The Tin Whistle

by Erik Hanberg

  “So Taveena’s taking the Walden out of orbit subconsciously?”

  “Not exactly. Taveena is simultaneously piloting the Walden and hacking the Lattice while in a deep meditative state.”

  “She’s meditating while she works? People can do that?”

  “It’s rare, certainly, but for one who has spent as many hours in meditation as she has, she’s prepared. Her mind is working in ways that AIs don’t have much data for. You once described conscious thought as being like a rowboat on the sea of unconsciousness. To extend that same metaphor, in Taveena’s brain right now, the sea is calling the shots.”

  Shaw was exasperated. Below him, he saw Alaska.

  “So what can you tell me?” he asked.

  “By dropping out of her orbit, she’s successfully evaded Galway’s laser satellites. So that’s not a worry anymore. I can also tell you that not only is the Walden’s orbit degrading, but that the Walden is actually speeding up. Most degrading orbits cause a loss of speed as they encounter the atmosphere. Not this one. So we can reasonably assume this is part of the goal. She’s driving the Walden into the atmosphere.”

  “But—” Shaw cut himself off. Why! he wanted to scream. It would sound like a whine.

  “We don’t know the answer to that,” Aquinas said, answering the question anyway. “The other thing I can tell you for sure is that as the Walden skids against the atmosphere, it’s actually coming apart at the molecular level. In other words, the nitrogen diamond is breaking apart.”

  “The ship is made of one of the strongest substances we’ve ever created. I’ve been back and forth through the atmosphere on the Walden several times and it didn’t happen then, did it?”

  “No. So we can infer that is intentional as well. The molecular machines she invented are slowly dismantling the Walden.”

  “What Florian wanted to do to the Lattice satellites… she’s doing to her own ship?”

  “Yes.”

  Shaw gulped. He considered the options. There was one in particular that scared him more than any other. “Is Taveena committing suicide?”

  “I’m sorry that I can’t give you a definitive answer,” Aquinas said. “Some signs in her mind suggest that she knows she’s about to die. But if that’s really the goal, it’s not the sole goal. She’s trying to do something else. We just—”

  “—just don’t know,” Shaw finished. Right.

  The Walden raced around the globe, sinking lower and lower into the blue atmosphere (above Shaw the sky was now tinged with blue instead of being the sharp black of space), and shedding the molecules of its outer hull. Behind it, the avatars of Shaw and Aquinas kept pace.

  “I assume that the hull is getting thinner and thinner as it disintegrates?” Shaw asked.

  “Most assuredly.”

  Shaw hoped he would elaborate, but it seemed Aquinas was determined not to volunteer any information Shaw didn’t explicitly ask for. “How long until the hull weakens so much that it’s breached?”

  “Ninety minutes,” Aquinas said. “That’s another full orbit, during which time billions of molecules will have been ejected into the atmosphere from the Walden. We expect it will break up about eighty thousand feet above northern Canada.”

  Shaw looked down at the Earth. Through the clouds, he could see that the Walden was just now passing over Oregon’s Pacific Coast, headed southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic beyond. This moment, still dozens of miles above the globe, was the closest he’d been to his home in a year.

  “Back in Rome… Is my body safe?” Shaw asked.

  “Yes. Soldiers are moving you back to the Vatican. And you will be happy to hear that the street fighting is mostly over. Dvorak’s mercenaries surrendered far faster than any of the AIs had anticipated.”

  “That’s a pretty good result for what you said was going to be a coin toss whether we won or lost. Aren’t you supposed to know everything?”

  “No matter how powerful the Lattice, it still doesn’t know the future,” Aquinas said. “We can make very strong educated guesses. But we couldn’t have predicted that when the Vatican wall exploded and you and your soldiers came barreling over it that it would dishearten the mercenaries so much that their battle lust just… melted in the face of attack. Humans are fickle creatures. I suspect that will always be true.”

  Just then, two escape pods ejected from the Walden, one after another. Sleek, black, and narrow, Shaw recognized them instantly as copies of the capsule that had taken him to Earth.

