Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  Oh. A chill settled between Wainwright's shoulder blades; she raised her eyes to the monitors again. The worldwire going down might not hurt Genie. It wouldn't even hurt the Montreal, in the long run, once the vast ship could be rewired and the fiberoptic and carbon cables that Richard had disassembled replaced. It might not even do any damage to the Feynman AI, she told herself, as she called up a thermal image of the Calgary crash site to assure that the reactors were still live.

  But anybody who had been undergoing nanosurgery when the crash came was as dead as if somebody had pulled the plug on his respirator. And she was staring right at the biggest, sickest patient of them all. She stood. “Give me an earth view. Full earth, whichever orbital platform has most of the Sun side.”

  It was Clarke. She should have known that. The view was North and South America, cloud-swirled oceans and mouse-tinged atmosphere, the landmasses gray-white with unseasonal snowfall, the grasping outline of North America indistinguishable from clouds and ice. The oceans were steel-gray and cadet-blue. Even the clouds had a jaundiced cast, through the shroud of dust.

  It was ridiculous, of course, to think that any change would be visible yet. Even if the worldwire failed catastrophically, even if Richard's intervention in the planetary ecosystem had just come to a crashing halt, it would be months, maybe years before the damage showed. Planets were great ponderous things, changing on scales barely noticeable in the span of a human life.

  Months, at the inside estimate. Years.

  “Captain,” her XO said, very calmly. “I realize this probably isn't the time for this, but we've got a communiqué from ground control in Calgary. They want to know if we can get some telescopic shots of the northeastern seaboard; a research trawler off Newfoundland just blundered into the middle of a shoal of dead fish, and Clarke doesn't have an angle on it due to cloud cover. They're wondering if we can tell them how widespread it is. Shall I tell them we won't be able to, ma'am? Nobody seems to have told them there's a crisis underway.”

  Months. She forced her hands to uncurl, unknot from the fists they'd somehow tightened into. It could be nothing. It could be completely unrelated.

  For a moment, she was tempted to tell him yes, go ahead, tell them they have to wait. Turn off the cameras. Don't go looking for everything else that's probably going wrong. As if, if she didn't look, it wouldn't be real.

  “No,” she said. “Let's have a look at those fish. And get the ship's entomologist and botanist up here, shall we? And Dr. Perry, too. He's an ecologist; he can earn his keep for a change. And tell ground control they need to get in touch with the cabinet, if they can't reach the prime minister in New York, and they're going to want a couple of climatologists with security clearances, and get me a thermal map of the oceans and water vapor shots of the atmosphere, and anything else you can think of that might be useful.”

  She felt as if she stood over her own left shoulder, watching, soothed by her own voice of command, as her bridge crew also seemed to be. Exactly as if what she was ordering would make any difference. Exactly as if they could do anything at all, except stand there and watch as the planet thrashed and died.

  I wonder if the condemned man has enough time to regret refusing the blindfold? she thought, before she squared her shoulders under the navy-blue uniform and went to do her job.

  Now, finally, space was terribly quiet, and Leslie was terribly alone. There was a half an hour's power left in his batteries and he was weak, shivering cold, clear-headed with hunger although the Benefactors had managed to provide him with oxygen and water. They'd given him back his body, he realized, in time for him to let him know that he was going to die. He wondered if the aliens had a concept akin to making one's peace with God. He wondered if they had the concept of death, when they were all of the same creature, one intimately connected mind.

  He wondered if they understood that they had killed him.

  No. He couldn't think like that. He had his hands back, and his eyes, and his space suit checked out fully functional except the radio and the redlined energy levels, and—

  —and he hadn't lost one fragment of the peculiar kinesis he'd inherited from the birdcages, the sense of the whole solar system spinning around him like a clockwork model, like a timepiece assembled by Einstein's watchmaker god. He could still feel it in his gut, rooted in his body as concrete and as invisible as an angel's wings rooted in the angel's shoulders.

