Kaleidoscope Century

by Barnes, John

  The girl had had maybe one minute of terror from the time the door caved in, tops. No physical pain other than the instant of the gun thumping on the roof of her mouth. A lot better than most people got nowadays. Still, that made three I’d killed today — more than in the month previous — and that made me feel funny.

  That was when I realized the word she had been mouthing was Kinder. Children. Shit.

  I violated a lot of rules. Stupid stupid stupid. It wasn’t like I’d just done them any big favors, I’d just orphaned the little bastards. But the twins looked to be about two. (Stupid shit. Probably she was pregnant when he took her in, and they weren’t even his.) I didn’t think those kids could contribute crap toward identifying me.

  And after all we were expected to improvise. So I did. I picked up the phone, called for help, and told the emergency dispatcher that I was monitoring him on datalink (I wasn’t — my cellular wouldn’t patch through), that I had handcuffed both of the kids to a remote-controlled charge, and that if he fucked with the White Flag on the car I was taking, or tracked the car, or if the cops got there in less than an hour, the kids would be blown to the moon.

  Then I took the car from the garage and peeled out for Essen. I figured the dispatcher would behave for an hour, mostly, though I expected cops were tracking the car one way or another. But they wouldn’t dare try bombing or blasting the car — too much chance I had a deadman program running. And an hour was all the time it would take me.

  Those kids had had it made, I thought, as I shot down the highway, doing top speed because there was nothing else on the road. That little house had been wall-to-wall toys. Father had had a telecommuting station, so both their folks were always there.

  Probably they’d even gone outside in the backyard a lot. Dad probably loved the hell out of Mom, because she was so beautiful and he’d never thought he’d get a pretty teenager for a bed partner. Mom probably loved him for taking her in, cleaning her up, giving her a place that was safe and secure. Probably those kids had no idea about a war, thought the world was one big warm friendly.

  Well, welcome to reality, dumbfucks.

  Still, I hadn’t liked the way they’d looked when I’d left them in that house with the bodies of their parents.

  Our agent in Essen turned out to be dead — caught and executed the year before. I nailed the politician to collect the bounty. The Amsterdam gig was routine — a good CO with one sharp staff officer. I bombed the car they both were riding in. One of those trips where all the bad stuff happens up front.

  The guy who talked about the weather in Ohio with me, in Brussels, gave me a jar of something to pour into the Seine above Paris. A complete milk run, or so I thought at the time.

  The first sign that the Eurowar was entering its last and worst phase came on that mission, and it wasn’t much just yet. As the bus headed south out of Brussels, I saw long rows of men and women filling sandbags. It was winter, after all, so one might have expected some flooding, but the river wasn’t particularly high. And it did seem strange to see so many people risking their lives by being out in the open. I was bored, so I asked.

  The bus driver grunted. “The worms, they say.”

  “The worms?” I asked.

  “Eating through dikes and destroying levees, far upstream. They’re having to spray poison but the worms don’t die easy. They look like ordinary earthworms, you know, but when they get a chance — poof, solid banks of earth become mud overnight. Not a good thing, you know, there aren’t many to work on these things with a war on. I don’t like being near it myself, I keep thinking what if the worms are somebody’s trick to get people into the open. I just can’t imagine what will happen next, you know, if this keeps up.”

  I sighed and said something about the damned war and the politicians. I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself since there were only four people on the bus, and once we reached the city of St. Quentin I was planning to get off the bus and leave a bomb behind me. In an abstract kind of way I admired this man’s guts, and anyone who could keep an old pile of rust like this running through three years of a war deserved some respect, but the existence of reliable transportation in an area where we had only sporadic control had to be dealt with. I’d get a substantial bonus for identifying and eliminating this one.

  The bus rumbled on south, bumping and slamming over the potholes of three winters without road repairs, as it wove its way through the smaller roads and every little cowpath, never repeating a route, like an ant or bee that knows roughly where it’s going but may jog and wander all over the map before getting there.

  There were more and more rows of sandbaggers. If the worms were Organization work, we’d done a fine job.

  Even then it didn’t occur to me, really, just how bad the emergency must be if they were exposing so many civilians to attack. But things changed fast — three months later it was no surprise when the Netherlands and Belgium signed a separate peace to get a chance to evacuate. Another typical dumbfuck move in a war full of dumbfuck moves, mistaking their allies for their friends. All they did was trade FSA deathbirds and mines for NATO deathbirds and mines. They still lost thousands who tried to take buses, trucks, or trains. After the first day, people just moved any way they could. June of 2001 saw the great refugee swarms pouring into Germany and France, walking or cycling to high ground with whatever they could carry or drag, and the beginnings of internecine fighting in NATO as the fleeing populations became too large for the refugee camps.

  By that time, though, the Sovs were too busy to exploit the opportunity. Prague and Budapest had to be abandoned within a week after fire-roaches appeared, with their terrible stings and single-minded attraction to anything that smelled of Russian gun-oil. The first tailored potato blight showed up later that fall, across Poland and Ukraine, and simultaneously the other potato blight swept Ireland. First one to jump the Atlantic.

