A keyboard was pushed to one side, while instead he was using fast-typing gloves clamped to the table. The arms disappearing into them were thin, and the tendons stood out clearly even in the poor light. A worn blanket hung across his legs, pulled up around his waist, while a bamboo cane hung from the back of his chair. He looked fragile, barely alive. A smoking pipe lay next to the screen, made from bone and brass. Tinny Asian pop music came from the back room.
He was leaning forward with a kind of stiff intensity, the gloves shaking so hard that he had to be working very fast, although several times he gave an abrupt sigh and glanced toward the back.
I knocked.
His head whipped around, and in the same movement he seemed almost to lunge toward the screen. But his hands were caught in the gloves, and after that one, convulsive movement he remained frozen in that odd position, his eyes locked on mine. There was something he didn’t want me to see, and from the expression that finally came over him after sitting there trapped by his own gloves for a minute, he knew that he himself had given this away. Had it really been that long since anyone had come to his door, since anyone had driven down this road, walked up this beach? His eyes finally lost focus and drifted to the floor. The tension went out of his shoulders and he slumped back into his chair, seemingly defeated by the mere appearance of an American soldier at his door. It was a strange performance in every way.
Elliot put a hand on my shoulder.
“We gotta go, Torres.” He squinted into the room, then craned his neck further into the shadows. “The fuck?” He took another step in and looked around, then stepped back to the door in confusion.
“You’re shitting me,” he said at last. “That’s him, ain’t it? The one we’re supposed to be rounding up? I thought this was all bullshit.”
But I’d already seen the titles on the books.
“It’s not biologicals, Tyrone.”
He hesitated, toying with the flap on his holster. “Listen, Torres,” he said finally. “Battalion’s screaming for my ass. We gotta do this and get out.”
“Go away, Tyrone.”
He stared at me. “Come on, Torres, get his ass out of here. What do you mean, ‘go away?’ You know this place is getting trashed tomorrow.”
“I’ll take care of it, Tyrone. I’ll get out with Polaski.”
Elliot ran the back of his hand across his mouth, looked uncertainly out through the open door, stared around the room one more time, then frowned at me as though he didn’t recognize me.
“Fine, Torres, fine. I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but fine, I ain’t been here. But you watch yourself, boy.”
Then he was gone, and a minute later the helicopter pounded away overhead. Inside the bungalow, the man still hadn’t moved.
I walked along the tables and glanced again at the books. They were English-language texts in disciplines I scarcely understood, but whose significance I knew very well.
None of the machines along the near side of the room, idling in their racks or cluttered on top of the tables, appeared to be connected to the outside world, or to the machine the man had in front of him.
Next to the charts on the wall he’d pinned a clump of photographs and articles. He was in some of the photographs himself, standing next to Westerners in what looked like academic settings. One photograph of him alone was partway down an article entitled DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY DISMISSES SCIENTIST’S CLAIMS OF CHEAP POWER.
I looked at the title for several minutes. I scarcely wanted to think what it implied. If the man had really found such a thing, it was worth any amount of money—yet according to the article, he hadn’t. So why had he clipped it and saved it?
I read the rest of the articles, keeping one eye on the man all the while. And as I read them, a mixture of anticipation and fear began to leave a sour taste in my mouth. Could it really be that no one had ever put all the pieces together?
On the other hand, maybe someone had. The military. Maybe their story about the missing researcher wasn’t all fabrication. Maybe the military had indeed put the pieces together, and had gotten to the man first. Then killed the story, courtesy of the Department of Energy.
And if it was true, and he’d then gotten away from them, even to this strange, scarcely settled island cleverly in the shadow of the equatorial Pacific war zone itself, he wouldn’t really have been surprised to find the Army at his door.
Me.
Which makes it easier. I walked around behind his chair to the back room, and he turned his head to follow. What was I going to do, though?
Or did I already know?
“Who’s here with you?” I said. He continued to watch me, but didn’t answer.
The back room was smaller, with its own door to the outside, half open. On the floor were a sleeping mat and some personal items, including a battered radio playing the music and some faded girls’ clothing.
I walked back to the table and leaned down to look at his screen. His eyes left mine to watch as I pulled the keyboard toward me, and his mouth opened with a hoarse sound of protest. His breath was strong with the half-sweet smell of opium.
On the screen were mathematical series that meant little to me, so I reached for a key to flip through the pages of the document he was working on, finding the operating system and the editor he was using unfamiliar. I glanced at the corner of the screen to try and find a page count, then stopped when I saw something else.
Next to the page count was the machine’s free memory count. But what should have been a few hundred billion—a few hundred gigabytes, maybe terabytes—was instead shown exponentially in a way I’d never seen before. 1.97 × 1015. Two times ten to the fifteenth.
Not hundreds of billions. Not trillions. Two quadrillion—a thousand times the memory of any workstation I’d ever worked on. And I’d worked on the best. The man’s eyes met mine.
