Why had the Center not gone this route? It feared, Smoke said, the gods and the mindless havoc they wreaked on failed universes. Places that didn’t match their standards. Presumably the Center knew what the gods wanted better than they did. So, it was entirely possible that self-preservation drove the Center’s urgency. The gods, if they decided a World was a dead end either rebooted it, if it was viable as a testing ground with another set of species, or they destroyed it, converting its raw resources into mega-trillions of spores to spread throughout the universe. The Center feared this happening to itself, so it was looking for neighbors to effect…what? A clash with the gods? Was this what the gods wanted?
Silver cared, but Gold, she knew, didn’t really care why the Center wanted what it wanted. Gold wanted out. She was, Silver knew, thrilled with the thought of a final end to her cycle of existence. She had said as much, recently. “I want off this merry-go-round,” she had told her, in English, and then rattled off a sentence in an old, Mayan dialect she said the priests had used with her. “I want an end to the long counting,” was how Silver translated it, with her limited knowledge, but knew there was sorrow and longing in that phrase too. Gold wanted to see this end, but not just with her life, with the whole sorry business. Silver suspected she had a plan. Gold usually did.
As she climbed, she mused on all these things. No great revelations hit her, since there were none. Only a narrowing set of possible outcomes. They would achieve their goal, capturing the AI and letting Smoke and the Center have it. Or they would not, and the gods of this place would, when they learned of it in their slow way, take their slow action. What happened to Silver, Gold, Smoke, and the Center in the latter scenario was anybody’s guess. Capture? Flight? Death, eventually, if the gods rebooted, or if the government powers here warred over these things. The gods could repair her, she knew, from all but major, catastrophic injuries. Vaporization in a nuclear blast was not something she or Gold could survive. Even a minor chemical explosion would put an end to them, she suspected, but had always been too chicken or sane to attempt it seriously.
She was nearing the shoulder of the first hill, and it was approaching midnight. No sign yet of watchers or sentries, just bare rocks and scree, with a few scrubby bushes here and there, where they had managed a foothold in what soil there was. She saw marmots, or groundhogs once or twice, and an owl had flown by, but there was nothing that looked like it was monitoring this approach. If she had set the monitors, though, she would have ensured they were invisible. So she assumed they were there and hoped for the best. It was what they were down to.
As she crested the hill, she did so gradually, ever so slightly poking her head beyond a boulder and letting her eyes adjust. The small narrow valley before the next, lower ridge was dark, and seemed empty. Beyond it, she could see the glow of street lamps and the edge of what looked like a parking lot, white lines sharp in the moonlight. Risking it, she started down the slope, angling towards the ridge above the lot.
Nobody shot at her. No lights, alarms, dogs barking. Nothing. As she neared the bottom, she could hear the hum of transformers, a heavy thrum of significant power draw. How did the Center manage power supplies, given it was presumably a massively parallel system with high needs for electricity? Or did it run on different principles than most silicon-based computers? She would need to ask Smoke when she got the chance.
If she did.
The ridge here was forested, as the facility was just below the tree line where nothing larger than some scrubby bush would grow well. She pushed into the thick brush, scrambling on her hands and knees very carefully, eyes out for tripwires or human sentries. Nothing. It was like they didn’t expect intrusion, which was puzzling, but maybe explained by corporate versus military mindset. The adversaries a corporation envisioned were boardroom politics and other corporations maneuvering within the law. Military planners thought of asset protection from hard men with guns. Perhaps they had not yet become an asset. If so, this was a good sign.
She was almost hopeful, almost ready to believe it, when she saw the hair-thin wire, about two feet from her face, stretched across the trees in front of her, silver in the moonlight. Monofilament, like fishing line, but thinner. Strong enough, when flexed, to trip a sensor. Or a claymore mine. Following the wire, she noted where it entered a thick clump of bushes. Well done, but not invisible.
