Rabbit looked out through a dozen cameras, everything that Alfred had suborned in the MCog area. His hands had entered the area just a few moments before; maybe that was what had panicked his enemies into their massive revocation attack. With a small and dwindling part of his attention he followed the wonderful riot around the library. Sigh. Alfred & Co had never guessed his connection with Scooch-a-mout, and yet…Who’d’a thunk they’d detect his affection for Credit Suisse CA? Or that the EU had such power over the certificate authority of a sovereign country?…Or that his own dependence was as broad as he was now discovering?
Rabbit had other apex CAs, though none so useful as Credit Suisse. They would suffice for a few more minutes. Where they didn’t, he had legal programs posting appeals against the most destructive of the revocations.
Meantime, focus on the fun things: What was Alfred trying to do? Sheer destruction? Intellectual theft? Rabbit was beginning to feel mean. He had been willing to settle for a secret backdoor into Alfred’s operation. Now, well, now he meant to steal it all. Starting with the fruit flies.
Rabbit reached out for his hands.
ROBERT REMEMBERED THIS area. They were back in the heart of GenGen country, the unending rows of gray cabinets, the crystal forests that connected them, the pneumo tubes. But up ahead was a sound like cardboard boxes being crushed.
The Stranger’s pdf had explanations for the abbreviations that were printed on the sides of the cabinets:
Dros MCog
Robert --> Miri: Fruit flies? This was where he had set down almost a third of the little boxes, having to crawl over above and between the cabinets.
Miri --> Robert: Yes. Did you read what Smart-Aleck claims about this? I don’t believe it.
“Hey, hey, my man!” And there was the Mysterious Stranger, Miri’s Mr. Smart-Aleck. His skin was practically glowing green, even in the shadows. The face was Sharif’s but the smile was inhumanly wide. “Talk as you please. Alfred discovered us here several minutes ago.” The Stranger looked around, as if expecting a visible enemy. “So now I don’t care if he hears you. Or me! What can you do, Alfred? You’re shutting me down, but I wager I’ll last another minute or two. Oh, I suppose you could shut down your own operation, too. I’d be instantly gone then.” He glanced back at Miri and Robert, and continued sotto voce. “If he does that, he’s truly desperate. And it won’t help him a bit, since you still have my pdf. You’ll still be here to destroy his underhanded plans.”
The Mysterious Stranger waved for them to follow. “Did you get to this part of my explanation?” He waved at the cabinets. “Molecular Biology of Cognition. MCog. And Alfred’s people have created the ideal animal model for their research.”
“Fruit flies?” said Robert.
“I don’t believe it,” said Miri. “Fruit flies can’t think. What could your ‘Alfred’—or you—do with them?”
The Stranger gave out one of its dismissive laughs, and Robert noticed Miri’s face jerk up. She might do better with this manipulator than Robert. After all, she wasn’t desperate for his help.
“Ah, Miri, you read but you don’t understand. If you had access just now to the wider net—and a few hundred hours of research—perhaps you’d understand that molecular biology depends more on data depth and analysis than it does on the particular class of organism. In his Drosophila melanogaster alfredii—is that what you call them, Alfred?—we have the metabolic pathways that are the basis for all animal cognition.”
Minus the editorial comments, this did look like some of the pdf.
They rounded a corner and saw the source of the sounds.
“Voila, Alfred’s three hundred thousand fruit flies, now being folded into convenient shipping cartridges.” The Stranger’s face and body bore less and less resemblance to the original Sharif. “But I must confess—I know what these little bugs are, but I don’t really know what Alfred has planned for them. Surely there are some marvelous diseases—cognitive diseases?—that might come out of such research. Or maybe he wants to get a head start on all the enhancement-drug people. Or maybe he’s into YGBM. But I do know—”
The fruit-fly arrays were being folded on a large transport table, much bigger than anything in Ron Williams’s shop class. The shipping cylinders rolled across the table, right through the Stranger’s body. The creature noticed this a half second late, but did a creditable hop back from the table.
