Existence

autie murphy verifies + + + he found the basque chimera

+!+ the child lives +!+ and is safe, for now.

safe from the normalpeople who would treasure +/- persecute -/+ or study himherit -/- perhaps to death

born in a year that would have been the square of the number of birthdays that jesus would have had – if jesus had lived twelve more years -+- and had an extra leap day every year + + + and if the primate avoided prime numbers +/- what more proof could anybody need?/-

+ + + good going murph + + +

only now, what do we do with this knowledge? the autie thing? dance with it a while + then pack it away

+ /- all facts are created equal. -/+ the number of dollars in your bank account -/- the number of holes in your socks… all the same, right? pragmatism is for poorparents -/- those who are distraught over the “autism plague”

– pragmatism doesn’t come easily to us -

+ + + but it must + + +

if we lack the passion & drive of homosaps-their cro magnon attention-allocation genius-then can we use something else? + + + something we are good at + + +

!/! if we super-autistics really are more like animals… or even maybe like Neanderthals… then might the chimera teach us something valuable?/?

maybe we should do something with this knowledge

possibly go talk to himherit

perhaps even care

25.

The journey of three thousand li began with a bribe and a little air.

And a penguinlike robot, standing on the low dining table that Peng Xiang Bin had salvaged from a flooded mansion. A mechanical creature that stayed punctiliously polite, while issuing commands that would forever disrupt the lives of Xiang Bin and Mei Ling and their infant son.

“There is very little time,” it said, gravely, in a Beijing-accented voice that emanated somewhere on its glossy chest, well below the sharply pointed beak. “Others have sniffed the same suspicions that brought me here, drawn by your indiscreet queries about selling a gleaming, egglike stone, with moving shapes within.”

To illustrate what it meant by others, the bird-thing scraped one metallic talon along the scaly flank of a large, robotic snake-the other interloper, that had climbed the crumbling walls and slithered across the roof of this once-lavish beachfront house, slipping into the shorestead shelter and terrifying Mei Ling, while Bin was away on his ill-fated expedition to Shanghai East. Fortunately, the penguin-machine arrived soon after that. A brief, terrible battle ensued, leaving the false serpent torn and ruined, just before Bin returned home.

The reason for that fracas lay on the same table, shimmering with light energy that it had absorbed earlier, from sunshine. An ovoid shape, almost half a meter from tip to tip, opalescent and mesmerizing. Clearly, Bin should have been more cautious-far more cautious-making queries about this thing on the Mesh.

The penguin-shaped robot took a step toward Bin.

“Those who sent the snake-creature are just as eager as my owners are, to acquire the worldstone. I assure you they’ll be less considerate than I have been, if we are still here when they send reinforcements. And my consideration has limits.”

Though a poor man, with meager education, Bin had enough sense to recognize a veiled threat. Still, he felt reluctant to go charging off with his family, into a fading afternoon, with this entity… leaving behind, possibly forever, the little shorestead home that he and Mei Ling had built by hand, on the ruins of a seaside mansion.

“You said that the… worldstone… picks only one person to speak to.” He gestured at the elongated egg. Now that his hands weren’t in contact, it no longer depicted the clear image of a demon… or space alien. (There was a difference?) Still, the lopsided orb remained transfixing. Swirling shapes, like storm-driven clouds, seemed to roil beneath its scarred and pitted surface, shining by their own light-as if the object were a lens into another world.

“Wouldn’t your rivals have to talk to it through me?” he finished. “Just as you must?”

One rule of commerce, that even a poor man understood-you can get a better deal when more than one customer is bidding.

“Perhaps, Peng Xiang Bin,” the bird-thing replied, shifting its weight in what seemed a gesture of impatience. “On the other hand, you should not overestimate your value, or underestimate the ferocity of my adversaries. This is not a market situation, but akin to ruthless war.

“Furthermore, while very little is known about these worldstones, it is unlikely that you are indispensable. Legends suggest that it will simply pick another human counterpart-if the current one dies.”

Mei Ling gasped, seizing Bin’s left arm in a tight grip, fingernails and all. But still, his mind raced. It will say whatever it must, in order to get my cooperation. But appearances may be deceiving. The snake could have been sent by the same people, and the fight staged, in order to frighten us. That might explain why both machines showed up at about the same time.

Bin knew he had few advantages. Possibly, the robot had sensors to read his pulse, blood pressure, iris dilation, skin flush response… and lots of other things that a more educated person might know about. Every suspicion or lie probably played out across his face-and Bin had never been a good gambler, even bluffing against humans.

“I… will need-”

“Payment is in order,” the penguinoid immediately conceded. “We’ll start with a bonus of ten times your current yearly income, just for coming along, followed by a salary of one thousand New Hong Kong Dollars per month. And more is possible with good results. Perhaps much more.”

It was a princely boon, but Bin frowned, and the machine seemed to read his thoughts.

“I can tell, you are more concerned about other things, like whether you can trust us.”

Bin nodded-a tense jerk. The penguin gave a semblance of a shrug.

“As you might guess, the amount of payment I just offered is trivial to my owners, so I would have no reason to lie. But you must decide. Right now.” Again, with that faint tone of threat. Still, Bin hesitated.

“I will pack some things for the baby,” Mei Ling announced, with resolution in her voice. “We can leave all the rest. Everything.”

But the penguinoid stopped her. “I regret, wife and child cannot come. It is too dangerous. There are no accommodations and they will slow us down.” As Bin started to protest, it raised one stubby wing. “But you will not leave them to starve. I will provide part of your bonus now, in a form they can use.”

Bin blinked, staring as the machine settled down into a squat, closing its eyes and straining, almost as if it were…

With an audible grunt, it stepped back, revealing a small pellet on the tabletop. “You’ll find the funds readily accessible at any city kiosk. As I said, the amount, though large for you, is too small for my owners to care about cheating from you.”

“That is not what worries me,” Mei Ling said, though she snatched up the pellet. While her voice was husky with fear, holding Xiao-En squirming against her chest, she wore a cold, pragmatic expression. “Your masters may find it inconvenient to leave witnesses. If you get the stone-how much better if no one else knows? After… Xiang Bin departs with you… I may not live out the hour.”

I hadn’t thought of that, Bin realized, grimly. His jaw clenched. He took a step toward the table.

“Open your tutor-tablet,” the bird-thing snapped, no longer courteous. “Quickly! And speak your names aloud.”

Bin hurried to activate the little Mesh device, made for preschoolers, but the only access unit they could afford. Their link was at the minimal, FreePublic level-still, when he spoke the words, a new posting erupted from the little screen. It showed his face… and Mei Ling’s… and the worldstone… plus a few dozen characters outlining an agreement.

“Now, your wife knows no more than is already published-which is little enough. Our rivals can extract nothing else, so we have no reason to silence her. Nor will anyone else. Does that reassure?” When they nodded, the machine hurried on.

“Good. Only, by providing this reassurance, I have made our time predicament worse. Over the course of the next few minutes and hours, many new forces will notice and start to converge. So choose, Peng Xiang Bin. This instant! If you will not bring the stone, I will explode in twenty seconds, to prevent others from getting it. Agree, or flee! Sixteen… fifteen… fourteen…”

“I’ll go!”

Bin grabbed up a heavy sack and rolled the gleaming ovoid inside. The worldstone brightened, briefly, at his touch, then seemed to give up and go dark, as he stuffed in some padding and slung the bag over a shoulder. The penguinoid was already at the flap of the little tent-shelter. Bin turned…

… as Mei Ling held up their son-the one thing they both cared about, more than each other. “Thrive,” he said, with his hand upon the boy’s head.

“Survive, husband,” she commanded in turn. A moist glisten in her eye both surprised and warmed him, more than any words. Bin accepted the obligation with a hurried bow, then ducked under the flap, following the robot into the setting sun.

Halfway down the grand staircase, on the landing that Bin had turned into an indoor dock, the penguin split its belly open, revealing a small cavity and a slim, metal object within.

“Take it.”

He recognized a miniature breathing device-a mouthpiece with a tiny, insulated capsule of highly compressed air. It even had a pair of dangling gel-eyepieces. Quang Lu, the smuggler, possessed a bulkier model. Bin snatched it out of the fissure, which closed quickly, as the robot waddled to the edge, overlooking the greasy water of the Huangpu Estuary.

“Now, make speed!”

It dived in, then paused to swivel and regard Bin with beady, now luminescent eyes, watching the human’s every move.

Peng Xiang Bin took a brief, backward glance, wondering if he would ever return. He slipped in the mouthpiece and pushed the gels over his eyes. Then took the biggest plunge of his life.

If and when our civilization expires, we may not even agree on the cause of death. Autopsies of empires are often inconclusive. Consider Alexander Demandt, a German historian who in the 1980s collected 210 different theories for the fall of the Roman Empire, including attacks by nomads, food poisoning, decline of Aenean character, loss of gold, vanity, mercantilism, a steepening class divide, ecological degradation, and even the notion that civilizations just get tired after a while.

Some were opposites, like too much Christian piety versus too little. Or too much tolerance of internal deviance versus the lack of it. Other reasons may have added together, piling like fatal straws on a camel’s back.

Now it’s your turn! Unlike those elitist compilers, over at the Pandora Foundation, our open-source doomsday system invites you, the public, to participate in evaluating how it’s all going to end.

Using World Model 2040 as a shared starting condition, we’ve seed-slotted a thousand general doom scenarios. Groups are already forming to team-reify them. So join one, bringing your biases and special skills. Or else, start your own doomsday story, no matter how crackpot! Is Earth running out of phlogiston? Will mole people rise out of the ground, bent on revenge? Later, we’ll let quantum comparators rank every story according to probabilities.

But for now, it’s time for old-fashioned, unmatched human imagination. So have fun! Make your best case. Convince us all that your chosen Failure Mode is the one that will bring us all down!

– from SlateZine’s “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” joshsimgame, August 2046

26.

That first day passed, and then a tense night that he spent clutching a sleeping dolphin by moonlight, while clouds of phosphorescent plankton drifted by.

I hear that cetaceans sleep with just half their brains at a time. Jeez, how useful would that be?

Fortunately, the same selective-permeability technology that enabled his helmet to draw oxygen from the sea also provided a trickle of freshwater, filling a small reservoir near his cheek. I’ve got to buy stock in this company, he thought, making a checklist for when he was picked up tomorrow.

Only pickup did not happen-no helicopters or rescue zeps, no speedy trimarans bearing the Darktide Services logo, or even a fishing boat. The next morning and afternoon passed pretty much the same as the first, without catching sight of land. The world always felt so crowded, he thought. Now it seemed endless and unexplored.

Funny. I would have expected Lacey to fill the sky with searchers, by now. And not just his mother. Despite a reputation as a thrill-seeking playboy, Hacker had some genuine friends, a brother who would join the search, and some loyal staff. Every bit of electronics in this suit must be fried. And I must have come down way, way off course.

The long day that followed seemed to pass quite slowly in the company of his new friends, who alternately carried and guided him in some unknown direction.

The helmet came stocked with one small protein stick. When that was gone, Hacker added hunger to his list of complaints. But at least he wouldn’t die of thirst. As fast as his suit could filter freshwater from the surrounding sea, Hacker guzzled it down, flushing out his system and occasionally releasing fertilizer for drifting plankton to feed upon.

Gradually, his thoughts began to clear.

Was I really about to head back into the reef? I must have been delirious. Maybe had a concussion. These flipper guys saved me from myself, I guess.

Of course, Hacker had seen dolphins-especially the bottlenose type-on countless nature shows and be-theres. He even once played tag with a pair, during a diving trip near Tonga. Perhaps for that reason, he soon began noticing some strange traits shared by this group.

For example, these animals took turns making complex sounds, while glancing at each other or pointing with their beaks… almost as if they were holding a back-and-forth conversation. And he could swear they were gesturing toward him. Perhaps even sharing amused comments at his expense.

Of course it must be an illusion-probably his concussion still acting up, plus a familiar excess of imagination. Everyone knew that scientists had finally determined the intelligence of Tursiops truncatus dolphins, after a century of exaggerations and wishful thinking. They were, indeed, very bright animals-about chimpanzee equivalent, with some basic linguistic cleverness-and they were true masters of underwater sound. But it had also been proved, at long last, that they possessed no true speech of their own. Not even matching the abilities of a human two-year-old.

