He reached out, pushed hard, was pressed back into the confines of his prison. No. Not a prison… and not pressed back. Not even blocked. It was as if the worldwire had simply ceased to exist, like those nightmares small children have that the world will vanish if it's not watched every instant. As if he'd sailed to the edge of the globe and had nowhere to go. As if he couldn't even step over that edge and fall.
His first thought was sheer frustration as he realized that nineteen-twentieths of his processing capability and all of his access to the physical world had been cut away. The second reaction was self-amused chagrin at how simply goddamned spoiled he had become, on the verge of a sulk because he couldn't reach around the world with a flick of his will. You have no time for this, he reminded himself, speaking for and to all the Richards and Alans and the unnamed processes and personas as well.
He was a distributed intelligence. It was highly unlikely that he could have been walled into some corner of the worldwire, or even of the Net, and even more unlikely that every other corner of his consciousness could have been purged simultaneously, with the flick of a switch. Which meant that somehow, somebody — the Benefactors, the PanChinese, or another power — had found a way to disrupt the quantum communication that bound the worldwire together and made the nanonetwork more than a mass of individual, aimless microscopic machines.
Bits of the Feynman AI — of Richard/Alan/Other — lived in every nanomachine on the planet. Well, not every one; the limited PanChinese network was still largely protected from his influence, and of course there were the machines he allowed to run their original program, such as the ones that Charlie had been using for his ecological experiments.
The ones that Charlie had been using.
The machines that had been… shutting off from the worldwire, inexplicably. The machines that had had their communications disrupted, that had been somehow severed from the quantum communication that networked all the machines, even the Benefactor machines, together — whether their programming was compatible or not.
Richard actually paused to consider that for a full two-hundredths of a second. And then he set about quite coldly, quite frantically attacking the question of just where the hell his consciousness was bottled up, and how to get a message out.
And he had to do it fast. Had to do it now, because if he wasn't in the worldwire, then the chances were that the worldwire was coming down like an unbraced scaffolding, and it would be taking the planet's entire ecosystem with it.
He was the ghost of Richard Feynman, dammit. The Harry Houdini of twentieth-century physics. The box hadn't been devised that could lock him in.
Mother of Christ, wasn't I supposed to be enjoying a quiet grave by now? The requirement to have adventures and be shot at should expire on one's fiftieth birthday, if not sooner.
And yet, here we go again.
At least Min-xue knows what he's doing. There must have been combat training in his past somewhere; at least basic, and probably something a little more advanced, judging by the way he belly-crawls along the aisle, head down, butt down, and drawing fire away from Patty and Riel. Not drawing enough fire, though, dammit; Riel yelps as one gets a little close and I can't turn around to see if they nailed her. But I still hear running in that direction and bad guys are still shooting past my position at something more interesting behind me. That's a good sign. Well, as such things go.
There's something about gunfire that makes me meditative. I wish the lights had all gone out dramatically when the shooting started, because then I could kick in the low-light capability in my prosthetic eye and have an advantage.
An advantage I need acutely, right now. Pity I'm not gonna get it. Ah well. At least it gives me something to bitch about. Gabe always did say that what soldiers did best, was bitch. And I argued that bitching was a second, after humping packs—
Fight now, Jenny. Compose your autobiography another day.
Besides, Min-xue's getting ahead of me, and it's my turn to leapfrog his position. My brain scampers on ahead, working so hard I forget the texture of the rug under my left hand, the stickiness of blood drying on my knees. Matson always used to say your brain's your best weapon, soldier. Use it. Name your weapons. Name your enemies. Name your objectives. Use A to get through B to C. What are you gonna do?
I'm trying, Sarge. You don't have to spit in my face.
I can track the bad guys by the sound of their weapons: four of them, I think. Small-arms fire, and small caliber. Well, maybe nine millimeter. Which doesn't make me happy, of course, but at least they only have handguns, and not big handguns — however the hell they got them in here — and they're being careful about firing now. Which means their ammo is limited.
Which is all the good. Or as good as it gets, anyway. But if you were gonna smuggle in guns, why would you smuggle in nine-mils, and not a crateful of automatics? Damn. I just don't know.
I'm up on Min-xue. He lies flat as I clamber past him, a bullet flicking sawdust into my hair when I risk a peek over the top of the desk. We've worked our way one aisle over; the enemy have taken cover behind the podium and the secretary's table at the back of the stage. Which means Frye's probably dead, and possibly the secretary general, too.
Be a pity if she is. I liked her handshake, and her hair.
But why did they run for the stage when they were already standing by Xiong? And then I remember the unobtrusive uniformed security officers collapsing like so many tipped over dominos, and I curse under my breath. Well, at least I know where they got the guns. They must have had some way to hack security's palm locks. They didn't bring the guns in. They took them away.
I risk another look as Min-xue crawls past, get a glimpse of muzzle flash, and duck fast. The bullet parts my hair. Another splinters wood off the desk, but doesn't come through.
They're definitely conserving their fire. “They're good shots at this range, with pistols.”
“They would be,” Min-xue says. “They're elite.”
“And wired.”
“Yes.”
“How about some good news?”
“Is that meant to indicate that you can provide some?”
I glance over. He's laughing at me, the son of a bitch — a silent, straight-faced laugh, but the curl at the corner of his lip and the dark flash of his eyes give him away. “Hah. Don't play poker, son. Yeah, I think I can provide some. I think if we can get our hands on those guns, we can use them, too.”
A moment's silence while he considers that. “No palm locks?”
It's gotten awful quiet out there. That's not reassuring. “I think they cracked the locks.” Straining my ears until I swear I can feel them swivel, I push myself into a crouch. Min-xue gets his toes under him when he sees what I'm doing, both of us ready to push. He looks at me and I look at him.
We've got that aisle, and a bank of desks between us and the podium. What the hell, right? It's not like we're going to get a better chance. Maybe they're out of ammo.
And maybe they're taking advantage of us hiding under cover, and using the lull to run up on Patty and Riel.
“Go?” he asks me, quiet and self-assured in a way I'd even believe, if I hadn't been inside his head.