“So where am I now?” Willy asked. “Do we have an end—”
His avatar flickered and then dimmed. Sid swore and dove into his workspace, trying to route alternate connections for Willy’s mind. In fits and starts, the avatar began to reappear.
“I’m doing everything I can,” Sid said to Willy in a private space. With Bob gone, Sid felt responsible for Willy. It had become a personal point of pride to outsmart the Alliance filters, to keep the data coming so Willy could stay with them, but his pride was melting into fear for his friend. Sid didn’t have a lot of friends.
“I know,” Willy replied. “I’d better send you some information Vince sent me—”
Sid nodded, sensing some data packets arriving, and just then Willy’s avatar completely disappeared.
Before Sid could give chase, ReVurb blocked his exits into the data pipes out of the underground. “Don’t bother, it’s hopeless.”
“We do have some news—would you like the good or bad first?” Sibeal said after they let Sid work in futile silence for a few seconds.
“Why do people keep asking me that?” Sid didn’t wait for an answer. He was still working in the background, but he knew Willy wasn’t coming back. He’d had enough with the bad news. “Okay, good news this time.”
“It seems Mr. Indigo survived the crash. We’ve located him in New Orleans.” ReVurb smiled. “At least, that’s what they’re going to announce in the news tomorrow.”
Vince was the granddaddy of the phrackers, although he was on the other side of a line that was increasingly thin. Now he was indicted, he’d practically joined their ranks. Probably something Vince, in his position, should have seen coming. In all cases, ReVurb seemed to be happy about it.
Sid waited. “And the bad?”
“The Ascetics have taken him.”
Well at least he’s not dead, and then quickly on the heels of that thought, but he might wish he was if they couldn’t get to him soon. “Anything new on Bob?”
Everyone there—Sibeal, ReVurb, Bunky—shook their heads.
Sid’s proxxi pinged him, dragging his point-of-view into a workspace world. “What’s so important?” Sid grumbled. Vicious opened up a display. Before his avatar disappeared, Willy sent them some documents that Vince had forwarded him.
Willy’s proxxi had been reading religious texts at the Commune. Vicious did a statistical analysis on the texts and one line stood out, something scrawled in the margins, a line Vicious couldn’t find any contextual links to: “The beginning of man, where time stops in a thousand tongues.” What the hell did that mean?
8
Molehills became mountains, at least from the point of view of the beetle Bob struggled to keep control of. The blanket of stars of the deep Sahara, thick enough for even an insect to imagine it could reach up and touch, hung above him in the sky. Moonrise was coming. He had to hurry.
Two legs forward, two legs back, two other legs forward, first two legs back. Just keep the rhythm, Bob kept telling himself. He couldn’t see it yet, but even without a three-dimensional overlay map, the beetle’s keen sense of smell was homing them in to the garbage pile.
Come on, you love this smelly stuff, Bob urged to the beetle’s small mind. But the beetle knew: here there were predators.
The beetle topped a tiny crest of sand, each grain the size of a boulder, and the town’s garbage dump came into view. It was pitch black, but in the insect’s infrared-shifted vision the garbage glowed with heat against the cold desert floor. Within the glow, something shifted, something brighter, and then another.
The rats were feeding.
The beetle’s legs backpedaled, quivering, but Bob pushed it forward.
Bob’s smarticle count was low, and keeping a communication link at nearly a half a mile was pushing his limits. Soon he would be empty. Already he felt the symptoms of withdrawal—his tweaking neurons, the buzzing itch on his insides that couldn’t be scratched.
I’m sorry, Bob wanted to tell the beetle, I need help. I need you to sacrifice yourself for me. He wanted to explain how this was the only way. But how to explain that to a creature, any creature, that their time must come to an end so that yours could continue, that there was some other good that required their death.
But there was no time for that. Bob pushed and pushed, ignoring the keening terror in the mind he was sharing. The looming pile grew larger, and then one of the warm red patches stopped, the saucers of its eyes turning toward Bob-beetle. In an instant it was over, the rat darting in and snatching the beetle from the desert floor, the beetle’s fear for an instant eclipsing the brightest of stars overhead.
And then nothing.
Bob’s telepresent link went blank, but he waited, maintaining the connection to the smarticles in the beetle’s body, which was becoming a part of the rat’s. The transfer was incomplete, but an image began forming. Mammals were much closer to home, much simpler to inhabit. Bob-rat now looked up from the garbage pile, tasting the remains of beetle shell in the back of his mouth.
Rubbing his eyes, Bob withdrew his primary subjective back into the jail cell and looked around. In amplified low-light he surveyed the walls, watched the priest sleeping in the cot in the cell next to him, and listened carefully to the snoring of one of the men in the front. Nothing had changed, so he slipped his consciousness back into the rat.
The smarticle density was too low for Bob to control the rat’s nervous system entirely, so he had to be selective. He tweaked the rat’s keen sense of smell. There’s something delicious in that structure up the road, was the message Bob implanted. The rat froze, its head swiveling to the horizon, and then it was off, scurrying toward the jail.
9
“So how do you like jail?” asked Vince, taking a gulp from his beer. He wasn’t too concerned about the Ascetics. They were criminals, if ones built around a quasi-religious cult centered on self-denial. He understood criminals, and it was always just about the money—it was never personal. Anyway, he was the one that contacted them. More distressing was his inability to see the future since Agent Connors’ team took away his Phuture News access. The lack of control was an itch he couldn’t scratch.
Connors leaned over the railing of their room’s wrought-iron balcony, inspecting the exterior wall. The noise of Bourbon Street echoed from several stories below, while the whine of electric VTOLs spun through the black skies. She leaned back in and turned around. “Is that supposed to be clever?”
“I mean,” Vince mumbled, “just wondering if you’re having any insight into what it feels like yourself.” He smiled. “It’s just a question.” Flopping down onto one of the two beds, Vince placed his beer on the center console and began playing with the room’s controls, but nothing activated. He frowned and gave up. “No matter how much the world changes, you know what stays the same?”
Sighing, Connors bowed her head. “What?”
“Beds!” said Vince, slapping the one he was on. “All this technology, all this change, and beds are pretty much the same thing as five hundred years ago, I’d bet.”
Connors leaned out over the railing again. “You’re like a seventy-year-old kid, you know that?”
Vince frowned and then smiled. “I’d bet a million dollars I know what you’re thinking.”
“A million dollars is about what you spend on a pair of shoes, isn’t it?”
“You know what I mean.” He took a sip of his beer. “You’re thinking, with one good leap I could just make it over to that next balcony.” He took another sip. “There’s no need to look out there. Hotstuff mapped the walls, exterior features, interior corridors.”