  “Wulf is in the first one, Ellie and Jane are in the second,” Aquinas reported.

  That was all Shaw needed to know. He changed his jump instantly—instead of tracking the Walden, he followed Ellie’s escape pod.

  Plunging into the atmosphere, Shaw followed the streaking pod as it hurtled toward the ground. A cone of fire developed around the nose of the escape pod, enveloping it entirely. It was as if the air itself was on fire, and the flames reached back as far as Shaw’s avatar, forcing him to readjust the position of the jump so he could see the pod and not just the orange and red of re-entry.

  For several minutes—though it felt like an eternity—flames engulfed the small craft. And for each second during that time, Shaw half-expected to see it break up into a million little pieces. He had been unconscious during his own re-entry—but what was it like for Ellie and for Jane? The heat and the vibrations and the noise must be terrifyingly intense on the inside. The only thing that gave Shaw hope was his own experience. His capsule had survived reentry—surely Ellie’s would too?

  When the flames cleared, Shaw breathed a sigh of relief. The pod was now descending very quickly—moving more downward than forward at every moment—and its speed had nearly cut in half. Until landing, that had probably been the most dangerous portion of the reentry process.

  Landing. Shaw looked around wildly, trying to get his bearings. They’d just passed the Rockies and now the vast Midwest plains were ahead of them. An inkling of a destination entered Shaw’s mind.

  “If the pod stays on this course, where are they going?” Shaw asked, knowing Aquinas was still listening to him somewhere.

  “Saint Louis, Missouri,” Aquinas answered. “I’ll make sure a team of doctors are waiting.”

  Shaw could practically hear the smile in the AI’s voice.

  The pod continued its descent, and the landscape gradually changed. Plains and fields gave way to more hills and forests, and the ground was close enough he could make out individual features and roads. It was like coming in for a landing on a slingshot or a shuttle now.

  Then all at once, the ground raced up and Shaw saw downtown Saint Louis and Gateway Arch coming out of the haze in the distance. Ellie’s capsule was going to fall short. Instead of making it to downtown, the pod came in low over a large green area. Shaw recognized it instantly: the site of the 1904 World’s Fair, now converted to Forest Park.

  Ellie’s pod skimmed the top of the trees before it dropped to the ground. It hung there, just a few feet off the ground, before the base of the pod eventually carved a brown ditch into the green landscape. It shot dirt up on all sides around it, but the pod maintained its orientation and never flipped or spun. By the time the pod skidded to a halt, it had left a cleft in the ground that ran for forty feet through the grassy park.

  The pod’s path had taken it almost to the far east side of Forest Park. And from across the street, a team of doctors and nurses raced out of the massive Barnes Jewish Hospital. They cut through traffic on Kingshighway, and made their way to the site of the crash landing.

  The first person to reach the capsule slid away a panel to reveal the controls. She typed something into the system and the entire escape pod began to vibrate and whine—a sound Shaw recognized from his own experience waking up in the capsule. Last time he’d had no idea what was going on. From the outside this time, he could see that the escape pod was being torn apart from the inside. A seam was growing around the equator of the capsule, separati
ng the top half from the bottom.

  The men and women from the hospital lined up on one side of the pod. After a few more seconds of waiting, they knelt together and heaved the lid of the capsule up. It toppled over and sank a few inches into the grass. But that’s not what interested Shaw.

  He was struggling to find a view through the sea of doctors and nurses. He pushed his way forward, his avatar sailing right through someone’s shoulder. When he emerged on the other side, he finally saw Ellie, Jane clutched to her chest.

  The bottom half of the capsule looked something like a boat, and when Ellie sat up, there was a brief illusion that she’d canoed her way into the middle of the park. She was in tears, and her hair and her body were slick with sweat.

  The nurses tried to take Jane from her, but she shouted them away. Her full focus was on her child. Jane wasn’t crying or shouting. She was motionless so far as he could tell.

  Shaw felt a fear seizing him as Ellie bent her head over and cooed at her daughter.

