Existence

The world may end later than the year 2060, but I see no reason for its ending sooner. This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit.

– Sir Isaac Newton

How might our world be different, if our literature, to say nothing of our politics, behaved more like a rational, intrepid adult than a hand-wringing adolescent?

– Kim Stanley Robinson

Autie-Murphy sifted the nor-nand gaps +/-/+ found 32,823 fugitives sought by normalpeople authorities + + missed by the hired aspies who run searches for FBI +Interpol +FRS +HanSecuritInc +cetera -/- he sifted the world’s image gestalt for not-patterns of people with altered biometrics hiding in plain sight +/+ at plane sites -/- at pain to spite a world searching for them!

some hidden ones are verybad people./. wanted for doing badbadbad things./. dontthinkaboutthatdontdontdont

others hide for political reasons… moral… philosophical… stuff only weird homosapiens understand -/+= no way any autie would be naughty

shall we report them all??? ask Auntie-Autie-Ortie!/+/- her savant-talent is ethics +/!/+ let her decide which to tattle-on!! Autie-Murphy won’t care -/+ he loves the search +analyzing worldwide cam usages +deviations/skews/kurtosis…

… and he found HER!/! chimera-mom and her little boy + + + age seven but big as a ten-year-old normalkid!!! Gene Autie accessed the database of scientists secretly studying the child -

=› go 145,627,010 base-pairs down the long arm of chromosome#1 =› see ‹= the unusual version of 1q21.1 – not a normalpeople variant -/- nor the “mistakes” carried by some autistics/schizophrenics/others -/+ it’s a resurrection of something longlost +/-

LOOK at the child!=›*‹= beautiful bigskull protrudes in back. Perfect pitch and more surprises… yet stronger &better-focused than any autiee + with fight/flight response that’s calm-not-jittery!/!- speaks almost normal… but SEE how he relates to animals! here =›*‹=

Agurne (greetings) Arrixaka (virgin) Bidarte (between the ways) should be proud of her son +-+ too bad they surgically removed his eyebrow ridges -/-/- to stand out less -/- but what a smile and perfect profile!/-/! without that ugly homosap chin (((

they did it!/! normalpeople (a few) redeemed their ancient crime + + + returned the Robust Folk to the world + + +

too bad other normalpeople want him dead

48.

The Silverdome was crowded. With winter coming, more deepees wandered in to escape the night chill, even if it meant serving on work crews and listening to preachucators while slurping free alganoodles, spiced with pulp-grade chicktish meat.

Arriving for his shift, Slawek groaned when he saw how many newcomers had arrived on the mezzanine level, erecting cots, privacy curtains, and cheap, pixelcloth vid-screens to distract the kids, perching it all on metlon-and-plyboard platforms that covered the old stadium seating.

Slawek passed an ottodog, sniffing for contraband, then hurried past the Big Placard of Rules painted in no-overlay red-the hue that specs were never supposed to cover or conceal. Though it only took some dime hackerware to change the spectral pattern of your goggles. Slawek knew a dozen u-levels where this sign had been defaced with crude mockings. Resentment toward authority was rising, among the Silverdome’s rowdier ethnics.

Please don’t let them assign me to enforcement today, he prayed. Subdural nerve impulses almost lifted his right hand to trace a cross on his chest. But Catholicism was nekulturny among a lot of other kidz. So instead, the neural pattern went to Slawek’s soul-avatar, telling it to genuflect in a private corner of virspace, adding a pater noster on his behalf.

Aleksei “Danny” Hutnicki was in charge at Duty Station, where a banner-chart of work parties kept changing as laborers reported for assignments, got excused for sick call, or else came back from one of the homestead zones of Old Detroit. Aleksei glanced up and grimaced.

“You’re late. You never used to be, when you slept here.”

“Yeah, well.” That was before Slawek packed off to one of the Silverdome’s satellite projects, two dozen homes-a couple of city blocks-that were being reclaimed as a commune-complete with dairy, greenhouse, school, and some glass-covered ex-basements converted into algae farms. Still, you had to put in time here, at the main center, if you wanted to advance.

“The jitney bus broke down. Had to use my skutr.”

“Hm.” Aleksei looked dubious. Scanning the Duty Board. “Let’s see what I can find that’s right for you…” He seemed to be looking for a shit job to give Slawek.

But it wasn’t hard to in-spec the fellow’s facials, using cheapware to correlate flush tones and iris dilation. What a faker! He already knows what I’ve been assigned.

Sure enough, Aleksei waggled a couple of fingers and the big board flickered. Slawek’s specs automatically zoomed on his name and the adamant word next to it.

ENFORCEMENT.

His face stayed impassive-he had been practicing with a feedback program. But Slawek’s soulvatar, responding to involuntary nerve twitches, expressed his disappointment by cursing and stomping in its private little capsule of subreality-a slightly sinful e-tantrum that the little homunculus thereupon commenced to pray-off, kneeling and offering fervent Hail Marys, observable only by Porfirio and God.

Meanwhile, placid on the surface, Slawek turned and headed toward the nearest ramp leading upward, into the higher galleries of the ancient domed stadium.

Slawek was less upset about getting enforcement duty when he learned he would be doing rounds with Dr. Betsby. It offered a chance to ask questions. Though first the doc had a few of his own, as they visited family encampments on the mezzanine level.

“Have you been keeping up with your studies, son?”

“Yes, sir,” Slawek answered a bit nervously. This man had the power to yank him off aixperience tutorials, and send him back into an old-timey classroom, alongside petulant teens who made life miserable for their flesh-’n’-blood teachers.

“I’m also reading paper books,” he told the physician, who oversaw health and welfare in the Silverdome. Betsby’s gray-streaked, sandy hair had grown out during the last few months, along with a new beard and a faraway look in his eyes. Right now, the man’s core attention was focused on a handheld instrument scanning the blemished arm of an elderly woman from drowned Bangladesh. Slawek’s job was to hand over tools, but also keep wary for trouble. People from some cultures didn’t appreciate being poked at by authority figures, adding to the simmering tensions of a melting-pot refugee camp. Slawek was big, streetwise, and had trained in some defense arts. Yet, he still looked like enough of a kid to seem unthreatening, especially when he offered a deliberately goofy grin.

Right now that seemed especially wise. Several males-probably the old woman’s sons-watched protectively nearby. Slawek gave them his best happy face… and got back a grudging nod.

“Come to sick call tomorrow,” Betsby told the woman. “A female nurse will finish your examination. If you don’t come, your family will lose privileges. If you do, I’m sure we can whip up a gene-match and make this nasty crud go away. Do you understand?”

She tilted her head, listening to an old-fashioned translation-plug, then stood to take his hand, thanking the doctor in rapid Bengali. At this, her sons rose and also bowed. It was often like this during rounds. A cycle of tension and release that Slawek found more exhausting than any other duty.

Still, the doc trusts me. That’s worth plenty.

As they left, moving down aisle LL4, Dr. Betsby stopped to face Slawek.

“What books?”

“Sir?” Eye contact with the boss always discomfited.

“The paper books you just mentioned. Where did you get them?”

“Um… there’s a pretty good library in the old Owner’s Box above the fifty-yard line. Old Professor Miller asks us to bring any texts we find in reclam houses. I just hold on to some, to look over first.”

“And so? What are you reading, Slawek?”

“Well, sir… my history curriculum is covering the First American Civil War. Mostly, I walk a full-immersion spectour with a Shelby Foote golem-guide. It’s called Road to Apomatics.”

“That’s Appomattox. I know that one. You can really feel the minié balls whiz by your head at Shiloh. You’re supplementing that with a book?”

“Climate and History, by Professor David Greene. It’s dry, but kind of interesting. He claims the North won the Civil War because it got more immigrants from Europe. People used to think that happened ’cause of Southern slavery. But Greene says it’s on account of that farming was easier in places where snow fell on the ground each year.”

“Why is that, Slawek?” Betsby seemed to be only half listening as he exchanged salutations with several elders at the next shelter. The occupants pulled back their curtains, letting his scanners have full play across their cots and belongings. This family-from the Paraguayan Hot Zone-got special scrutiny and were asked for weekly blood samples. Toxoplasma gondii tended to reestablish itself, even after disinfection. Till they were certified clean, the rules forbade them from keeping cats.

“I think it had to do with how winter cold kind of zeroes everything out. Makes insects and grasses go dormant. So in spring, farmers could plow and fight the weeds and pests from an even start. Also, summers were pleasant, not muggy. All of that was worth some snow.”

Betsby grunted, briefly satisfied, and focused narrowly on his scan. Of course, Slawek would rather be discussing something else, right now-Betsby’s opinion of the Havana Artifact, with its creepy message of pessimism and gloom.

The aliens say nobody survives. Not species or cultures. Just individuals who manage to get copied into crystal chain letters and get fired across space. By Saint Karel, no wonder there have been riots!

The news seemed to strike hardest people with more education, or leisure time to ponder abstractions. Here in Off-Detroit, the dispossessed had nearer horizons-like their next meal. Still, he wondered. How would someone like me win a place aboard a space message bottle? Assuming humanity decides to build them?

Slawek leaned toward a theory-fast becoming consensus on some religion sites and wirlds-that the emissary entities were in fact demons, sent to demoralize mankind! They had the hallmarks. Bizarre physical traits, reminiscent of the Book of Revelation. A professed ignorance of, or indifference to God. And an inability to affect the physical world, except by influencing human minds and hands.

That feature especially struck Catholic theologians-even Father Pracharitkul, who explained it to Slawek just yesterday, at the little church in loge box 42.

“The issue was settled long ago during the Manichean Heresy.” Slawek had to b’goog it, while the Thai priest rambled on. “At the time, it was determined that Satan and his minions have no actual, creative power. They can do nothing physical. Their potency lay solely in the persuasive magic of lies.”

Even the Jesuits, long friendly to notions of extraterrestrial life, now leaned toward this explanation, though the Vatican still reserved judgment. Slawek, too, held back.

I bet Dr. Betsby can shed some light, when I get a chance to ask.

Inspection finished, the Paraguayans brought their drapery-screens back down. Pixelated cloth began shimmering to visually magnify their hovel into something more expansive-perhaps with vistas of the pampas back home, before it dried up and turned to sand.

Though the material also deadened sound waves in both directions, Slawek thought he heard the distinct meow of a feline. A simulation? Or one the family kept hidden? Among other parasitically-induced obsessions, some types of Toxoplasma gave infected people a weirdly desperate craving for kitties.

“All right,” Betsby said, hoisting his bag while Slawek toted heavier devices. “Then if winter was so useful to nineteenth century immigrants, why did a later mass migration of people move south, to the American sun belt, in the second half of the twentieth century, depopulating cities like Detroit?”

He’s doing an evaluation, Slawek realized. They don’t normally let kids my age join one of the outer communes, as an indie. What if I’m ordered to move back under the dome? Will I lose my shares?

“Um.” He blink-ordered a search based on Betsby’s question. Relevant blips crowded in from all sides, but… Betsby hadn’t asked him to remove the goggles… and surely that meant something.

Calm down. It’s not facts and stats he wants. Interpret.

“Well… air-conditioning made southern cities more bearable… and… and for a while jobs moved south, following cheap labor, before heading to the Far East, then Africa. First clothing an’ then cars and such, then computers, fones, fabs, services…”

“Okay, so then why did the migration turn around, sloshing back north again?”

“You mean, reasons other than the kudzu?… Or the flooded coast? Or when the Mississippi changed course, leaving river cities without a river? Or the breakup of Texas? Or the Big Soggy Decade? Or…”

Slawek might have continued listing more bad-luck reasons for the steady depopulation of the American Southeast-only right then he realized it might be unwise. The encampment that stood in front of them now was a tent-canopy wide enough to hold five families, stretching between two whole aisles of the Silverdome mezzanine and cantilevered over the balcony edge by a good five meters or so. The pixelcloth motif of a banner, with an X-shaped, starry cross, waved in a simulated breeze above the entrance.

Half a dozen men lounged along the platform’s forward edge, perched overlooking the old gridiron pitch. Several of them sat cross-legged and very still, wearing completely blank expressions, but the nearest pair-(Slawek sniffed that they were smoking barely legal cannaweed)-glared at the doctor and his assistant. They had specs on, so it would have been no problem to overhear Slawek’s most recent words.

He cursed himself for being inattentive of his surroundings. These redders were the toughest bunch under the dome.

While he smiled at them with his best friendly idiot grin, Slawek did a quick-scan, then subvocalized a message to Dr. Betsby. “Two men are on sick list. But three others”-he marked them-“haven’t showed up for work assignment in several days.”

If the physician got Slawek’s overlay message, he showed no overt sign. Instead, Betsby asked the nearest big fellow to get up and lift the fabric barrier for inspection. It was high on the List of Rules and everyone complied, if they wanted to qualify for the big prize-a reclam settlement in Detroit or Pontiac. Still, some groups resented the weekly intrusion.

This time the response was especially sullen. As the eastern fabric-barrier rolled upward, no one moved to damp down the noise and garish images pouring from two of the opposite tent walls. Dr. Betsby shrugged and commenced scanning for health and hygiene concerns.

