Vortex

  Isaac’s smile disappeared and a cold light came into his eyes, a light even I could see. “It doesn’t matter what I want. It never did! I didn’t ask to be injected with Hypothetical biotechnology when I was in my mother’s womb. I didn’t ask to be cycled through the temporal Arch, I didn’t ask to be brought back to life when I was decently dead. What I wanted was never germane. It isn’t now. My neural functions are shared with processors embedded in the Network. I’m chained to Vox, I can’t exist without it, and Vox is about to be consumed by something … incomprehensible.” He made a visible effort to control himself. “The Hypotheticals don’t care about anything as trivially brief as a human life. It’s the Coryphaeus that interests them. When the Hypothetical machines reach Vox, they’ll absorb the Coryphaeus and dismantle Vox Core. Nothing human will survive.”

  I said, “How do you know that?”

  “I can’t talk to the Hypotheticals—I’m not what Oscar thinks I am—but I can hear them ticking out in the dark. Not their thoughts—their appetites.” His face went slack and he closed his eyes—listening, maybe. Then he shook his head and looked at Turk. “You were there when I was in pain. Not because you thought I was a god. Not because you could use me. Not like the doctors, hovering over me like crows over carrion.”

  “That’s little enough,” Turk said.

  “If you can save yourselves, I want to help. That’s also little enough.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  A trace of a smile returned to his face, but it was bitter. “If I can’t leave, I might be able to hide. I’ve been trying to create a protected space inside the Network. Not for my body but for my self. I mean to try. But the Hypotheticals are very powerful. And the Coryphaeus … the Coryphaeus is insane.”

  * * *

  The Coryphaeus is insane.

  As Treya I hadn’t given the Coryphaeus much thought. Few of us did. The Coryphaeus was an abstraction, a name for the processors that quietly and invisibly mediated between Network and node. Our teachers had shown us a diagram to explain it:

  —and that was as much as we had ever wanted or needed to know. The system was stable, self-protecting, self-perpetuating, and it had worked flawlessly for five centuries. What could it mean, then, to say that the Coryphaeus had gone mad?

  The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn’t mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider.

  That conflict was being played out in the surveillance and infrastructure systems that bound together our lives and our technology; it was being played out in the limbic interfaces and private emotions of everyone who wore a node. “What makes it especially dangerous,” Isaac said, “is that we can’t predict the result. The most likely outcome is an asymptotic trend toward self-destructive behavior in both the organic and inanimate aspects of the system.” He added, “It’s already happening … more quickly than I anticipated.”

  I asked him what he meant, then wished I hadn’t.

  “The end of Vox is days away. That means there’s no need for a surplus food supply. Or surplus people, if they’re not a willing part of the process.” He looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to meet our eyes. “The Coryphaeus is killing the last of the Farmers.”

  * * *

  I refused to believe it until I had seen evidence. As soon as Isaac left I rode vertical transit to one of the high towers and found a panoramic window. It was night, but the sky was unusually clear and the moon was bright on the northern horizon.

  The Farmers had lived in the hollow spaces under the outlying islands of the Vox archipelago. They had numbered about thirty thousand souls before the rebellion—fewer, but at least half that many, after.

  Now: none.

  The out-islands were sinking. The Coryphaeus had cut them loose from the central island and opened their ancient accessways to the sea.

  Any Farmers who survived the initial flooding, perhaps by climbing to the highest tiers of their enclosures, were dying as I watched. The Ross Sea drew the islands down in great upwellings of violet-colored froth. Geysers of water erupted from severed transit tunnels and ports. Cliffs of salt-encrusted granite heaved up dripping from the poisonous sea, then turned and settled beneath it forever, leaving oily residue and the tangled branches of dead forests.

  I stood there for most of an hour, too shocked even to weep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SANDRA AND BOSE

  Bose took her past the place where Orrin had once rented a room. It was a five-story walk-up in a part of town you drove through with your doors locked: windows like eyes shut against the sullen indifference of the heat-stricken street, a doorway littered with broken syringes. Up in one of those rooms, Sandra thought, in the long afternoons before the night shift began, Orrin must have patiently filled his notebooks, page by page, day after day. “You think he came back here?”

  “No,” Bose said. “But I don’t know how well Orrin knows the rest of the city. He has forty dollars in his pocket and I doubt he ever hailed a cab in his life. He’s taking transit and he might have decided to stick to the route he knows.”

  “Route to where?”

  “To the Findley warehouse,” Bose said.

  * * *

  So they followed the bus routes Orrin once would have taken to work, hot streets clotted with traffic under a sky dark with thunderheads. The afternoon light was fading by the time Bose turned off into a neighborhood of single-story industrial buildings set back in lifeless yellow lawns. The buildings housed small manufacturers and regional distributors, none of which seemed especially prosperous.

  Bose parked in the lot of a corner gas station with a coffee-and-doughnut shop attached to it. Sandra said, “Are we close to the warehouse?”

