“No bio,” Hack said.
“It finds tech-mech?” I asked.
He just looked at me.
“Part tech-mech, part bio?” I asked.
“Not bio.” Hack pointed to his targeting device. “You look. See what I mean.”
“Good.” I sat on the stool built into his apparatus. He adjusted the goggles over my eyes and slid a comm into my ear. When he set a neural cap on my head, though, I yanked off the goggles and pulled away the cap.
“What the hell.” I shook the neural cap at him. “You don’t put prongs in my brain.”
“You got to connect,” Hack said. “To the mesh.”
I had absolutely no desire to have him insert neural probes through my scalp into my brain. Gods only knew where this cap came from. It wasn’t something labs just threw away. “You make this?”
“Got from a good place,” Hack said.
“Don’t tell me.” I didn’t want any more knowledge of their criminal activity. I couldn’t turn them in, not if I wanted anyone here to trust me, but if I didn’t, I became an accessory. After silently going through my arsenal of cuss words, I said, “You sterilize the prongs?”
“Always.” Hack looked offended that I even thought I had to ask.
I pulled the goggles back over my eyes. “Go ahead.”
He fit the cap onto my head, and I winced as the filaments delicately inserted themselves into my head. I sat, submerged in darkness. Gradually I became aware of a hum. When I laid my palm against the body of the probe, it vibrated against my skin.
“Point the gun,” Hack said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Anywhere.”
Strange. I aimed at the wall.
“Shoot,” Hack said.
“Shoot what? No bullets.”
“Not shoot bullets at my wall,” Hack said, annoyed.
“Then what?”
“Just shoot.”
Well, what the hell. I pushed the firing stud. Nothing happened.
“Broken,” I said.
“Try again.”
I fired again. Still nothing—no, wait. The darkness had become—what? Fluid? I concentrated, and it seemed to congeal. My head was starting to ache.
“Shoot more,” Hack said.
I pushed the firing stud. The sense of thickening pressing in on my thoughts. My head throbbed. The darkness felt ugly. Vicious. It turned around—
—and saw me.
“Ah!” I ripped off the goggles. “Off!”
Hack immediately set about removing the cap. I would have yanked it off too, except jerking neural fibers out of your brain was a seriously bad idea. Hack was no amateur, though, and within moments, he’d removed the cap.
“Gods almighty!” I stood up, staring at him. “Is that real? Or a bad cap?” If I were lucky, what I’d detected was no more than an artifact of his cobbled-together machine.
“Real,” Hack said. “Different caps, remade machine, same result.”
“It feels—” I paused. Feels what? “Alive.”
“Yah,” he said. “Sort of.”
“Feels wrong,” Ruzik said.
It reminded me of the Lock, but with a malevolence I hadn’t sensed from that ancient EI. I had trespassed in the Lock corridor so it pushed me out, end of story. This felt inimical to human life.
“It’s an EI,” I said.
“Whose?” Ruzik asked.
“No clue,” I said.
“Not EI,” Hack said. “EI doesn’t hate. Just exists.”
I thought of Max and his emotions. “Simulates.”
“That wrongness,” Ruzik said. “Real. Not sim.”
It had felt genuine to me, too, a force of malice. I saw now why they thought it was “in the rock,” but that couldn’t be right. It had to exist as more than stone.
“Must be somewhere,” I said.
“You find,” Ruzik told me.
“Why me?” I was no cyber-rider. “Hack knows more.”
“Not about how to search,” Hack said. “You know how. You look at things. Creep around. Hassle people. Find hints.”
It wasn’t the most flattering description of my work, but I got his point. I solved puzzles for a living. I didn’t know as much about the tech, but maybe I could put together clues they didn’t see.
I motioned at the probe. “It works how?”
“Uses hidden bits.” Hack held up three fingers. “Three bits.”
That could mean anything. “Bits of what?”
He scooped up three rocks from the ground and dropped one. “Lightest.” He dropped the second. “Heavier.” He dropped the third. “Heaviest.”
I squinted at him. “Got no idea what you mean.”