“But I do know that he’s trying to ship them off-site.”
“So you claim.”
“Hey, trust me, Miss Miri. You’ve met Alfred. He’s the fellow who tried to kill Juan Orozco. The guy’s an evil loon. Ping the labels on these packages if you don’t believe me.”
Yes. UP/Ex labels with an encrypted destination. The first of the cylinders was sliding off the table, headed toward the nearest pneumo tube.
Now the Stranger was hopping from one foot to the other. “Only you can save mankind! Just knock the cylinders onto the lower tray. Don’t let Alfred win!”
That seemed to convince Miri. She rushed to the table, grabbed the package out of the pneumo tube lock, and tossed it to Robert. He caught it and the next and the next and now his arms were full. The white cylinders were as light as foam.
The Stranger’s image froze for a second. Abruptly, animation returned. “Heh! Excellently done.” He waved vaguely at the walls. “See that, Alfred? It doesn’t pay to cross the Rabbit!” Rabbit? The creature turned back in their general direction; by God, it did look a little bit like a rabbit. “That was a near thing, but I won! I mean, we saved mankind.” It drew itself up, but its whole body was tilted. “Damn Alfred. He is shutting me down a piece at time. Maybe I should exit with my impression of the Wicked Witch of the West. Dying, that is.”
The creature spun around, giving out melodramatic moans, its body dissolving around it. It hesitated, and said offhandedly to Robert, “Oh, don’t let the cylinders go untreated. Just drop them onto the lower tray.”
Robert didn’t move.
“I mean it!” said the Stranger, something like a serious tone creeping into its voice. It flailed about—more dramatic dying, or looking for an explanation? “If the bugs are disease vectors, you’re at ground zero! The lower tray will send them to an incinerator, all safe and tidy.”
Miri shook her head. “No. That’s an alternate path to the UP/Ex launcher.”
“Look at my pdf, you fool. The map.”
“I looked at my map, the one I cached this afternoon.” Miri’s smile was triumphant.
There was a two-second lag. Then the creature turned and looked almost straight at Miri. “I hate you, Miri Gu. You evil thing. Everything was going so well till you started meddling. I’ll get you for this.”
Then it was shouting. “Meantime, I’m gonna get you, Alfred. If I’m out of action, so are you! I’m blowing the whistle on you. I’m—”
The figure stopped moving. There was a moment of silence; then Robert heard a single word, faint and faraway: “…help.”
And the creature vanished. Robert and Miri stared at each other. It was just the two of them, and the ranks of cabinets.
“Do you think he’s really gone, Miri?”
“I…don’t know.”
Miri --> Robert: But if Smart-Aleck wasn’t lying about everything, then this Alfred guy is still around. Aloud, her words were timid. “Maybe we should stay here and wait for the police.”
“Okay.”
Miri plunked herself down on the floor. She was very quiet for a moment, both publicly and privately. Robert set the packages down and stared off into the dark, looking this way and that. Supposedly there were no more enemy robots. What could “Alfred” do with the fruit flies now? What could the fellow do to Miri and Robert himself?
Miri --> Robert: Things don’t sound the same.
Robert looked a question at her. Miri drew a golden arrow at right angles to the corridor they had arrived from.
Miri --> Robert: I kept track
of everything I heard when I was following you. There’s something new going on, most likely in the mouse arrays. Did you do anything over that way? She quietly came back to her feet.
Robert tapped at his keypad:
Robert --> Miri: Thts whr we put most of our eqt.
Miri’s chin came up.
Miri --> Robert: The sounds are like what we heard here. Someone’s packaging another shipment out.
29
DR. XIANG TAKES CHARGE
Günberk and Keiko and Alfred each had their own analyst pools. Ten seconds ago those analysts had agreed: as an active threat, Rabbit was gone, both topside and in the operation’s milnet. Dissent clusters hung around the opinion, but they were related to collateral-damage prediction.
