The Tin Whistle

by Erik Hanberg

  “You don’t even know what I’d be willing to do to save Jane,” Ellie said. She was crying freely. “And I want to live so badly. For her. For us. For everything we just talked about. This isn’t me giving up, By. I promise you that. But I’m not worth all… that, either.”

  “You are to me,” he said quietly. “You both are.”

  Ellie kept crying. “What did I tell you—when we fought on the Walden? I’m not trying to reopen that fight, but at the root of it… I… I blamed you. For putting me through so much, and all because you wanted to see me again. This would be the same thing again. Being together again, being a family, shouldn’t come at this kind of cost.”

  Shaw ran his hand through his hair, and he realized he was crying as well. “Is this really what Aquinas wanted? For us to talk like this? About this?”

  Ellie shook her head. “I don’t think so. I hope not.”

  Shaw leaned against an ivy-covered brick wall. “I didn’t make the decision I did just to save others,” he said. “I want you to know that. I wasn’t giving you up. But I thought there was a better way to save you. One that wouldn’t cause so many deaths.”

  Ellie looked at him strangely. “How?”

  Shaw shook his head. “I honestly don’t know anymore. I’m not sure I knew in that moment. But I believed that there must be some better option than letting Lucille and everyone at the Flathead research labs be gunned down from the sky.” Shaw exhaled, his body slumping farther against the wall. “Which, it turned out, was no option at all, because here we are.”

  As Shaw was being drained of his energy, Ellie seemed to be finding hers. “But you didn’t know that part yet,” she prodded. She was standing straighter, her eyes suddenly alert.

  “No,” Shaw said.

  “What were you hoping for?” she asked. “You must have had something in mind? If allowing for death and destruction wasn’t the way to save your family, then what did you have in mind?”

  “Nothing. And what does it matter?”

  “Because this is clearly what Aquinas wanted us to talk about!” Ellie cried.

  Shaw looked up in surprise. She offered her hand, meaningless since it was all air, but he accepted it. He pushed himself off the wall.

  “Keep talking,” Ellie instructed. “There’s something there.”

  Finally Shaw said, “I had…no, I have a hunch. I know that must sound crazy, because saying it out loud makes me feel crazy. Because it means that I passed on what I thought was an opportunity to save your lives for nothing more than a hunch. But that’s the truth of it. I have this… belief that there is something else I haven’t considered. That there is some other way out of this.” Shaw looked around the garden so he didn’t have to look at Ellie. There was a rose bush in bloom next to him, and the white petals glowed in the light of the bright moon. He peered around the rest of the garden in the darkness.

  “You know how…” Shaw stopped and rolled his eyes at what he was about to say. “Don’t laugh. But you know how you can know a space so well that you can walk through it in the dark? Like our bedroom or our kitchen—you and I both know the layout because we’ve lived there for seven years. We don’t need sight, we navigate with our other senses, or with pacing, or with whatever that sixth sense is that lets us just know a place really well.”

  “Yes. I know what you mean.”

  “For the past day or two, it’s felt like I’m in a dark room. But not just any dark room, one that I know as well as our own apartment. I’m standing in the dark, but I have this sense—not from sight but from who knows where—that there’s a door in front of me. Something inside me says that there’s a door, even if I can’t see it, even if I can’t fully explain why I believe it’s there. But when I reach for it, people start shouting all around me. ‘No, come this way!’ ‘No, not that way, this way!’ And so I pull back my hand… I listen to them.” Shaw looked at Ellie regretfully. “I mean, how can I not? One of them has my wife and daughter. The other has her finger on a trigger. But I’m getting whiplash trying to go back and forth.

  “And maybe… maybe everyone’s who shouting at me is wrong. Maybe that sense is right. Maybe I should just keep walking forward… my hand outstretched, waiting for my fingers to brush against the doorknob that I know will be there.”

  Ellie gave him a wan smile and Shaw realized he’d been acting it out. He dropped his hand that had been searching for the door.

  “It sounds like you still believe that,” she said quietly.

  Shaw looked at his wrap. “That there might be some way to avert a global disaster and save my family in the next forty-five minutes? Maybe I do.”

  “And Aquinas must too,” Ellie added.

  Shaw nearly smiled with recognition. It was almost certainly true. And if an all-seeing saint thought there was hope, then maybe there truly was.

  “So,” Ellie said. “No matter how improbable the idea sounds… Tell me. What do you want to do?”

  Somehow, Shaw knew instantly. “I want to talk to Taveena. To try to convince her of… something. I don’t even know what.”

  Ellie nodded firmly. “Then that’s what you have to do. Go.”

  It was Shaw’s turn to be an avatar. He was floating inside the control room of the Walden, a projection not through Taveena’s temple implant (she didn’t have one) but through the spaceship’s computer.

  Taveena glanced up from her workstation. “I wondered if you’d have the guts to come talk to me again.”

  “Your plan worked,” Shaw said. “You sent me to Rome with the hope that I would fight the cartel. I fought them, and I won. They’re broken, their satellites are gone, and you are working on a promising new way to destroy the Lattice—based on research that I instigated, no less. You got more than you could have hoped for.”

