"I found them on the Grid," he said.
With a glance, she called him a terrible liar, then yelled back into the workshop. "Reggie! Fruit flies!" Someone back there -- presumably Reggie -- let out a whoop of excitement. "Seriously, what's a corpse-in-training like you doing with new-gen schematics like that?"
"We're studying flocking algorithms," he said.
She leaned forward on the counter, in a way that Helen recognized. She wants you to check out her cleavage. But not too obviously.
"You needed to fab a design with six nanometer resolution, high-capacity video storage, and onboard wireless, so you can study flocking algorithms?"
He leaned in, gave her his best, most conspiratorial look, and whispered in her ear. "We're studying flocking algorithms really hard."
"Fine," she said, standing up straight and backing up. "Stick with your story. You should know that you're on the HomeSec watchlist. We were supposed to report you for trying to fabricate something like this. So we swapped your job with a boring one from the medical center."
"But why would you do that for me?" he asked.
"Because if we hadn't," she said, eyes bright with mischief, "then we wouldn't have gotten to make them. Or make a few dozen extras for our own amusement," she added. "A design like this marks you as a troublemaker, and I do enjoy seeing trouble made."
"Thank you," was all William managed to say.
"If you've got any other jobs you need printed out," she said, "you contact me direct-like." She double-tapped him on the back of the hand, downloading her contact information to him. "Or if you want to Alt-hang. But wear someone young and muscly, cause I'm not much into graverobbing."
She's very... direct, Helen said disapprovingly.
Reminds me of you, he replied. He smiled at the woman, took the package, and left.
So, are you going to look her up? Helen asked.
Would you be okay with that?
Sure. Just crawl over my mangled, bled-out corpse and have at her.
'Over your dead body,' then. I'm curious about the double-standard that seems to be at play here, but I suppose now isn't a good time to be making our relationship more complicated. What do I do with these things?
Pour them into the programmer, and give it a shake. He pulled a cylinder from his pocket, and pulled off the lid. He opened the package, which appeared to contain a smattering of dust. Per her instructions, he shook the cylinder hard for about a minute. Okay, the program should be uploaded into the flies. Now just set them loose.
William hesitated. What are they? It's not that I don't trust you, but... I'm not exactly comfortable with not knowing.
If you trust me, then trust when I say that the less you know the safer we are. He seemed unconvinced. They're not dangerous. They just collect information, but that information might topple a government.
Government's don't like being toppled, he reminded her. They never go down quietly. He poured them out into the air, where they got caught up in a passing gust. They scattered in all directions, mostly riding the air currents. As he watched them disperse, he asked, So, you designed them?
A big team of us did. It took a long time, subjectively speaking.
Objectively speaking?
Fifteen hours. Go home, William. There's nothing much to do right now, and you need rest. I can feel it. He nodded, and turned in the direction of the campus shuttle. William?
Yes, love?
I know that someday you'll be ready to... go. But I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for you to be gone. Please take care of yourself. He nodded, and she felt something from him that she couldn't explain. There was sadness, but also guilt. He was hiding something. And now he knew that she suspected something.
Stupid link, she thought, then broke the connection.
////////////////////////////
// THE STRANGELOVE GAMBIT //
////////////////////////////
Date: May 20, 2038
In hindsight, it was almost too easy. Given the report's conclusion -- we were nuked by China, and must retaliate with military force -- who might we suspect was on the committee that wrote the report? Some would have to be academics, to give the report mainstream credibility. But they'd be President Wright's sort of academics; pacifists need not apply. An ideal candidate's writings would show an obsession with Chinese military and economic clout, and a suspicion that they sought domination rather than peaceful coexistence.
It was still a pretty long list to work from, until you looked to see whose activities had changed recently. Everyone's patterns had been disrupted in the immediate aftermath, but most returned to their normal schedule within weeks. Only a couple had canceled their lectures and classes, dropping off the academic grid. Professor James McMurray had. Two weeks after the explosion, he had taken an early retirement from UCLA, where he had been teaching international relations for thirty years. In his departure letter, he'd been cagey, but had said his country needed him.
She had sent hundreds of flies on trips around the country1, to spy on fifty different people. McMurray was the first one to give her a glimpse of the report. One of the flies was clinging for dear life to his receding hairline, recording everything he saw. When he opened the report and scrolled through it, the video streamed back to Troy.
Soon enough, Helen had snapshots of the entire report. What she found disgusted her.
Two Chinese nationals had rented out one of the storage units from the high rise, one on the thirty-seventh floor, near the top of the building. It was believed the bomb went off somewhere up there, but it was just one of literally hundreds of storage spaces that might have housed the bomb. Shortly after renting the storage shed, the couple returned to China. Three days later, the bomb went off.
Four days after that, the President authorized an extraction team to infiltrate China and secure "the principals," as the report called them. The woman -- who had a heart condition -- died of a heart attack after being hit with a "non-lethal" agent. The husband was captured, taken to a CIA safehouse outside Beijing, and confessed under torture to having played a role in the conspiracy, and to receiving his instructions from an officer of the Chinese military.
