Chapter 12
Boise, Idaho
February 14, 2121
1930 hours
Liam Winger and his mother Dana Tallant rode into Boise from Haleyville and parked on the outskirts of town, a lot surrounded by cottonwood trees, with the Boise foothills peeking through the woods. They caught a Jiffycab into town; the Assimilationist rally was to start at 8:00 at Julia Davis Park and word on the street was that Symborg would make an appearance.
Leaving the Jiffycab, they ran into thousands of pedestrians streaming along the park walkways, past the Boise River Greenbelt and the zoo, past the Rose Gardens and bazaars and stands of vendors hawking hats and T-shirts and souvenir merchandise of all types. Ahead, through the trees, the first of the assimilator booths could be seen… already long queues of volunteers had lined up in front of the booths. Newsdrones circled overhead, sharing the sky with police drones, occasionally dropping down to get a closer look at the assimilator setup. There were dozens of booths, each manned by a technician and an intake specialist, who took down the name and vitals of each volunteer as they approached the booth. Once the preliminaries had been done, the tech assisted the volunteer into the booth and whoosh, nothing but atom fluff.
A steady stream of faint mist issued out of each booth, as the deconstruct bot swarms worked overtime, disassembling each volunteer and sending them right into oblivion…or as Symborg termed it: “unity with the Mother Swarm.”
Liam turned to Dana. “Pretty exciting, huh, Mom? Symborg…live and in person.”
Dana just shook her head. “You’re not really going through with this, are you?”
Liam grabbed his mother by the shoulders and steered her through heavy crowds, bumping and jostling their way up the greenbelt. A huge bandshell and stage lit up with powerful flood lights loomed ahead.
“It’s kind of exciting, don’t you think? I mean, look at those booths. All those people…they’re going into the mother swarm. Taken up. A new life for them. A new way. Yeah, Mom, I want to do it. I have to do it.”
Dana was jazzed by the crowd herself. “Your father won’t like it. Me, I think it’s a personal thing. Everybody’s different.”
Liam could feel the buzz of the bots that comprised Dana in his hands. Her shoulders were warm to the touch, vibrating slightly, like a hive of bees under a cloak, ready to burst out. “You did it. You changed. What was it like? Were you scared?”
Dana gave that some thought. She barely remembered anything. It had happened at night, overnight. Like a dream. She went to bed a Normal human. The swarms came in the dark, through an open window—she’d always liked the window open at night, listening to the wind rushing down the Buffalo range like a river of air—and it was over quick as that. At first, she felt smothered, like someone had draped a huge cloak over her, was it Wings? No, he was away, on a mission. Then her skin crawled all over and it itched like crazy. Then she went to sleep. When she awakened, she felt…how could you describe it?...warm, cocooned, sheltered, protected. Like she belonged. Like she was home at last.
“No, honey, I was never scared. It just happened.”
Police estimates of the gathering crowd ranged from a few hundred thousand to over a million. People came from all over the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states, even from western Canada. Symborg was coming. Symborg would be there. Symborg….
There were others in the vast crowd who weren’t so happy. A vociferous contingent of anti-angel protesters had promised a response. They called themselves Hellcats and their warnings and threats were all over the Net, all over the news. None other than assimilationist gadfly Lanier Barnes had promised to be there.
“We’ll make those haloheads and asses scream and shout,” he had told reporters. “Think of us as normalizers. Normality. Normals. That’s what we’re all about.”
Police patrols, bots and drones were thick in and over the crowd. They expected a violent confrontation and planned to be ready.
Promptly at 8:00 pm, the rally began. Excited and stirred like a hornet’s nest, the crowds surged forward, pressing against police cordons like waves lapping a pier. Liam and Dana found themselves caught up in the rush, caught in a riptide of humanity pushing, shoving, jostling and crowding ever forward. Police and event security pressed back, but the cordon shrank and drew ever tighter. Scuffles broke out and fists flew.
