“My last act,” John Morton says. “The Articles. Available to anyone. Download and join the Revolution. Become an American.” He tries to let the words hang, but the proud cast of his face is betrayed by a bursting cough. There is blood in his palm—more than the usual misting—and fresh gobs of it in abstract shapes across the blankets. He coughs again and again. The room seems to be coughing back, but really it’s just John Morton, echoing himself, coughing up whole handfuls of blood as the others press their backs against the farthest wall. They all know what’s happening here; they’ve each watched a few men die over the years.
Abruptly, the coughing stops. With his head rolled back, John Morton blinks away tears pink with just a trace of blood. Vision clears to show the room bent over him. The glow of the laptop touches only the ceiling directly above, and only slightly, the most vague hint of a soft spot in the shell of this realm—a path out, maybe. Follow the Articles into the Cloud and leave this sick body behind. Fingers click a few code‐sounding clusters of shortcut keys and his profile picture goes dark.
John Morton is dead.
Button Gwinnett :: May 19th 1777
In fits and halting starts, when the infection in his shattered hip ebbs, Button Gwinnett comes down from pure ravings and codes his worm. There, inside the smartphone he bought only a few days before the duel, his final revenge takes shape. “Murdered,” he mumbles, “murdered by Lachlan McIntosh.” He twitches through some fever fits. “East Florida,” he mumbles, “East Florida.”
A nurse crosses the room to the cot that was dragged out. Button’s hip shattered beyond any hope of moving him off the property. So he’ll die here in the top floor of this barn, out on a farm in the cool Georgia spring. “Dueling,” the nurse says. “Used to be pretty clear. Had patriots and had loyalists, Tories and Whigs. Now we got patriots killing patriots.” Head shaking as she fills a cup from a pitcher of water. “And you’re a Signer too. Shame, shame.”
Button drips sweat as he codes, teeth clenched and cracking. Eyes fixated on that smartphone screen and nowhere else. He has to work to touch just the right spots with fingers that won’t stop their tremors. The nurse approaches like she’s approaching an inanimate object, which is how she’s come to regard this man she’s supposed to ease into dying. Ranting all day long or just spitting and seizing. Talking, talking, talking, but never any more than at her. “… stole my army,” he mumbles. “Paraded around… turned tail for home… and now King George can slice through the colonies… like a red‐hot lance up a well‐worn whore.”
“You’re disgusting.” She bends down, pours cool water over Button’s lips. A few instinctive swallows. Button’s skin has passed from the color of flesh into a dry yellow. Blue screen light reflects a hundred beads of fever sweat.
This worm he’s coding, it’s just the latest counter‐tactic in a feud that’s raged for decades, winding its way through several generations of file‐sharing platforms, messageboards, political, judicial and religious listservs. Red meat email blasts and hyper‐tagged status updates. Acronym tweets and skeleton tweets and acronym tweets where each letter is the first letter of a skeleton tweet. Armies of skeletons. Both men have been expelled and readmitted to huge group email strings. Then expelled again. Entire inboxes clogged with their back‐and‐forth while others in the group were just sending it all to the junk mail folder. A scorched wake half a lifetime long, terabytes deep, seared through smartphones and social networking profiles, through the cloudware’s cloudware. A smoldering scar across the multi‐surface of Georgia. The most recent controversy, and cause of the fatal duel: who is at fault for the Georgia militia’s failure to take East Florida from the British, Governor Button Gwinnett or General Lachlan McIntosh? And so to the town of Thunderbolt, where both men had come to finally bring it into the real.
There they’d stood on a flat patch of grass on the edge of this same farm, each turned right shoulder forward to offer only the thinnest arrangement of their body. Two shots rang out, two distinct sets of echoes. Button watched Lachlan McIntosh’s face contort, watched him drop his pistol, slap his hands to his meaty thigh. Button felt something too, a bite in his groin and then a coolness down the back of both legs. He tried to take a step, but it was in vain. A spasm of sharp, metallic pain toppled him. Though the others had to wait for the doctor, Button knew the moment the bullet struck him. Just like he watched his own bullet vanish into McIn‐tosh’s muscle and knew that shot would not be fatal.
