“Excerpt from Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris
Basin”
Okay,
sports fans, here’s the excerpt you’ve been waiting for…
Prologue
To strive with
difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.
Samuel
Johnson
Ford’s
Creek, Colorado
March
20, 2155
2345
hours U.T.
The
problem with being a swarm being, Johnny Winger figured, was that you couldn’t
taste hot dogs being grilled on a
campfire. And that sucked.
He
really didn’t know how he had gotten here.
He had a memory—did swarm beings even have memories?—there had been an
endless field of waving, undulating plants, like a corn field, only it wasn’t
corn. When he looked closer, he could
see that the corn was actually composed of trillions of tiny bots, a whole
field of bots. A whole planet of
bots. When he walked through the field,
the bot-plants parted like corn stalks, but little poofs of them drifted up and
he soon saw he had a rooster tail of dust behind them, identifying the path he
had taken through the field.
Then
he had come to a small lake, barely a hundred meters across. There was a small white wooden footbridge
across the center of the lake. And, not
unexpectedly, he saw a small whirlpool churning alongside of the bridge piling,
right in the middle of a lake.
What
else was there to do but jump into the whirlpool? If this was a dream, that was the logical
thing to do, wasn’t it? So he jumped…
And
wound up here. ‘Here’ was actually a
place of strong, good-feeling memories.
‘Here’ was one of the good places.
It
was the old fishing camp and cabin at Ford’s Creek, Colorado. It had to be ’35, maybe ’36. His Dad, Jamison Winger, had often brought
him here for long weekends in the summer and fall. Trout and bass and all that cold running water
that burbled down out of the Rockies made Ford’s Creek a special place.
He
knew this place.
Now
he was inside the cabin. It was late,
well after midnight. He was supposed to
be in bed, in the top bunk, of course, with his brother Brad and neighbor Archie
below. There were others in the bedroom
too, but he didn’t know them and they were sound asleep anyway.
Somehow,
like a well-rehearsed routine, he knew what he was going to do before he even
did it. Trains ran on tracks and
memories followed tracks too.
Johnny
shimmied quietly down the ladder from the top bunk and padded across the hard
wooden floor to the bedroom door. He
cracked it open, crept out into a darkened hall and made his way toward the
living room up front. There were voices
there and some laughing and chuckling.
Cards were being dealt. It was
the grownups and their poker game again.
Johnny
stopped at the end of the hall and peered around the corner.
A
fire guttered in the chimney, mostly smoke, but no one paid any attention. A small rickety table was set up next to the
fire. Chairs had been pushed aside to
make room for the table. There were cans
and paper sacks strewn across the floor.
Someone
burped real loud and Johnny had to stifle his own laugh.
Grownups, really--
Five
men were playing poker around the table.
One was his Dad, tall, fringe of gray hair around a mostly bald top, red
flannel shirt not tucked in, his weathered, rough hands fanning out the cards
to study his draw. There were others
too: Hugh, Roy and Todd.
The
fifth man sat with his back to Johnny.
The low lights and the flickering flames of the fire cast deep shadows
across a broad set of shoulders. He
never turned around, and Johnny took to calling him the Shadow Man. He didn’t know the Shadow Man’s real name.
“Come
on, Roy, you in or out?”
Roy
was stocky, white-haired, ruddy-faced, in fact he had a pig’s face, Johnny had
always thought. His lips tightened and
he slapped a few cards down on the table.
“Yeah,
I’m in. I’ll see your five and raise you
five.”
Todd
tossed a few chips into a growing pile.
“I’ll call.”
Johnny’s
Dad did the same, but added, with a mischievous wink, “I’ll see your five and
raise you twenty.” He tossed a handful
of chips in the pile, which had now become a small hill.
The
Shadow Man said nothing at first. Then,
with no words, he tossed his own chips in, all of them. In a low, almost inaudible voice, he said,
“See…and raise fifty.”
That
raised eyebrows around the table. It
even gave Johnny a chill. Not what the
Shadow Man said but the way he said it…like a hiss, almost, like a snarl. The Shadow Man talked like Johnny figured a
talking grizzly bear would talk: guttural, menacing, hoarse and deep.
Who
was this Shadow Man? Johnny wondered.