Liam caught an elbow in the face. Dana took one to the mouth. Liam shoved back and wriggled himself enough space to help his mother to the edge of the crowd, toward a first aid booth that had been stationed near the bandshell. While rock and jam music blared from loudspeakers, lights strobed across the stage and the crowd, police drones swooped and sprayed unruly crowds with relaxant mist, Liam and Dana were attended by nurses and medbots, treating their cuts and bruises.
Liam’s face was aglow. “It’s insane. I love it.”
Shouts erupted nearby. Hellcats were swinging fists and batons and shockwands along the edge of the crowd. More fists flew. Bodies fell to the ground, trampled in panic. Police drones circled the melee and voices boomed out.
“DISPERSE AT ONCE! THIS IS A POLICE ORDER! CEASE AND DESIST AND DISPERSE AT ONCE…!”
Overhead, news drones captured everything.
Liam turned to check out the commotion. Something slammed into his face and he was knocked off his stool to the ground, stunned, semi-conscious, blood spurting everywhere.
“Her too! She’s one of ‘em!” came voices nearby.
Liam hauled himself up and immediately found himself in a shoving match with a burly, bearded red-haired man with a shockwand, illegal and deadly all the same. Big Beard swung the baton again and just clipped Liam on the shoulder, sending two hundred volts into his neck and arms. Liam’s arm went dead and he nearly fell, but grabbed a counter at the first aid stand and stayed upright. He collected himself and kicked out, knocking the wand from Big Beard’s hand. Then he waded in, fists flying.
Even a Cambridge professor can kick a little ass, he thought.
The melee lasted a few more minutes. Dana had been knocked down, but a police bot appeared and she picked herself up with a few scrapes while the bot swung around, sweeping out a clearing in the throng with its graser arms, whirling like a demented dervish, lights flashing and sirens whooping even over the thunderous jam of the loudspeakers.
The Hellcats were everywhere, battling it out with assimilationists, angels, onlookers, the curious and the committed all at the same time. Police seemed unable to stop all the fights. The best they could do was concentrate on containing the violence to the rally grounds.
Through it all, the jam went on and speakers came and went up on the stage.
While Liam and Dana were being treated, Symborg finally appeared.
Symborg acknowledged the crowds with a wave and moved to the center microphone. The angel was good, Liam could see that. Better even than his mom. 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. His height contrasted with a stocky frame, and his face was dominated by a black moustache. It was an appearance Liam had never seen before, but then Symborg was an angel and angels could do that.
“PEOPLE OF BOISE…THE TIME HAS COME FOR A CHANGE….” His voice boomed out across the rally ground and the crowd grew more and more frenzied, pressing ever tighter against the police cordon.
“PEOPLE OF BOISE…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 grounds.
“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.
The give and take went on for a few minutes, punctuated with more music, more strobing lights, more frenzy in the crowds, which pressed tighter and tighter against the barricades surrounding the stage.
Dana watched her son Liam, Liam! grow more and more entranced with the whole affair. His face was aglow, his eyes wide, his fists pumping in rhythm with the beat of the music. He pushed back into the throng, his hands reaching back for his mom. Their fingers were entwined for a moment, but the crush of the crowd forced them apart. Dana saw his head bobbing over the others.
She realized he wasn’t trying to get closer to the stage. He was heading for the line of assimilator booths. Long queues of volunteers snaked around the perimeter of the rally grounds. There was a shoving match outside of one booth, Lanier Barnes and his Hellcats trying to start a ruckus again. Police had already swarmed into the area and drones overhead swept the grounds with spotlights.
Dana tried to follow Liam but the surge and flow of the crowd was like a tide, carrying her away from the booths. Finally, she gave up. All she could do was watch as Liam squeezed and pushed and gradually made his way toward the first queue.
