by Julian Gough
He concentrates, to work out where the fire engines are. They’re moving, fast, towards the explosions; the car is moving at the human speed limit, south, past the airport, out of town . . . He disentangles the combined Doppler effect on each siren, locates them on his mental map.
And now he can hear the helicopters and the news drones approaching . . .
Three, no, four police cars go screaming by.
He winds up the window. Keep a low profile.
‘Multiple explosions of unknown origin,’ says Colt, like he’s quoting some movie, some game. ‘They’ll have to shut down the whole city. Let’s get out of here.’
They get out of there.
110
On the outskirts of the city, Colt says, ‘Pull over. In there.’
She slows, fast, so that their heads bow involuntarily for a second, as though they are sharing a moment’s prayer. Their seatbelts snap hard against their chests.
‘Sorry,’ says Naomi. She’d forgotten already, no safety overrides to smooth things out. ‘Sorry.’ She’s so ridiculously tired . . . Concentrate.
And then the car is turning off the road, between piles of construction debris, onto an empty paved lot.
Colt gets out, glances around.
No, not construction. Demolition. A former gas station. Tax breaks couldn’t save this one.
Even the pipes and walls of the underground tanks have been ripped out of the ground. Scrub bushes and weeds grow on the heaped debris, screening them from the road.
‘What?’ says Naomi, when she’s brought the big old BMW to a halt.
‘He’s going to work it out, that we aren’t Secret Service,’ says Colt. ‘He’ll report the car, eventually. I need to make sure they can’t track it.’
‘Is that . . . hard?’
Colt smiles. ‘Not on this thing.’ He realizes he’s been smiling a lot today.
Well, it’s kind of great to have problems you can solve.
Colt opens the door, steps out into the heat.
Crickets chirp.
Behind him, on the road, he can hear trucks roar past, in tight, fuel-efficient convoys in the self-drive lanes, but the piles of debris hide them from sight. He takes a few steps back, studies the vehicle.
There’s a reason he grabbed this one, when he had the chance. It’s powered by gasoline . . .
E-cars have to be in constant identified electronic contact with the road. Conductive tyres, to draw the power; to get billed. It’s impossible to hide where you are in an electric car. That’s one reason libertarian states have resisted e-cars for so long.
Because with a pure gas model like this . . .
Disable the transceiver, and nobody knows where you are.
It’s perfect. Silent. Invisible.
And this car is so old, it wasn’t born with a transceiver. It’s an add-on, in a unit that combines standard passive GPS with a transceiver, to transmit the car’s location and status to the state and federal traffic AIs, and receive in return traffic and weather warnings and advice . . .
Colt lifts the hood.
‘Found it.’
It’s attached to the chassis. Small, black, unobtrusive.
He studies it.
‘Damn.’
‘What?’
‘Not sure how I can hack it.’
He runs through the software options in his head. But how to even get access to it?
‘Hack it?’ says his mother.
Sometimes his mother can be so dumb. ‘It’s a sealed unit,’ says Colt.
Naomi leans over Colt’s shoulder. Studies the small black box. Frowns. ‘Don’t you just need to, you know . . . stop it working?’
‘Yes, that’s why I’m . . . oh!’ Colt gets it. Blushes. ‘Yeah.’
He walks over to the piled demolition debris. Finds a nice big rock that sits well in the palm of his hand.
He walks back to the car, leans in under the hood, and smacks the unit with the rock until there’s nothing left on the chassis but a smear of plastic and a wire.
Oh, that felt good . . .
Colt throws the rock back on the pile of debris, sits into the black leather passenger seat, closes his eyes, and tries to clear his buzzing mind.
‘Mama,’ he mumbles, ‘you should rest too.’
‘But, if they’re looking for us . . .’
‘False economy, to keep going, this tired. We’ll make mistakes. The Strip is on fire; they’re swarming the city. They’re sure we’re still there. Just a nap, just a few minutes . . .’
She tilts back her seat. Tries.
Even with his eyes closed tight, Colt’s visual system registers flashes of light, as neurons connect and trigger other neurons.
Naomi reaches out her hand, cautiously.
Her fingers brush against the back of his hand, and his hand reflexively jerks away from her. But he brings it back.
He slides his fingertips across the cool, dry skin of the palm of her hand, and his fingertips tingle like he is shedding charge into her, grounding himself.
She closes her hand around his fingers, and he ignores the impulse to pull away.
The lightning inside his brain calms down.
They fall asleep holding hands.
111
Colt wakes first. An hour, he thinks. I’ve slept for an hour. That’s good.
It had been deep, no dreams. Like being dead.
Now his mind, his brain, comes back to life. Oh, jeeez . . .
It’s like morning rush hour, in a city in the middle of a construction boom. Destruction, creation, confusion. Energy.
He waits a few minutes, with his eyes closed, to see if the riot in his brain will settle down.
It doesn’t; but he slowly gets used to it. That’ll do.
So, how will he hack into the immune system?
Into the drones’ vast, collective mind . . .
