by John Scalzi
The difference between Oversatch and everybody else was everybody else’s map of the world showed only the attractors. Oversatch used the instantaneous map, provided by internet work analysis, that showed what the actual actors in the world were up to at this very moment. They called this map ‘it 2.0.’ Gennady got used to reviewing a list of new nations in the morning, all given unique and memorable names like “Donaldduckia” and “Brilbinty.” As the morning rolled on Oversatch players stepped in to move massive quantities of money and resources between these temporary actors. As the day ended in one part of the world it began somewhere else, so the process never really ended, but locally, the temporary deformation of the network would subside at some point. Great Britain would reappear. So would Google, and the EU.
“It is like a game of Diplomacy,” Miranda commented one day, “but one where the map itself is always changing.”
When they weren’t focused outward, Gennady and Miranda scanned objects and printed them from Oversatch’s 3-D printers; or they tended rooftop gardens or drove vans containing produce from location to secret location. Everything they needed for basic survival was produced outside of the formal economy and took no resources from it. Even the electricity that ran the vans came from rooftop windmills built from Oversatch printers, which were themselves printed by other printers. Oversatch mined landfill sites and refined their metals and rare earths itself; it had its own microwave dishes on rooftops to beam its own data internally, not using the official data networks at all. These autonomous systems extended far past Stockholm—were, in fact, worldwide.
After a week or so it proved easier and cheaper to check out of the hotel and live in Oversatch’s apartments, which, like everything else about the polity, were located in odd and unexpected places. Gennady and Miranda moved to Gothenburg on the West coast, and were given palatial accommodation in a set of renovated shipping containers down by the docks—very cozy, fully powered and heated, with satellite uplinks and sixty-inch TVs (all made by Oversatch, of course).
One bright morning Gennady sauntered up to the cafe where Hitchens had asked to meet him, and tried to describe his new life to the Interpol man.
Hitchens was thrilled. “This is fantastic, Gennady, just fantastic.” He began talking about doing raids, about catching the whole network red-handed and shutting the damned thing down.
Gennady blinked at him owlishly. “Perhaps I am not yet awake,” he said in the thickest Slavic accent he could manage, “but seems to me these people do nothing wrong, yes?”
Hitchens sputtered, so Gennady curbed his sarcasm and gently explained that Oversatch’s citizens weren’t doing anything that was illegal by Swedish law—that, in fact, they scrupulously adhered to the letter of local law everywhere. It was national and regional economics that they had left behind and, with it, consumer society itself. When they needed to pay for a service in the so-called “real world,” they had plenty of money to do it with—from investments, real estate, and a thousand other legitimate ventures. It was just that they depended on none of these things for their survival. They paid off the traditional economy only so that it would leave them alone.
“Besides,” he added, “Oversatch is even more distributed than your average multinational corporation. Miranda and I usually work as a pair, but we’re geographically separated…and most of their operations are like that. There’s really no ‘place’ to raid.”
“If they just want to be left alone,” asked Hitchens smugly, “why do they need the plutonium?”
Gennady shrugged. “I’ve seen no evidence that Oversatch is behind the smuggling. They don’t seal the packages they send—I snoop so I know—and I’ve been carrying my Geiger counter everywhere. Whoever is moving the plutonium is probably using Rivet Couture. They do seal their packages.”
Hitchens drummed his fingers on the yellow tablecloth. “Then what the hell is Fraction playing at?”
The implication that this idea might not have been preying on Hitchens’ mind all along—as it had been on Gennady’s—made Gennady profoundly uneasy. What kind of people was he working for if they hadn’t mistrusted their captured double agent from the start?
He said to Hitchens, “I just don’t think Oversatch is the ultimate destination Fraction had in mind. Remember, he said he came from some place called ‘far Cilenia.’ I think he’s trying to get us there.”
Hitchens ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t understand why he can’t just tell us where it is.”
“Because it’s not a place,” said Gennady, a bit impatiently. “It’s a protocol.”
He spent some time trying to explain this to Hitchens, and as he walked back to the docks, Gennady realized that he himself got it. He really did understand Oversatch, and a few weeks ago he wouldn’t have. At the same time, the stultified and mindless exchanges of the so-called “real world” seemed more and more surreal to him. Why did people still show up at the same workplace every day, when the amount of friction needed to market their skills had dropped effectively to zero? Most people’s abilities could be allocated with perfect efficiency now, but they got locked into contracts and “jobs”—relationships that, like Fraction’s physical cities and nations, were relics of a barbaric past.
He was nearly at the Oversatch settlement in the port when his glasses chimed. Phone call from Lane Hitchens, said a little sign in his heads-up display. Gennady put a finger to his ear and said, “Yes?”
“Gennady, it’s Lane. New development. We’ve traced some plutonium packets through Rivet Couture and we think they’ve all been brought together for a big shipment overseas.”
Gennady stopped walking. “That doesn’t make any sense. The whole point of splitting them up was to slip them past the sensors at the airports and docks. If the strategy was working, why risk it all now?”