Then,
almost as if he were answering Johnny’s question, the Shadow Man spoke again,
just like a grizzly bear playing cards.
“I
never bet less than the house.” It was a
kind of an explanation. The Shadow Man
must have had a winning hand; he’d bet everything on that hand. More raised eyebrows.
“Sure,
whatever you say,” muttered Roy. He
didn’t look up, but continued fiddling with his own cards.
Johnny
had about a million questions. Was this fishing camp real? Did I actually jump into a lake on a planet
of bots? Am I dreaming?
“You’re
not dreaming,” the Shadow Man bent forward, toward Jamison Winger. “I saw the look on your face. You’re wondering how any hand could be that
good. My hand is that good.”
No
one argued with the Shadow Man and the game went on. As he hung by the corner of the hallway door,
Johnny tried to take in everything he saw.
He knew it all had some kind of meaning.
He’d
been deconstructed, he remembered that.
Doc III had done the honors, disassembling him into atoms and molecules,
just before the Keeper in that cave on Europa had consumed him…or what was left
of him. Now he was an angel, a
para-human swarm being just like all those weirdos who followed the
Assimilationists.
And
he remembered that Doc III had tried to maintain his original identity and
memory in a small nondescript file called Configuration
Buffer Status Check…a place the Central Entity would hopefully never think
to look.
Slowly,
piece by piece, even as he watched his Dad play a poker game with Roy, Todd,
Hugh and the Shadow Man, the memory of who he was and what he had to do came
back.
Thanks, Doc. The little assembler had managed to save
enough of his memory to figure all this out….
Johnny
remembered being outside the Inuit village of Nanatuvik, in Alaska and seeing a
man shuffling through the snow as he approached. The man was short, dark-skinned, enveloped in
a heavy qaspeq parka and hood, with
bone necklaces rattling around his neck as he approached. Another angel? It was hard to tell.
The
man spoke something, though Winger couldn’t hear over the whine of the
wind. He realized the man was
Nanatuvik’s angakkuq, the
shaman. He was gesturing at something in
the sky.
Winger
looked back over his shoulder. It was
late afternoon, with the sun low, but already he could make out the shimmering
veil of the aurora borealis hovering over the distant mountains.
The
angakkuq approached Winger and
stopped, placing a hand on Winger’s shoulder.
“The
peril of our existence lies in this fact: we eat souls. Everything we eat has a soul. All things have souls. If we hunt and fail to show respect for the
souls of our prey, the spirits will avenge themselves. See in the sky…the Old Woman of the Sea is
already disturbed. In the days to come,
we must be careful.”
With
that, the shaman ambled off toward a nearby hill.
Johnny
Winger knew he had his work cut out for him.
Already he had enough intelligence about the Old Ones to make life
difficult. He just had to find a way to
get it to UNIFORCE.
Mostly
he hoped he could block the Central Entity from executing the Prime Key.
Maybe,
somehow, in ways he could now only dimly perceive, he could block the Prime Key
himself.
That old shaman
was right,
he told himself. He would have to be
careful in the days and weeks ahead.
It
was a new life he was living as an angel.
The rules were different here.
He’d have to watch his step.
He
knew UNIFORCE needed every scrap he could give them if the Normals were to have
any chance of resisting the Old Ones. He
hated himself for using that term but the truth was he was half angel,
half-Normal himself, one foot in each world, pulled in two opposite directions
at the same time. He supposed that spies
and saboteurs had always dealt with that.
But
he had to remind himself of something his son Liam had once said. “Being an angel is so cool. You can be anything, you can go anywhere, you
can’t die….”
Already
he could feel the same pull Liam talked about.
But he had to resist. He had to
win this battle. Not only was it a
battle between Normals and angels, between humans and the Old Ones.
It
was a battle with yourself. That was the
hardest part. Somehow, he’d have to do
what Liam and Dana and millions of others hadn’t been able to do. Win that battle and save the small kernel of
his own identity, his own memories that Doc III had managed to squirrel away in
a small file somewhere in his config manager, to live another day.
The
Normal part of him was just a few bytes at the end of that file.
But
it was the only human part left. And
that was the part that had to survive.
Now
it had survived. Doc III had seen to
that.
Now
it was time to get to work. The Shadow
Man had told him, in ways he couldn’t really explain, that he had an important
mission to perform.
