"FBI again requests clearance to take over."
"Denied. The situation has escalated." For the moment, hopefully just for the moment. If police and rescue could bring the system back up, then all the hardware that Bob had just boosted over Southern California would simply be an expensive exercise. But one good thing about being locked and loaded was that he had lots more call on resources: Gu grabbed analyst teams from all across the national workshift and pushed the intel and sensor backlog at them. Priority questions: Are the San Diego labs secure? What is the prognosis for the current system failures?
Meantime, Bob's launches had soared to the top of their trajectories. He tweaked the Edwards munitions still higher, delaying them behind the gear from Pendleton. If nothing was resolved soon, he would have to light the uncrews' jets. I need answers, guys !
But the analyst mob was still busy connecting a billion dots, looking for patterns and conspiracies. Then a single observation changed everything. A weather-service geek doing her monthly reserve duty grabbed a very high priority: "Twenty seconds ago. I see ad hoc signaling in the backscatter above here" — and she drew an ellipse over San Diego North
County, covering much of Camp Pendleton. Somebody was making their own communications, simply blinking a light into the sky haze! The long axis of the scatter ellipse pointed right back toward UCSD. The words of the intercepted message streamed across Bob's vision:
Xiu Xiang — > anyone clever enough to notice me in the backscatter: <sm>GenGen laboratory automation has been corrupted. The system is attacking anyone opposing it. This is not a game. This is not a joke. What? Yes, I'll tell them. There are two people still in the labs. They are good guys! They are trying to help.</sm>
The NOAA analyst spoke over the script display: "The message is a one-second burst, retransmitted twelve times. What you're seeing is the summed cleanup."
It was clear enough. Bob Gu's fingers tapped in their gloves, launching his marines.
Then his own gee pod came tight and — — for a moment Bob Gu was not paying attention. For a moment he could not pay attention. Battle commit put the combat CO himself into the fray. In this case, launch took his landing dart almost horizontally out of Pendleton. Maybe this is not a good idea , he thought muzzily. But he always thought that coming out of a twenty-gee railgun launch.
Now he had to recollect his wits and context. His team and equipment were on schedule. The unthinkable Last Resorts were still high overhead, flexible to the last. The network munitions were already at UCSD. And the bio labs still showed green, all secure and peaceful.
His own landing dart was seconds away from the UCSD.
There was something else that was important, something in the last few seconds. Xiu Xiang? Bob's recollection came unsquished just as a DHS analyst team presented its own form of the insight: Xiu Xiang. A not uncommon name. But in all of Southern California there probably weren't more than three or four who owned that name. And one lived at Rainbows End with Lena Gu.
Suddenly he had a good idea just who was in the crosshairs of all that he commanded.
30
When the Network Stops
The Library had chosen. For an instant, Timothy Huynh and all the night crew were silent. The crowds of real humans were quiet, and even the millions of virtuals took part in a coordinated stillness.
The Library had chosen — and it had chosen the Scoochis.
On the Hacek side you could see the realization of defeat spreading. The triumph was real. How would the Hacekeans take it? There had been a few debacles in the late teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or the Zones of Thought? But tonight the Hacekeans had lost at the hands of others; they must do something … maybe even something gracious.
The silent stillness of the mob continued a second more. Then Dangerous Knowledge suddenly turned away from the library. Its gaze swept fiercely across them all. After all, playing loser wasn't in its repertoire. But whoever was behind all the creativity was flexible: After a moment, Dangerous smiled gently and turned back to the library. Its voice made concession sound like the granting of a favor: "We bow to the wishes of the Library. Here you have won, O Scooch-a-mout."
Wails arose from the Hacek side, but Dangerous raised a hand and continued. "We give up our claims here. We remain as guests only."
Sheila — > Night Crew: <sm>The Hacek people are in heavy discussion with the university administration. They're begging for whatever scraps they can get.</sm>
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.