Her walk ended at a large metal door that slid aside for them. The room beyond was a squashed sphere made of some gray alloy. The lights were a dim reddish-green color except for one spotlight that was a normal yellow-white. The spotlight illuminated a human-looking desk and an office chair that seemed of a piece with the rest of the room. Angel could think of no other reason for the bizarre architecture than to make the alien feel at home in the debriefing room.
The alien moved inside and the marines took posts by the sides of the door. “You have two hours, Miss Lopez. Any notes or recordings you make will have to be cleared through base security. If you need to leave the room for any reason, use the intercom in the desk.”
Angel nodded, took a deep breath, and followed the alien into the room. She tried not to jump when she heard the door slam shut behind her. She set the briefcase on the desk and sat down on the human style chair. It took her a few minutes to get comfortable. She kept shifting around on the seat until she realized that she was using it as an excuse not to look at the thing that was in the room with her.
Angel looked up and stared at her “Interviewee.” It had pooled itself into the lowest part of the room, and had pulled a good part of its mass up to be level with the desk and Angel’s eyes. It resembled a weathered cone made of semiliquid ivory.
Now what? How was she supposed to start this? Did these things understand English?
The alien answered for her by asking, “It is new, yes?” The voice was horrid, like a massive bass speaker suspended in crude oil. The voice rippled and bubbled as much as the flesh that created it.
It also sounded vaguely familiar.
“If you’re referring to me,” Angel said, regaining her composure, “yes, this is my first time here.”
“We never are interviewed by nonhumans before.”
“I suppose not.” Angel realized where she’d heard a similar voice—the mainframe at VanDyne.
“What do we discuss?”
“I’m supposed to talk to someone who was involved with VanDyne Industrial.”
“Someone?”
“You were involved with VanDyne, right?”
“I am political observer for that corporate unit.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Do not understand. Your language is difficult.”
“What did you do for VanDyne?”
There were a few moments while the creature seemed to digest the question. Angel began to realize that this wasn’t going to be easy.
“I watch.”
Angel sighed and put her head in her hands. “What do you watch?”
“The politics, the media, the video. I collect data for Octal analysis.”
Okay, Angel thought, I’m talking to a professional couch potato. At least it looks the part.
She only had a couple of hours to talk to this thing. She’d better start hitting him with what she came here to find out. “You controlled VanDyne, right?”
“The Octal controls all corporate units.”
“No, I meant—” Angel shook her head. “Never mind, you answered my question.” VanDyne had been an alien enterprise, and this creature had been a part of it. “Did VanDyne employ anything other than—” What was that name? “The Race?”
“You are referring to Earth species?”
Angel nodded.
“Race operations are morally bound to employ native species.”
“Huh? Run that by me again.”
“Direct involvement is anathema. We do not intervene physically.”
The bubbling accent was making the creature hard to understand. Angel wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “You’ve got to be bullshitting me—”
“Bullshit?”
“—if you semiliquid motherfuckers are responsible for half the shit you’ve been accused of. There are riots out there . . .” Angel took a few deep breaths. She needed to calm down. Stress and lack of sleep was eating at her nerves. The fact that the ammonia smell from this thing was giving her the first throbs of an oncoming migraine wasn’t helping her composure.
“You do not understand. All Race does is rearrange assets to our advantage. Any Race who does more than this is ended. This is law.”
Angel wished that the Fed handed out programs with the aliens. Hard enough making sense out of that verbal slurry when she knew what it was talking about. “Okay, let’s back up. All you Race do is ‘rearrange assets?’”
“We do no harm to sentients—”
“But you fuck with the economy?”
“We analyze the social structure and feed the variables that give us the outcome we desire.”
She remembered her talk with Steve the sociologist on the flight out here. These things were running the whole sociopolitical structure of the planet like a giant computer program. According to the sociologists’ charts, they’d been doing so since the turn of the century. “What was the outcome you desired?”
“We prevent any social unit from attaining the social, political, or technological inclination to leave its solar system.”
Angel thought of what she knew of the history of the past half-century. The implications were staggering. “So what you people do, you buy politicians, right?”
“We fund appropriate people and organizations.”
“Terrorists, right?”
The creature was silent for a moment. Then it said, “The fine distinction your language makes between political units is difficult to understand. We fund the appropriate variables to manipulate the political structure.”
“Jesus-fucking-Christ, you buy terrorists and you say you don’t harm sentients?”
The creature sat there, white, rippling, impassive.
“How many wars are you people responsible for?”
“War?”
Angel stood up on the chair, but she restrained herself from shouting. “Wars. Like the ‘rearrangement of assets’ in Asia, when Tokyo got nuked—that kind of thing.”
“I apologize. Again, the way you discriminate arbitration between political units is difficult to discern. Language is difficult.”