  “Jane… Jane…” Ellie gave her the slightest of shakes in her arm, but Jane didn’t respond. Ellie bent her head closer and listened. Ellie held the pose for a few seconds before she let out a strangled cry. “She’s sleeping! She’s sleeping! She slept through the whole thing!” Ellie’s cries gave way to a mixture of laughter and sobs.

  A nurse ventured closer. She didn’t try to take Jane from Ellie, but instead held out two fingers and placed them into the crease of Jane’s tiny elbow. After a few moments, her face showed her relief. She looked at the doctors near her and nodded. All around Ellie, the doctors and nurses seemed to change their stance from one of vigilance to relief.

  “Byron’s avatar is here watching,” the nurse whispered to Ellie. “His avatar followed you the whole way.”

  “Is it over?” Ellie asked.

  The nurse nodded. “You’re safe here. And Byron is safe in Italy as well.”

  “Time to come home, By,” Ellie whispered. “Come home to me and Jane.”

  Chapter 13

  Back in Rome, he and Grace and Nosipho monitored the last arc of Taveena’s final flight. They didn’t bother to jump, but watched in silence as a small pinpoint of light representing the Walden circled a holographic globe. It was moving eastward over the Arctic. It would reach Northern Canada in less than two minutes.

  “You’ll be happy to know that while you were in a jump, the board of Dvorak Systems just removed Galway from power,” Grace said, filling the time. “She’s no longer the CEO of Dvorak.”

  “Now that is good news,” Shaw said.

  “Galway could never see past the end of her own nose,” Grace said. “She came from the world of business and high finance. If she could save a dime with a noticeably worse product, she would. If she had the chance to create a monopoly to benefit her company, she would. All other considerations—ethics, the environment, laws, basic morality—were just obstacles to be overcome.”

  Shaw remembered Lucille and the picnic bench. They’d spoken for less than two minutes, yet—despite the brevity of their interaction—the horror of the moment would be with him for a long time.

  “Nosipho told me you were indistinguishable from your company,” Shaw said. “That it was all you cared about and that you would do anything for it. What’s the difference?”

  If he expected Grace to be offended, he was mistaken. “Some constraints are good,” she said. “If there’s no net on the tennis court, then where’s the fun in that? The risk of hitting the next or going out of bounds is what makes the game interesting.”

  Shaw shook his head in amazement. Grace Williams wasn’t Zella Galway, no. But she wasn’t a saint either—and he had firsthand experience to back up that assessment.

  “And now that she’s no longer got control of the company, the U.S. is a lot less squeamish about prosecuting,” Nosipho said. “The District Attorney in Montana has filed charges against her. She’ll be held accountable for her crimes.”

  “That means no one’s coming to kill you anymore,” Grace continued. “You’re a free man. I’d offer you a ride on the Flying Eagle, but something tells me you’d like to get back to Saint Louis on something a little faster than an airship.”

  Shaw looked at Alberto. “I’m arranging for you to use the pope’s private shuttle, sir. It will be ready in an hour.”

  Shaw couldn’t quite get used to the idea. He’d been a prisoner so many times, he could barely keep track of his multiple jailers. And with his not-guilty verdict in the United States—the verdict that had set Galway off on her own path to vengeance—Shaw truly was completely free. Of course, there was only one place he wanted to go.

  He turned back to the map in the room and held his breath as he saw the small light that was the Walden cross into Canada. If Taveena had some secret plan, this was the moment she was going to set it into action.

  A second passed and then another.

  Then, as Aquinas had predicted, the little light snuffed out.

  “Taveena?” Shaw asked after a few seconds.

  Aquinas shook his head. “She was aboard the Walden when the hull disintegrated enough that it breached. At that altitude… She died instantly.”

  “So it was a suicide mission then,” Shaw said quietly. “But why?”

  “This way she got to die while saving your family and Wulf,” Alberto suggested.

  “That doesn’t fit. But Wulf made it through re-entry safely?” Shaw asked.