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz: God willing, we’ve stopped the monster.
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: And we have the inspection data we came for. Now it’s time to get the hell out! She brought up a zoomed picture of the contingency tree. They were way out on a limb that led to full loss of deniability. And yet, until they knew for sure the results of their investigation, they needed the Americans kept ignorant.
Alfred presented his latest extraction schedule, the times padded just enough to cover his outshipment activities.
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: Eight minutes! That much? Keiko still had things covered on the north side of the labs. And the views of the riot showed the Bollywood team still in place by the library…but that affair was descending into civil disorder, the sort of thing that brings a direct police response. Meshing Alfred back into the Bollywood people should be easy now; very soon it would be impossible.
Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri: I’ll trim every second I can, Keiko.
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: You’d better! Five minutes is the most I can guarantee.
Alfred smiled at Keiko’s impolitely constrained panic. She and Günberk would do their best. And in some ways, this chaos was helpful. Fooling Günberk and Keiko had always been Alfred’s biggest problem. His outshipment would’ve been impossible if they weren’t so distracted.
Two minutes passed. Three. His secret team had completed most of the fakery. They had updated the logs to satisfy both Alliance and future U.S. investigators. Now they were working with one small section of the Mus musculus arrays, his true animal model. Alfred hopped from viewpoint to viewpoint, swooping over cabinets that looked like office blocks in some bland, utilitarian city. He couldn’t take more than a few of the mice, just a few of those conceived since the last update. His team had already shut down the in-progress experiments and started destruct operations. Now they detached the chosen arrays and began prepping them for launch. Other members of the team were already sending shipping cartridges to the pneumo port atop the cabinet. He could fit one twenty-by-thirty array—six hundred mice—into each cartridge.
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: Alfred! The public net is failing.
Vaz swore and glanced at the topside analysis. This wasn’t even close to Keiko’s deadline.
Braun --> Mitsuri, Vaz: It’s a full system failure. Mr. Rabbit has screwed us.
The analysts were boiling with contrary opinions. Failures like this happened a couple of times a year somewhere in the world, the price that civilization paid for complexity. But here there was a more sinister suspicion, that this failure was collateral damage from the revocation. Maybe Rabbit’s riot magic depended on his commandeering the embedded computer systems of the public environment. Now that his certificates were revoked, there was a cascade of failures working through almost everything, just as fast as the certificates failed.
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: Alfred! Clean up and get out!
The second and third cartridges would be ready in a moment. Alfred glanced at the UP/Ex status. The launcher was close to the MCog area. Most important, it was locally managed, unaffected by the crash outside. He entered a destination in Guatemala—and selected a launch vehicle that he’d emplaced some weeks before. It ought to be stealthy enough to get out of U.S. airspace.
Vaz --> Braun, Mitsuri: One minute. Can you give me that?
Mitsuri --> Braun, Vaz: I will try.
The topside analysts were hard into contingency planning and probability estimates. A thousand little changes were being made across the UCSD landscape, wherever the Indo-European operation had influence. The Bollywood presence would survive as long as any up there.
Alfred forced his attention back into the labs. The second cartridge was loading. The first cartridge was shooting down the pneumo, taking its little passengers to the launcher.
Alfred froze. The Gus were gone from the fruit-fly area. There was movement in another window, at the edge of the mice arrays. A girl and a man running toward the camera. They hadn’t been fooled by the fruit flies.
Alfred leaned forward. Okay. One minute. What could his people cook up in that time?
LENA’S WHEELCHAIR WAS no hiking machine. It did well enough on the asphalt, even going uphill; Xiu had to trot to keep up. But where the asphalt was carved by gullies, the chair had to walk. The going got very slow.
“Can you even see the road, Lena?” Her view-page was as dark as the natural view.
“No. I think someone has turned off the hillside. Side effect of the riot, maybe.” She moved to the middle of the road. “Sst! They’re still coming.” She waved at Xiu to come forward. “How can we stop them? One way or another, we have to find out what’s happening.”
