‘You’re saying that, let’s call them “general purpose” bioroids such as yourself are going to be uneconomic if legislation is passed to give you equality with humans?’
‘It’s possible that some way of reducing the issue would be possible, but yes. BioTek believes that there will be few of my “model” produced. By them at least. They have designs for far less humanlike life forms capable of bringing the scalable intelligence of a human to situations where humans would suffer ill effects, but where sufficiently powerful computers cannot be built into sufficiently useable cyberframes. There are some activities on Mars, for example, which could benefit from bioroids. Some orbital communities could benefit from bioroids engineered for low or microgravity.’
‘Okay,’ Resnik said, turning to look out at the audience and the cameras, ‘I think we’ve covered a lot of the political and social matters we need to here.’
‘The boring bullcrap,’ Iberson put in. ‘Do we get to do the interesting stuff next, Elaine, or should I ask Tara to shoot me now?’
‘Right after some important words from our sponsors, Charlie. We’ll be right back so that Charlie can ask our guests a few inappropriate questions.’
‘Can we ask Charlie how the wedding preparations are going?’ Fox asked, grinning.
Iberson sagged a little. ‘Just shoot me now.’
~~~
It was just before midnight when Naomi walked with Fox and Eve out of the studio and into the underground parking floor which served the media centre. There were two cars waiting: the one Fox had brought Eve there in, and a large limousine from the pool of cars the Sisters maintained at the chapter house. For whatever reason, the cordon of press representatives had been moved down into the reception area: Athena wanting more publicity seemed the most likely reason. There were uniformed Palladium security personnel keeping everyone back, but the dazzle of lights from cameras was considerable. Still, the threesome paused to let the photographers do their thing before getting into their transports.
‘How do you think it went?’ Eve asked. ‘It was my first nontechnical interview…’
‘I think it went quite well,’ Naomi replied. ‘You handled the questions well. You didn’t let Iberson provoke or embarrass you, though I think we had a little advantage since Fox seems to put the resident ice queen on the back foot a little. All in all–’
‘Hey!’ The shout cut off whatever Naomi had been about to say.
Fox turned, scanning around for whoever had shouted, but the glare from the cameras made it hard to see anything. She saw something moving, fast, cut in infrared and resolved a human body, but that seemed to be moving laterally… toward another figure which was far too close. She popped the clasp on her bag, moving between the figures and both Eve and Naomi.
‘The monster must die!’ One of them shrieked out the statement, just as they collided, falling together onto the concrete floor and rolling. Fox got her pistol out and used her bag to shade her eyes, and made a mental note to talk to Jackson about glare filters, and…
She saw one of the two jerk his arm up and in toward the other’s stomach. It was not quite right for a punch and the reaction was too extreme. The receiver of the strike jerked violently and then tried to curl up around the point of impact. His attacker, Fox thought they were both men, pulled back and reversed the grip on the knife he was holding before driving it down into his victim’s chest, lifting it and stabbing again. Then the man with the knife was pushing up, jumping over the fallen man and charging at the three women.
Fox fired off three rounds in rapid succession. The plastic slugs flattened against the man’s chest, each one pushing him back until he tripped over his fallen victim and fell onto his back on the concrete. Fox advanced toward him as he let out a growl of frustration and sat up. ‘I’ll kill you, b–’ The shout was cut off as Fox fired again, one round skating over the side of his skull, the second smacking him right between the eyes, and the third pancaking against the concrete as he went down hard. Fox kept walking at a steady pace, kicking away the fallen knife when she got to it and then crouching to check the man’s pulse.
‘I don’t… don’t know what to do!’ Eve’s voice behind Fox.
‘Here,’ Naomi said. ‘I want you to put pressure on this wound and…’
‘I want paramedics here ten minutes ago,’ Fox said over the security comms channel. ‘And then I want to know what the Hell just happened.’
‘I’m sorry, Eve,’ Naomi said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do for him. He’s gone.’
‘No!’ Eve said, more of a squeal. ‘No. He was trying to save… No, there has to be something…’
Fox turned. ‘There are paramedics on their way.’ Eve was kneeling beside the body of the stabbed man. Her hands and her dress were covered in blood. There was blood pooling around her knees. Naomi was just as badly coated. ‘They might be able to bring him back, Eve,’ Fox said, though from the looks of things, it was going to be a hard battle.
‘What about that one?’ Naomi asked, nodding at Fox’s victim.
‘He’s got a weak pulse. The medics will probably keep him alive.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Eve said. She was crying. She was kneeling over the body of her would-be protector and crying. ‘It’s not fair,’ she repeated, lifting blood-stained hands to cover her eyes.
‘No, it’s not,’ Fox said, though it was hard to hear her over the noise of dozens of reporters screaming out questions and the fake shutter noise of cameras taking pictures of death.
Part Two: The Death of the Old World
New York Metro, 23rd July 2061.
Fox watched the news streams as she stood under the water jets of the shower in her suite. It was fairly early on Saturday morning, not yet eight a.m., but that was late for Fox to be up and about. It would be a few hours yet before Eve was out of bed.