  “A few more hours of research time before their new satellites arrived would have been nice,” Taveena said, her focus already back to her research station.

  Shaw took a good look at Taveena. After months of private meditation and fasting, she had shed much of her size, though if she were on Earth in a major city where everyone took the treatment, she still would have stood out substantially from the weight-reduced citizens. She had also finally showered—at Dr. Coronovschi’s request. All that, Shaw had seen before.

  But then he had gone and stuck a pair of shears in her chest.

  Under the fabric of her shirt, Shaw could see the bulk of a bandage in the middle of her chest. She was clearly healing well. After all, she’d been strong enough to knock him out cold immediately afterward, and now she was working fiercely at her console.

  “Why are you here, Shaw?” she asked after a few seconds of silence.

  “Why did you accept my call?” he countered.

  She shrugged a single shoulder.

  “I’m here to tell you that your plan worked,” Shaw said. “I’m asking you to free my family.”

  “They are the only reason I’m still alive.”

  “Not anymore. The laser satellites orbiting you are gone. The new ones won’t be here for a couple hours. You don’t need hostages anymore.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “You don’t. The Walden has escape pods, right? You sealed me up inside one and shot me to Earth two days ago. You can do the same for them.”

  “You’re forgetting Galway is not the only one threatening me. The U.S. and China still have laser satellites within range and they’d love to take me out—especially given what I’m doing right now. If I released Ellie and Jane now, Wulf and I would be dead almost immediately. Hell, we might still be if they get an itchy trigger finger.”

  “If you can take down the Lattice before they shoot you, the Walden can disappear. You won’t need Ellie and Jane anymore.”

  “That’s true. In which case, I’ll free them after the Lattice goes down. But not before.”

  “And you won’t take them to some war-torn country? You won’t drop them in Italy or in the middle of some other civil war?”<
br />
  “Ellie can tell me where she wants to go. It will be up to her.”

  Their eyes met for an instant before she turned back to her screen. He believed her. Taveena was practical and logical to the point of terrible cruelty, but he hadn’t seen her filled with rage like Galway. If she didn’t need Ellie and Jane, she would release them. She wouldn’t kill them just because of what it would do to him or to fulfill any need for vengeance.

  “Thank you,” Shaw sighed.

  Taveena nodded curtly. “Are we done?” she asked, moving her left hand over to a keypad that Shaw guessed would end their call.

  He almost said yes. If the Lattice should fall, at least his family would be safe. He would die, and the Lattice would be gone, but at least this guarantee had been made.

  He almost said yes. But he knew that Ellie didn’t want the Earth plunged into chaos any more than he did.

  He almost said yes. But the sense that there was a door in front of his fingertips kept him in the room with Taveena.

  “Will you give me five minutes more?”

  Taveena stopped her work and looked him over with evident curiosity. “Isn’t your position at the Vatican about to be attacked?”

  “Between Grace, Nosipho, and the saints, I think they have it covered.”

  “Every second you stay is a second when you’re slowing me down. And in this race, every second may count.”

  “Five minutes,” Shaw asked. “Please.”

  Taveena paused again. “Five minutes.”

  Shaw felt himself groping for a door in the dark. Maybe he could share that feeling with Taveena. Maybe her brain could find the door and find the key. If he could just reveal it to her. To her, and to himself.

  “What if it didn’t have to be like this?” he said hesitantly.

  “Like what?”

  “The binary choice: Lattice on, Lattice off. Lattice good, Lattice bad. What if there were other options?”

  “It is a binary. The Lattice is either functioning, or it’s not. It’s good when it’s off and it’s bad when it’s on. There’s no middle ground, no matter how squeamish it makes you,” she said, shooting him an angry glance. “We’re not all petals in the wind like you are.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe there’s some third option out there waiting for us. If only we would try to see it.”

  Taveena harrumphed.

  Shaw remembered his conversation with the pope right before Alberto told him about the research at the Flathead research cluster. He picked up that thread again and warmed to it. “You know that I’ve been wrestling with that question. Should the Lattice stay? Should it be destroyed? You and Wulf and Peter Mayfield and so many people pushed me one way. But then Grace Williams and my wife and Yang and the people of Poligny and being trapped in quicksand thanks to a medicane pushed me the other. And at some point recently, I started to wonder, what if we’ve all been asking the wrong question.”

  “And what’s the right question?”

  Shaw didn’t know it until this moment. But when she asked, he was ready with his answer. “The right question is—can the Lattice be better?”

  “Better? “Taveena spat. “Better? That’s the big important question you’ve come up with?”

  “Can it be better? Why is no one asking that question?” Shaw said.

  “Listen. Ada Dillon’s new Lattice is better. It’s faster. It’s more expansive. You can search for anyone or anything in a moment. It’s better when measured on any spec. And yet it’s more terrible because of it.

  “Trying to make bombs better got us nuclear warheads. Trying to make marketing better got us invasive and addictive advertising. Trying to make factories more productive got us climate change and smog in our cities. Better technology usually winds up being worse for humanity in the end,” Taveena said.

  “Then let me rephrase the question. Can the Lattice serve humanity better?”