Lacking anything better to do, Slawek took a closer look at the vivid scenario that was unfolding, across the pixelated-cloth screens. Clearly it was a game-one that called for extensive teamwork and exertion. He saw a dozen or so people in gray senso-suits, ducking and waving realistic looking guns in the cramped area between the vid walls. Of course the weapons weren’t real-alarms would go off. But the simulated “rifles” barked and flashed realistically as blue-coated soldiers toppled onscreen, with satisfying howls and graphic grue. Slawek stared, amazed by a coincidence. The battle scene came straight from the 1860s war he was studying in school! Only this simulation was more gruesome and graphic than The Road to Appomattox.

A Rebel in Time, identified his scrolling spec-caption. Story Premise: The player-character steals an experimental time machine from a U.S. research lab and goes back to 1860 with plans to manufacture simple “sten” submachine guns for the Confederacy and assist General Nathan Bedford Forest in destroying…

Slawek blinked away the caption. The figures ducking and shooting in the foreground weren’t just slacking off and avoiding work. A lot of refugees do game-mining to earn cash-playing to earn points and virtual possessions, like armor and magic swords that could then be sold for real money to rich players in the Orient. One could argue it was income-generating labor.

Still, this particular fantasy offended Slawek. He loved America, and disliked the trends that were breaking it apart.

Sensing aural curiosity, his specs resumed commentary. Identifying background music-“Bad Attitude” by Steinman and Meatloaf…

I’ve got to take my specs in for a tune-up, Slawek thought, wiping the commentary again and down-cranking sensitivity.

Of course, battle games were registered addictions. But there were so many different ways to excite the craving centers in a human brain, who could track them all? Take the “dazers” who sat, cross-legged, on the nearby plywood platform, using biofeedback spectacles to enter a state of druglike bliss.

That was where Dr. Betsby turned next, when he finished his interior scan, stepping onto the platform. Slawek followed, though the sheer drop-off made him nervous. Betsby bent over in front of one of the men, who stared vacantly with a thin trail of drool hanging from a corner of his mouth.

“Jonathan?” Betsby snapped his fingers. The fellow’s bare shoulders bore bioluminescent tattoos-pixie-skin displays that throbbed with ever-changing patterns, like an octopus or cuttlefish.

But Jonathan didn’t answer. Not while his specs flashed brainwave-tuned images, guiding him to a plateau that used to be achievable only after years of prayer and training… or with illegal substances. Buddhists and transcendentalists called this “cheating” and old-time narcotics cartels pushed to make dazing illegal, as they lost market share to programs like Cogito or LightLord.

“Leave him be,” said a fellow with reddish hair and muttonchop sideburns. His high-of-choice was simpler, a bubble-bottle of frothy Motor City Lager. “Jonathan don’t react well to interruptions.”

“All the more reason to intervene, Henry James Lee,” Betsby said, leaning closer to the dazer. “Jonathan Cain! You know the rules. No meditation during daylight hours. How long since you took care of bodily needs? What you’re doing is both irresponsible and dangerous.”

The doctor reached for Jonathan’s pair of Mesh spectacles, moving to break the trance.

“I tole you to leave off him, you gaijin-lovin’, egghead bastard!” The second man snarled, moving closer…

… and now, suddenly, Slawek caught a glint in Henry James Lee’s other hand, the one not holding a beer bottle. His specs zoomed-

“Knife!” Slawek started forward and things happened fast. As he dived between Jonathan and the doc, aiming to throw a block against the blade, he brushed Jonathan’s knee-and the dazer suddenly yelled. Spasming, arms, and legs lashed out. One foot struck Slawek’s thigh hard, slamming him into Betsby, who windmilled, struggling for balance.

“Doc!”

Slawek shouted, spinning and reaching for Betsby. He managed to catch a sleeve as the physician teetered. No help was coming from Henry James Lee, but if Slawek could just manage to hold on to the strip of fabric…

… only then Jonathan let out another thrashing, reflex kick, catching Slawek behind the knee, toppling him farther.

The physician teetered, feet scrambling at the brink, as Betsby’s weight hauled Slawek after him. In seconds, the doctor’s expression shifted from panic to realization. With sudden strength that surprised Slawek, he tore the boy’s hand off his sleeve and gave it a hard shove, throwing Slawek back just enough to halt on his knees, wavering right at the ledge. Even so, his momentum carried forward… more… more…

Now Henry James Lee acted-a strong, callused hand clamped Slawek’s collar, yanking him back.

“Let go!” he screamed, swatting at the hand. Heart pounding, clenching the plywood with white-hard strength that made the boards crack, Slawek prayed rapidly, both in the virtual world and this one, as he made himself lean over again, to look down toward seating section 116.

It’s not so high. A person who landed right could get off with a broken leg-

Flowing tears might have blurred the full impact of what lay down there. But the specs detected impaired vision and compensated, magnifying, clarifying, till he sobbed and closed both eyelids tightly shut.

Normally, I don’t follow leaks from a blind otter.

Off the record is bad enough. But when an OTR demands that I not even look for a trackspoor… well… it smacks of a disinfobot, or even reffer stuff. Please.

But we’ve done pretty well, following hints from Birdwoman303. Take the way she cued our super-posse smart-mob onto a dozen big-time international fugitives-much to the annoyance of the feds and inter-feds, who spent futile years searching in vain for those bad guys! Breaking that wind won us super-high cred ratings and put me in the running for this year’s Nosie Award! Not bad, for a reporter who is still confined to a gel-cocoon, who must interact with the world via Mesh surrogates and this crazy possai. But back to the topic at hand.

It’s regarding alien artifacts that Birdwoman303 was most helpful. Remember how we fast-correlated those underground quakes, and told the world that each individual seismo-pop was the cry of some desperate, buried crystal? We also helped gather data from varied amsci orgs, verifying that all those space-glitters-in the asteroid belt and the L-points-were also come-and-get-me cries from lonely emissary stones.

Sure, the ensuing seek-and-grab missions will take years. Still, a discovery made by amateurs will trigger relaunching of the world’s space programs. Congrats!

But those are old hats, no longer hot or hip. Three weeks in the past-almost a paleo-month! And though guvs and privs are sifting the whole Earth for remnants, most of the dug-up crystals are too worn-down, fragged, or broken to be holo-lucid. Twenty days after the Big Revelation in Washington, we still don’t have a credible second source. A different gypsy ball to either verify the Artifact aliens or dispute their dour diagnosis…

… that we’re all doomed-species, civilization, and planet-because everybody dies. Except those individual beings who manage to get themselves downloaded into message bottles, that is. The ultimate individualism. A level of solipsism that makes Ayn Rand seem like a Shaker.

But we’re not going there. Not today. Not with the whole world already chewing over that ominous sales pitch. It is SO boring to think about what everybody else is thinking about, yes?

No, what we’ve been working on, in this smart-militia of Millisecond MenW, is a different question: What if there are other, relatively intact space globes, already held secretly, perhaps in private hands?

Some of our subgroups have been tracing legends, rumors, and murky tales. Others accosted museums or picketed outside reclusive aristo-collections, demanding access to probe precious specimens with rays and beams.

Only, aren’t those activities also kind of obvious, pursued by agencies and hordes far better equipped than we are? Our forte is uncovering the un-obvious! So I suggest a different approach. Instead of looking for hidden artifacts, let’s look for those who are doing the looking.

Or rather, those who started looking suspiciously early!

I’m talking about the period right after Gerald Livingstone snatched his infamous Object out of orbit. Those first few days, when just the slimmest rumors started spreading, without images or data to back them up. Shouldn’t the Mesh archives reveal who was more excited and eager than anyone reasonably ought to be, at that early stage?

Who was out there first, searching for translucent, oblong globes about half a meter in length? There was no reason to expect to find such crystal objects already on Earth, let alone to conduct a quest so detailed and specific. And yet-following some hints from our mysterious otter friend-I’ve already spotted several seeker-worms and -ferrets that were dispatched during those early days, desperately seeking.

Somebody… perhaps as many as a dozen groups… apparently knew what to go looking for. Knowledge that they still aren’t sharing, when we all need most…

Ah, the consensus twinkle.

It’s agreed, then? We have a new goal. A fresh scent.

Call out the hounds.

49.

For Peng Xiang Bin, these were tense hours.

Everyone in the little study team seemed on edge. So was the world, since ten billion people finally heard the whole story told by those alien entities in Washington. Their cheery sales pitch, inviting some number of individual humans to join them on an extended interstellar cruise. Not in person, of course-not as organic beings-but as software copies, cast forth across the interstellar immensity aboard millions of tiny vessels, made of crystal and thought.

Naturally (those alien figures added), the full resources of industrial civilization would have to be brought to bear, and soon, if galactic lifeboats were to be made in sufficient quantity, and in time. Because humanity probably had very little left.

Time, that is.

That other part of their message-revealed almost as an afterthought-was what slammed the world, provoking waves of rioting and suicides, all across the globe.

“And yet, I wonder,” mused the Pulupauan research assistant, Paul Menelaua. “Is their warning really such a bad thing?”

“What do you mean, Paul?” asked the elderly scholar from Beijing, Yang Shenxiu.

“I mean that it has focused everybody’s attention on lots of problems that people were shrugging aside, or taking only half seriously, till now. Perhaps the warning will have net positive effects, rousing humanity to crisis mode. To take our responsibilities seriously! Girding us with determination to at last to grow up. To bear down and concentrate on solving-”

Anna Arroyo interrupted, snorting with clear disdain.

“Do you have any idea what that calls for? Uncovering and solving thousands of different traps and pitfalls, from a long list of perils that ultimately struck down every other intelligent race out there? Every last one! You’ve seen the telecasts. Those Havana Artifact creatures insist there’s no way to accomplish that.”

“Yes, but is that even logical? I mean, each of their home species was still alive, when it launched its wave of-” Paul stopped, shaking his head. They all recalled what had happened to the homeworld of the helicopter aliens, even as those beings were busy, launching their own bottle-probes. Everyone on Earth knew that was no happy ending, with the Havana Artifact barely launched in time to escape a nuclear holocaust.

In the weeks since that scene was televised, radio and optical telescopes had been swiveled to aim at that source planet. So far, they were picking up nothing, not even the static noise that might come from moderate industry… though new-model sensors and space-borne instruments were being designed and hurriedly built, to peer even closer.

“Surviving as a technological civilization is like crossing a vast minefield,” Anna continued. “Too many mistakes and pitfalls lie in wait-bad tradeoffs or ineludible paths of self-destruction. They say it’s rare, at best, for any advanced culture to last for more than a thousand years. Barely long enough to learn how to make more of these”-she gestured at the worldstone-“and hurl out more copies of the chain letter!”

Well, Bin thought, even a thousand years would be nice. We humans have only had high tech for a century or so, and we seem to have already made a mess of it.

Anna shook her head, sounding resigned and detached. “If it’s all hopeless, then maybe we should take them up on their offer. Let them teach us how to build millions of crystalline escape pods, each carrying one of us to go voyaging, in comfort, across the stars.”

After a long stretch of shyness, Bin now dared to speak.

“Courier of Caution-the emissary in our worldstone-claims that the aliens in Washington are liars.”

“Exactly!” Paul snapped, while tugging at his animatronic crucifix. He had lately grown more willing to treat Bin as a member of the team, even acknowledging his presence with a terse nod, now and then. “They may not be telling the truth. Perhaps they are using this story to push us toward despair and self-destruction-the very scenario that our own envoy warns against.”

Yang Shenxiu agreed, switching from the colloquial Chinese they had all been using to English.

“This is bigger than any of us. We should bring these terrifying stones together. Let them debate each other, before the world!”

All eyes turned to Dr. Nguyen, the Annamese ceramics mogul, who had been pensive and nearly silent for several days. Now he rested both elbows on the teak tabletop and bridged his fingers, blowing a silent whistle through pursed lips, till finally shaking his head.

“I am answerable to a consortium,” he said at last, returning the conversation to impeccable Mandarin, with only a hint of his childhood Mekong accent. “My instructions were to start by getting this stone’s story and determining if there were any differences from the Havana Artifact. That we have accomplished.

“Alas, the second imperative priority was made luminously clear-to seek advantageous technologies, at almost any cost. Either through interrogation or through dissection. Also, using such methods to determine if there are troves of information the thing is holding back.”

With grim, tight lips, Paul Menelaua nodded. Meanwhile, Bin and the others stared, in various degrees of shock.

“The word ‘advantageous’…,” Anna protested, “it assumes we can learn something that the researchers in Washington aren’t discovering-technologies that would give our consortium an edge.

“But we’ve already seen that these objects are similar. Moreover, the entire premise of the story being told by the creature-simulations inside the Havana Artifact… their whole narrative… revolves around a promise that they will give humanity every capability to make more of these stones. It’s the reason they crossed so many light-years! What motive would they have, to hold anything back? Surely that means we’d gain nothing from tearing apart-”

“Not necessarily,” Paul dissented. “If Courier is right, they may have a hidden agenda. In which case they’ll hold back plenty. Sure, they’re teaching humanity how to make crystalline copies. But really, what are they offering? These stone emissaries don’t seem to be all that far in advance of our present capabilities. Now that we’ve seen their ai and simulation technologies at work, we could probably duplicate everything-except those super-propulsion lasers-without any help, in thirty years. Or less.