And yet, after watching a mother dolphin and her infant chase a big octopus into its stony lair, Hacker sensed with his jaw implant as the two certainly seemed to converse. The baby’s quizzical squeaks alternated with slow repetitions from the parent. Hacker felt sure a particular syncopated popping meant “octopus.”

Occasionally, one of the creatures would point its bulbous brow toward Hacker, and suddenly the implant in his jaw pulse-clicked like mad, making his teeth rattle. In fact, it almost sounded like the code that space-divers like him used to communicate with their capsules, after getting their eardrums clamped for flight. For lack of anything else to do, Hacker concentrated on those vibrations in his jaw. Our regular hearing isn’t meant for this world, he realized. All it does is make things murky.

It was all very interesting, and of course this would make a great tale, after he was rescued. But as some sharpness returned to his brain, Hacker wondered.

Am I getting any closer to shore?

And don’t these creatures ever get hungry?

He got his answer about an hour later.

Out of the east, there arrived a big dolphin who appeared to be snarled in a terrible tangle of some kind. At first, Hacker thought it might be a mat of seaweed. Then he recognized a fishing net-a ropy mesh that wound around the whole back section of its body, down to the flukes. The sight provoked an unusual sentiment in Hacker-pity, combined with guilt over what human negligence had done to the poor animal.

He slid his emergency knife from its sheath and moved toward the victim, aiming to cut it free. But another dolphin intervened, swimming in front of Hacker to block him.

“Hey, calm down. I’m just trying to help!” he complained…

… then stared as other members of the group approached the snared one and grabbed the net along its trailing edge. Backpedaling with careful kicks of their flukes, they pulled away as the “victim” rolled round and round. The net unwrapped smoothly, neatly, without any snarls, till about twenty meters stretched almost straight and the big dolphin swam free, apparently unharmed.

Other members of the pod swarmed in, grabbing edges of the net with their jaws, holding it open. Then, Hacker saw some of the younger members of the pod dash away. He watched in awe while they circled in a wide arc, beyond a school of fish that had been grazing peacefully above a bank of coral in the distance. The young cetaceans began darting toward the silvery throng-apparently a breed of mullet-causing the multitude to pulse and throb, moving en masse away from its tormentors.

Beaters! Hacker recognized the hunting technique. They’re driving the whole school toward the net! But how did they ever-

He watched, awed, as the entire clan of dolphins moved with a kind of teamwork that only came from experience, some of them chasing fish, while others manipulated the harvesting tool, till about a quarter of the school wriggled and writhed within its folds. At which point, they let the survivors swim away.

It was time to take a breather, literally, as bottlenose figures took turns darting for the surface. Then, one by one, each member of the pod approached the netted swarm and expertly inserted a narrow beak between strands of netting, in order to snare a tasty meal. This went on a while, taking turns breathing, eating, holding the net…

… until satiation set in, and play took a higher priority. One trio of youngsters began tossing a poor fish back and forth between them. Another pair nosed through the silty bottom, harassing a ray. Meanwhile, elders of the pod tidied up by carefully stretching the net, then rolling it back around the original volunteer, who thereupon sped off to the east, apparently unhampered by his burden.

Well I’m a blue-nose gopher, Hacker mused.

A number of dead or dying mullet still floated around. Hacker was only gradually recovering from his sense of astonishment, when one of his rescuers approached with a fish clutched in its jaws. It made offering motions…

Hacker remembered his own hunger. It ought to taste like sushi, he thought, realizing just how far he was from the ancestral-human world of cooking flames…

… and that brought on, unbidden, a sudden thought of his mother. Especially one time that Lacey had tried to explain her passionate interest in seeking other life worlds out there in space, spending half a billion dollars of her own money on the search. “One theory holds that most Gaia-type planets out there ought to have even more surface area covered by ocean than Earth’s seventy percent, which could mean that creatures like brainy whales or squid are far more common than us hands-and-fire types. Which could help explain a lot.”

Hacker hadn’t paid close attention, at the time. That was her obsession, after all, not his. Still, he regretted not spending the time to listen and understand. Anyway, poor Lacey was probably worried sick, by now.

Focusing on the moment-and his hunger-he swam closer to the dolphin, reaching for the offered meal.

Only it yanked the fish back at the last moment, repeating a staccato beat of sound. Hacker quashed a resurgence of frustration and anger, even though it was hard.

“Try to stop, when you’re in danger of overreacting,” his one-time therapist used to urge, before he fired her. “Always consider a possibility-that there may be a reason for what’s happening. Something other than villainy.”

His implant repeated the rhythm, as the dolphin brought its jaw forward again, offering the juicy prize once more.

It’s trying to teach me, he realized.

“Is that the pulse code for fish?” he asked, knowing the helmet would project his voice, but never expecting the creature to grasp spoken English.

To his amazement, the dolphin shook its head.

No.

Pretty emphatically no.

“Uh.” He blinked a few times, then continued. “Does it mean ‘food’? ‘Eat’? ‘Wash up before dinner’? ‘Welcome stranger’?”

An approving beat greeted his final guess, and the dolphin flicked the tooth-pocked mullet toward Hacker, who felt suddenly ravenous. He tore the fish apart, stuffing bits of it through his helmet’s narrow chowlock, caring very little about salt water squirting in, along with chunks of red flesh.

Welcome stranger? he pondered. That’s mighty abstract for a dumb beast to say. Though I’ll admit, it’s friendly.

In his prescient novel The Cool War, Frederik Pohl showed a chillingly plausible failure mode, in which our nations and factions do not dare wage open conflict, and so settle upon tit-for-tat patterns of reciprocal sabotage, each attempting to ruin the other’s infrastructure and economy. Naturally, this sends civilization on a slow death spiral of degrading hopes.

Sound depressing? It makes one wonder-what fraction of the “accidents” that we see have nothing to do with Luck?

Oh sure, there are always conspiracy theories. Superefficient engines that were kept off the market by greedy energy companies. Disease cures, suppressed by profit-hungry pharmaceutical giants. Knaves, monopolists and fat cats who use intellectual property to repress knowledge growth, instead of spurring it on.

But those dark rumors don’t hold a candle to this one-that we’re sliding toward despair because all the efforts of good, skilled men and women are for naught. Their labors are deliberately spiked, because some ruling elites see themselves engaged in a secret struggle on our behalf. And this tit-for-tat, negative-sum game is all about the most dismal human pastime.

War.

– Pandora’s Cornucopia

27.

“We’ve reconsidered the matter, Lacey. Given that poor Hacker is still missing at sea, we should not impose on your time of worry. It won’t be necessary for you to fly to our upcoming meeting of the clade, so far away from the search for your son. We’ll manage, even though we’ll miss your wisdom in Zurich.”

I’ll bet, Lacey thought, pondering the stately blonde who was portrayed seated in front of her, full-sized, through a top quality threevee holistube. Unlike their earlier exchange, back at the Chilean observatory, images now went both ways, between plush, high-security communications lounges in two far-apart branches of the Salamander Club-one of them perched high upon the Alps and the other here in Charleston, where magnolia scents wafted indoors on waves of sultry, junglelike heat, despite a double-seal entrance. Both rooms were decorated so similarly that the seam, separating real from depiction, was easy to ignore. It felt as if the women were chatting across a gap of two meters, not thousands of kilometers.

Security from eavesdropping came the same way as before-using twinned parrot brains as uncrackable encoding devices. Only now, the birds at each end were neuroplugged directly to elaborate transmission systems, allowing more sophisticated use of cephalo-paired encryption. This high-fidelity image helped Lacey read cues in the other woman’s expression. She didn’t need any sophisticated facial analysis program.

Sympathy is only an excuse, Helena. Deliberation is over. The peers have already reached a decision about the Prophet’s proposal, haven’t they? And you know it’s one I’d fuss about.

Testing that hypothesis, she ventured: “Maybe I should come anyway. I’ve hired skilled people to handle the rescue effort. If I hang around, I’ll just get in the way. Or else wilt in this damned humidity. A distraction might help pull my mind away from fretting-”

Transit delay was negligible as Helena duPont-Vonessen interrupted.

“Our thought exactly, dear. A diversion from worry may be just the thing. Hence, we do have a task for you. One that should engage your intellect far better than visiting a bunch of stodgy trillionaire gnomes.” Helena smiled at her own disarming jest. “Also, it will keep you much closer to the scene, in case the searchers find… in case they have need of you.”

Lacey felt her mind veer away from the icy place where she kept anguish over her missing son. That helped propel her the other way, into cool, analytical examination of Helena’s true meaning.

She doesn’t even suggest that I send a surrogate or representative to the meeting in Switzerland. She wants to deflect me to another topic altogether.

“Oh? And what task would you have in mind?” Lacey asked.

“To represent the First Estate-or, at least, our part of it-at the Artifact Conference in Washington. To be our eyes and ears, at this historic and disruptive event.

“After all, Lacey, isn’t this right up your alley? An abrupt culmination of everything you’ve dreamed about-contact with extraterrestrial life? Who, among all the members of our class, is better qualified to grasp the issues and implications?”

Lacey almost responded with irritation. Helena was offering her boffin work… almost like some big-domed hireling from the Fifth Estate.

Of course, it was also enticing.

Helena knows me. I’d love a chance to see this famous emissary probe from outer space.

But that wasn’t the point. Her aristocratic peers already had plenty of boffins hard at work on this very topic-either at the Artifact Conference in Washington or closely watching the data feeds-producing digested summaries and advice papers about the implications of an alien Message in a Bottle. Implications to the planet. To a teetering social compact. And to those sitting at the top of an unstable social pyramid.

They have decided already, Lacey realized, interpreting plenty from the other woman’s terse wording and guarded visage. This news of contact with an interstellar civilization must have tipped them over, uniting the leading families in consensus. They are just as upset and panic-ridden as those dopey demonstrators in a hundred cities, calling for the Livingstone Object to be destroyed.

Only, trillionaires didn’t join demonstrations. Lacey’s fellow patricians had other ways of taking action.

They’ve decided to join Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, she realized. And his Renunciation Movement.

Of course, she knew what that meant. Another surge in anti-intellectualism, fostered by populist politicians and mass media-at least, the portions that were controlled by two thousand powerful families. An ancient trick in the human playbook; get the masses lathered up in fear of “outsiders”-and what better outsiders than outright aliens? Whip up enough dread and the mob will gladly follow some elite, pledging fealty to men and women on horseback. Or yacht-back. Vesting them with power.

Lacey didn’t object to that part. Even before she met Jason, her parents and tutors had explained the obvious-that people aren’t naturally democratic. Feudalism was the prevalent human condition erupting in all eras and cultures, since history began to be recorded on clay tablets. Even in modern films and popular culture, the theme resonated. Millions who were descended from enlightenment revolutionaries, now devoured tales about kings, wizards, and secret hierarchies. Superheroes and demigods. Celebrities, august families, and inherited privilege.

This campaign in the media went way back. Subsidized court sages, from Confucius to Plato to Machiavelli, from Leni Riefenstahl to Hannah Niti, all warned against mob rule, preaching for noble authoritarianism. In his one and only book-circulated only within the clade-Jason compiled convincing arguments for newblesse oblige…

… though Lacey still wondered, now and then. Would either of them have found the case so compelling, if they weren’t already members of the topmost caste? The platonic crust?

Oh, no question, the species and planet would be better off guided by a single aristocracy, than by a fractious horde of ten billion short-tempered, easily-frightened “citizens” armed with nuclear and biological weapons. Government-by-the-people wasn’t her reason for being in love with the Enlightenment. Democracy was an unfortunate and potentially toxic side effect of the thing she really valued.

The peers think they’ll use Tenskwatawa as a tool to regain control. But this new wave of populist conservatism… this Renunciation Movement… is no brainless reflex, like in the century’s early years. No spasm of rural religiosity, easily steered by plutocrat puppeteers. Not this time. Nor will the Prophet’s followers be satisfied with just lip service to their cause. Not anymore.

Though it had only been a few seconds, Helena grew visibly uncomfortable with Lacey’s thoughtful pause.

“So, will you do this for us? We’ll supply whatever staff and ai resources you’ll need, of course.”

“Of course. And that would include-?”

“Well. All the linguistic feeds and any experts you desire.”

“And simulation tools? For projection-analysis of social repercussions, all that?”

“Absolutely, the very best available.”

Really? It was all Lacey could do, not to arch an eyebrow skeptically. The latest versions that you and the inner circle use?

