Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  “Your kidneys? Why?”

  “Not sure. The doctor told me that, with lupus, the immune system loses its grip on which cells are friendly and which are invaders. It will pick out one organ system to attack as a foe. My body has decided the enemy is my kidneys.”

  “So you’ll need new kidneys.”

  “No, Chimkin. It takes grist to make kidneys and to make them stick. And remember, grist is the real problem for me. My body just can’t handle it anymore.”

  “So are you saying…that you’re dying?”

  “Everyone dies eventually, Ping Li.” He’d used her full first name—something he did only when trying to be sure she fully understood his full meaning.

  Yes, everyone dies, Li thought. Papa is going to die. But not now! Not yet!

  “Oh, Papa. What about…what about a transplant?” she said. “What about taking one of my kidneys?”

  “I’d have to take both of them, my dear.” Her father bounced his eyebrows in the manner of Sindra, the villainous bolsa mayor on the merci melodrama he’d been following for years. “The truth is, my immune system can’t handle a transplant. Besides, all of my organs are going to come under attack eventually. Maybe one by one. Maybe several at a time.” Hugo Singh shook his head. “There isn’t anything that can be done.”

  Li nodded, feeling suddenly numb in mind and body. “How long?”

  “An e-month or two, Chimkin.”

  An e-month? And then her father would be gone. Gone. She couldn’t imagine a world without her father’s steady presence. He was a man who shuffled off to work every day, who constantly argued politics with his cronies, all of whom valued him for his independent, sometimes curmudgeonly opinions. Most of all, he was a man who believed all of his children were gifts from heaven, to be adored, pestered to do their best, looked after. He wouldn’t be able to look after her anymore. Li knew that would be his greatest pain.

  “I guess I won’t find out how the war ends.” Hugo Singh chuckled. “Not that we should be in a war to begin with.”

  “Better not to talk about that right now, Papa,” said Li, hardly hearing her own words. “Listen, I can take a coach to the Hub and be on the lift in…” She mentally called up the daily transport schedule out of the Hub, the Met’s connecting nexus at the Mercurial North Pole. “…five hours. That would put me at Akali Dal in…”Her convert performed the calculation by streamer transport from Mercury along the Dedo to Venus, then halfway out the Vas to her parents’ home bolsa. “…two and a quarter e-days.”

  “Ping Li, you need not come right away,” said her father. “A full virtual visit would be fine.”

  “I want to be there physically. Maybe there’s something I can do.”

  “Do not get your hopes up in that regard, Chimkin.”

  “I should be there.”

  “You have time. The doctor said it will be at least a couple of e-weeks before my pellicle breaks down to the point that I can no longer access the virtuality.”

  “Oh, Papa, you should have told me! You should have told me earlier.”

  “The diagnosis was not certain, and I didn’t want to distract you from your work. You are doing important work, aren’t you, Chimkin?”

  “Yes, Papa. I think so.”

  “I knew it! If you can’t tell me what it is, at least I can know that it is highly valuable.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to have a real pyre, you know,” her father said, leaning back into his argumentative posture. “Your sister will sing the ardasa.”

  “Suni has a beautiful voice,” said Li, feeling more despondent than ever. Her father was already planning his funeral—Sikh fashion, of course.

  They spoke a few more words, then her father signed off in his customary fashion by winking at her and letting his image dissolve, to be replaced in quick succession by Nanak and the nine gurus.

  Li immediately called up the streamer schedule leaving out from Johnston Bolsa, the way station above the Mercurian North Pole where one caught the pithway streamers that led out the Dedo to Venus and points beyond. She deliberated on whether or not to pay for a private transport—they were expensive, and seemed to become more so the longer the war dragged on. She finally decided against it. She could save the greenleaves and perhaps use them to buy her father something once she arrived in Akali Dal. She placed her reservation.

  And her reservation was denied.

  She placed it again.

  Denied.

  No explanation given. She tried another streamer departing two hours later.

  Denied.

  They couldn’t all be full. She checked the seating. There were beads that were clearly available. What was going on? She tried again. Again, she could not get a place.

  Li sat back. She found that she was breathing quickly, and her heart was racing.

  Calm down, she told herself. There’s some kind of clerical error. Despite her own self-instruction, she quickly tried to make another reservation. Denied.

  Her eyes began to tear up from frustration. She was wiping them on the sleeve of her tunic when her office door opened and Techstock walked in. It was the twenty-eight-year-old aspect.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked her.

  “I was…I was dealing with a personal matter.”

  “You were trying to leave,” Techstock said flatly.

  Li finished wiping her eyes and looked at him with a start. “How did you know that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You can’t go.”

  “My father is very sick.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Techstock said. “Visit him over the merci.”

  “It isn’t the same. He’s dying.”

  “You can’t go.” Techstock repeated himself in the same flat tone.

  “But why not?” said Li in frustration. The tears were welling up once again.

  “Because there’s a war on,” Techstock replied. “Whether you realize it or not, you’re part of the fight.”

