by Linda Nagata
“Food,” she told him, crouching to open it.
“Good, I’m hungry.”
Even in the dim light, she was struck by the familiar lines of his face. He appeared to be a Eurasian mix, with light eyes and a scattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks. But there was something in the shape of his eyes and his eyebrows, and in the angle of his chin, that made her wonder if she’d seen this kid before . . .
Matt worked it out before she did. “Hey, Akasha. Is he your brother? He looks just like you.”
Akasha rolled her eyes, lip curling in disgust. “This little weirdo doesn’t look anything like me.”
“He does look like you,” Ava said. “But I’ve seen your profile. Your brother is supposed to be dead.”
◇
According to the official record, Gideon Li had been with his parents during Nolo, sheltering in their Manoa Valley home when massive landslides broke from the valley’s steep walls, roaring through the neighborhood, burying homes under ten to twenty feet of eroded lava rock, mud, and crushed vegetation.
Before that day, Gideon had been a prickly genius on scholarship at Punahou School. Afterward . . .
“Legally, he is dead,” Akasha said. “He likes it that way.”
Gideon eyed his sister warily . . . until he noticed Ava’s gaze.
“You weren’t at home,” she said.
“I told them the house wasn’t safe,” Gideon growled, with that same lip-curling expression of contempt Ava had seen so often on Akasha’s face. “They didn’t want to evacuate.”
Akasha said, “He went to sulk in the bedroom. Nothing unusual about that. We had to share that room, and he was always sulking.”
“Shut up.”
“By that time, it was raining torrents. Too late to get to a shelter, that’s what I thought. But you couldn’t tell him no. He took his skateboard and climbed out the bedroom window.” Her face scrunched up. It was clear the next words cost her dearly. “The brat was right to leave. I went after him. It’s the only reason I’m still alive. I meant to bring him back. I mean, he was only twelve years old. I was fifteen. But I didn’t have a skateboard and I couldn’t keep up. He disappeared in the storm, and I ended up in the gym at Punahou. Afterward, I couldn’t find him on any of the survivor lists. You know how it was. If people didn’t check in, they got logged as dead. Two years later, I saw him on a moped. He didn’t stop though, even when I yelled at him.”
“I wasn’t in my right mind,” Gideon muttered.
“You’ve never been in your right mind.”
“But you need me now, don’t you?”
Akasha scoffed. “You’re sitting here at ground zero, idiot. If you want to keep your little kingdom, then you better help out.”
“Huko’s going to wipe me out anyway. You’re lucky you came when you did or you would have missed me. I’ve got a few more things to get off the houseboat, then I’m out of here.”
“So you don’t live in this tent?” Matt asked. Surely a facetious question.
“Shit, no. This is the garage.”
“Not that his houseboat looks much better,” Akasha told them.
“You could stay and clean it up for me.”
“Love you too, brother.”
Ava sighed, grateful for once that she’d been an only child. She pulled out the bento trays. “I need to eat. I only bought three bentos, but me and Akasha can share. Then, Gideon, you need to show us what you’ve got.”
◇
Fifteen minutes later they were walking single file through lashing rain, following Gideon as he led them on a muddy trail towards East Loch, the wind rising and falling in long monstrous breaths. Kiawe and elephant grass eight feet tall overhung the path, rustling, sighing, creaking in a velvety darkness that smothered the red beam of Ava’s flashlight. She walked behind Gideon, who carried his red LED lantern. Akasha followed with her own light, helping Matt to keep to the trail.
Matt had argued for the use of his smart glasses: “Come on. The infrared illumination is just a slight signal—less than the flashlights—and it’ll let me generate a guideline so I can stay on the trail.”
But Gideon denied the request: “Every device is a window for some faceless creep to look through—and I like my privacy.”
Ava had thought of Lyric and silently agreed. But now she wondered, “Don’t you get civilian drones flying in here, poking around? I mean, people have to know you’re here, and people get curious.”
