by John Barnes
During the six agonizing minutes it takes Quaz to die, lying on his back crushing his own bleeding intestines into the dirty street, more than sixty million experiencers worldwide tune in to Passionet; a hundred thousand channelspotters see to that. Through the haze of pain they catch the smell of smoke, glimpses of running feet, sounds of gunfire (most of it from Dennis trying to keep the riot off of Quaz—he himself dies, cut down by machine-gun fire, just an instant before Quaz, so that the last thing the experiencers see from Oran is Dennis Ysabel-Garcia pitching forward over Quaz).
Before Quaz is dead, there are thirty more riots in the cities of the world. Passionet jumps to Surface O’Malley, tells her they want to tell her some bad news, and asks her to react by staggering out into the streets blindly.
Surface points out that she’s in Bangkok, at the Orient, and that the rioting is taking on a distinctly anti-foreign character, not surprisingly since the Thai ambassador too turns out to have been subverted by the Klieg organization, and a large Siberian spy ring was broken that week. “I’m not a chicken,” she says, “and I’d like to see my career take off and all, but I’ll be damned if I’m going out in that. I’m a redhead, for god’s sake. If the mob doesn’t get me the soldiers will.”
They offer her a lot more, but she won’t take it. The bosses at Passionet are swearing, beating desks with fists, yelling into each other’s face about who gave her a break, but she’s threatening to jack out entirely until they call her and tell her there’s an evacuation staticopter on the way. The truth is right now they need her more than she needs them—the riots in Bangkok are the best they have anyone on-site for, and they need feed from her, and it had better not contain any text thoughts about Passionet needlessly risking her life or screwing her over.
The trouble is that whoever says that is going to be the weasel that capitulated to the bitch, next week when they assess the results and someone asks why she wasn’t out there dodging rocks, getting chased up alleys, and just maybe please-oh-god-of-profits getting gang-raped.
Worse yet, her bodyguards are agreeing with her. They must have gotten shaken up by Ysabel-Garcia’s death, though surely they must have known all along that things like that come with the job and that’s why they are paid so much.
While they argue, Surface (whose real name is Leslie) and Fred and Saul, the two bodyguards whom she’s gradually become friends with, are seeing what they can from the window. That’s freaking the controller and editor out at the control station, across town where the expressway crosses Klong San Sab, because not only is she letting her bodyguards address her as “Les,” she’s looking right at them every now and then, and they aren’t supposed to exist. The editor there is having to fake in all kinds of noise, scramble, feedback, and snow to cover all the times she does that, and even then he’s painfully aware that he can’t really get Fred and Saul out of the picture—they tend to show up in her thoughts and the most he can do is blur them out.
The editor wishes Rock were here, and Rock will be in a little bit—he’s coming in with the international rescue mission, riding a whistler with Japanese marines. The editor is wishing for just one really professional reporter who understands the job and would get into it. Synthi Venture the way she used to be, before she cracked up in Point Barrow, would be wonderful right now. Global Riot Two is shaping up to be bigger and better than its predecessor, and here they are stuck with—
Hold it. They zoom in. Screw the i.d., what Surface/Leslie and her bodyguards are seeing is too interesting to blur it out just to hide what everyone knows anyway. They can always claim it’s “uncensored footage,” whatever footage means when you’re talking about a recorded XV wedge.
Leslie, Fred, and Saul had been watching the crowd down by the Chinatown waterfront, across the Chao Phraya River from the Orient. Now it looks like a battle developing on the adjoining Phra Pinklao Bridge to the south of them; they don’t quite have the right angle for it, but through her binoculars Leslie—Surface, dammit! We pay you for your name to be Surface!—
Leslie gets part of it in focus, just as gunfire begins to rip back and forth across the bridge and bodies fall everywhere. “Outstanding,” the editor whispers.
