by Eliot Peper
Fear curdled in her gut as Diana realized the truth in her own words. “They’ll send drones to intercept us if they figure out what plane we’ve taken, use all their feed surveillance privileges to find us if we hide, and have everyone from local cops to the CIA trying to pin us down.”
“We should be able to revoke those privileges, right?” asked Dag. “Can’t we turn the feed back on and then carve out whatever capacities they’re using to track us? Their drones don’t work, their spy satellites don’t work, their weapons don’t work, but everything else goes back to normal?”
Javier was shaking his head. “That’s theoretically possible, but we’ll never be able to pull it off. The problem is time. If we had a week or so, we could have an engineering team figure out exactly how to specify and revoke those individual access privileges without screwing up a host of connected systems. It would be breaking a thousand laws and contracts, but it could work. But if they’re going to swarm us the minute we flip the switch, they’ll catch us before we can figure out how to turn off only their gear. We’d have to turn the whole feed off again.”
“No.” Rachel’s statement was solid granite.
Javier grimaced. “Right, so . . .”
“Whatever we try to tell the world, Helen will undercut it with spin,” said Diana, her underarms suddenly damp. Facts might be facts, but truth was relative. “If the feed is all or nothing, then we have to fight her on an even playing field. She isn’t omnipotent, but she has people in most major institutions. That includes Commonwealth. She had me cultivating inside sources, and she must have some of her own that she’s grooming to take over after you take the fall. That’s enough of a coalition to obscure our message while she solidifies her position. It’ll be a hot mess, and the confusion benefits her, not us.” The fire popped and she flinched. “With allegations this severe, she’ll find a way to step in until they’re cleared, and once she does, it’s over. She’ll lose the element of surprise once we tell the world what’s going on, but if I know one thing about Helen, she’s in it for the long game.”
The CFO ran his hands through his thinning hair. “So first you tell us we have to pull this crazy maneuver. And now you’re telling us we’re fucked either way.”
He was right. They were fucked either way. She should have seen this coming from the beginning, but some part of her must have never quite believed they would get this far to begin with. Bile rose in her throat.
Hsu frowned. “I can back-channel Helen’s ulterior motives so that other governments will be prepared, whatever the news reports say.”
“How long will those channels survive a smear campaign?” asked Dag. “And even if they do, how many governments will invest the billions necessary in developing parallel infrastructure to reduce their feed dependency?”
None of them. They’d all politely thank Hsu for his warning and proceed to ignore it. And with all of them painted as traitors, claiming they were being framed would come across as blatantly self-serving. Diana could already see the sneer hidden within Helen’s too-sweet smile, could already hear the whiplash of passive aggression in the heartfelt apology she would doubtless offer after the tribunal condemned Diana. At least that was if she didn’t play things simple and just make sure Diana disappeared.
“This is politics.” Hsu shrugged. “There are never any clear-cut answers. No matter what we come up with around this table, Helen is still going to do everything she can to get her way. We just have to be smarter and work harder.”
Diana remembered long nights spent poring over plans in Helen’s office, the scent of her perfume and stale coffee mixing into a strange olfactory cocktail that Diana would forever associate with preoperation anxiety. That anxiety always seemed to evaporate once Diana’s boots hit the ground, but it could appear out of nowhere to ambush her at the most inopportune times. The instant panic professionals had to anticipate and mitigate if they were going to survive to work another job.
Now that the physical exertion was over, Hsu looked relaxed, almost as if he were enjoying himself. This was his milieu after all, the court intrigue that coalesced around power’s choke points. Diana took a deep breath, trying to channel his composure. Right now, after the adrenaline of the chase had ebbed, was the time when panic was most insidious. It leaked into your head as the clarity of action faded, poisoned your thoughts, and sapped your strength. She needed to calm down. Nobody ever held all the cards.
Not even Helen.