Anyone outside of the clade-which meant 99.9996 percent of humanity (almost exactly)-would have called Lacey part of any “inner circle.” It went beyond mere wealth and its ability to buy influence. Family also mattered. Especially as the generation of self-made moguls in China, Russia, and the Americas departed, leaving their fortunes to privilege-born heirs, letting the old logic of bloodlines reassert itself. And yet, Lacey knew-despite her marriage to Jason, and the way her own parents helped stave off the Bigger Deal-even those ties never guaranteed real power. Or being truly in the know.

You still wondered, always-who are the real Illuminati? Those who know the really big secrets? The fellows who have the dirt and can blackmail even the most idealistic politicians. Those discreetly pulling strings and playing the world’s people-yes, including me-like pieces on a chessboard?

Does even Helena wonder about that?

When it came to most of the scions, princes, sheiks, and neolords whom Lacey knew-many of them convinced they were high intellects, because sycophants had flattered them and given them high marks at Oxbridge-well, one had to hope and pray that none of them was a secret string puller! Surely, any cabal of aristocratic titans ought to be smarter, by far.

Could it be that they don’t exist? Perhaps every part of the aristocracy thinks that someone else is really guiding affairs?

Lacey wasn’t sure which possibility felt more frightening. A cryptic superelite of mighty meddlers, working their will beyond her sight… or else that things actually were as they seemed, a mélange of cartels and “Estates,” of impudent guilds and impotent legacy nations, plus a bewildering fog of “smart” citizen-mobs and ephemerally frightening ais… all desperately tugging at the tiller, with the result that no one was really steering the ship. Nobody at all.

She answered, carefully.

“Hm. I… suppose some top ai tools would help. Can I access the Quantum Eye in Riyadh?”

Helena blinked, shifting back in her chair. This request went a bit further than diverting one crackpot old lady from bigger matters.

“I… I can approach the Riyadhians. Though, as you know, they tend to be a bit-”

“Suspicious? But aren’t they fully committed members of our clade? So, if there’s consensus that my mission is important-”

She left the sentence hanging. And it worked. Helena nodded.

“I don’t expect that will be a problem, Lacey. My factotum will contact yours about details. Only now, I am so sorry, but I must run. The Bogolomovs are arriving, and you know how much they love ceremony. They actually think they’re czars or boyars or something, complete with a family tree made of fairy dust and forged DNA!”

Helena chuckled demurely, then straightened and met Lacey’s eyes, with a level gaze of apparently sincere affection.

“Please accept our blessings, dear one. Our prayers are with you, for Hacker to be found and safely returned to you.”

Lacey thanked the younger woman, with all the back-and-forth that it took to bring polite conversation to a close. Only, her heart wasn’t in it. And, after the holistube went blank, she was left in silence, sitting in the leather-trimmed lounge, feeling miserable. Alone.

First, Jason has to go racing toward the nearest disaster area on Awfulday, instead of staying sensibly away from danger, becoming an iconic hero of newblesse oblige … as if that sort of honor ever did a widow any good…

… then Hacker goes hurtling himself into space-exhibiting all of Jason’s bravado without any of the showy responsibility…

… and now it comes to this. I am being cauterized by my peers. Set aside. Removed from deliberations that might affect the shape of civilization for generations to come. All because-with good reason-they fear I’ll be unhappy about their choice.

Shall I resign? Maybe join one of the other coalitions of do-gooder rich?

There were plenty of those, some of them more suitable for a philanthropist with her science-loving bent. Tech billionaires and first-generation entrepreneurs, fizzing with excitement over the Havana Artifact. Some, she knew well, as cosponsors of her Farseeker Telescope. Not all of the superwealthy were superreactionary. Not even a majority.

But those other rich folk tended to act as individuals or in small groups, pursuing personal passions and separate interests. The same fetish for uniqueness that had made them affluent prevented any action in concert. Not even the wary, tentative grouping that called itself the Naderites.

None of them-separately or all together-could match the influence, power, or Machiavellian ruthlessness of the clade.

If I step outside, I’ll join the billions. Those to whom history happens… instead of ordering it up, like a meal on a plate.

“There ought to be signs of intelligent life everywhere, madam, truly,” the showman-scientist crooned, his low, rich voice spiced with a velvety Jamaican accent.

“Ancient aliens-so-very smaart-should have preceded us by eons, sprouting corn all across our so-bright galaxy, even before the sun was born, filling the cosmos with culture and upfull conversation.

“Hence, it be fretful-puzzling, even long-back when we first began looking for signs of technological civilization, that this welcoming cosmos seem sparse. Indeed, with only one proved example of sapient life-us!”

Profnoo gestured with both hands, rocking his oversize head so avidly that each of his super-elongated earlobes rattled against thick collar ruffles. He swept them back to join the twitching, multibraided draidlocks of cybactivated hair that served as both antennae-receivers and his public trademark-though he was only the best known of a dozen science supertainers who came from that gifted little island.

“I know that,” Lacey sighed. She didn’t need a razzle-artist astronomer to lay out-for a thousandth time-the dismal logic of the Fermi Paradox. Yet, Professor Noozone proceeded to do just that, perhaps out of eagerness to impress his patron. Or else, practicing a riff for his weekly audience.

“See here now.” The professor pointed to a holistank that showed some kind of primeval sea, with meteors flashing overhead. “Precursors of life appear to emerge anywhere that you have a flow of energy, plus a dozen basic elements immersed in liquid-not just water, but almost any kind of liquid at all! And not only on planets with surface oceans! But ten times as many little worlds that have seas, roofed with icy covers, like Europa, Enceladus, Miranda, Tethys, Titan, Oberon…”

She wanted to interrupt. To get the man back onto the topic of the Artifact. But Lacey knew that any expression of outright disapproval might quash him too much. In order to be wielded effectively, power had to wear gloves-a lesson she had tried, in vain, to teach her short-tempered son.

Anyway, the situation with Professor Noozone was entirely her own fault.

It serves me right, for choosing an adviser with the brain of a Thorne or a Koonin, but with the insecure ego of a Bollywood star and the put-on reggae drawl of a rastaman.

Bulging implants throbbed just under the skin of Profnoo’s broad forehead, above dark, glinting eyes. The effect-totally intentional-made his cranium seem preternaturally large. Like an overinflated soufflé.

At least he doesn’t feel a need to lay the accent too thick, when he’s talking to me alone. Though his vowels were stretched and every “th” dropped into a “d” or “t” sound, she felt grateful that he wasn’t peppering in very many island slang expressions. In public, or on his shows, Profnoo can be hard to follow without subtitles!

Professor Noozone caused more images to dance about, with flourishes of a hand. “Indeed, our… your… earlier farseeker telescopes did find traces of life out there, on half a dozen planets! Those worlds, so far, proved disappointing. None of them exactly New Zion. Then there’s the next step. For life to rise-up an’ get smaart, an’ then technology-capable.

“Countless arguments have fumed and smoked over how much of a fluke it was, here on Earth, for humans to leap so far, so fast. And, if there very-truly are older races out there, how best to look for them. Does the lack of garish tutorial beacons mean there are no Elder Races out there, after all?

“But, irie. Of course, the arrival of the Livingstone Object seems to have settled that!” He chuckled with the satisfaction of someone whose side had proved right, after a century of debate.

“By the Artifact’s mere existence, and the plurality of alien types that it contains, we may conclude that we are surrounded by an upfull multitude of advanced civilizations! Their invitation to come-ya ‘join us’… to become members of some maarvelous community of star-bredren… has already thrilled and inspired billions across our lonely planet. Though the prospect may disturb a few downpressing ginnygogs an’ trogs who are terrified of change.”

Profnoo seemed unaware of Lacey’s ironic grimace, or her conflicted loyalties. By personality, she ought to share his forward-looking eagerness. If not for her worries about Hacker, she, too, might have been fizzing about the prospect of First Contact. (Though she would express it with more reserve than the super-extrovert in front of her.)

On the other hand, her caste-her peers in the top aristocracy-foresaw little good coming out of this. Even if the alien device represented a benign and advanced federation that was both generous and wise, the psychological disruption could spur fresh waves of anxiety, paranoia, or covetous wrath. With interstellar trade relations might come wave after wave of wondrous new technologies. Some hazardous? Even the most benign might shake an already tenuous economy, throwing whole sectors into obsolescence, putting hundreds of millions out of work, not to mention spoiling many investment portfolios.

No wonder this spurred a climax to long negotiations between the clade and Tenskwatawa’s renunciation movement. Few cultures ever managed to transition after contact with superior outsiders, without generations of intimidation and victimhood. Meiji-era Japan did it. And their method was not democracy.

But Lacey pulled her thoughts back to the present. The science-showman on her payroll was continuing his rapid-fire explication, never slacking momentum.

“… even that still leaves us awash in puzzles! We can only hope the Artifact Commission overcomes all linguistic barriers. Especially now that dem lagga heads will finally allow me… and you, of course, madam… close enough to ask questions!”

“So, what should we ask first, Professor?”

“Oh, there are so many things. For example, the mere existence of the Artifact, here on Earth, proves-irie-that interstellar travel is possible!”

Assuming, again, that it’s not a hoax, Lacey pondered, while noting that Profnoo still had not mentioned an actual question.

“True, we haven’t yet learned how the object crossed the vast gulf between the stars. But from the fact that it exists in a purely crystalline-solid state-tallowah an’ sturdy-I be wagering a whole-heap that the propulsion methodology wasn’t gentle! Perhaps a truly prodigious accelerator-cannongun fired it to near relativistic speeds. Or else, maybe its compact dimensions allowed slick passage through an obeah-generated wormhole, requiring the energy of a superdupernova! I-mon have done some rudimentary calculations-”

“Professor. Please. Can you stick to the point?”

“Ah, yes. The Invitation.” He nodded. “Do bear with me, Madam Donaldson-Sander, I-and-I will get to it! For, you see, even the possibility of interstellar travel was denied for eighty years by the cult of SETI. When their program of sky worship found nothing out there at all, they trotted out the same excuse. Just a little more time. Patience-and ever-more sophisticated-bashy gear-would eventually find the needle in the haystack… that wise, elder race they hoped for!”

Huh. Lacey couldn’t help getting caught up in the spell he wove. Noozone had amassed his own fortune out of millions of micropayments, as people zigged-in to view and tactail his leaping, explanatory extravaganzas. Though some just liked his snakelike draidlocks, wafting and stirring clouds of ambiguous, colored smoke.

“Alas, interstellar travel changes everything. If advanced star-mon can deepvoyage an’ colonize, then needles make copies of themselves. Colonies send out their own expeditions, spreading an’ filling the haystack!

“But we saw no fabulous Others. Nor any huge engineering projects that we may someday build, if we become a truly bold and successful civilization. Antimatter-spaceships, vaast solar collectors, Dyson spheres, and Kardashev worksheds that lace multiple star systems, all of them detectable…” Profnoo had to gasp and catch his breath.

“And it gets worse! Earth itself would show signs, if visitors ever flushed a toilet here, or tossed a Coke bottle into our Paleozoic sea. My oh, geologists and paleobiologists would see in our rocks, the very moment when extraterrestrial bacteria arrived! Nuh true?

“No. Something was wrong with the old SETI logic. Till this marvel-stoosh Galactic Artifact turned up. Only now…” He lifted a finger-and one of his mentally activated draidlocks wafted also.

“Now, it seems that life is fairly common-and-

“-sapient life, capable of technology, is not rare-and-

“-some form of interstellar travel appears to be possible-and-

“-a peaceful community already exists that…”

Lacey raised a hand of her own, cutting him off with four braids and four fingers lifted in the air. Glancing out the window, she had noticed that the yacht bearing them from Charleston to Washington was cruising rapidly up the Potomac. Soon, they’d pass the zeppelin port and the Awfulday Memorial, before finally docking at the Naval Research Lab. Not that she minded traveling this way. Shipboard facilities let her stay in constant linkup with the rescue effort, searching for her son. But it was time to start winding this up.

“All right, then. Suppose there is a Galactic Federation we’re invited to join. Doesn’t that conflict with everything you just described? Especially the sparse cosmos that we observed, till now?”

“It would seem so, madam.” Profnoo’s earlobe rings and beaded locks clattered as he nodded. “So, where’s the overlap in conceptual space? Between the previous, downpressing appearance of meager sapience, and what we now know to be its high, upfull frequency?”

The man’s unquenchable zeal to speculate did not bother her. Vivid and aromatic, Profnoo made his intellectual frenzy into something unabashedly masculine. Frankly, his flirtatious attention-laced with rousing scientific jargon-filled some of the void in Lacey that used to be occupied by sex.