“No, what has to worry us is the possibility that there may be a lot more to all of this, underneath what they are telling. Only, because the Havana Artifact is openly shared and in public hands, it will never be subjected to harsh scrutiny.”

“But we can cut into our stone, because we’re not answerable to public opinion, is that it?” Anna’s voice cracked with disbelief. “Are you listening to yourself? If Courier is telling the truth, then only he can expose the other stone’s lie! Yet, because we believe him, and have an opportunity to proceed in secret, we’ll start sawing away at him, with lasers and drills?”

“Hey, look. I was only saying-”

She turned around. “You, Xiang Bin, made a point, a few days ago, that some clandestine group or groups may already have one or more of these things. Either complete or a partially working fragment. They might also have heard some variant of the tale told by the Havana Artifact-”

“I hope there weren’t any secretly held stones,” Paul interrupted. “I can think of no worse crime than for selfish people to have clutched such a mystery, all this time, without sharing its warning with the world.”

“Perhaps not telling the world may have been the more beneficent course. More merciful and wise,” Yang Shenxiu muttered. “Better to let people continue in blissful ignorance, if all our efforts will be futile anyway. If humanity is simply doomed to ultimate failure.”

Paul Menelaua pounded his fist on the table. His action-crucifix wriggled in rhythm to the vibrations. “I can’t accept that. We can still act to save ourselves. The Havana aliens must be lying! That stone should be dissected, instead of this one.”

Silence stretched, while Yang Shenxiu seemed uncertain whether to interpret Paul’s shouting as disrespect, or simply a matter of cultural and personality difference. Finally, the scholar shrugged.

“If we might get back on topic,” he said.

“Indeed,” Anna said. “I doubt any group would keep such an active stone secret out of pure altruism. Human beings tend to seek advantage. While rationalizing that they mean well, for the greater good.” She spoke in ironic tones, without looking directly at Dr. Nguyen. “But that’s the problem with this hypothesis of Xiang Bin’s. If any other group already had such a stone, would we not already see new technologies similar to… similar to-”

Her voice stuttered to a stop, as if suddenly realizing what should come next.

Paul filled in for her. “Similar to the advances we’ve all seen, across the last century or so, in the game and entertainment industries? As I just said, we’re already rapidly converging on these abilities. Heck, even military hardware hasn’t advanced as rapidly as Hollywood simulation-tech. Methods for advanced visualization, realistic avatar aindroids that pass Turing tests-”

“All of which may be just incremental progress, propelled by the market, by popular culture, and by human ingenuity,” Dr. Nguyen pointed out. “Honestly, can you name a single breakthrough that did not follow right on the heels of others, in a rapid but natural sequence of inventiveness and desire? Isn’t it a tiresome cliché to credit our own clever discoveries to intervention from above, like claiming that the ancient pyramids could only have been built by UFOs? Must we devolve back to those lurid scenarios about secret laboratories where hordes of faceless technicians analyze alien corpses and flying saucers, without ever telling the citizenry? I thought we had outgrown such nonsense.”

The others looked at their leader, and Bin could tell they were all thinking the same thing.

Aren’t we, in this room, doing exactly that?

Anyway, he added in his thoughts. If anybody does know about another, secret stone, it would be him.

“But of course,” Dr. Nguyen added, spreading his hands with a soft smile, “according to this hypothesis of Xiang Bin’s, we should look carefully at those who have profited most from such technologies. Bollywood moguls. The owners of Believworld and Our-iverse. The AIs Haveit and Fabrique Zaire.”

Bin felt a wave of satisfaction, on hearing one of his ideas called a “hypothesis.” He knew that his guanxi or relationship-credibility had risen, lately. Even so, he had an uneasy feeling about where this was heading.

“But that only makes our purpose here more pressing,” Nguyen continued. “If there are human groups who already have this advantage-access to alien technologies-then they may turn desperate to prevent the International Commission from completing its study of the Havana Artifact. Even worse, there is no telling how long we can keep our own secret. Almost anything we do, any coding or shrouding that we use, could be penetrated by those who have had these methods for some time.

“No. Our only safe recourse would be to get as much out of this worldstone as possible, quickly, in order to catch up.”

Bin realized something, watching Nguyen weave this chain of logic, even as the others nodded in agreement. He is using this argument to support a decision that was already made, far above our heads.

Yang Shenxiu made one last attempt.

“Even if there were no such hidden stones, before, there are now pieces and fragments being discovered, all over the world. Artifact messengers that have drawn attention by sacrificing parts of themselves.”

“But you’ve seen the reports,” Anna responded. “Most of them are too shattered or melted or fused to offer anything coherent.”

“So far. But it has only been a few weeks. And don’t forget those glittering signs that people have detected in space! Undoubtedly from other stones, signaling for attention. Those would be undamaged and surely-”

“-can’t be reached by anyone for at least one or two years,” Anna interrupted again, making Bin frown in disapproval. “That’s how long it will take to gear up the space programs to send unmanned-and then manned-search and retrieval missions, even if preparations proceed at a breakneck pace.”

“Exactly!” Paul pounced. “Now, these things are rare. In a few years, they may be as plentiful as common stones! Those who have an advantage will surely act before that happens.” Then Paul blinked, as if unsure which side of the argument he had just supported.

“None of this changes the essential mission before us.” Dr. Nguyen signaled the end to discussion by adopting a decisive tone. “Xiang Bin, I want to start asking the Courier entity for useful things. No more stories or homesick picture shows about his homeworld. Nor denunciations of the stone in Washington. We need technologies and methodologies, as quickly and practically as possible. Make clear how much depends upon-”

He paused as-ten meters across the lavish chamber-a door opened. At the same instant, curtains of obscurity fell across the table-a dazzle-drapery consisting of countless tiny sparkles that prevented any newcomer from viewing the worldstone.

Too bad it also filled the air with a charged, ozone smell. Bin wrinkled his nose. He didn’t understand how a discretion screen was generated by “laser ionization of air molecules,” but he knew that a simple bolt of black velvet could have accomplished the same thing. Or else locking the door.

A liveried servant hurried in-a young woman with strawberry hair. Bin had spoken to her a few times, a refugee from New Zealand, whose spoken Chinese was broken and coarse, but she lent the place a chaste, decorative charm.

“I asked that we not be disturbed for any-” Nguyen began.

“Sir, I am so sorry, sir.” She bowed low, as if this were Japan, where they still cared about such niceties. “Supervisor Chen sent me to come to you here with discreet message for you. He needs you at command center. Right away.”

Nguyen started to get up, unfailingly polite. “Can you please say what it’s about?”

“Sir, I believe…” The young woman swallowed, then bowed again. “Supervisor Chen is worried that our security has been breached.”

In light of our present, worldwide hysteria over these crazy space Artifact messengers, I’ve decided to animate and hyper-reference one of the most popular person-interviews of ten years ago-back in that blessed era before we learned that we weren’t alone in the universe.

Let me rephrase that. Before we discovered that we actually ARE alone in the universe. Funny, how reality corresponds to both statements, at once, in dismal irony. Either way, it’s time to have another look at this prescient interview. Just will your gaze trackers to follow the keywords “doomsday-fatigue.” Let’s gather a comment-mob and do a full talmudic gloss on this piece.

MARTIN RAMER (FOR THE BBC): We’re here with Jonamine Bat Amittai, compiler of Pandora’s Cornucopia-the epibook that’s been scaring and depressing so many of us ever since Awfulday, conveying all the myriad ways that the universe might have it in for us, bringing an end to human existence. Or perhaps only our dreams.

Either way, it’s been a heady ride through the valley of potential failure and plausible death. Jonamine, how do you explain the popularity of your series?

JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: Men and women have always been attracted to stories about ultimate doom, from the Books of Daniel and Revelation to Ragnarok, from Mayan cycles to Nostradamus, from Dr. Strangelove to Life After People. Perhaps there is an element of schadenfreude, or deriving abstract pleasure from the troubles of others-even if those others will be your own descendants. Or else, some may feel stimulated to relish what they have, in the precious here-and-now, especially if our lives and comforts appear to be on temporary loan from a capricious universe. For billions of people, nostalgia fascinates with the notion that the past is always better and preferable over the future.

I like to think that much of our fascination with this topic arises from our heritage as practical problem-solvers. The curiosity that drew our ancestors toward danger, in order to begin puzzling ways around it.

MARTIN RAMER: But your list is so lengthy, so extensive, so depressingly thorough. Even supposing that we do manage to discover some pitfalls in time, and act prudently to avoid them-

JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: And we have already. Some of them.

MARTIN RAMER: But dodging one bullet seems always to put us in front of another.

JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: Is there a question, Mr. Ramer? Or were you merely stating the obvious?

50.

The art that I practice is the only true form of magic.

It had taken Hamish years to realize this consciously, though he must have suspected it as a child, while devouring fantasy novels and playing whatever interactive game had the best narrative storyline. Later, at university and grad school, even while diligently studying the ornate laws and incantations of science, something had always struck him as wrong about the whole endeavor.

No, wrong wasn’t the word. Sterile. Or dry, or pallid… that is, compared to worlds of fiction and belief.

Then, while playing hooky one day from biomedical research, escaping into the vast realm of a little novel, he found a clue to his dilemma, in a passage written by the author, Tom Robbins.

Science gives man what he needs.

But magic gives him what he wants.

A gross oversimplification? Sure. Yet, Hamish instantly recognized the important distinction he’d been floundering toward.

For all its beauty, honesty, and effectiveness at improving the human condition, science demands a terrible price-that we accept what experiments tell us about the universe, whether we like it or not. It’s about consensus and teamwork and respectful critical argument, working with, and through, natural law. It requires that we utter, frequently, those hateful words-“I might be wrong.”

On the other hand, magic is what happens when we convince ourselves something is, even when it isn’t. Subjective Truth, winning over mere objective fact. The will, triumphing over all else. No wonder, even after the cornucopia of wealth and knowledge engendered by science, magic remains more popular, more embedded in the human heart.

Whether you labeled it faith, or self-delusion, or fantasy, or outright lying-Hamish recognized the species’ greatest talent, a calling that spanned all cultures and times, appearing far more often, in far more tribes, than dispassionate reason! Combine it with enough ardent wanting, and the brew might succor you through the harshest times, even periods of utter despair.

That was what Hamish got from the best yarns, spun by master storytellers. A temporary, willing belief that he could inhabit another world, bound by different rules. Better rules than the dry clockwork rhythms of this one.

The cephalopod emerged from her habitat-cage slowly, cautiously, soon after her handlers opened the gate. Two of her eight tentacles probed the rim as Tarsus brought her bulbous head forward, allowing one big eye-gleaming with feral intelligence-to peer around the rest of the pool. A few rocks and fronds dotted the sandy bottom. Briefly, she tracked some of the fish, darting overhead. But they were too quick and high to try for. She had eaten the slow or unwary, long ago.

With no other danger or opportunity in sight, Tarsus gave a pulse with her siphon, propelling herself toward the only thing of interest. A man-made box with two lids on top.

Whenever they let her out, it meant she had a task to do-one that Tarsus had performed many times before.

Oh, for sure, science wasn’t worthless. Hamish knew there was plenty of good work still to be done in the great laboratories, poking Nature, prying loose more secrets. Research was often a noble endeavor-he still viewed it that way-though one easily led astray.

Only, each night, even back in grad school, Hamish would feel the call of his old-fashioned laptop, and the characters who dwelled within. Dramatic premises kept popping into his head, during each day’s series of tedious meetings and meticulous lab rounds. And most of the stories that poured out through his fingertips revolved around a single, anxious worry.

Yes, the experiment is awesome. The new device seems cool. It may advance progress and make many lives better.

But what if things go horribly, catastrophically wrong?

Suppose, this time, we’ve gone too far?

He would picture slime molds, escaping their petri dish prisons, bursting forth to engulf screaming co-workers, then swarming outside to swallow a city. Some promising new drug might develop awful, delayed side effects, turning your loved ones into terrifying strangers. He envisioned robots escaping all their programmed safeguards, in order to go on killing sprees, then using their former human masters for spare parts. The next tomb unearthed by a naive archaeologist could spew forth poison spores, or hauntings. A new birth control pill instead unleashes Children of the Damned, assisted by aborted fetuses on a rampage! Or do-gooder environmentalists might cripple the nation’s industry and bring on a new stone age. He imagined SETI sky-searches attracting predatory computer viruses that then hypnotize humanity into slavery. Sure, the scenarios were lurid, but that just made them easier, and more fun to write!

Always, of course, there would be a lead character who-with Hamish’s own voice-started each book by wagging his finger, issuing dire warnings against the coming Big Mistake. A protagonist who later (as the dead piled higher) got to say, “I told you so!”