Chapter
1
Farside
Observatory
Korolev
Crater, the Moon
March
25, 2155
0100
hours U.T.
Third-shift astronomers Nigel Course and
Lilly Fong knew of no better word to describe what they were seeing than dread.
Pure, unaltered, rock-in-the-bottom-of-your-stomach dread.
Both
were pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside
Array, scanning sector after sector of the heavens for any little burp or fart
worthy of an astronomer’s interest. The
High Freq array had just gone through a major tune-up last week and it was
Course’s job to give her a complete shakedown for the next few days.
At
the moment, she was boresighted to some distant gamma-ray sources somewhere in
Pegasus…where exactly he’d forgotten.
While
Fong peeled a banana and stifled a yawn, Course took one last look out the
nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was
fully enveloped in the nightfall. At
that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention
back to the array controls.
What the hell…
Nigel
Course looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars
out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied
them. He quickly pinpointed the source
of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…was picking up some
anomaly.
He
massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better
resolution on the target. SpaceGuard
didn’t beep without reason.
Only
it wasn’t SpaceGuard. It was
Sentinel. The outer solar system net.
A
quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Nigel Course’s neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely
targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides. He scanned the list, mumbling the details to
himself.
“
Hmmm….right ascension 22 degrees, 57 minutes, 28 seconds. Declination 20 degrees, 46 minutes, 8
seconds---“ Just as he was about to
consult the catalog, Sentinel threw up a starmap.
Lily
Fong dropped her half-eaten banana.
“The
Mother Swarm,” she murmured.
Course’s
fingers were flying around the keyboard.
“Lilly, we don’t know that. We
need to study this thing. It’s an
all-sector alarm, I’ve got returns on all bands. Whatever the hell it is, it’s big. Gi-normous, in fact. A quarter of the sky, centered on 51 Pegasi,
but not fifty light years away. In fact,
it’s right on our doorstep…or rather, Pluto’s doorstep.”
“Anything
on Doppler?”
Course
finagled with more buttons.
“Bearing…toward the inner system.
Margin of error puts in within a cone approximately two astronomical units,
centered…” he tapped more keys, “…centered on us or near us.”
Fong
shuddered. “It’s here. Billions of kilometers away but it’s
here. Can we get some resolution on the
thing?”
“We
can try.” For the next few minutes, the
two astronomers worked together, manipulating the instruments that comprised
the Sentinel net, a vast detection grid orbiting the sun beyond Pluto, a grid
designed and placed to alert UNISPACE to any threats coming from certain
suspect bearings…like 51 Pegasi. The
design parameters never mentioned the Old Ones or little green men or
extraterrestrial monsters from outer space by name, but no one was fooled.
Sentinel
was designed to do exactly what it seemed to have just done.
After
half an hour, Fong sat back in her chair.
Her face was pale, the blood had drained out when the Sentinel alarm had
gone off. A sheen of sweat beaded up on
her forehead and drops fell to the keyboard.
She ignored them and looked wordlessly over at Course.
“You
know what we have to do.” It wasn’t a
question. “The protocol’s pretty clear
when we get a Level One alert.”
Course
ran down the results of the last scan, the one that made Fong so pale. “I read the analysis this way, Lilly…just so
we’re clear on the details in case questions come up. After washing the raw data through ALBERT
three times, do you concur that the detected anomaly…we’re calling it KB-1 for now…Kuiper Belt Object One…is a
diffuse mass of small particle-sized objects with a thermal signature of a
large swarm?”
Fong
nodded silently, staring at the graphs and plots on her panel as if they were
contaminated. “I concur,” she whispered,
weakly. “It has to be the leading edge,
Nigel. That’s all it can be. We studied and simulated this possibility for
years, every which way we can. Most of
the runs converge on results very similar to, if not identical, to this. ALBERT doesn’t lie.”
Course
stood up and went over to a porthole, which gave onto a constricted view of the
nearest arrays of the Submillimeter Interferometer, and a shadowy backdrop of
Korolev crater’s steep craggy walls beyond.
A triangle of blazing sunlight still illuminated the upper rim, last
gasp of the lunar day.