Even if she were to establish an empire, it would be far from perfect. Ironically, poorer nations were less at risk than richer ones. Those with the least advanced tech were least dependent on the feed. Their lack of modern infrastructure was a strength if modern infrastructure could be remotely hijacked. And rich countries might be hit the hardest, but they also had the resources and expertise to mount an opposition, whether that meant building independent infrastructure to compete with the feed or ousting Helen. She might conquer the world, but could she keep it? The harder she pressed for concessions or tribute, the hotter the flame of rebellion would burn.
Every tyrant and every revolutionary dreamed of an end to history, a defining triumph that would forever fix a broken world. But reality was far messier than any manifesto could capture. History didn’t end. It swung on its axis and came back to bite you in the ass.
That said, even an incomplete or passing victory was a death sentence for those in this room and would send ripples of suffering far beyond it. In the very big picture, it might not matter. But in the very big picture, a city reduced to rubble, a nation torn apart, a family broken, a life snuffed out, none of those things mattered. Which was why Diana didn’t hold much stock in such bullshit generalities. Life mattered because life mattered. If she wasn’t helping to stop the kinds of things she’d had to suffer, then she was the failure she feared herself to be.
She raised her eyes.
“I need to get to DC,” she said. “I need to talk to the president before Helen can.”
“What?” The palpable concern in Dag’s voice was almost more than she could take. “Why?”
“If I can convince Lopez that Helen is playing him, it’ll wreak havoc on her ability to get anything done,” she said. “Even if I can just plant a seed of doubt, she’ll be thrown way off her game. It’ll give all of us the advantage we need to actually execute this plan.”
Hsu nodded slowly.
“What are you going to do?” asked Liane. “Just walk up to the White House?”
“I’ll figure something out,” said Diana. “It’s hard to keep me from getting where I want to go.”
“You could cycle down to SFO,” said Javier. “We can get you on a private jet, turn the feed on, and have you in the air and over to Washington before anyone else can make the trip.”
Diana grimaced. “That means Helen will have hours to conference with him over feed and kick off whatever she’s planning before I arrive.”
Rachel narrowed her eye. “Once we turn the feed back on, I can open a direct line to the president. You can talk to him over feed, do whatever convincing you need to do right away.”
“Helen will call him the minute the feed comes back on,” said Diana. Every turn led to a dead end. “There’s no way we’ll get him to pay attention to me, especially when he finds out I’m helping presumed traitors. Helen will burn my credibility in a heartbeat, and we’ll be back to square one.”
Javier held up his hands. “Which poison do you prefer? You can’t sprint from here to Washington.”
Diana restrained the urge to punch him in the face. If she physically flew there, she’d arrive late but might have a better chance of getting heard. If she called in via feed, there wouldn’t be a delay, but it would be easy to shut her up. Both were bad options. But she’d have to choose one and start prepping her pitch. At least it might give Lopez pause and buy them some time.
Nell leaned in to fill Diana’s coffee. “Did you say you need to get to DC before the feed comes back on?”
>
“That’s right.”
Nell placed the jug of coffee on the table, produced a pen from a hidden pocket, and began scribbling on Diana’s napkin, mumbling under her breath. As she flipped the napkin over to use the reverse side, Diana saw complex calculations scrawled across the flimsy paper.
Nell chewed on the end of the pen, unfolded the napkin so she could see both sides, and waggled her head back and forth. Then she looked up, and Diana couldn’t tell if the fire dancing in her eyes was a reflection of the hearth or blazed forth from some internal source.
“Did whatever training they gave you for your, ahh, professional development involve aviation?” she asked, arching an impossibly elegant eyebrow.
“Oh, I’m aces in a cockpit,” said Diana, wondering how much Nell knew about her background. “Top gun. Flygirl. The whole nine yards.”
“I can get you there,” said Nell matter-of-factly.
