By that time, the buckyballs are no longer visible. All that’s left are the former viruses, looking now like a field of sea urchins, spines as fine as spider silk at this resolution.

  “Okay,” says Charity. “What the hell are those?”

  “Not sure,” I say. I check the screen resolution. “They’re about half a millimeter in diameter, though. The spines are metallic, just a ­couple of atoms thick. Looks like they were curled up tight inside the protein coats, waiting for the trigger signal.”

  “They started unraveling right around two terahertz,” says Inch.

  I stare at the screen, and try to imagine myself designing something like this. No room for actuators. No room for a power supply, and no access to external power. Nothing but the material itself, and the signal . . .

  “Okay, I think I get it,” I say finally. “You make the spines from two layers of metallic ions, conditioned such that they expand differentially under the influence of an EM signal.”

  “Right,” says Inch. “Roll them up and put them inside a protein coat that’ll bind to cells in the GI tract. They get dumped into the cells, but don’t actually do any damage until they’re exposed to the trigger. Clever.”

  “Holy shit,” says Charity. “Get enough of those popping out inside the lining of your esophagus, your stomach, your intestines, and . . .”

  “Rip your guts right out of you,” I say. “I think we have a winner.”

  We watch the screen in silence. The spines are almost pretty at this resolution, bouncing off of each other like tumbleweeds in a breeze.

  “How did this happen?” Terry asks finally. “How did nobody at BrainBump pick up that this shit was in their product?”

  “Their production and quality-­control avatars were suborned,” says Dimitri. “By a rogue avatar calling itself Argyle Dragon, apparently.”

  “Wait,” says Inch. “How do you know that?”

  “My house avatar told him,” Terry says. “Right before he blew up my house.”

  “You’re sure she said Argyle Dragon?”

  Dimitri nods.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Inch says, “I have a lynch mob to organize.”

  His eyes roll back in his head, and he drops to the floor like a marionette whose strings have been cut. He looks like Doug again.

  Well, an extremely dead Doug, anyway.

  “So,” says Terry. “What now?”

  I shrug.

  “Dunno. I was hoping Dimitri would have some ideas, actually. I’d guess NatSec can shut down BrainBump production and sales pretty quickly, but obviously a lot of this stuff is already out there.”

  Terry nods.

  “That’s true, but if nobody knows how to trigger it . . .”

  Her voice trails off, and she glances quickly at Dimitri.

  “You all know how to trigger it,” he says quietly.

  23. TERRY

  Dimitri grimaces in pain as he takes two steps back. He un
zips his jacket, and suddenly it occurs to me that maybe I’m going to die today after all. I open my mouth to say . . . something . . . but before I can make a sound, he’s drawn a weapon. Tariq lunges into Elise, knocks her to the ground. Dimitri fires and Tariq drops soundlessly, blood spurting from a ragged hole where his left eye was an instant before. Charity rounds on Dimitri, but Anders is a blur . . .

  24. ELISE

  Dimitri steps back, pulls a gun from his jacket. Tariq crashes into me. I drop to the floor. Dimitri fires, and I look up to see Tariq slammed back against the kitchen wall. I reach for him as he slides to the floor. His right eye is open and staring and I think at first that he’s okay, that maybe Aaliyah can fix him again. But then his head lolls toward me, and I see the hole where his left eye should be. He sags limply into me . . .

  25. ANDERS

  Tariq is down. Elise is down. Three steps. The barrel turns slowly toward me. Two steps. Dimitri’s eyes widen. He didn’t know about me. One step. He’s faster than I would have guessed, too—­but not fast enough. I slap the weapon aside and crash into him . . .

  26. TERRY

  Dimitri is fast, but Anders is faster. He slaps the gun aside just as it discharges. The shot catches Charity squarely in the chest. Anders crashes into Dimitri, and they go down in a tangle with Anders on top. Charity drops to her knees beside them, one hand over the wound, the other reaching out for balance. Her eyes are wide, and a trickle of blood runs from her mouth. Anders has Dimitri’s right wrist in his left hand, but Dimitri smashes his forehead into Anders’ face. Blood spurts. Anders cries out, and Dimitri throws him aside . . .

  27. ELISE

  Anders and Dimitri are tangled on the kitchen floor. Charity falls to her knees beside them.

  Tariq . . .