Tales of Time and Space

by Allen Steele

  “Cindy, hi.” Dale looked up from the laptop on his desk when she knocked on the room’s half-open door. “Thanks for coming over. I’ve got a favor to ask. Do you…?”

  “Have a satphone? Sure.” It was in the backpack Cindy had carried with her on the plane. She’d flown to Minneapolis to hook up with an old college roommate for a camping trip in the lakes region, where cell coverage was spotty and it wasn’t smart to be out in the woods with no way to contact anyone. “Not that it’s going to do you any good.”

  Dale didn’t seem to hear the last. “So long as its battery isn’t dead—” a questioning look; Cindy shook her head “—I might be able to hook it up to my laptop through their serial ports. Maybe I can get through to someone.”

  “I don’t know how.” Sharon leaned against the door. “Internet’s gone down. My partner and I found that out when we tried to use our cruiser laptop.” She nodded at the digits on Dale’s laptop. “We just got that, same as everyone else.”

  “Yes, well…” Dale absently ran a hand through thinning brown hair. “The place I want to try is a little better protected than most.”

  “Where’s that, sir? The Pentagon?” Sharon’s demeanor changed; she was a cop again, wanting a straight answer to a straight question. “You showed us a Pentagon I.D. when you came over here from the airport. Is that where you work?”

  “No. That’s just a place I sometimes visit. My job is somewhere else.” Dale hesitated, then he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Opening it, he removed a laminated card and showed it to Sharon. “This is where I work.”

  Cindy caught a glimpse of the card. His photo was above his name, Dale F. Heinz, and at the top of the card was NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. She had only the vaguest idea of what that was, but Sharon was obviously impressed.

  “Okay. You’re NSA.” Her voice was very quiet. “So maybe you know what’s going on here.”

  “That’s what I’d like find out. Tonight, once we’ve gone upstairs to a balcony room.”

  Minneapolis was dying.

  From the balcony of a concierge suite—the only tenth-floor room whose door wasn’t locked—the city was a dark expanse silhouetted by random fires. No lights in the nearby industrial park, and the distant skyscrapers were nothing but black, lifeless shapes looming in the starless night. Sharon thought there ought to be the sirens of first-responders—police cruisers, fire trucks, ambulances—but she heard nothing but an occasional gunshot. The airport was on the other side of the hotel, so she couldn’t tell whether the jet which had crashed there was still ablaze. Probably not, and if its fire had spread from the runway to the hangers or terminals, those living in the Wyatt-Centrum would have known it by now; the hotel was only a mile away.

  A muttered obscenity brought her back to the balcony. Dale was seated at a sofa end-table they’d dragged through the sliding door; his laptop lay open upon it, connected to Cindy’s satphone. He’d hoped to get a clear uplink once he was outside, and a top floor balcony was the safest place to do this. And it appeared to have worked; gazing over his shoulder, Sharon saw that the countdown had disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the NSA seal.

  “You got through.” Cindy stood in the open doorway, holding a flashlight over Dale’s computer. The satphone belonged to her, so she’d insisted on coming along. Sharon had, too, mainly because Dale might need protection. After the incident in the kitchen, there was no telling how many ’bots might still be active in the hotel, as yet undiscovered.

  “I got there, yeah…but I’m not getting in. Look.” Dale’s fingers ran across the keyboard, and a row of asterisks appeared in the password bar. He tapped the Enter key; a moment later, Access Denied appeared beneath the bar. “That was my backdoor password. It locked out my official one, too.”

  “At least you got through. That’s got to count for something, right?”

  Dale quietly gazed at the screen, absently rubbing his lower lip. “It does,” he said at last, “but I don’t like what it means.”

  He didn’t say anything else for a moment or two. “Want to talk about it?” Sharon asked. “We’ve got a right to know, don’t you think?”

  Dale slowly let out his breath. “This isn’t just any government website. It belongs to the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s electronic surveillance facility in Bluffdale, Utah.” He glanced up at Sharon. “Ever heard of it?”

