METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  The Green Space project has been considered a success by outside observers. Highly visible program outcomes include the Curiosity asteroid tug program, as well as the Lagrange-G refineries, both dedicated to mining of asteroidal resources placed in high Earth orbit. The stated purpose of this effort was to provide for minerals and resource extraction that inflicted minimal waste processes on the terrestrial biosphere. The less widely acknowledged longer-term goal appears to be development of a permanent human space presence with a sufficiently deep population base to serve as a long term reservoir for species preservation and genetic diversity.

  The primary funders of Green Space have never stepped forward for formal comment, and thus all discussion of these goals is inherently speculative. From a technical perspective, Green Space for the most part leveraged the abandoned United States Air Force infrastructure at the site of the former Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Launch and orbit control was managed from remote facilities spread throughout Cascadia. A limited number of launches, in the GSO-19 through GSO-24 series, were conducted under contract with the Reformed China National Space Administration through their Xichang launch complex.

  * * *

  vi: Eighty was not so old, if one’s body was not conspiring against one’s self

  Charity contemplated Bashar’s most recent message. He’d been downstate, she knew that much. Talking to trees and what not. She’d even received a polite note from Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon, along with a gift certificate to Harry and David that the grove had thoughtfully sent along for vegetable reasons of its own.

  Trees were weird but considerate. You got that way if it took dozens of you thinking together to finish a sentence.

  But now …? Where in the hell was he? How could a man who’d lived off the grid for almost a century go even more off the grid?

  Following either darwin or Lightbull, of course. Bashar hadn’t needed to say that. But where was he?

  So far as Charity knew, her husband had never left North America in his life. Intercontinental travel was either too regulated and monitored, or simply too slow. The gyre-runners were about as anonymous as one got, but a whole year to get from San Diego to Osaka just wasn’t the speed at which Bashar moved.

  Mexico City, maybe, chasing a new thread on the long-stale Lightbull satellite lead. That was far enough outside his usual Cascadian haunts to be considered more off the grid. Except these days Mexico City was just as wired as Seattle, maybe even more so. The old economic divides between north and south had melted with the climate shifts and the slow collapse of the industrialized West. The Green movement knew no bounds.

  It wasn’t as if the Distrito Federal wasn’t just as gridded as the rest of the world. And the Cascadiopolis daughter-cities extended down into the Sierra Madre Occidental. He’d have friends that far south.

  So, not Mexico.

  North? Bashar didn’t like being cold. Charity just couldn’t see her husband headed for Alaska or the Yukon, even if the Greens were so thick on the ground there that the old-school statists had long since decamped for the Great Plains and other areas more supportive of recidivism. Besides which, what was up there anyway?

  Maybe he had hopped an airship bound for somewhere more distant.

  Tired of chasing darwin and Lightbull in circles, Charity put some more of her resources into chasing her husband instead. She had the advantage of knowing he was still out there with his head down, and roughly where he was last to be found.

  And if this didn’t have something to do with the problem of stopping the island plagues, she would skin him alive. Or at least have Malik do it.

  * * *

  Shavonne, one of the relief nurses, woke her much later. Charity never could keep track of time in her head anymore—another of those subtle penalties of aging which drove her half-crazy.

  She managed to form a coherent question. “What?”

  “You have a visitor, ma’am.” Shavonne was a quiet Afro-Irish immigrant whose parents had fled some round of European purges or another. The girl wasn’t ever able to be as comfortable with Charity as Malik managed. Charity’s personal theory was that something about herself signaled ‘authority’ and short-circuited any sociable tendencies that might otherwise be lurking in the nurse’s subconscious.

  “I don’t get visitors,” Charity said, bleary-eyed and bleary-brained. Her location wasn’t precisely a secret, but neither was it something she cared to have known. Being effectively immobilized by medical science was a hell of a security problem, and one of the reasons she and Bashar had agreed to part ways these past years, regardless of their feelings for one another. “Who is it?”