  “No,” she answered, her voice clipped.

  “You don’t care about the Lattice, Taveena,” Shaw pressed. “Not really. You care about its effects on people. You showed me that in the jumps when we were on the Walden together and my life was up for a vote. The gamblers and the addicts. The people like Erling who were played and manipulated because of the Lattice. That’s who you were fighting for. It’s not the technology, it’s the effect. So what if you could change the effects?”

  “You’re talking nonsense now,” Taveena said. “The Lattice has profoundly negative consequences for humanity. The effects aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Not having the Lattice has profoundly negative consequences for humanity. We saw that firsthand.”

  “The world was getting better,” she said. “After a couple weeks, it wasn’t the post-Apocalyptic landscape you pretend it was.”

  Shaw wondered how many times he’d heard her or Wulf or one of the other raiders say that. “It was getting better, for some. But who got hit the most? Rural people who had been relying on food delivery that used the Lattice to make sure they didn’t go hungry. People who couldn’t pull up stakes and leave, so they were hit by out of control weather that had once been under control. The poor people trapped in Poligny were the ones who paid the price while people like Grace and Nosipho could afford to get away from the violence and the chaos on their airship and fancy yacht. All the people you supposedly care about were worse off when the Lattice was down, and the rich survived just fine.”

  Taveena didn’t respond, but she had slowed her work enough that Shaw felt like he was beginning to reach her. He leaned forward, warming to his theme. “If their lives are hard with the Lattice, but worse without it, then work to change the Lattice now. If it has profoundly negative consequences, let’s change them. Let’s fix them instead of just smashing it!”

  “Some things are central to the experience of the Lattice,” Taveena said. “You can’t just wave a magic wand and fix them.”

  She disagreed with him, but Shaw was heartened and emboldened nevertheless. Because she’d just accepted his terms of the argument. “No…” Shaw allowed. His mind was racing. It felt like every cell in his body was thinking along with his brain. “I can’t wave a magic wand. I’m not a scientist. I’m not a programmer.” He felt his fingertips brush a doorknob in the darkness. “But maybe you can.”

  “Can what exactly?”

  “You’re hacking the code as we speak. Because the new Lattice was built on your molecular machine and nitrogen diamond technology, you will know better than anyone how to change it. So if you get in like Florian was trying to do, don’t press the self-destruct button. Make it better. Make it serve us better.”

  Taveena’s fingers were frozen over the keyboard, and her eyes were staring off into space away from him.

  “Back on the Walden when you were still trying to sway me to your side, you showed me all the ways people’s lives were worse off because of the Lattice, sometimes after only the briefest encounter with it,” Shaw said. “Make it better for them.”

  Taveena pushed against the console to back up from it and Shaw. She’d given up the pretense of programming. “Let’s say there was some way I could do what you’re suggesting,” she said, “although I have no idea what I would actually do. You realize what it is you’re suggesting, don’t you? Because it doesn’t change the fact that’s Galway’s satellites will still be here eventually. She will still want to kill me. I can’t hide and I can’t save your family if the Lattice is still working. Even if it’s ‘better.’”

  “No!” Shaw exclaimed, and Taveena looked visibly startled. “We’re not having that conversation right now. Threats against me, threats against my family, that’s not what this argument is about. And every time it comes up, it just derails us. We’re talking about the Lattice.”

  Taveena pushed forward until she was inches away from his avatar’s face. “Then let’s talk about the Lattice,” she said. “There’s no way that I can change the nature of the Lattice in a way that helps those people you were talking about. People w
ill still be able to snoop on their thoughts. They will still use the Lattice for their worst impulses. It doesn’t change.”

  “Maybe for some. But not everyone’s Lattice experience was terrible because of the Lattice itself. Some of it was because the poorest people who want to use the Lattice are at the mercy of the cartel. They had exorbitant prices for renting jump boxes for ten minutes. They had advertisers preying on their most base desires and feeding them more in an almost neurological way. Can you make that better?”

  “If I don’t destroy the Lattice… anything I do in there, the cartel will just change back,” Taveena said. She pushed off the wall and back to her console. “Whatever I do in here, if the Lattice is still around they’ll be able to see how I get into the code and they will reverse my changes. After I’m dead. And after your family is dead.”

  Shaw cast about for anything he could find to argue back with. “Then break the cartel,” he said. And he was firmly grasping the doorknob now.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s the door I’ve been looking for,” he said, almost to himself. “Break them,” he insisted. “If you get into the base code of the Lattice, don’t use it to destroy the Lattice, use it to destroy the companies in the cartel.”

  “They are broken. You said so yourself.”

  “Their military alliance is broken. But they still have a monopoly on the Lattice itself. Don’t you see? You can break that. Open it back up and give it to the people. Level the playing field. Instead of destroying the Lattice, make it a tool that helps everyone equally. Not just the Zella Galways of the world.”

  “It would hurt your friend Grace Williams as much as Galway. You want to take down Altair too?”

  “Yes.” There was no doubt now. “Break them.”

  “Are you forgetting that Tranq and I actually tried to do that?” Taveena asked. “I seem to remember you got pretty hot under the collar about it too.”