by M M Buckner
My tracer program found Jin in Frisco, California. Sacrée Loi! He’d flown straight into the war. California was a protectorate of Nome.Com. And Allistaire Wagstaff, Nome’s despotic CEO, had the worst human rights record on the planet. I couldn’t believe Jin had flown to Dr. Merida’s clinic in the teeth of the war. His action smacked of a death wish.
I sent a videomail to his address and waited for a couple of hours at the public Net stall, but there was no reply. So Luc and I checked into the cheapest lodge we could find, and for the next several days, we considered our options.
So much for Jolie’s Trips. The outbreak of violence in the northern Coms put an end to my entrepreneurial pursuits. As if I cared about that anymore. Every day brought new horror stories and market gyrations. I kept thinking about my friends in Paris. I watched the news every second. Caspar Van Hyeck, the CEO of Greenland.Com, made long windy speeches about peace, while Nome.Com’s Allistaire Wagstaff erupted with bloodthirsty threats. Pacific.Com’s Suradon Sura came on once at twice to denounce the rebels as suicidal fools. Net newscasters raced to air the most graphic violence.
Meanwhile, Uncle Org—the World Trade Organization, our only planetwide governing body—seemed baffled. Uncle Org’s thirty-two satellite-based Artificial Intelligence nodes were simply unable to comprehend the situation. The AIs overloaded the Net with their queries into human history. Maybe they were trying to fathom the purpose of war. Since their creation back in the twenty-first century, Uncle Org had managed Earth’s commerce with order and reason and stable exchange rates. This situation didn’t fit their scenarios.
It was a heady, nervous time in the south. Partisans mounted parades. Speculators ran scams. Southerners discussed the rebellion as if it were a sports contest. And everyone laid bets. A carnival atmosphere prevailed. You could practically taste the adrenaline.
Me, I wandered the bright, cluttered corridors of Palmertown in a daze. My life was in limbo. I didn’t know what to do next. These southerners, most of them, had never been to the north. They didn’t know the people living in the Paris tunnels. They didn’t bite their nails and feel their guts pulled apart every time the Net aired another explosion. Still, how dare they lay bets on this tragedy? I wanted to punch somebody in the face, but I didn’t know where to begin. Luc started drinking too much wine, which was way unlike Luc. Me, I stayed up all hours and bumped into walls.
Out of habit, I checked back every day at the public Net bureau for a reply from Jin. And I kept stopping in the open doors of bars, watching the Net news. What was happening to my friends in Euro? And what, by the Laws, could I do about it? I’m not usually one to hang around idle. I guess I was paralyzed.
The tenth morning, the public Net bureau posted a cryptic, text-only message for me, dated February 24, 2127, from the Merida Institute of Neuroscience.
“To La Sauvage. Boren was right. I can hear myself think. It’s a constant warbling bass note. Rapid changes expected. Wish you were here. J.A.S.”
The message from Jin came as a real relief, more so than I had expected. He was alive, and that gave me hope. I dunk the distance and worry intensified my attachment to him. I sent a vidmail back at once, begging him to get out of there. That word from Jin, and the hope it brought, made something click inside me. After I sent the reply, I didn’t hang around waiting for an answer. I went to find Luc. I was sick of feeling paralyzed. Luc and I both needed to be doing something. And finally, a notion had popped into my head about what needed doing.
If I’d been born with a little more smarts, I never would have tried this idea. Everything was against it. Ça va, I simply didn’t know. My funds were still mostly intact, so first thing, I got Luc sobered up, and we rented a double cube in midtown with room to work. And I painted a sign in glitter-glue on the door: “Euro Rescue Project.” Then I started calling friends.
Luc was too young and innocent to know how impractical my idea was. Luc would follow me anywhere. He bought equipment, built our Net site and started sending global vidmail, trying to reach the protes in Paris.
Jonas Tajor, an old acquaintance and totally brilliant geek living in Perth, Australia, helped a lot. Jonas had long curly hair and coffee black skin and a languid way of talking that calmed my nerves.
