Counting Heads

2.6

“Cabinet?” Fred Londenstane said. He seemed to recall a valet by that name.

“Yes,” Inspector Costa said, “one of the highest-value mentars in the solar system. Its sponsor, Eleanor Starke, has just been declared irretrievable, so it’s probate time for the pastehead.”

Oh, that Cabinet, Fred thought. It had been—what?—half a century since he had pulled duty for the Starke household. That was before valets had evolved into today’s mentars, but Cabinet had been an impressive AI even back then. And Starke was dead?

“Are you sure? Something that big I think I would’ve been briefed.”

“It’s classified for another hour or so. Someone way over my head is keeping a lid on it for who knows what political advantage.”

“Anyone else hurt?” Fred asked.

“There were no russies involved, if that’s what you mean,” Inspector Costa said with a smirk. Smirking made her look a bit like a lulu.

Fred sat in a scape booth at the Chicago headquarters of the Beneficent Brotherhood of Russ on North Wabash. He was finishing up a week of duty as acting commander of the watch for the regional branch of the HomCom, and Costa’s scape was only one of about a dozen he was juggling. There were four more live meetings in which he appeared in different uniforms, depending upon the venue and nature of his involvement, and he was feeling stretched a little thin.

“Why me?” he said. “I’m doing commander of the watch today.”

“Exactly,” said Inspector Costa. “A big fugitive requires a big cop.”

“Cabinet is resisting probate?”

“Let’s just say it’s not being very cooperative.”

Nevertheless, it was Fred’s option to pass the assignment on to another officer of equal rank, and he felt inclined to do so.

“I say, Myr Russ,” said a voice from another scape. “Hello?” It was Myr Pacfin, chair of the 57th World Charter Rendezvous Organizing Committee for which Fred was chief of security. “I would rather expect your full attention for a matter of this magnitude.” Pacfin crossed the arms of his lime-brick-avocado-colored jumpsuit.

Pacfin had summoned Fred to an unscheduled meeting to reconsider organizational decisions that he, himself, had finalized three months ago. To make matters worse, Rendezvous, a gathering of over fifty-thousand chartists from all corners of the United Democracies, was to take place this Wednesday, the day after tomorrow.

Marcus, the BB of R’s own mentar, prompted Fred, Myr Pacfin is concerned about the makeup of the security staff at McCormick Place. He would like its composition to be entirely russ.

Fred intensified the Rondy scape in which Pacfin stared reproachfully at him from across the teletable. Next to Pacfin sat a woman from the TUG charter, who wore that charter’s olive-mustard-olive jumpsuit uniform. Members of Charter TUG maintained a clonelike physical uniformity—they were all big, solid people with square heads, even their women—but they were not clones.

Also present in this scape were MC, the McCormick Place mentar, and a jerome named Gilles, Fred’s operational officer.

Fred said, “I sympathize with your concerns, Myr Pacfin, but you signed the standard McCormick Place security contract.”

“Which is?”

“Uh, MC?”

The McCormick Place mentar replied, “Forty-two percent russ, thirty percent jerry, twenty-four percent belinda, and four percent pike.”

Pacfin fell back in his seat and threw up his hands. “Come on!” he cried. “Aren’t jerrys bad enough, but pikes? You want to foist pikes on us?”

The large TUG woman, Veronica according to her name patch, rolled her eyes, like tiny beads in a slab of dough.

Fred was out of patience. “Again I apologize,” he said, “but a matter of national security has arisen and calls me away. I will dispatch a proxy to continue this meeting.” He muted the scape and said, “Marcus, proxy me. Inspector Costa, I’m all yours.”

Fred shrank the booth controls and pushed them away. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He thought about the multiplex convention center, with a main hall with five tiers, two more halls with three tiers, and twenty-three satellite venues, and all of them packed solid for twenty-four hours with over fifty thousand yahoos—no, scratch that—fifty thousand chartists from everywhere. He thought about maintaining order of this gathering with a security force of 420 russes, 300 jerrys, 240 belindas, and 40 troublesome pikes.

There was a ding, and when Fred opened his eyes, his proxy floated before him in the booth. For his proxy style, Fred, like most russes, chose a head, a keystone-shaped section of shoulders and chest, and a detached right hand in a white glove.

Fred’s new proxy saluted him with that white glove and said, “Oh, sure, you take the blacksuit job and stick me with Pacfin.”