“I
still don’t get it--“Course shook his head, turned back to the consoles. “51 Pegasi’s been quiet for years…SpaceGuard’s
never showed anything. Now, all of a
sudden, BLAM! Energy spikes all over the
place. We should have seen something
before…rising X-ray, rising gamma levels, something.
Black holes don’t just appear out of nowhere.”
“ALBERT
doesn’t say it’s a black hole, Nigel.
That’s just wishful thinking.”
Course
shrugged, staring at the velocity scans superimposed on each other, silently
willing the data to say something else, anything
else. “If it’s not a micro, then
what is it? What eats whole worlds?”
Fong
pointed to the graphs on her display. “That does. There’s your answer. ALBERT doesn’t care whether we like it or
not. Best match with the data from
Sentinel. Really, the only match.”
Course
took a deep breath. “I know, I
know. I’m just trying to make sure what
we have is airtight. Everytime we’ve
raised a flag, UNISPACE winds up hitting us over the head with it. Gamma ray burster…dark matter cloud…Type II
supernova…they’ve always got another explanation. But this time—“
“I’m
sending a NOTAP to Gateway. The Watch
Center needs to see this. Maybe they’ll
have some ideas.”
Course
nodded. “Do it. I’ll set SenDef Three. Sentinel Defense Condition Three. That’ll wake everybody up at Station T and
Station P…pretty much everybody from here to Saturn.”
The
Notice of Astronomical Phenomena went out from Farside moments later. It was like setting off a firecracker at a
funeral. In less than five minutes, the
dense grid of comm links from Saturn to Mercury had erupted into a furor,
buzzing and vibrating with questions, answers, expletives, exclamations,
proclamations, bad jokes and nervous posts.
All
Nigel Course and Lilly Fong could do now was wait…wait for the inevitable call
from UNISPACE Headquarters in Paris.
Four
hundred thousand kilometers from Farside, CINCSPACE General Mahmood Salaam had
been attending an awards dinner on the fifty-first floor of the
Quartier-General in Paris when his wristpad vibrated with an urgent
message.
It
was the first Level One NOTAP he had seen in his whole five-year tenure as
Commander-in-Chief of UNISPACE.
Salaam
studied the alert message: KB-1…Sentinel tripped…SenDef Three…large
formation moving toward the inner System…
The
Bengali commander sniffed. Somebody had Gateway probably flushed the
trash compactor when they shouldn’t have.
Still, it had to be checked out.
He
studied the ceremony program, calculating just when he could quietly exit the
proceedings without causing an uproar…or a diplomatic incident. Oscar
Amirante…ten years as a cycler captain aboard the Kepler…K-Dog, the
dockhands called it, Salaam chuckled softly at that…driving the old rattletrap on its never-ending bus
route…Earth-Mars-Venus, Earth-Mars-Venus, again and again and again. He figured Amirante was getting an award
for just maintaining his sanity.
Salaam
chose his moment and deftly slipped out of the auditorium. He rode the lift to the seventieth
floor. CINCSPACE suite. Also known as the Empire, to local wags.
At
his desk, he called up the full NOTAP.
No, this was no mistake, he quickly realized. As Salaam scanned the details, he realized
Farside had latched onto something, something big, whatever it was. You didn’t set SenDef Three and wake up half
the solar system for no reason.
Whatever
it was, Salaam knew, UNISPACE would be front and center.
CINCSPACE
figured he needed somebody to bounce ideas off of. Better get de Britt up and running, he
decided. His Chief of Staff, Ruyters de
Britt, was pure angel, currently residing in containment in an ornate New Delhi
pod that resembled Aladdin’s Lamp, a gift from his youngest daughter Miriam a
year ago. She’d always enjoyed watching
her four-star father summon forth angels and swarms from containment.
Salaam
waved his hand over a photoeye and the thing came alive instantly. Lights blinked on and a faint mist began
issuing from the spout of the lamp.
Five
minutes later, Colonel de Britt stood at attention before Salaam’s desk, a
near-perfect simulacrum of a mid-twentieth century Dutch naval officer. That had been Miriam’s idea too.
This
angel was good. By now, ANAD tech was
advanced enough so that there were no longer any edge effects. The angel’s hands and feet were as solid as
the rest of him. No pixellating. No motion tracking effects, with arms and
hands blurring out as the angel moved about.
You couldn’t tell, even on close inspection, that de Britt was nothing
but a para-human swarm entity.