“Apparently, dem use crystal capsules instead of radio! I suppose interstellar pellets are easy, cheap, and relatively fast.” He chuckled, though Lacey found the jest rather lame. “They also allow aliens to travel as surrogates-as complete downloaded personalities. Indeed, this may prove my conjecture about networks of connection-wormholes!”

Or else, they may avoid radio because they know something that we don’t, Lacey pondered. Perhaps they deem it unwise to draw attention to their home worlds. Because something out there makes it dangerous. The thought gave her a shiver, especially since Planet Earth had been anything but quiet, for the last hundred years or so.

“But, madam, just picture the long odds that this particular crystal-this Artifact-had to beat, when dem just happened to drift within reach of that astronaut’s garbage collecting bola-tether. Without any visible means to maneuver! A fluke? Or might there be others out there?”

Lacey nodded. That may explain why Great China, India, the U.S., the E-Union and A-Union have all announced new space endeavors. I should assign some agents-real and spyware-to learn more about these missions.

Something about the notion of “other artifacts” tickled the edge of her imagination.

Why only out there? Indeed…

But the thought eluded her, skittering away as the yachtmaster’s amplified voice reverberated. It was time to stop for inspection at the security cordon near the Naval Research Center. Captain Kohl-Fennel had already made arrangements, of course. The pause would be brief. Lacey shrugged.

“You were talking about contradictions, Professor. How to explain why we saw no traces of intelligence before, in a universe that now turns out to be filled with sapient life.”

“Yes… it be a puzzlement.” His dense, expressive lips pursed. “The use of something other than radio for communications may solve part of the conundrum. Another contributor may be some kind of Zoo Hypothesis.”

This one she knew well. “The idea that young races like ours are held in quarantine. Deliberately kept in the dark.”

“Yes, madam. Many possible motives have been offered, for why elder races might do such a dread thing. Fear of ‘human aggression’ is one old-but-implausible theory. Or a ‘noninterference directive’ leaves new races alone, even if it deprives them of answers they need, to survive.” Profnoo shook his head, clearly disliking that explanation.

“Or aliens may stay silent to sift our broadcasts an’ surf our networks, gathering our culture-art, music, and originalities-without paying anything in return! I call it the Cheapskate Thief Hypothesis. And it does vex me, truly, to think they may be such blackheart mon! First thing I plan to ask these beings? What intellectual property laws they have! Interstellar peace and friendship be fine… but kill-mi-dead if I don’ want my royalties!”

Lacey chuckled politely, since he seemed to expect it. In fact, Profnoo’s eyes had a glint as he hurriedly waggled notes in the air, caching this idea for his show.

Inwardly, she wondered, Would it have been better, if this all took place out of public view?

The professor assumes that citizenship in some galactic federation will involve expanded rights and privileges. But what if aliens exact a price for admission? Changes in our social structure or government? Or beliefs? Might they demand something tangible, in exchange for knowledge and trade? Like precious substances?

Lacey had once seen a humor magazine cynically explain why the U.S. government would both suppress medical advances and quash the truth about ET visitors-because officials were selling fuel for the aliens’ “cancer drive engines.”

But no. UFO scenarios were mental slumming.

More likely, they want access to cheap Earthling labor, outsourcing work to our teeming masses. Grunt toil their own citizens and robots are too spoiled to perform? Software can travel between the stars, so will Earth become the new coding sweatshop? Or intergalactic call center?

Lacey realized, If this contact episode had taken place behind closed doors… our elite talking to theirs… then we’d have had an option. The possibility of saying-“No thanks. No deal. Not now.

“Not yet.

“Maybe not ever.”

It frankly shocked Lacey, the path her thoughts had taken. Where was the zealot who spent her adult life pursuing this very thing-First Contact? When push came to shove, was she as conservative and reluctant as all the rest?

Why do I have the creepy feeling there’s going to be a catch?

She was still in that dour mood when Professor Noozone helped guide her down a ramp leading from the yacht to where several fresh-faced young men and women in starched uniforms waited to salute and greet her. It was a clear day. Beyond the zep port-with flying cranes bustling among the giant, bobbing freighters-she could make out the remade Washington Monument and the pennants of New Smithsonian Castle. But even those sights didn’t lift her spirit.

While servants brought the luggage and Profnoo’s scientific supplies, Lacey made sure to shake hands with her hosts, one by one. She tried to quash a bitter-and irrational-feeling of anger that sailors should be standing here, instead of helping right now in the search for her son, missing at sea. Of course, only fatigue could provoke such an awful resentment.

I can’t help it though. Underneath all the turmoil about rocks from space, beyond the scientific puzzles and philosophical quandaries I am, after all, a mother.

“The reception for our distinguished Advisory Panel will start soon, madam,” said Lacey’s assigned guide, a bright-looking ensign, who seemed a little like Hacker. “I’ll take you first to your guest quarters, so you can freshen-”

The young officer abruptly gasped as his face took an orange cast, flinching backward from some surprise that he saw, beyond Lacey’s shoulder. Others reacted, too, cringing or raising hands before their eyes.

“Bumboclot!” Professor Noozone cursed.

Lacey turned to find out what caused the flaring glow, when sound caught up with light-a low, rumbling boom accompanied a palpable push of displaced air. Thoughts of Awfulday raced through her mind-as they must have through everyone else.

But then, why am I still on my feet? she wondered until, turning, Lacey saw a globular gout of flame roiling in the sky beyond the Pentagon, some distance upriver, maybe in Virginia. The setting sun made it hard to see clearly, but the fireball faded quickly and she realized with some relief-it couldn’t be anything as terrible as a nuke. Not even a small one.

That comfort was tempered though, when there followed another detonation. And then another. And she knew that, when it came to explosions, size wasn’t everything.

What about the notion of “inevitable progress”?

Decades ago, author Charles Stross urged that-even if you think a marvelous Singularity Era is coming, you shouldn’t let it affect your behavior, or alter your sober urgency to solve current problems.

“The rapture of the nerds, like space colonization, is likely to be a nonparticipatory event for 99.999 percent of humanity-unless we’re very unlucky,” Stross wrote. “If it happens and it’s interested in us, all our plans go out the window. If it doesn’t happen, sitting around waiting for the ais to save us from the rising sea level/oil shortage/intelligent bioengineered termites looks like a Real Bad Idea.

“The best approach to the singularity is to apply Pascal’s Wager-in reverse-and plan on the assumption it won’t save us from ourselves.”

– from The Movement Revealed by Thormace Anubis-Fejel

28.

Washington was like a geezer-overweight and sagging-but with attitude. Most of its gutty heft lay below the Beltway, in waistlands that had been downwind on Awfulday.

Downwind, but not out.

When droves of upper-class child-bearers fled the invisible plumes enveloping Fairfax and Alexandria, those briefly empty ghost towns quickly refilled with immigrants-the latest mass of teemers, yearning to be free and willing to endure a little radiation, in exchange for a pleasant five-bedroom that could be subdivided into nearly as many apartments. Spacious living rooms began a second life as storefronts. Workshops took over four-car garages and lawns turned into produce gardens. Swimming pools made excellent refuse bins-until government recovered enough to start cracking down.

Passing overhead, Tor could track signs of suburban renewal from her first-class seat aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista. Take those swimming pools. A majority of the kidney-shaped cement ponds now gleamed with clear liquid-mostly water (as testified by the spectral scanning feature of her tru-vu spectacles)-welcoming throngs of children who splashed under summertime heat, sufficiently dark-skinned to unflinchingly bear the bare sun.

So much for the notion that dirty bombs automatically make a place unfit for breeders, she thought. Let yuppies abandon perfectly good mansions because of a little strontium dust. People from Congo and Celebes were happy to insource.

Wasn’t this America? Call it resolution-or obstinacy-but after three rebuilds, the Statue of Liberty still beckoned.

The latest immigrants, those who filled Washington’s waistland vacuum, weren’t ignorant. They could read warning labels and health stats, posted on every lamppost and VR level. So? More people died in Jakarta from traffic or stray bullets. Anyway, mutation rates dropped quickly, a few years after Awfulday, to levels no worse than Kiev. And Washington had more civic amenities.

Waistlanders also griped a lot less about minor matters like zoning. That made it easier to acquire rights of way, repioneering new paths back into unlucky cities that had been dusted. Innovations soon turned those transportation hubs into boomtowns. An ironic twist to emerge from terror/sabotage. Especially when sky trains began crisscrossing North America.

Through her broad window, traveling east aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, Tor gazed across a ten-mile separation to the Westbound Corridor, where long columns of cargo zeppelins lumbered in the opposite direction, ponderous as whales and a hundred times larger. Chained single-file and heavily laden, the dirigibles floated barely three hundred meters above the ground, obediently trailing teams of heavyduty draft-locomotives. Each towing cable looked impossibly slender for hauling fifty behemoths across a continent. But while sky trains weren’t fast, or suited for bulk materials, they beat any other method for transporting medium-value goods.

And passengers. Those willing to trade a little time for inexpensive luxury.

Tor moved her attention much closer, watching the Spirit’s majestic shadow flow like an eclipse over rolling suburban countryside, so long and dark that flowers would start to close and birds might be fooled to roost, pondering nightfall. Free from any need for engines of her own, the skyliner glided almost silently over hill and dale. Not as quick as a jet, but more scenic-free of carbon levies or ozone tax-and far cheaper. Setting her tru-vus to magnify, she followed the Spirit’s tow cable along the Eastbound Express Rail, pulled relentlessly by twelve thousand horses, courtesy of the deluxe maglev tug, Umberto Nobile.

What was it about a lighter-than-air craft that drew the eye? Oh, certainly most of them now had pixelated, tunable skins that could be programmed for any kind of spectacle. Passing near a population center-even a village in the middle of nowhere-the convoy of cargo zeps might flicker from one gaudy advertisement to the next, for anything from a local gift shop to the mail-order wares of some Brazilian bloat-corp. At times, when no one bid for the display space, a chain of dirigibles might tune their surfaces to resemble clouds… or flying pigs. Whim, after all, was another modern currency. Everyone did it on the VR levels.

Only with zeppelins, you could paint whimsical images across a whole stretch of the real sky.

Tor shook her head.

But no. That wasn’t it. Even bare and gray, they could not be ignored. Silent, gigantic, utterly calm, a zep seemed to stand for a kind of grace that human beings might build, but never know in their own frenetic lives.

She was nibbling at one of her active-element fingernails-thinking about Wesley, waiting at the skydock for her arrival, and trying to picture his face-when a voice intruded from above.

“Will you be wanting anything else before we arrive in the Federal District, madam?”

She glanced up at a servitor-little more than a boxy delivery receptacle-that clung to its own slim rail on a nearby bulkhead, leaving the walkway free for passengers.

“No, thanks,” Tor murmured automatically, a polite habit of her generation. Younger folk had already learned to snub machinery slaves, except when making clipped demands. A trend that she found odd, since the ais were getting smarter all the time.

“Can you tell me when we’re due?”

“Certainly, madam. There is a slowdown in progress due to heightened security. Hence, we may experience some delay crossing the Beltway. But there is no cause for alarm. And we remain ahead of schedule because of that tailwind across the Appalachian Mountains.”

“Hm. Heightened security?”

“For the Artifact Conference, madam.”

Tor frowned. She hoped that Wesley wouldn’t have any trouble coming to meet her. Things might be tense enough between the two of them, without this added irritant. He tended to get all lathered and indignant over being beamed and probed by agents of the pencil pushers’ guild… the civil servants assigned to checking every conceivable box and possible failure mode.

“For the Artifact Conference?” Tor’s thoughts zeroed in on something puzzling. “But that should already be taken into account. Security for the gathering shouldn’t affect our timetable.”

“There is no cause for alarm,” the servitor repeated. “We just got word, two minutes ago. An order to reduce speed, that’s all.”

Glancing outside, Tor could see the effects of slowing, in a gradual change of altitude. The Spirit’s tow cable slanted a little steeper, catching up to the ground-hugging locomotive tug.

Altitude: 359 meters said a telltale in the corner of her left tru-vu lens.

“Will you be wanting to change seats for our approach to the nation’s capital?” the servitor continued. “An announcement will be made when we come within sight of the Mall, though you may want to claim a prime viewing spot earlier. Children and first-time visitors get priority, of course.”

