by Tony Daniel
See below.
3. Anti-Information Zones
Grist-mil can be deployed to cut or confuse all communication, whether grist-based or otherwise, in a given area or system (such as, for example, the human nervous system).
Direct Demolition
Grist-mil is highly effective at destroying physical facilities and cutting lines of communication. Uses include:
1. Reserved demolitions
These are preset charges of grist useful for destruction of facilities in the event of strategic withdrawal or retreat. These generally incorporate, and are under the control of, fully sentient free converts who keep them in “safe” condition until needed.
Reserved use also includes land and space minefields armed with sentient or semisentient individual devices.
2. Deliberate demolitions
These are used when enemy interference is unlikely and there is sufficient time for placement. Deliberate demolitions are economical in their use of energy and computing resources, and can thus produce a much larger effect for the effort involved.
3. Hasty demolitions
These are used when time is limited and speed is more important than economy. Common sense should be exercised as much as is possible to prevent waste. In these demolitions, special care should be given to the placement of each grist-mil charge, and each charge should be primed with its controlling algorithm immediately. Even though this will take longer than normal deployment, this will make more likely a partial success of the demolition objective should the enemy interfere.
Delayed Demolition
Delayed grist-mil demolition charges are useful for the same reasons as other delayed grist-mil weaponry. Timed and delayed charges can catch an enemy off guard. Such charges can be deployed behind enemy lines for devastating effect. In this regard, they are particularly effective when combined with a stealth feature.
This use also includes land and space minefields. In addition to their use in defense and fortification, such devices can also be used as a passive means of attack if seeded behind enemy lines.
Six
About the only thing Aubry liked about Mars was the gravity. It was a lot closer to her native Mercury’s than the Earth-normal spin of the Met cables and most standard Met bolsas. When she was last on Mercury, five years ago, she had weighed around a hundred e-normal pounds. Now she was sixteen years old and twenty e-pounds heavier. Here on Mars that came out to forty pounds—eighteen kilograms. Most of it was muscle.
Aubry was also now fully space-adapted. It had been a long process, taking several years, because the alternative, a quick-adapt treatment, was extremely expensive. In any case, they were difficult to obtain when you were a fugitive from the government with a fifty-thousandgreenleaf bounty on your head.
Aubry’s pellicle served as an effective pressure suit as she stood on a ridge overlooking a deep chasm below. Her skin was even stronger than a standard planetary suit, actually, and was able to withstand a micrometeorite hit. Her body’s energy system had long been switched over from breathing and eating to slow fusion, even though she continued to have a meal now and then to keep up appearances, and breathed to avoid attracting attention. Here on the Martian surface, with no one around, there was no need to breathe.
You wouldn’t want to have the current Martian atmosphere inside you, in any case, Aubry thought. Centuries before, the air had been nice and clean—almost pure carbon dioxide. These days, it was a slurry of nasty organic compounds left over from the failed terraforming experiments of the 2700s. Grist and bioengineered protozoa had combined to produce an ecologic feedback of horrid proportions. The process had been initiated in the southern hemisphere, and that was where the damage was worst. But here, near the equator, the surface was still covered with a thin, toxic goo. Every step you took produced a sucking sound, even in the scant Martian atmosphere. Several non-Martians died every year when someone inadvertently tracked the stuff back inside the pressurized cities. Anybody who lived long-term on Mars had to undergo a series of antitoxin modifications in his or her grist pellicle. It was very expensive, and had served for over three hundred years to keep immigration down. The planetary goo, called “moraba” by the locals, attacked the central nervous system. It wasn’t a problem for Aubry. She didn’t have nerves anymore; she had wiring.
Much of the planetary landscape had been altered by the terraforming, as well. Mars had once been a desert, cut through with periodic liquid water channels. Now, in the southern hemisphere, the old “mare” plains, such as Hellas, really were shallow seas of moraba, and the hills had become islands. There was less moraba in the north, but plenty enough to provide a thin coating for every exposed feature. The planet retained its age-old pinkish, iron-oxide cast, so that the surface these days resembled nothing so much as pus oozing from an inflamed sore.