Gideon slowed, looked back. Raised his finger and moved it in a small circle. “Navy no-fly zone.”
“Convenient,” she conceded. “I guess they haven’t noticed your dragonfly?”
“I keep it below the treetops.”
“What about human trespassers?”
A cold chuckle. “Nolo stirred up toxic sludge from the bottom of the harbor. Shit that goes back to World War II. Maybe even before. Storm surge dumped it on the shore. Nowadays, step off the bike path and you could get hit with fumes that’ll leave you sick and dizzy.”
The toxic sludge was well documented and quite real. Still, Gideon’s tone stirred her suspicion. “You started the rumor about the fumes, didn’t you?”
Another glance back. “It’s not a rumor. I’ve got gas bladders all along the periphery.”
“You must have a record low social rating.”
Behind her, Akasha snorted. “Shoots! If he had a social rating.”
As they moved on, the rain passed and the wind eased. After a few minutes, Gideon stopped, turned around, and said, “Now we go dark.” He switched off his lantern.
“We’re not going to be able to see anything,” Ava objected.
“Trust me.”
“That’d be crazy,” Akasha murmured, but she switched off her light anyway. Ava did too, plunging them into darkness—except it wasn’t all that dark anymore.
Ahead, in the direction they’d been going, distant electric lights shone through the vegetation. From the freeway, probably, and the stadium on the other side of East Loch. Some of the lights might even be from the navy’s docks . . . or maybe not. Ava wrestled with the geography, suspecting Ford Island lay in the way.
Then Gideon moved aside, revealing a paler illumination.
“Whoa,” Ava said, wonderstruck. “What am I seeing?”
At her feet, a black glassy surface, curving away for at least fifteen feet before it disappeared within the shoreline mangroves. Beneath that surface, scattered patches of white light—she counted seven—alive with slow sinuous motion. Only one lay close to where they stood.
chapter
18
It took several seconds for Ava to make sense of what she was seeing. The glassy surface was a pond—no, an inlet—and the white objects glowing beneath the water’s surface—
“Are those robotic gels?” Matt asked.
“No,” Ava said. “They’re bioluminescent jellyfish.”
She had watched a bloom of party-light jellies dying in the surf only last night. The round mantle of the closest one was at least two feet across, with a dark spot the size of a quarter just off center.
Gideon said, “This big one’s the prototype.”
Ava crouched in the slick mud at the water’s edge to get a closer look and noted smaller spots—she counted three, but there might be more—scattered at irregular intervals around the edge of the mantle.
“This is your weapon?” she asked, looking up at Gideon—and trying to stave off disappointment.
“Yeah. And it’s really cool.” He stood beside her, his feet half sunk in mud. “My asshole friends swore they were serious, that there was gonna be a revolution before the handover treaty was signed. A fucking declaration of independence. Targeted military action to back it up. They wanted me to come up with something. So I did.” A contemptuous tsk. “You can guess what happened next.”
“No revolution,” Ava said. “They wised up and called it off.”
Another tsk. “They called it off, anyway. That’s
all I really know.” He shrugged. “They were probably watching too much Netflix to begin with. A lot harder to pull off a revolution in the real world.”
“But they didn’t give you a reason?” she pressed, wanting to better understand the scope of the aborted insurgency, and any options that might remain.
Gideon shook his head. “They’re tight with details. And I haven’t talked to them in a while. I gave ’em a working weapon, but I don’t think they got much out of their other developers. It’s not like they have a big talent pool to draw on. So the cops and the guard probably decided they didn’t want to go along with it.” He cracked a cold smile. “Or the kupuna heard about it and told them to sit their asses down before the grandkids got killed.”
Akasha disregarded all this, demanding, “What’s it do?”
“It blows shit up.” Gideon crouched beside Ava. He gestured at the jelly. “You wouldn’t know it by looking at them here, but jellyfish are strong and fast—and these party-light cultivars are common enough they don’t draw much attention.”