“Of course.”

A trickle of tourists had already begun streaming forward to the main observation lounge. Parents, dressed in bright-colored sarongs and Patagonian slacks, herded kids who sported the latest youth fashion-fake antennae and ersatz scales-imitating some of the alien personalities that had been discovered aboard the Livingstone Object … also called, for some reason, the Havana Artifact. A grand conference may have been called to deliberate whether it was a genuine case of First Contact, or just another hoax. But popular culture had already cast judgment.

The Artifact was cool.

“You say an alert came through two minutes ago?” Tor wondered. Nothing had flashed yet in her peripherals. But maybe the vigilance thresholds were set too high. With a rapid series of clicks on her tooth implants, she adjusted them downward.

Immediately, crimson tones began creeping in from the edges of her specs, offering links that whiffed and throbbed unpleasantly.

Uh-oh.

“Not an alert, madam. No, no. Just preliminary, precautionary-”

But Tor’s attention had already veered. Using both clicks and subvocal commands, she sent her specs swooping through the data overlays of virtuality, following threads of a security situation. Sensors tracked every twitch of the iris, following and often anticipating her choices, while colored data-cues jostled and flashed.

“May I take away any rubbish or recycling?” asked the boxy tray on the wall. It dropped open a receptacle, like a hungry jaw, eager to be fed. The servitor waited in vain for a few moments. Then, noting that her focus lay far away, it silently folded and departed.

“No cause for alarm,” Tor muttered sardonically as she probed and sifted the dataways. Someone should have banished that cliché from the repertoire of all ai devices. No human over the age of thirty would ever hear the phrase without wincing. Of all the lies that accompanied Awfulday, it had been the worst.

Some of Tor’s favorite software agents were already reporting back from the Grid.

Koppel-the summarizer-zoomed toward public, corporate, and government feeds, collating official pronouncements. Most of them were repeating the worrisome cliché.

Gallup-her pollster program-sifted for opinion. People weren’t buying it, apparently. On a scale of one thousand, “no cause for alarm” had a credibility rating of eighteen, and dropping. Tor felt a wrench in the pit of her stomach.

Bernstein leaped into the whistle-blower circuits, hunting down gossip and hearsay. As usual, there were far too many rumors for any person-or personal ai-to trawl. Only this time, the flood was overwhelming even the sophisticated filters at the Skeptic Society. MediaCorp seemed no better; her status as a member of the Journalistic Staff only won her a queue number from Research Division and a promise of response “in minutes.”

Minutes?

It was beginning to look like a deliberate disinformation flood, time-unleashed in order to drown out any genuine tattles. Gangsters, terrorists, and reffers had learned the hard way that careful plans can be upset by some softhearted henchman, wrenched by remorseful second thoughts about innocent bystanders. Many a scheme had been spoiled by some lowly underling, who posted an anonymous squeal at the last minute. To prevent this, masterminds and ringleaders now routinely unleashed cascades of ersatz confessions, just as soon as an operation was underway-a spamming of faux regret, artificially generated, ranging across the whole spectrum of plausible sabotage and man-made disasters.

Staring at a flood of warnings, Tor knew that one or more of the rumors had to be true. But which?

Washington area Beltway defenses have already been breached by machoist suiciders infected with pulmonella plague, heading for the Capitol…

A coalition of humanist cults have decided to put an end to all this nonsense about a so-called “alien Artifact” from interstellar space…

The U.S. president, seeking to reclaim traditional authority, is about to nationalize the D.C.-area civil militia on a pretext…

Exceptional numbers of toy airplanes were purchased in the Carolinas, this month, suggesting that a swarm attack may be in the making, just like the O’Hare Incident…

A method has been found to convert zeppelins into flying bombs…

Among the international dignitaries, who were invited to Washington to view the Livingstone Object, are a few who plan to…

There are times when human-neuronal paranoia can react faster than mere digital simulacra. Tor’s old-fashioned cortex snapped to attention a full five seconds before her ais, Bernstein and Columbo, made the same connection.

Zeppelins… flying bombs…

It sounded unlikely… probably distraction-spam.

But I happen to be on a zeppelin.

That wasn’t just a realization. The words formed a message. With subvocal grunts and tooth-click punctuations, Tor broadcast it far and wide. Not just to her favorite correlation and stringer groups, but to several hundred Citizen Action Networks. Her terse missive zoomed across the Net indiscriminately, calling to every CAN that had expressed interest in the zep rumor.

“This is Tor Povlov, investigative reporter for MediaCorp-credibility rating 752-aboard the passenger zep Spirit of Chula Vista. We are approaching the D.C. Beltway defense zone. That may put me at a right place-time to examine one of the reffer rumors.

“I request a smart-mob coalescence. Feedme!”

Disinformation, a curse with ancient roots, had been updated with ultramodern ways of lying. Machoists and other bastards might plant sleeper-ais in a million virtual locales, programmed to pop out at a preset time and spam every network with autogenerated “plausibles”… randomly generated combinations of word and tone that were drawn from recent news, each variant sure to rouse the paranoiac fears of someone.

Mutate this ten million times (easy enough to do in virtual space) and you’ll find a nerve to tweak in anyone.

Citizens could fight back, combating lies with light. Sophisticated programs compared eyewitness accounts from many sources, weighted by credibility, offering average folk tools to reforge Consensus Reality, while discarding the dross. Only that took time. And during an emergency, time was the scarcest commodity of all.

Public avowal worked more quickly. Calling attention to your own person. Saying: “Look, I’m right here, real, credible, and accountable-I am not ai-so take me seriously.”

Of course that required guts, especially since Awfulday. In the face of danger, ancient human instinct cried out: Duck and cover. Don’t draw attention to yourself.

Tor considered that natural impulse for maybe two seconds, then blared on all levels. Dropping privacy cryption, she confirmed her ticketed billet and physical presence aboard the Spirit of Chula Vista, with realtime biometrics and a dozen in-cabin camera views.

“I’m here,” she murmured, breathlessly, toward any fellow citizen whose correlation-attention ais would listen.

“Rally and feedme. Tell me what to do.”

Calling up a smart-mob was tricky. People might already be too scattered and distracted by the rumor storm. The number to respond might not reach critical mass-in which case all you’d get is a smattering of critics, kibitzers, and loudmouths, doing more harm than good. A below-zero-sum rabble-or bloggle-its collective IQ dropping, rather than climbing, with every new volunteer to join. Above all, you needed to attract a core group-the seed cell-of online know-it-alls, constructive cranks, and correlation junkies, armed with the latest coalescence software, who were smart and savvy enough to serve as prefrontals… coordinating a smart mob without dominating. Providing focus without quashing the creativity of a group mind.

“We recognize you, Tor Povlov,” intoned a low voice, conducting through her inner-ear receiver. Direct sonic induction made it safe from most eavesdropping, even if someone had a parabolic dish aimed right at her.

“We’ve lit a wik. Can you help us check out one of these rumors? One that might possibly be a whistle-blow?”

The conjoined mob voice sounded strong, authoritative. Tor’s personal interface found good credibility scores as it coalesced. An index-marker in her left peripheral showed 230 members and climbing-generally sufficient to wash out individual ego.

“First tell me,” she answered, subvocalizing. Sensors in her shirt collar picked up tiny flexings in her throat, tongue, and larynx, without any need to make actual sound. “Tell me, has anyone sniffed something unusual about the Spirit? I don’t see or hear anything strange. But some of you out there may be in a better position to snoop company status reports or shipboard operational parameters.”

There was a pause. Followed by an apologetic tone.

“Nothing seems abnormal at the public level. Company web-traffic has gone up sixfold in the last ten minutes… but the same is true all over, from government agencies to networks of amateur scientists.

“As for the zeppelin you happen to be aboard, we’re naturally interested because of its present course, scheduled shortly to moor in Washington, about the same time that a new wave of high-level delegates are arriving for the Artifact Conference.”

Tor nodded grimly, a nuance that her interface conveyed to the group mind.

“And those operational readouts?”

“We can try for access by applying for a Freedom of Information writ. That will take some minutes, though. So we may have to supplement the FOIA with a little hacking and bribery. The usual. We’ll also try for some ground views of the zep.

“Leave all that to us.

“Meanwhile, there’s a little on-site checking you can do.

“Be our hands and eyes, will you, Tor?”

She was already on her feet.

“Tell me where to go…”

“Head aft, past the unisex toilet.”

“… but let’s have a consensus agreement, okay?” she added while moving. “I get an exclusive on any interviews that follow. In case this turns out to be more than…”

“There is a security hatch, next to the crew closet,” the voice interrupted. “Adjust your specs for full mob access please.”

“Done,” she said, feeling a little sheepish over the request for a group exclusive. But after all, she was supposed to be a pro. MediaCorp might be tuning in soon, examining transcripts. They would expect a professional’s attention to the niceties.

“That’s better. Now zoom close on the control pad. We’ve been joined by an off-duty zep mechanic who worked on this ship last week.”

“Look, maybe I can just call a crew member. Invoke FOIA and open it legally-”

“No time. We’ve filed for immunity as an ad hoc citizen posse. Under PA crisis rules.”

PA… for Post-Awfulday.

“Oh sure. With me standing here to take the physical rap if it’s refused…”

“Your choice, Tor. If you’re game for it, press the keypad buttons in this order.”

A virtual image of the keypad appeared in front of Tor, overlaying the real one.

“No cause for alarm,” she muttered.

“What was that?”

“Never mind.”

Feeling somewhat detached, as if under remote control, her hand reached out to tap the proposed sequence.

Nothing happened.

“No good. They must’ve rotated the progression since our zepspert worked on that ship.”

The wikivoice mutated, sounding just a tad less cool. More individualized. A telltale indicator in her tru-vu showed that some high-credibility member of the mob was stepping up with an assertive suggestion.

“But you can tell it isn’t randomized. I bet it’s still a company-standard maintenance code. Here, try this instead.”

Coalescence levels seemed to waver only a little, so the mob trusted this component member. Tor went along, punching the pad again with the new pattern.

“Any luck getting that FOIA writ?” she asked, meanwhile. “You said it would take just a few minutes. Maybe we’d better wait…”

Procrastination met its rebuttal with a simple a click, as the access panel slid aside, revealing a slim, tubelike ladder.

Up.

No hesitation in the mob voice. Five hundred and twelve of her fellow citizens wanted her to do this. Five hundred and sixteen…

Tor swallowed. Then complied.

The ladderway exposed a truth that was hidden from most passengers, cruising in cushioned comfort within the neatly paneled main compartment. Physics-especially gravity-had not changed appreciably in the century that separated the first great zeppelin era from this one. Designers still had to strive for lightness, everywhere they could.

Stepping from spindly rungs onto the cargo deck, Tor found herself amid a maze of spiderlike webbery, instead of walls and partitions. Her feet made gingerly impressions in foamy mesh that seemed to be mostly air. Stacks of luggage-all strictly weighed back in Nashville-formed bundles that resembled monstrous eggs, bound together by air-gel foam. Hardly any metal could be seen. Not even aluminum or titanium struts.

“Shall I look at the bags?” she asked while reaching into her purse. “I have an omnisniffer.”

“What model?” inquired the voice in her ear, before it changed tone by abrupt consensus. More authoritatively, it said-“Never mind. The bags were all scanned before loading. We doubt anything could be smuggled aboard. Anyway, a crew member may be checking those soon, as the alert level rises.

“But something else has come up. A rumor-tattle points to possible danger higher up. We’re betting on that one.”

“Higher?” She frowned. “There’s nothing up there except…”

Tor’s voice trailed off as a schematic played within her tru-vus, pointing aft to another ladder, this one made of ropey fibers.

Arrows shimmered in VR yellow, for emphasis.

“We finally succeeded in getting a partial feed from the Spirit’s operational parameters. And yes, there’s something odd going on.

“They are using onboard water to make lift gas, at an unusual rate.”

“Is that dangerous?”

“It shouldn’t be.

“But we may be able to find out more, if you hurry.”

She sighed, stepping warily across the spongy surface. Tor hadn’t yet spotted a crew member. They were probably also busy chasing rumors, different ones, chosen by the company’s prioritization subroutines. Anyway, a modern towed-zep was mostly automatic, requiring no pilot, engineer, or navigator. A century ago, the Hindenburg carried forty officers, stewards, and burly riggers, just to keep the ornate apparatus running and deliver the same number of paying customers from Europe to the U.S.

