The wind pushed a break in the clouds, revealing the faint twinkle of some brave stars trying to shine down on Gotham.
“Do you ever wonder why?”
Bob snapped his attention back into his body. Near to him was a man, sitting on a park bench, in a gray raincoat with a hydrophobic shell. The falling mist of rain danced away from him in a veil as the man looked toward the bay. That’s odd. No hits popped up in Bob’s identity algorithms. “Why what?”
The man looked into Bob’s eyes, smiling. “A hundred billion stars in this Milky Way galaxy, and a hundred billion more galaxies just like it. Life fills every available crack in this Solar System, and most stars have planets—many of them similar to Earth.”
“And yet?” Bob was still trying to get an identity.
“And yet not a peep from anyone out there. Do you ever wonder why?”
Except for the POND data, thought Bob, remembering the mysterious signal from a supposedly extraterrestrial source that Patricia had detected with her Pacific Ocean Neutrino Detector. She’d instructed them to keep quiet about it, but perhaps Bob should release the news. It might even pull society from its downward spiral if the world realized that someone else was out there. But first they needed to decode the data. That’s what Patricia asked them to do. What was inside the message might be as important as the message itself.
Bob shook his head, feeling the weight bearing down. He was the wrong person for this job.
The man was still smiling at Bob. “No? You never wonder? You look like you do.”
Bob sensed that something had gone terribly wrong. In his mind the Sea Wall before them opened up and the irresistible force of the black ocean beyond came rushing through, swallowing them and everything in its path, sweeping the world away. The vision pulled the breath out of him and he had to lean on the bench the man was sitting on.
The man reached out to steady him. “Sometimes, to look out there, we need to look inside.”
The man looked familiar, but Bob’s internal systems were sure he’d never seen the stranger’s face before. Bob sent splinters shooting out into the multiverse, looking for a recognition point, for any identity associated with his strange visitor. Still nothing. Bob regained his balance and tried to string out the conversation to buy time. “I don’t think about it much.”
The man retreated and smiled. “You should.”
Bob’s identity-theft splinters, able to slice through most security blankets in the outside world like butter, were still coming up blank. He felt a phantom pulling his attention away. He turned to find Sid’s skewed grin.
“We can go. We’ve been vetted.”
“By who?”
Sid pulled up the lapels on his jacket against the rain. “I don’t know. They kept their distance and asked me specifically not to scan for them.”
Bob flicked his chin toward his shoulder. “Who’s that guy?”
“What guy?” Sid craned his neck to scan the crowd.
Bob turned, but the man on the bench was gone. He rewound his inVerse to replay the conversation, but it was blank as well. There was nothing in his meta-cognition systems or external memories that recorded the event, nothing but what was in his own head. Bob closed his eyes. Had he imagined it?
Sid sensed Bob searching through his systems. “I think you need to get some sleep.” He put an arm on Bob’s shoulder. “Let’s get back to Deanna’s apartment.”
7
Rain hammered down on the tin roof of the church vestry.
Vince watched the Reverend prepare tea on a side table, a tiny kettle whistling atop a heating pad. The Reverend stooped to fetch a set of china cups and pot from a shelf. Vince looked around. He’d imagined something rougher, something more oppressive—creaking doors, dim rooms, an agonized Jesus hanging from a cross—but the interior was sparse and neat. A water-driven radiator rose up from the wooden floor, filling the space with hissing heat. They hadn’t outrun the storm. Soaked, splattered in mud, Vince and Brigitte sat awkwardly in front of the Reverend’s desk. Zephyr went next door for dry clothes and blankets.
So this is what it feels like to be in the middle of a black hole. The sound of the multiverse silence was deafening to Vince’s metasenses. No data feeds, no messages, no information other than what his own mind and body could provide. No Van Eck radiation could get through the shield over the Commune; comms jamming, image jamming, even externally-stored memory jamming of those going in and out. The inside of the Commune was an informational black hole, protected by the American Family Values faction of the Democrats, a neo-wild project of human preservation.
Entering the Commune was passing into another world in more ways than one.
The Reverend smiled at them. “Sorry about the rain.” The kettle pinged, and he picked it up and filled the teapot. “Zephyr is… well, the boy was late.”
“So you’re Willy’s grandfather?” Brigitte turned to face the Reverend. “He told me so much about you.”
“Is that right?” The Reverend wasn’t asking, wasn’t telling. He picked up the teapot and two cups and placed them on the large desk before them.
Vince heard the tick-tock of a clock in the hallway outside. The wall behind the desk was filled with books, and Vince squinted to read what was written on the spines: several Bibles, Chaucer, Jung, Nag Hammadi, Blavatsky. A painting of a crystal mountain in a desert hung on the side wall. “Don’t you want to know why we’re here?” Vince asked.
“You said…” The Reverend paused, leaning against his desk. “You said you were Willy’s friends and wanted to speak with his mother.”
“Yes, but—”
“Then that’s what you’re here for.”
“Is she here?” Brigitte glanced over her shoulder at the door.
“She is.” The Reverend stood up straight. “I’m going to see where on Earth our Zephyr is with those clothes.” Walking toward the door he motioned at the teapot. “Serve yourselves. And don’t try activating your smarticle networks.” He left the door ajar.
Vince leaned forward for the teapot. “Don’t they find it even slightly ironic to be driving horses and carts under a vast nano-bot radiation shield?” He felt some warmth seeping into his hands. “Old man McIntyre must be over a hundred—tell me he’s not using the latest in gene modification—”
“I can hear you, Mr. Indigo.” The Reverend was in the doorway. “These should about do.” He tossed a pile of clothes into Vince’s lap. Walking forward, he unfolded a blanket that he brought around Brigitte’s shoulders. She shivered and gripped it around herself, silently mouthing thank you.
The Reverend continued back behind his desk, passing a hand over its center as he sat down. A three-dimensional hologram sprang up over its center, an image of the bipedal transport Vince and Brigitte used on their way up, now threading its way down the mountain trail in the rain.
“We Neo-Luddites aren’t against technology. What we are against is the replacement of humans by technology.” The Reverend waved his hand, and charts and graphs spread out to fill the room. “DAD now has two robots for every human, and ten times that many if you count synthetic intelligences. We’re becoming a very small ruling minority, Mr. Indigo.”
Vince did his research before coming. “Weren’t Luddites the ‘machine destroyers’?”
“Machine destroyers, yes.” The Reverend turned the phrase around in his mouth. “But that is not what we do. I think you misunderstand us, Mr. Indigo. We offer our youth an opportunity to connect with nature, work with their hands, and delve into the depths of their humanity before…”