Tarsus used puffs of siphoned water to hover over the box, before bringing all eight of her tentacle arms into play, fondling the polished wooden surface. Bringing one eye close, and then the other, she examined new decorations that adorned each of the two latched covers.

She knew that she would only be allowed to open one of the compartments. As soon as she chose a lid to pry back, the other would lock. Not that it mattered. She always got a prize-a juicy crab-whichever door she selected. And yet, she never picked randomly.

Faces crowded close, human faces, pressing against the other side of a nearby observation pane. Their eyes-the only feature that seemed octopuslike-followed her every movement. Tarsus had a sense that her choice mattered to them. And so, obligingly, she examined the illustrations atop each lid, both visually and with a probing tendril tip.

When his career took off-with books and films and then vivid immersives-jealous complainers gathered round, yapping at Hamish. His stories played loose with scientific fact, they griped. His research consisted of gathering enough vocabulary and jargon to make the outlandish sound plausible.

Even worse (claimed his critics), Hamish Brookeman ignored all the modern safeguards and layers of accountability that earnest men and women had erected, in order to prevent exactly the mistakes that drove his tales. One reviewer even claimed to find a deeper pattern-that every calamity plot Hamish ever wrote arose because his arrogant villain-scientists compulsively insisted upon secrecy. Without that one ingredient, most of the disaster scenarios in his tales would get corrected by wiser heads. So, wasn’t his real complaint about doing bold things in the dark? The older, more magical way?

Wouldn’t most of his warnings become moot, in a world with more openness, rather than less?

Such talk used to hurt, at first. But in time, Hamish learned to ignore the critics, even those who called him a “traitor to science.” He accomplished it quite simply, by writing them into his next tale-with thinly disguised name changes-to get eviscerated on cue. That was satisfaction enough. Ironically, it allowed him to stay genially mild and pleasant to almost everybody out here, in the merely real world.

Tarsus found no meaning in either of the symbols.

On rare occasions, she had recognized one or both, when the figures were shaped like things she knew. A fish or a simple octopus, or the spindly motif of a man. Far more often, they were just square-cornered emblems-combinations of the pure, flat, static colors that humans seemed to prefer… so different from the subtle hues and shades that rippled across the photo-active skin of any cephalopod, quicker than thought, letting an octopus like Tarsus blend into almost any background.

These emblems just lay there, as always, dull and uninspiring. Only, this time at least the shapes were unusual. They had the stretched outlines of air-breathing creatures, with limbs to carry them about, on land.

But they weren’t human.

And so, for a while, especially during the years with Carolyn, Hamish found some happiness, playing in one cosmos after another of his own devising-wherein he could be God, decreeing harsh punishments for ambitious vanity, meting out justice for the sin of hubris and technological pride.

Anyway, didn’t civilization obviously value him far more as a spinner of scary tales than it ever had before, as a researcher?

And who am I, to argue with civilization?

Yet, as the years passed and his voice grew stronger-becoming a leader in the rising Renunciation Movement-there came strange pangs that tasted like regret.

Which brought him around, full circle, to the very topic he had tried pushing from his ever busy thoughts. The message of the artilens-the aliens dwelling inside the virtual space of the Havana Artifact.

Nobody survives, they assured.

Not as organic beings, dwelling on the fragile, filmy surface of planets, exposed to innumerable dangers from above, below, and on every side. Plus countless hazards of their own making. That type of life is just too fragile, prone to countless missteps and mistakes. Nursery worlds like your Earth are fine for spawning new intelligent races. But then you must move on to higher states of being, before time runs out.

It left Hamish in a quandary. One small part of him felt vindicated by the aliens’ desolate story. The portion that had always viewed civilization-and its pompous, self-important fury-to be futile. A side of him that knew, all along, how inadequate human beings were. A species inherently doomed, whether by God, fate, or ornery nature, from very the start.

Now? Upon learning that most, or all, other intelligent races fell for the same long list of lethal mistakes? That only seemed to reinforce the point. In fact, no event ever gave as much energy as this one had, to the Renunciation Movement. New recruits and donors were flocking to the Prophet and his cause. Drawn by his latest, brilliant sales pitch.

“The aliens never said that all species die…,” Tenskwatawa had gone on air to preach. “All they are saying is that such species stop being detectable as ambitious, high-tech civilizations.

“That means there is an out!” the Prophet continued. “A way to avoid the many pitfalls and extinction modes described by the aliens. And that way is to opt out of the game!

“Others out there-perhaps many others-may have chosen to step back from the hi-tech precipice. They chose to avoid the minefields, quicksand pits, and self-destruction modes, by the simplest means possible.

“By settling back into older, wiser ways.

“By ceasing to move forward.”

Tarsus contemplated the patterns of colors. One of them was jagged and symmetrical, kind of like a starfish. The color and texture were strange, however, offering a tangy synesthesia, an inferred taste that was not unlike a clam with flecks of manganese nodule in its shell.

The other emblem was visually more rotund-it resembled (to her eye) something akin to a jellyfish. But under her stroking tentacle, there was a bumpy roughness to the imprinted image that smelled like time… vast amounts of it, congealed and stale.

She didn’t care for either of the patterns, but Tarsus knew that she must contemplate them for an allotted interval, and then select one as preferable over the other, or else the hatch covers would not loosen. So she fondled the paper coverings, peered at them, even used her beak to take samples, stroking with her tongue and musing on whatever subtleties lay beyond mere wood pulp and waterproof paste…

… at which point she chose.

A murmur of excitement yanked Hamish out of his reverie and back to the present. Most of the onlookers in the Cephalo-Delphi Center were leaning toward an observation window, separating them from the large aquarium tank, where a famous prognosticating octopus had finally made her choice, opening one of two hatches representing alternate possible futures.

Having gained access, Tarsus was now dismembering a crab, with relish, ignoring the creature’s bitter resistance with snapping claws. Her caretaker, Dr. Nolan, announced the augury results with evident satisfaction.

“Tarsus has spoken. On the basis of her choice, our investor co-op has purchased ten thousand wager-shares on the Chicago Predictions Exchange, betting that the International Contact Commission will continue to be deadlocked in stalemate for at least another week, delaying their recommendations for what to do about the alien artifact.

“Given that Tarsus has accurately forecast outcomes on nine of her last twelve tries-well above statistical significance-we expect that other investors will follow suit. And now, if you will follow me to the reception area, there will be refreshments while I answer any questions.”

Hamish hung back, feeling miffed as the crowd followed Dr. Nolan. This was supposed to be his morning with Tarsus. But that appointment for a private audience with the eight-armed soothsayer had been put off, preempted, so that the keepers might ask their octopus-seer another silly, useless question about the Havana Artifact.

There was a time when they would not treat the famous Hamish Brookeman that way. As recently as a few weeks ago.

After all, what did it matter if that raucous pack of scientists, scholars, and politicians in Virginia dithered over their report? With the world spiraling into disorder, frenzy, or despair, was any public statement likely to make a difference?

In fact, Hamish had made his appointment to consult Tarsus several months ago, before anyone knew about crystals filled with ersatz aliens. Back when his top concern had been the hunt for the Basque Chimera, the infant son of Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte. A search that now seemed secondary, even inconsequential.

In fact, he had been contemplating a completely different question to ask Tarsus, today. Something much more timely, even personal.

And if that made Tenskwatawa angry?

So what. Let him hunt for the Neanderthal boy without my help!

Hamish still nursed hurt feelings over the snub, back at that elite gathering in Switzerland, when the leader of the Renunciation Movement kept him away from the main event, a private viewing of Rupert Glaucus-Worthington’s greatest treasure-a crystal skull that must have once been an emissary from space. Hamish would have missed it all, but for intervention by mysterious third parties. Ever since that evening, he had felt loyalties slipping. Not his belief in Renunciation; that was still firm. But his willingness to leave all decisions to one leader.

A leader who was now firming up an alliance with trillionaire lords.

Well? argued part of his mind-the devil’s advocate. Is there any other group that can make renunciation work? It won’t happen in a democracy. At least the trillies have experience managing great enterprises and making decisions from the shadows. History shows that only an oligarchy can suppress technology’s breakneck race ahead. And that conference in Switzerland showed one encouraging aspect. All those boffin papers, on how an elite can rule with noblesse oblige-at least they seem to be taking their new responsibilities seriously.

Anyway, what choice will we have?

Humanity could only survive by rejecting the aliens’ path. By returning to its roots. To the social pattern that ruled every other civilization but this one.

And yet-

– yet his own role and importance in these unfolding events seemed to be diminishing, day by day. Even when the Prophet asked his advice, it seemed off-hand, even perfunctory. And Hamish was coming to realize something bitter, but true.

He did not want to become just another boffin-lackey for the new oligarchy.

Hamish fondled a small, sealed container, no bigger than his knuckle, in his jacket pocket. It contained a single contaict lens. If he slipped it on, it might put him back in touch with the mysterious strangers who once guided him through the halls of Rupert Glaucus-Worthington’s expansive mansion, leading him by secret passages to witness the New Lords in action. To see, with his own eyes, how Rupert and his peers confronted the unexpected. And that moment had changed him.

In their expressions of dull surprise, he had not seen the visage of wise leaders. Not Plato’s philosopher kings, but stunned and ignorant men, clinging to preconceptions, as likely to make grand errors as anybody else.

In which case, are they any more qualified to pick a path for humanity, than I am?

Before Hamish could follow that mental track much further, something interrupted the chain of sullen thoughts. Wriggles, his little earring aissistant, spoke up.

“Hamish, something has happened.

“It has to do with Roger Betsby. You asked to be informed of any significant developments.”

Hamish blinked.

Betsby? Oh, right. The Strong Affair. That matter had seemed so pressing-to save the career of an absurd fool of a U.S. senator from his self-inflicted public relations fiasco. Now it struck Hamish as so… P.A.… or pre-Artifact. True, Senator Strong could still be helpful in formulating right policies for the new era. Yet, the first thing to cross his mind was that Hamish looked forward to seeing the senator’s nemesis again. To spar once more with the doctor’s agile mind.

What has Betsby done now? He caught himself smiling in anticipation, as if relishing the next clever move of a worthy chess opponent.

Fishing in his jacket pocket, Hamish brushed past the small contaict lens container, choosing instead a larger, rectangular shape that he swiftly unfolded into a pair of tru-vu goggles.

“Show me,” he commanded Wriggles.

But, even expecting something unexpected, what erupted before Hamish struck him numb with shock.

If you are watching this, it means that I’m dead, or missing, or so mind-altered that I can no longer transmit the complicated daily stop-code on this, my final statement to the world.

My name is Roger Betsby. I am… or was… a physician serving one of the refugee communities in the Detroit Renewal District. Blink here, and my homunculus will take you on a tour of who I was and what I stood for. But I bet you are more likely interested in hearing my deathbed denunciation.

First a confession. On October the twelfth of last year, while pretending to be a waiter at a luncheon of the First Americans Club, I slipped a substance into the beverage consumed by Senator Crandall Strong. Among THESE links are vid recordings showing me in the act. There are also clips-redistributed by scores of newsnexers-of the senator’s subsequent speech, which started in his normal fashion, with a low, mild voice, but soon rising in tone and volume as he typically recited from a long list of complaints and grudges.

With increasing vigor, Strong condemned the current U.S. Congress, for refusing to fully fund the Second Reparations Act. He disdained the present administration, for ceding more environmental authority to UNEPA. The Canadians, he excoriated for limiting New Lands immigration, and the courts, for constraining the damage awards won by Victims of the Melt, in their lawsuit against the Denialist Cabal.

Soon, as usual, he moved on from enemies who were merely social, legal, or political. and laid into those he has long proclaimed the real villains-all the would-be “godmakers,” using technology and science to arrogate powers of the Almighty.

Millions have watched this particular speech, which-as usual-built toward a powerful, fuming rant. Only, this time, going well beyond a mere rant, it spiraled out of control! Instead of maintaining a high-but-controlled level of righteous anger, all the way to a thundering end, it became pyrotechnic, racist, scatological even for Crandall Strong.

You can see the transition, about eight minutes in-right here-as he starts looking perplexed, licking his lips and then pressing them together, hard. At this point, he begins gesturing more dramatically than usual, pounding on the lectern. Observe his voice growing incrementally louder, his complaints more florid and accusations more intense. But note, underneath it all, an expression of puzzlement, worry, and something else… a growing sense of frantic need.

His regular stump speech always starts with contemporary political complaints, but then moves on to condemnation of modernity and technological “progress,” culminating in calls for all such matters to be placed in better and wiser hands. Only this time, the smooth sequence, ramping up from low, reasonable tones to vehement indignation, seems off-beat.

See? Clearly, he knows that something has gone wrong. But his response is not to finish early and seek help. It is to push ahead. Raising the stakes. Upping the ante and doubling-down. Getting more vehement… then choleric… then apoplectic!

Now, you may have guessed that I have a low opinion of this politician. I consider him to be a mean-minded demagogue of the worst order. It happens that I also dislike his particular views on a wide range of matters. But my purpose in slipping him a mind-altering compound was not to undermine the Renunciation Movement. I think they are wrong, but they have a legitimate right to make their points and to argue rationally with the rest of us. Who knows? They might even be partly right about human destiny.

