Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Aprli 2014

by Penny Publications

  "I can't believe it," muttered Corva as she took off the glasses. "She's... Toby, she's awful."

  He sighed heavily. "Family, huh? Seriously, I'm starting to get over the shock of it all. That Evayne... is not my Evayne. My sister's gone, Corva."

  Then—because he couldn't put it off any longer—he said, "So what about it? Do we stay here an extra day while we wake Halen? Or do we leave him safe where he is, for now at least?"

  He held his breath. The look on Corva's face was heart-rending. She bit a fingernail and stared for a long time back at the stairs to the underground vault.

  "We go," she said, almost inaudibly; and in that moment it was as if she'd taken a giant step, over countless choices and possibilities, to a place from which there was no going back. She hung her head, and without another word followed Toby out of the house.

  They climbed out of the plastic-wrapped house into bright sunlight, hot air, and the buzzing of cicadas. Corva hugged herself and looked around. "Whoa. They did a bad job on the street." She'd noticed the unkempt wilderness that had sprung up around the pink house-shapes. Wrecks had, too—he sat up on his haunches, whiskers twitching, almost quivering with alertness. Orpheus sat nearby, watching him with the air of a worldly-wise traveler observing a tourist.

  "This way," Toby said. "I've got a pack and supplies for you." He began walking through the tall grass. Corva hurried to catch up.

  "When are we?"

  "Not far from where we left things." He watched the denners scout ahead. "It's funny—I have to do the math every now and then to keep it straight." He counted it out on his fingers for her: "The main lockstep hasn't started its next turn yet—Kenani's been asleep on Wallop for eighteen years real-time, so he's still waiting for Evayne to arrive so he can turn us over to her. One more week has passed in the Weekly since we left there. And two years, real-time, have passed since you went to sleep."

  She grinned. "Yeah, it can be confusing. You'll get used to it." Then she lost the smile. "How long have you been awake?"

  "A few months. Long enough, like I said, to get over certain things."

  "And in all this time you've done... what?"

  It was his turn to grin. "I've been driving Evayne out of her mind.

  "Do you want to help?"

  18

  "It's all about the interface," Miranda was telling Corva, "and the things it can do for you."

  "'You' being a McGonigal," Corva pointed out.

  "Well, yeah. Which is why I can only show you this mock-up. Toby can't share it with anybody else. It's the biocrypto, you know."

  Toby watched them out of the corner of his eye as he kicked through the remains of a recent battle. Having spent several weeks together now, the two women were chatting like old friends, despite the fact that one of them was a fourteen-thousand-year-old game personality. He'd found a way to port data from the government strategic models—to Consensus, and had given Corva an account in that. Now they both could see the whole vast network of Thisbe's planetary civilization spread out around them, icons and pointers and information flags standing like giants over the horizon; or, they could zoom it all into a hand-held map. They could manipulate the timelines, slide back to review or forward to project outcomes—though only he could enter any commands into the real interface.

  "I can't believe the army gave you an account," she'd said when he first booted it up for her. Toby had laughed shortly.

  "The alternative was letting me blunder around with no firm data. What would you have done?"

  "Here," said Miranda now. "See how you can monitor the cicada beds? There's health status, power levels, number of sleepers..."

  "I don't see any names. How can you tell who's who?"

  "You can't. That information is in the government's emergency database, which you, and Evayne, don't have access to."

  "—And that was the key to the whole plan," said Toby; but he wasn't watching the other two anymore. He had knelt by the remains of a burned-out bot to examine its design. "Damn."

  The bot was cylindrical, not human-shaped at all though it did have legs. It was about the size of a refrigerator, but he couldn't tell whether it had been armed. Of course, it was hard to tell much from the landscape of churned ground and twisted metal that spread over about a square kilometer of grassland. The forest fire started by the battle was still going, a few klicks east of here; Thisbe fire-fighting bots were water-bombing it with monotonous regularity. If they didn't get it under control in the next day or so, the lockstep system would be forced to wake up everybody in the neighboring town so they could evacuate.

