Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  “You should know that our forces have surrounded the launch facility and it cannot be seized by any other force of any size before we can destroy it. As a developing nation we claim the right—”

  Someone off camera shouts. The dictator’s eyes grow wide; he turns to say something. Then the picture lurches, hard, and the signal goes dead.

  Klieg guessed right; this is the cue. From half a dozen concealed places in the room, the “moderates” of the governing council—all the people who had some sort of power base and were not obviously anti-Abdulkashimare pulling out lengths of iron pipe.

  Klieg manages not to look, much.

  There are four Abdulkashim loyalists in the room, and there are three moderates, and one length of iron pipe for each one. Roles seem to have been apportioned early, or at least the biggest one always holds the legs, the smallest pins down the wrists, and the third one wields the pipe.

  The Abdulkashimists scream and struggle, but the real effect is nil. Whenever one of them manages to pull an arm or leg away, the man with the pipe bashes it.

  When at last they are held down and spread-eagled, the Minister for Justice declares them all to be criminals against the legitimate order of the Siberian people, and the Special Minister for Mines, the Director of Academic Research, the Minister of Public Health, and the Minister of Surface Transportation begin to use their pipes in earnest. On the three male Abdulkashimists, none of them can resist crushing the testicles first before brutally pounding on the head, nor do they stop beating when the man is unconscious or dead.

  The pipe is too large to go into the Abdulkashimist woman, but it’s heavy enough to bruise her or break the pubic bone, and the Director of Academic Research slams it across her breasts as well, twice, before he caves in her head at a single stroke, like a watermelon hurled to the sidewalk.

  Assuming he gets out of here alive, John Klieg’s score is even. Besides, if he can live through the next fifteen minutes, he’s rich. He starts to move, very slowly, toward a side door, keeping his head down low.

  That’s when the door bursts in, and troops fill the room. It’s some colonel Klieg has never heard of, who has decided to take over from all the involved factions, for the good of the nation. Among his first actions is to abolish capitalism, and to arrest Siberia’s most notorious capitalist.

  Just as John Klieg is being led off in handcuffs for the second time, Louie Tynan is about to try a different kind of catch. When the package arrives, he brakes it so hard that he captures it.

  The robots strip it for its precious cargo of processors. He’s going to need lots of them.

  He pulls other raw materials from the package, feeds them to his synthesizers, and then takes the leftover six tons of iron and miscellaneous metal and shapes it into a fine dust, blowing it out the back, the eddy currents induced by the coil strong enough to heat the iron instantly to plasma. He expels it as atoms moving at almost a tenth of the speed of light. It’s a nice hard boost—twenty-three g’s would have turned the old body to jelly—and every bit counts now.

  Two days later, weeks ahead of schedule, he begins to overtake the forward packages in the train. Back at the moon and ahead on the asteroids, the other Louie and the wiseguys rush to lengthen their catapults and to add laser boost so that they can continue to accelerate packages beyond the end of the catapult; it’s going to be a lot harder to catch him with a package, and he needs packages. Between stripped components and his own integration, he is now running at seven brain-years per minute.

  “I’d say the results were completely satisfactory,” Harris Diem says, but Brittany Lynn Hardshaw is having none of it.

  Nor is her old friend and most trusted advisor going to back down. It’s later in the day Abdulkashim was shot down and the countercoup erupted in Novokuznetsk, and media reaction is dribbling in. Everyone has assumed, quite rightly, that the USA was behind the shoot-down-who else had a body in low Earth orbit that could be deflected precisely enough to hit the aircraft carrying Abdulkashim?—and that people high in the Siberian government knew about it in advance and used the shoot-down to signal the start of their coup.

  Harris Diem is pleased no end. At one stroke, they have plunged the Siberian government into the hands of greedy, tin-pot types who have neither Abdulkashim’s ability nor his charisma; thus there is no more real threat in Siberia for at least a political generation. Alaska is secure, both from Siberian aggression and from being lured into a Siberian alliance; as long as the Hardshaw Doctrine, that no formerly American territory will ever be permitted alliance with an Asian or European power, holds, Alaska will remain American for all practical purposes, whatever its official status.