The longer he leaves it, the harder it will be. It’s learning so fast.
It’s already improvising.
Taking over other systems.
The seeds, the bugs, weren’t originally part of it. They were part of the base security. Short range.
Impressive; when the drones lost our visual pattern, they modified their behaviour. Split up, came in low; got close enough to use Bluetooth devices to find us. Bluetooth! Dinosaur tech . . .
He takes a deep breath.
Taps his knees in a calming rhythm. In 5/4 time. Like Grandad’s jazz. Like that old vinyl record Mama used to play sometimes and cry, even though it was a happy song.
Take Five.
Colt reconnects his helmet to the world, and gets to work.
He could build himself a new, hyper-encrypted identity. But hyper-encryption draws serious attention.
So, he uses plain vanilla encryption that he knows they are automatically cracking and reading.
An ordinary-Joe online identity he built years before. The guy he’s pretending to be is even called Joe. He uses the same useless, see-through, compromised tools everybody else uses.
They can see everything he is doing. They can see right through him. So they can’t see him at all.
They have killed him. Now he is a ghost.
Aaaaand . . . go.
He breaks open a low-level NDSA program that one of the Russian kids who worked on the game cracked the year before. Borrows another identity as a trusted technician.
There must be factsheets for technicians, in some secure, read-only document silo.
He finds them. Reads the specs.
Oh, man.
Colt would probably have been able to hack into the immune system even if he hadn’t been enhanced. It simply isn’t finished yet. There are still coders’ backdoors all over it.
Getting in isn’t going to be the problem.
The problem will be switching it off.
It’s a radically decentralized neural network.
It routes around damage.
There is no kill switch.
And all the d
rones are in communication with each other, all the time.
Spying on each other. Damn. Makes them really hard to hack.
No central base, because a base can be taken out, can be compromised. The entire information architecture for the immune system is run by the drones themselves.
Hmm, flexible, not fixed. Any spare capacity in any drone is assigned a task, sorting through the raw data the drones suck in through their sensors, filtering it, condensing it; running pattern recognition, predicting target movement.
Oh beans, it’s designed to be unhackable. A lot of what should be software is hardware.
The whole thing is that strange mixture of state-of-the-art and the embarrassingly out-of-date that characterizes military and government technology.
He digs deeper, learns all he can. When he’s ready, he takes a deep breath.
OK, he can’t hack into the drone cloud’s mind, the swarm intelligence itself; but he can see where the swarm touches down. Where it communicates with the ordinary electronic world. Actions are thoughts, and thoughts are actions. He can work out what it’s thinking from what it’s doing, where it’s doing it.
The swarm piggybacks local cellphone towers; local Wi-Fi stations. Fibre relays.
And because the surveillance agencies have put backdoors into so many of these civilian systems, Colt can get in too.
He digs in, deep.
Skims metadata off the phone networks and analyses it, NDSA style. He even uses some of their code to do it, some of it code he stole off his father, which he knows is cheeky, and risky, but it’s quicker than writing his own . . .
Uh oh.
The immune system is losing its mind.
Colt and Naomi have been pushed from orange to red.
And the system doesn’t believe they are dead.
His mother stirs, in the passenger seat.
He must have said something out loud.
‘We need to go, Mama,’ he says. ‘We need to go, now.’
‘Mmmm,’ she’s not really awake, but she reaches for her seatbelt, puts it on. Sits for a moment, letting the fog clear from her head. Starts the car.
As Colt puts on his seatbelt, he blows on his hand, and the air incongruously whistles an off-note on the small hole in the exposed end of a bone. He winces.
‘What’s wrong?’ she says, suddenly alert despite the tiredness.
‘My hand’s hot,’ he says.
Oh dear Lord, she thinks. Infection?
She reaches out, takes his right hand, brings it to her face.
My God. Look how fast he’s healing.
Too much flesh has been shot away to fully repair, yet. But new flesh is closing the edges of the hole. She resists an urge to kiss it. Pattern recognition, she thinks; an automatic firing of the neurons associated with taking his hand and raising it to her face.
Once, she would try to kiss him better, whenever he hurt his hand, as her mother had done for her. A nettle, a thorn, a bite, a burn . . . But he didn’t like the touch, the kiss . . .
‘Mama?’
She blinks. ‘I think . . .’ This is too fast, this is . . . I don’t think it’s infection. ‘I think the new areas of your brain must be . . . rebuilding your other tissues, somehow. You’re running hot, again, like you were when you first transformed . . .’
He’s evolving, inside.
‘What?’ says Colt.
She realizes she’s murmured that out loud.
‘Mmmm,’ says Naomi. ‘Nothing. Thinking.’
They drive on. No transponder. No phones. No electronic ID. Nobody knows where they are.
Naomi is so tired, her mind gradually clears totally of all thought.
There is no thought.
And then, a thought, that seems to come from outside her. From outside the world.
This has happened before, not just once, but again and again.