He spun around and strode out of the chamber, back into his den. I followed and found him watching the news holos from Cries that rotated above the sawed off stump of rock. He flicked his finger through the screen below the holos and they vanished. More flicks, and he brought up an image of wave oscillations. It had been years since my student days, and I couldn’t recall where I had seen those patterns. No, wait, I did remember. It was the waveform created by a superposition of tau, muon, and electron neutrinos as they oscillated from one form to another. Glyphs scrolled across the pedestal, defining the feed. He had linked to an Earth database that listed Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald as the winners of something called the Nobel Prize for their work on neutrino oscillations.
I looked from the holo to Hack, to the holo, back to Hack. “You understand this?”
“Yah.” He seemed surprised by the question. “Three bits. Three kinds. Mixed up.”
He couldn’t be saying he understood particle physics. “How know that?”
“I learn.”
I didn’t see how. The theoretical treatment of neutrino oscillations required knowledge of quantum mechanics and partial differential equations, and that was just a start. “Math, too?”
“Math, yah. Easier than reading.”
I stared at him. “Quantum physics is easier than reading?”
“Eh?”
“You know what waveform mean? Eigenstate? Hamiltonian operator? Superposition?”
He scowled at me. “Jibber words. You make up.”
“Not jibber. Math.”
“Not my math.”
“Fine.” I scowled back at him. “Show me your math.”
He tapped the pedestal and the neutrinos disappeared. As he continued entering codes, new holos appeared, simple waves like the eigenfunctions for a particle in a box. He cycled through ever more complex images. He was showing me the solutions to equations of mathematical physics using symbols unlike anything I had seen in my classes.
Hack waved his hand through his holo equations. “My math.”
“You figured all that out?”
“Some. Get ideas from mesh places.”
“Gods,” I murmured. In Hack, was I seeing an echo of our ancestors? They had struggled to decipher the libraries left by an alien race, strange knowledge they used with limited understanding. They developed technology based on what they learned, as evidenced by the Locks and Izu Yaxlan, but the way they applied scientific theories was so strange, we had trouble deciphering their machines. Their knowledge disappeared in the Dark Ages that followed the fall of the Ruby Empire. We had to relearn everything, and the second time around we did it the way humans thought rather than using alien formulations. However, our gene pool had to include the descendants of those geniuses who unraveled the alien libraries. Hack might be a throwback to that time. Hell, from what I’d seen, so was the Ruby Pharaoh. It didn’t surprise me that such brilliance occurred in people with pronounced Kyle traits; their abilities derived from an increased number of neural structures in their brain. Instead of ancient libraries from some unknown species, however, Hack had to work with another “alien” source—the rest of humanity.
“You get help from interstellar meshes?” I asked.
“Yah.” He shrugged. “Code says Knights got to
read. So I read.”
I read. Two simple words—and they contained a world of triumph. In a culture where simple literacy was rare, Hack had learned to read at a level beyond what even most educated Skolians could manage. He had no idea what he had done; he was just down here working in his cyber den.
Hack waved at his holos. “You know this?”
“Some.” I kept a working knowledge of the tools I used, including the methods I used to hide from spying Majdas. In recent years, neutrino detection had become more feasible for smaller devices like my shroud. Electron neutrinos affected matter differently than tau or muon neutrinos, but all their interactions were tiny. In previous centuries, they had to pass through a lot of matter, like an entire freaking planet, before the effects added up enough to measure. Now we had better ways to investigate their behavior, enough to untangle their history from their waveforms. Some neutrinos went through most anything, including solid rock, and some didn’t. We could read their history from how they interacted in the background flux of neutrinos. It offered a powerful probe. Top-end shrouds interfered with that probe, blurring the history. It was why I had sprung for one of the most expensive jammers available, to hide me from neutrino detectors as well as more mundane sensors.
If Hack had done what I thought, that meant he had created a neutrino detector from a dismantled pulse rifle, salvaged lasers, a music amplifier, and a top-of-the-line shroud. I’d known he was one hell of a cyber-rider, but this went beyond even the best wizards.