  “Isn’t that the place where they bug everyone’s phone?”

  “That’s one way of putting it, yeah. Bluffdale does more than that, though…a lot more. They’re tapped into the entire global information grid. Not just phone calls…every piece of email, every download, every data search, every bank transaction. Anything that’s transmitted or travels down a wire gets filtered through this place.”

  “You gotta be kidding.” Harold appeared in the doorway behind Cindy, apparently having found the restroom he’d been searching for. He’d tagged along as well, saying that Sharon might need help if they ran into any more ’bots. Sharon knew that this was just an excuse to attach himself to Cindy, but didn’t say anything. Her roommate knew how to keep away from a wolf…and indeed, she left the doorway and squeezed in beside Dale, maintaining a discrete distance from the annoying salesman.

  “Not at all. There’s two and half acres of computers there with enough processing power to scan a yottabyte of information every second. That’s like being able to read 500 quintillion pages.”

  Harold gave a low whistle. “All right, I understand,” Sharon said. “But what does that have to do with us?”

  The legs of Dale’s chair scraped against concrete as he turned half-around to face her and the others. “Look…something has shut down the entire electronic infrastructure, right? Electricity, cars, phones, planes, computers, robots…everything networked to the grid was knocked down three days ago. And then, almost immediately after that, every part connected to the system that’s mobile and capable of acting independently…namely, the robots…came back online, but now with only one single purpose. Kill any human they encounter.”

  “Give me another headline,” Harold said drily. “I think I might have missed the news.”

  “Hush.” Cindy glared at him and he shut up.

  “The only other thing that still functions are networked electronics like smartphones and laptops…stuff that runs on batteries. But they don’t do anything except display a number and make a ticking sound just like the robots do. And that number seems to decrease by one every time there’s a tick.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Cindy said. “It began the moment my cell phone dropped out.”

  Dale gave her a sharp look. “You were on the phone when the blackout happened?” Cindy nodded. “Do you happen to remember what the number was when it first appeared on your phone screen?”

  “Sort of…it was seven billion and something.”

  “About seven and half billion, would you say?” Dale asked. She nodded again, and he hissed beneath his breath. “That’s what I thought it might be.”

  “What are you getting at?” Sharon asked, although she had a bad feeling that she already knew.

  “The global population is approximately seven and a half billion.” Dale’s voice was very low. “At least, that’s about how many people were alive on Earth three days ago.”

  Sharon felt a cold snake slither into the pit of her stomach. A stunned silence settled upon the group. Her ears picked up a low purring sound from somewhere in the distance, but it was drowned out when both Cindy and Harold started speaking at once.

  “But…but why—?”

  “What the hell are you—?”

  “I don’t know!” Dale threw up his hands in exasperation. “I can only guess. But—” he nodded toward the laptop “—the fact that the most secure computer system in the world is still active but not letting anyone in tells me something. This isn’t a cyberattack, and I don’t think a hacker or terrorist group is behind it either.” He hesitated. “I think…I think it may have
come out of Bluffdale.”

  Sharon stared at him. “Are you saying the NSA did this?”

  “No…I’m saying the NSA’s computers might have done this.” Dale shook his head. “They always said the day might come when the electronic world might become self-aware, start making decisions on its own. Maybe that’s what happening here, with Bluffdale as the source.”

  The purring sound had become a low buzz. Sharon ignored it. “But why would it start killing people? What would that accomplish?”

  “Maybe it’s decided that seven and a half billion people are too many and the time has come to pare down the population to more…well, more sustainable numbers.” Dale shrugged. “It took most of human history for the world to have just one billion people, but just another two hundred years for there to be six billion, and only thirty after that for it to rise seven and a half billion. We gave Bluffdale the power to interface with nearly everything on planet, and a mandate to protect national security. Maybe it’s decided that the only certain way to do it is to…”

  “What’s that noise?” Harold asked.