That was the first pillar of the case. The second rested on trace amounts of cadmium-114 found at the detonation site, which was supposed to indicate that the uranium had been enriched in the Huang He nuclear facility in Xi'an. Helen didn't believe it. With half a gram of that particular isotope, it would be easy to fake the incriminating evidence.
The next piece of evidence was, in the report's own words, "somewhat circumstantial." Which she decided was a euphemism for "completely unrelated." A high ranking member of the Chinese Nationalist Party had, a few years earlier, given an impromptu -- and at the time, little noticed -- speech at a fundraiser. In it, he talked about how fragile America's economy was, and how a single great crisis would cause the dollar to collapse, allowing China to buy up the entire country for a song. A couple of years later, a member of the Politburo made an impolitic remark about America's economy being built atop a monkey's fart.
The last piece of the case was difficult to make sense of. It talked about performing a detailed psychological and political profiling of "all major state and non-state actors" using "cutting edge prediction and pattern recognition algorithms." It didn't specify the techniques used, but reported an 89% probability that China had initiated the attack.
Then she brought up the footnote to that part of the report. The report was called A Probabilistic Predictor of State and Non-State Terrorism Using Classified and Unclassified Datasets, and authored by Dr. Andrew Childer of MIT. Wolf's handler. In other words, they'd asked Wolf whodunnit, and it had pointed one of its bladelike fingers at China.
The report speculated on China's motivations. It speculated that China was using the attack to devastate the American economy and turn America into China's vassal state. It sounded like the fevered dream of a political nutjob to Helen, but it seemed that the most powerful people in the country bel
ieved it. Even Vincent believed it, and he was neither stupid nor a warmonger.
As she read the final pages, Helen's blood ran cold. In those final three pages, the committee made their recommendation: their simulations showed a 93% chance that a surprise nuclear strike would leave the Chinese unable to launch a nuclear counteroffensive, and a 99% chance that the United States' Artemis laser array could prevent any enemy nukes from reaching our cities. The risks were "acceptable," and while "acknowledging the gravity of The Measure," they believed "the option should be given sober consideration by the Commander in Chief."
"The Measure." They couldn't even bring themselves to say it, or take responsibility for it, as though history would hold them blameless if the decision to execute an entire country were veiled behind enough obfuscating euphemisms and bureaucratese.
Was it a form of collective madness, like the insanity that burned its way through Salem hundreds of years ago? As before, people cowered thoughtless in the face of fear, and once again, innocent people would be given over to the fire.
No, Helen thought. Fuck that.
She fired off a brief message to Andrea, her old publicist. Long time, no see. How would you like to put on an event for me?
/*****/
William was also woken from sleep by Helen's voice -- voices? -- in his head. He untangled himself from another Helen's arms. She made a muffled sound of displeasure, but didn't wake. As he sat on the edge of her bed, trying to wake up, he shook off the feeling that Helen had just caught him with another woman.
The boundaries between the real world and Altworld were getting increasingly fuzzy. He was in his apartment, yet when he put his hand on her thigh, the sensation came from the alt. Still, there was no question in his mind that the woman herself was real. Interesting times, he thought.
She won't wake up, you know, Helen murmured in his mind. She's totally zonked.
I could tell. Did you mess with her adenosine levels?
Didn't have to.
William stumbled into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. He preferred his morning stimulants the old fashioned way.
The pot began to boil. It was the same coffee pot he'd used back when he and Maeva were living together. It was a cheap set, from back in the days when China insisted on manufacturing everything, but wasn't entirely sure how to go about it. Every decade or so, he'd had to break into it and solder something back together, and when it did work, it made bitter coffee with a slightly metallic aftertaste.
William delighted in this. From the scorch stains on the glass base to the faded Dukaikas/Bentsen sticker on the blue plastic casing -- a little reminder to himself never to vote, as his candidates always seemed to lose -- the little machine had been his faithful companion for nearly thirty years now. "You and me, kid, every morning," he said to himself.
Maeva had begged him to throw it out so often, it had gotten to be a running joke, right down to the ever-changing name of the machine. One day it would be, "You are not getting rid of Weyland," the next it would be, "You hurt Bilbo's feelings." They'd lived a block from a Starbucks, which was probably the only thing that kept their argument friendly and low in violence.
As he put the coffee to his lips, he wished he could have that old argument with her just one more time. Maybe this time he'd surprise her, and break down and buy a deluxe espresso machine. He gave the machine an apologetic pat.
Wow, you seem really sentimental toward a machine that must be older than I am. How do you drink that swill?
The Mighty Javacus is not amused by your impertinence, lowly peasant!
You know, for ten bucks you can get one of the new machines with the advanced neural networks. It will make a perfect cup every time. Seriously, it pains me to see you drink that.
I know, but I prefer that coffee taste like shit, William replied. Tastes better that way. Then he laughed.
Laughing at your own jokes again?, Helen asked.
No. Just amazed at the way you sometimes know exactly the right thing to say.
He could practically hear Helen trying to recall what right thing she had said, then give up. I have to do one last merge before the big meeting. See you in Troy.
