"Vanderbo approved you to manage the campaign, you know."
Lio looked at him, clearly surprised- "I didn't. I suppose I should have guessed, but . . ."
"Lio, what happened? I saw the autopsy report. After I ... left ... what happened?'
Lio sat on the edge of her desk and folded her arms. "I wish I knew. He sealed himself off from everyone. I suppose it was a week or so after you-after." She frowned. "He was very hurt by what you did."
"You seem to be the only who knows what that was."
"I was handling your severance. Four days into it, he changed his mind- He never explained himself. Not like it was his habit to do so, but Id never known him to keep a disaffected employee before. If they quit or he had them dismissed, lie never trusted them again. No second chances."
Coren slipped the disk into his pocket and sat down. 'And after that?'
"I thought it was exhaustion. He gave instructions to several department heads, gave me that disk to give to you, then locked himself in his residence. After a couple of weeks he began issuing orders again, almost always by comm. Occasionally he'd call someone to his residential office for a private meeting, but they all claimed they didn't see him then, either: he conducted everything via intercom. I thought-we all thought-that this would be the way he'd come out of it. But then all communications ceased last week. When no one heard anything for three days, Shola took it on herself to investigate. She found his body."
She didn't mention that, Coren thought, covering his expression by taking a drink.
"Did anyone else get a special disk?' he asked
"Can't say. That was the one I was told to deliver. Other attorneys may have received similar instructions. I haven't asked."
"But I imagine Vanderbo did."
"He wouldn't be worth his reputation if he hadn't. I doubt he'll tell you anything, though."
Coren shrugged- "Depending on what this contains, I may or may not ask him." He finished his drink and stood- "Did you ever trace the blackmail?'
'The threat that made him withdraw from the race? No. He found it on his desk one day, already delivered, with no record of who brought it or where it had come from."
"Someone had to have delivered it"
"Surveillance showed nothing." She slid off the desk to her feet. "Of course, if he had ever allowed for real surveillance . .
"He wouldn't have been Rega then."
I suppose not. But he might be alive now."
Coren went to his private office, on the fourth floor of an older building in the Infant District near the Southwest Corridor of D.C.
The first surprise Coren found on the disk was that it contained a full holographic recording. Rega Looms, tall and almost austerely thin, bloomed before his desk.
"Coren."
Coren glanced down at the desktop. A request for confirmation showed on the monitor attached to the reader.
"Yes, Rega," he said
The disk, through the Al in the desktop, identified his voice, and the recording proceeded
"I owe explanations," the image of Rega continued- "To whom, I'm not sure. Perhaps to Nyom, but it's too late for that I doubt she would ever have listened anyway. So I'll make them to you and trust that you will know what to do with them.
'Twenty-five years ago-a little more than that, really-A had a son, a fact you discovered, much to my dismay. You're very good at what you do, Coren. Sometimes I wish you weren't so good, but that skill has been useful to me and it would be incredibly dangerous to me were it employed by my competitors. I've never questioned your methods or censured you in any way, though I'm sure you think I would if I knew what you did to serve my will. I find it safer to keep you in my employ, despite any possible ethical conflicts, than to let someone else use those same skills. My thinking may be faulty and my ethics dubious in this instance, but I'm following instinct rather than principle.
"In any event, I had a son. Once. Within six months of his birth he began developing a series of illnesses. I thought, as did the first cadre of doctors who looked at him, that he suffered some immunological dysfunction, making him unusually susceptible. This proved not to be the case.
"Long ago, Earth was host to what 1, through my church~ call 'abominations.' Every era has a list of things too frightening to contemplate and too difficult to control that it labeled 'abomination' and summarily tries to purge from its present and all future generations. Difficult as it may be to grasp this, at one time nuclear energy was such a thing. Not without reason-it took a long time to learn to use it property and control it safety-but. for a time it was scorned and almost abolished. Polymerase gene therapy was another such thing, with its promise of extended life. Go back far enough and the very thoughts people had could be abominations. Logic once threatened our humanity, evolution threatened our morality, and scientific positivism threatened our pride. Each in their turn was called an abomination and we tried to purge ourselves of the monsters before they changed us forever.
'We failed- When the life-imitating artifacts we created to save us from lives of toil became abominations, we tried once more to rid ourselves of them, and once again we failed. But this time with a difference.
'-Where are no robots on Earth anymore. Not the way there once were. We have machines that do work, yes, but we do not have machines that think for us, act independently on our behalf, and threaten to supplant our decision-making freedom of choice by their mock-compassionate intervention. The robot as heir to humankind no longer strides among us. We abolished it
"But humans are not rid of them. Humans took them to space where they proliferate in such abundance that one day they will likely return. Perhaps we'll find then that we were as foolish to fear them as we were to fear vaccinations or invasive surgery or secularism. Perhaps.