“Well, how many ‘arbitrations’ are your fault?”
“During my Earth operation, I know of no large negotiation between political units unfavorable to the program objective.”
Angel sat down very slowly. “You are saying all of—”
“I know no details of the Asian operation. But until we are captured, no major political negotiation ended unfavorably. The assumption is the Asian operation is successful.”
“Those ‘negotiations’ have killed a hundred million people,” Angel whispered. Suddenly her problems seemed petty.
It all boils down to the end justifying the means, don’t it? That attitude is almost human.
If she had any idea of what to grab, she would have tried to strangle the thing.
She shook her head. No wonder the Fed tried to keep such a lid on these things. This kind of shit would fuck with everyone’s mind. There were a lot of people out there who wouldn’t like to think their glorious war for national whatever was the result of some alien pushing buttons.
The whole Pan-Asian war, an effing “political negotiation.” Kinda helped put things in perspective. Against her will, Angel found herself laughing.
“I do not understand,” said the creature.
“I suppose you wouldn’t. I was just thinking that I should thank you.”
“What thanks?”
“Well, if not for you and your buddies, I probably wouldn’t exist. If it wasn’t for the war boom in genetic engineering—” She shook her head and wondered if the thing she was talking to could even understand the concept of irony. “Back to VanDyne . . .”
“VanDyne,” repeated the creature.
“This was what VanDyne was for, right? Shifting
assets?”
“Correct.”
“What kind of assets?”
“Technological assets. Informational assets—”
“Information?”
“Correct.”
“What kind of information?”
Chapter 25
Angel took the full two hours with the alien. The attempt to pry comprehensible facts out of the creature was exhausting. It didn’t help that she had a constant feeling that, any time after the first fifteen minutes of the conversation, the Fed was going to burst in all over the place and she was going to disappear under a swarm of anonymous Fedboys chanting, “National Security.”
She kept feeling that even as the Sikorsky took her and the academics up over the bay.
Somewhere there was a recording of her conversation with the alien. Somewhere a bored security official was reviewing the interviews with the captive aliens. Sometime soon, that official was going to reach the last interview. Angel knew that, fifteen minutes from then, all hell was going to break lose.
Because, once someone actually looked at the stuff she’d talked to that blob about, that someone was going to call Washington. When they were told who she was—
Her only hope was to get out of the Presidio before that happened.
Information, she’d asked the alien. What kind?
The alien’s long rambling answer took a long time for her to decipher, but she now knew what Byron Dorset carried for a living.
If anything, that knowledge made things worse.
VanDyne dealt in a lot of things before the Fed took it over. The most important “assets” the Race “moved” from VanDyne Industrial were predictions. Very specific predictions.
The Race had stepped a few centuries beyond Steve the sociologist’s sinusoidal curves. With their programs and the monster computer they kept at VanDyne, they could give demographic projections for any political unit you could name. They could have projections up to a decade in advance that came within a few points. They could tell you what the economy would look like, what technical areas would be advancing. They could predict the crime rate, the birthrate—everything from beer sales to the number of Masters of Science Degrees in biological engineering that would be awarded in 2077. But the point wasn’t prediction.
The Race’s programs weren’t passive. They were dynamic. They knew what “variables” to “feed” to achieve a favorable outcome.
In some cases those outcomes were elections.
Every four years, they were presidential elections.
Angel stared out at the sun rising behind Oakland. She had to get out from under the Fed. Even though the security teams controlling Alcatraz only debriefed her to the extent of making sure that she wasn’t smuggling out some record of the interview, somewhere—maybe right now—there’d be a review of whatever record the Fed made of her interview.
The magnitude of what Byron had been doing made Angel shudder.
The ramcards she was carrying were a step-by-step formula for a candidate to win the 2060 American presidential election. The way the aliens worked, it was possible, in fact it was likely, that the current head of state, President Merideth, had been a VanDyne client during his last run.
This was heavy shit.
Worse, she could see evidence of it in the current race. Not since the first few decades of the century had there been such a chaotic grab for the presidency. For decades it had been the Democrats and the Constitutionalists and the occasional independent.
This year, candidates were coming out of the woodwork to challenge President Merideth. Third parties—Libertarians, Greens, the NOA party—were actually getting percentages and major vid attention. Even the Republicans were making noises about running a candidate for the first time since the party collapsed in ’04.
Maybe the chaos was because this was the first election in six decades that wasn’t running according to a program.
It was becoming obvious that President Merideth had a much clearer picture of the “alien threat” than he was letting on in his media crusade. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that the takeover of VanDyne followed so close on the heels of the incident at the Nyogi tower. The aliens became public in January, and within a month VanDyne was captured.