  He also wondered if the birdcages could see through his eyes, now, could hear through his ears, as he felt through their nameless organs of sense. He hoped so. He hoped they could see the way the sunlight refracted through the bars and the veils of their ship, casting rainbows over the entire interior. He hoped they could see how lovely they were, their bodies merging and separating again like drops of mercury shaken on a plate.

  His wondering was answered when the shimmering veils between the struts of the birdcage vanished like popped soap bubbles, revealing the Montreal, the shiptree, and the brown-gray marbled sphere of the Earth behind them, all limned from behind with sunrise. Leslie caught his breath as slanted rays dusted his faceplate with gold and refracted in sprays of color through the prismed latticework that was all that stood between him and naked space, and he felt as if all the voices within him caught their breaths as well—not that they had voices, in particular, or breaths. Yes, he thought. This is my world. This is what light looks like, my friends.

  The shiptree was right there, so close he could see the whorls of light along its plume-shaped length. He could feel it out there, feel it press against the curve of space, as if he could reach out and touch it. Oh, if Richard could see this—

  Leslie started smiling inside his helmet almost before the idea finished unraveling. Maybe he couldn't tell the Benefactors what he needed. But maybe he could show them.

  He wasn't finished yet. He shaped the map for them, let them feel it in his mind. Showed them the way the mass of his body would move, from the birdcage to the shiptree, and asked them for their help in getting there.

  And they sang in his head, the answer, the throb and cadence of their voices that were not voices, but a sensation like the press and lift of the surf. (go) they would have said, if what they said was words. (Go) and (go) and (heal) and (go) and (rejoin your mind) and (go) and (heal) and (go) and (come and sing to us again) . . .

  (Come and sing to us again) . . .

  “I will,” Leslie answered. And so they pushed him forward, into night.

  When Min-xue lifted himself off her back, Patty was ready for it. She got her toes under her and her hand on the prime minister's wrist and tugged while Min-xue and Jenny crouched scuttling toward the end of the long line of curved tables, and hauled Riel into a squat with an ease that surprised them both. They froze, eye to eye, and Riel licked her lips, her bloodied business suit rising and falling with measured breaths. Riel ducked at a popping, scattered sound. Patty didn't realize it was gunfire until Riel's palm flattened her head against Riel's shoulder, holding her under the level of the tabletop. It won't stop bullets. Will it stop bullets? Alan?

  They leaned together hard, but the flat shattering impacts arced away from them, in pursuit of Min-xue and Jenny. The bullets weren't anywhere close; Patty leaned out for a quick glance as the other two pilots clambered over floor-hugging diplomats, leapfrogging each other like 3-D cops. Alan?

  Alan still wasn't there.

  “Where the hell is security?” Riel asked. “They can't have bought everybody.”

  Which was right, wasn't it? The General Assembly hall should be full of men and women with guns. Men and women on their side, security who worked for the UN. “I don't know. I don't know where Alan is either. I don't know—”

  “Hell,” Riel said, softly. “The Chinese did something to the security forces. Nanotech, poison, something, something weaponized, I don't know . . .” her voice trailed off.

  “Why them and not us?”

  “They got to them. We've been unavailable. This is the part
where they're trying to get to us.”

  Riel's grip tightened on Patty's wrist, and Patty ducked back under cover. She'd gotten a look at the way the wood of the desk fronts had splintered when the gunfire struck them. “The tables won't stop a bullet.”

  “Might.” Papa Fred didn't lift his head off the floor when he spoke, and his voice was thready with pain, but it was strong. “That's small-caliber stuff. Just keep your heads down and run.”

  Good advice. Easy advice. If his blood wasn't all over her hands and knees—okay, it wasn't, maybe, all his own blood, some of it was the Mountie's, but some of it was—

  Breathe, Patty. She squeezed Riel's hand, and Riel squeezed hers back, and she realized that the prime minister was shaking just as hard as she was. That helped, somehow, despite the blood squishing in her shoes, her stockings sliding against wet greasy leather. Riel glanced left and right, and leaned forward like a sprinter from her crouch. She'd kicked her shoes off, the pearl-gray high heels tumbled on their sides, and blood scattered her feet as if she'd done a particularly terrible job with her toenail polish. “Ready?”