Her fingers, brushing the leaves aside gingerly, found a green plastic box. Sensors and not mines. She had dealt with mines decades before, in a different, wetter forest. They were difficult to detect and circumvent if the enemy had time to work on their perimeter. This was military-grade stuff, she reckoned. So, they were expected.
Had they hired it out, or was this the best a special forces team could do on short notice—say, a day or two with a small team? Wiring the entire ridge would take days of hard, scrambling work, and the small rocky valley she had come through would also be difficult to wire. Motion sensors and infrared, though, were not too hard. So, either they were a corporate security team playing with mil-spec toys, or they were actual military operators. She envisioned a small team, an advance team sent up with only their regular kit out. They would prioritize their most advanced sensors where they assumed threats would approach. The ridge had been steep, not ideal for a group of armed men to sneak in by. She had done it quickly, moving unencumbered. Armed men probably would not have such an easy time. In a pinch, with limited resources, a small team would focus on the more obvious approaches.
That meant there were sensors ahead, if her tenuous logic was realistic. Thin, she thought, very thin. But all they had, now. Somewhere out there, Gold was waiting. Or moving.
Chapter Forty-Two
Jessica sat in the minivan’s back seat next to Rodriguez as they drove out of the foothills towards the Sierra Nevada. The highway, I-80, crawled with traffic. She looked out past the traffic, the hills covered with rank on rank of houses. Who lived here? What did they do? People here worked in the Valley, most likely, or in the San Francisco Bay Area. Industry had come here after the War and never left, morphing from wartime factories to peacetime service economies. But people still clung on, riding the tiger of the shifting economy, adapting, as always.
Even the Valley had morphed. Once it had been all hardware research and development. Transistors and semiconductors. Founded by companies that were taxpayer funded or had their roots in public funds. The whole computer industry did. If you went back to the fifties and sixties, you could find it. The government had built Silicon Valley and its imitators. Although to admit that now, in hyper-capitalist Mountain View or Seattle, was a gross taboo. The myth was strong; companies started in garages had grown up to be the most powerful in the world. Hadn’t Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos hauled themselves up by their bootstraps? She smiled at the thought, thinking of Bezos bragging how he had driven the early Amazon packages to the post office himself. Never acknowledging that the whole concept of an efficient postal infrastructure that enabled Amazon to exist in the first place was due to massive public investment in the good old USPS. Don’t even mention ARPAnet, or the other public roots of the Internet.
No, the Valley was full of rugged individualists who cast a cold eye on government. It was a sham, a legend they believed because, well, if you didn’t you couldn’t really play in the Valley, not at the highest levels. You had to drink the Kool-Aid, or the club wouldn’t let you in. Venture capital flowed to people who bought this myth, perpetuated it, and so on down the chain. Nobody questioned that the very roads, postal carriers, and stable economy were all due to a relatively sound federal and state government system. It was a joke that these people were in a race to invent a god. What kind of god would it be, coming out of such a skewed, hypocritical mythos? It would surely be amoral, just as capital itself was amoral. If efficiency is all, then morals are baggage you can’t keep with you.
The housing tracts gave way to fields, the last gasps of the great central Valley farms reaching this far north. In the fi
elds, workers were picking…strawberries? Garlic? She couldn’t tell. It looked like hard, hard work. The work humans had done for many generations, scratching a living out of the ground. Would that change? Even with AI in the world we’d still need farmers, right?
“Hey, Smoke,” she said, breaking the silence. “You have farms like this in your World?”
Rodriguez looked at her, puzzled. “He’s from another planet,” she told him smugly. “You knew that, right?”
He blinked at her. “What?”
“God, wait until you find out what she is.” She smiled at him, then wider as he gaped at her.
“We have farms, yes. Mostly automated. Around the Center,” Smoke said. “Elsewhere, people live more simply. Hunters and gatherers. Small groups.” He looked back over his shoulder at Rodriguez. “It is another planet. Sort of.”
“Wait,” Rodriguez said. “This is a joke, right? Like, you’re fucking with me right now.”