We’ve come to
this,
Salaam realized. Real and virtual all mashed together…you can’t tell one from another. De Britt’s voice was deep and just slightly
atonal, like was talking out of a barrel.
***General Salaam, how may I be of assistance,
sir?***
Salaam
pressed a button on his wristpad, squirting the details of Farside’s NOTAP to
his chief’s processor. The angel
brightened slightly as the data went out.
“Chief,
this one’s big. Farside doesn’t send
NOTAPs without cause.”
De
Britt’s face seemed frozen for a second, as its processor crunched the
details. Then its officious smirk came
back…somebody’s idea of what a chief of staff should look like when awaiting
orders. Salaam could change the default
setting; he just hadn’t gotten around to it, what with all the awards
ceremonies and other busybody affairs he had to attend to.
***KB-1, sir…should I notify the rest of the
staff…command protocol calls for a briefing within two hours of receiving said
NOTAP.”
Salaam
leaned back in his chair and swiveled around far enough to watch the night time
spectacle of Paris out his windows. The
security screenbots dimmed slightly to avail a clearer view. He watched tourist jetcabs circle the Eiffel
Tower like so many moths drawn to a light.
“Yes,
Colonel, go ahead and set up a briefing.
Make it one hour from now…command briefing theater. And get me the status of all our ships beyond
Gateway, specifically Station P and T.
UNSAC will want to know what we’re doing about this.”
De
Britt nodded slightly. ***At once, sir…I am accessing UNISPACE
general registry now…accessing…accessing…Station P, Phobos, reports frigate UNS
Korolev is in dock, depot-level maintenance.
She is scheduled to be ready for duty in six weeks…plasma engines
currently undergoing teardown and level three upgrades***
“What
about Stations E and T? Anything we can
send out on twenty-four hours’ notice?”
De
Britt continued accessing. His face
cycled between the normal smirk and something that reminded Salaam of a
constipated salesman. ***Yes, sir…accessing…Station E reporting
frigate UNS Archimedes and corvette UNS Xerxes both at PSA…post-shakedown
availability. Both just returned from
shakedown following Level One overhaul and mission refits. Station T, Titan,
reporting frigate UNS Tycho within one week of full patrol readiness. Normal
mission load onboard and Gold Crew finishing up their quals and training
requirements in two days***
“Good,
de Britt. Good. Thanks.”
Salaam continued watching heavy night time traffic circle the 5th
Arrondisement below the Quartier-General.
The black of the Bois du Bologne lay off to his left, De Britt’s
reflection hovering in the window glass above his view of the huge park.
Tycho and Korolev.
Salaam pecked out a command on his wristpad, summoning the crew
rosters for both ships. Tycho was captained by one Jim Loudermilk,
the old dog. Korolev Gold Crew was Jeremy Lao’s boat and therein could be a
problem. Lao was a walking casualty,
nearly killed after a scoopship accident at Jupiter and he should have been
cashiered out of the service for the harebrained kamikaze stunt he had pulled
in the upper atmosphere of that gasbag planet.
But Lao had friends in high places and now he was skippering the Gold
Crew of a Frontier Corps patrol frigate out at Station T, the bleeding edge of
UNISPACE authority.
Sure don’t want
to send Lao to do a man’s job, Salaam thought. He stroked his black moustache, turned back
to de Britt. But I might have no other choice.
“Colonel,
I’ve got to send some eyes out to check out this ‘astronomical phenomena.’ But it’s ticklish. Worse, it’s political. Which means if I don’t send Lao and his Gold
Crew on some kind of mission soon, UNSAC will jump down my ass with both
feet. I don’t know how much longer I can
keep Lao bottled up at Station T with upgrades, new training requirements,
wargames and sims and more upgrades.”
De
Britt seemed sympathetic, but Salaam was reminded that any sympathy, indeed any
response by the angel, was an artifact.
Programmed in. A behavioral
module called up.
***Begging the
General’s pardon, sir, but Captain Lao has shown excellent marks in all recent
wargame exercises and training sims.
Perhaps an assignment of this magnitude, investigating a Level One NOTAP
in the outer system, would allow the Captain to demonstrate just how far his
command skills have come since his rehabilitation program concluded***
Salaam
sniffed. “Exactly. Give me the man enough rope and see if he’ll
hang himself, that’s what you’re saying.
