Fraction was sitting in one of the leather armchairs, chatting with Miranda who leaned on the bar counter at the back. Both greeted Gennady warmly as he walked in.
“How are you doing, Gennady?” Fraction asked. “Is Oversatch agreeing with you?”
Gennady had to smile at his wording. “Well enough,” he said.
“Are you ready to take it to the next level?”
Warily, Gennady moved to stand behind the long room’s other armchair. “What do you mean?”
Fraction leaned forward eagerly. “A door to Cilenia is about to open,” he said. “We have the opportunity to go through it, but we’ll have to leave tonight.”
“We?” Gennady frowned at him. “Didn’t you tell us that you were from Cilenia?”
“From, yes,” said the cyranoid. “But not in. I want to get back there for my own reasons. Miranda needs to find her son; you need to find your plutonium. Everybody wins here.”
Gennady decided not to say that he had already found the plutonium. “What does it involve?”
“Nothing,” said Fraction, steepling his fingers and looking over them at Gennady. “Just be in your room at two o’clock. And make sure the door is closed.”
After that cryptic instruction, Fraction said a few more pleasantries and then left. Miranda had come to sit down, and Gennady only realized that he was still standing, holding tightly to the back of the chair, when she said, “Are you all right?”
“They found the plutonium,” he blurted.
Her eyes widened; then she looked down. “So I guess you’ll be leaving, then.”
He made himself sit down across from her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t . . . want to leave you alone to face whatever Cilenia is.”
“My white knight,” she said with a laugh, but he could tell she was pleased.
“Well, it’s not just that.” He twined his hands together, debating with himself how to say it. “This is the first time I’ve ever been involved with a . . . project that . . . made something. My whole career, I’ve been cleaning up after the messes left by the previous generation. Chernobyl, Hanford—all the big and little accidents. The rest of it, you know, consumer culture and TV and movies and games . . . I just had no time for them. Well, except the games. But I never bought stuff, you know? And our whole culture is about stuff. But I was never a radical environmentalist, a, what-do-you-call it? Treehugger. Not a back-to-the-lander, because there’s no safe land to go back to, if we don’t clean up the mess. So I’ve lived in limbo for many years, and never knew it.”
Now he looked her in the eye. “There’s more going on with Oversatch than just a complicated game of tax evasion, isn’t there? The people who’re doing this, they’re saying that there really can be more than one world, in the same place, at the same time. That you can walk out of the twenty-first century without having to become a farmer or mountain man. And they’re building that parallel world.”
“It’s the first,” she admitted, “but obviously not the last. Cilenia must be like Oversatch, only even more self-contained. A world within a world.” She shook her head. “At first I didn’t know why Jake would have gone there. But he was always like you—not really committed to this world, but unwilling to take any of the easy alternatives. I could never see him joining a cult, that was the point.”
Gennady glanced around. “Is this a cult?” he asked. But she shook her head.
“They’ve never asked us to believe in anything,” she said. “They’ve just unlocked doors for us, one after another. And now they’ve unlocked another one.” She grinned. “Aren’t you just the tiniest bit curious about what’s on the other side?”
He didn’t answer her, but at two o’clock he was waiting in his room with the door closed. He’d tried reading a book and listening to music, but the time dragged and in the end he just waited, feeling less and less sure of all of this every second.
When something huge landed with a crash on the shipping container, Gennady jumped to his feet and ran to the door—but it was already too late. With a nauseating swaying motion, his room was lofted into the air with him in it and, just as he was getting his sea legs on the moving surface, the unseen crane deposited his container somewhere else, with a solid thump.
His door was locked from the outside. By the time it was opened, hours later, he had resigned himself to starving or running out of air in here, for by that time the container ship Akira was well under way.
So he lay with his eyes closed, feeling the slow rise and fall of the ship around him. Behind his own eyelids was an attractor that he needed to subside into, at least for a while.
Eventually there was an insistent chirp from beside his bed. Gennady reached for the glasses without thinking, then hesitated. Mumbling a faint curse, he put them on.
Oversatch sprang up all around: a vast, intricate glowing city visible through the walls of the shipping container. Today’s map of the world was all crowded over in the direction of China; he’d find out why later. For now, he damped down the flood of detail and when it was just a faint radiance and a murmur, he rose and left his room.
His was one of many modified shipping containers stacked aboard the Akira. In Oversatch terms, the containers were called packets. Most packets had doors that were invisible from outside, so that when they were stacked next to one another you could walk between them without going on deck. Gennady’s packet was part of a row of ten such containers. Above and below were more levels, reachable through more doors in the ceilings and floors of some containers.
The packets would all be unloaded at their destination along with the legitimate containers. But in a rare venture into illegal operations, Oversatch had hacked the global container routing system. Officially, Oversatch’s shipping containers didn’t even exist. Off-loaded from one ship, they would sooner or later end up on another and be routed somewhere else, just like the information packets in an internet. They bounced eternally through the system, never reaching a destination, but constantly meeting up and merging to form temporary complexes like this one, then dissolving to recombine in new forms somewhere else. Together they formed Oversatch’s capital city—a city in perpetual motion, constantly reconfiguring itself, and at any one time nearly all of it in international waters.