  “Go!” Terse and low, and Patty lunged out of her stoop into a cramped, crablike run, ears straining, zigzagging up the long naked aisle and hauling Riel along behind her, both of them ducking and skidding and trying like hell not to trip over any of the people huddled against the edges of the furniture or over any of the furniture itself.

  This time the gunfire was for real. Not intermittent, but staccato, a rhythmless drumbeat that hurried her feet and kept her head ducked between her shoulders. Riel wasn't fast enough, and it was no good dragging her. The bad guys were behind them, still spread around the area where the PanChinese delegation had been sitting. Jenny, where are you? Jenny Jenny Jenny—

  Quit waiting for somebody else to save you, Patricia, she snarled to herself, and grabbed a startled Riel by the wrist and shoulder and pushed her ahead, getting her own body in between the prime minister and the bullets, the way Papa Fred and the Mountie had. Patty laughed as she did it, realizing that her own life might be as important in the long run, especially if Alan and Richard were—she didn't think dead. Not dead, because they couldn't be dead. They hadn't ever been alive.

  If Alan and Richard weren't coming back, Patty and Jenny and Min-xue were the only pilots Canada had left. If Min-xue was really Canadian. Which hadn't been settled yet.

  Oh. I bet it was worth it to the Chinese, if they could get all three of us, and Riel, and the Chinese guy who shook her hand and smiled—

  Yeah. She could see how that would be worth a really big risk. Especially if you had a way to get guns and wired fighters inside the UN. But it didn't matter. It was her job to get Riel out alive. Riel and herself, and to trust Jenny and Min-xue to save themselves, and Papa Fred.

  Who saves me? Well, of course. Patty had to save herself.

  The gunfire stopped and she heard somebody yell, and somebody hit somebody. She heard running footsteps behind her, gaining fast, coming up the aisle the same way she and Riel had.

  It wasn't going to work. They weren't going to make it to the door before he caught up with them, and the mob was still shoving through it anyway. Riel was already turning around, ducking into the shelter of another long curved row of desks, when Patty realized that she'd run out of time.

  It was dark where the Feynman AI collectively found himself—what threads he was able to maintain, as a crash reduction in resources caused him to slough most of himself in a frantic effort to regain stability—and it was very, very still. The transition was shockingly fast, even—especially—by his inhuman standards. Instantaneous, not a word Richard chose lightly.

  He reached out, pushed hard, was pressed back into the confines of his prison. No. Not a prison . . . and not pressed back. Not even blocked. It was as if the worldwire had simply ceased to exist, like those nightmares small children have that the world will vanish if it's not watched every instant. As if he'd sailed to the edge of the globe and had nowhere to go. As if he couldn't even step over that edge and fall.

  His first thought was sheer frustration as he realized that nineteen-twentieths of his processing capability and all of his access to the physical world had been cut away. The second reaction was self-amused chagrin at how simply goddamned spoiled he had become, on the verge of a sulk because he couldn't reach around the world with a flick of his will. You have no time for this, he reminded himself, speaking for and to all the Richards and Alans and the unnamed processes and personas as well.

  He was a distributed intelligence. It was highly unlikely that he could have been walled into some corner of the worldwire, or even of the Net, and even more unlikely that every other corner of his consciousness could have been purged simultaneously, with the flick of a switch. Which meant that somehow, somebody—the Benefactors, the PanChinese, or another power—had found a way to disrupt the quantum communication that bound the worldwire together and made the nanonetwork more than a mass of individual, aimless microscopic machines.

  Bits of the Feynman AI—of Richard/Alan/Other—lived in every nanomachine on the planet. Well, not every one; the limited PanChinese network was still largely protected from his influence, and of course there were the machines he allowed to run their original program, such as the ones that Charlie had been using for his ecological experiments.

  The ones that Charlie had been using.