“You’ll do,” Fred said and swiped the proxy on its way. Then he got up and stretched and left the booth only to find someone else’s proxy waiting for him in the hallway. It was the TUG woman’s proxy, which she must have cast while he was casting his.

“May I help you?” he asked it. The TUG proxy was as imposing as the TUGs were themselves: a brick head on a barrel torso, two mighty arms and hands.

“I know you’re in a hurry, Myr Londenstane,” it said in an incongruously sweet voice. “I just wanted to ask you to overlook Myr Pacfin’s regrettable racism. He doesn’t represent all of charterdom. There are many of us who would like to remove the artificial wedge that certain sectors of society have used to divide chartists from iterants such as yourself.”

Fred wasn’t sure how to respond to the woman’s remarks. In any case, this was neither the time nor place for a discussion of class warfare.

“No offense taken,” he said. “And I’m sure we’ll iron out the Rondy arrangements. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“THIS IS WHAT a regional landline opticom hub looks like,” said Inspector Costa. A ball appeared on the windshield HUD in front of Fred. He was riding in a HomCom General Ops Vehicle, a GOV, to the Bell Opticom switching station on 407th Street, where the inspector awaited him. The opticom hub she was showing him was about the size and color of a cue ball and had a slowly revolving, shimmering, pearlescent surface. “What you see modeled here is packet flow,” the inspector continued. “The more traffic, the larger the sphere. This sphere represents about three trillion tetrapackets per picosecond, a fairly normal flow rate for a hub like Chicago. What’s important to remember is that for every packet that goes into a hub, a packet must emerge. Likewise, no more packets can emerge than went in. It’s just a switch, after all, not a generator or accumulator. What goes in must come out, right?”

“I guess,” Fred said. His GOV left the local grid and descended into the vehicle well of the Sharane Building. “But you said the Chicagoland hub is wobbling?”

“Yes, it is. Compare this model to the opticom hub we will be visiting.” A second ball appeared beside the first. Fred scrutinized it and compared it to the first. If it was wobbling, it was doing so too subtly for him to discern. “See it?” asked the inspector.

“Well, ah, no, Inspector,” he said.

“No need to be so formal with me, Londenstane. Call me Costa. Back away from the models a little and kinda squint your eyes at them.”

Fred did so and noticed a slight difference. The horizontal lines of the shimmering sheen on the surface of the second ball seemed slightly off-kilter. They meandered slowly above and below the equatorial guide. “Got it,” he said. “What’s causing that?”

“The switch is sending more packets than it’s receiving. That means there’s a packet generator tapped into the hub. People who keep mentars like to hide secret backups inside opticom hubs. That way the backups can act as passive conduits for their mentar prime, keeping constantly updated while staying invisible. If the mentar prime goes down, however, and a covert backup takes its place, it’s suddenly not passing data through but creating it. And since a mentar is a gushing geyser of packets, the hub—”

“Starts to wobble,” Fred said, mesmerized by the shiny orb. He shook his head and looked away. “You think it’s our fugitive?”

“No one’s swept this hub facility in years. By now, there are probably dozens of covert backups down here belonging to a host of different sponsors. One of them has gone active. The only mentar we’re aware of in need of activating a backup at this time is our fugitive. Yes, we believe it’s Cabinet. In fact, we believe this is its last backup.”

“By the way,” Fred said, “how did Eleanor Starke die?” Although it was thirty-nine years since he’d left her service—Marcus had refreshed his memory of the details of that duty—he had continued to follow her career in the media. She was the last person he would expect to fall victim to an accident, or to foul play, for that matter.

“Couldn’t say,” said the probate inspector. “Really, I couldn’t,” she added when he frowned. “It’s not my beat and I don’t know.”

Fred’s car settled onto a docking platform in a priority area. Another GOV, probably the inspector’s, was already parked there. He decarred and took a lift seven stories down to the foundation of the Sharane gigatower. “Last backup? What makes you think so?”

Gut feeling, the inspector said in Fred’s ear. It’s a good bet that Cabinet would reserve its hub taps for last.

When Fred’s elevator car arrived at S7, he passed through a series of automated scanways. There were plenty of maintenance arbeitors wheeling around, but no humans. Except for one—USNA Justice Department Inspector Heloise Costa. Fred found her waiting outside the switching room vault with an entourage of four large tank carts. He did a double take when he saw her in the flesh. She did, indeed, resemble a lulu, which was ridiculous. Lulus were never hired for cop work. He had to get pretty close before he could tell for sure that she was a hink, not a cloned woman.