The only good consequence of the terraforming had been the elimination of Martian dust storms, as the moraba absorbed the particles from the air and held them fast in its sticky confines. That altered the normal variations of dust cover at the poles, however, and they were steadily eroding—with the precious water component getting locked up in the useless organic stew of the atmosphere, where it was difficult to separate.
All in all, we made a huge mess of the place, Aubry thought. But at least it taught us to adapt ourselves , instead of the landscape. Who knows what might have become of Venus or Europa if we’d tried the same trick on them?
Thousands of feet below Aubry was the floor of the Noctis Labyrinthus, the initial valley that formed the huge equatorial rift on Mars known as the Valles Marineris.
Somewhere down there in the sunless declivities was Aubry’s mother.
Aubry had spent years finding her. She’d followed clue after clue, gone down hundreds of blind alleys of investigation, seen leads dry up before her eyes. Fortunately, she had some of the best v-hacks in the Met working with her—people who could make the merci do tricks its original designers had never thought of, and if they had, would probably consider obscene, at least from a design perspective.
And so she’d found Danis. She was being held with hundreds of thousands of other free converts in a square kilometer of grist spread across the floor of Noctis Labyrinthus.
It was a concentration camp for sentient computer programs. They called it Silicon Valley.
“A-3 in position on the escarpment.” Aubry sent the thought modulated through merci back channels to the partisan comm coordinator who was serving as the relay and cutoff person for the operation. A referred to the fact that she was an aspect—that is, bodily present on Mars; 3 meant that she was not alone in physically being in the vicinity.
There was A-2—his real name was Bin___128A. Bin was a rat. Literally. And, of course, a former free convert. He’d grown into a man back on the Nirvana, when the partisan force had been born. Bin was back in the old FUSE tunnels, waiting at Aubry’s designated escape hatch.
A-1 was Aubry’s friend and mentor, Jill. She would be leading an assault on the other side of the prison camp and raising a great hue and cry. Jill was to create a magnificent diversion in the physical world, as far away from Aubry’s position as possible. Aubry was part of the virtual strike force. She possessed the one piece of hardware that was essential for the virtual attack’s success.
“C-12 acknowledge,” the comm officer answered. He was a v-hacker who was not on Mars. He wasn’t anywhere in particular. The C in C-12 was for convert. Jill didn’t know the man’s name, and she didn’t want to. No one was more in danger now in the Met than free converts. Biological humans might get arrested and imprisoned for life. Free-convert rebels got sent to horrible places—places like Silicon Valley, for instance.
The partisans’ prime slogan said it all: “Need to know is the way to go.” The less information you knew, the less they could torture out of you if they caught you.
Aubry listened as the other members of the raid team checked in over their back channel merci communication. They were pig
gybacked onto a game show of some sort, and Aubry experienced the occasional cross-bleed of ghost images and audio as the game show audience applauded and peaked the meters. Secret communications were always dicey like this. If you wanted perfection, you could sign on to the Glory Channel—perfect reception there. Perfect reception, that is, as you were transformed into an entirely helpless receptacle of Interlocking Directorate propaganda.
“C-1 reports first burn initiated,” said C-1. Aubry knew who C-1 was. Everyone did. Like Jill, he was legendary in partisan circles. He was the free-convert v-hacker named Alvin Nissan. Alvin was the best in the business. She’d known him on Nirvana, where he’d been one of the Friends of Tod. The Friends were allegedly pacifists. Yet here Alvin was heading up an operation that was designed to kill as many Department of Immunity agents as was necessary to achieve its goal.
Guess Alvin isn’t FOT anymore, Aubry thought. No—better not to reflect on such matters. The fact that she knew Alvin’s name and designation was bad enough. She probably ought to reformat the memory.