“Except from sea serpents?” Ava asked him.
“Well, yeah. The snakes keep the population in check. Serpents are fast, but I couldn’t use them because every serpent is tracked and monitored by HADAFA.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They’re artificial lifeforms.”
“Sure. Just like the jellyfish. So tell us what you’ve got.”
“You’ve weaponized them,” Matt said, eyeing the crouching kid with a predator’s intensity.
“No. Not the jellies. They’re just a vector.” In the upwelling light, Gideon looked both smug and diabolical as he peered at Ava. “Remember what it used to be like at New Year’s, when the whole fucking city would light up with illegal fireworks? You have no idea how many sealed shipping containers filled with fireworks survived Nolo, all of it smuggled in past Homeland So-Called-Security. No way was I going to waste all that potential—”
“Wait—you unpacked fireworks? You’re lucky you didn’t blow yourself up.”
Gideon scoffed. “Remote operation. That monkey bot’s not just a toy, you know.” He stood up, and Ava stood up too. “So anyway, I did a lot of experimenting. Best thing I’ve come up with so far is robot fish. Easy to print, assemble, and program. They use standard batteries and carry a decent payload of salvaged gunpowder.”
“Navy is on to that,” Matt said, sounding disappointed. “The harbor’s patrolled by robot tuna. You’re not going to get a drone fish past them.”
“I can get a swarm of aquatic drones past them,” Gideon said. “It’s not hard, because the robot tuna are looking for free-swimming devices.”
He’d brought a telescoping rod with him. He extended it now, and, crouching again, he used it to reach into the inlet’s water, poking at the curtain of three-foot-long tentacles beneath the prototype jelly. The tentacles writhed as he touched them, and some wrapped around the pole, allowing him to lift them to the water’s surface.
Embedded among the glowing tentacles, Ava counted eight opaque white shapes, each six or seven inches long, bullet-shaped, with dorsal and lateral fins, and a vertical fish tail. “The payload,” she murmured, starting to see how this might work.
“The swarm is passive when it’s with the jelly,” Gideon explained. “But when the jellyfish gets past security and is close on the target, the swarm activates and the components strike like one.” He lowered the tentacles back into the water. “It’d be better if I had access to C-4, but when the swarm packs together, they’ll still manage a solid bang. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Damn cool,” Ava agreed. “If it works.”
“How do you steer the jellies?” Matt asked, sounding skeptical.
Gideon stood up again. “That part’s not great, but it’s good enough. Party-lights are CRISPRed, too. Their sting doesn’t do much to humans, but they’re good at feeding on other jellyfish. You know, to keep the water safe for people ’cause we get so many wild jellies these days, like they’re the last thing surviving in the ocean.
“Anyway, party-lights were designed so they stay near-shore and close to the surface. A side benefit is that it makes their population easy to monitor. You just have to have an aerial drone count the glowing mantles. Another side benefit, for me, is that I can get a radio signal to that hub at the top of the mantle.”
With the rod, he indicated the dark central spot Ava had seen before. As she looked at it again, she noticed a wisp of wire protruding from it.
Gideon pulled out his tablet. Ava leaned in to look at the screen. A green line traced a complex path against a black background. It took her a few seconds to recognize the display as a map of East Loch. A labeled point marked the inlet where they stood.
Gideon expanded the map. The point grew into a circle with six hash marks around its perimeter. He said, “Jellies are predators, but they get eaten, too. Sea serpents are the main problem for big party-lights. I can fake a serpent attack by using an electric shock. The jelly responds by swimming away from the jolt.”
He tapped the screen. The jellyfish at their feet pumped its mantle and bobbled away from the shore. Ava watched it with a little shiver of horror.
“Sweet Jesus,” Matt murmured in her ear. He’d moved in close to get a look at the screen over her shoulder. “This is monster-movie shit—and this is the best we’ve got?”