  “Can’t rightly say, ma’am.” Shavonne sometimes let herself be a bit overly rule-bound, Charity knew from experience.

  “Are they cleared?”

  “Site security passed him up to the ward.”

  After a quiet, exasperated moment, Charity asked, “Him who?”

  “Says his name is Joel Cairo.”

  “Right, and I’m Ruth Wonderly.”

  Shavonne’s bushy ginger eyebrows drew up. “Who?”

  Charity sighed. “Never mind, just send him in.” If this was a hit, simply declining to see the man wasn’t going to change much. Anyone who could get through site security could get through Shavonne, not to mention Charity’s door. On the other hand, if this was a legitimate visit, at … she checked the virteo display by her bed—four in the morning? …well, she was beyond curious at this point.

  Joel Cairo proved to be a compact, fit man so bald he might be suffering from alopecia. And possibly the whitest man she’d seen in a long time. Aryan Bund recruiting poster white.

  “You’re a hard woman to find, Ms. Oxham,” he said.

  “And you’ve been dead a century and a half, Mr. Lorre.”

  Cairo chuckled. “No one ever gets it.”

  “A bit flashy, for an alias?”

  His chuckle broadened to a smile. “Do you know how many James Bonds I’ve met over the years?”

  She had to ask. “Were they any good?”

  “You have a point. Some of them did become grave men on the morrow.”

  “Spare me the horrors of a classical education,” Charity said tartly. “If you’re here for a hit, get it over with. Otherwise, speak your piece. I’m old and sick and want to go back to sleep.”

  “You’re connected to Bashar.” Cairo’s voice was flat, all business now.

  A flutter of fear stirred within her. “You wouldn’t ask me that if you didn’t already know.”

  “I wasn’t asking.”

  “So?”

  He continued: “I saw your husband yesterday.”

  Interesting, thought Charity. “Not many people ever realize they’ve seen Bashar. At least not the ones who live to talk about it later.”

  “He was using the name Credence.”

  “My husband always was the man of a thousand faces.” Or a thousand names, more to the point.

  “Bashar ever use the alias Lon Chaney?”

  “Some people aren’t so in love with their cleverness as you are, Mr. Cairo. Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you’ve been pulling searches and asking questions that point to something I care about deeply.” Cairo frowned. “I shot a messenger yesterday so Mr. Credence could get a ride in her place. The messenger will be missed, but she’ll never be found.”

  “We’ve all killed people.” Memories of Charity’s time in Tehran drifted through her head. A lot of blood and screaming back in her army days. “That doesn’t impress me.”

  “This will impress you: the late messenger was from Lightbull.”

  Charity’s heart fluttered all over again, to the point where the medical alarms began complaining. She closed her eyes and controlled her breathing. Center, center, center.

  The door cracked open. “You all right in there, Ms. Oxham?” Shavonne asked nervously.

  “Yes, thanks. We’re just talking.”

 
After a long moment, the door clicked shut again. Malik would have been more … demonstrative … in his attentions. But she didn’t need rescuing. Nor medical intervention. Not here and now.

  Charity took a long look at the man who called himself Joel Cairo. “Perhaps you and I do have much to discuss, sir.”

  “Yes. For one thing, Samira Bashar Oxham is going to die in …” His stare unfocused briefly as Mr. Cairo checked some internal data feed. “Twenty-three hours, forty-two minutes and eleven seconds. Plus or minus ten minutes.” His stare focused on her. “She and about a million other people. Unless your husband can do something to stop it.”

  “Even Bashar can’t turn back a nuke,” Charity said sadly.

  “Not that. Bigger. Much bigger.” Cairo leaned closer, investing his personal energy into her social space. “The zero-pop kill is coming.”

  “City killers? Not the island plagues?” She bit back her next words, knowing she’d already given away too much.