Well, de Britt, you may just be right.
I’m following the book on this one.
Cut orders now for Korolev and Tycho to get underway in twenty-four
hours. Whatever this KB-1 thing is,
we’ve got to get some eyes on it.
Farside can’t tell us much more than something’s approaching the
Sentinel outer line, something big…like a swarm. If it’s our long-awaited friends, I can’t
think of any better welcoming party than Jim Loudermilk and Jeremy Lao. ‘Loud I don’t worry about…he’ll follow orders
and investigate before salvoing his big guns.
As for Lao…” Salaam just shook
his head, “…who knows what the man’ll do.”
De
Britt said, ***Perhaps such
unpredictability works to our advantage, sir, especially against an unknown
adversary***
“How
do you mean, Colonel?”
***Just this, sir…if Captain Lao is
unpredictable to us in his tactical responses to an unknown adversary, he
surely will be just as unpredictable to the adversary as well. As Sun Tzu has stated: “…that general is skillful
in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend, and he is skillful in
defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”***
Salaam
said, “Well spoken, Colonel. Just cut
the orders. And spit out an agenda for
that briefing too. I want to get the
troops in here by 2100 hours.”
Thirty
kilometers west of the Quartier-General, Solnet reporter Dana Polansky was
arguing with her daughter Jana about attending yet another Assimilationist
rally coming to Paris.
Not
for the first time, Dana wanted to throttle her daughter around the neck.
“No,
you absolutely cannot go to that rally.
And you’re not leaving this apartment dressed like that either, young
lady. Go put on something longer. And cover up your chest…I’m not raising a
hooker here.”
Jana protested, “Mom! All the girls at the academy
are wearing these—“ she stuck out her new leggings, the ones with holes in
strategic places and threw back her hair.
““Come on, Mom…come with me…it’ll be fun…we’ll have a great time…get to
see Symborg…isn’t he just so riff…and
watch all the freaks get vaporized…it’ll be a great day—“
Dana told her daughter to watch her
mouth. “That’s not funny. And they’re not freaks…just terribly
misguided. This is a serious thing, Jana…you
know that. I’ve tried to explain what
Assimilationists think and believe…the whole thing’s a serious threat and I
don’t want you to encourage them by showing up.”
“I’ll be one person out of a million,
Mom…nobody’ll notice. Plus I’m going
with friends. Come on…I want to go see
Symborg…in person. I want to see if he
can really change shape right in front of everybody—wouldn’t it be so cool to
be deconstructed and become an angel?”
“No it most certainly would not be ‘cool.’
And don’t you have some homework?
I haven’t seen you spend two minutes studying this afternoon.”
Jana was almost in tears. “You never let me spend any time with my
friends. This place is like jail.
They’re all going…why can’t I go, huh?
What did I do wrong?”
Dana was growing exasperated with her
daughter. Raising a teenager was tough
at any time but when you were a Solnet reporter and traveled most of the time,
it was especially difficult. She worked
hard to find the right balance…giving Jana enough space to be herself and have
a normal life but not enough to get into serious trouble. It was a high-wire act and most of the time,
Dana felt like she was already teetering off the wire.
“There’s nothing wrong with Symborg…or
the Assimilationists,” Jana insisted.
She grabbed a light jacket from the front closet of their appartement along the Avenue Emile Zola—not
two hundred meters from the Seine—and jerked open the front door. “You just don’t like him ‘cause he’s
popular…and he’s gorgeous too.”
“He’s a cloud of bots, Jana. It’s an act.
Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m going. I’m almost fourteen years old and I can
decide for myself—“
“Jana—so help me, if you—“
But Jana Polansky had already slipped
out the door. She stalked off down the
sidewalk, heading no doubt for the Metro stop a few blocks away. The Assimilationist rally was set for 8:00
that night, at the Place de la Concorde.
The Metro would get her there in half an hour, tops.
For a long minute, Dana glared at her
daughter’s back, noting with a combination of envy and worry Jana’s broad hips
and long legs. She’d certainly picked up
the ‘walk’ in recent years and she knew how to get attention, which wasn’t hard
for Jana. Her long blond curls and easy
smile did that. No boy ever stood a
chance.