“Maybe they’re on to us and they’re trying to move it to its final destination before we catch them,” said Hitchens. “We know where the plutonium is now—it’s sitting on a container ship called the Akira about a kilometer from your bizarre little village. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, do you?”
So this was what people meant when they said “reality came crashing back,” thought Gennady. “No,” he said, “it’s unlikely. So now what? A raid?”
“No, we want to find the buyers, and they’re on the other end of the pipeline. It’ll be enough if we can track the container. The Akira is bound for Vancouver; the Canadian Mounties will be watching to see who picks it up when it arrives.”
“Do they still have jurisdiction there?” Gennady asked. “Vancouver’s part of Cascadia, remember?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Gennady. Anyway, it seems we won’t need to go chasing this ‘far Cilenia’ thing anymore. You can come back in and we’ll put you on the office team until the investigation closes. It’s good money, and they’re a great bunch of guys.”
“Thanks.” Euros, he mused. He supposed he could do something with those.
Hitchens rang off. Gennady could have turned around at that moment and simply left the port lands. He could have thrown away the augmented reality glasses and collected his fee from Interpol. Instead he kept walking.
As he reached the maze of stacked shipping containers, he told himself that he just wanted to tell Miranda the news in person. Then they could leave Oversatch together. Except…she wouldn’t be leaving, he realized. She was still after her estranged son, who had spoken to her mostly through emails and now wasn’t speaking at all.
If Gennady abandoned her now, he would be putting a hole in Oversatch’s buddy system. Would Miranda even be able to stay in Oversatch without her partner? He wasn’t sure.
He opened the big door to a particular shipping container—one that looked exactly like all its neighbors but was nothing like them—and walked through the dry, well-lighted corridor inside it, then out the door that had been cut in the far end. This put him in one of a number of halls and stairways that were dug into the immense square blo
ck of containers. He passed a couple of his co-workers and waved hello, went up one flight of portable carbon-fiber steps and entered the long sitting room (actually another shipping container) that he shared with Miranda.
Fraction was sitting in one of the leather armchairs, chatting with Miranda who leaned on the bar counter at the back. Both greeted Gennady warmly as he walked in.
“How are you doing, Gennady?” Fraction asked. “Is Oversatch agreeing with you?”
Gennady had to smile at his wording. “Well enough,” he said.
“Are you ready to take it to the next level?”
Warily, Gennady moved to stand behind the long room’s other armchair. “What do you mean?”
Fraction leaned forward eagerly. “A door to Cilenia is about to open,” he said. “We have the opportunity to go through it, but we’ll have to leave tonight.”
“We?” Gennady frowned at him. “Didn’t you tell us that you were from Cilenia?”
“From, yes,” said the cyranoid. “But not in. I want to get back there for my own reasons. Miranda needs to find her son; you need to find your plutonium. Everybody wins here.”
Gennady decided not to say that he had already found the plutonium. “What does it involve?”
“Nothing,” said Fraction, steepling his fingers and looking over them at Gennady. “Just be in your room at two o’clock. And make sure the door is closed.”
After that cryptic instruction, Fraction said a few more pleasantries and then left. Miranda had come to sit down, and Gennady only realized that he was still standing, holding tightly to the back of the chair, when she said, “Are you all right?”
“They found the plutonium,” he blurted.
Her eyes widened; then she looked down. “So I guess you’ll be leaving, then.”
He made himself sit down across from her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t…want to leave you alone to face whatever Cilenia is.”
“My white knight,” she said with a laugh, but he could tell she was pleased.
“Well, it’s not just that.” He twined his hands together, debating with himself how to say it. “This is the first time I’ve ever been involved with a…project that…made something. My whole career, I’ve been cleaning up after the messes left by the previous generation. Chernobyl, Hanford—all the big and little accidents. The rest of it, you know, consumer culture and TV and movies and games…I just had no time for them. Well, except the games. But I never bought stuff, you know? And our whole culture is about stuff. But I was never a radical environmentalist, a, what-do-you-call it? Treehugger. Not a back-to-the-lander, because there’s no safe land to go back to, if we don’t clean up the mess. So I’ve lived in limbo for many years, and never knew it.”
Now he looked her in the eye. “There’s more going on with Oversatch than just a complicated game of tax evasion, isn’t there? The people who’re doing this, they’re saying that there really can be more than one world, in the same place, at the same time. That you can walk out of the twenty-first century without having to become a farmer or mountain man. And they’re building that parallel world.”
“It’s the first,” she admitted, “but obviously not the last. Cilenia must be like Oversatch, only even more self-contained. A world within a world.” She shook her head. “At first I didn’t know why Jake would have gone there. But he was always like you—not really committed to this world, but unwilling to take any of the easy alternatives. I could never see him joining a cult, that was the point.”
Gennady glanced around. “Is this a cult?” he asked. But she shook her head.
“They’ve never asked us to believe in anything,” she said. “They’ve just unlocked doors for us, one after another. And now they’ve unlocked another one.” She grinned. “Aren’t you just the tiniest bit curious about what’s on the other side?”