  Individual things happened, at first all over Europe, then around the world. No eels here, no robins there, turf that turned to black slime in one place and deer who became inexplicably aggressive and migrated in great destructive herds like lemmings in yet another area.

  The flashchannels kept trying to come up with names for it — ecowar, environmental terrorism, all sorts of terms that mostly told us, as usual, that the news people were the last to get what was going on.

  After all, it was a logical consequence of having SMOTs plus good remote sensing on satellites. An ecosystem’s more complicated than a rail net, electric power grid, or market, but it’s the same kind of math, you can study it the same way if you can get enough data, and therefore disrupt it the same way. The only thing that had kept both sides from waging ecowar right from the beginning was the problem of learning how to translate the targeting into DNA. Both sides had raced to get the genetic code up as a piece of general engineering; they had finished so close to each other that from our perspective, in the twenty-second century, with so much history lost, we can’t even say which side “won.”

  The SMOTs running on thousands of microsupers in tiny little labs, a few freshly trained microbiologists in each one, wrote script after script for ecological disaster. Here a new fungus to attack a particular set of roots; there a bacteria that locked up soil phosphorus in an unusable form for a few weeks out of each growing season. Here the super-grasshopper, toxic to birds and especially attractive to them; there beetles that fed only on the leaf buds of trees in the spring. Everywhere, as vegetation lost its grip, mud and slime replaced soil, and the living parts of the continents bled down into the oceans.

  Hawaii and Cuba seemed almost in a race to see which could have worse things happen to sugar cane; California, South Africa, and the Crimea all had the same mad proliferation of insects; cabbages died equally well around the Baltic and around the Great Lakes, destroyed by modified loopers.

  The final blow, the one that forced all the politicians to sit down and talk straight, came in the West Pacific War, one of a dozen little brush
fires that flared up as we got the allies involved. Japan and South Korea had no desire to attack the Soviet Far East and face being turned into another helpless, prostrate Europe. China had been quietly feeding Russia. Neither side felt like getting involved on the home ground.

  Hence Indonesia, backed by China, was brought to attack the Philippines, backed by Japan and South Korea. The bio labs were hit with precision munitions on the first day. And what escaped from the two labs was so identical that no one could tell who had “originated” it — not that anyone wanted credit. Tailored Rice Blast was going to wipe half a billion lives from the Earth.

  The best brains in the intelligence communities went to work on that. How had labs more than a thousand miles apart, working without any direct knowledge of each other, created two things so identical genetically that they couldn’t be told apart? To the analysts that was a lot more interesting than the mere starvation of hundreds of millions, which after all was new only in scale.

  The answer they found was painfully simple. The tendency had been noted in the 1970s for public, not secret, labs to move faster and farther. More heads and hands on the problem meant greater speed. Leaked information diverted other researchers toward itself, and multiplied the effect of research in that area. By 2001 the side that won the scientific race was almost always the side that kept fewest secrets — the rewards of getting there first were always outweighed by the dangers of being second.

  Once the smart guys figured that out, everyone published nearly everything — so military inventions were appearing on both sides of the conflict at almost exactly the same time. The software you distributed to your troops this morning would be in the other side’s hands before nightfall.

  The idea that you could attack an ecology using the same algorithms as were used to attack railroad systems, communications nets, or power grids — and tailor organisms to do it — wasn’t any one general’s idea, or even any one SMOT’s. SMOTs had been told to look for systems on the other side that could be disrupted. No one had told them to stick to highways, water pipes, and warehouses. The SMOTs copied each other. Became more alike. Got brighter and more destructive. As if the war itself had become an intelligent being, with purposes all its own, which didn’t include human survival.

  “By the next spring the people at the top of the warring nations were finding out what any sophomore in college ecology could have told them” — that’s how Sadi put it, once, in a file he was filling up with his personal history of the twentieth century. Why was a copy of it on my werp? “Release anything in large enough numbers, and not all of it will die on cue. The next spring saw all the bugs and germs spreading back from the infected zones into the places that had launched them, and also revealed the (now obvious) point that what’s easy to modify is apt to mutate.”

  From my standpoint, the summer of 2002 was the summer when I was getting rich. Bonuses were raining into my account, and though collapse was coming on fast, and with it the war’s end, if I lasted out this last winter, and if the final collapse came in the spring, then I could live like a king in the aftermath. Plenty of the world’s fortunes had gotten started in wars. No reason why mine shouldn’t be one of them.

  Meanwhile we were busy. Targets we had been trying to hit for years — especially scientists and engineers — were popping out of their protection like pheasants out of a cornfield, as the spreading ecological catastrophe made their hiding places and secure areas uninhabitable.

  One night, I met two other Organization agents under a bridge in Germany, to swap data between our computers (the major secure way of trading information by then). We all stuck around to get drunk together, and in the course of talking and bragging, we discovered that every one of us had nailed at least one Nobel Prize winner. The blonde woman whose name I didn’t get had bagged three of them, one while in bed with him.

  It gave us all a good laugh. But considering how much wine we’d had, almost anything would have.

