Or to the way we handle thieves?" another Scientist asked.
Og watched his father's body language from the visual stream of an onlooker in the room with him.
Ragni leaned on his cane. "It's all the same discussion, really, and one that we should have had after the fall of the Gangs. When it comes down to it, we have to ask ourselves: do we force the will of one group on others? And, if so, what goal and methods are best for society?"
"We don't need to. We'd have never made it this far without strong social cohesion."
"But do we really have social cohesion? Or is it forced through violence and fear? And what effect are we having on those coerced?"
"This philosophical stuff is all well and good," another Scientist posted. "But we need to figure out how to calm people down, or how to handle defense of the Main Hub and the six factories if things get worse."
The conversation turned away from Ragni's questions. He seemed darkly dismayed.
Og watched his father for some time, wondering…
"This is what we want to do," Jason continued, moving the virtual diagrams around in the air. "We'll scatter the components in this low-wavelength trapping layer - literally at random. We don't have the capability to accurately place them. But, some percentage of the constructed panels will end up working for some specific angle." Standing tall with pride, he paused for effect. "And that's how we'll increase efficiency."
Next to Dierk, Elizabeth stood behind him, nodding along with his explanation.
Aarón listened, his bearing grave. His peppered hair and weathered skin seemed to match his silence in unspoken connotation.
She wondered if the older Scientist would take several young nobodies seriously in the middle of a rising crisis. Perhaps they should have taken the time to get Edmundo, Jason's older friend. From the same culture as Aarón, and of the same generation, his word might have carried more -
"Sounds good."
Jason half-laughed in disbelief. "What, really?"
The older man looked at each of them in turn, his countenance still grim. "If ever there was a time for bold ideas, it's now." He paused at Elizabeth. "You should take pride in your work. This isn't the streets. I like to think we Scientists hold ourselves to a standard of merit, rather than culture or standing. You could have presented this yourself."
She couldn't help but smile. "It's only my second day -"
He nodded gravely. "Unfortunately, it won't work."
"What, why?"
"It's ten to twenty times more expensive, at the least. We'd be burning tremendous resources on failed solar cells."
She felt her face burning bright red. "But if we don't do it, the Peak might hit. The food supply - the violence -"
"It's not under my control. It's just not profitable, so nobody will do it."
"Profitable?"
"Yes. Production chases profit. You think you're the first person to ever have this idea?"
She stared at him, horrified, wishing she didn't comprehend.
He shrugged. "There's just nobody to pay for it."
That terrible pressure around her heart threatened to return. "No," she insisted. "If it's profit motive, what profit is there in the Peak hitting? What profit is there in society imploding?"
His eyes seemed very heavy, and his shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. "Believe me, those who might have the capital to invest in your expensive process have more than considered that eventuality. The Peak hitting would not be the end of the human race - it would just mean mass death for the bottom thirty or forty percent, and that violence and starvation would erupt long before the food supply actually reached shortage levels. It's happened before. I'm sure you remember, and I'm sure there are some wealthy who are positioned to benefit immensely if such a thing should actually happen again."
She fought a surging roar in her head, her every fiber burning. A massive pain buried deep within her moved, finding place and sense. Trembling, she kept control through sheer force of will.
"Benefit?" she finally demanded. "Benefit how?"
Dierk answered her plea, his gaze on the ground. "Somebody always benefits."
Jason's features seemed drained of color. He nodded unhappily. "Own the right infrastructure, make the right investments…"
Aarón remained stone-faced. "As they say, work is life. And who supplies the work? Every disaster is an opportunity for change, but change isn't always good."
Her clenched fists shook with refusal. "This can't be it. We can't just accept this. Please help us. I'll find an investor somehow. I'll convince them."
The older Scientist bowed his head for a long, still moment, but then sighed. "I like your enthusiasm, even if I feel it's hopeless. Fine, let's go talk to people."