  Moreover, because the intervention was specifically an American military one, not at the request of the UN (the price Diem extracted from Rivera, in exchange for doing the deed, was that it be neither sanctioned nor condemned by the UN) a precedent has been established for unilateral American action, another extension on the principle established by Louie Tynan’s mission. First, joint orders, so that Colonel Tynan could claim to be following his American commander’s; now unilateral action and no comment from the SecGen. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the sovereignty lost in the years after the Flash is being pulled back into place, and if Clem and its spawn are the price that has to be paid for that, to Harris Diem, who has given his life to building the strength of whatever organization Brittany Lynn Hardshaw headed, from the Shoshone County Prosecutor’s Office to the USA, the price is well worth it.

  His boss is less pleased. “In the first place, Harris, if you haven’t noticed, we are still losing lives worldwide at rates in excess of a million a week to the superhurricanes and their aftereffects. That number will climb this winter when famine and disease set in as well. And although we got Abdulkashim’s paws off GateTech’s launch facility, it’s still being held by Siberian military and it clearly was damaged in the fighting—and we can’t even get engineers out there on the job to find out how damaged. Now we’re totally dependent on Louie Tynan.”

  “Nothing wrong with that, he’s a good man.”

  “There’s everything wrong with having to bet the future of the planet on one man, no matter how smart he is or what capabilities he’s added to himself!”

  When Diem leaves the Oval Office, he’s shaking his head. It’s a shame to see the boss going soft after all these years; maybe real power politics have no appeal to her anymore. Maybe she’s gotten that strange disease of wanting to leave a significant mark on history. That’s been known to happen to presidents in the past, and on rare occasions has even done the Republic a little good.

  Anyway, she was still her old self in one regard, and moreover she’s right about the issue she raised. Influence needs to be exerted toward getting Klieg out of jail in Novokuznetsk; it’s pretty obvious to everyone that he was Hardshaw and Rivera’s inside man and tipped them off to everything as it broke. He isn’t safe in that jail in that country, and it wouldn’t look good for anything to happen to him—in this game if you want to have any friends, you’ve got to protect the ones you have.

  Carla Tynan doesn’t know at first what is different when she gets the message from Louie. It’s a long one, and it’s full of memories, sweet and bittersweet, warm and detached, funny and dark. It’s the most beautiful love letter anyone ever sent to anyone, as far as she’s concerned, and yet it’s clearly just a preamble.

  Then she finds out what he’s done; that that beautiful letter came to her from a dead man.

  She thinks of her own warm, carefully exercised body, live and healthy here in its hotel bed on Guadalcanal, and that there will never be a Louie Tynan to touch and hold her again. She recalls the feel of his right arm cocked over her thigh when he lifted her on one shoulder, to prove he could do it, on their first date. She remembers his warm breath against her neck when he would fall asleep and slowly creep over until he was using her as his pillow. She thinks of the scratchy feel of his crew cut under her hand.

 
It annoys hell out of her because she knows him well enough to know he’d expect this, but she also thinks of the feel of his stiff cock between her lips, of his fingers probing her anus….

  All gone. No more. He decided what he was doing was more important, supposedly. But Louie had been neglecting his beautiful, beautiful body for a long time. Even before he began to be telepresent on the moon, well before he started building additional processors to run on. And that body was, to Carla, so much her link to him; she can’t imagine Louie without his body. She’s stuck with a grief that races through a billion processors around the globe.

  It hurts more because his message is so detailed and clear that she is quite certain he is sincere.

  The only part missing is the most important—that although it had to be, that it was necessary, he himself is not grieved by the loss of his body, nor did he even think of how she might feel. He may know she loves him but it’s clear that after all these years he doesn’t really understand how or why she does.

