And the Greater Scooch-a-mout was conciliatory in victory, though it didn't step away from its embrace of the library. "You are welcome as guests, in a library with real books."
Hanson > Night Crew: <sm>Admin is squealing about that, but the publicity should pay for extra floor space. We've won, gang!</sm>
For some minutes, everything was cool. Ending a riot without a police confrontation or a physical debacle was a little bit anticlimactic, but the riot designers had even more special effects to wind things down. Katie Rosenbaum gathered the spider bots all together, then sent them out to Huynh's mechs for a bizarre "peace dance" that incidentally cleaned up most of the night's garbage. Tim sensed negotiations going on between the two sides, things being traded, promises made. Dangerous Knowledge retreated into the sky, and both sides played with special effects that were new on this night.
But now, when things should have been getting smoother, there were network problems. Here and there, service was unusably slow or all jittery. It made everyone look bad. Scooch-a-mout still stood by the library, embracing the pillar that had "walked." You hold a heroic gesture that long and you just look stupid. Huynh looked at his mech status board. There hadn't been a Scoochi update for almost seven seconds. That was no way to drive a mech.
Huynh > Hanson: <sm>Hey, Sheila. Who's driving the Greater Scooch-a-mout?</sm>
Hanson > Huynh: <sm>Dunno. He was good, but now he's dropped the ball. It's okay, we're winding down now. Just take control and walk the robot out. No need to look cool.</sm> Then she was messaging the whole night crew, trying to tidy up and get all her GenGen people and gear back where they belonged.
Huynh drove his forklift toward the Greater Scooch-a-mout mech. He walked along behind and tried to figure some nice way to get the two off the field. His robot's "Mind Sum" mists weren't matching its movements anymore; they looked like crap. Okay. He'd take control of the Greater Scooch-a-mout, and have the two robots give a last high five, and then rumble out together. That would be cool, if not fully so.
Maybe it didn't matter. The network problems were getting a lot worse. There were strange latencies, maybe real partitions. Blocks of the virtual audience were being run on cache. Single-hop still mostly worked, but routed communication was in trouble. Huynh stepped a few feet to the side and managed to find a good diagnostic source. There were certificate failures at the lowest levels. He had never seen that before.
Even the localizer mesh was failing'.
Like the holes in threadbare carpet, splotches of plain reality grew around him, eating out the mists and crowds, revealing the armies of everyday lab mechs. Where there had been hundreds of thousands of players, now there were open stretches of dark lawn, and the crowds of real humans, standing in shock.
"Tim! Your forklift!" The shout was real sound, from Sheila Hanson, just a few feet away.
Huynh turned back toward the library. He had lost contact with Mind Sum! He ran toward the mech. The forklift had continued autonomously for just a couple of steps. But this was not a flat lab floor, and the localizer mesh was failing around it. The robot had tripped on one of the ornamental boulders that fringed the terrace. It teetered off-balance, shrieking location queries in all directions. But now the mesh was gone, and the forklift was in trouble. Its onboard systems were designed to cope with instability: the failure mode consisted of stepping quickly into the fall, lowering its center of gravity, and dropping stability limbs. That would have worked down in the clean environment of the labs. Here, its lunge took it to the edge of the north-side grade and there was no localizer mesh to alert it to the drop. The stability limb settled into thin air, and the forklift tipped over the edge.
There were screams.
Huynh ran out onto the robot battlefield. All the epic imagery was gone, but the robots still had local coordination. They rolled out of his way. He scarcely noticed. All his attention was on his forklift. He had direct contact now. He surfed across the forklift's cameras and felt sick. There was someone pinned underneath. He climbed down the hillside and fell to his knees. The woman was trapped there, still screaming. Her leg, up to above the knee, was crushed by forklift composite.
Someone scrambled down beside him. Sheila. She wriggled under the blades of the forklift, reached down to grasp the woman's hand. "We'll get you out. Don't worry. We'll get you out."
"Yes!" said Tim. He had full control now. Between his own vision and the cameras, he could see how it had fallen, and where the woman was pinned. Be cool and everything will be okay . The forklift put its weight on knees that didn't touch the woman. There was solid support, no surprises. From under the blades he could hear Sheila comforting the woman.
Okay, just shift the weight back, push off into a low sitting posture. Easy
But now there were other screams, and the sounds of people running.
Smale > Huynh: <sm>Help us, Tim!</sm>
Huynh glanced through a camera on the other end of the forklift: The robot that had been the Greater Scooch-a-mout was still standing by the library, but now its center of gravity was absurdly high and someone had overridden all its safeties, to push against the nearest pillar. The mech's foot pads were grinding into the concrete cladding of the terrace. There was the sound of motors on emergency burn, but in an off/on/off rhythm that sounded almost musical. The robot looked like a child trying to prop up a teetering bookcase.
Huynh turned the camera to look up and up at the sixth-floor overhang, almost directly overhead. There were gaps in the concrete, and places where the floors tilted and swayed. It was a building that had the smarts to stabilize itself, even to move a little. But now that intelligence was cut off from location information. Like Timothy Huynh's forklift, the library was doing its best to remain standing and on its own vast scale, it was failing.
31
Bob Contemplates Nuclear Carpet-Bombing
Bob coasted across the UCSD campus, his landing dart now as slow and quiet as the network munitions that were raining out of the sky. This was a classic network-superiority assault, absent significant defenses. There were many many things to do and only seconds to do them, but for these few moments he had a paradoxical sense of security. There weren't many places in the modern world where a human could be as self-sufficient if only temporarily as when in command of such an assault. Bob Gu's expeditionary group had its own network, its own power supplies, its own sensors. Even if all his remote analysts were to disappear, his marines would still be in business.
At the moment, thousands of assault nodes were nestling into trees and bushes, fastening themselves to vehicles and ledges and the sides of buildings. Even before they touched down, they asserted primacy over what civilian network hardware still functioned. That takeover was almost complete. He already had access to almost all the embedded controllers in the area. In combat, those local systems were often unsalvageable. Here, there were a few seconds of intense interrogation, DHS authority was asserted, and he had control. The cars and wearables, the medicals, the viewpoints and financials and police systems, they were all responding. Police and rescue workers were reconnecting via the combat net. Already he could hear their voices picking up the operation. With just a little luck, there would be no loss of life, just a very bad and strange network outage. He would leave the combat net in place, just as in a foreign operation. Over the coming days it would be replaced not by administrative forces but by the gradual reassertion of the civil system. None of that was really important. "The labs. Have they responded?"