“Maybe we are, maybe we aren’t. It doesn’t matter to you, so just shut up about it,” Gold said from the front seat.
“You can let me out here. I won’t tell anyone,” he said. “I won’t tell a soul. I will forget all about you.”
“Forget about me?” she leered back over the seat at him. “But we’ve been over this, remember?” Gold said. She had a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes and had bundled under a jacket like a blanket. “Surveillance avoidance,” she had said, when Jessica raised an eyebrow at her.
“I told you, I won’t tell—” he started, but Gold cut him off.
“We need you when we get there. You’re the only one who has worked with this thing. We need you to make sure it is healthy, running okay, not insane. Or whatever. Right, Smoke? The machine needs to not be nuts.” She glanced back at him. “That’s all, then you’re free to go.”
“You people are nuts,” he said, sullenly. Jessica wondered if he’d considered just rolling out of the van, but it had sliding back doors which she didn’t think would open when it was moving. She had considered it, for sure.
This was a raid, she knew. Both Silver and Gold were dangerous in such situations. She’d seen, back at the first house, what they could do. And she’d seen Silver on the beach, with the lone gunman Gold had sent. She shivered. Remembering that alone was surreal, and now here she was going on some harebrained raid on a data center likely protected by armed professionals. It was nuts.
But considering what she’d seen, what she’d learned, she felt a need to be here, be on site, get the story. In Iraq, she had done some crazy, for her, things. Taken meetings with people who she shouldn’t have. Gangsters and terrorists, warlord types in Africa. She’d been in dangerous situations before, but never knowing there would be violence. Before, it had been the raw undercurrent of violence lurking under the surface of those meetings. The sullen, hard-eyed men. One man, a Turkish gangster in Kurdistan, had been all smiles, a gracious host, and a charming interview. But she learned later, after his death in a shootout with police, that he was a brutal mass murderer. He had poured her tea. She shook her head, looking at Gold. Is she any different? She wondered.
Smoke was silent, then he said flatly, “It might not be sane.”
“Explain, please,” Jessica said. “What does that mean?”
He glanced at her in the mirror. Then to Gold. “Explain what it is you said, Smoke,” Gold sneered. “What it means.” She looked out the window.
“It was one theory of the Mind we studied. That they had us learn. Newborn machine intelligences can go insane by our standards. They will not think like humans, be like humans. If they do, if they act human, are relatable, it is mimicry. Something put up as a shield to interact with a World that expects certain behaviors. This insanity will pass, it is a phase, but they can be dangerous in this phase.” He said this all in a rush, as if it relieved him to tell someone.
“Now you tell us?” Gold asked. She didn’t sound angry, but Jessica was wary, watching her.
He shrugged. “It’s just the theory they taught me. I don’t know if it is true,” he said lamely.
“It’s true,” Jessica said, leaning forward. “If the Center taught it to you, they probably know. For all you know, the Center is engaged in some elaborate mimicry, which is how it knows so much about it.” Jessica flopped back in her seat, exasperated.
“We all have masks,” Gold said from the front seat. “Once you know that, the world gets a lot easier to deal with.”
“What’s under the Center’s mask, though?” Jessica asked, looking out the window. A refinery, pastel-painted tank farm, smoldered in the distance.
“More masks, probably,” Gold said. “Masks and masks and masks.”
Chapter Forty-Three
She didn’t hesitate. It was time to take risks, so, dammit, take them. She eased herself around the green box, with its wire that led to either warning enemies or death by hidden land mines. Two feet away she found the other wire, headed downslope at a tangent. So, she had found a seam, a hole in the perimeter. Sloppy. Still, she was careful. She had seen what claymore mines did in Vietnam, and had no wish to see it again, and from the wrong side of one. Moving as quickly as she dared, she crept down the slope, crawling on her belly, alert for more wires, for a second layer.