She figures it out, and he captures the “Eureka!” moment—the struggling mob on the Chinatown waterfront had been Thais, attacking Indian and Chinese shops; the Indians, Bangalas, Pakistanis, and Chinese seem to have gotten together enough to mount a counterattack, and they are fighting their way across the bridge into the downtown. “Every little merchant over there probably has a couple of full auto weapons, after eighty years of war around here,” Fred comments. “They just had to get organized.”
“There are plenty of guns in Thai hands too,” Leslie says. “Chinatown’s fighting because it’s their lives, homes, and families, and by now because they’re pretty pissed off. Holy shit.”
The binoculars fly back onto faces, and looking through Leslie’s eyes, the editor sees that the crowd is parting as Thai Army tanks roll through. He gets a nice heavy sigh of relief from Surface, something that’s just a little overdramatized, almost as if she were going to cooperate.
The struggle passes south of them, and Leslie/Surface and the bodyguards rush for windows on that side of the building, pounding down corridors to find a public window that looks out toward the National Gallery.
The tanks pushing through from the Chinatown side were in a hurry for a reason. The National Museum is in flames; five thousand years of magnificent art are being lost before Leslie’s horrified eyes. As she watches, unable to look away, she realizes that the mobs around the museum are all in coverall uniforms—they are the vast factory labor force that normally sweats out twelve-hour days in the huge European, Japanese, and American plants, their minds pacified by looped tapes of XV porn, induced pain blockers keeping them from noticing soreness or tiredness till they unplug for the day, blissed out and uncomplaining as the computers guide their hands. Her heart sinks; what’s burning is theirs, it’s their birthright, the proudest expression of the Thai nation—
These people may not even know they’re Thai. They spend their lives dreaming away in the Anthill, the mile-high concrete-block dormitory built into the Indraphitak/Toksin/Klong Samray triangle south of the city, and what they have dreamed of is the wealth, the glitter, the excitement they could look down on from their windows above the clouds.
Her binoculars zoom in on a tank as it turns its machine guns on the mob, clearing a path for the oncoming fire engines. A hundred people die as she watches, and it is all for nothing—the roof is caving in on the old former palace that is the center of the museum. Nothing will save it now.
The officer standing beside the tank looks familiar, and she realizes he is Major Srimuang, who guided her around her first day here; she clicks the binoculars to zoom autofocus, and sees that he is weeping, though whether at the scattered corpses in coveralls or the blazing museum, she can’t tell. She recalls him as a cultured, intelligent man, and it was he who told her about the human robots of the factories; perhaps he weeps for the deaths, for the destruction of the art, and for the horror that a five-thousand-year tradition should be destroyed by a mob of people to whom it ought to belong and who never had a chance to know it.
He’s breathing hard and beginning to thump the side of the tank; then he’s talking into his radio, giving some order or other. Moments later, loudspeakers on all the tanks are crackling, talking to the crowd; it seems the major is addressing them directly. As he speaks, he wipes his eyes once, stands tall, and begins to speak firmly.
“Can you get me a translation of that?” she asks the controller.
“We’re working on—fuck, Leslie, get out of there, he’s telling them they’ve destroyed their heritage, that the museum is full of Thai things, and now he wants them to—”
But the three of them have already seen what is happening and are rushing back down the corridor. The main guns on the tanks are elevating to take aim at the Orient Hotel.
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br /> The three of them are most of the way to the next wing when the first shells tear into the building behind them; all three go sprawling, and Leslie has the deeply annoyed thought that she’s having a hell of a time running with all this extra meat hanging on her chest. The feeling is so deep and passionate that the editor leaves it in, along with the controller’s calling her Leslie.
“Screw it, this is great XV, the best we’ve ever worked on,” the controller mutters.
“Yeah, we’ll get names and roles straight later, for the re-releases.”