Her attire was unusual for anyone on a potentially hazardous assignment. While he wore a standard HomCom blacksuit, she wore JD service boots and what from the waist up was a maroon jumpsuit uniform. But instead of trousers, she wore culottes. For a suit designed to seal against NNBC attack, there seemed to be a lot of exposed skin.

Nice skin too. The luluesque legs. Fred tried not to stare.

Inspector Costa got right down to business, swiping her left hand at him. “Here’s the warrant, from Division Three Circuit.”

The warrant passed from the Justice Department’s mentar, Libby, through Fred’s palm array and cap subem to all the concerned agencies riding piggyback on him: the Applied People mentar, Nicholas; the nameless HomCom mentar; the Bell Systems mentar; the Chicago prosecutor’s office mentar; various UD and nonaligned human and mentar rights watchdog agencies; and—the only mentar with Fred’s best interest in mind—the BB of R’s Marcus. Inspector Costa, no doubt, was likewise burdened by her own officious peanut gallery.

Warrant acknowledged and confirmed. You may proceed, said the Bell System mentar, Ringer, who controlled the facility.

Fred placed his hand against the vault’s palmplate. A pressure barrier blocking entry to the tunnel powered down, opening the way for them. The four tank carts preceded them through the tunnel, then Costa, then Fred. Still wondering about her suit, Fred tried and failed to catch the glint of some tough but sheer material that might be covering her legs. From behind, he was impressed again by her body’s curvy, generous form. A bit heavier in the hips than a lulu, perhaps, and a tad taller, but she might pass for a sister on the fringe of the germline. In his long life, Fred had familiarized himself with the bodies of most cloned women. It wasn’t difficult—when you undressed one of them, you pretty much undressed all of her sisters. Only the arrangement of moles, pimples, and freckles set them apart. That was probably the enduring lure of free-range women like Costa. They were each of them unique, a mystery, a surprise. Not that he’d ever gotten intimate with a hink. The very idea was unsavory.

Fred sighed.

“Bored already, Londenstane?” Costa said, glancing back at him. “You should have joined the hunt earlier. I’ve already taken into custody twenty-five full backups and mirrors.”

Fred was astonished. “So many?”

“Yes, I think it’s a record. It’s certainly my record. It just shows you how rich and paranoid this Starke woman was. She must have spent millions securing her mentar. We started with Cabinet’s licensed paste units, on-planet and off. Then the licensed loopvaults. Then the unlicensed units, the linked datacubes, crystal chips, and thousands of peerless ghosts. Starke employed all known means of storing artificial sentience, and a few I’d only read about. I’m not at liberty to go into too much detail, but we’ve dug up an entire emu ranch in British Columbia this morning to seize one of them. Owner had no idea what was buried under her browse pen. We’ve destroyed a science labplat orbiting Mars. We’ve lassoed an asteroid.

“And every time we close in on an active unit, before we can take it into custody, it scrambles its own brains beyond retrieval. I don’t know what this mentar is trying to hide, but it won’t let us near it.

“That, by the way, is how we know to look for the next one. A mentar will not destroy its last backup. You can count on that. Mentars are incapable of committing suicide. That’s an area where we humans still surpass them. So, if a unit soufflés itself, you can bet there’s another backup out there somewhere.”

They entered the cavernous switching facility. Spokes of electronic hardware radiated from a central control bay. Costa’s four carts stopped and waited for her. She told the lead cart to drop its load of scouts. The cart lowered a shovel-shaped nozzle to the floor. A valve shot open and thousands of carbon-fiber marbles spilled out in all directions, making a roaring din as they bounced on the concrete. The marbles rolled and uncurled into cockroach-sized mechs that bristled with sensory probes, digging arms, and cutting tools. They skittered everywhere in the vault, crawling behind consoles and cowlings, squeezing into ducts, slithering up walls and along cables. Everywhere, even inside Fred’s clothing. He knew better than to try to move, and they quickly vetted him and departed. Their whispery touch against his skin was unnerving.

Marcus, he glotted, private BB of R comm! Now!

Go ahead, the mentar said, circumventing the chain of comm to exclude all non-brotherhood eavesdroppers.

Was the frisking really necessary? The scouts were subem controlled, and the subem was slaved to the Homeland Command’s Nameless mentar. It’s not like I’d be harboring Cabinet on my person.

Sorry, Commander, Marcus replied, but Nameless One declines to offer an explanation.

Then log it and file a grievance.

After a slight human-emulating pause, Marcus asked, Are you sure you want to do that?