NAPA had turned up while the paramedics were working on the two men from the car park, and it seemed the cops were there primarily to be an annoyance. There was a lot of shouting about national security and terrorism, and that everyone had to be interviewed concerning the incident, and national security trumped Palladium’s right to police the building… And it had been a good thing that Naomi was there: it stopped Fox from shooting a NAPA inspector in the head.
What was becoming apparent from the news feeds was that the incident had not gone the way the man with the knife had intended, in a major way. Videos from the scene of the attack had appeared on the news channels within minutes, spreading to private sites as bloggers of various sorts saw them. By the time anyone had thought to recut the part which showed a blood-soaked Eve crying over a human corpse with the tag ‘Bioroid kills human,’ it was far too late: the real videos had received such extensive stream time that everyone had seen Naomi and Eve desperately trying, and failing, to save the man. The medics could do no better: too much blood loss, too much trauma, and he had been declared dead at the scene. His attacker had been luckier, in a way: the medics had saved him, but there was a lot of evidence of what he had done and, maybe excepting an insanity plea, he was going down for murder. Plus, he had created one martyr and made Eve look more human than almost any amount of chat show appearances were going to manage.
‘Do we have identities on these two yet?’ Fox asked inside her head.
‘The dead man has been identified as Jeremy Victor Tasker,’ Kit replied. ‘His reasons for acting in the manner he did are currently unknown. He was single with no living relatives and resides in an apartment block in Brooklyn. The other man is Alexander Musgrave, again single with no living relatives. Other than that, I have found out very little about him. I do not believe he is from New York. The last record of him is from the Kansas Belt where he spent two months working as a farmhand in twenty fifty-six.’
‘Check radical religious sites, humanist forums, uh, I’m sure you can think of a few other possibilities. The places fanatics hang out. This guy was willing to die to get to Eve.’
; ‘You believe this was a suicide mission? He did not expect to survive it?’
‘I don’t think he was worried about the possibility of death. He didn’t expect to get away, that’s for sure.’ Fox was silent for a second. ‘The surest way of assassinating someone is to do it at close range and to go in without any thought for your own survival. He messed up, got impatient, and that’s where we got lucky. Well, lucky might not be fair. We never gave him the opportunity to get in close and he didn’t have the skills to infiltrate our security.’
‘But that does not preclude the possibility that there is someone else who does have those skills.’
‘Nope. That’s why we’ll be increasing the security around Eve until this PR operation is finished.’
25th July.
‘I believe I have identified the reason Musgrave chose to attack Eve,’ Kit said. They were at home, in the apartment viron they shared, and Kit had taken to treating it as a ‘real place’ and not teleporting into whatever part of it she felt like. She had walked into the lounge to make her report.
‘That… both took a while and didn’t take as long as I expected,’ Fox replied. It was early. Eve and the humans in Fox’s care were in bed, asleep, and Fox felt that now was a good time to catch up on some paperwork, but this was important too.
‘GrokIt does not have a very useful application interface. I had to resort to scanning web pages.’
‘GrokIt? The meme-filtering thing?’
‘It is a little more than that, though that is its primary function. Both Musgrave and Tasker were subscribers and quite extensive users. Their politics would appear to be sharply different, but they both had an interest in apocalyptic memes. Musgrave appears to have a survivalist bent, which is probably why he seems to have come in from the protectorates and gravitated toward the Jersey Sprawl. They both encountered the Ragnarok ninety-seven meme and there are postings from them arguing over the interpretation of the meme. Tasker appeared to take something of a fatalistic view, suggesting that the end was coming and Eve was here as the first of those who would come after humans. Musgrave began with a “humans must survive” idea and that evolved into a belief that bioroids were going to end humanity and had to be stopped.’
Fox nodded. ‘You found their posts through their LifeWeb accounts?’
‘All GrokIt subscribers are required to have valid LifeWeb accounts.’
‘Any other posters who looked like they might follow Musgrave’s view?’
Kit smiled. ‘I have identified eighteen people who might be an issue and their identities have been flagged to our security systems. If they get near to Eve, we should know about it.’
Fox grinned back. ‘I’m not sure what I’m here for really. We could just get you to run Palladium.’
‘You just want to get out of board meetings. One other thing concerning GrokIt. Following the death of Mister Tasker, GrokIt reclassified the Ragnarok ninety-seven meme from “Caution” to “Toxic.” This might have resulted in greater resistance among the target population, but all indications are that the damage has already been done. MarTech and GrokIt both estimate some fourteen to eighteen hundred people have been affected, all of them in this country. However, not all of them will want to kill Eve or attack BioTek.’
‘Uh-huh. Let’s hope that people like Alexander Musgrave are thin on the ground.’
~~~
‘There is something else a little strange in the data I am gathering from GrokIt and LifeWeb.’
Fox was busy watching from just off-stage as Eve was interviewed with Gottschalk for an afternoon biotechnology programme. Thankfully, no one had thought having Fox in the same stream was a good idea. Kit’s comment came out of the blue, but Fox was not exactly over-stressed at the moment. Bored would actually have been a better description. ‘Okay,’ Fox said, ‘I’ll bite. What’s strange?’