“Paris? Easy hack, love. We’ll bounce a relay through the Aussie Fugue. That’s our procession of 720 contrapuntal satellites circling in harmonic low-Earth orbit at 20 degrees to the ecliptic. A true masterwork of southern engineering. Those Norse-arses think they can scramble us out of their hemisphere? Jolie love, we’ll go deep. We’ll go hard. We’ll go wire! We’ll interface with the Transatlantic Cable. You didn’t know that old relic was still there? Electrons rip!”
Sanguine, that’s how Jonas made me feel. He tapped into pirate Net bands and sent queries to the Euro underground. He patched through to wire-based networks I’d never even heard of. He sent pulsed messages through urban power grids. It took time, but eventually we made contact. The Euro protes were living in hell.
Insurgent prote leaders had underestimated the will of the Coms. When work stoppages occurred, the managers simply shut down life support—leaving whole sectors of protes to suffocate in the dark. Food was scarce. Air was undependable. And almost everywhere, the water supply had been compromised. Old, old diseases, with sinister names like cholera and typhoid, were cropping up. Caught in a trap, the protes were beginning to turn against each other. There had been bloody battles.
Our friends Françoise Thou and Victor Bouille were still alive. I spoke to them. But Celeste and Rupert Chalotais, their three little girls, the Herbier brothers, and Uncle Qués, my old mentor in street crime—all dead. So many friends gone, I couldn’t even cry. All I knew was that we had to get the living ones out of there. We needed a major airlift. And we needed housing and doctors and food and clothing. I didn’t have enough money for all that. Listening to Victor Bouille’s thin voice through the static—it made me crazy.
My idea was to run a quick hack on the WorldBank, grab some funds, then buy a cheap car and fly straight into Paris and see what I could do. But another good friend, maybe my best woman Mend in the world, talked me out of that. Her name was Adrienne Stroebel.
Adrienne was another Euro tunnel rat like me. Only, instead of Paris, she’d grown up wild as a weed in Nether Berlin. When I first met her, Adrienne had been chopped down and brutalized so many times, you would have expected her to turn ugly and stunted. Not Adrienne. The hard knocks seemed to concentrate her beauty, and when Adrienne’s time came to flower, she produced the loveliest, fullest, sweetest-smelling blossom imaginable. At sixteen she escaped to Palmertown and landed a job as a model. You may have seen her in the Transkei fashion ezines. Tall, willowy, with huge azure eyes, lemony skin and a nimbus of frosty hair. She’s smart, too, my Mend Adrienne, but a little bossy.
“Jollers, we need a financial strategy.” It didn’t seem to disturb her that I hated that nickname.
“Adrienne, I have a financial strategy. The WorldBank. Half an hour on the Net, and I’m in.”
“Wrong, Jollers. Just shut up and let me take care of this. Our cause needs packaging. Poignant visuals. A stirring theme. I’ll stage a few small entertainments to seduce the bleeding hearts. I understand how these southerners part with their cash.”
She did, too. Adrienne hosted VR séances, hatha yoga chant-ins and other glam charity events. Plenty soon, she raised a pot of money. More Euro expatriates started showing up in our little office in midtown. Hundreds of people wanted to help. Next thing I knew, Luc was organizing committees and banks of Net nodes. Adrienne took care of finances. Jonas handled communications. Rebel Jeanne Sabot—my speed-freak pilot friend—Rebel Jeanne recruited pilots and set up a network of secret rendezvous sites in Euro.
And this local guy Luc met in a bar, Trinni al-Uq, he helped us acquire aircraft Trinni also got us a bargain on modular jellyfish—you know, those inflatable seafarm units that float on the ocean and harvest oxygen straight out of the b
riny depths. We anchored three stealth-shielded jellyfish in the Mediterranean to house refugees.
Me, I’m a decent pilot, so I flew the Paris run. I met the protes in an abandoned solar plant built under the Butte de Montmartre. Men, women, children. None of them had seen the surface, and they were nervous, you know. I tried to remember what Luc used to say to calm people down. I made jokes. I helped people put on their surfsuits. The littlest kids we wrapped in cargo bubbles, and I tried to turn that into a game. I led people up top, forty to a load, tethered on a safety line. I remember this one kid, she was so amazed to be walking on the surface, she did a cartwheel, even in her gawky oversized surfsuit. Man, that was bliss to see.