  “Yes and yes.” His hand rose as if to touch her, then paused. “I had to work with Bashar because there was no time for anything but improvisation. Your husband happens to be a world-class expert at improvisational problem solving.”

  “Does he know why you’re working with him?” Charity asked.

  “No.” Cairo’s smile was bleak. “A mutual friend helped Bashar find his way. Is there anyone else you’d rather have trying to stop this?”

  Her answering smile was as wintry as his, Charity knew. “No, not really.” Me in the old days, she thought but did not say. “What will you do if he can’t stop it?”

  “We—I—have someone on the inside of this. Work with them, you can do more than lie here and trip data alarms. So much more, Charity Oxham.”

  * * *

  vii: We’re definitely in meatspace

  Bashar thought very, very fast. Around eleven thousand tons of rock was going to make a damned big splash wherever it landed. They didn’t drop mining packages anywhere in Cascadia—wrong hydrography for it. Except the eastern end of the Gulf of Alaska, but no one would ever get the environmental clearances needed to make that big a mess in the vicinity of Glacier Bay. Not to mention affording the fines and fees from the oceanic wildlife and coastal forest natural entities.

  Seattle.

  His daughter Samira.

  Hell.

  He knew where and what and now even why. J. Appleseed wanted a rock dropped on their hide, to hide their tracks with darwin. These guys wanted the rock to be more accurate than J. Appleseed’s data, in case of a double-cross. Lightbull probably won either way. That would be how a conspiracy of that nature thought.

  No matter how it came out, the losers were Seattle first, the human race second.

  Bashar would have to find some way to stop this. His mouth moved distinctly from his thoughts. Even at his current age, he could still multitask well enough to spin convincing bullshit. “J. Appleseed’s distributed. It’s not like they have an office building downtown.”

  “Well of course they’re distributed,” wheezed Bibendum.

  There was something damned unnerving about that boy. If this was what very many of the orbit-born looked like, then the hard Greens would have to rethink their whole genetic reservoir concept.

  The strange, pale kid continued, “None of this would work if they weren’t. But we need to eliminate the computing cores and all the pre-virtualization infrastructure. Now. Get them out of there. If anything survives, even if the AIs don’t double cross us, somebody might find enough evidence to stop the plans.”

  Which would be too damned bad if the island plagues didn’t happen worldwide, Bashar told himself. He held his tongue this time.

  Lu called up a street-and-infrastructure map of the Seattle metro area on the virteo projection. With a few flicks of his fingers, a series of red spots and dots overlaid the intertwined grids of roads and pathways and core data pipes.

  J. Appleseed. All of it. The 4th Avenue offices he’d so recently been ejected from. The computing cores he’d helped secrete within the city’s telecommunications infrastructure some decades back. As well as various warehouses, training facilities and satellite offices. The dots, Bashar realized, were the home locations of remote workers.

  Darwin and Appleseed came together here. No wonder they’d bounced him hard from the offices. Somebody high up must have believed he’d twigged to what was coming. Which, in a sense, he had, but not to this degree of detail.

  Moselle spoke up as she traced the red overlays with a light pen. “That’s our intel from about two weeks ago, per the Appleseed AIs. Obviously we have the inside material, but we also know that J. Appleseed has a lot of right and left hands that don’t communicate very well. Our sources are the highest, but given that parts of the organization run on the classic cell system, even the top doesn’t know everything about what its various tentacles are doing.” Her grin owed much to sharks and hyenas. “We’re told you people do.”

  “Nobody knows everything,” Bashar temporized. He took a shot, adding, “Not even us.”

  “Organizational modesty is a new vector for you,” Moselle observed with some obvious surprise.

  Who precisely did these people think he worked for? Or with? He tried another shot. “The appearance of infallibility has its uses, but we’re down to targeting time here. Clarity trumps propaganda.”

  Bibendum laughed. His mirth was as grating as his speech. “You’re a contractor. Or maybe a convert. None of the birthright Bull Dancers would ever say anything like that.”

