“No,” Edmund admitted. “I have someone better at it than I am. You’ll find out. And I guarantee you’ll hate it.”
“Okay, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, I guess,” Herzer said. “I wish we had guns, though. Try to let some brigands get though a volley of rifle fire.”
“Expansion rate protocols,” Edmund said with a shrug. “Won’t work.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” the younger man said, shaking his head. “I mean, first of all, why outlaw explosives and second how in the hell does it actually work? Expansion rate conversion never made any sense.”
“You want an answer?” Talbot said, setting down the steel again and then sitting on the anvil. “I’ve about got my mad worked out, we’ll let the forge cool off now that… Well, don’t worry about pumping. So you want the answer?”
“Yes, I wouldn’t have asked the question if I didn’t.”
“I know you went to day-school with Rachel,” the smith frowned. “And I know she knows this. So why do I have to explain it?”
“You don’t if you don’t want to,” Herzer replied, standing up and stretching his legs. He felt better than he had all day. He really had needed some exercise. “But I took the preindustrial technologies track. I mean, it was covered in backgrounds to history, but that’s all they said. And I never really cared before.”
“Okay, but I’m not going to take fifty thousand words and if you don’t understand it, you don’t understand it. Got it?”
“Got it,” Herzer said with a chuckle.
“The first thing is ‘why?’ ” Talbot said. “The protocol got emplaced shortly after the AI war. You’re up on that?”
“Somewhat. There was a class on it. I didn’t sleep through it.”
“So you know it was bad, bloody. Nearly as bad as this… shit we’re in. There was a twenty-five percent die off in the first year of the war, some from fighting, most of it from starvation and other extermination programs of the AI’s.”
“Yes,” Herzer said grimly. The Norau rump of the Council hadn’t passed around current casualty estimates, but he’d seen the bodies by the tracks with his own eyes. If the human race had as little as a twenty-five percent die-off rate from this Dying Time he’d be very surprised.
“Anyway, the die-off and the war produced a great deal of pacifism in its wake. But at the same time it produced a lot of people who were pretty extreme. One group of them ambushed one of the members of the Council and wiped him and his bodyguards out. It wasn’t easy. The ‘assassins’ — for want of a better word for a group of six hundred battle-armored infantry backed by AI tanks — were nearly wiped out by the bodyguards and the Council member, who for all his pacifism had gained it in the frontlines of the war.
“That really shook the Council. If Hollingsworth could be taken out, anyone could. The only thing that could prevent that was Mother.”
“Ah.”
“Now, no group of Council members had ever gotten large enough and unanimous enough to have Mother control crime or anything like that. That was so intrusive that they all recognized it would lead eventually to a revolt of one form or another. And most of them were against it in principle. On one level you know that Mother is always watching. But as long as you know, it doesn’t matter… So, anyway, they decided that they could either violate that long-held prohibition against using Mother for surveillance purposes, or they could find some other way around it.”
“Weapons controls?” Herzer asked. “But… But, I guess it sort of makes sense…”
“Sure, if you have no understanding of history,” Talbot snarled. “Anything resembling universal suffrage is a postindustrial, postgunpowder concept. Gunpowder gave the Everyman a way to kill the Lord on his horse. Industry, by which I mean steam and internal combustion, removed the need for day-in, day-out muscle use! As long as their comfortable replication- and information-based society was stable and stagnant, everything was fine. But take that away and what do you have?”
“This,” Herzer whispered, noticing how Edmund referred to the pre-Fall society as “theirs.” “Okay. So, no internal combustion, but why no steam?”
“Low power steam works,” Talbot said. “But when you build up really useable pressures it passes the point that Mother is programmed to find dangerous and… the heat just… goes away. Into the damned Net for Sheida to use, I suppose. It even interferes with high temperature forges; forming steel is a balancing act.”
“Oh. Okay, that’s the why. What’s the ‘how’?”
“Next you have to understand Mother.”
“It’s the central computer that runs the Web. So?”
“Oh, child,” Edmund said with a grim chuckle. “Mother is not a computer. Mother is a program. Actually, an OS/P, an operating system/protocol. But Mother has become much more than that. Mother is connected to every single outlet of the Web. She sees through every nannite. She hears through every ear. Her sensors detect every shift of the wind, every change in kinetic energy, the potential of every raindrop, and have a very good idea where the individual molecules are going to end up. Have you ever heard that one about ‘see every sparrow fall’?”
“Yeah,” Herzer said, caught in the odd spell of words that Edmund seemed to be casting.
“Mother knows it before it starts to drop.”
“So…” Herzer looked at the smith and shrugged. “Why doesn’t she stop this war?”
“Because Mother doesn’t care,” Edmund replied with a grin. “She’s not here to stop wars or start wars — wars are human things and it’s not her job to tell humans how to be human. She just runs the Web and the various things that are attached to it. As long as the combatants don’t do anything stupid to the actual information transfer architecture, Mother won’t do anything to them.”
“That is… weird.”
“Mother was written by a guy who in retrospect turned out to be pretty damned weird. Name of Arthur King. Ever heard of him?”
“The name and that he was the founder of the Web.”
“Not quite, he just wrote Mother. The Web existed before him, the only thing he really did was make the last major modification to its internal structure. And that was the last thing he did on this earth, apparently. Because he disappeared right afterwards. Vanished, without a trace.”
“And this has what to do with the explosive protocols?”
“Remember, Mother knows all, Mother sees all. But the only time that Mother does things about it is if the Council tells her to. She’s controlled by the Council members. They vote on what actions she should take outside of directly securing the Web. If enough of them told her to destroy the Earth, she would.”
“What? How?” Herzer said.
“There are various ways that come to mind. It depends on if they just wanted the biosphere wiped out or really destroy the Earth. If they wanted the biosphere destroyed, she could probably just dump an enormous amount of power into the mantle and cause every volcano on Earth to erupt and keep erupting. That would wipe out everything but bacteria in time. She could wipe out any particular species simply by causing its chemical processes to stop. Are you feeling happier now?”
“That’s crazy!” the boy said, shaking his head. “Since when?”
“Since looong before you were born, boy. Nobody talks about it and most people don’t even think about it. Mother owns us, but we, in turn, own Mother, through the Council. There is a reason that I hate the Council, hated it long before this damned war, and thought that it needed far more oversight than it was getting.”