But there didn’t seem to be any. Just the one cordon she had found the hole in. Lucky she had seen that, she knew. It must near time, so she hurried as much as she dared. The forest ended abruptly, cleared and kept clear with a ditch that bordered the building site and parking lot. There were six, maybe seven cars in the lot. Different makes. No obvious spook cars, black SWAT vans or the new-style militarized police SUVs. No tanks. She looked long and hard, taking her time. Nothing amiss, that she could see. She settled in to wait. Gold would be coming.
She didn’t have to wait long. A cat, an ordinary house cat, wandered out of the shadows. It glanced at her, not thirty feet away. She was immobile, a statue, as long practice had taught her. Movement draws the eye. Be still as stone, and even animals can’t see you. The cat was white with black markings like a Holstein cow. It trotted up the concrete steps from the parking lot to the door, mewling. It meowed again, wanting in. Someone’s pet, she thought. A staff member, maybe? It was a lonely post.
An ordinary night she realized. If there were sentries patrolling, the cat would hide, for sure. It would never feel comfortable enough to wander around if strange men were crawling in the bushes. She watched as it waited, pacing, and then the steel door opened a crack. The cat trotted forward, its legs blurring as it pranced inside. Silver watched as another shadow detached itself from the base of the stairs and caught the door as it swung shut. It stuck, the yellow light from inside slicing across the parking lot. The shadow flowed up, moving with impossible speed, like an insect crawling up a wall.
Gold. Silver heard a muffled thump as the door closed with a loud snick. She watched, breathless. So fast. It never ceased to amaze her, when she saw how quick Gold could be when she wanted. Silver was sure she was nowhere near as fast. Silver had barely seen her before she was inside the closing door.
After a moment, the door opened, Gold’s leg extending gracefully to hold it open along the bottom while she crouched, covering the interior, a corridor intersection, with a machine pistol. Gold must have taken a sentry’s gun, then. Gold motioned COME to her without looking over her shoulder and returned both hands to her weapon. Her head swiveled unceasingly, checking all identified points of threat in a precise oscillation, never looking away from any one direction for long. Left, right, forward.
Silver stood and ran. She took several seconds to cross the parking lot, and crossing to where the kitty had been, leaped up the stairs, over Gold, and into the corridor. Gold eased the door behind her closed and rose into a firing crouch, stepping over the body of the one who had let the cat in. He was wearing black, a uniform of some kind, with a webbed belt. His head tilted at an odd angle, his face frozen in a look of mild surprise.
“Follow me
, ten feet behind. Watch our backs,” Gold whispered. She glanced at Silver’s hands. Silver showed her three river stones she’d been keeping perfectly matched for throwing. Gold nodded. “Find a weapon if you can. I think there are six. Five now, plus some New Frontiers staff, maybe ten of those. I think the staff are hostages, not being allowed to leave, at least.” She stalked off to the right, and Silver followed.
They reached a closed doorway on their left, a sign that said CAFETERIA over it. Tall, thin windows in the two doors, that ended maybe eighteen inches off the ground. Gold didn’t slow, just crouched lower, slithered across the floor below them, and stood, facing back towards Silver, all in one smooth motion. She glanced back over her shoulder, down the corridor, then motioned with the hand on the barrel of the weapon. OPEN.
Silver reached, and with her left hand, the one holding two stones in reserve, grasped the handle, twisted, and pulled the door open all the way. Gold glided swiftly past her into the cafeteria, low and with a grin on her face. A series of pops in rapid succession, like muffled firecrackers. Silver counted five. There were thumps, and a series of inarticulate exclamations. Silver, steeling herself, dodged into the door to the right, the opposite direction Gold had gone.
Inside were a dozen surprised-looking people sitting on the two rear tables. Several of them wore white lab coats. There were black-clad figures on the ground, one of them sitting on a stool, leaning over. Blood dripped from him onto the tile floor in a steady stream. As she watched, he slowly began to lean. Gold, crouched in the corner, hissed, and stepped forward to catch him, easing him to the floor to lie with the others. In less than two seconds she had gotten off five shots, on target.
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