In a moment so sharp and shocking that you may as well call it revelation, she knows what the voice says is true.
Buddha.
Confucius.
Jesus.
Mohammed.
Forty days in the desert. Forty days under a tree.
Purging.
Praying.
Dehydrating.
Meditating.
Clearing the body.
Clearing the mind.
And then, a chrysalis state.
After three days and nights, reborn.
Transformed.
The body heals itself. The mind heals itself. If you die, as Jesus did, you can self-repair.
My God. We can scientifically mass-produce Jesuses.
A new kind of human. Yet something like this has happened before; accidentally; sporadically; somehow. A mutation? An infection? Generating, midlife, new neurons, fresh connections . . . Does it only appear in the male line? Jesus, Buddha, Confucius . . . Could the mutation have been inherited? But they had no children.
And Mohammed’s sons died as infants . . .
Her mind is a mess, she’s exhausted, she knows that. But she doesn’t think she’s wrong.
Each time, before, it disrupted the world, it almost changed everything, but it was a little too early, conditions weren’t quite right. They were like butterflies waking in winter.
This is going to happen all over the world. Soon.
A wave of Christs. Mohammeds. Buddhas.
What will happen, when we are all the messiah . . .
What can you do with such a thought?
Nothing.
She drives on.
*
After a while, Naomi says, ‘This is such a great car.’
Colt says, ‘Mmmm.’ He isn’t mentally present. Naomi reaches across and strokes his shoulder. ‘Mmm?’
‘We’re going to be home soon,’ says Naomi. ‘And if the house is under observation, they’ll see us.’
‘Mmmm, yeah, I know. I’m working on it. Maybe slow down a little.’
Naomi slows down a little.
Colt works out just how long this is likely to take him.
And how long it will take to get home.
‘A little slower.’
Slower? Naomi blows some air through her nose. ‘How about I just take a loop through the hills,’ she says, ‘and come back to our place from the far side, through Penwick? They won’t be expecting that.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ says Colt. ‘But won’t that be a little too much of a . . .’
Naomi puts her foot delicately on the accelerator, and presses.
‘Wow,’ says Colt.
They’ve just crossed the county line, back into Lincoln County. And there are no cops or speed traps or cameras out here, God bless their neighbours’ libertarian hearts.
There had been cameras, briefly, but the locals shot them up. Claimed they’d mistaken them for jackrabbits. Local judge let them off.
So, just desert. Straight roads. Long curves. Roadrunner country. ‘OK,’ says Colt.
Naomi doesn’t even look at the sky. She knows they aren’t being observed, she can feel it. And it feels good.
Not just to have shaken off the drones.
My God, she thinks, I’ve been observed all my life.
My father; mother; the kids at school; all those other students, judging; lab techs; workmates; Ryan; the cops; God; Donnie; the NSA; NDSA.
All those observers in my head, finally gone off duty. No, better; I’ve shaken them off.
OK. Got to get to the house. Let’s see . . .
She comes out of a bend, puts the pedal down. She and Colt sink back into the black leather seats.
Too fast.
In reflex, her foot drifts up, off the accelerator, and the car slows and the roar of its engine fades to an apologetic murmur.
Apologetic.
Her eyes go moist, and her vision blurs.
Fuck that.
She puts her foot to the floor and the car roars.
112
‘For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure
of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.’
— Francis Bacon, Novum Organum
They park below the low hill, out of sight of the house.
Now Colt just needs to find out if their house is under observation. And, if it is, by what . . .
Easy.
What isn’t easy, is to see if you’re being observed, without being observed seeing . . .
OK, thinks Colt. I can shake information out of the cell towers.
God bless the government. They’ve been crippling encryption and installing hardware backdoors for so long, most communication infrastructure is nothing but security flaws and open backdoors . . .
Colt uses a national security override key that he’s been saving for a rainy day, and pops everything open.
The cell towers tell him who’s been pinging them.
OK, there is a drone observing the property.
No, two drones.
One’s charging . . .
He can’t hack into them. Damn.
Wait; Naomi’s described these to him.
They’re the ravens that escorted her to the base.
Ryan’s personal drones.
Too small to do serious data analysis, or threat-processing.
So, just eyeballs for the drone cloud.
He can’t get into the packets of data the eyeball drones are sending. But he doesn’t need to decrypt the packets. He knows what’s in them, from the packet size, and rate of delivery. Live, high-definition pictures.
The eyeballs are simply saying, ‘This is what we see. What should we do?’
And the drone cloud, the brain, is saying, ‘What you see is fine. Do nothing. Keep observing.’
So, let’s keep it that way . . .
And then . . . what if I intercept the signal, en route, and replace it?
They can’t broadcast all that data over major distances unaided. Don’t have the power, the range.
So how . . .
What’s the signal path . . .
Colt looks from horizon to horizon, and his helmet paints in the communication infrastructure; overlays it all on the landscape, colour-coded. Buried fibre, overhead wires, towers.
Oh, perfect. They commandeer local booster towers . . . neat.