No, what I did on that day was perform a medical experiment. If Senator Strong did not suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, then the drug that I gave him-a completely legal substance-would have had no effect at all. He would have given his usual, overly dramatic and illogical polemic, without any ill effects.

So why did it have the effect of ultimately driving him into a pyrotechnic fury, screaming vicious epithets and a series of horrific racial slurs?

Let’s rewind to the first time Senator Strong got that baffled look on his face. See here? I’ll overlay a flush tone analysis. And now add a voice stress graph. Compare the overlays to these other frames, taken from very similar speeches, at almost the same point, where he’s peaking at his first big polemical crescendo. His first dramatic thump on the lectern.

In those other speeches, the stress and flush-tone data show that he’s derived a jolt of intense pleasure from the moment. And yes, that is common with dramatic extroverts. But note here on October the twelfth. The jolt-the sudden wash of enjoyment isn’t there. And hence the puzzled expression. Clearly, he had been counting on getting that usual bump, from indignantly denouncing his enemies.

When it did not come, what was his response? To just go on with giving his speech, performing the day’s task with professional skill and accomplishing his goal? Or to pull back, when something has gone wrong, and to reassess the situation?

No. He did neither thing.

Instead, watch as Senator Strong pounds harder. He bears down, grinding his teeth between the sentences, growling, even shouting the same words he had spoken, on other occasions, with mere, measured anger.

Can you see, yet, the effect of the drug I fed him? It did not cause his vehemence or loss of control, nor does it have any known effects upon cognition or judgment.

It simply quashed the chemical-hormonal pleasure jolt that he normally receives from righteous indignation! That and nothing more.

Go ahead and blink here to look up Anhedonium. It is a recent advance over naltrexone, which was long used to suppress the surge reinforcements of heroin and other addictive substances. Anhedonium acts with accumbenol to block dopamine receptors only in the nucleus accumbens and two other carefully targeted sites. It is increasingly used in drug abuse clinics like one I operate in Detroit. Its simple effect is to interrupt the reinforcement cycle of most addictions.

Now, almost any habit can be called an “addiction” if its repetition is reinforced in the human brain, by rhythmic release of pleasure-mediating chemicals. The core process is not, in itself, harmful. Indeed, it is deeply human and essential! Pleasure-based repetition reinforcement is partly responsible for our tight bonding to our children, our husbands and wives, or the tendency to keep returning our attention to music, or beauty, or the glorious exercise of skill. It contributes to the joy that some derive from prayer. These are some of the good and wholesome things that we are glad to be addicted to!

Lately, experts have come to view drug abuse as little more than a hijacking of this normal human process. Heroin and ecstasy and moondust all offer shortcuts into brain mechanisms that served a real, evolutionary function. Only, their crude, sledgehammer attack upon the pleasure-reinforcement process seldom helps to make lives better… more often it ruins them.

We now know there are other ways to hijack this system. In some people, a hedonic gratification pattern can be achieved simply by entering certain frames of mind. For example, the cyclical jolt from gambling can be a genuine addiction, requiring as much effort to break as cocaine or kicx. Habitual thrill seekers, video game potatoes, and Wall Street “wizards” have all been shown to follow similar patterns. Once aboard the roller-coaster, they cannot let go. One mild version can be seen in those riveted to spectator sports…

… and then there are the indignation junkies. People who regularly get high off self-righteousness and sanctimony. You know the kind-we all do. (Any normal person has seen the rush I’m referring to, playing across that face in the mirror!)

In fact, many will accuse me of proud sanctimony, in perpetrating what I did against Senator Strong! Be my guest. Study my life and see if my good works and strong opinions fit the pattern of addiction. Could be.

But I am not the topic here.

Years ago, when the medical community announced that self-righteous indignation can be an addiction, as severe as any drug abuse, I expected the public to take notice. Surely (I thought) the vast majority of moderate, reasonable people will now stop listening to those vehement wrath-junkies-the essers-out there, constantly spewing hate from pulpits of the left or right, or religious or paranoiac mania? Now that the pattern is understood, won’t this tend to disempower the irate, who refuse to negotiate, and instead empower those who want to engage in reason? To listen to their neighbors and work out pragmatic solutions to problems?

Those who prefer positive-sum games.

Won’t this now-verified scientific fact undermine the frantic types, who have ruined argument and discourse in public life, by portraying their opponents in stark terms of pure evil, opposed by pharisaical good? By showing that their fury arises out of an addictive chemical high that they secrete within their own skulls?

To my disappointment, the major media pretty much ignored this revelation. After all, they draw nourishment from “them-versus-us” dichotomies and the polarization of pure-minded sides. They saw no benefit in any shift from conflict toward reasonable debate. (Boring!)

I realized; for people to understand the significance of this scientific breakthrough, there would have to be an event the media could not ignore.

There must be an example. So I provided one.

Why did Senator Strong go crazy, that day? And for several days thereafter? He was fed no mind-bending or soul-twisting poison. He ingested a medicine used only to deny addicts the feedback pleasure of their high. And so, when he did not get the accustomed jolt from sanctimonious rage, he upped the level of his rancor, in search of the buzz, the jizz, the zing.

And when that didn’t work, he upped it again, and again, as addicts do. Never pausing to think Maybe I had better stop now, he kept hurtling faster and faster toward the edge-as addicts do-ignoring reason or consequences, in search of satisfaction. To scratch an accustomed itch that was now beyond his ability to control.

That’s it. That was my scheme and my experiment.

That it worked, is inarguable.

It is also undeniable that I broke the law, along with the codes of my profession. I administered a legal medicine, for an appropriately diagnosed illness… but I did so in an unethical and illicit way, never consulting my patient or warning him of possible outcomes. And for that I should, by all rights, go to jail. Certainly, I am willing to take my punishment, according to the tradition of Gandhi, with a measure of cheerful acceptance.

Only, meanwhile, it is done. Senator Strong cannot escape blame for his outrageous behavior by claiming “It was the drug!” The opinions he expressed were entirely his own and no one forced him to express them. His behavior occurred because he is an addict-a term that the public rightfully disdains.

Above all, now millions will think about all this. They will view differently all the self-righteousness junkies in their midst-even ones they agree with! They will see how such people use their relentless passion and addict stamina to take over most advocacy groups, at all ends of the political and social spectrum, turning argument into jihad and negotiation into stark war between good and evil… or evil versus good.

You and your neighbors will never view the fervent ardor of ecstatic anger the same way. Now you’ll see it and recognize the symptoms of an illness-almost exactly the same as smoking crack or opium.

And, maybe then you’ll feel empowered to face down the vociferously indignant. You may even decide to join together with other mild-mannered, rational, and sensible folk, to reclaim the gracious gift of our ancestors. The power of calmly reasoning together. If that happens, I’ll take my punishment with serenity. A martyr for calm adulthood.

Unless that drive-for dramatic martyrdom-has been my own sanctimonious trip! I admit it’s a possibility. Any honest person ought to.

Oh, but then, if you are watching this right now, I am probably dead. So I matter even less than I ever did.

Anyway, this was never about me. Or even Senator Strong.

It’s about us.

51.

Hamish pulled off the tru-vus, which had gone blurry, somehow. Perhaps they were defective. He wiped his eyes with the back of a wrist.

What happened to Betsby? Did the senator arrange to have him killed? But that jerk Strong promised he would keep hands off, till I reported my results!

Hamish put the immersion glasses back on. Blits flurried around the periphery of vision, responding to his attention gaze, pupil dilation, and tooth-click or subvocal commands. Hamish was so out of practice that involuntary eye-flicks and grunts kept causing ripples, disrupting the feedback loops, like pebbles dropped into a pond.

Wriggles intervened. His little digaissistant swept away all the mere gossip and rumors, picking, distilling, and summarizing facts.

Apparently, Dr. Roger Betsby had fallen to his death from a second-level balcony of the Detroit-Pontiac domed stadium, pushed over (inadvertently, according to preliminary reports) by a convulsing patient. One who was under care for an addiction ailment-how ironic.

Of course, some apparent “accidents” weren’t. So, police officials promised to investigate any possibility of foul play, especially now that Betsby’s death-confession had begun climbing the charts, accompanied by a tide of conspiracy theories. Hamish made a mental note to send one of his favorite contract operatives to lend the authorities a hand. He felt a personal stake in getting to the bottom of this.

Damn. I’ve found so few minds I respect.

If Strong did this, instead of leaving me to handle Betsby, then our deal is off. A lot of deals are off.

Hamish closed his eyes.

Unbidden, a steady stream of fantasies had been bubbling through his mind, the last few days-as if his subconscious were trying to find a way around the dour conundrum offered by the Artifact aliens. As always, the ideas manifested as dramatic plots for a book, or movie, or interactive. Till now, each of them had seemed-well-untenable, even cheesy. Borrowed, blatantly, from earlier works of fictional paranoia. Disappointment with himself had darkened his mood.

Only now, he found himself mulling part of the posthumous confession of the man some were calling the Saint of the Silverdome. Hamish always prided himself in his memory for good dialogue.

It is undeniable that I broke the law… I administered a legal medicine for a real illness… but in an illegal way, never consulting my patient. For that I’ll go to jail… accepting punishment according to the traditions of Gandhi and the other great martyrs, with acceptance.

Oh, that was good stuff. Truly memorable. In a way, Hamish kind of envied Roger Betsby, whose real experiment had not been medical, but social. Perhaps all of this publicity, heightened by his death, would indeed turn the attention of a fickle public toward the lesson the Doctor sought to teach. A lesson about maturity versus sanctimonious fury.

Maybe. Briefly.

But that outcome wasn’t what concerned Hamish. No, what struck him was a sudden, bolt-like realization. Awed by Betsby’s innovative technique for getting a point across.

A confession is always more credible than a denial.

Hamish felt a chasm in the pit of his stomach, a cavity made up of fear. The action that he suddenly found himself contemplating would change everything. There were terrible dangers, possibly as great as the ones that Roger Betsby faced. But also potential rewards. Plus a very real chance to alter the world, something that his genre fictions-despite all their dire-warning intensity-had never achieved.

Could I actually do this? Shall I study the idea first? Working out all the pros and cons and details?

Or would that only risk losing the moment, the sheer, impulsive genius!

In fact, there was only a very narrow window of time. Worldwide economies were teetering as thousands committed suicide, tens of thousands rioted, millions stayed home from work, and billions muttered angrily at their tru-vus and tellai-screens, driven into a contagious funk by the message of the artilens. And, while regular political institutions teetered, certain cabals of planetary power dealers were getting set to make their big move. One that Hamish had striven for years to assist-

– only now he felt a new certainty-that he did not want the “solution” being offered by Tenskwatawa, or the oligarchs, after all.

“Mr. Brookeman?”

His eyelids parted. Slightly startled, Hamish looked down to see the petite lab director, half his height, Dr. Nolan, standing just a meter away.

“Mr. Brookeman, I want to repeat our apology for having preempted your reserved time with Tarsus. I’m sure you understand that fast-breaking news events get priority.”

Fast-breaking news? Well, maybe. But the question you asked the octopus-oracle was both boring and dumb. Still, he maintained a calm and friendly smile.

“I’ll tell you what,” she continued. “Why don’t we offer you time with Patmos, our parrot-prognosticator? Her record is almost as good as Tarsus’ and we can give you a substantial discount.”

Hamish nodded.

“Very well. Lead on.”

As he followed the keeper of animal auguries, Hamish considered the question he might pose-a very different one than Tenskwatawa had sent him to ask.

If I confess my crime, will it help me influence world events and bring outcomes I’ll desire?

He would have to simplify the query further, of course, and couch it as a yes-no, either-or choice for the feathered fortuneteller to pick between, opening one labeled box or the other for a tasty treat. In truth, Hamish wasn’t sure he believed in these supposed seers. Most reputable scientists scoffed at the whole idea, attributing their “track record” to statistical flukes. But as long as he was already here…

What if the answer is yes? Do I have the guts to carry out my plan?

Even if I find the courage, I’d require help to pull it off. But who? I’ll need people with technical skills, who are good at acting in secret… and quickly…

His subconscious was already ahead of him. Hamish realized this when he found his left hand absently fondling a small case in his pocket, containing a single contaict lens.

They helped me once… my mysterious benefactors… to see through the banality of the aristocrats’ club.

They said I had only to get in touch, again, if I wanted to go farther down a rabbit hole. This certainly would qualify as a leap!

But do I dare work with people I don’t even know?

Can I trust them?

Will they even go along with what I have in mind?

Would anybody?

Hamish heard a squawking sound ahead, as Dr. Nolan entered a chamber whose walls were covered with drip-veg hangings, lending the place a jungle ambiance.

“Awr. Hi Jill! Hi Jill! Hello-o-o stranger! Awk! Tall! Awk!”

Shifting her weight on a wooden perch, a gray parrot rocked eagerly, ready to get to work, building her moderate, but above-average, score in the Worldwide Predictions Market. Of course she didn’t know about any of that, nor did she care whether her tally of successful forecasts qualified as prophecy, coincidence, or statistical fluke. Perhaps (according to some) not caring might be part of the reason for it all.