Without touching the keyboard I walked to the back of the table, around to the computer cabinet itself. To one side of it, a twenty-centimeter section of the power cord had been stripped of its insulation, and the three copper conductors inside it carefully strung between two small pedestals in plain view on the table, as though between tiny telephone poles. Other than that there were only old-fashioned, transparent fibers leading to the gloves and keyboard and screen, also in plain view—no wireless antennas—and nothing else. Nothing. Everything the man had was inside that one machine. He might have been mirroring his data among multiple memory stores inside the box to keep it safe, but it wasn’t leaving the machine. He had surrounded his computer with an air-gap and shielding, lest anyone hack his way in, intercept its signals, or add a tracer wire when he wasn’t there.
I unfastened the clips and drew off the heavily shielded cover. The man said something and pulled himself out of his chair, but then slumped back down, quickly out of breath.
In the center of the machine were two oblong, dull silver shapes side by side, about six inches long and two wide. They bore Department of Defense asset tags. I’d heard rumors about such blocks, but I’d never seen any. They were petabyte memory blocks, one quadrillion bytes each, two to the fiftieth power, all of it static, immune to accidental loss. The document the man was writing couldn’t have needed a fraction of that memory, but whatever he was writing about must have. It was an amount of memory used to solve the mysterious equations of chaos, or to simulate the interactions of genetics or particle physics. The blocks would have cost millions each.
Blood was pounding in my ears as I walked back to the screen and began scrolling through the pages. Many of them seemed to deal with the rotation of super-symmetrical particles, the eerie fringe of quantum physics that had caught my attention in the book titles.
Somewhat more familiar engineering work followed. One page was titled SUMMARY DATA: OUTPUT IMPEDANCE. It dealt with the production of electrical power, and the numbers were very low. He was dealing with something that put out a tremendous amount of power, like a power plant generator.
&nbs
p; Much farther down, a section was titled CRITICAL THERMAL THRESHOLDS AND WORKABLE MASS, and there, once I understood it, I stopped. It wasn’t a generator at all, but something that weighed only a few kilograms. The size of a car battery. It had to be some kind of pulsing device, then, because anything so small could only put out that kind of power for a few thousandths of a second.
The man was staring into his screen now along with me, at the same time tamping down his pipe absently with a finger.
The last page was titled OBSERVED SUSTAINABILITY, and had only a few sentences. But I stared at the words in those sentences for a long time. Over and over I looked at them, not believing.
Decades. Not thousandths of a second, but de cades.
The man was looking directly at me now, his face an awful conflict of what I took to be both pride and pain.
I walked away, reeling. A device like the one spelled out in those blocks would give the world the kind of power people were literally dying for. Was it really possible?
“Observed,” it said. Not theoretical. Observed. A virtual observation in the blocks? Still, it would have been enough.
Power—and with it, freedom.
I
was standing next to the computer’s cabinet when I looked up again sometime later, facing the man across the table. The evening had left the room gloomy and dim, his face lit only by the screen. He’d lit his pipe when I’d first walked away, and his head was wreathed now in amber smoke that drifted through the glow between us, obscuring his features.
How long had I been pacing? Back and forth I’d gone past the clippings on the wall, past the now-darkened doorway, past the smoke and the keyboard, one eye always on the man and his hands, on the computer laid bare, on the silver blocks lying exposed in its middle like a beating double heart in an open chest. How many times had I remembered my father’s hands clutching his chipped and dirty glass, and how many times had I imagined, as on every other day of my life, an engine of bone-crushing power hurling me upward and away from it all? How many times had I wondered where this invention had really come from, only to tell myself that it surely wasn’t from this one, wretched man, that he himself, hidden away here with whatever guilty secret it was, could not possibly have had any intention of sharing it with the rest of a world so desperately in need.
My hand rested on one of the blocks. I ran my thumb down one side of it and my fingers down the other, feeling for the flange on the bottom. Don’t. There was a throbbing in my ears, a roaring sound. Don’t speak. The man sat in his smoky world of half-light and watched my hand. The block slid upward in its socket.
Don’t ask. A pair of dark eyes flashing their warning. Don’t want.
I slipped the first block into my trousers pocket. The cloth lining of the pocket tore—the block was much heavier than I’d expected.
The second block slid loose from its case. The man became agitated for a moment and pent up frustration seemed to pull at his features, but the opium soon took back its hold and left in its place only the moist, unfocused eyes, leaden already with resignation and the torpor of the drug. The block slipped free and the screen blinked out, leaving only a shadow in the gloom where he had sat, a memory fading away already into the night.
I don’t remember finding my way back to Polaski’s and my little two-man camp that night, but I do remember walking along the hillside above the jungle, smelling the hot air and the dust, and thinking I could hear someone playing a flute far off in the distance. The tune was familiar, but difficult to hear.
By the time I reached camp, though, the music was gone. Polaski was gone, too, leaving me just a sleeping bag and a packet of food.
I lay down on the bag and looked up into night, thinking that maybe my future lay out in the darkness, after all. A future bought with a single, quick, mean-spirited theft.
Just before falling asleep I remember thinking it would be good to hear the flute again. It remained quiet, though, and I reached down for the touch of the blocks instead.