“Your thing.” I motioned toward the smaller chamber that housed his device. “Detector?”
He considered the name. “Yah, detects.”
“What? Solid?”
“Not solid.” He stood watching the quantum waveforms shimmer above his holo pedestal. I could almost feel him struggling for the words. “Mesh.”
“It detects the mesh?” That didn’t make sense. The mesh was everywhere, easy to detect.
He turned to me. “Mesh shadows.”
“What is a mesh shadow?”
“Shake back and forth.”
“Don’t understand.”
He waved his hand through the holos showing the waveforms created when neutrinos interchanged their identities. “Shake back and forth.”
Ah. Now I understood. “Oscillation.”
He squinted at me. “Eh?”
“Oscillation. Means ‘shake back and forth.’”
He snorted. “Osky bosky, talks too much.”
In the Undercity, any word with more than three syllables was considered an explosion of verbosity, like a chatty kid who wouldn’t stop talking. He must have heard the term oscillation before, though, if he knew it was one word rather than several. I held up my hand and counted on my fingers. “Shake back and forth. Four sounds. Ah-suh-lay-shun. Four sounds.”
Hack glowered and didn’t deign to acknowledge my point. He didn’t refute it, either, though. He would dismiss words like “theoretical quantum dynamics” or “uncertainty principle” as too talky, but I didn’t doubt now that he knew what they meant.
“Mesh waves mix,” Hack said.
“With what?”
“Hidden bit waves.”
That sounded like he was somehow mixing the neutrino waveforms with the mesh signals, he received in his cyber den, which made no sense. The mesh worked on electromagnetic signals and neutrino oscillations were created by particles with mass. It wasn’t impossible to have particles switch back and forth between photons and mass, but I’d never heard of anyone superposing electromagnetic transmissions with neutrino mass oscillations.
“Mix mesh and neutrinos together?” I asked.
“Yah,” Hack said.
“Not possible. Mesh is EM.”
“EM?” he asked.
Even if he understood what electromagnetic meant, I doubted he would acknowledge knowing a word so disreputable, it had six syllables. So I just said, “EM. Waves.”
Hack waved at me, then grinned. “So Hack is a mesh?”
I smiled. “I meant the mesh works on electromagnetic wave transmissions. Oscillations.” I had to use Cries words; the terms I needed didn’t exist in the Undercity dialect.
Ruzik laughed. “Yah, Hack osky bosky in the head.” When Hack glared at him, he smirked.
Interesting. They understood the Cries words well enough to make a play on them. Good. I needed a mixture of the two dialects for what I wanted to describe. “You say your detector picks up EM waves, but that it somehow mixes those with the neutrino waves. What you call hidden bits.”
Hack shrugged. “Yah. Just mixing. Nothing much.”
He made it sound so simple. Just mixing. Maybe some scientist somewhere else had figured out how to combine neutrino superpositions with the mesh signals that networked civilization, but I’d never heard of that feat. Now Hack claimed he built such a detector and used it to probe the mesh the way neutrino sensors probed matter. Maybe he really had done it. At the age of twenty, he understood more cyber-tech than I’d ever know. Down here in his stalactite-encrusted den, he approached engineering with no formal background, just the libraries of a people alien to him. He was the closest analog that existed among modern Skolians to the technologists of the Ruby Empire. If anyone could detect the presence of ancient EI that the rest of us had no idea existed, it would be Hack.
“How far?” I asked. “What you detect—how far away?”
“Not away,” Hack said. “Inside.”
“Inside the rock,” Ruzik added.
“You try the detector too?” I asked Ruzik.
“Yah.” He grimaced. “Not again.”
I didn’t want to feel that malice again, either. I had to, though, if I was going to find what created it.
I sat in darkness after Hack fastened me into his detector for a second time. The machine targeted regions of the rock, or more accurately, the neutrino flux through that region of space. Although scientists no longer needed giant tanks of water to find neutrinos, those detectors were more accurate than Hack’s contraption. I couldn’t find anything this time even when I “fired” in the same direction I had tried that last time. I swiveled the detector and fired again. Nothing. I pointed it at Cries and picked up faint signals, mechanical in feel, no sense of malice, probably the larger EIs that ran the city. The device apparently couldn’t detect anything smaller, like gauntlet EIs.