  And that hurts terribly.

  For the first time since he left, she lets twenty-four hours go by, and then more, without answering his messages; she even leaves his messages untouched on processors he controls so that he can see she hasn’t read them. She makes it clear in a thousand ways that she is just too busy to be bothered and that, after all, their relationship is supposed to be strictly business, now isn’t it?

  If nothing else, she can make him regret not having a hand to hold roses in, feet to stand on her porch with, or a head to hang in embarrassment.

  For most of his life, Jopharma has picked coffee, and most of the time on just these few mountains in central Sumatra. Once, when there was a big bonus, he went over to Celebes to work for a while, and sent money home for his mother to save up so he could get married, but now that he has a wife, he has no reason to go elsewhere. He knows about Clem, of course, because everyone talks about it. But since there is nothing for him, or anyone he knows, to do about it, he just kept picking coffee, until early this year.

  Now the situation is getting desperate. The heavy cloud cover and rain have spoiled the crop, and there is nothing to pick. At least, up this high, they will not drown like the poor souls down below, but still… the unending clouds are something he has never seen before. It has been getting steadily colder too, and though a fire at night has always been pleasant, now it is necessary to have one all the time. Wood costs something too, and the landlord is not about to forgo rent merely because the world is ending.

  For a while, the man down the road, who had a TV, would announce which Clem these clouds were part of, but since it never clears—the man said that the weather scientists on TV are claiming that the islands trap the foul weather, or some silly thing like that—the question ceased to be interesting.

  Jopharma has not been to many places, but like most men, he has seen some XV and a great deal of television. He knows a bit of the world. Thus it is not with complete surprise or shock that he looks out the door and sees snow falling. It is only with a sinking heart.

  With one thing and another, since she’s been unplugged for so long, it takes them a good part of the afternoon to get Mary Ann transmitting satisfactorily. It’s really a pretty remarkable piece of fieldwork, considering they do it while the truck is rolling. At her insistence, Jesse is there holding her hand the whole time—not really because she’s nervous, though she pretends to be, but because she figures he’ll appreciate a chance to ride all day in air conditioning.

  It’s interesting too because he’s done so much work on various direct brain interface systems as part of his Realization Engineering curriculum. There, of course, the emphasis is on getting a working interface between mind and simulator, so that the mind can play, try things out, see what they’re like—expensive, by the standards of old-time engineers, but worth it because of the chance to get the exact right product.

  Here the idea is clarity rather than accuracy in the interface. That is, it doesn’t matter nearly so much whether they are getting exactly what Mary Ann—or Synthi Venture—is feeling as it does that what they get be clear, that it feels real rather than like a dream or an animation. Verisimilitude matters more than verity, Jesse thinks to himself.

  Just at the moment, they’re monkeying around with the part of her brain that gets active when she sings. One of the outputs they’re getting is nausea, and that’s probably a matter of a couple little folds on a pea-sized lump that happens to be in that area; they stimulate those, identify it, modify the pickup, try again.

  It’s a very long day, and at the end of it, they tell Mary Ann that part of the problem is “you went and took a real vacation,” as one of the doctors puts it.

  “That’s a crime?”

  “Well, usually they won’t put you in jail for it, but it’s a different thing from what most people in your line of work do. If you’d just gone to the same kind of resort you’re always going to for work, gone mostly incognito to lower the stress, and spent all your time drunk on fruit punch drinks by the pool, other than killing the occasional neuron, you’d have changed nothing about your basic brain structure. It would all be there pretty much the way the machine left it before you went off on your vacation. But you went and did something new and different, and when the brain learns its structure changes. The big things are still in the same place but everything’s in slightly different shapes. Probably some people out there will get the idea that you’re not the real Synthi Venture—whenever somebody comes back from a real vacation, that always happens.”

  “Is that why Rock is always the focus for the conspiracy nuts?”