Leading them out of the quiet-halls, they emerged into the Factory Six complex proper. Colored with intricate patterns of yellow, red, and green that each flowed through the series of factories in accordance to function and flow, the place seemed an oddly navigable maze. Thousands of men and women labored on the lines, operating the machines. The lines themselves traveled off into the distance, disappearing into further spaces lost in the maze of pipes, walkways, and enormous mechanisms.
Aarón led them up metal stairs and along a narrow walkway. In light of the tremendous noise, he began texting with one of the operators, explaining their need. The woman indicated the farthest line.
After a winding sojourn through the maze, they came to the indicated line, and a mini-workspace with another Scientist bent over a table, modifying a gutted solar cell prototype.
Aarón and the woman conversed for a moment.
He returned to them. "There's something you should see."
Out of the building, through a brief bout of sunlight and back into another complex, they followed an incredible tumble of danger-red pipes. The sound remained overwhelming, but shifted away from screechy and sharp. Instead, the space reverberated with liquid pumping and swishing sounds, mixed in with something grinding and crunching.
"It's our fuel refinery," he texted. "Raw materials from the Shield mines are turned to transportable slag in the west, then piped here and refined. But apparently they've got this new byproduct you'll want to see."
Leading them to a tank off to the side, he scooped out some of the contents with a curved implement. The small pile of black debris glimmered brightly in the diffuse sunlight streaming in through windows set high above the pipe maze.
"We've just been dumping this new waste in the sea for the last month," he wrote. "But apparently it's got interesting refractive properties they've been waiting to investigate once we have enough placement precision. Might be a lead."
She grabbed the material's linked composition files, ecstatic.
Dierk nodded. "It looks promising."
"This might actually work?" Jason asked, shaking his head. "Wow."
Aarón carefully put the refining byproduct back in the tank. He smiled lightly. "It's been a long time since I've been so intrigued. I'm glad you were so -"
A refinery worker ran by them in a hurry.
A moment later, two more workers bolted past.
"What's going on?" Aarón texted one of them.
"There's a list!" came the enigmatic reply.
Concerned, the old man led their small group to the refinery entrance. The street ran more densely crowded than usual, filled with red-faced people arguing.
Kitna held his shirt tight as they pushed through the increasingly rough crowd.
"Rolf, what the hell's going on?"
He pulled her into an alley full of prone zombies, seeking respite from the tumult. He gripped his hair, his eyes wild. "My list… somebody publicized my list…"
"What list?"
"I just searched," he breathed, eyes wide. "I searched for all the people that had ever gotten a checksum error in the game!"
She grabbed his shirt harder, trembling with horrified understanding. "So you connected the error to people?"
"But who would have??
? how would anyone have noticed or cared? They… they can't kill a million people!" Even as he said it, dark memories circled his awareness, mocking his naïve comment. He looked out of the alley, tracing the randomly colored nightmare everyone else called society. Leaving the natural tones of the Main Hub - and its possible safety - now felt like a terrible mistake.
The mistake revealed itself between his racing thoughts. He'd been aware that facts could be obscured by private communication; he'd even wondered at the size and scope of the revolution - but there was no reason that private communication might be limited to only one group, or only one method.
The arena was far larger than he'd guessed.
She screamed terrified questions, clawing at him, but he heard nothing.
There was somebody else…
There had to be somebody undermining the Undermining… somebody ensuring that everything was going terribly wrong… they had to have exposed the list on purpose.
He gripped his forehead, resisting panic. Who would benefit from all this? He could sense multiple agendas at work, crossing purposes, but the next steps were impossible to predict.
And, in any case, his own personal demons refused to give him time to think on it.
In the distance, he saw certain dots moving on the map, eager to catch up to him outside the safety of the Main Hub. They didn't care about the list, or about the situation. They were coming for him, and Og wasn't around to warn them off this time.
As much as he hated to face it, he could feel the paths ahead constricting. Too much was happening, and too fast. He could feel each passing second slicing branches from the Tree of his future.