Button finds now the eyes of the nurse, who freezes in their grip. It’s the first time he’s looked directly at her. Not just raving to the room when he says, “Georgia is half‐asleep. Under its moist and ancient fields are caverns of hidden gold. All of it burned and dug up. Machines in every town to force life patterns on the humans who live there. Machines that take your cells and rearrange them, make them something new, something loyal. Whether you like it or not.” Button climbs, then, back down into his smartphone, back down into his worm. And man does that thing look nasty. “Lachlan McIntosh’s Georgia,” he says. “Unless I can stop him.”
The nurse takes a chamber pot from under him. “How you going to do that?” she wants to know. “Twitching with the fever and pouring out the last of your fluids?” She makes the face of someone smelling that putrid smell that soaks the blankets all the way through. Ain’t just the chamber pot that stinks. “You’re not getting your hateful self out of that cot ever again.”
“Don’t need to get out of the cot,” Button says. “This worm’ll get him. Get inside his accounts. And from there, climb right into his brain.”
“I thought that’s what you said that other guy was going to do. That General McIntosh you keep talking about. Those machines.”
Button stops now. Smiles. What he’s been building in the tiny hard drive inside that tiny smartphone must be complete. “Never mind the British,” he says. “The King, the Parliament, it’s other Georgians we have to fear. East Florida was not the first of his schemes. And it won’t be the last. Lachlan McIntosh will try to destroy this state, and whatever country comes out of this rebellion too. And when that happens, it will be clear to all that Button Gwinnett died trying to save Georgia… and America, too.”
“Sounds like you feel pretty satisfied,” the nurse says, “thinking about the end of Georgia.”
He shouts the name “Lachlan McIntosh,” startling the nurse. The chamber pot slips from her hands, turns into porcelain shards on the wood floor. “Do you think I yelled that loud enough?” Button asks. But the nurse is looking at the chamber pot in pieces and the turd and the wet spot around it, considering if she’s going to bother cleaning up this mess. “Do you suppose Lachlan McIntosh heard? In his bed somewhere in town, recovering as I die?” And as if he’s given himself a cue, Button melts then, a little deeper into the cot. “One last memory of Button Gwinnett,” he mumbles. “The sound of his name in my voice… echoing forever.”
Only a thin tunnel leads back to the world from where Button has sunk. The damp blankets around him like a bath gone cool. He lifts the smartphone toward his face. A flash of Bible words makes the shape of hell for him in a plume of blood ink darting likewise across his vision in puffs. He slides that dead fingertip westward across the surface of his touchscreen and his worm is off, into the Cloud, to find Lachlan McIntosh and infest his accounts.
PHILIP Livingston :: June 12th 1778
When Thomas M’Kean comes into the small converted coatroom, he’s hit with a wall of humidity so thick he has to suck on it just to get a breath. The air sticks in his throat and nose, smells like the inside of a greenhouse after all the flowers have been watered. “Hello?”
From the far corner, an electronic voice comes gurgling. “Dr. Rush told me you rode back into town.”
“Just now,” M’Kean affirms.
“The Articles,” the voice techno‐gurgles. “Still haven’t got them ratified, have we?”
M’Kean steps toward the sound. “Getting the people to click ‘
like’ is one thing, getting them to actually ratify…” but he stops, because that’s the moment he sees Philip Livingston. M’Kean’s not sure he would recognize his old friend if he didn’t already know it was him. Livingston’s face has lost all its former shape. Skin sags from the skull, revealing pinkish, watery tissue under oddly protuberant eyeballs. The rest of his body is the same sort of drippy, looks poured into some kind of wheelchair/cart contraption that holds him seated upright. Rolled over to a bank of monitors, deep in the room’s deepest corner, Livingston smiles knowingly at M’Kean, then nods at the screen’s live stream of the congressional debates happening a few rooms away.