  The world cracked open inside Bashar’s head. He felt like a man who’d stopped to pick up a twig on the beach and discovered it was the least extension of a huge log buried in the sand.

  The Bull Dancers.

  Lightbull.

  And it all came together for him in an implosion of insight. J. Appleseed and Lightbull cooperating to spread the island plague. A hidden hard Green agenda behind his life’s work with the foundation, not to mention everyone else’s. They planned to crack Seattle like an egg to cover their tracks. Not just J. Appleseed’s tracks. Lightbull’s tracks using the foundation as a front. Which meant the zero-pop rewilding plan hadn’t passed the tipping point yet.

  The world could still be saved.

  The whole business made a horrific sense. These people had been hired to fake the destruction of J. Appleseed by creating a disaster on an epic scale that would bury the evidence forever beneath a mountain of hot rock, steam and ash, with a million bodies to keep the alleged corpse of the foundation company. A million bodies who’d done nothing to deserve a stone dropped on them from heaven.

  Except they wanted to destroy the infrastructure for real. Leave no pockets undisturbed. Which would free Lightbull to go into a radical metastasis and begin the process of launching the island plagues and pursuing zero population. With Seattle a cauldron of hot ash, no one in a position to stop the plan would be able to uncover any evidence in time to be useful.

  That was never what they were about. Lightbull had to have suborned the foundation and its AIs decades ago. Perhaps even back when William Silas Crown was alive, Bashar realized, recollecting some of the irregular behavior of the triplet AIs near the end of Crown’s life, when the two of them had briefly been in contact one last time.

  He swept the room with his best staff meeting stare, what a colleague used to call his ‘speaker-to-morons’ look. These people thought he was one of them. One of the Bull Dancers who had destroyed his beloved Cascadiopolis all those years ago. That gang of idiots with the helicopter-rocket down at Schaadt’s Shack had been waiting for a contact from Lightbull. Instead, they’d got him.

  Everybody eventually made a terminal error. Bashar would do his level best to make sure that taking him into orbit had been theirs.

  “You don’t know what kinds of things I’d say, Mr. Bibendum.” He used his coldest voice. A century of being a hard man gave Bashar a tone of authority few could match.

  The pink-eyed kid shrank ba
ck for the first time. Perhaps no one ever pushed him hard.

  Live and learn, Bashar thought with a vicious glee. “Light pen?” he snapped at Moselle.

  She tossed him hers. In the microgravity of the conference room, it flew oddly. “Where are we headed right now, by the way?” he asked, with a nod toward the bulkhead.

  The look she gave him told Bashar he’d almost blown his newfound cover with that question. “Orbital Zero. Where else?”

  The larger of the two asteroids being gutted by Green Space Mining for minerals while simultaneously being hollowed out for long-term habitats. Where the mining packages came from. “Not GSO Prime?”

  Moselle grunted and exchanged an unreadable-to-Bashar glance with Lu. Bibendum just glowered.

  Bashar turned his attention to the map, still thinking furiously. As a site consultant, he had no power here. He was just a data source and a form of verification. But playing the role of a representative of Lightbull he could wield their power. Perhaps even authority, depending on who’d precisely contracted this job.

  “You’ve got most of the coverage correct here.” He traced the same series of hotspots Moselle had minutes earlier.

  She glared at him. “All major infrastructure, distributed as it is, has been accounted for.”

  The AIs were the core of J. Appleseed. Crown’s old triumvirate of Heinlein, Hubbard and Kornbluth, supplemented by the rest of the board of directors. There hadn’t been a human seated on that board in forty years or more. And AIs could live, well, anywhere their code was compiled and running and properly hardened.

  Like cores embedded in Seattle’s subterranean infrastructure.

  Or anywhere with enough processing power. In a grove of trees. Inside someone’s head.

  Anywhere at all.