Jeez,
she looks like a hooker, Dana thought.
At least, she looks
high-class…what the hell am I saying?
Dana slammed the door and bit her lip,
wondering if she ought to call the police.
She tried out a few sentences: my
daughter’s run off with a boy…she’s lost…she went to the big rally…she’s been
kidnapped by a cloud of bugs…none of them worked.
Then she remembered. The beige jacket. It was Jana’s favorite, the one with the
supple suede front, the fringe around the neck…almost elegant.
Even better, it was one of several
jackets that Dana had planted spybots on.
No, she wasn’t proud of that.
She’d sweet-talked a contact at UNIFORCE into loaning her a pair of the
things…they were the size of molecules, but contained within their
hundred-nanometer casings enough smarts and power to keep an eye on any subject
and send back visual and audio feeds over a distance of tens of
kilometers. And these were programmable
bots as well. One of them, the one
planted on Jana’s beige jacket, could be commanded to replicate into a Mobility
Obstruction Barrier, a MOBnet, that when fully expanded, would envelope the
wearer in a makeshift cocoon and immobilize them on the spot. With its locator beacon transmitting away, it
would then be a simple matter for police to track down the recalcitrant subject
and take them into custody.
Dana found the control pack in the back
of her little black clutch and set it up on the nightstand beside her bed. She turned the thing on, following the
on-screen instructions and then fiddled with a few knobs to activate the bot
and tune in to its transmission. After
some finagling with the imager, she studied the grainy image for a second…
Yep,
that was Brie…Jana’s
best friend, tapping out something on her wristpad. And there was Louelle, beyond her, putting on
some lipstick, eyeing her lips critically in a compact. Dana realized they were on the Metro, on a
train. Others shuffled in and out of the
picture.
Dana felt like a prying voyeur but she
couldn’t tear herself away from the images.
She tweaked more knobs and got a tinny sort of audio for her
efforts.
The train must be stopping. Passengers had begun standing, crowding
around the doors. The image shifted—Jana
was now standing too—and Dana could see big sheepish grins of anticipation on
Brie and Louelle’s faces.
“Come on…”Brie said. The girls dove out the door, pushing and
squeezing through the throng. Dana
strained to see better….
The whole affair was set to start at
eight that night, in the Place de la Concorde, with stages and lighting set up
around the great Obelisk at the center of the plaza. Even as they exited the Metro station at Concorde,
Jana, Brie and Louelle were crushed by the surging waves of the crowds, with
hundreds of thousands moving up the Champs Elysees from Tuilerie Gardens en
masse.
News drones and aerial porters circled
low overhead like black crows, and bright stage lighting had been erected all
around the Place, focusing attention on the huge Obelisk at the center—a long
ago gift from Egypt—and the theatrical stage built up around it. A cordon of gendarmes formed a tight security
perimeter around the stage and clustered in knots up and down the boulevard,
trying to keep some kind of order.
The crowd pushed forward, a single
organism with a single thought: get as close to Symborg as possible. As they were carried along, Dana spotted a
row of assimilator booths just this side of the stage. Manned by uniformed technicians, draped with
bunting, banners and flags from the Church of Assimilation, seeing the booths
send a chill down her spine and automatically, she tried to will Jana away from
them, back toward the center of the crowd.
Girl,
no way you should be going anywhere near those death traps.
Near on to eight o’clock, the girls had
parked themselves alongside the entrance to Rue Royale and the Hotel Crillon
beyond. Stage lighting started to strobe
and the crowd surged forth in anticipation.
Music from somewhere blasted across the promenade, a fanfare fit for a
king. Dana half expected to see a
horse-drawn carriage with imperial guards trotting alongside. Instead, a single man mounted the platform
and the lighting changed again, narrowing down to the single bright beam of a
spotlight.
In spite of herself, Dana felt a lump in
her throat. Assimilationists knew how to
put on a show.
It was Symborg. And the crowd, which had been jostling and
vibrating like a stirred pot, suddenly came alive.
Symborg acknowledged the crowds with a
wave and moved to the center microphone.
The angel was good, Dana could see that.