CHAPTER 38
It was Diana’s second bicycle ride of the day. She pedaled along behind Nell, weaving through the dead cars that filled the streets of San Francisco, making the city look like a giant diorama. Scared faces stared down from dark windows, but many residents had taken to the streets, trading rumors with neighbors they’d rarely had cause to interact with before. In front of a squat apartment building, someone had set up a charcoal barbecue, and the mouthwatering smell of grilled meat was attracting people like moths to a lamp. A street performer played violin on a corner, earning what must have been the largest crowd of her career. It took Diana a moment to register what was odd about the crowds, but finally it clicked. They were weirdly heterogeneous. Bankers, kindergarteners, lawyers, house husbands, artists, teachers, courtesans, engineers, therapists, county clerks, doctors, and baristas united in common confusion at the miraculous and frightening lack of feed.
The thick scent of brine enveloped them as they reached the bay. A small private harbor was tucked between two of the piers, pleasure yachts and speedboats rocking gently in their berths. More boats. Diana was sick and tired of boats. If only there was solid ground to stand on anymore.
Nell pulled up and tried the gate.
“Damn,” she said. “Looks like this one defaulted to stay locked without the feed. Give me a hand?”
Diana dismounted and boosted Nell up and over the fence. Diana collected the briefcase from the basket, passed it over to Nell, and then followed her over the fence, chain links cold against her fingers. Seals barked up at them as they walked out along the dock, the animals’ slick hides and blubbery bulk reminding Diana of some of the old sketches Dag had shown her, split panels featuring spectacularly diverse marine life under the waves while the land above was a ravaged waste.
She had always found the fantasy a little odd. If anything, ocean biodiversity had plummeted faster than its terrestrial equivalent with acidification and dead reefs pushing ecosystems over the edge. Apex predators like sharks were all but extinct. Seals were doing okay, especially the ones near urban centers that supplemented fish with human scraps. Maybe he had been depicting one of the marine protected areas where sea life was reestablishing itself faster than anyone had expected. More likely she was taking the whole thing far too literally, and the juxtaposition said more about the subsurface motivations that drove people to destructive acts than about actual fish.
How strange a person Dag was. Brokering secret deals, undergoing commando training in Namibia, and now finding his sensibility as an artist, weaving together disparate ideas, conflicting themes, and a wide palette of styles into a counterintuitively cohesive whole that created more of an emotional impact than an intellectual one. He was so damn weird and marvelous all at once. That look he’d given her when they made it out of the emergency stairwell. The concern in his voice when she’d stated her intention to go straight into the belly of the beast and seek out Lopez. In their hours of planning on the flight down from the Arctic, everything had been coldly professional, two fugitives orchestrating a last-ditch maneuver where teamwork was a matter of survival. She’d assumed that he hated her, that any relationship they once shared would end with their gambit. But if they somehow made it out of this mess, might something more be possible?
“This is she,” said Nell, kneeling to untie the lines of a thirty-foot sailboat. They hopped on board, and Nell adjusted various knots, checked the rigging, and raised the sails. “We’re lucky, it usually calms down at this point in the day, but we’ve still got a good west wind blowing.”
With Nell at the helm, the little boat zigzagged out of the docks and into the open bay, tilting at an angle as it picked up speed. Afternoon sunlight turned the water to liquid amber, the dark hulks of frozen container ships throwing shadows across the waves lapping at their gargantuan hulls.
“They’re almost like islands, aren’t they?” asked Nell. “Going from state of the art to derelict in the blink of an eye. There’s a certain beauty there. Like those colored sand mandalas Buddhist monks create and wipe away. A reminder of impermanence.”
Diana looked back at Nell. Wind whipped at her hair, white water of the cresting waves matched her light-gray eyes, and the sun made her umber skin appear to glow from within. She was comfortable here on this boat, self-possessed, unconcerned, or at least not terrified by the crisis that had short-circuited the entire planet.
“How did you know I could fly?” asked Diana.
Those beautiful gray eyes settled on her.
“Duck,” said Nell.
“What?”
“Duck, we’re jibing.”
Diana ducked just in time for the boom to swing across above her head. The boat settled into its new line.