  The machines that had been . . . shutting off from the worldwire, inexplicably. The machines that had had their communications disrupted, that had been somehow severed from the quantum communication that networked all the machines, even the Benefactor machines, together—whether their programming was compatible or not.

  Richard actually paused to consider that for a full two-hundredths of a second. And then he set about quite coldly, quite frantically attacking the question of just where the hell his consciousness was bottled up, and how to get a message out.

  And he had to do it fast. Had to do it now, because if he wasn't in the worldwire, then the chances were that the worldwire was coming down like an unbraced scaffolding, and it would be taking the planet's entire ecosystem with it.

  He was the ghost of Richard Feynman, dammit. The Harry Houdini of twentieth-century physics. The box hadn't been devised that could lock him in.

  Mother of Christ, wasn't I supposed to be enjoying a quiet grave by now? The requirement to have adventures and be shot at should expire on one's fiftieth birthday, if not sooner.

  And yet, here we go again.

  At least Min-xue knows what he's doing. There must have been combat training in his past somewhere; at least basic, and probably something a little more advanced, judging by the way he belly-crawls along the aisle, head down, butt down, and drawing fire away from Patty and Riel. Not drawing enough fire, though, dammit; Riel yelps as one gets a little close and I can't turn around to see if they nailed her. But I still hear running in that direction and bad guys are still shooting past my position at something more interesting behind me. That's a good sign. Well, as such things go.

  There's something about gunfire that makes me meditative. I wish the lights had all gone out dramatically when the shooting started, because then I could kick in the low-light capability in my prosthetic eye and have an advantage.

  An advantage I need acutely, right now. Pity I'm not gonna get it. Ah well. At least it gives me something to bitch about. Gabe always did say that what soldiers did best, was bitch. And I argued that bitching was a second, after humping packs—

  Fight now, Jenny. Compose your autobiography another day.

  Besides, Min-xue's getting ahead of me, and it's my turn to leapfrog his position. My brain scampers on ahead, working so hard I forget the texture of the rug under my left hand, the stickiness of blood drying on my knees. Matson always used to say your brain's your best weapon, soldier. Use it. Name your weapons. Name your enemies. Name your objectives. Use A to get through B to C. What are you gonna do?

  I'm trying, Sarge. You don
't have to spit in my face.

  I can track the bad guys by the sound of their weapons: four of them, I think. Small-arms fire, and small caliber. Well, maybe nine millimeter. Which doesn't make me happy, of course, but at least they only have handguns, and not big handguns—however the hell they got them in here—and they're being careful about firing now. Which means their ammo is limited.

  Which is all the good. Or as good as it gets, anyway. But if you were gonna smuggle in guns, why would you smuggle in nine-mils, and not a crateful of automatics? Damn. I just don't know.

  I'm up on Min-xue. He lies flat as I clamber past him, a bullet flicking sawdust into my hair when I risk a peek over the top of the desk. We've worked our way one aisle over; the enemy have taken cover behind the podium and the secretary's table at the back of the stage. Which means Frye's probably dead, and possibly the secretary general, too.

  Be a pity if she is. I liked her handshake, and her hair.

  But why did they run for the stage when they were already standing by Xiong? And then I remember the unobtrusive uniformed security officers collapsing like so many tipped over dominos, and I curse under my breath. Well, at least I know where they got the guns. They must have had some way to hack security's palm locks. They didn't bring the guns in. They took them away.

  I risk another look as Min-xue crawls past, get a glimpse of muzzle flash, and duck fast. The bullet parts my hair. Another splinters wood off the desk, but doesn't come through.

  They're definitely conserving their fire. “They're good shots at this range, with pistols.”

  “They would be,” Min-xue says. “They're elite.”

  “And wired.”

  “Yes.”

  “How about some good news?”

  “Is that meant to indicate that you can provide some?”

  I glance over. He's laughing at me, the son of a bitch—a silent, straight-faced laugh, but the curl at the corner of his lip and the dark flash of his eyes give him away. “Hah. Don't play poker, son. Yeah, I think I can provide some. I think if we can get our hands on those guns, we can use them, too.”