Livingston presses a button that’s been welded to the arm of the cart. When he speaks, his voice doesn’t come from his mouth but out of a speaker beside the button. “I can keep track of everything that happens from here. Or should I say doesn’t happen, with this Congress. But votes, when we get around to them, for votes I have to actually be present to be counted.” He looks to the speaker, then back to M’Kean. “Vocal chords,” the speaker says. “Too moist anymore for real sound. Would just come out as bubbles without this thing.”
Livingston returns some of his attention to the bank of screens. “You should see the moderates’ faces when they roll me in, knowing I’ll be the vote that’ll break some stalemate they’ve worked themselves into. It’s the only time they remember to come and get me, when the whip falls short the exact length of Philip Livingston.”
A film of water has condensed itself down from steam to coat M’Kean’s face. He wipes it off with a pass of his hand. Wipes his hand down the leg of his pants.
“Keep the humidity up in here for the skin,” Livingston says. “Got magnets in the cart, too, that Doc Bartlett set up for me. Says it’s to keep the water from settling.” He points to the bank of screens, to the little screen there on the arm of the cart. Each has a moon of deep blue a quarter risen into frame. “It’s what makes them blue circles,” the speaker says. “The magnets.”
“What is it you’ve got?”
Livingston shrugs. “Bartlett’s at a loss, but Rush says a severe case of dropsy, maybe some gout on top, or underneath. I don’t know, and as much as he talks, I don’t think Rush really knows either. Probably feels like he needs to make a prognosis. He knows I’m dying. Everyone knows that.”
“How long have you got?”
“Don’t know what it is, can’t know how long.”
M’Kean sighs. “Rush is a bleeder and butcher, and though everyone likes him just fine as a man, those with any sense know to tune out when it’s a doctor he’s trying to be. At least Doc Bartlett keeps his mouth shut when he doesn’t know what’s happening.” M’Kean takes a step closer, his countenance suddenly more serious. “I need your opinion on something, Livingston.” M’Kean produces a smart‐phone, flexdocs already open, holds it down for the watery old man.
“Don’t give it to me,” Livingston says. “Everything I touch becomes damp these days.” He leans to eye the data. “Well… what have we here?”
“One of our programmers, during the retreat through New Jersey. Noticed these spikes. Ever since, we’ve been picking up some real heightened activity in this one sector of the Cloud.”
Livingston looks into the screen attached to his cart. Types on a little keyboard mounted under his fingers. Scans a second. His speaker says, “Looks like it started in a profile somewhere. Behaves like something… unpacking itself.”
“Unpacking itself… funny. That’s exactly what our programmer said.”
“Probably just a function set caught in a loop, keeps expanding its algorithm in some sort of code cycle it can’t bust out of.”
“And that doesn’t worry you?”
“Not enough to ride all the way out to York, PA to tell the Congress.” Livingston shows him the screen. “Seems to be generating search drones here and there, doing some math equations. Math equations never hurt anyone. Empty noise. Random data being created and crunched and used to create more data. That’s all.”
M’Kean casts a long gaze at the state of his old friend. “We’ve seen a bit of this same thing, you know.”
“Same thing as me?”
“Our programmer, the one who found this data.”
“He has dropsy?”
M’Kean shakes his head. “He’s dead. Instead of saturating, he dried out. Thing changed the makeup of his cells. It’s what the doctors out there are telling me. All happened pretty quick once he crossed paths with this program.” M’Kean notices something in Livingston’s face. “You’ve seen it.”
“It?”
“This program. You’ve seen it before. Did this dropsy come after or before?”
“Dropsy, dried out, different effects. What makes you think the same program could be responsible for both?”
“Ours said this thing was modifying itself. Changing its own code.” M’Kean lets the future‐sounding sit. “Maybe this unpacking, this shape shifting, expanding, is all part of the same thing, this program feeling its way across? Trying different things. Saturation, dehydration, who knows who else out there might be already affected and how? Once it finds a way that works to some kind of acceptable efficiency…”
This last idea has put a little fright into Livingston. He takes a few breaths to wonder, then: “Look, M’Kean, if it were up to me, we’d be concerned about the Internet in proportion to the battlefield, but we’re not likely to get many votes for that.” Livingston looks into the screens, one by one, right down the line, feeds streaming in from the debate that’s been droning on and on this whole last week and going absolutely nowhere. “When this program fills up its assigned sector of the Cloud, it’ll stop. Nowhere else to go. Problem contained.”