  “You mean you’re part of the fight! I’m just around because I’m…well, I’m not even your mistress anymore.” Now the tears were streaming. She ordered her pellicle to dry them up, but it was too late. “I don’t know what I am.”

  “That used to be true,” Techstock staid. “But you’ve discovered something, haven’t you?”

  “How…how did you know about that?”

  “Because I can feel him drawing away from me,” Techstock said. “You have the Director’s attention now. He knows you’re on to something.”

  “I don’t want his attention,” Li said. “I didn’t ask for it.”

  “It’s too late,” said Techstock. “You get the Glory, and you take everything that goes with it.”

  “I just want to see my papa.”

  But Techstock was no longer listening. He was lost in his own ruminations once again, his Glory fog.

  “Who would have thought it,” he said. “Little Li is the lucky one.”

  Fourteen

  Aubry was simultaneously descending into the dark valley of Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars and playing a game of virtual pelota with the guarding algorithms of the death camp. Perceiving in two worlds under such stressful circumstance might have led to a schizophrenic breakdown in some people, but Aubry was made of tougher stuff, both mentally, physically—and virtually. She was the daughter of a free convert and a biological human. What was more, she had been multiple-environment-adapted—she’d undergone a sea change, really—and within the outer body of a sixteen-year-old girl was lodged a finely honed weapon of guerrilla warfare. She was space-adapted, insulated and defended against all manner of grist-based attack. She didn’t even have to eat anymore except to keep up appearances. Her nuclear-powered heart took care of her energy needs.

  Still, somewhere in there was a sixteen-year-old woman. She was a woman who had been stripped from her family at the age of eleven and thrown into the hard life of a partisan warrior. But she’d never forgotten where she
came from. She prayed every day that her father and brother were safe, that they had made it to the outer system.

  Her mother had been transported here, to Silicon Valley—the free-convert death camp. Aubry had seen the consignment records. And now, after five years, the time had come to make a rescue attempt.

  It was only, indirectly, a rescue attempt. Aubry was enough of a realist to understand that she could not go directly to her mother and release her from her cell—or from whatever confinement representation was in use in the prison camp. There were, at that point, millions of free converts being held inside.

  When considered logically, the chances of actually rescuing her mother were extremely low. Alvin Nissan himself had said they were somewhere between five and ten percent. This didn’t matter to Aubry. There was a chance. And Alvin had equipped Aubry with a detecting algorithm that might aid her in locating her mother once she was inside.

  And if this attempt to save Danis didn’t work—why then, Aubry would have to try again. No matter how long it took, she would keep trying. Aubry also knew that, even if her mother were to be rescued on this attempt, she would still return. These were Aubry’s people being held against their will. No one doubted that Amés intended to exterminate all free converts as soon as the merci-polling results gave him the go-ahead. This was inevitable, as the Director took over more and more of the populace through the outright co-option of LAPs combined with the manufacture of Glory addiction and dependency in the masses.

  What Amés could not possess, he would destroy. Anyone not blinded by the Glory could see as much. It was only a matter of time. And yet there were teeming millions in the Met who refused to understand this point—who, instead, believed the opposite to be the case. Aubry could only put it down to the enormous propaganda power of the merci, whose content was under the control of the Director, either directly or indirectly.

  It would have been amazing to think for her eleven-year-old self, but for the past five years, Aubry had caught maybe two or three hours of merci programming. She was as disconnected from the Met’s consensus reality as she could be and still physically dwell among the people there.

  The partisans were, of course, not there to liberate Aubry’s mother per se. An important objective was to strike a blow to the Department of Immunity’s complacency in having all of the Met under its control. If successful, it would be both a propaganda victory and also a blow to morale within the Department itself.

  The second objective had come from Jill. Jill’s obsession, her underlying mission in life, was to locate the personality known as Alethea Nightshade—the woman whose face and body Jill wore. Jill had reason to believe that Alethea might be somewhere in the prison, since all sentient convert coding was being rounded up and placed there. Jill herself had made a promise to the mysterious LAP named Thaddeus Kaye that she would find the woman, no matter what it took.

  This was a search for a particular individual, but, on a larger scale, finding her would also be a strategic gain for the partisans. Thaddeus Kaye, wherever he was, was not merely another LAP. He was a key—perhaps the key—to the present war. His convert personality was written on local space-time, in the manner that ordinary converts were encoded in the grist.

  Aubry didn’t pretend to understand the science behind it all. But to recover Alethea—this Thaddeus Kaye’s long-lost girlfriend or something (Aubry wasn’t clear on the exact details)—was to find a back door into Kaye’s mentality. And to gain access to that mentality was to have access to the makeup of local reality itself.

  At least, according to Alvin Nissan, that would be the case. Gaining that access was the prime reason his v-hacks were allied with Jill and her partisan rats and ferret warriors in the first place.

  “This Alethea will let me get ‘root’ on Thaddeus Kaye,” Alvin had hold Aubry. “And when I have root on Kaye, I can do what I like with the whole system.”

  “You mean the whole solar system,” Aubry replied.

  “That’s right,” said Alvin. “Local space-time. It’s the dream of every hacker since ancient times. To get root on reality. To make the natural hack.”

