“I almost fell for that. You’ve gotten good.”
Her eyes widened. “Wh-what—”
“You’re trying to weasel out of something, just like that last time when you and Peter were planning to wipe out my colony on Jaspex—remember, in Consensus? You gave me the same kind of bullshit speech that time.” He scrunched up his mouth and tapped his chin. “Now, what would it be that you’re avoiding this time…?
“Mom.” He could see from her expression that he’d hit the mark. “I’m not Toby the Messiah until I go to Destrier and wake her up. All this stuff about pogroms and revolutions—that’s all theoretical, isn’t it? There’s something else going on here.”
Evayne glared at him. “Oh yes? Well, tell me you weren’t on your way to Destrier next.”
She had him with that one. He ducked his head. “With nobody around to tell me the rules of the game, what else would I do? You stacked the deck against me, Evie. I want to know why.”
Now this older woman, who looked so much like some long-lost aunt, looked away and said, with real sadness, “It’s far too late for that, Toby. I wish we’d had a chance to finish growing up together, I really do. But that chance is gone. This has to be good-bye.” She made a throat-cutting gesture and her image vanished.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE IT,” muttered Corva as she took off the glasses. “She’s … Toby, she’s awful.”
He sighed heavily. “Family, huh? Seriously, I’m starting to get over the shock of it all. That Evayne … is not my Evayne. My sister’s gone, Corva.”
Then—because he couldn’t put it off any longer—he said, “So what about it? Do we stay here an extra day while we wake Halen? Or do we leave him safe where he is, for now at least?”
He held his breath. The look on Corva’s face was heartrending. She bit a fingernail and stared for a long time back at the stairs to the underground vault.
“We go,” she said, almost inaudibly; and in that moment it was as if she’d taken a giant step, over countless choices and possibilities, to a place from which there was no going back. She hung her head and without another word followed Toby out of the house.
They climbed out of the plastic-wrapping into bright sunlight, hot air, and the buzzing of cicadas. Corva hugged herself and looked around. “Whoa. They did a bad job on the street.” She’d noticed the unkempt wilderness that had sprung up around the pink house shapes. Wrecks had, too—he sat up on his haunches, whiskers twitching, almost quivering with alertness. Orpheus sat nearby, watching Toby with the air of a worldly-wise traveler observing a tourist.
“This way,” Toby said. “I’ve got a pack and supplies for you.” He began walking through the tall grass. Corva hurried to catch up.
“When are we?”
“Not far from where we left things.” He watched the denners scout ahead. “It’s funny, I have to do the math every now and then to keep it straight.” He counted it out on his fingers for her: “The main lockstep hasn’t started its next turn yet. Kenani’s been asleep on Wallop for eighteen years realtime, so he’s still waiting for Evayne to arrive so he can turn us over to her. One more week has passed in the Weekly since we left there. And two years, realtime, have passed since you went to sleep.”
She grinned. “Yeah, it can be confusing. You’ll get used to it.” Then she lost the smile. “How long have you been awake?”
“A few months. Long enough, like I said, to get over certain things.”
“And in all this time you’ve done … what?”
It was his turn to grin. “I’ve been driving Evayne out of her mind.
“Do you want to help?”
Eighteen
“IT’S ALL ABOUT THE interface,” Miranda was telling Corva, “and the things it can do for you.”
“‘You’ being a McGonigal,” Corva pointed out.
“Well, yeah. Which is why I can only show you this mock-up. Toby can’t share it with anybody else. It’s the biocrypto, you know.”
Toby watched them out of the corner of his eye as he kicked through the remains of a recent battle. Having spent several weeks together now, the two women were chatting like old friends, despite the fact that one of them was a fourteen-thousand-year-old game personality. He’d found a way to port data from the government strategic models to Consensus and had given Corva an account in that. Now they both could see the whole vast network of Thisbe’s planetary civilization spread out around them, icons and pointers and information flags standing like giants over the horizon; or they could zoom it all into a handheld map. They could manipulate the time lines, slide back to review or forward to project outcomes—though only he could enter any commands into the real interface.
“I can’t believe the army gave you an account,” she’d said when he first booted it up for her.
Toby had laughed. “The alternative was letting me blunder around with no firm data. What would you have done?”
“Here,” said Miranda now. “See how you can monitor the cicada beds? There’s health status, power levels, number of sleepers…”
“I don’t see any names. How can you tell who’s who?”
“You can’t. That information is in the government’s emergency database, which you, and Evayne, don’t have access to.”
“And that was the key to the whole plan,” said Toby; but he wasn’t watching the other two anymore. He had knelt by the remains of a burned-out bot to examine its design. “Damn.”
The bot was cylindrical, not human shaped at all though it did have legs. It was about the size of a refrigerator, but he couldn’t tell whether it had been armed. Of course, it was hard to tell much from the landscape of churned ground and twisted metal that spread over about a square kilometer of grassland. The forest fire started by the battle was still going, a few klicks east of here; Thisbe firefighting bots were water-bombing it with monotonous regularity. If they didn’t get it under control in the next day or so, the lockstep system would be forced to wake up everybody in the neighboring town so they could evacuate.
Which would be perfect.
“Did you find something?” Corva came over, her feet crunching on the burnt, black ground.
“I can’t tell what model this was,” he said, poking at the downed bot with a stick.
“And that’s a problem because…?”
“It’s a problem if Evayne’s got a reserve of non-McGonigal bots. That would mean she can get around the network problem.”
“I still don’t get that,” Corva said to Miranda.
“It looks as though Toby has an administrator’s account to the lockstep system, but Evayne is just a user,” said Toby’s virtual shipmate. “He’s been able to override all of her commands to lockstep technology. That includes any of Evayne’s systems that he can communicate with.”
“Which is why she cut herself off from the planetary network,” Toby said. Standing, he brushed ashes from his knees and looked around for more clues. “She can’t take over my bots, but I can take over hers. I could even have taken over her ships and shut her down in orbit, if only I’d known about this sooner!”
“I’m sorry,” said Corva sarcastically, “but why didn’t you?”
“It’s the interface.” Miranda shrugged. “It’s kind of … cryptic. Lots of things it doesn’t tell you. Like, for instance, the identity of a given sleeper. There are emergency systems that can track who sleeps where and can wake a sleeper remotely. For example, you can set an alarm to do that if somebody close to you dies or some other personal emergency happens. Your ship’s manifest cross-referenced names with the cicada beds the passengers were in. But by themselves, the beds don’t keep that kind of information.”