At twice the length, Spirit carried five times as many people, served by only a dozen human attendants.

Below her feet, passengers would be jostling for a better view of the Langley Crater, or maybe Arlington Cemetery, while peering ahead for the enduring spire of the rebuilt Washington Monument, with its tip of lunar stone. Or did some of those people already sniff an alert coming on, through their own liaison networks? Were families starting to cluster near the emergency chutes? Tor wondered if she should be doing the same.

This new ladder was something else. It felt almost alive and responded to her footstep by contracting… carrying her upward in a smooth-but-sudden jerk. Smart elastics, she realized. Fine for professionals. But most people never took a liking to ladders that twitch. The good news: It would take just a few actual footsteps at this rate, concentrating to slip her soles carefully onto one rung after the next, and worrying about what would happen when she reached the unpleasant-looking “hatch” that lay just overhead.

Meanwhile, the voice in her ear took on a strange, lilting quality. The next contribution must have come from an individual member. Someone generally appreciated.

“Come with me, higher than high,

Dropping burdensome things.

Lighter than clouds, we can fly,

Thoughts spread wider than wings.

Be like the whale, behemoth,

Enormous, yet weightless beings,

Soundlessly floating, the sky

Beckons a mammal that sings.”

Tor liked the offering. You almost wanted to earn it, by coming up with a tune…

… only the “hatch” was now just ahead, or above, almost pressing against her face. A throbbing iris of polyorganic membranes, much like the quasiliving external skin of the Spirit. Coming this close, inhaling the exudate aromas, made Tor feel queasy.

“Relax.” The voice was back to business. Probably led by the zep mechanic.

“You’ll need a command word. Touch that nub in the middle to get attention and say ‘Cinnamon.’”

“Cinnamon?”

It was only a query, but the barrier reacted instantly. With a faintly squishy sound, it dilated and the stringy stepladder resumed its programmed journey, carrying her upward.

Aboard old-time zeps, like the Hindenburg, the underslung gondola had been devoted mainly to engines and crew, while paying passengers occupied two broad decks at the base of the giant dirigible’s main body. The Spirit of Chula Vista had a similar layout, except that the gondola was mainly for show. Having climbed above all the sections designed for people and cargo, Tor now rode the throbbing ladder into a cathedral of lifter cells, each of them a vast chamber in its own right, filled with gas that was much lighter than air.

Hundreds of transparent, filmy balloons-cylindrical and tall like Sequoia trunks-crowded together, stretching from the web-floor where she stood all the way up to the arched ceiling of the Spirit’s rounded skin. Tor could only move among these towering columns along four narrow paths leading port or starboard… fore or aft. The arrow in her specs suggested port, without pulsing insistence. Most members of the smart-mob had never been in a place like this. Curiosity-the strongest modern craving-formed more of these ad hoc groups than any other passion.

Heading in the suggested direction, Tor could not resist reaching out, touching some of the tall cells, their polymer surfaces quivering like the giant bubbles that she used to create with toy wands, at birthday parties. They appeared so light, so delicate…

“Half of the cells contain helium,” explained the voice, now so individualized that it had to be a specific person-perhaps the zep mechanic or else a dirigible aficionado. “See how those membranes are made with a faintly greenish tint? They surround the larger hydrogen cells.”

Tor blinked.

“Hydrogen. Isn’t that dangerous?”

Her spec supplied pics of the Hindenburg-or LZ 129-that greatest and most ill-fated ancient zeppelin, whose fiery immolation at Lakehurst, New Jersey, marked the sudden end of the First Zep Era, in May 1937. (Facts scrolled along the bottom, lured in by attention cues.) Once ignited-how remained controversial-flames had engulfed the mighty airship from mooring tip to gondola, to its swastika-emblazoned rudder, in little more than a minute. To this day, journalists envied the news crew that had been on-hand that day, with primitive movie cameras, capturing onto acetate some of the most stunning footage and memorable imagery ever to accompany a technological disaster.

Nowadays, what reff or terr group wouldn’t just love to claim credit for an event so resplendent? So attention-grabbing?

As if reading her mind, the voice lectured.

“Hydrogen is much lighter and more buoyant than helium. Hydrogen is also cheap and readily available. Using it improves the economics of zep travel. Though of course, care must be taken…”

As Tor approached the end of her narrow corridor, she encountered the trusswork that kept Spirit rigid-a dirigible-instead of a floppy, balloonlike blimp. One girder made of carbon tubes, woven into an open latticework of triangles, stretched and curved both forward and aft. Nearby, it joined another tensegrity strut at right angles. That one would form a girdle, encircling the Spirit’s widest girth.

Tracking Tor’s interest, her spec spun out statistics and schematics. At eight hundred feet in length, Hindenburg had been just 10 percent shorter than the Titanic. In contrast, the Spirit of Chula Vista stretched twice that distance. Yet, its shell and trusswork weighed half as much.

“Naturally, there are precautions,” the voice continued. “Take the shape of the gas cells. They are vertical columns. Any failure in a hydrogen cell triggers a pulse, bursting open the top, pushing the contents up and out of the ship, skyward, away from passengers, cargo, or people below. It’s been extensively tested.

“Also, the surrounding helium cells provide a buffer, keeping oxygen-rich air away from those containing hydrogen. Passenger ships like this one carry double the ratio of helium to hydrogen.”

“They can replenish hydrogen en route if they have to, right? By cracking water from onboard ballast?”

“Or even from humidity in the air, using solar power.

“And yes, the readouts show unusual levels of hydrogen production, in order to keep several cells filled aboard the Spirit. That’s why we asked you to come up here. There must be some leakage. One scenario suggested that it might be accumulating in here, between the cells.”

She pulled the omnisniffer-a phone attachment-from her purse and began scanning. Chemical sensors were all over the place, naturally, getting cheaper and more acute all the time-just when the public seemed to want them. For reassurance, if nothing else.

“I’m not detecting very much,” she said. Tor wasn’t sure how to feel-relieved or disappointed-upon reading that hydrogen levels were only slightly elevated in the companionway.

“That confirms what onboard monitors have already shown. Hardly any hydrogen buildup in the cabins or walkways. It must be leaking into the sky-”

“Even so-” Tor began, envisioning gouts of flame erupting toward the heavens from atop the great airship.

“-at rates that offer no danger of ignition. The stuff dissipates very fast, Tor, and the Spirit is moving, on a windy day. Anyway, hydrogen isn’t dangerous-or even toxic-unless it’s held within a confined space.”

Tor kept scanning while moving along the spongy path. But hydrogen readings never spiked enough to cause concern, let alone alarm. The smart-mob had wanted her to come up here for this purpose-to verify that onboard detectors hadn’t been tampered with by clever saboteurs. Now that her independent readings confirmed the company’s story, some people were already starting to lose interest. Ad hoc membership totals began to fall.

“Any leakage must be into the air,” continued the voice of the group mind, still authoritative. “We’ve put out a notice for amateur scientists, asking for volunteers to aim spectranalysis equipment along the Spirit’s route. They’ll measure parts-per-million, so we can get a handle on leakage rates. But it’s mathematically impossible for the amounts to be dangerous. Humidity may go up a percent or two in neighborhoods that lie directly below Spirit. That’s about it.”

Tor had reached the end of the walkway. Her hand pressed against the outer envelope-the quasiliving skin that enclosed everything, from gas cells and trusses to the passenger cabin below. Up close, it was nearly transparent, offering a breathtaking view outside.

“We passed the Beltway,” she murmured, a little surprised that the diligent guardians of Washington’s defensive grid allowed the Spirit to pass through that wall of sensors and rays without delay or scrutiny. Below and ahead, she could make out the great locomotive tug, Umberto Nobile, hauling hard at the tow cable, puffing along the Glebe Road Bypass. Fort Meyers stood to the left. The zeppelin’s shadow rippled over a vast garden of gravestones-Arlington National Cemetery.

“The powers-that-be have downgraded our rumor,” said the voice inside her ear. “The nation’s professional protectors are chasing down more plausible threats… none of which has been deemed likely enough to merit an alert. Malevolent zeps don’t even make it onto the Threat Chart.”

Tor clicked and flicked the attention-gaze of her specs, glancing through the journalist feeds at MediaCorp, which were now-belatedly-accessible to a reporter of her level. Seven minutes after the rise in tension caused by that spam of rumors, a consensus was already forming. The spam flood had not been intended to distract attention from a terror attack, concluded mass-wisdom. It was the attack. And not a very effective one, at that. National productivity had dropped by a brief diversion factor of one part in twenty-three thousand. Hardly enough damage to be worth risking prosecution or retaliation. But then, neohackers seldom cared about consequences.

Speaking of consequences; they were already pouring in from her little snooping expedition. The mavens of propriety at MediaCorp, for example, must be catching up on recent events. A work-related memorandum flashed in Tor’s agenda box, revising tomorrow’s schedule for her first day of employment at the Washington Bureau. During lunch-right after basic orientation-she was now required to attend counseling on the Exercising Good Judgment in Impromptu Field Situations.

“Oh great,” she muttered, noticing also that the zeppelin company had applied a five hundred dollar fine against her account for Unjustified Entry into Restricted Areas.

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE, MS. POVLOV, said an override message. AN ATTENDANT WILL ARRIVE AT YOUR POSITION SHORTLY IN ORDER TO HELP YOU RETURN TO YOUR SEAT FOR LANDING.

“Double great.”

Ahead, beyond the curve of the dirigible’s skin, she spotted the massive, squat bulk of the Pentagon, bristling with missiles, lenses, and antennae… still a highly-protected enclave, even ten years after the Department of Defense moved its headquarters to “an undisclosed location in Minnesota.”

Soon, the mooring towers and docking ports of Reagan-Clinton National Skydrome would appear, signaling the end of her cross-continental voyage. Also finished-despite a string of interesting stories, from the Atkins Center to Hamish Brookeman railing at the Godmakers’ Conference-was all chance of a blemish-free start to her new career in Big Time Media.

She addressed the group mind. “I don’t suppose any of you have bright ideas?”

But it had already started to unravel. Membership numbers were falling fast, like rats deserting a sinking ship. Or-more accurately-monkeys. Moving on to the next shiny thing.

“Sorry, Tor. People are distracted. They’ve been dropping out to watch the reopening of the Artifact Conference. You may even glimpse some limos arriving at the Naval Research Center, just across the Potomac. Take a look as the Spirit starts turning for final approach…”

Blasted fickle amateurs! Tor had made good use of smart-mobs in the past. But this time was likely to prove an embarrassment. None of them would have to pay fines or face disapproval in a new job.

“Still, a few of us remain worried,” the voice continued. “That rumor had something… I can’t put my finger on it.”

The “voice” was starting to sound individualized and had even used the first person “I.” A sure sign of low numbers. And yet, Tor drew some strength from the support. Before an attendant arrived to escort her below, there was still time for a little last-minute tenacity.

“Can I assume we still have some zep aficionados in attendance?”

“Hardly anyone else, Tor. Some us are fanatics.”

“Good, then let’s apply fanatical expertise. Think about that leakage we discussed a while ago. We’ve been assuming that this zeppelin is making hydrogen to make up for a significant seep, into the air outside. That’d be pretty harmless, I agree. Have any of those amateur scientists studied the air near Spirit’s flight path, yet?”

A pause.

“Yes, several have reported in. They found no dangerous levels of hydrogen in the vicinity of the ship, or in its wake. The seep is probably dissipating so fast…”

“Please clarify. No dangerous levels? Is it possible they found no sign of a hydrogen leak at all?”

The pause extended several seconds longer, this time. Suddenly the number of participants in the group stopped falling. In the corner of Tor’s specs, she saw membership levels start to rise again, slowly.

“Now that’s interesting,” throbbed the consensus voice in her ear.

“Several of those amateur scientists have joined us now.

“They report seeing no appreciable leakage. Zero extra hydrogen along the flight path. How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Call it a hunch.”

“But at the rate that Spirit has been replacing hydrogen…”

“There has to be some kind of leak. Right.” She finished that thought aloud. “Not into the baggage compartment or passageways, either. We’d have detected that. But the missing hydrogen must be going somewhere.”

Tor frowned. She could see a shadow moving beyond the grove of tall, cylindrical gas cells. A figure approaching. A crewman or attendant, coming to take her, firmly, gently, insistently, back to her seat. The shape wavered and warped as seen through the mostly transparent polymer tubes-slightly pinkish for hydrogen and then greenish tinted for helium.