In the Orient Hotel, Leslie and her guards get to their feet and scramble away from the burning, crumbling south-facing wing of the hotel. “The last we knew, the internationals weren’t far off,” Fred shouts. “Let’s try to get to the interior parking lot, maybe we can get picked up—”
There’s another roar from another volley of the tank main guns, and the building shudders as the facade on that wing goes down. Holding each other’s hands, the three rush down the stairs toward the exit to the parking lot. A Thai hotel employee jumps out at them, brandishing a heavy iron curtain rod, and Saul guns him down without stopping to find out what he was after.
As they find the door to the parking lot, they hear a blessed sound—the high-pitched scream of staticopters and the whump-shrikk-thud! of the antitank missiles they’re firing. Later Leslie will learn that with Japanese thoroughness, they bagged all the Thai tanks, plus all the fire engines trying to save the National Museum, plus both the still-standing wings of the museum.
For right now, though, they’re just overjoyed to see Rock leaning out of the side door of the teardrop-shaped fuselage, and in a few seconds they’re aboard, tumbling to safety inside. During a brief get-organized interlude of not being linked through, Rock hugs her and kisses both the men on the cheeks—“Thought we’d lost the whole cute trio of you,” he says. “You’ve sure been putting on a show, guys.”
It’s only then that Leslie realizes how much of her contract and basic protocols she’s been violating, but she has only a minute or so to think she’s going to be fired before they’re congratulating her on creating a whole new genre—live behind-the-scenes XV. The ratings have soared to astronomical, and from now on she’s supposed to fall out of the Surface role and into being Leslie on cue, when asked to.
Too many good old boys identify with Rock, though—so he’s not going to be called upon to be David. Keeping it carefully below registerable level, Leslie thinks to herself that it’s their loss.
Part of Louie’s problem is that big as the job is physically, he is so much bigger than it is mentally. So he has more time, perhaps, than would be optimal, to look at the mission and the consequences of failure, if that happens.
Some of the meteorological models he’s been running are suggesting that Antarctica will warm particularly fast because it normally reflects so much heat back into space, and the methane “window” closing over it will trap correspondingly more heat; if that should prove true, then all sorts of strange consequences may follow, as immense quantities of fresh water run off the ancient glaciers and the Earth beneath is released from more of its burden.
Nothing for it, though… he can only go as fast as he can climb the “stalk,” and he can only climb the stalk once it’s there. The stalk is what he’s been calling the stream of added components and material that the catapults on the moon and in the asteroids will be sending up behind him.
As you lengthen an electromagnetic catapult, the velocity it imparts to the packages it sends increases proportionately; all the catapults will be continuously lengthening, so that packages will fly off them faster and faster. As each package overtakes the Good Luck, it will pass through the six-mile-long funnel of concentric rings, and magnetic braking will be applied to the package. As the package loses momentum, the Good Luck will gain it; the package will continue on, still going faster than the Good Luck, but considerably slowed, and the ship will have accelerated.
Once beyond the ship, the package itself will unfurl its own magnetic funnel; the next package will pass not only through the ship, but through the package ahead of it, boosting each of them before assuming the lead.
As each successive package takes over the lead in this game of leapfrog, it will be going more slowly, having given up more and more of its momentum to the ship and the packages behind it as the train through which it must pass lengthens. Meanwhile the rear of the train will be going faster and faster.
Finally the point will be reached where the ship begins to overtake the packages ahead of it, and as it does it will shove them back hard behind it. This will not be enough to reverse their direction—they will continue on outward—but it will slow them a great deal.
But as the ship climbs into the lead, the packages behind it, in turn, will again be accelerated and driven forward by more packages coming in. By the time the ship is at the head of the column, all the packages behind it will be moving faster than it is, ready to pass through and begin the process over again—with the whole train now moving faster.
Now, as packages pass and repass through each other’s coils, they fold to go through the ones ahead of them and unfold to catch the ones behind them, like great pulsing tulips chasing each other backward through space.
With time, as more packages arrive, the train gets longer, and the back end, launched by bigger and bigger catapults, faster.
As the train grows into the “stalk” up which Good Luck must climb, the front end of the train moves most slowly, the rear most quickly, and as components advance from rear to front, they gain velocity. Thus the train as a whole goes faster and faster.