“Robert will see you.”
“Damnation!” Lena dithered, caught in a dilemma.
“Go back to the side of the road. I can stop them more safely, anyway.”
“Hmph,” said Lena. But she retreated.
Xiu stood still for a moment. There were the distant sounds of the freeway. From over the hilltop there were noises that might have been chanting. But nearby was just insect sounds, the feel of air cooling in the night, the narrow roadway jumbled and rocky under her feet. She saw light sweep across the outcroppings above her.
“I can hear them, Xiu.”
Xiu could, too, the crunch of tires and now the faint whine of electric motors. The mystery car came around a last, unseen bend in the road, and she tensed to dive out of the way.
But on this road, cars could not speed. Its headlights slowly bore down on her. “Make way, make way.” The words were loud, and the view-page in her hand came alight with flashing warnings about the penalties for interfering with the California Highway Patrol.
Xiu started to give way, and then she thought, But it’s the CHP I want to talk to.
She waved for the car to stop. The vehicle slowed still more, then turned and tried to edge past her on the left. “Make way, make way.”
“No!” she shouted and hopped back in front of it. “You stop!”
The car moved even more slowly. “Make way, make way.” And it tried to pass her on the other side. Xiu jumped in the way again, this time flailing her backpack as though it could do some damage.
The auto backed up a yard or two, and turned slyly as if preparing an end run. Xiu wondered if she really wanted to jump in front of what happened next.
WITH EVERY HEARTBEAT, pain spiked through Tommie. After a moment he realized that was good news. He raised his head, saw that he was stretched out on the back seat of a passenger car. That was Winston and Carlos in the facing seats.
“Where’s Robert and his little girl?”
Winston Blount shook his head. “They stayed behind.”
“We split up, Professor Parker.”
Scary memories were coming back. “Oh…yeah. Where’s my laptop? We gotta call 911.”
“We called, Tommie. Everything’s okay now, this is a CHP vehicle.”
Despite his haziness, that didn’t make sense. “It sure doesn’t look like one.”
“It’s got all the insignia, Tommie,” but there was dawning uncertainty in Winston’s voice.
T
ommie slid his legs from the seat and pushed himself into a half-sitting position. The pain squeezed tight on his chest, clawed out along his arms. He almost blacked out again, and would have fallen forward if not for Carlos.
“Hold…hold me up!” Tommie looked forward. The car’s headlights were on. The road was steep and narrow, with scattered remnants of asphalt surfacing, the sort of thing you might see in the East County, or in short stretches along the coast, a disconnected remnant of lost roadway. They slowed, negotiating deeply shadowed gullies. Bushes swept close around them. And now ahead he saw someone standing in the middle of the road. The car slowed to a crawl just five yards short of—it was a young woman.
“Make way, make way,” their car said over and over, trying to get by on one side and then the other.
The woman hopped from side to side, blocking them. She was shouting, and swinging a good-sized backpack at them.
Their car backed up a few feet, and Tommie heard the faint squeal of a capacitor preparing for something drastic. The wheels turned a few degrees—and the woman jumped in front of them again. Her face was bright in the headlights. It was a pretty Asian face…if you added thirty years to it, you got the face from some very distasteful turn-of-the-century papers in Secure Computing. She was the last person he’d ever expect to play “block the tanks at Tiananmen Square.”
The headlights went out. The car jolted forward. Then the brakes engaged and they slid halfway into the ditch. There was a muffled explosion that might have been that capacitor slagging itself. The doors on both sides of the vehicle popped open and Tommie slid partway into the cool night air.
“You okay, Professor Parker?” That was Carlos’s voice, coming from close behind his head.
“Not dead yet.” He heard footsteps on the roadway. A light flared in a small hand, and the woman said loudly, “It’s Winston Blount and Carlos Rivera—” and then more conversationally, “—and Thomas Parker. Y-You probably don’t know me, Dr. Parker, but I have admired your work.”