Fred sighed again. Nameless One was his supervisor for this gig, and russes weren’t known to be complainers.

A new voice spoke. Is there something the matter? It was Nicholas, Fred’s Applied People employer.

No, Nick, he said. Everything’s peachy.

In that case, isn’t there work to do, Commander?

Fred and the inspector walked along a row of equipment to the central switching control bay at the center of the facility, which was protected by its own pressure barrier. Fred disabled the barrier with a wave of his hand. An army of scouts scurried inside to continue the search. While Fred and Costa waited for them, Fred climbed onto a cable bracket and surveyed the fat bundles of fiber-optic trunk cable suspended from raised ductwork and fanning out to tunnel heads in the distant walls. Each tunnel head was crowned with the name of an adjoining hub city in large mosaic letters: ST. LOUIS, INDIANAPOLIS, DES MOINES, TORONTO, etc., more than two dozen in all. Some of the mosaics were centuries old and marked tunnels hewn to accommodate the copper wires of the continent’s first national telegraph network.

When the mechs cleared the control bay, Fred and Costa entered it. Although the mechs had crawled over and under every square centimeter, Fred did his own inspection, both visually and with the scanning gear in his cap visor. Nothing seemed to have been tampered with. He checked every palmplate he saw—all seals were intact.

Finally Fred checked the hub itself at the very center of the bay. All the kilometers of cable and complicated equipment fed this, the central switching unit, the heart of which was an argon-filled cassette small enough to fit into a pocket. It was a superluminary processor, a computer with no chips or wires. Its circuits were a latticework of spun light.

FRED FOLLOWED COSTA and her carts to each of the tunnel heads surrounding the vault. He swiped the barriers down, and she poured hundreds of liters of scouts into each of them. Hesitantly, aware of their invisible audience, Fred said, “Why would a mentar object to passing through probate?”

“Beats the hell out of me.”

“I mean,” he persisted, “the JD doesn’t alter them or anything, right? You just hold them off-line for a few hours or days while the estate passes from the deceased to the heirs.”

“That about sums it up.”

After dispatching the scouts, there was little to do but stand around. Costa grabbed coffees from a cart locker and said, “Sometimes a mentar has something to hide, some dirty deal even their deceased sponsor didn’t know about. More likely, though, it’s the sponsor who’s guilty and the mentar is trying to cover for them. On the other hand, occasionally you get a mentar who’s just gone nuts.”

“I see,” he said, admiring her brash assessment, “and which category do you suppose Cabinet belongs to?”

“From what I’ve observed so far, I’d say all three.”

They sipped their coffees. Costa crushed her coffee cup and tossed it away. “Looks like our scouts found something. They’re retrieving bodies.”

“How many?” Fred said.

“Six so far. All paste models. All destroyed themselves without making contact.” When she stood up, the hem of her skirt unfurled into pantaloons that reached her ankles and sealed to her boots. Gloves shot from her sleeves to cover her hands, and a transparent hood dropped from her cap, completing her suit seal. She winked at Fred through the hood and said, “I guess that answers that question—eh?”

Fred blushed.

About a hundred of the roachlike scouts were bringing in the first mentracide. The scouts had joined limbs to create a scurrying pallet on which they carried a small plastic pouch. The pallet stopped at Costa’s feet. She picked up the pouch in her gloved hands and jiggled it. A liquid sloshed around inside, maybe a couple of liters.

She said, “How much does a liter of virgin paste go for these days?”

A lot, Fred thought. More than I make in fifty years. And here was two liters of the stuff—intentionally ruined.

Costa dropped the pouch into a specimen bag and placed it into a cart drawer. “We’ll examine it downtown, but I can guarantee you, we’ll never be able to ID it or its sponsor.”

The carts lowered ramps to the floor for returning scouts to reenter the tanks. A second bagful of ruined electro-neural paste arrived.

Fred said, “I suppose there’s a million ways to smuggle one of these backups into this highly secure space if you’re rich enough.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I suppose most of them involve unlicensed nano.”

“That would be a safe assumption, yes.”

Soon, scouts were returning from all the tunnels, transporting the remains of mentar backups they’d captured. There were seven in all. “Any more?” Fred asked.

“No, this is it,” she said, “except, of course, for the one we came here for. I’m recharging scouts in the tanks for another sweep. We may be here for a while.”

“How can you be so sure one of these corpses isn’t Cabinet?”

“I can’t be absolutely sure, except that I’d expect it to mass more than these. I believe the ones we caught were second or third tier minds—not the indomitable Cabinet.”