  Which would be perfect.

  "Did you find something?" Corva came over, her feet crunching on the burnt, black ground.

  "I can't tell what model this was," he said, poking at the downed bot with a stick.

  "And that's a problem because...?"

  "It's a problem if Evayne's got a reserve of non-McGonigal bots. That would mean she can get around the network problem."

  "I still don't get that," Corva said to Miranda.

  "It looks as though Toby has an administrator's account to the lockstep system, but Evayne is just a user," said Toby's virtual shipmate. "He's been able to override all of her commands to lockstep technology. That includes any of Evayne's systems that he can communicate with."

  "... Which is why she cut herself off from the planetary network," he said. Standing, he brushed ashes from his knees and looked around for more clues. "She can't take over my bots, but I can take over hers. I could even have taken over her ships and shut her down in orbit, if only I'd known about this sooner!"

  "I'm sorry," said Corva sarcastically, "but why didn't you?"

  "It's the interface." Miranda shrugged. "It's kind of... cryptic. Lots of things it doesn't tell you. Like, for instance, the identity of a given sleeper. There are emergency systems that can track who sleeps where and can wake a sleeper remotely, for instance you can set an alarm to do that if somebody close to you dies or some other personal emergency happens. Your ship's manifest cross-referenced names with the cicada beds the passengers were in. But by themselves, the beds don't keep that kind of information."

  "Which means I've been able to use both Orpheus and the beds to winter over. Doing it with Orph is incredibly exhausting for both of us; if I was only able to use denner hibernation we wouldn't have been able to just randomly jump through time the way we're doing. Like I said, that's what makes this plan possible. And, I mean I can't be positive, but this," he gestured at the mechanical carnage, "sure looks like it's working."

  Bots had fought bots here: networked Toby machines versus locked-down marauders from Evayne's ships. Hers had been on a search-and-sweep of the local town, breaking into houses and reading IDs off the cicada beds. Evayne had human troops doing the same thing, but Toby didn't go near them— and, so far at least, Evayne hadn't harmed any of the helpless Thisbe citizens whose homes she was invading.

  "I was expecting a tug-of-war," he said. Orpheus and Wrecks were waiting at the edge of the burned ground, and Toby's denner sniffed dubiously at Toby's pant-cuffs as the humans met them. He and Corva shouldered their packs and waded back into the tangled brush.

  "I thought we'd both be issuing orders to the lockstep system. She'd command it to do one thing, I'd tell it no, she'd say yes. I was expecting a game of global whack-a-mole, but it hasn't worked out like that."

  "Whack-a-what?"

  "But it sort of has," he went on, oblivious. "Better, really. I wake up a whole town, Evayne freaks out and sends her people to find out if it's an army group assembling. Random beds come awake all over the planet, and she can see that in the interface, but not who it is who's woken up. She never knows whether one of them might be me, so she has to send somebody to investigate each and every one. Which takes fuel and people—and means she has to have people awake all the time. But I can sleep for years if I want."

  He'd expected that he would have to manually wake people, because if he scheduled wak
e-ups ahead of time, Evayne could find them in the interface (though, not who they were) and investigate before they woke, or just reset them. Toby's plan had involved being awake more than sleeping. As it turned out, that hadn't been necessary. He had Evayne's forces dancing to his tune all over the planet, which freed him up to mess with her in other ways.

  Corva shook her head. "Sooner or later she's going to start killing people. She's gonna call your bluff. What are you going to do then?"

  "If she pisses me off, I'll wake the whole damned planet. She knows that." He could tell she was far from satisfied by that answer, so he said, "How's the story end? There's a bunch of possible ways:

  "If I wasn't here, but let's say some pretender who'd convinced the local government I was the messiah, then Evayne would have waited until most of the planet was wintering over. Thisbe just doesn't have the resources to replace all the McGonigal cicada beds in time. So she'd be able to dig in, take out the military's installations, and threaten whole cities with destruction unless they turned me over. That was your brother's nightmare ending to the story.