‘The population of the Ragnarok meme forum has been decreasing over the past two weeks,’ Kit said. ‘This is not what I would expect to see in the trailing edge of a memetic campaign favouring a subject the subscribers like. There have been a number of non-posting grokistas–’
‘I’m sorry, what? Grokistas?’
‘That is what members of the GrokIt community call themselves. I don’t come up with this stuff. I just report it.’
‘That’s right up there with “I was only following orders.” Go on, what’s happening to the lurkers?’
‘They have been vanishing. Several have simply stopped posting anywhere on GrokIt or LifeWeb, but I was able to find seven instances in the last eight days of the users committing suicide.’
Fox frowned. ‘People are killing themselves over this meme?’
‘I spoke to some of the AIs in the memetics division and we don’t believe the deaths are directly caused by Ragnarok ninety-seven. Most of those who have died or vanished have absorbed a number of memes set under GrokIt’s apocalyptic classification. One in particular, the Eschaton one nine six meme, has caused sufficient concern to be classified “radioactive” on GrokIt’s threat rating scale.’
‘Naomi mentioned that one. I take it that radioactive is worse than toxic?’
‘It is bad enough that it is blocked from view to most subscribers. Current estimates suggest that over six hundred million people are infected with it, however.’
‘Is there a basic description?’
‘Yes,’ Kit said. ‘Eschaton one nine six is a relatively generic “end-times” meme. The word “eschaton” is taken to mean the final act of the world, the end of time, the end of the world, etcetera. Eschaton memes are those which persuade their adherents that some specific sign marks the end of the world. In this case, that sign is the return of Halley’s Comet, though the meme is, as is often the case, a little vague about how the comet is dooming us all, or what aspect of its appearance actually marks the end.’
‘But it’s perihelion on Thursday.’
‘Yes, Fox. It seems likely that this will be a major trigger point in the actualisation of the meme. We could see a lot of activity over the next few days, though the meme may lose some believers if the world does not end on Thursday.’
‘Yeah,’ Fox said, thoughtfulness in her tone. ‘On the bright side, if the world does end on Thursday, we won’t have to worry about the metro policing vote.’
‘I believe that is taking the concept of silver linings on clouds a little too far.’
‘You’ve seen the latest voting projections, right? If the world doesn’t end, it’s going to be all cloud.’
27th July.
It began with reports coming out of Australia, Japan, and China. Information from the latter was fragmentary but seemed to indicate the same sort of thing as the Australian and Japanese news: people were killing themselves, in increasing numbers and often in groups.
In Japan, the favoured method seemed to be jumping from arcologies, but sixteen members of a martial arts club had committed simultaneous seppuku, which they streamed on LifeWeb and a few other sites. The LifeWeb feed had been cut as soon as monitoring AIs had realised what was happening, but the video had gone out via other sources and been featured on several news channels. The Australians seemed to prefer shooting themselves, though a small cult of survivalists had blown themselves up with mining charges.
Even with the relative sparsity of contracted sites in the two countries, Yuriko Fukui and Harry Keen, the Palladium investigators for the two regions, were having to rely on security people with evidence-collection vests to cover all the ground.
Kit had, while Fox was still running her sleep cycle, put the entire investigation division on alert. By the time Fox came back online, there were reports of deaths coming in from the Russian Union, the South African Federation, Britain, and the Nordeuropäische Union. Even the stoic Scandinavians and Germans were finding ways to kill themselves in the face of the oncoming apocalypse.
‘You could have interrupted my sleep cycle,’ Fox said as she scanned over the news feeds in the apartment viron.
‘Eschaton?’
‘We have detected evidence of Eschaton one nine six infection in ninety-two percent of the subjects. I have notified the relevant detectives regarding the others so that investigation can be focused on them.’
‘Good. Right now, I’m worried about what we’re going to see here. I’m sure we’ll see a few quiet suicides, but Americans have a weird tendency to decide to take a few people with them when they go, especially if they have a gun available.’
Kit frowned. ‘Isn’t that something of a foregone conclusion?’
‘Uh-huh. That’s what worried me.’
~~~
‘I have a call waiting from Marie,’ Kit said as Fox watched the IB-62 news feed.
‘Not surprised,’ Fox replied. ‘Put her through.’
Marie’s image appeared within Fox’s sensorium, unmasked. The redheaded actress looked worried. ‘Have you seen the news from– Oh, you have seen the news from Times Spire.’
Fox gave a nod. ‘Lone gunman with a compact caseless pistol. Seven confirmed dead, plus the gunman who was shot by NAPA patrol officers. Did you check with Shark and Daker?’
‘I put a call through to Nathan. He’s fine. Adrian’s at home working on scripts. Nathan wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think anyone we know was in the coffee shop when it was hit. What’s going on, Fox? What’s with all these suicides? I mean, this was suicide-by-cop, right?’
Eden Burning (Fox Meridian Book 7) Page 6