There were several such gaps in her brain—places where she’d deliberately erased certain information in case she was captured. It was jarring to come upon them. No matter how much you intellectually understood why you suddenly drew a blank, you felt like you should know the information. Maybe one of these days the grist engineers would invent a deletion algorithm that would take care of the emotional reaction to lost knowledge. They ought to, if only for practical purposes. Clever interrogators would be able to learn a lot by what you didn’t know, but should. She’d have to bring that up during her next feedback session.
That is, provided she survived this little operation.
“C-1 reports first burn in place,” C-12 reported. “Waiting for stabilization.”
This could take a while—at least an hour, according to the estimate of the v-hacker team who had designed the mission. The attack team was now connected to Silicon Valley through a back door in the merci. But the process had to be made “commutative,” as Alvin put it. Trying to force a virtual two-way tunnel into the grist of Noctis Labyrinthus would set off all the security bells, and the mission would be over before it began. The idea was to pick the lock on a door that was already there.
Aubry didn’t relax her body, but she settled herself into waiting mode—a state of being she’d become very familiar with over the years. She wouldn’t be jumping off the cliff anytime soon. She suppressed an urge to go ahead and jump. Her mother was down there, ensconced somewhere in that blanket of grist.
I’m coming, Mom, Aubry thought. I’m coming to rescue you!
But not yet.
Seven
From
Grist-based Weapons
Federal Army Field Manual
Compiled by Forward Development Lab, Triton
Gerardo Funk, Commandant
Section III: Stealth Types
Concealment
Physically concealing a weapon or demolition charge is sometimes the only option, and can be very effective when the enemy is not actively using grist-mil detection means. Weaponry grist concealed within other weapons can provide a devastating secondary attack.
Camouflage
Grist conceals itself extremely well. Sentient and semisentient grist can be made translucent to electromagnetic radiation. Isotropic effects can be used to prevent detection by other means. Generally speaking, only specialized detection grist can locate a camouflaged grist-mil weapon or demolition device.
Mimicry
Mimicking a structure, area, or person for a length of time is extremely effective and often devastating to the enemy. Sufficiently complex military-grade grist can incorporate itself into a structure or system—become a load-bearing wall, say, or white blood cells in an enemy soldier’s body—and lie in wait in such circumstances. It will then activate itself for military use when conditions are ripe.
Eight
Timing was everything in the rebellion business. Aubry had learned that the hard way five years ago at the tender age of eleven when her new home—an island of safety she’d only reached a few months before—suddenly became the most dangerous place to be in the solar system.
Nirvana, the disconnected island—a “mycelium,” as it was known—created by the Friends of Tod in the midst of the Met, was doomed from the day Amés took control of the Interlocking Directorate, and many of the Friends of Tod knew it. And after Amés’s intelligence chief had been “murdered” on a visit to Nirvana, any Friends who weren’t convinced of that fact should have been. Within a matter of e-weeks, the Department of Immunity attacked.
Aubry’s friend Jill, who was now the leader of the partisan resistance, had been prepared. But that took nothing away from the devastation the DIED ships wrought. By the time they were finished with their antimatter cannon, Nirvana was an eviscerated hulk, a piece of radioactive space junk. Hundreds of Friends of Tod—those who had volunteered to stay behind, who knew what was coming—had died martyrs’ deaths. It was their way of fighting the war against Amés.
But not my way, Aubry thought. I’m going to take as many of those DI bastards with me as I can if I have to check out early.
Aubry smiled. Just the sort of thing Jill would say. The woman had certainly worn off on her over the years. She’d become, in effect, the big sister Aubry never had. Relentless drive. Ruthless courage. All packed into a five-foot-two-inch frame. And don’t forget, thought Aubry, somewhere in there is the rat-hunting ferret Jill once was. Literally.
