"I had been waiting years for this, of course. I was so bored, and in those days so angry at what had been done to me, that I had freedom on my mind the way a slave chained to a galley oar does. My only exercise was mental—you can see my legs, my withered arms, what Keener's incendiaries did to me—but I was a pilot, damn it! In a few minutes I had lost everything—my ship, my health, my freedom—but I had in me still that drive, that need. If I was denied the skies, I could fly through information space, the way my PEREGRINE fellows and I had discovered. It might not be the same as walking the streets like other citizens, but it would still be escape of a very real sort.
"It was true that I had no devices to access the net. No visible ones, in any case. But even then my caretakers understood very little about my capabilities . . . and, more importantly, my obsession for escape. It was easy enough to steal a length of fiberlink from the men who installed the wallscreen. When they were gone, it was almost as easy for me to perform a brief if messy operation with a magnifying glass, a butter knife I had ground down to razor-sharpness, and various other implements, including old-fashioned solder. It would have looked horrible to anyone but me, the wires going directly into a long and bloody incision in my arm, but I connected up to the old input control point from the PEREGRINE days and began using some of my implanted systems to force a machine-language connection, reversing through the wallscreen downlink.
"I won't bore you with all the details. My keepers on the base eventually noticed what I was doing—I was so enraptured with my newfound freedom that I was not as cautious as I should have been. They brought four MPs to subdue me—me, all one hundred and ten shriveled, pre-metric pounds!—and ripped out the wallscreen. Doctors sewed me back up. See, here is the scar. They put a big flashing marker on my file ordering that nothing which might allow me that kind of connection was ever to be given me again, and I was subjected to periodic random searches for decades.
"But what they didn't know was that it was already too late. In the early hours of my newfound freedom, I located and downloaded a raft of specialized gear to my internal systems, including a very clever little black market number that permitted me to make remote connection to nearby networks, using my own metallicized bones as an antenna. Long before the telematic jack became a chic accessory for the busy new-rich, I had one of my own, invisibly hidden inside me.
"Since then, I have continually upgraded myself, all without the knowledge of my captors. Not everything could be done by software alone, but to a man who can go anywhere and converse with anyone, not much is out of reach. In a fit of reflexive honesty, the military had kept my pension for any survivors that might turn up. I made it disappear with a small numbers trick, then moved it into some other areas and began growing it—legitimately, always legitimately. I don't know why that matters, but it does. I have never stolen from anyone. Well, except information. I'm not the world's richest man by any stretch, but I have a tidy sum now, and for a long time I bent it all toward self-improvement. Upgrades?" Sellars suddenly laughed, a genuine bark of amusement. "I am the Upgraded Man! Do you remember my chess-by-mail game, Major Sorensen?"
The man narrowed his eyes. "We examined the hell out of that. No codes. No trick writing. Nothing."
"Oh, it was a perfectly legitimate game—we made sure of that. But you can put quite a bit of expensive black-market nanomachinery in the period after the word 'check,' which is how one of my contacts was able to send me the last things I needed to be able to upgrade my system and survive without constant hydration. I tore out and ate a tiny little piece of paper and the little machines went to work. I would not have lasted a day in that tunnel under the base without that improvement."
"You bastard," Sorensen said admiringly. "We were wondering what you were going to do after you broke out. We had every medical supply place in three states on the watch."
"But why?" Ramsey asked. "Why did you wait so long to escape? I mean, you've been there thirty years or so, haven't you?"
Sellars nodded. "Because after I'd gained full-time access to the net, and had read every file, explored every record, my anger began to fade. A terrible thing had happened to me, an injustice—but what did that really mean? Now that I had a sort of freedom, what more did I want? Look at me, Mr. Ramsey. It was clear that I was never going to be able to live a normal life. I still harbored deep resentments, but I also began to put my endless free time into other things. Exploration of the fast-growing worldwide data sphere—the net. Amusements of various sorts. Experiments.
"It was in the course of one such experiment that I found the first track of the Grail Brotherhood. . . ."
"Hang on a bit," said Ramsey. "What sort of experiments?"
For a moment Sellars hesitated, then his waxy face seemed to harden. "I do not wish to talk about that. Do you want me to go on, or have you heard enough for one day?"
"No, please continue. I didn't mean to offend you." But Catur Ramsey's radar was still flashing. It almost seemed like the old man wanted to be asked again, but Ramsey had no experience reading the odd features. But there's something there, he thought. Something important, at least to Sellars. Is it important to us, too? It was impossible to guess. He filed it away for later. "Please, go on."
"I have already explained much of what I discovered then. What the Brotherhood seemed to be doing, the weapons at its disposal, all were bad enough. But now, just in the last forty-eight hours, everything has gone completely off the rails. I am having a terrible time trying to make sense of anything and my whole Garden is in an uproar."
"Garden?" said Kaylene Sorensen before anyone else could. "What garden?"
"I apologize. It is the way I order my information—a metaphor, in a sense, but a very real thing to me as well. If you like, I will show it to you someday. It was . . . really quite beautiful once." He shook his head slowly. "Now it is blighted. Order is gone. Something drastic has happened to the Grail network, and also to the Brotherhood itself. The newsnets tell me that several people I believe to be part of their leadership have all died within the last few days, their empires suddenly in chaos. Is this part of some move toward immortality—of conveying themselves into the virtual universe forever, as I suspected that they planned? If so, it seems odd they would leave such disruption behind, since they must surely still need some kind of economic power to maintain that huge, expensive network."
"You're only guessing about that," said Michael Sorensen. "About a lot of things."
"I am only guessing about almost everything," said Sellars, amused and disgusted, and at that moment finally won much of Catur Ramsey's trust, "But the probability factors are too high to ignore, and have been since I first encountered this ghastly plot. I'm terrified, trying to grope at something behind a big thick black curtain and guess what it is. But I am certain that whatever it might be, it's bad and getting worse—unfortunately, that's the guess I'm most confident about. Do you think I would have involved a child like your daughter if I could believe for an instant I might be wrong? Me, who had his own life ruined by trusting those who should have known better and planned better? Major Sorensen, Mrs. Sorensen, I can never earn forgiveness for endangering your daughter, so I haven't asked. But I can promise you that I only did it because I felt that the stakes were so frighteningly high. . . ." He stopped and shook his hairless head. "No, that would not make it better. She is your child, after all."