Angel could picture the scene. The government clamps down on the aliens infecting Nyogi, very very publicly. The aliens running VanDyne get nervous and try to use their Holy Grail as a bargaining chip in an election year. It was a decent threat—lay off our people or someone else gets your job.
Merideth was in a bind. The aliens had been blown all over the media. He wouldn’t have known the nature of the beings running VanDyne until then. Suddenly he was being blackmailed by creatures who didn’t have the best interests of the country at heart.
So, to keep his relation with these things secret, and to keep the data out of the hands of his opponents, he stomps VanDyne.
Unfortunately, for all concerned, he stomps it a little late.
Byron was left stranded with the info when VanDyne was raided. The information was already out there and the memory of the big brain at VanDyne was scragged.
What does Byron do?
Angel shook her head. Byron got greedy, that’s what he did. Back in February he could have sold the info to whoever VanDyne had slated to get it—probably Alexander Gregg, the Constitutionalist front-runner—and pocketed the whole shebang.
But no, he waited for the field to get muddy out there. There were a dozen credible candidates out there now, with little sign of winnowing a year before the election. It was anarchy at the polls—and Byron tried to auction off the election.
No wonder he got creamed.
That being the case, now what?
She could ditch the cards, wipe them, scrag the data, and let this laughable excuse for democracy continue without outside interference. That might score some spiritual victory, but it would probably get her furry hide nailed to a wall. No one would believe that she’d erased the stuff, least of all the Knights and whoever they worked for—they’d already gotten one blank set of tickets. They would strip her apart until she told them where the real set was. The moreaus would probably just kill her out of frustration.
Not only that, but she’d lost that option when Mr. K copied the data. Whatever she did with the Earthquakes’ tickets in her pocket—the data was still out there.
At least none of the players knew that. Angel hoped they all assumed the encryption would keep her from copying the data. She hoped none of them knew about Mr. K.
No. Everybody believed she had the only set of this crap. So, the only way she had to get out from under this was to consummate the deal with somebody. If the players after her knew the deal was done, they might give up on trying to trash her ass.
She had to sell the shit or she was going to become very dead. She had to hand off this hot potato, and get the hell out of San Francisco.
To whom, though?
Not to the Knights—ever. Not the moreaus either. They were the ones that offed Byron in the first place. Merideth? That was a possibility, but she was afraid right now of being swallowed up in the name of national security. She doubted she could arrange anything with the Fed without quietly disappearing off the face of the Earth afterward.
So what was she going to do?
She pulled out the tickets and watched them glint in the dawn light streaming through the Sikorsky’s window. Rainbows shot by the holographic Earthquakes’ logo. Again, she damned Byron for handing these off to her. She wondered if the data had always been disguised as these tickets, or if Byron was just playing on her love of the game.
“The Denver game,” Angel whispered to herself.
“Tonight, isn’t it?” said her neighbor, Steve the sociologist, without looking up from the keyboard in his lap.
“Four p.m. November 16, Hunterdome—”
She had called one set of people the folks from Denver because she figured that Byron had set a meet for that game. Whoever the Denver folks were, they were high up on her list because they hadn’t yet managed to stomp her or someone close to her.
It gave her a chance.
Besides, she wanted to see the damn game.
She watched the mutilated golf course grow beneath the Sikorsky. She almost expected a ring of army officers, marines, or cops around the landing area. Something was going to blow—she could feel it.
But nothing seemed amiss at the impromptu air base. She couldn’t see anything wrong in the ranks of Sikorskys, air-cranes, and the dozens of aircars. None of the numerous people wandering around below her seemed to be giving much attention to the landing helicopter. As their copter made a turn to approach the landing area, her gaze passed over temporary buildings, warehouses, the gravel lot where she had been directed to park.
She only got a glimpse of the parking lot.
“Excuse me,” she said to the sociologist as she stepped over him. She bolted to the other side of the helicopter, feeling the first stirrings of panic. The other side of the helicopter had come about, and now had the parking lot barely in view. Even at a very skewed angle, she could see it.
What the fuck was Byron’s BMW doing here?
A lot of the academics had turned to look at her. The sociologist character was telling her she better strap in for the landing.
The BMW meant those moreaus were here. Not on the base—the parking lot was outside the secure perimeter—but somewhere nearby. There were four of them, moreaus, combat strains. They were capable of taking out a fox trained in counterterrorist tactics unarmed.
They probably weren’t unarmed now.
Four against one, and all she was armed with was an empty briefcase.
Dust blew by the windows as the Sikorsky landed. There was a thump that almost knocked her over, and the copter was on the ground. She had been gripping the chair so tightly that it hurt her knuckles to let go.
The rotors slowed and came to a stop. She stayed by the windows as the doors opened and the passengers began offloading. Where were they?