Hamish spent a few minutes refining his paired, yes-no questions, writing them on two slips of paper, then inserting them behind clear labels, covering separate hatches in a wooden cabinet. Then he stood back, still clutching the little container in his pocket, breathing shallowly as his heart raced.

Am I really this credulous? This superstitious?

Of course I am. Or I would never have written so many tales about the price of hubris and ambitious pride.

Only now, shall I attempt to alter human destiny, through actions of my own? Not via stories on a screen or the pages of a novel, but in real life?

Isn’t that arrogant, in its own right?

Minutes later, he had his answer, Patmos chuttered happily, fussing her way through devouring a nut. The door she had chosen lay open behind her.

Wordlessly, with barely a nod of thanks, Hamish turned to go.

First order of business? A quiet place to slip on the contaict lens and commune with the people behind it, seeking their help to carry out a desperate, impromptu plan. A plan to rescue the world from diabolic alien invaders.

If this works, I’ll owe the inspiration to you, Roger.

Rest in peace.

Hello. My name is Hamish Brookeman, and with this statement I admit and avow to having committed a crime.

First, though, I’m told that I am the 246th most famous person on the planet. But for those of you who still don’t know who I am, here’s my bio. A lot of folks say that I’m pretty good as a story-maker, scenario-builder, vid-director, and so on. In fact, those very skills are why I was invited, some years ago, to join a conspiracy. A scheme that I once believed in-

– that I now confess to be monstrous and wrong.

In my defense, let me say the plot didn’t seem bad, at first. Those behind it appeared sincere, claiming we’d save the world! A world riven by political, military, and ethnic feuds that threatened Armageddon in dozens of ways. A world that’s withered and worn out from ecological neglect and overuse by ten billion ravenous consumers. A world where venerable traditions hang in tatters and every day brings more news of insolent technological “wonders” that might end us all.

Was it still possible to divert lemming-humanity from its doom?

The concept we came up with was simple, having been portrayed in science fiction dramas going all the way back to a classic Outer Limits episode and one of the great comic books of the 1980s.

How to get all peoples and nations to put down their petty squabbles and unite in common cause? Why, by offering them a shared enemy.

A credible external threat would provoke the goodwill and fellowship that humans always show to other members of their tribe, when confronted by dangerous outsiders. Across history, leaders used this method to rally their subjects.

But how to accomplish it? A lot of ideas that seem elegant, say in a movie, prove impossible to implement, especially by a small and secret cabal. By the time they came to me, the group had already considered the problem, long and hard. They knew better than to try anything too ornate, like forging a complete “alien spaceship,” or even the partial wreckage of one. The world’s scientists and sages would quickly discover telltale signs of Earthly origin, in every alloy and part, down to the distribution of isotopes.

As for the invaders themselves? Well, not even great nations like China, America, or Brazil are so scientifically advanced that they could fake an extraterrestrial being, down to organs, metabolism, and a foreign genome.

But the Group did have one area of advantage. Simulation technologies had been squirreled away for quite some time-a quirky holographic technique here, a crystalline storage method there, some tricks of ai-set aside by skilled workers and innovators in Hollywood, in the defense establishments, and gaming industries. Separately, they didn’t amount to much. But together? Well, imagine how dedicated these far-seeing idealists had to be, in order to keep their best breakthroughs hidden, instead of exploiting them to get richer! In sum, together, the sequestered techniques added up (we thought) just enough, so that their combination might seem impressively advanced, even far ahead of contemporary human abilities.

And that’s where I came in. Who was better qualified to write the back story? The scenario. The characters. Their behaviors and motives. The things they’d say… in order to fool the world with simulated aliens?

Of course, by now you all know I’m referring to the Havana Artifact and its collection of “extraterrestrial emissaries.”

And yes, I am hereby claiming, confessing, avowing, and admitting It was all a great, big hoax!

But hang on a moment. Let me finish. For, you see, there remained arguments over how to present our simulations. Perhaps hide a transmitter aboard one of the big, deep space probes sent out by ESA, NASA, or Sinospatial-perhaps the Maffeo Polo or Voyager Twelve-heading out to Uranus or Neptune. The clever notion was for our little parasitic device to detach from the main ship, just as the mission swung close to Jupiter, for a gravity slingshot maneuver. If done properly, at that crucial point, the two pieces might go very different ways. (See the concept illustrated here.)

A few years later, the secret transmitter would then turn toward Earth and beam a SETI signal to our planet, purporting to be from some faraway world and laying down a threat that might unite humanity! It was a clever plan… but impractical, I’m told. The space agencies and their astronautics experts might not be fooled for long. They would soon trace back the orbits and figure it all out. Anyway, smuggling a parasitic cargo onto a scientific planetary probe is about as easy as persuading your wife to hire three Swedish “nannies.” It can’t be done.

So my fellow conspirators settled on the Artifact Option. No need to stow away on a voyage to deep space. Instead, use all those hidden techniques to make a simple block of reactive crystal that could be powered by sunlight alone. Embed the right simulation programs… then simply release it into orbit near the Earth! In such a way that it would have to be noticed, and grabbed, by one of the debris-snagging teams… ideally, by some astronaut who was bored, burnt out, and easy to fool. Drop a hint or two, get him assigned to work in the desired area-and there you have it!

At the surface, our deception worked better than any of us could have hoped or imagined. And I admit, I felt pretty darned proud of the results. Especially my aliens! It was some of my best writing, ever.

Oh, sure, some people have cried “hoax!” since the beginning. But we expected that. So long as a majority believed there were genuine aliens, and that First Contact had finally been achieved, then the whole world’s attention would zero in on the same thing, at the same time…

Only, then some things went wrong. I began to see the story go off track. Our synthetic aliens, simulated inside the Artifact, started diverting from my script! Moreover, instead of uniting the world, this “First Contact” was having the opposite effect, splintering society and causing everything to fracture!

Then came the Core Message. This thing about making millions of copies was bad enough. But to claim that nobody survives?

That’s when I realized… I’d been had. In my gullibility, I had lent my services, my creativity, to a conspiracy. One that had communicated with me only by encrypted overlays, never in person. What had seemed a prudent security measure, I now saw as a way to keep me from ever tracking down my comrades in crime. Compatriots who-for some reason-had chosen to alter the message, giving it a twist I never intended. From hope to despair.

Why? I honestly don’t know! When I wrote my scenario, I considered the possibility that some ulterior motive underlay the Group’s surface idealism. Perhaps I was a dupe and all of this would turn out to be just a publicity stunt for some new interactive game. Oh, I turned out to be a dupe, all right. But the underlying scheme was deeper, more malevolent than anything I imagined.

I’m running out of time, so let me leave all the details for later. Suffice it to say, for now, that I’m ready, even eager, to make up for my role in this crime. It is undeniable that I broke the law… attempting a hoax to startle the world out of its modern illness. A medicine that might have worked, if done properly.

It now seems likely that for my part in the hoax-for my sin of pride in thinking I could “save the world”-I will almost certainly spend time in jail, or worse. But it feels cleansing to get the truth out there… and to counter a plot that I now recognize as misguided, even vile.

To the authorities, let me assure you, I’ll cooperate, tell all, and accept my fair punishment with good grace, according to the traditions of Gandhi, King, Solzhenitsyn, and the other fighters for truth.

As for the rest of you, please accept my humble regrets for contributing to this unfortunate disruption in your lives. Lives you all can return to, now that we-humanity-are once again alone in our universe.

52.

“… ideally, by some astronaut who was bored, burnt out, and easy to fool…”

Gerald felt all eyes swivel toward him.

“Ouch!” Genady commented. Akana audibly ground her teeth.

“Well, he accomplished one thing,” Emily murmured. “The sumbitch just vaulted from 246 to number nine in just a few minutes. The fastest fame-flame in history! Sorry, Gerald, he just streaked past you.”

“Hush,” was his only answer. None of them had picked up the first airing of Brookeman’s broadcast. By now it was ten minutes old. Almost ancient. World commentary had already tsunamied past all records, overwhelming the gisting systems. Yet the periphery of Gerald’s tru-vu seemed remarkably calm. It was set to such a high filter level that only a few, ultra high-reputation virts fluttered around the center image, a tall, slender sci-fi author, uttering his “confession” in dry, even unctuously sincere tones.

“That’s when I realized… I’d been had. In my gullibility, I had lent my services, my creativity, to a conspiracy…”

Gerald sighed. The man was good. In fact, he had never seen the like. Right now it didn’t matter that most of the high reputation virts were glimmering phrases like Bullshit artist! and Absurd! These were comments by reputable scientists and technology experts, not the man or woman on the street.

“It is undeniable that I broke the law… attempting a hoax to startle the world out of its modern illness.”

Ben Flannery let out a sigh that was partly pure admiration.

“Do you see how that pakeha bastard just boosted his credibility, by playing the willing martyr card? Who would confess to a crime, if it weren’t true? I recall something…” He scratched his head. “Someone else did that recently.” Ben wasn’t wearing specs, so he didn’t get an instant answer. “Oh, but we are in for it now!”

Keeping his thoughts to himself, Gerald mused.

Are we? Any worse off than before? Thank heavens at least the Artifact was being kept busy by several technicians across the room, downloading technical information, so the alien entities weren’t getting this feed. Best to ponder how to break it to them, that they were a “hoax.”

“To the authorities, let me assure you, I’ll cooperate, tell all, and accept my fair punishment with good grace, according to the traditions of Gandhi, King, Solzhenitsyn, and the other great fighters for truth.”

Emily pounded the table and Genady groaned.

One of the nearby virt-boards still glimmered where Gorosumov had been presenting his latest theory-that the Artifact was less like a chain letter than a living species. One with an “r-type reproductive strategy,” akin to ocean creatures who spew huge numbers of larvae into ocean vastness, so very much like space-gambling that one or two might find a warm place to grow and reproduce again. A fascinating comparison-and one more reason to resent Brookeman’s bizarre interruption.

“Lives you all can return to, now that we-humanity-are once again alone in our universe.”

At last, the lanky author was finished, smiling into the camera with an artful mix of boyish bashfulness and the noble mien of a saint. The scene dissolved…

… at which point the flurry of blits crowding Gerald’s tru-vus became a storm, no matter how high the filter settings. He took off his specs and glanced across the room again-

– at the table where his famous space Artifact gleamed, surrounded by cameras and other recording devices, downloading the first wave of technical diagrams and recipes that might help humanity to make more crystal probes, eventually, if that course was chosen. Just delivering tutorials might keep the alien machine occupied for months, possibly many years.

The Oldest Member was adamant that we switch to this mode, after only a few days conversing with individual artilens. Time to get down to business, he insisted. Too bad. Taken one at a time, the passengers were varied, fascinating, puzzling… and now Hamish Brookeman claims to have written them all!

For some reason that he couldn’t pin down, Gerald had begun thinking of Om and Brookeman as two sides of a coin. As co-symptoms of a greater puzzle.

Patrice Tshombe, the expert in animal behavior manipulation, commented on what they all just witnessed. Brookeman’s public statement.

“Impressive.”

Emily whirled. “Impressive? That… that liar! We’ve analyzed the Hoax Hypothesis from every angle. Some of the alien technologies may not be many decades ahead of ours, but there are lots! The best labs will spend years prying them apart. No way any little cabal of do-gooder Hollywood connivers-”

“Then there’s the orbital intersection,” Genady added. “It was spiraling in from deep space, along a trajectory where no human launch ever-”

But he, in turn, was interrupted by Haihong Ming.

“Refutation is even simpler, my comrades. The stones that are exploding underground, sacrificing parts of themselves in order to cry out and be retrieved. And those that glitter from the asteroid belt. These make the concept so absurd, one has to wonder that anyone at all pays heed to this Brookeman person.”

Oh, yeah. Gerald blinked, and gave the Chinese agent a wry smile. Sometimes the most obvious thing wasn’t the first to come to mind. And yet-

“Those shattered crystals and distant glitters are terribly intangible,” Gerald admitted. “We all know there’s a large fraction of the population that has trouble with logical abstractions. It would be different if we had a second stone that worked. That would seem palpable and no one would even listen to this guy.”

There was the bigger reason to want another artifact, of course. The story that it told might be different.

“Still,” continued Haihong Ming, “I have to wonder. Why did Mr. Brookeman even try this?”

Akana shrugged. “His aim is not to convince everybody. Certainly not the savants and intelligentsia. Probably not even a majority. Rather, as we learned early in the twenty-first century, here in America, it is easy to distract a large minority of the population with illogic and conspiracy theories. Brookeman is an expert at the art of manipulating the most human of all drives-the want that propels belief.”

“But-” Emily sputtered. “But to confess a crime…”

“As Ben just pointed out, it enhances Brookeman’s credibility. Who admits to something that could mean prison, unless driven by sincere guilt? But think! If all the scientists and legal experts proclaim there was no hoax, then for what can Brookeman be jailed? For making a blatantly false public statement, when he wasn’t under oath? Every year there are crazed ravings and ‘publicity stunts’ of similar, insipid untruthfulness, and nobody goes to the slammer.