The shipping container where the plutonium was stowed wasn’t part of this complex. You couldn’t get there from here; in fact, you couldn’t get there at all. Gennady had skulked on deck his first night on board, and found the contraband container way up near the top of a stack. It was a good thirty feet above him and it took him ten minutes to climb precariously up to it. His heart was pounding when he got there. In the dark, with the slow sway of the ship and the unpredictable breeze, what if he fell? He’d inspected the thing’s door, but it was sealed. The containers around it all had simple inspection seals on them: they were empty.
He hadn’t tried to climb up to it again, but he kept an eye on it.
Now he passed lounges, diners, chemical toilets and work areas as he negotiated the maze of Oversatch containers. Some Swedes on their way to a holiday in Canada waved and shouted his name; they were clearly a few drinks into their day, and he just grinned and kept going. Many of the other people he passed were sitting silently in comfortable lounge chairs. They were working, and he didn’t disturb them.
He found his usual workstation, but Miranda’s, which was next to his, was empty. Another woman sat nearby, sipping a beer and having an animated conversation with the blank wall.
Somewhere, maybe on the far side of the world, somebody else was waving their hands, and speaking this woman’s words. She was riding and that distant person was her cyranoid.
Yesterday Miranda and Gennady had visited a bus station in Chicago. Both were riding cyranoids, but Miranda was so much better at it than Gennady. His upper body was bathed with infrared laser light, allowing the system to read his posture, gestures, even fine finger motions, and transmit them to the person on the other end. For Gennady, th
e experience was just like moving an avatar in a game world. The physical skills needed to interpret the system’s commands lay with the cyranoid, so in that sense, Gennady had it easy.
But he had to meet new people on an hour-by-hour basis, and even though he was hiding thousands of miles away from that point of contact, each new encounter made his stomach knot up.
At the bus depot he and Miranda had done what countless pimps, church recruiters and sexual predators had done for generations: they looked for any solitary young people who might exit the buses. There was a particular set to the shoulders, an expression he was learning to read: it was the fear of being alone in the big city.
The cyranoids he and Miranda rode were very respectable-looking people. Together or separately, they would approach these uncertain youths, and offer them work. Oversatch was recruiting.
The results were amazing. Take one insecure eighteen-year-old with no skills or social connections. Teach him to be a cyranoid. Then dress him in a nice suit and send him into the downtown core of a big city. In one day he could be ridden by a confident and experienced auditor, a private investigator, a savvy salesman and a hospital architecture consultant. He could attend meetings, write up reports, drive from contact to contact and shift identities many times on the way. All he had to do was recite the words that flowed into his ears and follow the instructions of his haptic interface. Each of the professionals who rode him could build their networks and attend to business there and, through other cyranoids, in many different cities in one day. And by simple observation the kid could learn tremendous amounts about the internals of business and government.
Gennady was cultivating his own network of cyranoids to do routine checks at nuclear waste repositories around the world. These young people needed certification, so he and Oversatch were sponsoring them in schools. While they weren’t at school Gennady would ride them out to waste sites where they acted as representatives for a legitimate consulting company he had set up under his own name. His name had a certain cachet in these circles, so the six young men and three women had a foot in the door already. Since he was riding them they displayed uncanny skill at finding problems at the sites. All were rapidly blossoming.
He sat down under the invisible laser bath and prepared to call up his students. At that moment the ship gave a slight lurch—a tiny motion, but the engineer in Gennady instantly calculated the quantity of energy that must have gone through the vessel. It was a lot.
Now he noticed that the room was swaying slowly. The Akira rarely did that because not only was it huge to begin with, it also had stabilizing gyroscopes. “Did you feel that?” he said to the woman next to him.
She glanced over, touching the pause button on her rig, and said, “What?”
“Never mind.” He called up the hack that fed the ship’s vital statistics to Oversatch. They were in the Chukchi Sea, with Russia to starboard and Alaska to port. Gennady had been asleep when the Akira crossed the north pole, but apparently there hadn’t been much to see, since the open Arctic Ocean had been fogbound. Now, though, a vicious storm was piling out of the East Siberian Sea. The video feed showed bruised, roiling skies and a sea of giant, white-crowned pyramidal waves. Amazing he hadn’t felt it before. Chatter on the ship’s comm was cautious but bored, because such storms were apparently as regular as clockwork in the new ice-free arctic shipping lanes. This one was right on schedule, but the ship intended to just bull its way through it.
Gennady made a mental note to go topside and see the tempest for himself. But just as he was settling back in his seat, the door flew open and Miranda ran in.
She reached to grab his hands, stopped, and said, “Are you riding?”
“No, I—” She hauled him to his feet.
“I saw him! Gennady, I saw Jake!”
The deck slowly tilted, then righted itself as Gennady and Miranda put their hands to the wall. “Your son? You saw him here?”