"We have to go… now." Grabbing her hand and pulling her along, mind on fire with desperation, he set off toward the paths that held the best chances. For the moment, the best action was delay - and putting the most distance between himself and his pursuers. He could sense something enormous about to happen; wills hanging dark and brooding over civilization, like the roiling Rain Belt's black presence - except not content to remain in place, instead poised to surge forth over unsuspecting millions.
Og dropped his tools and left the labs, heading for his father.
The Hub's main quadrant had ceased flowing altogether. Densely packed people stood in confusion, not sure what to do or feel. The tone of the crowd's roar shifted emotions rapidly, swinging back and forth between fearful and angry.
The conversation in Forum B had taken a much darker tone. An older Scientist had revealed something damning after a list of people with strange errors had caught public attention. "It's private communication," she'd written. "I know, because we used the secret system to help organize a revolution against the Tyrant. Someone might now be using that against us."
He tried desperately to follow the related conversations, but they'd begun progressing faster than he could read.
"There's over a million people on this list," one of the younger Scientists posted. "They can't all be involved in a conspiracy!"
"Stop," Ragni wrote. "We can't solve this by creating a phantom enemy. This won't unite anyone, won't stop any violence."
"It looks like there's also code that generates the error randomly, possibly created by accident," another added. "It's impossible to tell who legitimately used the private communication bug."
"So we've got a million people in the public eye, and we have no idea whether they're guilty?"
He squeezed past people, ran up a set of stairs, and burst into the room where Ragni stood gazing unhappily out of a window.
"Dad! What the hell is going on?"
The old man sighed, rubbing his beard. "I'm glad your brothers aren't here for this."
Scattered layabouts watched their heated conversation with interest, all fearful.
"How can you say that?" he demanded.
Ragni's jaw trembled. "I think this might be it. We made it twelve years on our own, at least that's something."
He stood in shock. "What do you mean this might be it? You can fix this, Dad, right? We can do something."
The conversation in Forum B turned toward defense plans for the Main Hub.
Ragni watched adults in the main quadrant hurry to hide their children. "I don't think so. Not this time. A million people, scattered all over civilization… there will be at least one in every community."
"We'll talk it out," he insisted.
"Not this time. The demographics of the game, and of the list, mainly involve those least fortunate. Zombies and the dispossessed. If we had certainty of guilt, it might be one thing, but this is exactly the unclear situation this system can't handle." He leaned on the window, watching the men and women outside organize, piling debris in front of the Main Hub's entrances and gathering makeshift weapons. "We have a million people out there who know they're not guilty, and their friends and loved ones who will believe them and support them, and then many more who won't know what to think."
"So there's our opportunity! We'll insist everyone remain calm and we'll work out a solution."
"No. I've seen this before. An invisible enemy is a powerful thing. Zealots always rise in situations like this, and they will use that phantom threat to goad the population to action. This isn't just going to be a riot, my son. This has been coming for a very long time."
He tried to breathe, fighting brimming sorrow. The world felt wrong, like he'd never seen it before, and he knew his last vestiges of blissful ignorance had finally faded. He suddenly saw the real possibilities, the real state of the world. People were going to die… and the people he cared about, having left the Hub, were not immune. "I have to go."
Ragni smiled, his pride overshadowing his sorrow for a moment. "I thought you might."
He took a hesitant step forward, not wanting to suggest that this might be the last time they ever saw each other.
"Just go, you big sap," the old man laughed, vainly shrugging off the situation. "We'll talk again tomorrow, when this is all over."
He sniffed, nodded once, and turned away, hurrying down the stairs with a pounding heart.
Elizabeth stood in the roaring crowd. Jason, Dierk, and Aarón clustered in an unhappy circle around her. Above, on an outside walkway jutting from the refinery, a fiery-eyed young Anglan stood, his clothes set to light blue.
"Make no mistake," he mass-texted, his speech drawing waves of shouted support. "They will come to kill us. This was never about thieving children or even some mythical Undermining subverting society!"