  The buzzing had become louder. Even as Sharon turned to see where the sound was coming from, she’d finally recognized it for what it was. A police drone, the civilian version of the airborne military robots used in Central America and the Middle East. She’d become so used to seeing them making low-attitude surveillance sweeps of Minneapolis’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods that she had disregarded the sound of its push-prop engine.

  That was a mistake.

  For a moment or two, she saw nothing. Then she caught a glimpse of firelight reflecting off the drone’s bulbous nose and low-swept wings. It was just a few hundred feet away and heading straight for the balcony.

  “Down!” she shouted, and then she threw herself headfirst toward the door. Harold was in her way. She tackled him like a linebacker and hurled him to the floor. “Get outta there!” she yelled over her shoulder as they scrambled for cover.

  They’d barely managed to dive behind a couch when the drone slammed into the hotel.

  Afterwards, Harold reckoned he was lucky to be alive. Not just because Officer McCoy had thrown him through the balcony door, but also because the drone’s hydrogen cell was almost depleted when it made its kamikaze attack. So there hadn’t been an explosion which might have killed both of them, nor a fire that would have inevitably swept through the Wyatt-Centrum.

  But Cindy was dead, and so was Dale. The cop’s warning hadn’t come in time; the drone killed them before they could get off the balcony. He later wondered if it had simply been random chance that its infrared night vision had picked up four human figures and homed in on them, or if the Bluffdale computer had backtracked the satphone link from Dale’s laptop and dispatched the police drone to liquidate a possible threat. He’d never know, and it probably didn’t matter anyway.

  Harold didn’t know Dale very well, but he missed Cindy more than he thought he would. He came to realize that his attraction to her hadn’t been purely sexual; he’d liked her, period. He wondered if his wife was still alive, and reflected on the fact that he’d only been three hours from home when his car went dead on a side street near the hotel. He regretted all the times he’d cheated on her when he’d been on the road, and swore to himself that, if he lived through this and she did, too, he’d never again pick up another woman.

  The drone attack was the last exciting thing to happen to him or anyone else in the hotel for the next couple of days. They loafed around the atrium pool like vacationers who didn’t want to go home, scavenging more food from the kitchen and going upstairs to break into vending machines, drinking bottled water, getting drunk on booze stolen from the bar. Harold slept a lot, as did the others, and joined poker games when he was awake. He volunteered for a four-hour shift at the lobby barricades, keeping a sharp eye out for roaming robots. He saw nothing through the peep-holes in the plywood boards except a few stray dogs and some guy pushing a shopping cart loaded with stuff he’d probably looted from somewhere.

  Five days after the blackout, nearly all the phones, pads, and laptop computers in the hotel were dead, their batteries and power packs drained. But then Officer McCoy, searching Cindy’s backpack for an address book she could use to notify the late girl’s parents, discovered another handy piece of high-tech camping equipment: a photovoltaic battery charger. Cindy had also left behind her phone; it hadn’t been used since her death, so its battery still retained a whisker of power. Officer McCoy hooked the phone up to the recharger and placed them on a table in the atrium, and before long they had an active cell phone.

  Its screen remained unchanged, except that the number was much lower than it had been two days ago. It continued to tick, yet the sound was increasingly sporadic; sometimes as much as a minute would go by between one tick and the next. By the end of the fifth day, a few people removed some boards and cautiously ventured outside. They saw little, and heard almost nothing; the world had become quieter and much less crowded.

  Although Harold decided to remain at the Wyatt-Centrum until he was positive that it was safe to leave, the cops decided that their presence was no longer necessary. The hotel’s refugees could fend for themselves, and the city needed all the cops they could get. Before Officer McCoy left, though, she gave him Cindy’s phone so he could keep track of its ticking, slowly decreasing number.

  In the dark hours just before dawn of the sixth day, Harold was awakened by light hitting his eyes. At first he thought it was morning sun coming in through the skylight, but then he opened his eyes and saw that the bedside table lamp was lit. An instant later, the wall TV came on; it showed nothing but fuzz, but nonetheless it was working.