She shook her head. “No, not here. And I didn’t exactly see him. I mean, oh, come on, sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”
They sat well away from the riding woman. The shipping container was very narrow so their knees almost touched. Miranda leaned forward, clasping her hands and beaming. “It was in Sao Paolo. You know Oversatch has been sponsoring me to attend conferences, so I was riding a local cyranoid at an international symposium on vanishing rain forest cultures. We were off in an English breakaway session with about ten other people, some of whom I knew—but of course I was pretending to be a postdoc from Brasilia, or rather my cyranoid was—you know what I mean. Anyway, they didn’t know me. But there was one young guy . . . Every time he talked I got the strangest feeling. Something about the words he chose, the rhythm, even the gestures . . . and he was noticing me, too.
“About half an hour in he caught my eye, and then leaned forward quite deliberately to write something on the pad of paper he was using. It was so low-tech; a lot of us had noticed he was using it but nobody’d said anything. But at the end of the session when everybody was standing up, he caught my eye again, and then he balled up the paper and threw it in a trash can on the way out. I lost him in the between-session crowd, so I went back and retrieved the paper.”
“What did it say?”
To his surprise, she took off her glasses and set them down. After a moment, Gennady did the same. Miranda handed him her notebook, which he hadn’t seen since the first day they met.
“I’ve been keeping notes in this,” she whispered, “outside the glasses. Just in case what we do or say is being tracked. Anyway, I had to snapshot the paper through my cyranoid, but as soon as I could I downloaded the image and deleted the original out of my glasses. This is what was on the paper.”
Gennady looked. It said:
Cilenia, 64° 58' N, 168° 58' W.
Below this was a little scrawled stick figure with one hand raised. “That,” said Miranda, pointing at it. “Jake used to draw those as a kid. I’d recognize it anywhere.”
“Jake was riding cyranoid on the man in your session?” Gennady sat back, thinking. “Let me check something.” He put his glasses on and polled the ship’s network again. “Those numbers,” he said, “if they’re longitude and latitude, then that’s almost exactly where we are now.”
She frowned, and said, “But how could that be? Was he saying Cilenia is some sort of underwater city? That’s impossible.”
Gennady stood up suddenly. “I think he’s saying something else. Come on.” The unpredictable sway of the ship had gotten larger. He and Miranda staggered from wall to wall like drunkards as they left the room and entered one of the lengthwise corridors that transected the row of packets. They passed other workers doing the same, and the Swedes had given up their partying and were all sitting silently, looking slightly green.
“I’ve been checking on the, uh, other cargo,” said Gennady as they passed someone, “every day. If it’s bound for Vancouver there’ll be a whole platoon of Mounties waiting for it. That had me wondering if they wouldn’t try to unload it en route.”
“Makes sense,” called Miranda. She was starting to fall behind, and a distant rushing and booming sound was rising.
“Actually, it didn’t. It’s sealed and near the top of a stack—that’s where they transport the empties. But it’s not at the top, so even if you did a James Bond and flew over with a skycrane helicopter, you couldn’t just pluck it off the stack.”
They came to some stairs and he went up. Miranda puffed behind him. “Couldn’t they have a trick door?” she said. “Like in ours? Maybe it’s actually got inside access to another set of packets, just like ours but separate.”
“Yeah, I thought about that,” he said grimly. He headed up another flight, which dead-ended in an empty shipping container that would have looked perfectly normal if not for the stairwell in the middle of its floor. The only light up here was from a pair of LEDs on the wall, so Gennady put his hands out to move cautiously forward. He could hear the storm now, a sh
uddering roar that felt like it was coming from all sides.
“One problem with that theory,” he said as he found the inside latch to the rejigged container door. “There’s a reason why they put the empty containers on the top of the stack.” He pushed down on the latch.
“Gennady, I’ve got a call,” said Miranda. “It’s you! What—” The bellow of the storm drowned whatever else she might have said.
The rain was falling sideways from charcoal-black clouds that seemed to be skipping off the ocean’s surface like thrown stones. There was nothing to see except blackness, whipping rain and slick metal decks lit intermittently by lightning flashes. One such flash revealed a hill of water heaving itself up next to the ship. Seconds later the entire ship pitched as the wave hit and Gennady nearly fell.
He hopped to the catwalk next to the door. They were high above the floor of the hold here, just at the level where the container stack poked above deck. It kept going a good forty feet more overhead. When Gennady glanced up he saw the black silhouette of the stack’s top swaying in a very unsettling manner.
He couldn’t see very well and could hear nothing at all over the storm. Gennady pulled out his glasses and put them on, then accessed the ship’s security cameras.
He couldn’t make out himself, but one camera on the superstructure showed him the whole field of container stacks. The corners of a couple of those stacks looked a bit ragged, like they’d been shaved.
He returned the glasses to his shirt pocket, but paused to insert the earbuds.
“Gennady, are you online?” It was Miranda’s voice.
“Here,” he said. “Like I said, there’s a reason they put the empties at the top. Apparently something like fifteen thousand shipping containers are lost overboard every year, mostly in storms like this. But most of them are empties.”
Year’s Best SF 16 Page 27