Tor blinked. Suddenly feeling so dry mouthed that she could not speak aloud, only subvocalize.

“Okay… then… please ask the amscis to take some more spectral scans along the path of this zeppelin. Only this time… look for helium.”

The inner surface of her specs showed a flurry of indicators. Amateur scientific instruments, computer-controlled from private backyards or rooftop observatories, speckled the nation. Many could zoom quickly toward any patch of sky-hobbyists with access to better instrumentation than earlier generations of top experts could have imagined. Dotted lines appeared. Each showed the viewing angle of some home-taught astronomer, ecologist, or meteorologist, turning a hand- or kit-made instrument toward the majestic cigar shape of the Spirit of Chula Vista…

… which had passed Arlington and Pentagon City, following its faithful tug into a final tracked loop, turning to approach the dedicated zeppelin port that served Washington, D.C.

“Yes, Tor. There is helium.

“Quite a lot of it, in fact.

“A plume that stretches at least a hundred klicks behind the Spirit. No one noticed before, because helium is inert and utterly safe, so no environmental monitors were tuned to look for it.”

The voice was grim. Much less individualized. With ad hoc membership levels suddenly skyrocketing, summaries and updates must be spewing at incredible pace.

“Your suspicion appears to be well based.

“Extrapolating the rate of helium loss backward in time, more than half of the Spirit of Chula Vista’s original supply of that gas may have been lost by now…”

“… replaced in these green cells by another gas.” Tor completed the thought, while nodding. “I think we’ve found the missing hydrogen, people.”

For emphasis, she reached out toward one of the nearby green cells. The “safe” ones that were there to protect life and property, making disaster impossible.

It all made sense, now. Smart polymers were programmable-all the way down to the permeability of any patch of these gas-containing cells, the same technology that made seawater desalinization cheap and ended the Water Wars. But it was technology, and so could be used in a multitude of ways. If you were very clever, you might insert a timed instruction where two gas cells touched, commanding one cell to leak into another. Create a daisy chain. Vent helium into the sky. Transfer gas from hydrogen cells into neighboring helium cells to maintain pressure, so that no one noticed. Then trigger automatic systems to crack onboard water and “replace” that hydrogen, replenishing the main cells. Allow the company to assume a slow leak into the sky is responsible. Continue.

Continue until you have replaced the helium in enough of the green cells to turn the Spirit into a flying bomb.

“The process must be almost complete by now,” she murmured, peering ahead toward the great zep port, where dozens of mighty dirigibles could already be seen, some of them vastly larger than this passenger liner, bobbing gently at their moorings. Spindly fly-cranes went swooping back and forth as they plucked shipping containers from ocean freighters at the nearby Potomac Docks, gracefully transferring the air-gel crates to waiting cargo-zeppelins for the journey cross continent. A deceptively graceful, swaying dance that propelled the engines of commerce.

The passenger terminal-dwarfed by comparison to those giants-seemed to beckon with a promise of safety. But indicators showed that it still lay ten minutes away.

“We have issued a clamor, Tor,” assured the voice in her head. “Every channel. Every agency.”

A glance at spec-telltales showed Tor that, indeed, the group mind was doing its best. Shouting alarm toward every official protective service, from Defense to Homeworld Security. Individual members were lapel-grabbing friends and acquaintances, while smart-mob attendance levels climbed into five figures, and more. At this rate, surely the professionals would be taking heed. Any minute now.

“Too slow,” she said, watching the figures with a sinking heart. Each second that it took to get action from the Protector Caste, the perpetrators of this scheme would also grow aware that the jig is up. Their plan was discovered. And they would have a speedup option.

Speaking of the perps, Tor wondered aloud.

“What can they be hoping to accomplish?”

“We’re pondering that, Tor. Timing suggests that they aim to disrupt the Artifact Conference. Delegates arriving at the Naval Research Center are having a cocktail reception on the embankment right now, offering a fine view toward the zep port, across the river.

“Of course it is possible that the reffers plan to do more than just put on a show, while murdering three hundred passengers. We are checking to see if the Umberto tug has been meddled with. Perhaps the plan is to hop rails and collide with a large cargo-zep, before detonation. Such a fireball might rock the Capitol, and disrupt the port for months.

One problem with a smart-mob. The very same traits that multiplied intelligence could also make it seem dispassionate. Insensitive. Individual members surely felt anguish and concern over Tor’s plight. She might even access their messages, if she had time for commiseration.

But pragmatic help was preferable. She kept to the group mind level.

“One (anonymous) member (a whistle-blower?) has suggested a bizarre plan using a flying-crane at the zep port to grab the Spirit of Chula Vista when it passes near. The crane would then hurl the Spirit across the river, to explode right at the Naval Research Center! In theory, it might just be possible to incinerate-”

“Enough!” Tor cut in. Almost a minute had passed since realization of danger and the issuance of a clamor. And so far, no one had offered anything like a practical suggestion.

“Don’t forget that I’m here, now. We have to do something.”

“Yes,” the voice replied, eagerly and without the usual hesitation. “There is sufficient probable cause to get a posse writ. Especially with your credibility scores. We can act, with you performing the hands-on role.

“Operational ideas follow:

“CUT THE TOWING CABLE.

(Emergency release in gondola. Reachable in four minutes.

Risk: possible interference from staff. Ineffective at saving the zeppelin/passengers.)

“PERSUADE ZEP COMPANY TO COMMENCE EMERGENCY VENTING PROCEDURES.

(Communication in progress. Response so far: obstinate refusal…)

“PERSUADE ONBOARD STAFF TO COMMENCE EMERGENCY VENTING PROCEDURES.

(Attempting communication despite company interference…)

“PERSUADE COMPANY TO ORDER PASSENGER EVACUATION.

(Communication in progress. Response so far: obstinate refusal…)

“UPGRADE CLAMOR. CONTACT PASSENGERS. URGE THEM TO EVACUATE.

(Risks: delay, disbelief, panic, injuries, fatalities, lawsuits…)”

The list of suggestions seemed to scroll on and on. Rank-ordered by plausibility-evaluation algorithms, slanted by urgency, and scored by likelihood of successful outcome. Individuals and subgroups within the smart-mob split apart to urge different options with frantic vehemence. Her specs flared, threatening overload.

“Oh, screw this,” Tor muttered, reaching up and tearing them off.

The real world-unfiltered. For all of its paucity of layering and data-supported detail, it had one special trait.

It’s where I am about to die, she thought.

Unless I do something fast.

At that moment, the zep crew attendant arrived. He rounded the final corner of a towering gas cell, coming into direct view-no longer a shadowy authority figure, warped and refracted by the tinted polymer membranes. Up close, it turned out to be a small man, middle-aged and clearly frightened by what his own specs had started telling him. All intention to arrest or detain Tor had evaporated before he made that turn. She could see this in his face, as clearly as if she had been monitoring vital signs.

WARREN, said a company nametag.

“Wha-what can I do to help?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

Though hired for gracile weight and people skills, the fellow clearly possessed some courage. By now he knew what filled many of the slim, green-tinted membranes surrounding them both. And it didn’t take a genius to realize the zep company was unlikely to help, during the time they had left.

“Tool kit!” Tor held out her hand.

Warren fumbled at his waist pouch. Precious seconds passed as he unfolded a slim implement case. Tor found one promising item-a vibrocutter.

“Keyed to your biometrics?”

He nodded. Passengers weren’t allowed to bring anything aboard that might become a weapon. This cutter would respond to his personal touch and no other. It required not only a fingerprint, but volition-physiological signs of the owner’s will.

“You must do the cutting, then.”

“C-cutting…?”

Tor explained quickly.

“We’ve got to vent this ship. Empty the gas upward. That’ll happen to a main cell if it is ruptured anywhere along its length, right? Automatically?”

A shaky nod. She could tell Warren was getting online advice, perhaps from the zep company. More likely from the same smart-mob that she had called into being. She felt strong temptation to put her own specs back on-to link-in once more. But she resisted. Kibitzers would only slow her down right now.

“It might work…,” said the attendant in a frightened whisper. “But the reffers will realize, as soon as we start-”

“They realize now!” She tried not to shout. “We may have only moments to act.”

Another nod. This time a bit stronger, though Warren was shaking so badly that Tor had to help him draw the cutter from its sleeve. She steadied his hand.

“We must slice through a helium bag in order to reach the big hydro cell,” he said, pressing the biometric-sensitive stud. Reacting to his individual touch, a knife edge of acoustic waves began to flicker at the cutter tip, sharper than steel. A soft tone filled the air.

Tor swallowed hard. That flicker resembled a hot flame.

“Pick one.”

They had no way to tell which of the greenish helium cells had been refilled, or what would happen when the cutter helped unite gas from neighboring compartments. Perhaps the only thing accomplished would be an early detonation. But even that had advantages, if it messed up the timing of this scheme.

One lesson you learned early nowadays: It simply made no sense, any longer, to rely for perfect safety upon a flawless professional protective caste. The police and military, the bureaucrats, and intelligence services. No matter how skilled and sophisticated they might grow, with infinite tax dollars to spend on advanced instrumentalities, they could still be overwhelmed, or cleverly bypassed. Human beings, they made mistakes. And when that happened, society must count on a second line of defense.

Us.

It meant-Tor knew-that any citizen could wind up being a soldier for civilization, at any time. The way they made the crucial difference on 9-11 and during Awfulday.

In other words, expendable.

“That one.” Warren chose, and moved toward the nearest green-tinted cell.

Though she had doffed her specs, there was still a link. The smart-mob’s voice retained access to the conduction channel in her ear.

“Tor,” said the group mind. “We’re getting feed through Warren’s goggles. Are you listening? There is a third possibility, in addition to helium and hydrogen. Some of the cells may have been packed with-”

She bit down twice on her left canine tooth, cutting off the distraction in order to monitor her omnisniffer. She inhaled deeply, with her eye on the indicator as Warren made a gliding, slicing motion with his cutter.

The greenish envelope opened, as if along a seam. Edges rippled apart as invisible gas-appreciably cooler-swept over them both.

HELIUM said the readout. Tor sighed relief.

“This one’s not poisonous.”

Warren nodded. “But no oxygen. You can smother.” He ducked his head aside, avoiding the cool wind, and took another deep breath of normal air. Still, his next words had a squeaky, high-pitched quality. “Gotta move fast.”

Through the vent he slipped, hurrying quickly to the other side of the green cell, where it touched one of the great chambers of hydrogen.

Warren made a rapid slash.

Klaxons bellowed, responding to the damage automatically. (Or else, had the company chosen that moment, after several criminally-negligent minutes, to finally admit the inevitable?) A voice boomed insistently, ordering passengers to move-calmly and carefully-to their escape stations.

That same instant, the giant hydrogen gas cell convulsed, twitching like a giant bowel caught in a spasm. The entire pinkish tube-bigger than a jumbo jet-contracted, starting at the bottom and squeezing toward a sudden opening at the very top, spewing its contents skyward.

Backwash hurled Warren across the green tube. Tor managed to grab his collar, dragging him out to the walkway. There seemed to be nothing satisfying about the “air” that she sucked into her lungs, and she started seeing spots before her eyes. The little man was in worse shape, gasping wildly in high-pitched squeaks.

Somehow, Tor hauled him a dozen meters along the gangway, barely escaping descending folds of the deflated cell, till they arrived at last where breathing felt better. Did we make any difference? she wondered, wildly.

Instinctively, Tor slipped her specs back on. Immersed again in the info-maelstrom, it took moments to focus.

One image showed gouts of flame pouring from a hole in the roof of a majestic skyship. Another revealed the zeppelin’s nose starting to slant steeply as the tug-locomotive pulled frantically on its tow cable, reeling the behemoth toward the ground. Spirit resisted like a stallion, bucking and clinging to altitude.

Tor briefly quailed. Oh Lord, what have we done?

A thought suddenly occurred to her. She and Warren had done this entirely based on information that came to them from outside. From a group-mind of zeppelin aficionados and amateur scientists who claimed that a lot of extra hydrogen had to be going somewhere, and it must be stored in some of the former helium cells.

But that particular helium cell-the one Warren sliced-had been okay.

And now, amid all the commotion, she wondered. What about the smart-mob? Could that group be a front for clever reffers, who were using her to do their dirty work? Feeding false information, in order to get precisely this effect?