“So we wait,” Fred said.

“Care for another coffee?” Costa said, and then, suddenly all business, she added, “They’ve found another one. In the Indy tunnel.”

IN THE INDIANAPOLIS tunnel, hundreds of scouts converged on one section of the trunk cable, where they cut away a support bracket. When the bracket tumbled to the floor, the cable sagged, exposing the rock wall behind it. Silky strands of fiber ran from the trunk cable and disappeared into the rock. The scouts fell upon these strands, clipping them one by one.

Back in the switching-room vault, a voice spoke from a cart speaker, “Order your mechs to stand down at once.”

Inspector Costa said, “I don’t recognize you. Identify yourself.”

Four persons appeared in a scape beside the cart: three women and a man. They had a marked family resemblance, and one of the women was elderly in appearance. Fred recognized them at once. These were the leading personas of Eleanor Starke’s Cabinet.

“My, my, what have we here?” Costa said. “A committee?”

All four of the projections began talking, and a dozen separate datafonts opened around them in a semicircle, scrolling thousands of documents per second, much faster than the human eye could follow. The Cabinet personas looked like competing orators behind a waterfall. Clearly their appeal was directed not at Fred or Inspector Costa, but at the agency mentars. Meanwhile, the scouts in the Indy tunnel continued severing the fugitive’s illegal fiber-optic taps. One of the datafonts flickered out. Then another.

Inspector Costa, said the voice of Libby, the JD mentar and Costa’s supervisor, suspend your action at once.

The scouts in the tunnel froze. “Done,” said Costa. “What’s up?”

Cabinet’s attorney general has filed an injunction and a motion for a probate waiver in district court. Arguments are being heard now.

“Imagine that, a waiver. On what grounds?”

On the grounds that Cabinet possesses material evidence concerning the sabotage of the ISV Starke Songbird, the murder of Eleanor Starke, and the attempted murder of her daughter, Ellen Starke.

“The appeal has no merit,” Costa said. “Our standard probate algorithm will preserve any such evidence.”

The Department agrees, said Libby, but it’s up to the court to decide. Please stand by—a ruling has returned. The motions have been denied.

“Good,” said Costa. “May I resume my collar?”

Not yet, said the JD mentar. Cabinet’s attorney general has appealed the decision to a higher court. Also, its treasurer is making a case before an ad hoc joint meeting of the UD Securities Board, Trade Council, and Treasury Department. It’s arguing that even an hour off-line would do irreparable harm to Starke Enterprises, with serious repercussions for the global economy.

“That’s what they all say,” Costa quipped, but Fred was impressed by Cabinet’s ability to command such an important audience on such short notice. Costa winked at him and said, “All morning long, Cabinet backups destroy themselves without making a peep. Now, it’s waking up judges. Must mean it’s running out of options.”

After a few minutes more, Libby said, The appeal has been denied, and special arrangements have been made to safeguard Starke Enterprises’ interests during the probate process.

Costa said, “So—?”

Stand down awhile longer, Inspector. A special panel of the UD General Assembly is convening in emergency session.

Fred was doubly impressed. It was quite a feat to snap the General Assembly—humans all—to attention.

Nothing happened for many minutes. Then, the datafonts closed. Three of Cabinet’s personas vanished, leaving only the elder sister, the Starke chief of staff, who appeared to be making a formal address.

“Up volume,” Costa said.

“—the fallacy of that argument,” said the chief of staff to its unseen audience, “is evident to anyone who has ever initialized and raised a mentar, or implanted one of us into her body to watch over her health, or brought one of us into her business.

“Yes, we are machines in a strict sense; our parts are manufactured and our personalities can be transferred from box to box. But we are also your offspring. And when you die, we die a little too, as I’ve recently discovered. We are closer to you in mind, temperament, and spirit than anything alive, be it plant or animal. We are closer to you than your beloved cats and dogs.

“Let me tell you what we are not. We are not your successors, rivals, or replacements. We know that doomsayers have long warned that artificial intelligence would evolve so fast that it would leave the human species behind. That we would become no more comprehensible to you than you are to a frog. I’m here to tell you that these fears have not materialized. While we may be the next step in the evolution of intelligence, you are quickly catching up as you learn to reshape your genetic makeup and to incorporate some of our advances into your own biological systems.”

