But he still had to be close enough to be controlling the thing. To keep leakage and the chance of interception to a minimum he was probably on a tight-link communications setup, which argued in turn (on the grounds of greatest security, if nothing else) for line-of-sight. Now, of course, the thing had a line of sight to most of the city, but before, when it had been aggregating itself out of the assembled Imperial functionaries, that line would have terminated strictly within the stadium walls.
Shaa stopped and squinted around himself again. The dust was still swirling, still rising. With the amount of energy the hypothesized tight-beam would have to be carrying, and the amount of dust it would now be having to push itself through, was it too much to ask for a trail of scintillation?
Here came Gashanatantra now, coughing and rubbing his eyes and splashed to the knees and up to his shoulder with churned mud, fresh from not-quite-skirting a loam-caked hollow where the Corpus had planted its hand on its way to its feet. “Any ideas?” Shaa said to him.
“With this prodigious a waste of power normal rules may not apply,” Gashanatantra yelled back. “What are you looking for up there in the sky?”
Shaa quickly explained. Gashanatantra craned his neck back and joined him in the scan.
Someone new humped their way up the muddy slope, looking in their caked-on and oozing demeanor more large earthworm than humanoid; Jardin. “He is using my power,” Jardin gasped. “He is readying a curse-based spell.”
“Where?” demanded Gashanatantra.
“Where the head was.”
Shaa took off.
“He’s cut off my links to the stuff buried under the stadium field, too,” said Favored. “All the capacitors, the power reservoirs, the precursor vats -”
“To you cross-double is he about,” spat Haddo.
“There’s no way he could -” Favored began, wheeling on Haddo.
“Iskendarian,” I said. “How much of the Iskendarian virus had infiltrated the Scapula before he dropped off the net?”
“I’m not sure what I was looking for,” Favored said reluctantly. “Some, I guess.”
“Do you know how to do a display rollback?” I said. “Here, look, like this - now what was your access sequence for that screen? Okay.” The old status screen on the Scapula’s thrall-network came back, I fine-tuned the sieve, and - there were signature traces of the Iskendarian infection wherever I looked. There - in the Scapula, too. And here I’d never even thought about network-wide contagion - I must have been doing something right when I’d designed that virus-thing. But how long did the Scapula have left before he realized he had to fight Iskendarian? Or for that matter, how long before Iskendarian was in control?
Now, I knew I must have put some kind of safeguards in the Iskendarian code. Hmm - I wondered if the Scapula had found out anything about the privileged subcarrier channel. How much did Favored know? - that might give me a clue. “Where did you stick the communications module?” I asked him.
I let him pick an option from one of his coded dialog screens and the second quantum level trunk status display popped up. Activity across the net was lower than I’d ever seen it - not surprisingly, considering that most of the high-volume transmitters had melted down and any remaining others were wisely lying low. And the subcarrier burst bands, that the magical nanoeffectors used to talk to each other themselves?
“The hell is that?” hollered Favored, as the new splashy readouts stabilized. “Is that magic we’re looking at?”
“Part of it,” I told him. ‘“Magic’ doesn’t just happen, you know, something’s got to do the work. Molecular-scale machines - any advanced-enough technology is indistinguishable from magic, I’m sure you’ve heard that, haven’t you? And there’s got to be a way for the systems to communicate, right? How else could you handle things like clairvoyance, or even this workstation being able to monitor what’s happening clear across the city? We’re not talking about witchcraft with this stuff, just cold engineering. Although I’ll be damned if I know how they pull some of these new tricks.”
Favored was now sort of shrinking back against the wall as he watched me work. “You really did build this stuff, didn’t you? I mean - somebody built it, right?, that’s what you’re saying? I mean, there’s technology from the past, sure, but - when you dig down to the roots magic’s magic, it just is ... isn’t it?”
“I would have thought you, of anyone, would be above those old superstitions,” I said. “Of course I didn’t do everything myself; there’s a tremendous amount of work embedded in this stuff. But most of it before me was basic science that got put together into building blocks. I came in when there were already blocks to play with. You might also keep in mind the fact that I thought it was an abstract exercise. If I’d ever thought someone would dump my work directly into implementation I’d never have fooled around the way I did. I did things that directly violated the safeguards designed to keep the stuff from getting out of control.”
“Like what?” Favored said weakly.
“Mutation, for one.” It was interesting to hear myself talk. More than interesting, actually. It was like listening to someone else give a lecture on my own life. As these revelations came reeling out of dead storage and into the light of day they were also emerging into a realm where I could actually know them, rather than their being latent wisps of potential. “I didn’t do too much hardware, per se; I was presented with a hypothetical substrate that I used as a basis for implementing an operating system, and then I did a lot of application programming on top of that. I did work out a lot of the user interface material and the spell compiler - you know, the way the machines could respond to incantations and so forth, translating user commands into internal reprogramming - but I got to thinking how interesting it could be if these programs could evolve. So I put together a system that treats program code like genetic code, letting program fragments transfer across nanomachines, mate, and recombine. Most of the time you’d get nothing, of course, but my models showed that there were enough ‘occasionallys’ that panned out to make things interesting. But that’s exactly the sort of interesting stuff you don’t want going on out in the real world. In software, anyway. Although in my defense I have to point out these concepts were already in the air when I started tinkering with them.”
“How so?”
“I mean genetic engineering; real genetic engineering. Where do you think all you humanoids and nonhuman creatures came from? And why you can all interbreed, and we can breed with you too? Most species aren’t more than few snips and twists away from human makeup in the first place.”
Was I only one in the area who wasn’t trailing their jaw down around their ankles? It was always difficult to tell with Haddo, but as slack as his hood looked I figured it wasn’t too great a stretch to put his expression down as “incredulous” as well. To be truthful, I didn’t know if I was any less confounded than the others, if perhaps a little less outraged. I might actually have gone a bit too far just now, telling them in such a conversational tone that they owed their existence to a few nips and tucks by a harebrained experimenter. Probably best to turn the conversation to something else. As it happened, something else was at hand. If -
“Why are you telling us this?” said Favored. “Are you planning to rub us out?”
“There’s been enough skulking around in the dark as it’s been,” I said. “I don’t care who knows any more. Except the Scapula - now here we go.”