  “Close enough.”

  Bose suggested coffee. The restaurant, if she could dignify it with that name, held a dozen small tables, all vacant. The windowsills were dusty and the green linoleum was peeling where the floor met the walls, but at least the place was air-conditioned. “Better get something to eat,” Bose said. “We might be here a while.” She ended up carrying a muffin and coffee to a corner table. From this angle she could see the street, the long row of anonymous buildings on the far side, the threatening sky. Was one of these buildings the Findley warehouse?

  Bose shook his head: “The Findley warehouse is around the corner and a couple of long blocks down, but the nearest bus stop is just across the street—see it?”

  A rusty transit sign bolted to a light standard, a concrete bench tagged with ancient graffiti. “Yes.”

  “If Orrin comes by bus, that’s where he’ll get off.”

  “So we’re just going to sit here and wait for him?”

  “You’re going to sit here. I’m going to scout around the neighborhood in case he got here ahead of us, though I doubt that. I don’t really expect him until after dark.”

  “You’re basing this on what, intuition?”

  “Did you finish reading Orrin’s document?”

  “Not all of it. Not yet.”

  “You have it with you?”

  “A printout. In my bag.”

  “Why don’t you read the rest of it, and we’ll talk about it when I get back.”

  * * *

  She read it while Bose did his drive-around, and she was within a few pages of the end when he pulled back into the lot. He parked behind the restaurant’s Dumpster where the car would be hard to see from the street—an act of prudence or paranoia, she thought. “Find anything?” she asked when he came through the door.

  “Nope.” He ordered another coffee and a sandwich and she heard him ask the w
oman behind the counter, “You mind if we sit here a while more?”

  “Sit as long as you like,” she said. “We do most of our business at lunch. It’s mainly drive-through after three. Make yourselves comfortable. Long as you buy a little something now and then.”

  “There’s a tip in it for you if you keep a fresh pot brewing.”

  “We’re not allowed to accept tips for counter service.”

  “I’ll never tell,” Bose said.

  The woman smiled. “Looks like the rain’s starting. Good time to be indoors.”

  Sandra saw the first fat drops strike the restaurant window. Moments later, water was washing down the glass in quavery sheets. Rain bounced from the steaming asphalt of the parking lot, and the scent of moist, tepid air seeped under the door.

  Bose peeled a layer of plastic wrap off his sandwich. “You finished Orrin’s story?”

  “Just about.”

  “You understand why I think he’s headed here?”

  She nodded tentatively. “Orrin—or whoever wrote this—obviously knows a few things about the Findley family. Whether they’re true or not is a different question.”

  “I’m more concerned with what’s going on in Orrin’s head than what’s true. Remember what he told Ariel? ‘Tonight’s the night.’”

  “He has unfinished business. Or at least he thinks he does.”

  “Right. What he doesn’t know is that Findley and his people are on high alert. There are private security cars parked all around the perimeter of the warehouse.”

  “Private security? What, like Brinks?”

  “No, not like Brinks. These guys aren’t bonded and they don’t advertise.”

  Sandra shivered and told herself it was because of the sudden damp in the air.

  Outside, in the flooding rain, a city bus pulled up. A puddle had formed around a blocked storm drain and the bus’s wheels splashed the three indifferent blue-collar guys who were waiting for it. They got on. Nobody got off. The bus pulled away.

  “Orrin could get hurt,” she said.

  “We see him, we take him back to Ariel and make sure they both get out of town. That’s the plan. If he gets past us there’s really nothing we can do.”

  The wind picked up. There was one tree on the entire street—a spindly sapling on the lawn that hedged the sidewalk—and it bent before the storm like an arthritic pensioner. The restaurant’s plate-glass windows rattled.

  Sandra found her thoughts returning to the scar on Bose’s body and the story of his father’s death in India. “Those thieves who broke into your father’s place in Madras,” she said.

  He gave her a startled look. “What about them?”

  “What were they after?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “I’m curious.” I’m entitled to be, Sandra thought.

  Silence. Then: “Maybe you guessed. They were after the drugs.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “The kind of drugs you seem to think they were after. Martian drugs.”

  “Because your father wasn’t just an engineer, he was involved with Fourths.”

  “He despised the people who were only interested in longevity. He hated the word. He used to say it wasn’t longevity that mattered, it was maturity.”

  “Your mother knew about this?”

  “My mother was the one who recruited him.”

  “I see. So the scar…”

  “What about it?”

  “I didn’t get out of med school without a course in anatomy. Unless the knife that cut you had a blade under an inch long, it would have damaged major organs. Not usually a survivable wound, especially if you had to wait for help.”

  She was so accustomed to Bose’s perpetual calm that she was startled when he wouldn’t meet her eyes. After a time he said, “It was my mother’s decision.”

  Sandra had come to this surmise last night, but it was still slightly shocking to hear him admit it. “To give you the Martian treatment, you mean.”