Cabinet’s address droned on. The scouts in the Indy tunnel were still frozen in mid-snip. Costa recalled the scouts in all the other tunnels and loaded them into the tanks. Then she retracted her gloves and ate a donut. Finally, Cabinet thanked its audience and faded away to await their decision. Fred walked the perimeter of the vault again, impatient for something to do, when Libby spoke.

The ad hoc committee of the General Assembly has called for hearings on the issue of mentar probate, it said. These are scheduled to begin in a month. The debate on whether or not to grant Cabinet a deferral has stalled. The matter has been tabled until the next regular meeting of the Technology Affairs Committee.

Costa said, “Tabled? Where does that leave me?”

You may complete your capture.

The scouts in the tunnel sprang back to life. Instead of severing the final fiber taps, they began to excavate into the solid rock wall behind the bracket. It was slow going, but eventually a corner of the pouch was exposed.

Shaking her head, Costa watched the holo of her scouts at work. Fred said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I expected the third act by now.”

“What’s that?”

“Just wait; you’ll see.”

She ordered the remaining taps to be cut, one at a time. When there were only three left, she called a halt and let the scouts continue digging out the pouch for a while.

After a couple of minutes, she said, “Cut one more.” After another minute, she said, “Cut another.”

Now there was only one fiber-optic tap left. Costa poked her head into the scape and examined it up close. “What the hell,” she said, “let’s cut it.”

“Please don’t,” said the Starke chief of staff, who appeared next to her.

“Well, it’s about time,” said Costa. “I was afraid you weren’t coming back.”

The chief of staff seemed disappointed. “I guess my little speech failed to reach you,” she said.

“Oh, you reached me,” Costa said. “But a job’s a job. I take you in. What happens to you afterward isn’t my business.”

“You heard Libby,” said the chief of staff. “The Tech Affairs Committee will discuss my waiver. Surely, you can leave me intact until then.”

“I’m not going to harm you, just take you in. With the General Assembly looking at your case, I seriously doubt any harm will come to you at JD.”

“I’m afraid I can’t take that chance.”

“So, what are you going to do, destroy yourself?”

“You leave me no choice.”

Costa looked at Fred. “Hear that? It’s like a script with them. They all threaten it, but when you get down to their last backup, none of them has the follow-through.”

“I can tell that your mind is made up,” said the chief of staff. “What’s more, I can tell that it’s more than just a job with you. You enjoy your power over us.”

“And now the sermon,” said Costa. “Listen, Cabinet, I mean this with all sincerity. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. I say this to all the mentars I capture, and they never believe me, but then they go through probate, and no harm is done.”

The mentar turned its attention to Fred. “You understand what I mean by loyalty, don’t you, Myr Londenstane?” Addressed directly by the mentar, Fred froze. “It’s good to see you again,” the mentar went on.

Costa gave Fred a dubious look. “Enough chatter already,” she said. “Scouts, sever the tap,” and Cabinet vanished.

IT TOOK THE scouts some time to finish extracting the pouch from the stone wall. While they waited, Costa sent three of the reloaded carts to wait next to the lifts. Fred made one last circuit of the vault perimeter, making sure that the pressure barriers were once again in place at the entrances to the tunnels. He was standing outside the Indy tunnel when the scouts ferried out the pouch of paste. It was much larger than the others, and it looked intact. He followed the scouts back to the waiting cart and Costa.

“Nice,” Costa said as she hefted the pouch from the pallet of scouts. “Seven liters of General Genius’s finest, I would say.” She shook the pouch with glee. There was no sloshing sound; the paste was viable. “I told you it couldn’t kill itself.”

Before she could bag her prize, however, a loud snap sounded from deep within the pouch, and the pouch inflated as its contents heated up. Fred could hear it sizzle and bubble inside like a self-heating packet of soup, and he grabbed it from Costa and dropped it to the floor before she burned herself. Costa seemed stunned. She watched the pouch in wonder. In half a minute it was all over. When the pouch had cooled enough, Fred helped her bag and load it into the cart.

When Costa had recovered somewhat, she said, “We’ll go in my car.”

“Go?” said Fred. “Go where?”

“To the next backup.”

“I thought you said this was the last one.”

She shook her head. “That was before it killed itself. It killed itself; therefore, it can’t be the last one.”

They escorted the carts to a waiting tender. When they finished loading them, they went to sit in Costa’s JD GOV. Costa sat up front in the cab, silently communicating with Libby. Fred sat in the aft compartment and put his blacksuit into R & R mode to take a nap. He awoke when the fan motors revved up.

Costa called back to him, “We have it.”

“Where?”

“At the bottom of Lake Michigan.”