  “And you’ll make changes for the common good, of course,” Aubry had said a bit sarcastically. “Since you’ll be in the original position of all humankind when you’re king of the world.” As a sixteen-year-old, she found she had a much lower threshold for bullshit than she’d had at eleven.

  Alvin had smiled—a facial expression that looked like a scowl until you got to know him. “The king won’t do anything without your consultation, Lady Aubry,” he told her. He sighed. “And about a thousand Friends v-hackers who could pull the plug on my ass at any moment should I get out of line.”

  In any case, Alvin had been unclear about how, exactly, possessing Alethea Nightshade’s convert was going to give him “root” on someone who might, indeed, be a force of nature but who was also a human being—a pretty irascible and stubborn human being, as Jill had described Kaye. Aubry suspected that Alvin himself wasn’t clear on the method. But if he somehow could pull it off…

  Then the partisans would stop the war. They could write the terms of the postwar settlement. They could define the terms for, well, everything. Merely the remote possibility of achieving that justified the Noctis Labyrinthus operation.

  The attack on Silicon Valley was years in the planning. The camp was wound round with the sort of security and cryptography that, before the war, had been considered fundamentally impregnable. But the impossible had become necessary. Something had to be done to save the thousands of souls that the partisans believed were being systematically exterminated in the prison.

  Because the most important objective of the partisan force was to strike a blow against the genocide that they knew was going on in the camp.

  Since the creation of the Met and the dawn of the modern era, genocide had been unknown among humans. Most were sure it was a relic of the barbarous past.

  Like they believed total war was gone for good, Aubry thought. Only we’re in one now.

  Genocide had never really gone away. Perhaps it never would. But neither would the need to call it what it was and resist it.

  Fuck the ethics anyway, Aubry thought. My mother is in there.

  Unless Danis was already dead. Reformatted to random ones and zeros.

  This was something Aubry could not let herself think. There was no way to know. But based on the information the partisans had put together, only 10 million free converts had been killed. And according to that same information, there were close to 500 million souls imprisoned in the Silicon Valley grist.

  So the odds, though gruesome, were in her mother’s favor.

  Onward, downward into the valley.

  —And Aubry used a blast of air from her arm rockets and sped toward her opponents, the red-and-white-clad security team of Noctis Labyrinthus. A forward came out to meet her, and she easily twisted around him, moving closer to the goal.

  The pelota player overlay within her grist had made the move, and not her. Aubry had used expert system overlays before to allow her to accomplish various tasks when she had no time to learn the technicalities. But she’d never felt one manifest itself so strongly, so quickly. She’d felt the surge of the other’s personality from the moment she saw the pelota ball.

  Aubry, surprised, reacted by suppressing the overlay.

  Just then defensive midfielders rushed to box her in, forcing her to back-pass to her own teammate. She didn’t recognize her own midfielder—they were all in anonymous representation mode—but she knew from the jersey number, 15, that it was Logan36, a free-convert v-hack known for creating a strain of Glory-blocking grist for which the Department of Immunity had yet to find a counteragent. Logan36 and his spray of three worked the ball among themselves, pulling defenders and red-and- white-clad strikers in every direction.

  The v-hacks were clearly loving that this break-in was representing as pelota. Almost to a man and woman, they were what was known as extremas �
�that is, rabid fans.

  Aubry felt a strange yearning rise within herself.

  This is what I exist for! I have to do my job!

  It was the overlay’s voice in her head. Was it speaking to her? Such things were not supposed to be conscious. Then she realized the overlay was engaged in dialogue with itself. She was listening in on Bastumo’s inner dialogue—or at least a very sophisticated simulation of it.

  There is a game! It doesn’t matter where or why! Bastumo must play pelota!

  That’s why you’re here , Aubry thought, although the overlay allegedly would not understand such an abstract thought. She let go of any conscious direction of her virtual body here in the game. Play ball, Bastumo!

  She grabbed a passing back, who was coming up to help, and spun around him, robbing momentum from the defender and sending Aubry toward the spinning arena wall.

  Just like Sint and I did when we got on board the transport bead when we were fleeing Mercury, Aubry thought. For every brother, there is an equal and opposite sister. It seemed so long ago. Would she even recognize her brother if she saw him again?

  Yes. Of course she would.

  Aubry-Bastumo timed her contact with the moving wall, rebounding at an angle that sent her streaking into the Security backfield. Several panicked defenders attempted to follow after, but their air jets were no match for the velocity Aubry had picked up from her contact with the spin of the arena wall.

  Logan36 saw her dash for the goal and, with a mighty kick, sent the long ball her way.

  Too long.

  Aubry stretched and added her air jets to her velocity going forward. Not enough.

  The Ranger goalkeeper bounced out on his tether and snagged the ball, as Aubry crashed through the penalty box and careened into the opposite wall. The rotating goalpost caught her and swatted her down toward the arena wall in an out-of-control spin. She met the pellucid arena wall with a shoulder and had to grind it even harder into the wall to dampen her spin.

  Part of the game. Sometimes attacks fail. But the joy is that I will get to attack again!