She didn’t know how to feel. Inside, maybe a little pride. Liam was taking a big step here, and she admired the courage of it. Her own change hadn’t come like this. Truth was: she didn’t really remember how it had happened. One night, she had gone to bed Dana Albright Tallant, a Normal wife, retired Quantum Corps nanotrooper, a forty-five year old woman with a few more wrinkles and lines than before. Something happened. She thought it had been a dream. When she woke up, she was Dana Albright Tallant. But no longer Normal. Now, she was changed, now she was an angel. She liked to think of herself as a big family of nanobots, gathered together in a form resembling Dana Albright Tallant. How were you supposed to feel? She had the same memories. The same lines and wrinkles, though some resolution at fine scale was gone. But she could do so much more, with her new multi-configuration powers. Oh, she could do so very much more now.
And now Liam, her own son, would soon be joining her.
Symborg was doing magic tricks up on the stage. The crowd roared its approval.
He approached the mike again and told them how he loved Boise, no less than any of them. How he loved the mountains and the streams, how he lived and breathed Idaho and always would. From down in front of the stage, Dana Tallant managed to wriggle an arm free and pressed a few buttons on her wristpad, zooming in for an extreme close-up on the robotic messiah himself.
Is that sweat on his forehead? She wondered if angels could even do that, then decided it was like everything else at the rally…part of the show. What she didn’t see was the faint trail of bots that drifted off Symborg’s hand and down into the crowd itself.
Symborg continued his magic, his blurry hand by turns a cloud of bots, a magic wand, a djinn granting wishes, mesmerizing the crowd, plucking their emotions like a mandolin, first rising, then falling, cresting and receding. He was a master showman…Dana had to admit that.
What she didn’t know was how well Symborg knew his crowd. The bots he had loosed into the crowd, unseen, were now embedded in the heads of scores of nearby faithful.
Even as he dazzled the crowd, Symborg was receiving feeds from the bots that many of them had already ingested. A faint pall of fog wafted off the stage, sending more and more bots into recon mode among the rally. Processor module ANALYZE GLUTAMATE PATTERN MATCHING received results from the nanobotic sleuths even now burrowing into their brains, sniffing along highways of equal glutamate concentration, rebuilding memories from their chemical residues.
Algorithms ran and massaged the data from the bots. The crowd was hooked, in synch with Symborg. Patterns matched with high confidence. Symborg saw snatches of memory, fragments of images…large crowds, banners and dancers, a train creeping into a station, belching smoke, brakes squealing. Some kind of rally, somewhere else.
All this the crowd gave up to the bots in their brains, and to Symborg, who smiled back and went on with the rally.
Liam managed to work his way up to the front of one of the queues. A uniformed attendant came forward with a tablet, asking questions, interviewing Liam. What was his name? Where did he live? Why did he want to do this? Did he have a wife? Children? Give us your next of kin for notifications.
Liam signed something on the tablet. He didn’t read it. He was in a different place, in some kind of trance state, perhaps, lost to the sounds and the jostling around him. He did hear faint voices over the din of the crowd. Lanier Barnes was nearby, his nasal twang distinguishable from the tumult of the crowd. He had an amplifier and he was trying to drown out Symborg.
“IT’S A LIE, PEOPLE…ALL THIS IS A LIE…DON’T DO THIS…IT’S A BIG SCAM…YOUR LOVED ONES ARE GOING RIGHT TO HELL…THERE’S NO MOTHER SWARM….”
But Liam didn’t care. He knew Lanier Barnes and his Hellcats were nearby, the jostling and shoving was getting worse, hectoring and harassing the volunteers but the police were already there, just as Liam was ushered into a booth.
The technician smiled faintly as he shut and secured the assimilator booth door. More like a hatch.
The deconstruction process began. At first, Liam felt nothing. Maybe a general sense of peace and serenity, like floating on a raft in a summertime lake, perhaps a result of the bots which had already entered his brain and were managing his pleasure centers, stoking dopamine in his ventral tegmentum.