  “Yep. That guy does something new every time off. Fine structure of his brain looks like the coast of Norway. Where poor old Quaz—well, he was a nice guy but he didn’t really need three convolutions to rub his brain cells together in.”

  “‘Poor old Quaz’? What happened?”

  She hasn’t heard, and when he tells her she bursts into tears. “I didn‘tn’ even like him much, but since I never really knew him…” She clutches Jesse’s hand tight.

  The doctor nods. “See? And on top of everything else, you’ve gone and developed a heart.”

  That night, when they make love, Jesse thinks about the idea of a million girls his own age, all over the world, tuned in to Synthi Venture and feeling what he’s doing. It’s terrific; he decides there’s nothing to worry about.

  Except, of course, that just before he falls asleep, he thinks of thousands of wrinkled old grandmothers—and grandfathers—also tuned in to Synthi Venture….

  Mary Ann feels him tense and asks him what the matter is, rolling over to rest a hand on his chest. He tells her, and now that he’s awake and telling her, they lie cuddling and giggling for a while.

  “So have you decided?” he asks. “They left it up to you.”

  “Yep. I’m definitely doing this from now on as Mary Ann, though of course they’ll cross-promote until the public gets the idea firmly in mind that Synthi and Mary Ann are the same person. But my feeling is that the artificial persona was just naturally a focus for trouble. Figure that when they put in a somebody-that-isn’t-you, if you have one drop of healthy selfpreservation, what you’re going to let that personality have is all the bad parts. That’s part of why most of the people in the business are either strung out or assholes.”

  “Makes sense to me,” he says.

  “Of course,” she says, “if every so often your adolescent immature side just wants to bone hell out of Synthi Venture, my middle-aged horny side might find a way to enjoy it.”

  “It sounds like something worth trying,” Jesse says, so they do. Mary Ann draws a deep breath, her eyes unfocus, and he realizes that now she is Synthi Venture. He takes her in his arms, and then it’s all wild energy and screaming for the next half hour.

  Jesse tells her afterward that Mary Ann is a better lay, though Synthi is a nice change of pace, and that seems to be the right thing to say.

  Next morning Jesse
finds himself in the middle of what really ought to be a surrealistic dream. It’s a story conference for Passionet, with all the usual attendees, and that alone is something he’d never have expected to attend, but add to it two big-name professors of semiotics, a noted director of rock concerts, and two quiet guys in suits (one from the White House and one from the UN), plus “Synthi’s Representative Friends,” as one of the consultants keeps calling them, while talking about them as if they are not there. The “SRF’s” are just Jesse and the Herreras, but he and Tomas have already spent a coffee break arguing about whether the T-shirts should read “SRFs: Because the time to represent Synthi’s friends is NOW” or “SRFs World Tour 2028.”

  Two of the writers seemed to think the idea was “fun—something we can use a little later on. Keep that one, guys, we’ve got it marked as yours, there’ll be some cash if we use it.”

  “How much do you suppose they mean?” Tomás whispers to Jesse. “And are they really that desperate for ideas?”

  “Well, I’d guess enough to buy some beer,” Jesse says, a little awkwardly because as the norteamericano he should be the expert and he doesn’t have any more idea than Tomás does. “And as for desperate for ideas—have you seen XV?”

  Tomás stares at him, nods as if he’s just heard something very shrewd, and claps him on the back.

  The conference lasts a long time, and Jesse has a feeling that his old instructors from the required course in Interdisciplinary Communication were really understanding it when they constantly claimed that people in different fields never really hear each other. The government guys seem to think that all they have to do is give Mary Ann and the writers a list of ideas that will then be programmed into the waiting heads of all the experiencers out there, more or less like the anti-drug messages in the old sitcoms. The university semiotics guys seem to be mostly arguing that no matter what is presented, people will reinterpret it into the same old thing. The writers seem to be obsessed with coming up with things to “substitute for the violence so that it will have some story values.” Passionet execs appear to be trying to arrive at any solution that won’t cause anyone to get up and walk out.