  "But if I really am Toby McGonigal, then I can have the whole planet up and running before she can get herself established. Then, we have enough force to put up a good fight, maybe even win. In that case, the outcome's not certain—and that means there'd probably be a pitched battle. I might die, you might die, but probably, Evayne would lose. If she survived, she'd end up our prisoner. And with her as our hostage, the road to Destrier's wide open.

  "That's Halen's dream version."

  "That's the one you agreed to," she pointed out.

  "Corva, a lot of people die in that case, and me—I end up just like Evayne, locked into playing my role in a myth I didn't invent. It sucks, I was never going to do that, and I'm sorry I had to let you think I would."

  "Okay," she said, with a slight smile.

  "The thing is, this thing about me being able to override her commands changes the story. But for this twist on it to work, I had to make sure she committed herself now, when she doesn't have that extra force. I had to lure her in.

  "So, when she arrived, the planet was wintering over. She thought it was safe to come out of orbit, so she set some ships down by the capital, and headed in with a big force to wake up the government and throw down her ultimatum. A force of soldiers was waiting there—the ones who hadn't been using Mc-Gonigal beds. There was a confrontation; but I'm sure the Thisbe soldiers were confused and demoralized at that point. They figured I'd betrayed them. So they were facing each other tensely in the middle of the Grand Plaza when one of Evayne's aids came running up to her. I wasn't there, by the way; I watched it all later on the security footage. Couldn't quite make out the expression on her face, though, when her people told her that McGonigal beds all over the planet were starting to wake up—including other army bases.

  "If I'd woken the whole planet we'd have been in Version Two of the story again—a pitched battle. But it wasn't like that. There were just enough Thisbe military awake now to keep Evayne from safely leaving the planet. Also enough to put up a good defense if she tried some stunt like threatening to wipe out a town."

  "Wait, but why?"

  "It was a message from me to her."

  "Yes, but why? What did you think she was going to do?"

  "Exactly what she did do. I know Evayne. If you dangle something just out of her reach, she'll keep jumping at it until she collapses. She's always been like that, but who knows it aside from me and Peter? In forty years, nobody's ever done this to her. She's probably totally forgotten that this is her vulnerability.

  "So, I made myself the bait, and said 'here I am, come get me.'"

  "You set the rules of the game! If she breaks them by escalating—"

  "Then I escalate too. If she hurts anyone, I wake the bombers, the mechs, and missile battalions. She could play a different game, but only by denying her essential nature—"

  Corva reached out and gave Toby a hard shove. As he stumbled, she shouted, "That's crazy dangerous! She could swoop in and catch us at any time! Then what?"

  He laughed. "Then I lose everything. But only me."

  "And me, you jerk. You dragged me into this."

  "Are you saying you thought you were safe when you came with me?"

  "Well, no, but—"

  "Evayne may know about denners but she doesn't know we have Orpheus and Wrecks. She suspects I'm using non-McGonigal beds; some models don't have to report their status to the lockstep network. I know she thinks this because she's got her people scouring the planet looking for those beds. She rousts anybody who's in one and then destroys it. Meanwhile, she's watching the network. Any Mc-Gonigal bed that's activated—either waking up or going under—could be me. So she has to investigate. And that's sapping her strength. Even worse: it's using up time."

  "Are you saying," and now she was shouting, "that there's thousands of people out there who've had their beds destroyed? That they're stranded in real-time?"

  He shook his head. "You know the lockstep laws. They can use any available bed if they can't get to their own. Although, the other thing Evayne's doing is disabling all the empty McGonigal beds she can find, to deny me a resting place. She's got enough for the refugees—but she thinks she can tighten the noose around me this way."

  A little calmer, Corva nodded to the denners. "Except we don't need the beds."

  "Right."