The technician, whose nameplate said Irvin, sat at a console just outside the booth. The tech pressed buttons to begin the seal and containment process. In seconds, a tight bot-proof seal had been formed around the interior of the booth, a barrier formed of electron injectors and a dedicated botscreen.
“Let’s do it,” another tech nearby told Irvin. Irvin pressed more buttons.
Inside the booth, a fog had formed…that was the first layer of nanobots released into the compartment. Liam disappeared into the fog, only a leg and a shoulder could be seen.
The fog thickened. A faint buzz could be heard from inside the booth. More and more bots were released and replicated, swelling to fill every cubic millimeter of the booth.
Liam didn’t move. Irvin checked the cam on his display, zooming in through the front porthole on Liam’s right leg. At first, it was unchanged, a smooth gray pants leg with some half-frayed cuffs showing, hitched up just above his shins. But even as Irvin watched, the gray of his pants had begun to fade. In moments, it was a lighter gray, like the fog itself, oscillating between darker and lighter, but still gray. Then the gray became a translucent shimmer, almost like a ghost, flickering slightly, but growing ever dimmer. His shoulder was the same.
Liam Winger was slowly but steadily being disassembled. He was being steadily broken down into a pattern, a pattern of atoms and molecules.
The end came softly, almost as if Liam were walking away in a light rain. His body, the physical Liam Winger, began to fade inside the booth. At first, it had been barely perceptible, just a faint blurring of his skin, his extremities, a smearing of his legs and shoulder, as if a photo had lost contrast.
In time, and the time was less than five minutes, Liam Winger had devolved—that was the commonly accepted word now—into a nearly translucent shadow, still recognizable in form, but without substance. You could see right through the form and the shadow to the other side of the booth.
And then he was gone. Enveloped and enmeshed and at one with the greater swarm of nanobotic mechs that was Config Zero.
That’s what the brochures said. That’s what Symborg said.
Bit by bit, the police cordon was shrinking and contracting. No
w Symborg had finished and with a flourish, waved his arms toward the crowd. The crowd roared back. The stage began to shake and the people on the stage stumbled momentarily. Symborg retreated toward a row of seats on the edge of the stage.
The rally organizer…all the announcements called him Detrick…grabbed a microphone. He tried to calm the crowd.
His amplified voice screeched with feedback and was drowned in the deafening roar of the crowd, which surged forward with renewed fury. It was like a rock concert mixed with religious revival, amplified a thousand-fold. The dronecams captured everything: people wailing, fainting, shrieking, even dying in the crush. The crowd became a crazed, mindless thing.
And no one was paying any attention to Detrick.
Finally, in order to save the situation, Symborg was forced to leave the platform, under escort. As he did so, the crowd broke through the last barriers and pressed forward to try and touch the angel. Just when it appeared Symborg and his police protective detail were about to be crushed to death in the surging crowd, Symborg did what angels can do…he dematerialized into a loose, amorphous swarm and disappeared in a faint puff, dissipating into the air above the stage.
Newsdrones captured the whole thing on dronecam video.
And the rest of the police detail was left to fight their way out of the crowd, who became even more agitated at the disappearance of their hero Symborg. Soon, the stage collapsed completely and a full-scale riot had developed.
The assimilator booth which had once contained Liam Winger was knocked over by the onrushing multitude. Lanier Barnes and the Hellcats had broken through the police cordon and rushed the booths, knocking most of them over, scattering and assaulting many of the techs and volunteers.
Police in full armor waded into the riot, swinging batons and shockers left and right.
Dana Tallant barely escaped with her life. In the end, she did as Symborg did, as all angels could do.
She de-materialized and disappeared in a faint sparkling smoke cloud. In moments, she was gone, now on picowatt propulsors, heading back on stiff late winter breezes coming down off the Buffalo range, back to Highway 7 and the farm in Haleyville.