With the wind and the rustling leaves, Gideon, fortunately, hadn’t heard him. That was clear when he turned to Ava with an impish grin. “So where’s the target?”
Just like that . . .
She straightened up. “You’ve got just the one?”
“Yeah, like I told you, the revolution got called off. I’m working on my own here.”
“And you’ve done impressive work,” Ava assured him, ready to elbow Matt if he started to say anything else too critical. “We saw that on the way in, but . . .”
She should have worried about Akasha, not Matt. “What she’s trying to say, dear brother, is this whole setup is comic book, not real world.”
“It’s not that,” Ava said quickly. “But . . . you haven’t tested it, have you?”
If he had, HADAFA would surely have observed the explosion and issued a report.
Gideon backed off a step, looking annoyed. “I’ve never actually blown anything up,” he admitted. “But I’ve tested all the components, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’ve run this jelly across the loch and brought it back again. It will work.”
Ava looked to Matt, her chest tight with anticipation. “We might as well try it.”
He nodded, but sounded glum: “Yeah, if there’s any chance at all.” He turned to Gideon. “Let me give you the target. All we want to do is disable the submarine, force it to stay in port.”
“And let Huko batter it?” Gideon asked.
“Yeah. Cost of treason.”
A minute later, Ava watched as the luminous jellyfish shivered and thrashed and then retreated, its wide mantle coiling and snapping, propelling it erratically down the inlet. She trailed after it, edging along the shore, feeling her way, and discovering a path there.
The other jellies in the inlet roused as the augmented one passed by. One by one, they began to follow it, a parade of party-lights.
Ava went with them around the curve of the inlet. The augmented one moved more gracefully now, its mantle working in slow, steady, fluid motion. Its serenity a sharp contrast to her own tangled nervous system.
She glanced ahead. Mangrove leaned in over the mouth of the inlet, framing the bright lights of the eastern shore. She went no farther, but stayed to watch.
The companion jellies did not share their leader’s motivation and they soon fell behind. But the augmented jelly moved with steady determination as if on a mission. Or did she see it that way only because she knew it was true? Without that knowledge, would its behavior still seem aberrant? Would the robot tuna tag it as suspicious because it moved with more purpose than any jellyfish should?
The jelly entered open water. She watched it until it was just a faint glow some two hundred feet offshore. Then she drew a sharp breath and turned, making her way back to the others.
“How long will it take to get there?” she asked Gideon.
The faint, upwelling light of his tablet revealed a thoughtful frown. “All the way to navy docks? At least a couple of hours.”
A couple of hours before they knew if the tactic would work . . . a couple of hours to come up with a backup plan when this one failed.
“Have you got anything else?” she asked.
“Nothing that’ll get past navy security.”
Matt said, “You mentioned other developers working for the insurgency.”
“I can’t tell you who.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t. Because I don’t know. Security protocol, right? In case some jackboot comes asking.”
“But you could get word out,” Ava said. “Contact your contact.”
“Why? I don’t think they’ve got anything.”
“But you could ask,” she pressed.
“I told you,” he said, his voice low and defensive, “it’s been a while since I talked to them.”
“Ah, geez,” Akasha said. “You had a meltdown, didn’t you, when you heard the revolution was off? And they dropped you. They cut you off. They’re not taking your calls.”
He shrugged, but didn’t deny it—and Ava felt an avenue of opportunity close.
“I gotta go by the houseboat,” Gideon said. “Take care of something before I head out. You guys might as well come. It’s not far. And anyway, if you take off on your own, you’re gonna get lost.”
◇
With his red lantern lighting the way, Gideon led them up the eastern side of the peninsula, to a little cove bordered with the ubiquitous mangrove. The houseboat was moored close to the trees, a dark and angular silhouette against the bright lights across the water—headlights, streetlights, and a cluster of pinpoint blue lights flashing silently as HPD attended to some unknowable emergency.