Outside the vehicle’s polarized plastic shell, the sinking sun glared like the malign orb of a Cyclops bent on mankind’s destruction.
When the bug-wide door slid up, dragon’s breath assailed the Power Jocks. Their plugsuits strained to shield them from the hostile environment.
Surprisingly, a subdued and pensive Tigerishka volunteered for camp duty. As dusk descended, she attended to erecting their intelligent shelters and getting a meal ready: chicken croquettes with roasted edamame.
A.B. and Thales sloughed through the sand for a dozen yards to the nearest infected solarcell platform. The keek held his pocket lab in gloved hand.
A little maintenance kybe, scuffed and scorched, perched on the high trellis, valiantly but fruitlessly chipping with its multitool at a hard siliceous shell irregularly encrusting the photovoltaic surface.
Thales caught a few flakes of the unknown substance as they fell, and inserted them into the analysis chamber of the pocket lab.
“We should have a complete readout of the composition of this stuff by morning.”
“No sooner?”
“Well, actually, by midnight. But I don’t intend to stay up. I’ve done nothing except sit on my ass for two days, yet I’m still exhausted. It’s this oppressive place—”
“Okay,” A.B. replied. The first stars had begun to prinkle the sky. “Let’s call it a day.”
They ate in the bug, in a silent atmosphere of forced companionability, then retired to their separate shelters.
A.B. hoped with mild lust for another nocturnal visit from a prowling Tigerishka, but was not greatly disappointed when she never showed to interrupt his intermittent drowsing. Truly, the desert sands of Paris sapped all his usual joie de vivre.
Finally falling fast asleep, he dreamed of the ghostly waters of the vanished Seine, impossibly flowing deep beneath his tent. Somehow, Zulqamain Safranski was diverting them to flood A.B.’s apartment….
4. THE RED QUEEN’S TRIATHLON
In the morning, after breakfast, A.B. approached Gershon Thales, who stood apart near the trundlebug. Already the sun thundered down its oppressive cargo of photons, so necessary for the survival of the Reboot Cities, yet, conversely, just one more burden for the overstressed Greenhouse ecosphere. Feeling irritable and impatient, anxious to be back home, A.B. dispensed with pleasantries.
“I’ve tried vibbing your pocket lab for the results, but you’ve got it offline, behind that pirate software you’re running. Open up, now.”
The keek stared at A.B. with mournful stolidity. “One minute, I need something from my pod.”
Thales ducked into his tent. A.B. turned to Tigerishka. “What do you make—”
Blinding light shattered A.B.’s vision for a millisecond in a painful nova, before his MEMS contacts could react protectively by going opaque. Tigerishka vented a stifled yelp of surprise and shock, showing she had gotten the same actinic eyekick.
A.B. immediately thought of vib malfunction, some misdirected feed from a solar observatory, say. But then, as his lenses de-opaqued, he realized the stimulus had to have been external.
When he could see again, he confronted Gershon Thales holding a pain gun whose wide bell muzzle covered both of the keek’s fellow Power Jocks. At the feet of the keek rested an exploded spaser grenade.
A.B. tried to vib, but got nowhere.
“Yes,” Thales said, “we’re in a dead zone now. I fried all the optical circuits of the vib nodes with the grenade.”
A large enough burst of surface plasmons could do that? Who knew? “But why?”
With his free hand, keeping the pain gun unwavering, Thales reached into a plugsuit pocket and took out his lab. “These results. They’re only the divine sign we’ve been waiting for. Reboot civilization is on the way out now. I couldn’t let anyone in the PAC find out. The longer they stay in the dark, the more irreversible the changes will be.”
“You’re claiming this creeping crud is that dangerous?”
“Did you ever hear of ADRECS?”
A.B. instinctively tried to vib for the info and hit the blank frustrating walls of the newly created dead zone. Trapped in the twentieth century! Recreationist passions only went so far. Where was the panopticon when you needed it?
“Aerially Delivered Re-forestation and Erosion Control System,” continued Thales. “A package of geoengineering schemes meant to stabilize the spread of deserts. Abandoned decades ago. But apparently, one scheme’s come alive again on its own. Mutant instruction drift is my best guess. Or Darwin’s invisible hand.”
“What’s come alive then?”
“Nanosand. Meant to catalyze the formation of macroscale walls that would block the flow of normal sands.”
“And that’s the stuff afflicting the solarcells?”
“Absolutely. Has an affinity for bonding with the surface of the cells and can’t be removed without destroying them. Self-replicating. Best estimates are that the nanosand will take out 30 percent of production in just a month, if left unchecked. Might start to affect the turbines too.”
Tigerishka asked, in an intellectually curious tone of voice that A.B. found disconcerting, “But what good does going offline do? When PAC can’t vib us, they’ll just send another crew.”
“I’ll wait here and put them out of commission too. I only have to hang in for a month.”
“What about food?” said Tigerishka. “We don’t have enough provisions for a month, even for one person.”
“I’ll raid the fish farms on the coast. Desalinate my drinking water. It’s just a short round trip by bug.”
A.B. could hardly contain his disgust. “You’re fucking crazy, Thales. Dropping the power supply by 30 percent won’t kill the cities.”
“Oh, but we keeks think it will. You see, Reboot civilization is a wobbly three-legged stool, hammered together in a mad rush. We’re not in the Red Queen’s Race, but the Red Queen’s Triathlon. Power, food and social networks. Take out any one leg, and it all goes down. And we’re sawing at the other two legs as well. Look at that guy who vandalized your apartment. Behaviour like that is on the rise. The urbmons are driving people crazy. Humans weren’t meant to live in hives.”
Tigerishka stepped forward, and Thales swung the gun more towards her unprotected face. A blast of high-intensity microwaves would leave her screaming, writhing and puking on the sands.
“I want in,” she said, and A.B.’s heart sank through his boots. “The only way other species will ever get to share this planet is when most of mankind is gone.”
Regarding the furry speculatively and clinically, Thales said, “I could use your help. But you’ll have to prove yourself. First, tie up Bandjalang.”
Tigerishka grinned vilely at A.B. “Sorry, apeboy.”
Using biopoly cords from the bug, she soon had A.B. trussed with circulation-deadening bonds, and stashed in his homeopod.
What were they doing out there? A.B. squirmed futilely. He banged around so much, he began to fear he was damaging the life-preserving tent, and he stopped. Wiped out after hours of struggle, he fell into a stupour made more enervating by the suddenly less-than-ideal heat inside the homeopod, whose compromised systems strained to deal with the desert conditions. He began to hallucinate about the subterranean Seine again, and realized he was very, very thirsty. His kamelbak was dry when he sipped at its straw.
At some point, Tigerishka appeared and gave him some water. Or did she? Maybe it was all just another dream.
Outside the smart tent, night came down. A.B. heard wolves howling, just like they did on archived documentaries. Wolves? No wolves existed. But someone was howling.