I dreamed that night about a wolf. It walked toward me across a black planet at night, the color of ashes, its face smooth. And it had no eyes.
TWO
The First Messenger
W
hen I awoke the next day the ground was shaking. My sleeping bag whipped in the wind and something heavy slid across my waist. A voice called out from above.
“It’s time, Torres.” God’s voice.
I put my face in the bag and felt for the blocks. If they were gone, I thought, maybe the punishment would stop.
“Let’s go, Torres!” The blocks were still there. The thing on my waist slid higher and I grabbed for it. It was a rope, a pair of ropes, and they dragged me out of the bag and lifted me into the air.
The island sank away and I coughed and squinted at the jungle, clutching the rope ladder with one hand and my pocket with the other. The old man’s bungalow was quickly gone, lost among the trees, and moments later the island itself had dwindled to little more than sand and rock in the ocean, a meaningless slash of umber against the grey.
Turbines exploded in my ears as my head lifted over the deck. Polaski sat in the far gunner’s seat with a foot up on the helicopter’s magnetic cannon, swinging it back and forth past my face. I snapped myself in and put on a headset.
“Good morning,” said Polaski.
“Jesus, Polaski, are we in a hurry, or what?”
“Bolton got orders.”
I came fully awake as I remembered the Army and its plans. And the blocks. What had I planned to do? The day was starting too fast, and I wasn’t awake enough.
“What happened yesterday?” said Polaski.
“I found something,” I said, “so I stayed.”
“You found something.”
Polaski was the last one I should be telling. He’d want to sell the blocks themselves the first chance he got.
“Under a rock, maybe?” he said. “You found something under a rock?”
“No. I took it.”
“You took it.” The cannon stopped, aimed at my crotch. “And you’re telling me this why?” He was enjoying himself. “You want me to do something about it?”
I did and I didn’t.
The helicopter plunged nose-low and raced along the beach of the main island, then banked through a gap in the jungle and heaved its tail into the air. The skids struck hard and it spun to a stop in front of the mess.
“Find me after the briefing,” said Polaski.
T
he company was sprawled in chairs under the mess canopy, disheveled but mostly good-humored. Leaning against a table in front were two women wearing the white insignia of the MI controllers, looking crisper than the others. One was A. W. Paulson, a stocky Midwesterner with hard eyes, and the other Katherine Chan, a slender, honey-skinned woman with a quick smile and glossy black hair.
I nodded to Chan, then sat down next to Elliot and tried to get the sand out of my ears. I glanced up now and then at Chan’s figure and dark eyes. Elliot blew elaborate kisses to someone in back, then settled into his seat with a sigh.
“I ain’t gonna ask,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s good.”
He leaned closer. “On the other hand, maybe I am. Hell, Torres, you look like you swallowed a cat.”
“I think I did.”
“You think you did? You ain’t supposed to say ‘I think I did,’ Torres, you’re supposed to say ‘Hell no, Tyrone, I ain’t swallowed no cat, what you talkin’ ’bout?’ I swear I gotta watch you short Mexicans.” He stretched out his legs. “I knew a short Mexican once. No one could see him coming, so he got stepped on a lot. Got shorter and shorter all the time.”
“You’re making that up.”
“ ’Course I’m making it up! Ain’t nothing around here to be cheerful about if you don’t make something up. See—here comes his nibs. He don’t look too cheerful, neither. He better make something up, quick.”
Bolton walked in, out of place as ever. He was a s
mall but good-looking man with broad shoulders and sandy hair, wearing immaculate dress whites. He looked like a freshly-scrubbed schoolboy stepping up to the front of the class, eyes alert as he surveyed the troops.
“All right, listen up.” He was Welsh, and still had the accent.
“Let’s see if we can straighten up a bit first, right where we sit, shall we? We’ve got a major coming along, and I shouldn’t want to be caught less than kempt, hm? He’s a Senior Manufactured Intelligence Controller—”
“A what?” The slurred question came from a woman in back, followed by snickers around the mess.
“Sorry,” mumbled the woman, finally. “I guess they teach you to talk like that in OCS.” Her eyes were glassy.
The mess quieted at the mention of OCS, and Bolton looked uncomfortable. “Well, Miss—”
Another spasm of laughter and she jammed her knuckles into her mouth. Bolton actually blushed and looked around the front for help.
Finally he took a breath and leveled his gaze at the back.
“I speak that way, Miss, precisely because I am not a lieutenant, and am for that reason making my very finest effort to seem like one—I am not even a corporal. You are clearly new here, so that is something you could not have known. Our lieutenant had the ill grace to pitch forward and puke his life onto our playing field, and a decision was made that a replacement would not be well received. Thus his bars were handed to me, and our MI controllers here were kind enough to break into BuPers and make it legal. I apologize if I am not what you expected.”
There was an awkward silence, then she wheezed out behind her hands, “Jesus, what a weird outfit.”
“It is an organization, Private, in which you should find yourself most comfortable.” He broke his gaze after a minute and gave the assembly a sheepish smile.
A Grey Moon Over China Page 3