  Alberto nodded. “He’s being taken care of in a hospital in California. Taveena sent him home as well.”

  “She’d been content to let them die before,” Shaw mused. “She wouldn’t have done all that just to save their lives but not her own.”

  “Perhaps she would rather go out on her own terms than wait for Galway’s satellites to show up,” Alberto ventured.

  Shaw shrugged. “Maybe. But I doubt it. She was trying to accomplish something. Whether it was destroying the companies in the cartel or destroying the Lattice itself, she had a plan.”

  “Whatever her plan was, thank God it didn’t work,” Nosipho said.

  Shaw stayed quiet.

  “And you got lucky,” Nosipho told him. “If she had gone after the Lattice companies like you suggested she do, don’t think we’d all be sitting here buddy-buddy. Galway would be the least of your worries.”

  Grace put her arm softly on Nosipho’s shoulder. Nosipho crossed her arms angrily, but she didn’t push her point. Grace said, “I would like to know what she was up to, though. If she found a way to destroy the Lattice, someone might be able to hunt it down in her subconscious and then we’ll start this whole mess over again. We need to be prepared.”

  The holographic globe dimmed, and Aquinas moved toward them. “Please join me outside. There’s something you need to see.”

  Shaw, Nosipho, Grace, and Alberto exchanged glances and then hurried after the saint. “What?” Shaw asked, trying to keep up. He couldn’t remember Aquinas moving this quickly before. “What’s going on?”

  “Spheres,” Aquinas said.

  “In Rome?”

  “In Rome. In Italy. In Europe. Everywhere.”

  Shaw, Grace, Nosipho, and Alberto found the rest of the saints waiting on a terrace off the pope’s private apartment. They had a commanding view of all of Rome. Shaw’s eyes immediately went to the sky. It was midday, and the cloudless summer sky was a deep blue. Shaw strained, but he couldn’t find any black spheres anywhere in the sky. Was it still too dark to see them?

  “You’re looking in the wrong place,” Joan of Arc said.

  The four humans turned to her and watched the AI kneel on the red clay balcony. “Down here,” she said.

  Shaw crouched next to her, and Nosipho and Grace followed suit. He saw the red of the terrace’s surface, but nothing else.

  “What am I looking for?” he asked.

  Joan of Arc brought her glowing hand lower, and in the light of her holographic projection, Shaw saw something glint. More than a single s
omething. As she moved her hand about, he saw several speckles reflect the light.

  “What are they?” he asked.

  “Nitrogen diamond spheres. Almost microscopic.”

  Now that she had pointed them out, Shaw could pick them out without her light. They were ant-sized. Surely he would have seen them before? What was going on?

  “And they’re growing,” Grace said, already at a conclusion he was just now beginning to understand. They were already larger than ants. Shaw looked around the balcony. What had moments ago been solidly red was speckled with black dots—like the terrace had just come down with a disease.

  Shaw instantly remembered the way he and the raiders had used growing spheres inside the lead dome to crush the Nevada Installation. Those spheres had grown larger and larger until—

  “Are we in danger?” he asked Aquinas.

  “No,” Joan of Arc said, shaking her head. “If we correctly understand what the molecular machine is doing, they won’t get much larger than a… a baseball, to use a frame of reference. Easy to fit in the palm of your hand.”

  “You still can’t tell for sure what they are for?”

  “We have strong suspicions,” Joan of Arc said. She had an amused glint in her eye.

  The spheres were now pebble size, not even an inch in diameter.

  “This is Taveena’s work, is it?” Nosipho asked.

  “Yes,” Aquinas said. “These spheres are being built by the molecular machines that were discarded from the Walden’s nitrogen diamond hull. They just have… new instructions. They float down through the air and then—wherever they touch the ground or water, they begin to grow.”

  “When we were orbiting with the Walden, you said there were billions of them that were being ejected from the ship before the hull breached,” Shaw said, turning to Aquinas for confirmation.

  “Yes, sir,” Aquinas answered. “We counted. There are ten point three billion of them, give or take a few.”