We airlifted almost 30,000 Euro protes that first month. Thank the Laws my friends stepped in. Luc, Adrienne, Jonas and the others, they made it happen. Without them, the rescue project never would have come together. Mes dieux, but they teased me, too. Luc and Jonas called me “Chief.” Adrienne called me “the rescuing angel.” They asked me about every little thing as if my opinion carried real weight. Plenty soon, all the volunteers in our midtown cube were following their lead, calling me “Chief” and asking me stuff. I made up answers left and right.
Jin sent three more text messages during that time. I saved them, but they didn’t make any sense. “Imagine experiencing the world without language,” he wrote. “Could we distinguish boundaries if we had no names for foreground and background?” Another time, he wrote, “We label each experience by referencing what we’ve seen before. A large room, a white person, a sharp stick. Imagine seeing something entirely new. It must be like birth.” In his last text message, he wrote, “I will perceive undifferentiated experience, without the intervening metaphor of number. I will see and hear everything at once.”
Frankly, that didn’t sound like fun to me. I kept sending back vidmail telling him to get the heck out of there. Even as I flew low under the Paris security scans and met those frightened refugees and led them up to the Earth’s surface for the first time in their lives, I was thinking about Jin. When I wasn’t flying, I was watching his movies. I memorized his every line and gesture. It shames me to admit I even downloaded a sexy photo of Jin from one of those sleazy fan-club sites, and I carried it folded up in my belt. I didn’t even tell Adrienne about that.
Have you ever been so obsessed with someone that you feel wired on speed twenty-four hours a day? You’re distracted and edgy. It’s not exactly a pleasant feeling. All the time I was flying, that old Van Gogh copter-jet back and forth to Paris, I imagined Jin was there beside me, watching everything I did. I imagined I was earning his approval.
His first videomail came in April. I was working in the office in Palmertown when the Net node on my arm vibrated. I took the call just like that, thinking it was Luc or Adrienne or Jonas. But it was Jin.
He looked pale, and his eyes were too bright. I bent close to the small screen and adjusted the contrast. His hair seemed wet He was grinning like a fool. To my surprise, a text box opened onscreen, covering half his face. “Hello, pet.” The words appeared letter by letter in the text box, as if he were typing slowly.
“Jin,” I whispered, “can you speak?” That text box scared me.
He shook his head, still wearing the inane grin. He really didn’t look like himself. Haltingly, he typed, “I have developed an aversion to the sound of my voice.”
I braced my arm on the desk to keep my Net node from shaking. Finally, I remembered to activate the holo. Jin’s face projected above the screen in a fist-sized, three-dimensional shimmer. I also enlarged the text box and tilted it toward me so it was easier to read. The projection floated like a sheet of white film just above my arm.
“Nonlinear phonemes,” he typed with apparent effort. “Nanobots in my astrocytes. Wish you were here.”
Just then a shadow fell across his image, and Jin turned his head. A second later, the holograph vanished, and my screen went gray. That last part of Jin’s message haunted me. “Wish you were here.” He’d said that before. What did he mean by that? Did he want me to come? I tried all day to reestablish the connection.
A month after that, Jonas retrieved a second vidmail from Jin that had hung up in a Net traffic jam and would never have gotten through to me. The date header was gone. Who knows when he sent it. The first part of the message was distorted, and Jonas had to clean it up. What emerged from the shadows was Jin, sitting in half-light, wearing a blindfold.
Again a text box opened. Jonas enlarged it for me, but instead of typed text, what appeared were quivery scrawled letters. Jin was writing by hand, using a slate and stylus. His first word took shape with glacial slowness. It was, “Fear.”
Mes dieux, but I clenched my fists till the fingernails cut. Jin in a blindfold sending a message of fear? My imagination ran rampant. Adrienne walked in about then and leaned over the screen to see what we were staring at, but Jonas must have signaled her to be quiet. More words were forming in the text box. I watched the holograph of Jin’s emaciated face, shadowed by the black cloth. His hollow cheeks had grown as pale as my own. He pursed his lips in concentration as he wrote. “Fear the light,” his sentence read.