The crowd surged, and the four of them struggled to remain standing.
"Come on," Jason wrote to them. "We can't stay here."
They pushed through the crowd, making slow progress through the press.
"It's about control!" the speaker wrote, throwing his arms up in the air. "Who works the Fields? Us! Who works the factory lines? Us! Who drives the trucks? Us! So why are we starving? Why do we live on the whims of the rich?"
The roar grew deafening, surging with each repeated call to action. She ducked under raised fists, all cheering for the words nobody would have dared spoken the day before. Reaching the wall, she helped pull her companions from the press.
"Are you tired of working to the bone for someone else? Are you tired of being cast into the flames as fodder? The fires of Factory Seven are still burning, glooming over civilization in a belt of black, oppression incarnate, a Rain Belt fueled by negligence, uncaring, and the bodies of fifty thousand of our brothers and sisters. Who was held responsible? Nobody! Are you tired of being told it's just the system, that it's nobody's fault, that it's just the way things are?"
Surprised, she looked up at the distant orator, hearing her own thoughts reflected back at her.
The speaker began pacing. "When it's one against a thousand, we Marginalized have no choice but to submit - but millions together cannot be ignored!"
Mouth agape, she watched as he committed the unthinkable.
"Today, we break our silence. Today, we speak. Try firing me for my opinion no
w, you bastards!" Lifting the cord from around his neck, he held his cell up - and then threw it into the air. Thousands of eyes watched it sail down into the crowd, a stunned silence falling over the area. The momentary quiet seemed almost more deafening than the prior roar. The world seemed to go still, all minds momentarily taken aback.
Then, it happened.
Someone else cast off their cell.
It arced through the air, falling back among the people.
The roar returned, an almost-physical wave of boisterous support and angry condemnation, two sentiments conflicting explosively. The first shoving and punching began almost immediately, the violence spreading in a rapidly expanding wave of its own.
Seeing the crowd move up against the wall, fearing an oncoming wave that might crush them, the small group of Scientists rushed for a nearby street.
"Wait," Dierk wrote, stopping once they were free of immediate danger. "I can't…"
"Can't what?" Jason asked, breathing heavily.
The thin Subian lifted his cell off and dropped it on the ground.
She stared at him in disbelief. "What do you think you're doing?"
His gaze seemed distant. He spoke almost absently, his unheard words transcribed to text by her contacts using the movements of his mouth. "Rolf and Kitna would understand. I just can't do it anymore. Please tell them."
She shouted after him, but he was already gone, lost in the churning sea of shoving bodies pouring into the streets.
Watching the distant riot as they moved, Rolf gave a questioning glance.
Kitna nodded, silently confirming his suspicion. The public breaking of the list had forced the revolution's time table even further forward.
He could feel the game progressing, moves and countermoves made by unknown players on unknown sides, employing vast strategies in a ruleset he didn’t yet understand, aiming for goals as yet hidden.
He pulled in information constantly, trying to piece together the game, trying to grip some small foothold, but the picture remained far too large to predict the next move - and he couldn't get out of the way if he didn't know which way to run.
Nearby, they could hear someone shouting in the distance; two people arguing heatedly. Those passersby visible from their position hurried past the alley's mouth, probably heading for the safety of wherever they called home.
"Where can we go?" Kitna asked, visibly resisting panic.
"There's nowhere we can hide," he responded, pulling them into an alley and sinking down to the hard stone between two zombies. "Whatever else happens, we're on that list. If they decide to kill everyone on the list, they'll look for us. A single location search and there we'll be."
But, for the moment, he remained more worried about the three Subians heading their direction. Breathing hard, but thankful for the moment's rest, he staggered to his feet again.
They left the alley quickly, trying not to draw attention, but many fearful glances traveled their way from passersby who had the list cross-referenced and knew exactly who they were.
"Rolf!"
The text filled him with a sudden and powerful relief.
"Og! Og, damnit! What should we do? Should we head for the Main Hub?"
Somewhat distant from