“When is…” one of the other men said. His lips kept moving but the audio feed slipped into garbled static. Bob tunneled down into the tibiae of the beetle, the thin cuticle ear drum located on its front legs. Instead of trying to interpret nerve packets at the end of the trachea, it might be better to go straight to the timpani. It worked, and the sound information normalized. “…so will be here the day after tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Toothface replied. “The kid’s neural load is bleeding out fast. The priest is dangerous, he knows—”
The priest, Bob thought, looking at the old man in the cell beside his. So the old man was a priest.
The terrified beetle managed to override Bob for a second and shifted under the doorway, garbling the sound again. Bob steadied it, sending soothing impressions into its primitive awareness, trying to match his brain’s gamma frequency waves to those of the insect’s optic lobes.
Not for the first time, Bob wished he had his proxxi there to help him. Robert was still locked out. Something happened in the event under New York that warped his pssi interface.
“—just stay out of that room,” continued Toothface’s voice after a second or two. “Keep him isolated. Is that clear?”
The other men nodded. Bob noticed a clutch of keys on one of their belts. Toothface sat down at a wooden table in the middle of the room while one of the men went to fill a kettle from the well outside.
“The forty-year war is nearing its end,” said the Bedouin to Bob. “They’re getting desperate.”
Bob held the beetle steady, shifting his primary awareness back into his body. He’d ghosted into insects before, but beetles had undergone an explosion of radial evolution that resulted in a bewildering array of sensory systems. He had never inhabited a scarab beetle before, but he was getting the hang of it.
“The Weather Wars, you mean?” Bob replied to the Bedouin.
Depending on what you defined as the starting point, the Weather Wars had been going on about that long. But how would capturing Bob have anything to do with that long-drawn-out conflict? Bob looked at the old priest more carefully. They said he was dangerous. How?
The priest shrugged. “Attach what names you like.”
There were no digital or network systems in here, no listening devices, so nobody could hear them. This was more to protect them than me, thought Bob. No way for him to escape digitally. Everything about this place was as primitive as possible, including the physical locks. He had to get those keys.
“The star with two tails is rising in the morning sky again,” the Bedouin added. “Gog and Magog are unshackled.”
Bob stared at him. The main danger this guy seemed to be was to himself. He played along. “So this is it, then, the end of the world?” In an overlaid display, his insect-mind watched the men in the other room pouring tea.
“Not the end, a rebirth.” The Bedouin looked out his window at the sky. “But yes, it will be the end of this world.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
The Bedouin sat down on his cot. “I am not excited, not afraid, but embracing, accepting.” He took a deep breath. “The world must be cleansed. Our suffering must be brought to an end.”
Despite his disdain, a part of Bob could understand what the priest meant. He’d been sheltered on Atopia, but much of the world was a horrible place, plagued by war, disaster, famine. The pattern was repeating. After enslaving the natural world, humans were now enslaving the endless virtual worlds and creatures they were creating. It wasn’t something Bob thought about much, protected and isolated on Atopia, but coming out into the world was changing his perspective.
The men in the next room laughed, and Bob sharpened his awareness in the beetle.
“No more dirty desert after this,” Toothface said. “With the money we get for this kid.”
“If he’s so dangerous, maybe we should just cut him up into pieces,” laughed one of the men, pulling a cruelly curved knife from his belt. “Just to be sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
Toothface liked that and slapped the table, all of them joining in laughter. “Maybe we should,” he said gruffly, and the laughing stopped.
Letting the beetle slip back under the doorway, Bob looked at the priest through the bars of the jail. “Is there anything bigger than a beetle I could get my hands on out here?”
6
The man in front of Vince held onto the bars of the balcony railing as if they were the bars of a cell. “Buddy, you got some smarties? Just a little,” he begged, “just a taste.”
Not a man, realized Vince, staring into the desperate face, but a boy, emaciated with that same hollow look all junkies shared. “Sorry—”
“Please, I know you have some, I can sense them.” The boy reached through the bars and grabbed Vince’s arm.
“Hey!” Vince pulled away, and the boy jumped back, rubbing the fingers he’d touched Vince with into the back of his neck. He’d swiped a few of Vince’s smarticles onto his fingers, and was rubbing them into the spot closest to his pleasure centers, trying to eke out a tiny jolt of endorphins in a fantasy world.
“Should just give the kid what he wants.” Agent Connors yawned.
Smarticles, the tiny neuro-reactive engines that powered commercial pssi, were a controlled substance internationally. In the big cities, Cognix was giving it away for free, hooking a populace that would pay for it later. This place, however, was outside any legal-licensed jurisdiction, which meant having real smarticles was illegal—though that didn’t mean everyone wasn’t copying them.
And they definitely weren’t free.
“Not going to happen,” Vince replied.
Money wasn’t the problem. Sid had created their own private smarticle stash for their gang, to shield them from prying eyes. Vince swallowed his in a time-release capsule that had attached itself to the inside of his small intestine. He didn’t want them getting around. They could be used to track him.
“So what’s our next step?” Vince asked Connors.
Two bloodied and ragged people leaning on each other blended perfectly into the melee of Bourbon Street, lending them a cloak of invisibility, but everywhere they went for a room, they were turned away. Of course the bars were open twenty-four hours, so they still had somewhere to go.
“We wait.” Agent Connors settled herself into a corner beside Vince.
Vince leaned back and closed his eyes. She might not have any connections here, but he did. He sent out some bots to test the local underground. Hotstuff was feeding him threat reports, his mind cycling through images and situational reports.
He watched a pack of pickpockets, a gang of neurally-fused teenagers that were circling through the crowd, prowling. Even in the short time they’d been there, Vince had watched a breathtaking progression of trending memes moving through the crowd, evolving hourly, new forms morphing from old; an influx of new machines, neural formations, virtual worlds, reality skins.
True mind-uploading was beyond current technology. Research into it was banned in many places—mostly on moral and legal grounds, and on religious ones in America—but the distinction was blurring. The meta-cognition frameworks of most “people” were outweighing their meat brains. The logic behind the original bans, clear just years and months ago, was becoming irrelevant as pssi permeated the population.
When the turbofan went down, he’d assumed he was going to die. They were too high, it was too fast, they had no protection from his networks. The survivability matrix was nil. In the flames and noise he’d closed his eyes, waiting.
And then nothing.
When he regained consciousness, it was quiet, just the sound of bullfrogs groaning in the darkness. He was soaked, twisted together in the metal and plastic wreck. He didn’t feel anything. Relaxing into what he assumed was his coming death, he closed one eye, looking at the stars in the sky, then opened it and closed the other. Two working eyes. Pausing, he tried wiggling his toes—and no spinal cord injury. Gingerly pulling himself out from the wreck, he’d checked his body for gaping bodily wounds. None of those either.