Max, I thought. Can you point me in the direction of the Lock temple in the desert?
Yes. Turn the detector right by one hundred and eighteen degrees. Max created a heads-up display using the goggles I wore, with the target glowing in the center.
I centered on the glowing dot and pressed the firing stud. No response. Either the Lock EI had shrouded itself against nosy humans or this detector wasn’t sophisticated enough to pick it up.
Try Izu Yaxlan, I thought.
The dot moved on my heads-up map, and I swiveled my chair until I was sitting with my back to Cries. This time when I fired, I picked up a signal. Gods almighty, yes, Izu Yaxlan contained an EI, a huge one. The signal came in strong and mechanical—and then disappeared.
Huh. Maybe it had caught my clumsy attempts to spy and didn’t approve. I swung the detector slowly back toward the Lock, taking readings every few degrees—there! A signal in the desert. It felt different, more familiar, modern. It had a structured quality, too, like the military EIs I worked with. I’d bet my pension that was Calaj, somewhere between the Lock and Izu Yaxlan. No wonder we were having so much trouble finding her. It wasn’t only that she had the best shrouds the military produced, which she had undoubtedly enhanced, but also that she kept moving in an unpredictable pattern, not what I expected for a crazed killer in search of victims. In fact, nothing Calaj had done struck me as murderous except when she shot at me in the Down-deep.
“Hack,” I said. “Bring me out.”
He set about disengaging me from his machine. When I was free, he and Ruzik considered me. “How bad?” Ruzik asked.
“Not bad.?
?? I stood up, massaging my stiff neck. “It’s hiding.”
“The EI?” Hack asked.
I nodded. “I found others. Cries.”
“I also, sometimes.” Hack laid his hand on his detector. “This machine private. Ken?”
“I ken.” I would protect their secrets. Revealing my sources would cripple my investigation, but I’d have kept my silence regardless. I couldn’t betray their trust. By saying nothing, however, I was abetting a crime. I had to do something about that, but what, I didn’t yet know.
Whatever I decided, I needed to move fast, before we lost Calaj again.
XIII
Taz
Without Singer’s directions, I’d never have found her home. She hid it even better than Dara and Weaver did theirs. I ventured into the Maze and squeezed my way along, jabbing my skin on spikes of rock or crawling through passages barely big enough for a child. Eventually I reached a chamber about ten paces across with a ceiling crusted by blue crystals. A cave entrance lay before me, tooled into a smooth archway. I stood in my dusty clothes with my pulse gun holstered. I’d taken off my backpack, and I kept my arms by my sides, holding the pack with my uninjured hand.
“Taz?” I called.
A man stepped into view, not under the archway, but from a nearby crevice. I had an impression of height, but what I noticed first was the Mark 89 Automatic Power Rifle he had trained on me, the same monster gun Singer had used to save my life two days ago. That lethal beauty looked even bigger in this cramped space. I lifted my gaze to the man—
Ah, gods. No wonder Singer felt driven to such extremes. Women would lay down their lives for this man, any woman anywhere. He stood taller than average, with a well-built physique. He had no scars on his face or his arms, which his muscle shirt left bare. His black hair was well tended, combed and less ragged than most people wore down here. What hit me though most, though, wasn’t that beautiful body or his well-kept appearance, but his face. You never found men this handsome in the Undercity. Life here leached any beauty out of my people. We fought, we struggled, we lived with disease, deformity, and violence, and it all took its toll.
Not so on this man. He was Undercity, yah; we had a look, one born of our small gene pool. All Raylicans had dark skin, but ours was slightly lighter because we needed less melanin to survive. Our larger eyes adapted our vision to the dim light. Oddly enough, our high cheekbones and straight noses were similar to the Majdas, except their noses stayed straight. Practically the only people here who didn’t end up with a broken nose at least once in their life were cyber-riders protected by dust gangs.