Eventually Good Luck will slow some packages to match velocities, devour the parts of the package it can use, and expel the rest as reaction mass, hurling it back down the train to the following packages, each of which will also thrust against the used-up husk in the same way.
In this way, Louie will gain both velocity and processors—he will get smarter as he gets faster. He should reach 2026RU by Christmas, have whatever he needs set up by January, and be back on his way in early February, with about fifty times his present processing capability (which is already about 8000 human brain-years per day).
Before Louie has even reached the icy ball of 2026RU, Clem will have finished with the Northern Hemisphere. By the time Louie returns and the first Frisbees begin to arrive behind him, the Southern Hemisphere will have endured considerably worse superstorms, because there are fewer and smaller landmasses there to interrupt them.
Louie’s guess, based on just over a trillion model runs, is that in the Southern Hemisphere the storms will continually circle the equator between 0 and 32 degrees latitude, generally moving southward and westward but varying it enough to avoid moving out of existence, spawning fresh storms regularly.
With good luck, he will arrive back just as the last storms in the Southern Hemisphere are blowing out, and as next year’s “Clem” is starting in the Northern Hemisphere.
With good luck, there will be some civilization left to save, and if not there will still be many millions of people alive, and some of them will have radios or televisions, and the data networks will still exist in many places.
With good luck, if there’s not a civilization, Louie will be able to start a new one after he stops the storms.
He’s got his doubts. Global Riot Two is in its fourth day and still growing. There have now been riot-related deaths in every city with a population of more than 500,000, worldwide. Troops have staged wholesale massacres of civilian looters in Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Caracas, Montevideo, Riyadh, Bujumbura, Katsina… the list goes on and on and on.
Nobody even recalls the news published in Sniffings that started all this; just as the tropical depression that started Clem is long since gone, so are the causes of the riot. Clem continues to run because he’s a hurricane and there’s more warm water; Global Riot Two keeps running because it’s a riot and there’s more looting and burning to be done.
If Global Riot Two were a war, it would already be the sixth bloodiest in the twenty-first century—still nothing compared to what the twentieth century was able to do, but give it time, give it time….
He must not let it have one second more than can be helped, Louie thinks. Right now speed is everything.
He is the fastest-moving human being there has ever been, right now; he is gaining speed all the time—and he has such a long way to go.
The rioting hasn’t been bad in Novokuznetsk, or so they assure Klieg, but that’s just compared to what it is everywhere else. With tens of thousands dying worldwide daily, a little martial law, a little looting, some occasional sniping seems like getting off easily.
Certainly he’s glad to have Glinda and Derry here, away from the much worse situation in the States.
John Klieg has always regarded himself as a practical philosopher, and the cornerstone of his practical philosophy has always been that most people are idiots when it comes to understanding how business works, what it does, and what it can and cannot do. What they constantly lose sight of is that business works by making money move from place to place, that what it does is keep the world on a reasonable, sensible course because business people are reasonable and sensible, and that’s that. It can make some people rich and give jobs to most of the rest. It can’t make the world into some kind of pie-in-the-sky paradise where everything works out just like in the movies and people get just what they deserve.
If business did make the world work like the movies, then the movie business would shut down. And Klieg loves movies, and he has a lot of friends who put money in them.
What really has him disgruntled, he realizes, is that here he had the opportunity not just of the century, but maybe of the millennium, and suddenly in the middle they change all the rules. Just like those government bastards. Hell, if private enterprise had been allowed to open up space in the first place, instead of jacking around with the government, there’d have been million-dollar houses all the way from Orlando to the Space Coast before they ever got the first satellite up, and by now there’d be six or seven names that meant space the way Rockefeller means oil, Ford means cars, and Hughes means airplanes. Instead, it was always this goofy stop-start thing, driven by big drives to go noplace in particular, with nobody really in control of it and no bank or CFO anywhere to keep the keel even.