Aubry and Jill had been some of the last ones off Nirvana when the Met attack came. Jill had planned the retreat to the last detail, making sure that the partisans’ tracks were all covered, or at least obscured and untraceable. Many of the Friends of Tod were merci engineers and v-hacks—the people who had built and maintained the virtuality in the first place. If Amés had wanted to stage a surprise attack, he chose the wrong people to fight. Days before the DI got their operation under way, various FOTs had tapped the vinculum, the Met army’s special segment of the merci, and merci traffic in general. They had picked up indications that a major event was about to unfold. It didn’t take much more work to search out what that event was.
The trouble was, it wasn’t easy to get off Nirvana. The same isolation that made the mycelia—the various disjoint islands in the Met—attractive to those who wanted to get away from it all also made it difficult to engage in a hasty exit. To leave undetected was going to be a special problem. But the FOTs got together and solved the predicament in their usual manner: They asked Tod.
Aubry, Jill, and their friend Leo Sherman had brought the old-time tower to Nirvana, and since then, he’d settled in among his followers like a peg in a hole. The very evening when the FOTs discovered that an attack was imminent, the leadership duo of Otis and Game called a council meeting and vision quest.
The meeting was held in the Council Hut in Oregon Bolsa, the principal enclave of Nirvana. The hut was rich with a specialized grist that, as it had before, gave Aubry the vegetable creeps. It had heavy-duty encryption encoded into it. Switching her senses entirely to her convert portion in the virtuality, Aubry found herself in the Council Clearing, a clear space in a tangled woodland of vines, creepers, and knotty underbrush. It was all a virtual representation of the extreme secrecy that surrounded this meeting of minds, but the best programmers had created the space, and it felt very real—and dreadfully looming—to Aubry.
In the center was a circle of stones where all took their seat, and at the center of the circle was a blue-white fire. A long smoking pipe was passed around, and Aubry took a ceremonial puff. In the real world, she knew, her brain had just received an influx of neurotransmitters tailored to bring her to a full state of alertness.
Aubry knew that most of the FOTs were high on the drug known as enthalpy. The “thinking pipe” complemented the psychedelic effect of enthalpy, so that you could have visions while avoiding muddleheaded nonsense.
At least that was the theory.
“Old bone dancer,” said Game. “He is with us.” Game was a woman of around sixty, but she took a few years off her virtuality persona and, Aubry noticed for the first time, made the tips of her ears noticeably pointy.
“Old bone dancer is the tobacco in our pipe, and the light in our eyes,” said Otis, who was Game’s male counterpart in the loose leadership of the FOTs. He was also her romantic partner.
The gathered circle of FOTs answered, more or less in unison, “Old bone dancer.”
They were referring to Tod the time tower, of course. The Friends couldn’t seem to avoid their doublespeak and aphorism, even in the most dire of circumstances.
“We cannot be seen or heard or known here on Nirvana,” Otis continued. “Neither can we be smelled, tasted, or v-hacked.”
Time towers were Large Arrays of Personalities, much like all the other LAPs in the solar system. They were very old, some of the first attempts to create a manifold—a LAP of LAPs. Their conscious present was spread out in time—a month was a day to them, a year a month, and so on. As a result, most were stark, raving lunatics.
But some—like Tod—made a certain sort of sense.
Otis had once explained to Aubry another peculiar characteristic of time towers. They could block grist transmission within a certain sphere of influence. They could jam the merci. No one—neither scientist nor mystic—was quite sure how they did so, but that didn’t stop the powers that be from seeking to exploit them. This was one of the reasons the Friends had built Nirvana in the first place—to provide a safe haven, and lots of grist for his convert portions to stretch out in, for their “god,” Tod.
And then, in the midst of the blue flame that filled the center of the circle, old Tod himself appeared.
He was very tall and lanky—a good two meters in height—with a double joint in his overlong neck that made him look gooselike. He was squatting in the fire, with his arms drawn around his knees.