"But the man-shaped mechanism wasn't the only manifestation of that abomination that we failed to be rid of. Along with the technology to build such a machine came ancillary technologies that gave us the basis for an economy of abundance which we did embrace without regard to the consequences. You cannot build a machine that acts like a brain unless you can build molecular components that imitate life processes. And we did indeed build such machines-tiny components, artificial germs, self-replicating and adaptive in their own clever ways. Nanotechnology to any home kitchen and draw a meal at the common trough and you see a primitive form of it at work, breaking down one kind of molecule and turning it into another and manufacturing food- A lot of our clothing is 'assembled! this way, and we even have cultures that clean, though now they're used exclusively in environments where a high order of sanitation is absolutely necessary. Once anyone could acquire a culture of these little cleansing machines to flense the dirt from their floors and walls and furniture. We built tiny machines for medical purposes, devices that could reestablish the homeostatic base of a body, 'resetting' it, as it were, to a condition prior to whatever disease it suffered
'And there's where it all began to go wrong. Sometimes they caused breakdowns rather than repairing them. The adaptive capacities of these little machines surprised us, nearly overwhelmed us. They caused plagues. We don't talk about them much anymore, but a thousand years or more ago there were terrible diseases flourishing on the Earth caused by nanotech cultures that had-as they used to say with characteristic understatement gotten away from us."'
Rega. paused, his gaze seeming to look inward He shuddered and refocused on where he thought Coren would be, which appeared to be about ten centimeters in front of where Coren actually was.
"Humans got rid of them. It took centuries. We had to build more of the same machines to do it, to hunt down the destructive little things. For many groups, it was taking too long. The reaction on the part of others was far too violent. We had hyperdrive then, all to ourselves, and people fled- The war continued, a hysterical cycle of development and destruction, pocket revolutions, ideological battles fought with budgets as well as guns. How, we asked, do we get rid of the bad and save the good? The a
nswer was clear, but few at first willingly embraced it. The problem was in the definitions what is Good? In time, we realized that the good we wished to preserve was ephemeral, illusory. There was no good- There was only convenience.
"Once we understood, it took only a few centuries to win. Once we understood, there was no compromise. It all went. We got rid of all of it Space travel as well as nanohomeopathic medicine, imitation intelligences as well as information viruses, robots as well as life extension. You cant have any of it and be free of the bad- All of it undermined us, threatened us, made us lesser, weaker, more dependent, inhuman. A little over two hundred years ago the last positronic manufacturer on Earth closed down. Shortly after that, when the original Spacetown was shut down, the last positronic robot was destroyed. We had won.
He smiled grimly. "So we thought My son was the victim of a residue. An ancient parasitic infection of nanotech." We never knew where it came from-it could have been in the soil somewhere, in a carpet we bought, passed from another infant in the hospital, waiting dormant in some food-we never knew. But the little abominations set up residence in his lymphatic and limbic systems and began to alter his immune responses and change his internal structure. 'It happens,' the doctors told us, Maybe one in ten million, one in twenty million, sometimes more often, sometimes less often. Not often enough for them to get a solid criteria, sound etiology, dependable vectors. . .'They didn't know. It happens. It happened to Jerem. He was being killed by artificial machines that once may have been designed to do just the opposite, but by then had altered or combined with other machines like them to become pathological. They could not cure him without making it worse--in other words, without killing him faster than the disease would
'And we could not keep him. The infectiousness of the disease was as unknown as any other factor. Every case was slightly different, unique in some property that made the entire medical process powerless. We had to surrender him to a quarantined death
"In my desperation, I began flailing about for answers, and in so doing got myself involved in enterprises I never would have considered otherwise. One of them was Nova Levis.
'I told you that I had named the lab. I took that name from a colony my church had settled on. We wanted a place where we could build an alternatively-tooled culture without interference or temptation from this one. Like other ideas, it seemed sound at the time, but it necessitated violating one of our principle objections, which concerned space travel. Eventually, the Church of Organic Sapiens repudiated the colony. But we had this research lab, then-or I did-which was violating the rest of my principles and doing fundamental research in high level prosthetics. I wanted to cure my son. I wanted them to find a way to make him whole. I didn't care that it cost me my credibility with myself. I wanted life for my son.
"Here is the secret of Nova Levis that you should know: It was using those children, those victims of these opportunistic technological infections, to find ways of doing it intentionally with a specific result in mind. They wanted to build hybrids. Hybrids that wouldn't die, of course. And I was a shareholder, giving them money, along with others, to do the very thing that I believed to be the ultimate abomination, which is the complete dehumanization of Homo Sapiens. The cure for all that ailed humankind, they believed, was to cure us of being human."