“And if it doesn’t? What if when there’s no more room to expand, it spills out instead?”
“Your programmer. Did he do any calculations? Estimates on how long that would take? For it to fill up its sector?”
“Exponents,” M’Kean shrugs. “Could be a year or years. Could be a month. Days. Maybe it’s now…”
Livingston thinks about it. “Took me off appropriations when I stopped being able to go to the meetings. Who you need to talk to is John Adams.”
Great, M’Kean thinks. He’s about to ask where when he looks in over Livingston’s shoulder and there he is, the little Colossus of Congress, staring back from inside one of those screens. John Adams, the Duke of Braintree, and he does not look pleased. “What is it, Mr. Livingston?”
M’Kean leans his face into the vision of the webcam. “We need some money, Adams. To hire more programmers.”
Adams’ face contorts. “Ha! Write a resolution. Bring it to the floor. Get a majority. Gather up the taxes or the loans. It’s as simple as that.”
The door to the little chamber opens right then and in comes Dr. Ben Rush. Slips silently past M’Kean and begins Livingston’s twice‐daily checkup. Makes M’Kean wonder what other goings on must be stored in that brain of the doctor’s. Always poking in and out of rooms. Never in charge of anything, but always present, it seems, observing.
Livingston is typing something and then one of the screens is filled with data much like the data M’Kean has on his smartphone.
“What’s this?” Adams wants to know.
Livingston’s speaker says, “Some activity we’re concerned about in the Cloud.”
“Autonomous replicating selfware,” M’Kean says.
Adams’s eyes roll inside the little viewer inside the screen. “What’s it do? Send junk tickles to all your virtual friends?”
M’Kean tells him, “It replicates itself. Or maybe it’s better to say it expands itself.”
“In case you didn’t notice because you were in such a panic about this expanding computer program, you didn’t just ride into Philadelphia, but York, Mr. M’Kean. That’s because the British army is in possession of Philadelphia.”
“And New York,” Rush says, dripping sarcasm, “thanks to his Excell
ency”
“And Delaware, your home state, Mr. M’Kean.”
“I was there, Adams. I was in New York.”
“Then you know to forgive me if the Internet’s not one of my main concerns right now.”
Rush says then, “This dick Washington. Keeps vanishing. Won’t even return an email. What, expects us to send an actual person out there to meet with him? Does he even know how long that takes?”
M’Kean asks Adams, “What about what’s happening to Livingston here?”
“Mr. Livingston has gout. Isn’t that right, doctor?”
“Dropsy’s my main concern,” Rush says. “A severe case, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Nothing out of the ordinary?” and M’Kean touches Philip Livingston’s forearm, his finger sinking in a good half inch, leaves a dent the shape of a human finger when he takes it away. The three men in the room and the other in the feed all look back to the dent. Slowly, it fills with water and then the water becomes regular old skin again. “Does that look ordinary to any of you?”
Livingston’s still looking at that spot on his arm. His speaker says, “M’Kean thinks my sickness has something to do with the Internet, this program a few of us have come across.”
“Same thing with our kid in New Jersey,” M’Kean takes it up. “The more time he spent in there looking at it, the faster he changed. What if it’s this program that’s doing it, changing their actual physical bodies? Replicating itself, filling up the Cloud, what happens if it’s not just one sector, but the whole Internet teaming with it?”
Adams smiles. There’s years in it. “What would happen to this body, Mr. M’Kean, and this war, if we went chasing off after each and every thing that might be a problem some day? You want to save the Revolution? Write a bill. Present a resolution to the Congress. Start counting delegates.”
M’Kean scoffs, a glance at the endless debate, endlessly streaming on and on. “Congress has proven itself not more than a good way for nothing to get done.”
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