“Fear the light? What the hell?” said Adrienne.
Now Jin was scribbling another word. His stylus vacillated, then skipped. “Blind,” he wrote. With desperate illogic, I prayed to the Laws of Physics for his safety. Jin’s stylus wandered on, skittering like a seismograph. The final sentence was almost illegible. “Blind yourself.”
That was the end. “Fear the light. Blind yourself.” The message terminated in a rough cut. From the silence that followed, I could tell that even Jonas and Adrienne felt shaken.
Adrienne squeezed my shoulder. “Jollers?”
“It’s all right,” I answered.
We said little about the message, that day or any other.
Two weeks later, a curtain fell on Euro. Jonas’s network started failing. Luc couldn’t reach any of his contacts. Adrienne stomped around our midtown cube slapping the Net monitors as if that would make them work better. Apparently, Greenland.Com had detected our covert communications, and they simply shut down the power grids. Only much later did we discover what that meant in terms of prote lives.
From the commercial news channels, we learned that the largest three Coms—Greenland, Nome, and Pacific—had used the rebellion as an excuse to annex and devour their smaller rivals. Now there were no longer fourteen northern Coms, just three. Greenland was claiming all of Euro as its protectorate. Nome had taken over the entire continent of Norm America. Pacific had annexed the Arctic Sea and a big chunk of mainland Asia.
The “Triad,” they styled themselves. When they issued a joint statement, every bar in Palmertown fell silent. We watched Caspar Van Hyeck, Allistaire Wagstaff, and Suradon Sura announce that the conflict was over. Then our links to the north went dead. We heard no more news. Even the commercial channels were stymied. It was as if half our planet had dropped out of existence.
For several weeks afterward, Jonas kept sending messages through the old grids, hoping they’d flicker back to life, but they didn’t. The refugees we’d placed in the floating Mediterranean camps were safe enough. Those jellyfish were stealth-clad and self-sustaining. Trinni gave the protes training classes over the Net in how to operate the equipment. At first, we offered to place them in jobs down south, but the protes voted to stay close to home. They elected themselves a central management committee and set up an internal barter system. They could sail their little fleet wherever they wanted, so we decided to let them be.
For a while, we kept flying missions. But no one met us at our rendezvous spots. Then four of our aircraft were shot down in one week, so we called a halt. After that, we just waited. Adrienne’s fundraisers started losing money. One by one, our volunteers lost heart and drifted away.
The appalling thing for me was how abruptly everything changed in Palmertown. One day there was a war. The next day, no war. It was over, forgotte
n, yesterday’s news. Even now, I try not to blame the southerners. Those northern cities were no more real to the citizens of Palmertown than some exotic movie. The north existed only on the Net. The people around me had never visited Paris. They didn’t grow up in those tunnels. They hadn’t lost mothers and brothers. In fact, the war had changed their lives very little. It was easy to forget.
Adrienne was the first to go back to her old job with the fashion ezine. “You did your best, Jollers. It’s time to move on.” Ever practical, that was my Adrienne. But I knew about the handkerchief she carried hidden in her sleeve because her beautiful azure eyes kept leaking tears.
When my funds ran completely out, Luc found a job in human relations for a big furniture chain, and I signed on with a surface repair crew. We gave up the midtown office, and Luc and I rented a tiny residence cube in the lower city. Typical southern place, it had beige walls, dented drop-down lockers, a coffin-size toilet, and a door with a broken latch. We splatter-painted the walls and floor with fuchsia glow-foam, bought cheap yellow hammocks and fixed the latch. Luc acquired a flat-panel Net node for the wall, and I splurged on an animatronic aquarium. I love those things. But the place never felt like home.
I kept narrow casting vidmail to Jin. He hadn’t left my mind, not for an instant. Long after we’d lost touch with our friends in Euro, I kept badgering Jonas to help me reach Jin. Why, when half the world was disintegrating, did I continue to brood over the fate of one man? Because I’d promised? Because I felt responsible? Because my damned female hormones kept urging me to protect him? As I record this years later, I can tell you the real reason. It’s because I have the kind of heart that, once it gets set, it’s like concrete. At the time, though, I didn’t stop to examine motives.