The doubt passed through her mind in seconds. And back out again. This smart-mob was open and public. If something smelled about it, another mob would have formed by now, clamoring like mad and exposing the lies. Anyway, if no helium cells had been tampered with, the worst that she and Warren could do was bring a temporarily disabled Spirit of Chula Vista down to a bumpy but safe landing atop its tug.

Newsworthy. But not very. And that realization firmed her resolve.

Tor yanked the attendant onto his feet and urged him to move uphill, toward the stern, along a narrow path that now inclined the other way. “Come on!” she called to Warren, her voice still squeaky from helium. “We’ve got to do more!”

Warren tried gamely. But she had to steady him as the path gradually steepened. When he prepared to slash at another green cell, farther aft, Tor braced his elbow.

Before he struck, through the omniscient gaze of her specs, Tor abruptly saw three more holes appear in the zep’s broad roof, spewing clouds of gas, transparent but highly refracting, resembling billowy ripples in space.

Was the zep company finally taking action? Had the reffers made their move? Or had the first expulsion triggered some kind of compensating release from automatic valves, elsewhere on the ship?

As if pondering the same questions, the voice in her jaw mused.

“Too little has been released to save the Spirit from the worst-case scenario. But maybe enough to limit the tragedy and mess up their scheme.

“It depends on a rather gruesome possibility that one of us thought up. What if-instead of hydrogen-some of the helium cells have been refilled with OXYGEN? After experimenting with a similar, programmably permeable polymer, we find that the fuel replenishment process could be jiggered to do that. If so, the compressed combination-”

Oxygen?

Tor shouted “Wait!” as Warren made a hard stab at one of the green cells, slicing a long vent that suddenly blurped at them.

This wave of gas wasn’t as cool as the helium had been. It smelled terrific, though. One slight inhale filled Tor with sudden and suspicious exhilaration.

Uh-oh, she thought.

At that moment, her spectacle-display offered a bird’s-eye view as one of the new clouds of vented hydrogen contacted dying embers, atop the tormented Spirit of Chula Vista.

Like a brief sun, each of the refracting bubbles ignited in rapid succession. Thunderclaps shook the dirigible from stem to stern, knocking Tor and Warren off their feet.

Is this it? Her own particular and special End of the World? Strangely, Tor’s clearest thought was one of professional jealousy. Someone down below ought to be getting truly memorable and historic footage. Maybe on a par with the Hindenburg Disaster.

This was the critical moment. With their plan dissolving, the reffers must act. Any second now, a well-timed chain explosion within the Spirit’s great abdomen…

While the violent tossing drove Tor into fatalism, all that invigorating oxygen seemed to have an opposite effect upon Warren, who surged to his feet, then slipped through the tear that he had made and charged across the green cell, preparing to attack the giant hydrogen compartment beyond, heedless of the smart-mob, clamoring at him to stop.

Tor tried to add her own plea, but found that her throat would not function.

Some reporter, she thought, taking ironic solace in one fact-that her specs were still beaming to the Net.

Live images of a desperately unlikely hero.

Warren looked positively giddy-on a high of oxygen and adrenaline, but not too drugged to realize the implications. He grimaced with an evident combination of fear and exaltation, while bringing his cutter-tool slashing down upon the polymer membrane-a slim barrier separating two gases that wanted, notoriously, to unite.

Sensory recovery came in scattered bits.

First, a smattering of dream images. Nightmare flashes about being chased, or else giving chase to something dangerous, across a landscape of burning glass. At least, that was how her mind pictured a piling-on of agonies. Regret. Physical anguish. Failure. More anguish. Shame. And more agony, still.

When the murk finally began to clear, consciousness only made matters worse. Everything was black, except for occasional crimson flashes. And those had to be erupting directly out of pain-the random firings of an abused nervous system.

Her ears also appeared to be useless. There was no real sound, other than a low, irritating humming that would not go away.

Only one conduit to the external world still appeared to be functioning.

The voice. It had been hectoring her dreams, she recalled. A nag that could not be answered and would not go away. Only now, at least, she understood the words.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

After a pause, the message repeated.

And then again.

So, it was playing on automatic. She must have been unconscious for a long time.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

There was an almost overwhelming temptation to do nothing. Every signal that she sent to muscles, commanding them to move, only increased the grinding, searing pain. Passivity seemed to be the lesson being taught right now. Just lie there, or else suffer even more. Lie and wait. Maybe die.

Also, Tor wasn’t sure she liked the group mind anymore.

“Tor? Are you awake? We’re getting no signal from your specs. But there’s a carrier wave from your tooth-implant. Can you give us a tap?”

On the other hand, passivity seemed to have one major drawback. It gave pain an ally.

Boredom. Yet another way to torment her. Especially her.

To hell with that.

With an effort that grated, she managed to slide her jaw enough to bring the two left canine teeth together in a tap, and then two more. The recording continued a few moments-long enough for Tor to fear that it hadn’t worked. She was cut off, isolated, alone in darkness.

But the group participants must have been away, doing their own things. Jobs, families, watching the news. After about twenty seconds, though, the voice returned, eager and live.

“Tor!

“We are so glad you’re awake.”

Muddled by dull agony, she found it hard at first to focus even a thought. But she managed to drag one canine in a circle around the other. Universal symbolic code for “question mark.”

‹?›

The message got through.

“Tor, you are inside a life-sustainment tube. Rescue workers found you in the wreckage about twelve minutes ago, but it’s taking some time to haul you out. They should have you aboard a medi-chopper in another three minutes, maybe four.

“We’ll inform the docs that you are conscious. They’ll probably insert a communications shunt sometime after you reach hospital.”

Three rapid taps.

‹NO›

The voice had a bedside manner.

“Now Tor, be good and let the pros do their jobs. The emergency is over and we amateurs have to step back, right?

“Anyway, you’ll get the very best of care. You’re a hero! Spoiled a reffer plot and saved a couple of hundred passengers. You should hear what MediaCorp is crowing about their ‘ace field correspondent.’ They even backdated your promotion a few days.

“Everyone wants you now, Tor,” the voice finished, resonating her inner ear without any sign of double entendre. But surely individual members felt what she felt, right then.

Irony-the other bright compensation that Pandora found in the bottom of her infamous Box. At times, irony could be more comforting than hope.

Tor was unable to chuckle, so her tooth did a down-slide and then back.

‹!›

The Voice seemed to understand and agree.

“Yeah.

“Anyway, we figure you’d like an update. Tap inside if you want details about your condition. Outside for a summary of external events.”

Tor bit down emphatically on the outer surface of her lower canine.

“Gotcha. Here goes.

“It turns out that the scheme was partly to create a garish zep disaster. But they chiefly aimed to achieve a distraction.

“By colliding the Spirit with a cargo freighter in a huge explosion, with lots of casualties, they hoped not only to close down the zep port for months, but also to create a suddenly lethal fireball that would draw attention from the protective and emergency services. All eyes and sensors would shift for a brief time. Wariness would steeply decline in other directions.

“They thereupon planned to swoop into the Naval Research Center with a swarm attack by hyperlight flyers. Like the O’Hare Incident but with some nasty twists. We don’t have details yet. Some of them are still under wraps. But it looks pretty awful, at first sight.

“Anyway, as events turned out, our ad hoc efforts aboard the Spirit managed to expel almost half of the stockpiled gases early and in an uncoordinated fashion. Several of the biggest cells got emptied, creating gaps. So there was never a single, unified detonation when the enemy finally pulled their trigger. Just a sporadic fire. That kept the dirigible frame intact, enabling the tug to reel it down to less than a hundred meters.

“Where the escape chutes mostly worked. Nearly all passengers got away without injury, Tor. And the zep port was untouched.”

Trying to picture it in her mind’s eye-perhaps the only eye she had left-took some effort. She was used to so many modern visualization aides that mere words and imagination seemed rather crude. A cartoony image of the Spirit, her vast upper bulge aflame, slanted steeply groundward as the doughty Umberto Nobile desperately pulled the airship toward relative safety. And then, slender tubes of active plastic snaking down, offering slide-paths for the tourist families and other civilians.

The real event must have been quite a sight.

Her mind roiled with questions. What about the rest of the passengers?

What fraction were injured, or died?

How about people down below, on the nearby highway?

Was there an attack on the Artifact Conference, after all?

So many questions. But till doctors installed a shunt, there would be no way to send anything more sophisticated than these awful yes-no clicks. And some punctuation marks. Normally, equipped with a tru-vu, a pair of touch-tooth implants would let her scroll rapidly through menu choices, or type on a virtual screen. Now, she could neither see nor subvocalize.

So, she thought about the problem. Information could in-load at the rate of spoken speech. Outloading was a matter of clicking two teeth together.

Perhaps it was the effect of drugs, injected by the paramedics, but Tor found herself thinking with increasing detachment, as if viewing her situation through a distant lens. Abstract appraisal suggested a solution, reverting to a much older tradition of communication.

She clicked the inside of her lower left canine three times quickly. Then the outer surface three times, more slowly. And finally the inner side three more times.

“What’s that, Tor? Are you trying to say something?”

She waited a decent interval, then repeated exactly the same series of taps. Three rapid clicks inside, three slow ones on the outside, and again three quickly inside. It took several repetitions before the Voice hazarded a guess.

“Tor, a few members and ais suggest that you’re trying to send a message in old-fashioned Morse code.

“Three dots, three dashes, then three dots. ‘SOS.’

“The old international distress call. Is that it, Tor?”

She quickly assented with a yes tap. Thank heavens for the diversity of a group mind. Get one large enough, and you were sure to include some oldtech freak.

“But we already know you are in pain. Rescuers have found you. There’s nothing else to accomplish by calling for help… except…”

The Voice paused again.

“Wait a minute.

“There is a minority theory floating up. A guess-hypothesis.

“Very few modern people bother to learn Morse code anymore. But most of us have heard of it. Especially that one message you were using. SOS. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. It’s famous from old-time movies.

“Is that what you’re telling us, Tor?

“Would you like us to teach you Morse code?”

Although she could sense nothing external, not even the rocking of her life-support canister as it was being hauled by evacuation workers out of the smoldering Spirit of Chula Vista, Tor did feel a wash of relief.

Yes, she tapped.

Most definitely yes.

“Very well.

“Now listen carefully.

“We’ll start with the letter ‘A’…”

It helped to distract her from worry, at least, concentrating to learn something without all the tech-crutches relied upon by today’s tenners and twenners. Struggling to absorb a simple alphabet code that every smart kid used to memorize, way back in that first era of zeppelins and telegraphs and crystal radios, when the uncrowded sky had seemed so wide open and filled with innocent possibilities. When the smartest mob around was a rigidly marching army. When a journalist would chase stories with notepad, flashbulbs, and intuition. When the main concern of a citizen was earning enough to put bread on the table. When the Professional Protective Caste consisted of a few cops on the beat.

Way back, one human life span ago, when heroes were tall and square-jawed, in both fiction and real life.

Times had changed. Now, destiny could tap anybody on the shoulder, even the shy or unassuming. You, me, the next guy. Suddenly, everybody depends on just one. And that one relies on everybody.

Tor concentrated on her lesson, only dimly aware of the vibrations conveyed by a throbbing helicopter, carrying her (presumably) to a place where modern miracle workers would strive to save-or rebuild-what they could.

Professionals still had their uses, even in the rising Age of Amateurs. Bless their skill. Perhaps-with luck and technology-they might even give Tor back her life.

Right now, though, one concern was paramount. It took a while to ask the question that burned foremost in her mind, since she needed a letter near the end of the alphabet. But as soon as they reached it, she tapped out a Morse code message that consisted of one word.

‹WARREN›

She expected the answer that her fellow citizens gave.

Even with the hydrogen cell contracting at full force to expel most of its contents skyward, there would have been more than enough right there, at the oxygen-rich interface, to incinerate one little man. One volunteer. A hero, leaving nothing to bury, but scattering microscopic ashes all the way across his nation’s capital.

Lucky guy, she thought, feeling a little envy for his rapid exit and inevitable, uncomplicated fame.

Tor recognized what the envy meant, of course. She was ready to enter the inevitable phase of self-pity. A necessary stage.

But not for long. Only till they installed the shunt.

After that, it would be back to work. Lying immersed in sustainer-jelly and breathing through a tube? That wouldn’t stop a real journalist. The web was a beat rich with stories, and Tor had a feeling-she would get to know the neighborhood a whole lot better.

“And we’ll be here,” assured the smart-mob. “If not us, then others like us.

“You can count on it Tor.

“Count on us.

“We all do.”