He didn’t answer her, but at two o’clock he was waiting in his room with the door closed. He’d tried reading a book and listening to music, but the time dragged and in the end he just waited, feeling less and less sure of all of this every second.
When something huge landed with a crash on the shipping container, Gennady jumped to his feet and ran to the door—but it was already too late. With a nauseating swaying motion, his room was lofted into the air with him in it and, just as he was getting his sea legs on the moving surface, the unseen crane deposited his container somewhere else, with a solid thump.
His door was locked from the outside. By the time it was opened, hours later, he had resigned himself to starving or running out of air in here, for by that time the container ship Akira was well under way.
SO he lay with his eyes closed, feeling the slow rise and fall of the ship around him. Behind his own eyelids was an attractor that he needed to subside into, at least for a while.
Eventually there was an insistent chirp from beside his bed. Gennady reached for the glasses without thinking, then hesitated. Mumbling a faint curse, he put them on.
Oversatch sprang up all around: a vast, intricate glowing city visible through the walls of the shipping container. Today’s map of the world was all crowded over in the direction of China; he’d find out why later. For now, he damped down the flood of detail and when it was just a faint radiance and a murmur, he rose and left his room.
His was one of many modified shipping containers stacked aboard the Akira. In Oversatch terms, the containers were called packets. Most packets had doors that were invisible from outside, so that when they were stacked next to one another you could walk between them without going on deck. Gennady’s packet was part of a row of ten such containers. Above and below were more levels, reachable through more doors in the ceilings and floors of some containers.
The packets would all be unloaded at their destination along with the legitimate containers. But in a rare venture into illegal operations, Oversatch had hacked the global container routing system. Officially, Oversatch’s shipping containers didn’t even exist. Off-loaded from one ship, they would sooner or later end up on another and be routed somewhere else, just like the information packets in an internet. They bounced eternally through the system, never reaching a destination, but constantly meeting up and merging to form temporary complexes like this one, then dissolving to recombine in new forms somewhere else. Together they formed Oversatch’s capital city—a city in perpetual motion, constantly reconfiguring itself, and at any one time nearly all of it in international waters.
The shipping container where the plutonium was stowed wasn’t part of this complex. You couldn’t get there from here; in fact, you couldn’t get there at all. Gennady had skulked on deck his first night on board, and found the contraband container way up near the top of a stack. It was a good thirty feet above him and it took him ten minutes to climb precariously up to it. His heart was pounding when he got there. In the dark, with the slow sway of the ship and the unpredictable breeze, what if he fell? He’d inspected the thing’s door, but it was sealed. The containers around it all had simple inspection seals on them: they were empty.
He hadn’t tried to climb up to it again, but he kept an eye on it.
Now he passed lounges, diners, chemical toilets and work areas as he negotiated the maze of Oversatch containers. Some Swedes on their way to a holiday in Canada waved and shouted his name; they were clearly a few drinks into their day, and he just grinned and kept going. Many of the other people he passed were sitting silently in comfortable lounge chairs. They were working, and he didn’t disturb them.
He found his usual workstation, but Miranda’s, which was next to his, was empty. Another woman sat nearby, sipping a beer and having an animated conversation with the blank wall.
Somewhere, maybe on the far side of the world, somebody else was waving their hands, and speaking this woman’s words. She was riding and that distant person was her cyranoid.
Yesterday Miranda and Gennady had visited a bus station in Chicago. Both were riding cyranoids, but Miranda was so much better at it tha
n Gennady. His upper body was bathed with infrared laser light, allowing the system to read his posture, gestures, even fine finger motions, and transmit them to the person on the other end. For Gennady, the experience was just like moving an avatar in a game world. The physical skills needed to interpret the system’s commands lay with the cyranoid, so in that sense, Gennady had it easy.
But he had to meet new people on an hour-by-hour basis, and even though he was hiding thousands of miles away from that point of contact, each new encounter made his stomach knot up.
At the bus depot he and Miranda had done what countless pimps, church recruiters and sexual predators had done for generations: they looked for any solitary young people who might exit the buses. There was a particular set to the shoulders, an expression he was learning to read: it was the fear of being alone in the big city.
The cyranoids he and Miranda rode were very respectable-looking people. Together or separately, they would approach these uncertain youths, and offer them work. Oversatch was recruiting.
The results were amazing. Take one insecure eighteen-year-old with no skills or social connections. Teach him to be a cyranoid. Then dress him a nice suit and send him into the downtown core of a big city. In one day he could be ridden by a confident and experienced auditor, a private investigator, a savvy salesman and a hospital architecture consultant. He could attend meetings, write up reports, drive from contact to contact and shift identities many times on the way. All he had to do was recite the words that flowed into his ears and follow the instructions of his haptic interface. Each of the professionals who rode him could build their networks and attend to business there and, through other cyranoids, in many different cities in one day. And by simple observation the kid could learn tremendous amounts about the internals of business and government.