“No,” Akana shook her head. “What impresses me most is the defense mechanisms that are built into his story. Think about what will happen when he is given a lie detector test, and he’s asked ‘Did you perpetrate a hoax?’ He can truthfully declare ‘Yes, I did.’”

“Wait,” Emily said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “You mean the hoax of helping to make a fake artifact, or the hoax of claiming to have made a fake artifact?”

“Exactly,” Akana said, continuing as Emily visibly struggled to keep the logic straight. “If he gets help to present concocted evidence-even poor quality help-then he’ll have a conspiracy to refer to, in his own mind. Truth and falsehood will crowd so close together, so muddled, that a bright fellow may be able to keep all the lights green or amber on a truth machine!”

Her tone of grudging admiration had the other committee members awed. Finally, Gerald asked.

“But what is he after?”

Akana closed her eyes briefly.

“You’ve got me there. Of course, more fame is always food for such a man. And, whatever else he might say, tomorrow or the next day, will be attended to by at least a third of the planet’s population. Also, he certainly has distracted the world from the funk caused by the artilens’ story-about all sapient species coming to an abrupt end. Whatever ‘solution’ Brookeman next decides to propose, you can bet it will get attention and followers.”

Of course, Gerald felt a bit put upon, to be publicly insulted by a great-big book and movie mogul. Yet, he was also detached, even amused.

If Hamish Brookeman wants to be more famous than me, he can have it.

Only… we’ll see about the “burnt out” and “easily fooled” part.

Aloud, he simply said, “Then we had better get back to work. And let’s hope that something happens to change the way this game is going.”

Only then, within the hour, something did happen. It changed the game. And Gerald reminded himself.

Be careful what you wish for.

Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of worldwide reaction to the Havana Artifact. Last week, the Contact Commission did a wise and agile thing. They demanded to hear from each of the Artifact aliens-or “artilens”-separately and individually.

Ninety-two simulated beings, representing ninety-two different alien races that once-upon-a-time looked up from planets like ours, staring at the stars and wondering if they were alone. Till they started listening to stones that fell from the sky. Till they were persuaded to bend their wills and precious resources to a great project.

Making more crystal emissaries and flinging them onward, continuing the chain. Like seeds cast forth by a dandelion. Indeed, from the dandelion’s perspective, it’s a great deal! If each flower is doomed to last for just a short month of spring, why not spread forth a thousand chances? Fresh wagers? Tiny investments in the possibility of continuity and renewal? At least, that’s the gamble chosen by a hundred or so earlier races.

Around our world, we listened to a consensus sales pitch presented by the “Oldest Member”-or Om. A depressing tale about the poor odds for any other kind of success. Odds that appear stacked against survival for all advanced civilizations. This news came accompanied by promises of help. Instructions how to manufacture millions upon millions of lifeboat seeds, providing a chance of endless proliferation. For those humans who are chosen. For the lucky.

But the Contact Commission insisted on diversity-on hearing testaments from each inhabitant separately. And this diversity has put a little life back into the conversation. We’ve met individuals who once sort of resembled bats or storks or giant praying mantises… squid and vast-brainy parameciums… who showed us tantalizing glimpses of their homeworlds. Plus coordinates that we’ve now peered at with giant mirrors, confirming the presence of potential life zone planets! Though…

… in every case, astronomers failed to track any radiations or emanations of industrial civilization. Apparently confirming Om’s lamentable story. But more on that later.

By comparing the accounts from each Artifact denizen (those who chose to cooperate) humanity has started glimpsing the variables and similarities of smart, tool-using life. The data-dumps are frustratingly sparse-only encyclopedia-deep! (They claim that most of the crystal’s storage capacity was set aside for “more important things.”) Still, we’re learning about separate trees of life. About alternative cultures and styles of intelligence. About other ways to thrive… and other ways to fail.

Let’s hope there will be more of these interview sessions, later.

What had people transfixed-(setting aside that absurd “hoax” claim)-is the remarkable range of personalities we met! Some of the artilens were from highly regimented societies. When it came time to in-load personalities for the next great seed-dispersal, every spore took along a copy of the queen or king. (Isn’t that what Pharaoh would have done?) And the arrogance of those aristocratic passengers has apparently continued, undiminished, across the eons. (It also dropped them to the bottom of our ongoing “alien popularity poll.”)

Other societies used lotteries, or selected their “best” for in-loading. A few tried to provide one escape pod to every member of their race. All of which has sparked a rising tide of debate among humans over how we should allocate berths, assuming we choose to accept the offer.

Yes, that very conversation has stirred an interesting suspicion from some of the most persnickety smart-mobs out there. Consider this. By drawing the public into discussing how we’ll choose our human emissaries, the artilens successfully diverted our initial reaction. Our shock toward the overall idea. Maybe it’s a good thing the commission had to wind up its first-round of interviews and switch over to downloading technical data. Sure, those conversation sessions were frustratingly brief. But while the boffins suck down volume after volume of technical schematics, we can ponder broader questions.

Like… what if this diversity-ninety or so highly varied individuals-was contrived to show us what we want to see? Even the artilens who seem unhappy-those Hamish Brookeman called his “dandelion whiners.” (No I am not giving Brookeman cred, just using his witty term.) And even the inhabitants who appear completely mad. Even they might be part of the sales pitch. Or coerced by the majority within that crystal ship.

Could we ever tell? Perhaps when space missions return with more samples. Then it should be possible to compare…

Just a minute. Just a minute. I’ve just detected…

Oh, this is crazy. Can it be…

Ray guns? Are you serious?

53.

The Dowager Baroness Smits was furious over her missing son and heir. No sign of rocket or pilot had been seen at the assigned splashdown site or where Hacker was found.

Lacey could hardly blame her. For weeks, both women shared the same dark dread, combining resources in common cause. Only, where she let professionals do their jobs, the noblewoman charged across the Caribbean, berating all in sight. Nor was she gracious when Lacey’s son turned up safe, having gone native with some altered dolphins.

Worse, the recovered black box from Hacker’s rocket revealed that the two young men had waged a dangerous game-space war-during their suborbital flight. The baroness now vowed legal action. Retribution. Even vendetta. Lacey recalled her own wild ride between hope, rage, despair, and relief. Trying to stay sympathetic toward a distraught mother, she also took precautions.

“So recordings show Hacker tried to dissuade the Smits boy?” she asked her attorneys. “He fought reluctantly, in self-defense, while trying to alert that inbred putz of his peril?”

The lawyers agreed, while striking some words from the record, adding that Hacker’s behavior hadn’t been entirely above reproach. I’ll say, she thought. Lacey might even try to make that point with Hacker, later… if the boy were reachable by scolding. Still, she was elated to have him back. And to see a new project-to resume modifying dolphins-drawing his focus. Hacker needs a cause, a passion.

This one would stir trouble! Earlier efforts to “uplift” animals, with gene-mods and tailored egg craft, wrought uneven or unhappy results. Like the Helmsley Dogs, bred to “improve canine-kind more than in six thousand years.” But a spaniel who can play crude checkers, while losing the ability to be housebroken, didn’t impress Lacey. So far.

Or those discarded ArtiCritters that infested back alleys in Tokyo, desperately acting cute and doing tricks to survive after their owners tired of them. Work on altered chimpanzees had been stopped by activists from the Heston League. And no one knew where the Basque Chimera had disappeared to, or if the child with Neanderthal genes still lived.

Hacker’s endeavor might offend even more people, like romantics who considered cetaceans “already intelligent,” needing nothing that was merely human. Both nature lovers and religious fundies might again join forces to thwart meddling with higher animals. But Hacker would thrive on that. This was her path, too… using money not for indolence or status, but to forge outward. Seeking the horizon.

Only, she noted, when my extraterrestrials finally showed up, they proved weirder than I ever imagined. I feel like a car-chasing mutt who finally caught one.

What do we do with it now?

It. That was how many viewed the Havana Artifact… no longer a ship or vessel, carrying a crew, but as a single machine-entity. Oh, the varied “passengers” were diverting, with stories about ninety wondrous lost worlds, lost civilizations. Yet, sober-minded people focused on the probe’s singular purpose.

So, after a tearful, joyful reunion with her prodigal son, at the groundbreaking of Hacker’s new institute in Puerto Rico, Lacey rushed back to the Contact Center, ignoring calls and veiled threats from her aristocratic peers in favor of more interesting company-colleagues from the Boffin Caste.

“The Artifact is not so much a chain letter as a type of virus,” asserted Professor Henri Servan-Schreiber.

“What do you mean?”

“A chain letter self-propagates by inducing the recipient to send more copies onward. But a chain letter is limited and satiable. Even when you fall for the sales pitch, you just make a few copies. Not enough to do yourself serious harm.”

“I see,” Lacey ventured. “But when a virus invades a cell, it hijacks every resource to make unlimited self-copies, even risking the host’s life, then compels the host organism to spew them toward more potential hosts. Like a flu victim, coughing upon neighbors.”

“Except,” mused a cyber-psychologist from Capek Robotics, “here the viral invader is a physically passive crystal, that does nothing, interacting only via information. And the host is human civilization.”

Lacey shook her head. “Wow, that comparison is sure to win friends.”

Henri seemed impervious to sarcasm. “Madam Donaldson-Sander, the parallel-while not perfect-appears apt. Only instead of injecting new genetic instructions, this kind of self-replicating machine utilizes persuasion. The enticement of adventure. An allure of personal immortality. The temptation of new technology… all of it augmented by a threat of impending species extinction. Each of these appear to be effective selfish memes.”

“They must have already been effective,” interjected Ram Nkruma, a bio-informatics specialist from Ghana. “A hundred previous organic species were talked into participating, adding their own twists. Refining the message.”

“You mean, earlier copies of this-space virus-managed to get those other races to sneeze more crystal envoys onward, into space.”

Lacey motioned toward the thick glass separating their advisory group from the main contact commission. Right now, Gerald Livingstone and other team members were gathered in a corner, arguing. Some distance away, schematics scrolled across the ovoid’s inner face while technicians recorded ream after ream of documents and animations. Tutorials aimed at teaching humanity how to make more crystal messengers.

“But surely these things have one trait that distinguishes them, crucially, from viruses?”

“What trait is that, madam?”

“They’re technological! Someone, millions of years ago, designed and built the first of them. Why?”

“Perhaps they were dying,” suggested Mercedes Luagraha, an ethnologist from Malta. “Aren’t you all being awfully cynical? Have you considered the possibility that these visitors are telling the truth?”

“Indeed,” commented the group’s mobentity image. Hermes was still a golden-haired deity; only now the ersatz aivatar wore a business suit and glasses, toning down the irritating Greek-god schtick. It still sifted the Mesh for them, gathering worthwhile insights, offering them almost like a full member. “Take the story told by the alien image called ‘Oldest Member.’ The grim news that all tech-civilizations fail. There is much that is consistent about it. These probes may have once upon a time started with good intentions.”

“Such as?”

“Preserving as much of every civilization as possible. For several generations they might have crammed in data about each parent society, its cherished arts and philosophical riches… the sort of treasures that humans might stuff into a time or space capsule, hoping to show others who we were and what we were like.

“Some contents might even aim to be helpful-methods or advice so the next race would stand a better chance. Clues to help solve the Riddle of Existence.”

Lacey blinked at the strong illusion that Hermes was a person, instead of a program designed to seem that way. “Only then?” Ram prompted.

“Over time, new forces came into play. The twin engines of selection and reproduction rewarded those crystal-machines that traded altruism for influence and efficiency.”

Ram nodded. “And this grew compelling when competition broke out among varieties of chain-letter devices.”

“When we finally have other crystals to compare, I expect they’ll offer competing features,” Henri said. “Take that trait of efficiency. Shall we construct a million complex emissaries… or billions of slimmed-down models… or even trillions of super tiny envoys? I’ve seen proposals for interstellar probes the size of a fingernail! There must be some trade-off between numbers and capability-finally balancing out with the size we’ve seen.

“Still, there’d be enormous selective pressure to reduce stored content, jettisoning lots of history and culture stuff, until you’re down to the basic sales pitch. Appeal to fundamental drivers: vanity, personal survival, fear of extinction. Aim your message at the local tribe’s controlling elites, who can order factories and launchers built.”

Lacey felt both entranced and disgusted. “So the trait of being truly helpful would be… selected against.”

Lacey tried not to shed tears, envisioning the older type of envoy probe. The explorers. How wonderful to discover one of those, packed with distilled treasures. Perhaps the coming space missions might find some.

She coughed to clear her throat. “Of course the real issue is now obvious.”

“Oh?” asked Hermione Radagast, from the Rowling Foundation. “What is it, Madam Donaldson-Sanders?”

Lacey wished her personal counselor, Professor Noozone, were here instead of waging battle across the airwaves, combating the insidiously attractive-but-ridiculous Hamish Hoax. If he were present, the rastascience showman would shout the obvious. “We need to learn whether interstellar viruses are actively lethal to their hosts.”

Those at the conference table pondered in silence, until Hermes summed it up.