  “As a last resort. For the purpose of saving my life. It was a hugely controversial decision, among the people who knew about it. But I didn’t have a choice—I was comatose when it happened.”

  Cellular technology engineered by the Martians from samples of Hypothetical debris, grown in bioreactors and injected into his damaged body, repairing it, working in him even now … She recalled something he’d said just a couple of mornings ago: Once the biotech infiltrates your cells, it’s there for good. Some people find that idea abhorrent.

  This body she had touched: not wholly human.

  “That’s why you care so much about Findley’s import business.”

  “Findley and the people he works for are corrupting and debasing something that might be vital to the future of all of us. They’re more than ordinary criminals. They’re the kind of people who’ll commit murder—not for the sake of a few extra years of life, which might be understandable, but for the privilege of retailing it.”

  “Like the people who killed your father.”

  “Exactly like.”

  A fresh pulse of rain rattled the window. The streetlights had come on, serial halos of yellow light. Bose reached over the table to touch her hand, but she drew it away without thinking.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  TURK’S STORY

  1.

  Isaac Dvali visited us once more before our planned escape. As before, he screened us from the Network’s embedded sensors, but I wondered whether there wasn’t one surveillance device still operational—namely, my own node. If the Coryphaeus wanted to know what was happening, couldn’t it just look through my eyes?

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking of the Coryphaeus as a personality,” Isaac said. “It isn’t. And it can’t do what you’re suggesting.”

  “Still … it’s in my head.”

  “Not to spy on you. Vigilance is a Network function. The Coryphaeus will try to influence your emotions and your unconscious beliefs, but it hasn’t established full connectivity yet. For now it can’t act except through the agency of other people. If it wants to speak to you, it will have to use someone else’s voice.”

  “You think it might do that? Speak to me?”

  “I think it will do anything in its power to keep you from leaving.”

  * * *

  We finalized our plans, simple as they were. Allison and I would travel separately to the high tier that housed the military aircraft. We would need one of the larger vehicles to get to the Indian Ocean and past the Arch without refueling. There wouldn’t be a posted guard at the aircraft bays—there was little need for guard details in a tightly Networked community—but civilians or technicians who happened to be present might try to interfere with us, especially if the Coryphaeus figured out what we were up to. Once we were aboard I would attempt to pilot our ship out of the docking bays. If we got that far, it should be possible to isolate the vehicle (and my node) from any signals originating from Vox Core.

  During this time Isaac would be shielding us from the attention of the Coryphaeus. Whether he had enough influence to leverage our escape was an open question, but it might at least improve the odds.

  Isaac stood up to leave. He hesitated at the door of the suite, fragile child and luminous monster in equal parts, and asked almost wistfully whether we had any more questions. I said no. Allison shook her head.

  “Please be careful,” he said, giving me a studying look. “The deeper the node embeds itself, the better the Coryphaeus knows you. On some level, it’s already negotiating with you. Sooner or later it will offer you something you want. And you might find it hard to say no.”

  * * *

  In the remaining hours I practiced operating Oscar’s Network toys, reassuring myself that I could get the appropriate response from them at least nine times out of ten. I could already interact fairly confidently with the ordinary Networked control surfaces (video feeds, temperature controls, etc.) in the suite. A military aircraft was a vastly m
ore complicated device, but it didn’t need more from its pilot than a reliable communication of intent. I figured I was just about good enough to give it that.

  I slept a few hours while Allison kept an eye on the video feeds. The murder of the Farmers had made her somber and deeply wary. Newsfeeds reported minor outbreaks of violence throughout Vox Core: A woman had committed suicide by leaping from the high wall of a housing tier. A man had stabbed his infant daughter with a kitchen knife. Waves of conflicting emotions were propagating almost too quickly for the Coryphaeus to identify and extinguish them. And there was worse news. Allison shook me awake: “You have to look at this,” she said.

  I followed her out of the bedroom. What she wanted to show me was fresh video from an overflight of the Hypothetical machines. As the sequence began, the Hypothetical machines were crawling through a dry glacial valley toward the shore of the Ross Sea. No doubt they were closer to us than they had been the day before, but otherwise there seemed to be nothing unusual about the image. The angle of vision altered subtly as the drone continued to circle beyond the safe limit. I wondered what I ought to be looking for—and then it was obvious. Suddenly, simultaneously, all the Hypothetical structures began to deform and dissolve.

  Almost at once, there was nothing on the ground where the machines had been but a dense gray fog. The camera zoomed in until fog filled the entire screen, not fog anymore but a granular swarm of small objects. I used my Network skills to overlay a scale gauge in metric units. It told me the objects were all uniformly sized, each one a little more than a centimeter on its longest axis.

  Which only confirmed what I already knew: these were the same crystalline butterflies that had swarmed the vanguard expedition in the Wilkes Basin—now in vastly greater numbers. The Hypothetical machines must have converted their entire mass into this form.