  I was sitting next to the blonde woman, and we were passing the jug back and forth. Peter, the other agent, whom I’d worked with a few times, was passed out on her other side. We had begun to get maudlin, about things like sausage stands and the good beer there used to be, and I was thinking about not having gotten any ass in a while. I sure wasn’t going to try with the lady beside me, though. If she didn’t like what I was doing, I’d be dead before I knew what hit me.

  The damp of the ground was soaking through the seat of my jeans. Mostly I was thinking about what I would do after the war was over. With all the money I could get a big, defensible house somewhere, with servants. There would be a lot of desperate young woman — so I could probably and a pretty one that would do what I wanted for a safe place to sleep and enough to eat. Hell, I could probably keep a harem if I wanted. In a couple of years, I’d be sleeping in a great big warm bed, eating huge hot meals, waited on by naked bitches …

  For right now I had a jug of red wine, this spot under the bridge sheltered from the drizzle, and the touch of the blonde woman’s leather bomber jacket against my shoulder. It was less lonesome here, in the damp dark, than it had been for a while.

  “So, you gentlemen want to show a lady some fun?” she asked.

  “You mean sex?” I asked stupidly. God, I was drunk. I just hoped I’d be able to function and remember it afterwards.

  “That’s the idea, fella. It’s been a while since I got the itch scratched just for fun. And I’d like to refresh my memory about what it’s like to do it just because I want to.”

  “Fuck,” Peter said.

  “Unhhunh,” she said, nodding emphatically.

  “Fuck,” he repeated. “Fucking killing kids and cops and teachers. Murder the poor bastard firemen. Poison in the wells. Fuck.” He fell silent. Passed out again.

  We rolled him over on his side so he wouldn’t throw up and choke on it — as much privacy as we were going to get. We each had a ground cloth, and that gave us a surface that, if not comfortable, was at least tolerable.

  The kissing was the best part; the rest was just relief after getting worked up. When we had finished, and pulled our pants back up, she held me for a long moment, and then whispered, “There’s something else I’m supposed to communicate to you. It shouldn’t matter that Peter’s around, I think he’s out. Memorize this — the name is Jason Tester, that’s spelled with an ‘o,’ and here are the account numbers and passwords.”

  She rattled off some long character strings. By now I was used to my enhanced memory, and not surprised that I could recite it back on the first try. Then I asked, “So who is this guy? Am I supposed to partner up with him, kill him, what?”

  She laughed, and folded her fingers around mine. “No, stud, you’re going to be him.”

  “It’s an alias?”

  “Yes. For after you transit.”

  “After I — “

  “You remember a shot you got, just before you went active for the Organization? The one that let you repeat all those twenty-digit numbers back without a hitch, and kept you from dying of mutAIDS?”

  “Sure.” It came back to me. “I’m going to lose my memory and get ten years younger.”

  She nodded. “We know a lot more about the special treatment than we did when we first gave it to you. About three months from now you’re going to come down with something that feels like the worst flu you’ve ever had. Then for about six months you’ll be pretty helpless, raving with a fever, not aware of your surroundings. You want to be somewhere where people will take care of you — you won’t be lucid. At the end of the six months, you’ll emerge about ten years younger, biologically, than you are now.”

  I was thirty-five now; physically I would be twenty-five. “How do you know it will be in ninety days for me?”

  “I have orders, you goof. They can figure it to within plus or minus three weeks now, because they’ve had a lot of experience with it. In fact I’m part of the experience — I was one of the first tests in the field. Believe it or not I�
�m just over forty years old if you go by the clock.” I’d have pegged her thirty at most.

  She went on. “Anyway, the important thing to remember is that your appearance will change enough — due to weight loss and youthening — so that you can take on a new identity easily. But make sure you’ve got everything you need written down, and with you, by the time it hits. Start keeping your records with you right now, if you aren’t already. Make sure they contain everything you want to remember — especially the account numbers with all your cash in them. And try to make sure you come down sick near a charity hospital, or with a private duty nurse around, or something like that.”

  “And the Organization will take me back on afterwards?”

  “Oh, yeah. You’ll be younger and have an airtight false i.d. And your motor skills will stick — you’ll still be a good shot. They’ll want you. Don’t worry.”

  So I didn’t worry. We had more wine, and then tried to have sex again, but I couldn’t get it up so we just messed around for a while until she was satisfied. The whole time Peter stayed asleep, as far as we could tell, and when we were done we got a blanket out of his pack and covered him, shook the cold and damp off ourselves, and walked back along the canal to the town, holding hands till we parted company, with a gentle little kiss, in the white-green smear of harsh light under a streetlight. Just as if we had been any other couple, or known each other’s names.

  5.

  I rise and stare out into the dark. My first lifetime wasn’t even my worst. In my memories — and many of my notes and text — I seem not to be bothered by it at all. That worries me, or ought to.

  I guess.

  For right now I just want to get the bare facts down. I find several tearful confessions in here, drunken maudlin babblings where I rave on about how delicate and pretty that very young German housewife was. I talk about her breasts so much that I think she must have been naked to the waist — perhaps they were making love when I burst in? — or something unusual must have happened that involved them.