Rega's eyes closed briefly.
"The hospice that kept my son was violated and several children stolen, my son among them. We never traced them, though I believe strongly that Nova Levis was involved- It was never proven in court. I didn't know then why these children were taken. I have a very good idea now. Already invaded by nanotech, their bodies already adapting to the presence of these invasive machine cultures, they were ideal for further experimentation along these lines. They were physiologically ideal for continued augmentation by artificial means.
"I began to suspect this a few years after the kidnappings. But I thought naively, as it turns out-that it was an experiment doomed to failure. My son was going to die anyway. This merely hastened it. I didn't want to consider that his suffering would be prolonged- It seems I was wrong about that, too.
"I never told Nyom. I never told anyone. When the investigations into the kidnappings turned up nothing more than a local ring that was selling orphans to a black market dealer who may or may not have been using them in a stave trade . . . well, I let it drop. I subsequently took control of the Church of Organic Sapiens and have ever since been waging a war against anything that smacks of this kind of subversion of the human essence. My enemies see me as a zealot and a fanatic. Maybe I am. But they never lost a son the way I did- They might feet differently about all this if they had."
He licked his lips.
"Something terrible has been done to those children, Coren. They are being built into something horrible. I don't know that anything can be done to change it. But perhaps our only hope is complete isolation. They're beginning to talk that way in the Spacer worlds, though for different reasons. The factions are choosing sides on Aurora. The Solarians seem to be simply shutting everyone out I dont know what will happen. I don't know that I have any thought what I would want to do, or want you to do. All I wanted with this was to explain. I just wanted you to know. Maybe understand. But at least to have an explanation."
8
MIA STEPPED into a docking bay that was still cold from its recent exposure to hard vacuum. Across the broad deck bodies lay, many contorted into crablike shapes, others torn open, missing limbs, all of them blackened and encrusted by frozen blood and viscera now thawing. Mist boiled off them. Mia felt herself wince involuntarily; soon enough the smell would be vile.
Dock crew and regular military stayed back from the biomonitor drones now floating over each corpse under direction of the Spacer recovery technicians. Mia spotted several robots standing by the locks of the salvage boats parked just within the bay doors.
"Hey."
Ros Yalor, her partner, hurried up to her. He was a short man with a wide forehead and thick limbs.
"Where's Reen?' she asked
"Down at the end of the line, with the Spacer salvage commander."
Mia started walking again. Yalor kept up with her easily.
"What is all this?' Mia asked- "I just got word to come down here, no explanation."
"Baleys. Four drones were launched off-schedule three hours ago. Traffic control was challenged, their operator cut the link and left them to the will of gravity, and the patrol ships started taking them out Aside from full cargoes of contraband, they were carrying ... these . . ."
Mia cringed. She did not approve the policy that dictated anything unauthorized be shot down. It resulted in messes like this., a wasteful loss of life.
Besides, she knew of at least one team of Terran agents that had died this way. Because of that, if nothing else, she had argued to change the policy. But probably because of that, someone higher up blocked any modification.
"Did they take them all out?' she asked
"They're not being fully forthcoming about that Three blew cleanly, but there's a question about the fourth one. It may have entered the atmosphere."
'Without traffic control, it probably burned up."
Or maybe it got dam ...
"Point of origin?' she asked
"Not certain yet"
She gave Yalor a sour look and he shrugged sympathetically. But then they reached Reen and the Spacer commander.
Reen gave her a brief nod, and returned his attention to the Spacer. Mia did not recognize him. Tatter than Reen, silver-white hair drawn back in an elaborate queue tied by blue, green, and gold ribbon, his face glistened with the too-smooth elegance of an older Spacer. Two small spheres hovered just above either shoulder, his remote personal aide links connecting him to his cadre of robots. Mia had seen Spacers with a dozen or more of these devices, called extensions by Spacers, but which Terrans derisively referred to as their "pals."
"I believe," Reen said, carefully, as if he had been trying vainly to
make a point for some time, "that a scout ship ought to go down as soon as possible to locate the fourth drone."
"If it reached the ground," the Spacer said in reasonable tones, "it is probably in a million pieces from the impact. What do you want us to recover? DNA-,`
"I want certainty, Captain Delas. If it is in a million pieces, I want verification."
'And if its not?'
"Then we may have cause to step up our internal investigation. That would imply a secondary traffic control-"
"We detected no such signal during the intercession."
"-or the presence of a pilot on the drone itself."
Captain Delas's mouth twitched in a sardonic smile. "Rather pathetic pilots, then. None of the other three made the least attempt to evade us."
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