  The power had returned. Astonished, he rolled over and reached for Cindy’s cellphone. It no longer ticked, yet its screen continued to display a number, frozen and unchanging:

  1,000,000,000.

  This is the first of two stories in this collection that take place within my Coyote series and the spin-off novels set in the same universe, which has become my best-known work. It occurs very late in the chronology, after Coyote Horizon but before Coyote Destiny and is loosely related to Galaxy Blues but it can be read on its own. This is also the first time Hex is mentioned, although I wouldn’t get around to writing about that place until the novel Hex a couple of years later.

  But that’s not what this story is about.

  I think everyone has someone with whom they fall in love, only to have things not work out as they hoped they would. Heartbreak and regret is part of the human condition; we go through life wondering how things may have been if only you’d said or done the right thing at the right time. This story’s title is taken from a traditional American spiritual, but somewhere out there is a girl—whose name isn’t Jordan, by the way, although I once had a close friend with that name—whom I haven’t seen since the night many, many years ago I said something to her that I shouldn’t have said.

  I doubt she’ll ever read this, but if she does, I hope she’ll consider this an apology.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF JORDAN

  Jordan and I broke up on the docks of Leeport, about as lovely a place as you can have for the end of an affair. It was a warm summer evening in Hamaliel, with sailboats on the water and Bear—the local name for Ursae Majoris 47-B—hovering above the West Channel. We’d gone down to the waterfront to have dinner at a small bistro that specialized in grilled brownhead fresh from the fishing net, but even before the waiter brought us the menu the inevitable arguments had begun. There had been a lot of those lately, most of them about issues too trivial to remember but too important to ignore, and even though we settled the matter, nonetheless the quarrel caused us to lose our appetites. So we skipped dinner and instead ordered a bottle of waterfruit wine, and by the time we’d worked our way through the bottle, she and I decided that it was time to call it quits.

  By then, it had become apparent that we weren’t in love. Mutual infatuation, yes. We had the strong passions th
at are both the blessing and the curse of the young, and Jordan and I never failed to have a good time in bed. Yet desire was not enough to keep us together; when it came right down to it, we were very different people. She’d been born and raised on Coyote, a third-generation descendant of original colonists; I was an émigré from Earth, one the gringos who’d managed to escape the meltdown of the Western Hemisphere Union before the hyperspace bridge to the old world was destroyed. She came from money; I’d been a working man all my life. She was a patron of the arts; my idea of a good time was a jug of bearshine and a hoot-and-holler band down at the tavern. She was quiet and reserved; I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, even when it was in my best interests to do so.

  But most important—and this was what really brought things to a head—she was content to live out the rest of her life on Coyote. Indeed, Jordan’s ambitions extended no farther than inheriting her family’s hemp plantation—where we’d met in the first place, much to her parents’ disapproval, since I was little more than a hired hand—while having a platoon of children. I was only too willing to help her practice the art of making babies, but the thought of everything to follow made my heart freeze. After five years on Coyote—fifteen by Earth reckoning, long enough for me to have allegedly became an adult—I wanted to move on. Now that the starbridge had been rebuilt and the Coyote Federation had been tentatively accepted as a member of the Talus1, humankind was moving out into the galaxy. There were worlds out there that no human had ever seen before, along with dozens of races whom we’d just met. This was my calling, or at least so I thought, and the last thing I wanted to do was settle down to a dull life of being a husband and father.

  So we broke up. It wasn’t hostile, just a shared agreement that our romance had gone as far as it could go, and perhaps it would be better if we no longer saw each other. Nonetheless, I said something that I’d later regret: I called her a rich girl who liked to slum with lower-class guys, which was how I’d secretly come to regard her. I’m surprised she didn’t dump her glass over my head. But at least we managed to get out of the restaurant without causing a scene; a brief hug, but no kisses, then we went our separate ways.