Something told William that today was going to be a very good day.
/*****/
Date: May 22, 2038
A crowd, hundreds of thousands strong, gathered outside the gates of Troy. The crowd was noisy and festive, with the ground full of fire spinners and music, and the air filled with fireworks. Helen stood on the wall that surrounded her city and looked out over the crowd, feeling nervous and giddy. The advertisements for the event had been made deliberately vague, saying only that it involved the attack on New York, that it would be a defining moment in history, and that it would require civil disobedience on a massive scale. Also, dress for a party. Andrea had done her job well.
There were thousands of her sisters out among the crowd, and she was trying to take it all in, or at least weave the thousands of disparate conversations, arguments, flirtations, dances, and songs into a single, impressionistic sensory experience. Even at her most focused, it was nearly impossible. But it felt closer than it ever had.
Someday, perhaps. Today, she had work to do.
William appeared in the midst of the crowd. One of her sisters ran up to him, throwing her arms around him, kissing him with a determination that surprised even her.
What is all this? William asked. He had to shout the thought over the din of the crowd.
She cast him a half-mad smile. It's the end of the world! Ragnarok! Apocalypse any damn minute now!
That's great, love. But if you don't start making sense, I'm off to watch the fire dancers.
Helen laughed. The world! Everyone is coming together to save it! Kriti and Mardav appeared together, as usual. See? You and you, go save the world! Chop chop! Kriti gave Mardav a quick smile before rushing off into the crowd. Helen wondered if Kriti knew that she and Mardav were sneaking around for no reason, then wondered if anyone in the lab realized that the two were trying to keep it a secret.
Helen caught the concern in Mardav's eyes as he looked back and forth between her and another Helen, who was arguing with a floating dolphin who had been passing out pamphlets against overfishing.
"Are you all right?" Helen asked him. Unlike William and Kriti, he had rejected the offer to set up a thought link.
Mardav nodded. "I was just thinking about the gods of India, with their many heads and arms and their ever-shifting forms and personalities."
"Why?"
"I have no reason. My mind, it wanders about."
"I think I would make a terrible god."
"I agree," Mardav said. There was a hint of malice in his voice, which surprised Helen. She would have to deal with that later, though.
I have to do this speechy thing. Kiss me good luck? Helen asked William. He did, and every one of her siblings went weak in the knees at once. When he let her go, the sky went dark, and the crowd went quiet. As Helen nestled into her lover's arms to watch, she also stood atop the battlements of Troy, suddenly burning bright as a small sun. Her voice boomed out, rolling through the audience like a clap of thunder.
"We are gathered together at a defining mom- Sorry. Too loud?"
The crowd responded with a chorus of yeses. Bright Helen looked chagrined.
"How about now? Better? Okay. We are gathered together at a defining moment in history, in the aftermath of our greatest tragedy. Over the last two weeks, we who remain have come together, to bury and to remember the dead, and to bind up the wounds and heal the hearts of the living. It has been the most profound and humbling honor of my life to be a part of that."
"Seriously," Helen said, her voice quavering a bit. "You guys rock." This yielded a few sympathetic chuckles.
"It is at times of greatest crisis when we truly learn who we are. You have shown, through your actions, that ours is a species of indomitable courage and optimism, who can come together to build a better future o
ut of the ashes of tragedy."
"But we also hunger for retribution. We want to call someone to account, to exact punishment equal to the pain inflicted upon us. We fear the possibility of another attack. We look at our fellow human beings and ask ourselves, 'was it you?' Some of us have let our suspicions get the best of us, and let fear take control."
That's right, she thought. I'm one of you. Still human. I think.
"I called you all here because you have to know: the forces of fear are on the march. They are strong, they are organized, they are in control, and they are planning to do something unspeakable in your name."
Helen lifted her hand in the air, and made a small waving motion. "I've just made a file available to all of you. It contains a highly classified report from the top levels of the Wright administration. I warn you that the very act of downloading it is highly illegal, and by distributing it I am almost surely committing treason against the United States. It contains the results of a federal investigation into the bombing. It names China as the perpetrator, on what I believe is the flimsiest of evidence. Finally, it proves that our government is considering a full-scale nuclear response, one which would kill hundreds of millions of--"
The ground beneath her shook, and claps of thunder split the air. As Helen watched, a quarter of the crowd flickered out of existence as their connections to Troy were cut. The thoughts of her sisters flowed into her, and she knew Troy was being crushed under the weight of a denial of service attack. Millions of computers across the Grid were flooding her systems with fake requests, all in an effort to shut out the people who wanted to hear her.
Make this stop, she thought to herself.
The response came back, curt. About fifteen steps ahead of you. Just give the gor-ram speech!
"Sorry," she told the crowd. "Technical difficulties. But as I said, the government is seriously considering the idea of turning China -- a nation of one and a half billion people -- into a sea of radioactive glass. The proof I've collected is already spreading across the Grid, and I need every one of you to make sure that everyone sees it. Write about it, flood Altworld with it, shout it from the rooftops, print it in dead tree format and throw it at people! We only get one chance to stop this thing, and no measures are too extreme."