“Yes.” Gabe and Charlie, two voices at once.
Wainwright again. “Just to be absolutely certain I understand this, you're proposing we flash our own network, reprogram it, and leave it wide open — so the Benefactors can wander in and do whatever they want? To the entire planet? And hope they end the PanChinese attack?”
“Yes,” Gabe said, without even the decency to sound chagrined at the ridiculousness of it.
“How do you propose we do that when we can't even talk to the worldwire currently?”
“Therein lies the problem,” Gabe said, gritting his teeth. Richard felt his heart rate kick up; it was pattering along tightly. “I was hoping Dick might have a clever idea.”
“All we need is an access point,” Richard said. “A patch of the worldwire we can tap into. Then we can hack our way through it. Island to island, so to speak. World War II, in the Pacific.”
“You need something you can run a hardline to. What if Elspeth went after one of Charlie's ecospheres?”
“Not safe,” Richard said. “The pressure doors could come down any second. Or the captain could trigger them as a precaution. Or, worse, the Chinese could remotely open an air lock, and they could fail to deploy.”
“Blake made it to the processor core,” Wainwright said.
“Yes, and I've recommended he hole up somewhere and not try to travel further. In any case, we can't delay — if the pressure doors do come down, you'll lose me as well.”
“Putain de marde. They'd sever the cable.”
“Yes,” Richard said. “We need to use what's at hand.”
Gabe swallowed, and Richard could see how carefully he did not look at his daughter. “No.”
“I still haven't said yes,” Wainwright snapped.
“Gabe—” Richard stopped, but not before Genie heard.
Genie looked up from the quiet conversation she'd been having with Elspeth and over at Gabe and Richard's image. “Papa?”
“Petite—”
Richard saw Elspeth's hand tighten on Genie's shoulder, and saw the darkness that crossed Gabe's face. He knew as plainly as if Gabe were wired what he was thinking: it wasn't going to be enough. Not again. Not again—
“Richard,” she said, “could you use me? Wire into my control chip and hack into my nanonet?”
“Gabe. Genie—” Richard let them see him shake his head. “That puts you at risk, Genie.”
“I know,” she said.
Gabe allowed the silence to drag, and Richard was right there with him, too close to the pain himself to argue. Not again. Not Genie, not like this, not after Leah. No.
None of them should be permitting this to happen. But it was the same equations Leah had considered and understood, and Genie considered and understood them now, as well. Richard was struck, abruptly, by how much both of them got from Jenny Casey, despite there being no biology between them.
But Elspeth caught Gabe's eye, and he caught hers, and neither one of them said anything. At last, shaking his head, his hands white from the force with which he had been holding the edge of the desk, he sat back in his chair. He looked from Elspeth to Genie. He didn't say yes, but he also didn't say no.
“It's what Leah would have done,” Genie said, her eyes very bright. Gabe nodded. It was exactly what Leah would have done.
It was exactly what Leah had done.
Gabe got up and walked across the lab, and ducked down to wrap his arms around his daughter's shoulders. He held her tight enough that Richard thought she would have squeaked, if she hadn't been holding her breath. And then he looked up, smoothed her hair, and stepped back. “Captain,” Gabe said, in the vague direction of a mote, “it's your call. Go or no-go?”
Richard realized, watching the two of them, what Gabe was wrestling with. And he felt a flush of pride in both — in Genie, that she wasn't going to stay in her sister's shadow, or stay safe behind locked doors. She had to stand up and be counted. And in Gabe, because Gabe was going to let her, and wasn't even going to let himself pretend it didn't hurt.
“Go,” Wainwright said, measured seconds later. “Go, dammit.”
“All right then,” Richard said, wishing suddenly — viciously — for the ability to turn and punch a wall. “Let's get to work.”
Elspeth opened the skin on the back of Genie's hand very carefully, using a dissection tool from Charlie's second-best kit, which was stowed in the storage lockers to keep it away from the moisture in his own lab. The scalpel was sharp; there was hardly any blood, and Genie watched interestedly, wincing a little as Elspeth peeled the skin back, but obviously unimpressed by the pain. It would take more pain than that to impress Genie Castaign. There was no way to sterilize the tools, but that would be less than meaningless if Richard could get Genie's nanonet back on-line. And if he couldn't— They'd have larger problems.
The control chip was a flexible, irregular blue oblong; the actual chip was carbon-based, only a centimeter square, but there was a gel-sealed interface port and a series of power cells no bigger than a pinkie nail attached. Gabe handled the splicing procedure himself, sitting Genie down in his chair behind the desk and running a hardline from the interface to her hand. The pins slid in smoothly; if he'd known where the port was, Richard thought Gabe could have managed it through the skin, just a little prick and in, the same way the pilots' serpentines worked.
Richard took a deep, strictly metaphorical breath and extended himself to take control of the nanoprocessor, feeling after its operating system with the lightest fingers he could manage. He infiltrated it before Gabe's hands had left the connection, using the direct interface with the control chip to leapfrog to the few million nanosurgeons that were in physical contact with it. It wasn't enough of a network to support a persona thread, or even a fraction of one, but it was enough, he hoped, to form a jumping-off platform for the Benefactors when he opened the system to them.
If they understood what he was doing, what he was offering. If they understood why. If Leslie had made them understand.
He threw open the floodgates.
For long picoseconds nothing happened. And then Genie's head drooped, she slumped to one side, and her father caught her shoulders as she started to topple. Richard held on tight, the rush of data around him like the sound of the surf in his ears, whatever the Benefactors were doing spreading in ripples through Genie's nanonet and then the worldwire, leaving the network momentarily limpid and calm in its wake, as clean as if it had never been programmed at all.
Richard reached out and hesitated. There was another AI in the system. With a persona he at first mistook for one of his own threads, separated and maintained during the attack. Until he reached out to reabsorb it, and it snarled at him and lunged.
The pieces are kind of sickening when they finally snap into place. I imagine an audible pop, the sound of a broken limb yanked straight. It's not a bad analogy. This won't be pretty.
And it looks like we're not getting any help from Richard, because I'm reasonably certain that's not him, exactly, who's floating in the corner of my eye.
And I'm not about to put down the gun.
Riel knows. That's what the eye contact means. That's what she's telling me.
Do it, Jenny. We're dead already, anyway.
Nothing you want to face less than a woman with nothing to lose. My hand isn't shaking as I bring up the liberated gun. It hasn't shaken in years. Not for this, anyway.
Fast. Hot damn. Even for me, I'm moving fast, and the whole world around me is like a snapshot, a ruin full of broken statues sprawled between the pillars.