“It took me more than fifteen years to earn my place as Analog’s receptionist,” said Nell. “I knew I wanted it from the beginning. There were others that did too, but they dropped off along the way, got distracted, moved on to other adventures. Receptionist. One who receives. Not usually a particularly sought-after position, right? Not a career most people dream of? That’s why Analog’s current owner always serves as its receptionist, passing the role along to whoever takes over when they retire. You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat the receptionist, how they act when they don’t think they’re performing. Duck.”
Diana was quicker this time.
“We’re a club, not a bar,” said Nell. “Everything depends on our community of members. That means we need to keep that community strong and healthy and vibrant and diverse and a little off kilter. Otherwise things go sideways. The rolls are deeper than you might have heard. Over the years we’ve had members who were heads of state, subversive poets, public intellectuals, Olympic athletes, leading technologists, business moguls, graffiti artists, and Nobel Prize winners. We’ve hosted everyone from Mara Winkel to Huian Li. There are a lot of . . . personalities. You learn to read people pretty quickly. Duck.”
Across came the boom.
“So one day you wander in, so unassuming you made it a kind of art form. The thing that initially piqued my interest was just how little I could actually remember about you. It was hard to remember what you looked like, how you spoke, or why you were there. So I started paying more attention. You met with all different sorts of people. Hackers, lawyers, government officials, pianists, a much broader social array than most folks, except maybe journalists. But you weren’t a journalist. And you weren’t anything else either. And in all the little conversations we’ve shared, it’s incredible how few personal details you’ve let slip. Never in an awkward way, everything just seemed to move around you like you were the center of gravity in a dance that you were observing but not participating in. I talked to the retired owner about it, but I already knew. We’ve had spies as members before. Duck.”
Another jibe.
“I saw how good you were,” said Nell. “That’s why I guessed you might have trained as a pilot. But that’s the wrong question.”
Diana let out a long breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. It was as if Nell w
ere undressing her, clothing peeled away with tender care and then tossed crumpled on the floor.
“Why are you helping me?”
Nell released the helm and clapped her hands.
“Much better!” She reached over and squeezed Diana’s thigh. “I’m helping you because you’re a good person, Diana. People in your position”—she shook her head sadly—“you put yourselves through a lot, put others through a lot. When you transform yourself into so many people for so many people, it must be easy to lose yourself, to forget what it means to just be you, to believe that you have anything real left inside.”
“It’s because of the Akira reprints, isn’t it?” Diana twisted her mouth into a smile to cover her inner turmoil.
Nell laughed. “Jorani is so obsessed with those comic books. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to rescue her from them.”
“I’m telling you,” said Diana. “You should give them a try yourself. They’re really good.”
“I’m worried I’d like them too much,” said Nell. “That’s what keeps me away.”
She gave Diana’s thigh one more squeeze. The pressure transmitted a frisson of empathy that Diana was at once terrified and fascinated by, a hint of kinship that bled all the way through the growing network of cracks in her layers of burnished armor.
Then Nell’s eyes flicked up with a soft “Oh.”
A peregrine falcon rocketed down slantwise through the golden air, descending in a murderous dive toward a pigeon that was attempting to flee across the open water. The falcon went in for the kill. Missed. Raised its wings in powerful flaps to regain altitude. Dove again. Missed again. Ascended again and finally struck true, then soared off to devour the prize held fast in its talons.
You were the center of gravity in a dance that you were observing but not participating in. The bloody aerial ballet sucked Diana in. She wanted to be able to look down on everything from a safe vantage, to catch thermals as she noted every nuance and detail of the creatures cavorting below, to be a watcher who could strike with deadly precision. Peregrines were a particularly good example of raptors’ resilience. Unlike the sharks in Dag’s drawings, these graceful airborne assassins thrived in an anthropogenic world where skyscrapers were their cliffs and street pigeons their quarry. Peregrine populations were higher in urban centers than they had ever been in the wild. Cities were a counterintuitively ideal habitat. Diana realized that deep inside she was still a little girl wishing she could rise above the fray of a failing state.