Very few edge effects…often, angels fuzzed out at their extremities,
where the swarm didn’t have good config control. This one was tight and dense over its entire
surface…only an occasional pop or flash in the torso area, one or two in the
face, gave away the fact that the angel was a para-human, a swarm of nanobots configged
to look human. In stature, he was a
smallish man, dark of color but that could be easily enough changed. In fact, Dana realized, it had changed. Now Symborg had acquired a lighter skin tone. Subtly lighter, to better blend in with the
crowd.
“PEOPLE
OF PARIS…THE TIME HAS COME FOR A CHANGE….”
His voice boomed out across the plaza and the crowd grew more and more
frenzied, pressing ever tighter against the police cordon.
The angel worked the crowd like a
practiced stage actor.
“PEOPLE OF
PARIS…WHAT IS IT THAT ASSIMILATION BRINGS?”
The response roared up out of the crowd
like a thing alive.
“PEJERU…PEJERU…PEJERU!!”
A radiant smile came to Symborg’s face,
beamed by cameras to screens throughout the rally ground.
“Peace.
Ecstasy. Joy. Enlightenment. Rapture.
Unity with the Mother Swarm. You
are right!”
The crowd roiled and throbbed like a
frenetic horde, as one, surging again and again against the stage and the
police barricade. Dana watched her
daughter’s friends with growing alarm.
Brie and Louelle chanted in unison with the crowd…PEJERU! PEJERU! It was a nonsense phrase, an acronym, but
it hypnotized both of them. Dana could
see it in their faces: the glazed eyes, the smiles frozen in place, their hands
punching the air in syncopated rhythm.
It gave her a chill. Her own daughter was caught up in this
madness.
The rally went on, with Symborg calling
for witnesses to come forth and soon long lines had formed at the assimilator
booths, lines of people waiting to die, to be de-constructed and absorbed into
the mother swarm. Despite the jostling
and shoving of the crowd, Dana’s eyes stayed with the image. Right beside her, Brie squirmed and squealed
like a teen-ager at a concert, bit by bit pushing her way ever forward toward
the stage. Louelle and Jana tried to stay close. Surrounding the plaza, giant screens, even
3-D renderings of Symborg’s face, lent an Olympian grandeur to the
gathering.
Dana paid little attention to Symborg’s
words. She was more concerned with the
girls’ reactions. In between following
Solnet coverage of the rally on her pad, she studied her daughter’s
surroundings with growing dread and alarm.
“…TAKE…AND
DRINK…AND YOU WILL KNOW THE LOVE OF THE MOTHER SWARM…”
For a moment, Dana wasn’t sure what
Symborg was referring to but then she saw the drones circling overhead, aerial
porters with trays of some kind of drink.
En masse, they swooped down to drop off paper cups to a sea of
outstretched hands.
That’s when Dana decided to trigger the
MOB feature on the control pack. She
stabbed the button and watched in growing horror as the image wobbled and
careened, then collapsed to the ground, graying out as trillions of bots
replicated into a mesh cocoon right in the middle of the crowd.
Oh my God, what
have I done…she could be trampled in that riot.
Checking her Solnet feed, she found a
dronecam view of the rally on one channel.
As she panned the scene, she saw a commotion along one edge of the
crowd. She had no control of the
dronecam…another reporter was covering the rally. But as the drone zoomed in, she could see a
small army of black-jacketed people carrying something that looked like a body
bag…with a start and a chill down her back, Dana realized it was Jana they were
carrying. Jana encased in a MOBnet,
writhing, thrashing, with the attendants forcing their way against the crowd
like a ship nosing through water.
She tried to swallow but her mouth was
dry.
Jana!
Dana Polansky watched for a moment as
the emergency detail emerged from the thickest part of the crowd and made for a
nearby church, along one edge of the plaza, along the Rue de Rivoli. It was an ornate, almost gothic building in
the shadow of the Hotel Crillon and Dana knew it had long ago been taken over
by the Assimilationists.
They were taking her daughter right
toward it!
Dana Polansky shivered, sprang out of
bed, grabbed a jacket from the closet, and dashed out the door of their
apartment, practically running, gesturing frantically for a taxi, trying to get
to that church as fast as she could, anyway she could…before something really
terrible happened.
No way was she going to let Jana fall
into the hands of those freaks.
So that’s the excerpt. I expect the full story to be done sometime
in the late spring of 2017. Look for it.
The next post will be on October 10.
See you then.
Phil B.