  They walked together for a long time, Corva with her head down and hands behind her back while Toby broke the trail for her. He was headed for a road that led to the next town. It was going to take a couple of days to get to it on foot, but he'd been learning patience recently. He could afford the time.

  "How does it end?" she said suddenly. "This version of the game?"

  He looked back at her, grimly satisfied. "Peter and Evayne started something they think they can control. They can't control it—but I can.

  "The game doesn't end on Thisbe. This is just the opening move."

  They'd been sleeping in houses, but there were none nearby, here between the towns. He was pretty sure Evayne had no automated hunters in the sky right now (the Thisbe ground forces having shot most of them down) so he decided to risk a fire.

  He and Corva sat side by side on a log and roasted some stringy rabbit that Wrecks had caught. It was comfortable and even romantic for a while; they talked about their vastly different childhoods, finding so little in common that it was amazing to both they could relate to one another at all. After a period of companionable silence, though, Toby noticed that Corva was staring at the sinuous river of stars that crossed the sky. After a time she stood up and put her back to the fire. "I've never seen this," she murmured.

  "What, the Milky Way?"

  "No. That." She nodded at the horizon.

  Under the sky, there were no lights at all. Beyond the small circle of orange cast by the fire, everything was utterly black and still. The saw-toothed cut-out of trees on the horizon reminded Toby of another time he'd stared into black like that. It was on his first waking in orbit around Lowdown, when he'd turned away from that same vision of the Milky Way to find sight absorbed by the vast circular blackness of the planet. He remembered what that had felt like, and coming to stand next to her, he felt a bit of it now.

  Except for the occasional crackle from the fire, there was no sound at all. It was as if they were standing at the border to the land of death, nothing ahead of them but perfected stillness.

  Corva shivered. "Is this why we did it?" She turned to nod in the direction of the town they'd left. "Did we have a million years of being faced with... with this every night—and did we invent fire, and weapons and clothes and culture and art and houses just so we wouldn't have to look into it?—that awful emptiness?"

  He nodded. "I guess you never camped out."

  She turned to him. "You're not afraid of it, are you? Not the way the rest of us are."

  Toby shrugged. "I've seen it before, I guess."

  "Y
ou want to rub her nose in the horror of real-time?"

  "Or her men's noses. Every second that ticks by while they chase me, they age, while the people they left behind remain..."

  "Perfect."

  He laughed. "Imagination does funny things. Especially when it's faced with something like this. Right?" He shouted that last word into the night.

  There was no echo. Silence and blackness ate the word and remained untouched.

  "Don't do that!" Corva sat down again, now resolutely staring into the fire. Toby noticed she was playing with her little hologram locket.

  He sat next to her. "What is that, anyway? You've worn it since I've known you."

  It had been a while since Corva had given him her I-can't-believe-you're-so-stupid look. "You're kidding. You're playing this complicated mind-game with your sister's people, and you don't even know how they think about time?"

  "I know they're afraid of it. Else why run faster and faster into the future?"

  She gave a heavy sigh. "Yeah. Okay, there's two visions of time—of what it is. The first is the oak in the acorn. You know what that is?"

  He wracked his memory, trying to remember how Evayne's official religion worked. "That everything's predestined, unfolding according to some kind of plan?"

  "Oh, it's more than that. It's the idea that the only true creative moment in all of time was the first one—the Big Bang. Everything that's happened since is just working out the implications made possible in that first second. The engine was built before time, and now it just runs. Your sister's taken that idea, applied it to human civilization, and put you at the heart of it. Toby," she said, now struggling to keep a straight face, "you're the Big Bang of the locksteps."

  "Great. Another title to add to my list."

  "The story is that you saw it all in a flash of vision—I mean how humanity could cheat time and become eternal, even if our individual lives are still short. You built an eternal city of sorts, a real Olympus that would abide no matter what happened on Earth or the other fast worlds. One of the things that means is that there can be nothing new added to the locksteps. No innovation. No revolution. No change of any kind."