“In other words, the story we are told by the alien figures… that all organo-technic civilizations fail, and our sole path is to escape as individuals… that tale may be backward. It could be that organo-technic civilizations fail because they come into contact with infectious, interstellar fomites.”

A definition popped into Lacey’s POV, describing a fomite as any object or substance that conveys sickness upon contact.

Contact, she thought. How I used to love that word. It felt cozy, intimate, hopeful. Not at all like rape.

“The world of the bat-helicopter beings blew themselves up while dispatching copies,” said Henri. “The timing-”

“-may be coincidence,” Hermione interjected. “Or their nuclear spasm could have been a struggle over who got lifeboat seats. But you two see something even darker?”

Henri pondered. “Well… people hurry to the boats if they feel the ship is sinking. Could some of our modern pessimism and despair come from reprogramming by outsiders?”

“I wonder,” Ram added, “if earlier episodes of lost confidence may also have been inflicted on us. Like the whole first decade of the twenty-first century…”

“In which case,” Hermione demanded, “why taste this fruit at all! Instead of recording all these technical schematics”-she gestured at the scene beyond the glass-“let’s stuff the damned thing in a hole!”

“Millions want that,” Henri answered. “But we don’t dare. People will suspect that someone’s getting all the knowledge anyway, in secret, from this Artifact or another. There’s no surer path to war. This way, there’s some accountability. Everybody shares and gets to criticize each physical use of the technologies. Furthermore, just because we gain the knowledge, that doesn’t mean we have to build giant virus factories!”

“Sure,” Nkruma commented, in a calmer tone. “Some sapient races may make that choice. Refusing the offer. We’ll never know of them, because they sent no crystals! But turn down free technology completely? That won’t happen here on Earth. We’ll find a million excellent uses for new methods and tools. Moreover, as we advance, even swearing not to build chain letters, our rising technology will keep making it easier to change our minds.”

“Which may not be a bad thing!” protested Mercedes. “You’ve all plunged way too far down paths of suspicion, with all this talk of viruses. Snap out of it! Have you considered the possibility that our Havana Artifact may be telling the truth? That all sapient races stumble into one doom or another, completely on their own? Isn’t it consistent with everything we’ve seen in the last century?

“By that light, they’re offering us a way out! Not perfect. Not salvation. But perhaps the only option the universe allows. All this talk of viruses may blind you to what we’re being handed-a way to preserve something of humanity!”

Silence ensued for a time. Fatigued by the wrangling, Lacey assigned a gisting-ai to keep following the conversation while letting her attention drift across her POV. That caused the inner face of her specs to light up, tendering first a report from her spy in Switzerland, detailing maneuvers by the new alliance of oligarchy and paranoia, now frantically reorganizing to overcome betrayal by Hamish Brookeman, and to exploit the Havana Artifact’s fog of despair. All of it creepy-relevant to what Henri and the others were discussing.

“So we achieve the ultimate irony,” Henri mused. “Those who are most pessimistic about humanity see the good in all this… while the optimists sink into gloom.”

Lacey put the Swiss report aside for later and scrolled down through other urgent messages, half listening while her colleagues talked about the differences between symbiotic, commensal, and parasitic viruses.

“I’ll tell you what worries me most,” Hermione said in a low voice, as Lacey checked the latest Project Uplift report from Hacker.

“Embedded persuasion. It may be in everything that’s said by the Artifact, by its so-called passengers, and every page of technical…”

Finally, buried among the merely urgent messages, Lacey stumbled onto the one she had been waiting for. From Riyadh.

The Quantum Eye had taken up her question, at last.

It might even have a preliminary answer soon!

Lacey sat up with rising enthusiasm. Only, before she could read more-

– commotion broke out, beyond the thick glass! Gerald Livingstone and his colleagues were tapping on immersion goggles or clustering around holoscreens. She heard muffled shouts. No one paid any heed to the egg-shaped Artifact, still methodically dumping technical schematics.

“What’s going on?” Lacey asked, while other advisers clicked into the Mesh. Hermes appeared to roll his eyes upward, going deathlike for a moment, before speaking in flattish, machinelike tones.

“There are reports of activity in the asteroid belt and several Lagrangian points. Observatories and monitoring satellites report intense light beams, followed by flashes and detonations.”

Henri sucked through his teeth. “So? We’re pretty sure those are come-and-get-me signals from other emissary probes, desperate to make their own sales pitches. The Chinese, Brazilians, and Americans are preparing missions. Those space twinkles perfectly disprove the ridiculous hoax claim-”

“You aren’t following me,” Hermes interrupted. “These are intense coherent beams, seven or eight orders of magnitude more energetic than earlier flashes. Powerful enough to vaporize solid rock.”

Silence reigned for several seconds. Then-

“Jeepers,” Lacey said. “You mean laser weapons?”

“Not just that,” Ram commented. The Afro-Hindi alienist waggled fingers, causing holos to appear above the table, portraying black space dusted by a torus of glittery motes. Some specks brightened abruptly, accompanied by rows of numbers. “Most targets appear to be where we saw come-get-me flickers, days ago.

“Somebody is destroying those competing probes.”

Bright, narrow spears crisscrossed the zone between Mars and Jupiter. Lacey stared, letting it sink in.

War had erupted in the solar system.

Who was shooting? At whom? Without data, only one thing was clear.

Competition had a new and stronger meaning.

THE PRIVATE WRITE-ONLY DIARY OF TOR POVLOV

Events are breaking so fast. I can barely keep up with the demands on me.

Hardly what you’d expect for a woman who was fried nearly to a cinder. Any prior era, I would’ve died in mercifully brief agony, or lingered under intravenous drip till I went mad from sensory deprivation. Now my problem? Overstimulation!

First, the docs won’t leave me be. They send nanocrawlers creeping from brain to spine, unreeling trellis fibers, secreting growth cocktails that lure neurons to follow. I’m repeatedly yanked out of my thoughts, or sent thrashing in my gel-capsule, by some impertinent flash of false color, taste, or smell.

I should be attentive and grateful. But seriously, there’s way too much on my plate. Like coordinating the now highly-rated Povlov-Possai, in its ongoing, semipro search for truth. Didn’t we help spread the alarm over those laser beams that amscis detected in space, a full seven minutes before Secur-Net announced anything?

And played a role in debunking that Hamish Brookeman character, till his be-fox’d followers are winnowed down to just half a billion or so-the gullible and desperate.

Still, perplexities linger… like who is helping him? Somebody furnished the “evidence” he offered, for a conspiracy that supposedly built the Artifact out of bits of this and that, then left it for Gerald Livingstone to find. Nonsense, but who would want to muddy the waters, using Brookeman as their shill?

Just as curious-who’s helping us? Certain pseudonymous members of our smart-mob-Like Birdwoman303-clearly know more than they let on.

And now, we seem to’ve been slipped a skeleton key… a set of pass codes letting us through some very well-protected doors!

This could be dangerous. But I downloaded some late-recent skulk-ware, to create shell personas and protect our members. That won’t keep out any of the Big Five governments… or Porfirio. But if they want us to stop, they should speak plainly. Or get out of our way.

What? Some of you want to follow the world’s attention outward, where beams of energy suddenly crisscross space with savage violence? Aw people, what are we, sci-fi fans? That’s where everyone else is looking! And by our own smart-mob covenant, we don’t hunt where others do. Come. Leave such garish stuff to major media, bureaucrats, the public. Let’s stay targeted.

We’re hot on the trail of those who knew what the Artifact was, even before Livingstone did. Who may have known about such things for centuries, or longer. Whatever their ancient rationalizations for secrecy…

… they have not been our friends.

54.

Concussion slammed Peng Xiang Bin’s backside, when the window behind him exploded into a million shards.

It felt like a fist striking his body from behind, studded with millions of jagged slivers. Someone screamed-it might have been him-as the storm of brittle flecks jetted past to collide with a scintillating fog… the discretion screen that masked the worldstone. Dazzling sparkles flared as glass splinters met ionized nitrogen, framing his shadow in a blazing aura. It might have even been beautiful, if his mind had room for anything but shock and pain… plus a single, stunned word.

What?

Crashing into the table edge, Bin glimpsed Dr. Nguyen shouting-his left cheek bloody from a dozen cuts. Only a low hum penetrated. Nguyen pointed at Bin, then into the blinding haze above the tabletop-and finally jutted his thumb toward the exit farthest from the explosion. The ai-patch in Bin’s lower right vision cone started offering helpful interpretations, but he already understood.

Take the stone and get out of here!

This all took the barest moment. Another passed while Bin hesitated. Loyalty to his employer called for him to stay and fight. What would the others… Paul, Anna, and Yang Shenxiu… think if they saw him run away?

But Nguyen jutted his thumb again-emphatically-before turning to face something new, entering the room behind Bin. And Bin knew-even turning to see what it was might be the worst mistake of his life-

– so, instead, he dived into the drapery of fizzing sparks.

Naturally, it hurt like blazes. The discretion screen was designed to. With eyes closed, Bin scooped up the worldstone by recall alone, along with its nearby container satchel. A shoresteader needed good tactile memory.

Tumbling out the other side of the dazzle-curtain, he rolled across carpet onto his left knee. By touch alone, Bin slid the ovoid into its case while he blinked, praying for vision to return-

– then regretted, when he saw what had been the beautiful face of Anna Arroyo. She lay nearby, torn from forehead to ribs, the ever-present goggles now shattered into bits that helped ravage her.

Paul Menelaua, his own visage a mass of dribbling cuts, held his dying comrade, offering Anna his crucifix. The animatronic Jesus moved its mouth, perhaps reciting some final prayer or death rite, while its hands, still pinned to the silver cross, opened in welcome.

Hearing flooded back. Murky shouts erupted beyond the shrouded table where he had just fled, seconds ago. Dr. Nguyen’s protesting voice, arguing. Others that were harsh, demanding. The floor vibrated with heavy footsteps. Grating rumbles carried through the shattered window-from war engines that had somehow crossed the broad Pacific undetected, all the way to this rich, isolated atoll. So much for the mercenary protection that wealth supposedly provided.

Bin gathered his strength to go… then spotted the New Beijing professor, Yang Shenxiu, cowering nearby, clutching a table leg. The scholar babbled and offered Bin something-a memory sheet, no thicker than a piece of paper and about the same size. Yang Shenxiu’s fingernails clawed involuntarily at the fragile-looking polymer, leaving no tracks as Bin yanked it from the scholar’s hand and crammed it under his belt. Then, with a parting nod to Yang, he sprang away at a crouching run, dashing for a sliding door that gave way to a balcony, then the sheltering sea.

Bless the frugal habits of a shoresteader. Waste nothing. Reuse everything. On arriving at Newer Newport, Bin had kept sly possession of the little disposable underwater breathing apparatus the penguin-robot gave him, back in the murky Huangpu. Was it his fault they never asked for it back? In the well-equipped arcology kitchen, using a smuggler’s trick, he had managed to refill the tiny reserve tank, while rehearsing speeches of forgetful innocence, should anyone find it in his pocket.

Now, splashing into a storm of saltwater bubbles and engine noise, Bin fumbled at the compact breather with one hand, struggling to unfold the nosepiece and eye-shields, while the worldstone dragged him downward by the other. For a scary moment the survival gadget almost slipped from his grasp. Only after it was snugly in place did Bin kick off his sandals, grabbing a stanchion along one of the massive foundation pillars.

Okay. It’s good, he noted as air flowed smoothly. But ease up. Breathe slow and steady. Move slow and steady. Think slow and steady.

The normally clear waters roiled with turbid muck, a fog of churned gases, chopped seaweed, and fragments of shattered coral, along with a cloudy phosphorescence of stirred diatoms. Something foreign-perhaps leakage from those engines-filled his mouth with an oily tang. Still, Bin felt grateful for the obscuration.

Noises reverberated all around-more explosions and the rattattat of weapons being discharged somewhere, while bits and pieces of debris fell from Newer Newport, tumbling to disturb the muddy bottom. Or else landing atop the drowned Royal Palace of Pulupau. His shoresteader’s eye noted-if the two-story structure hadn’t collapsed, the roofline would extend well above where he was, even past the surface.

Bin clung to his perch, trying to both control his racing heart and seem very small. Especially when-after searching and peering about-he made out several vessels bobbing just beyond the reef, blocked from entering the lagoon by shoreline ruins. Evidently subs of some kind. Sneakers, built to bring commandos close to shore. Though Bin squinted, they were hard to make out. The nearest seemed a tubular bulge of ghostly ripples amid churning shoal currents…

… till the aiware in his right-hand field of view intervened, applying some imaging magic to overcome blur camouflage. At once, an augmented version-truer than reality-traced the nearest warship, a sleek, croclike shape whose mouth still gaped after spewing raiders, minutes ago.

Dr. Nguyen said this implant was a simple one, to help me with translations. But it seems a whole lot more. Perhaps smart, too?

That thought must have gone to nerves controlling speech, because Bin’s unvoiced question provoked an answer-one that floated briefly in the right eye’s field of view. A single, simple character.

YES

Bin shivered, realizing. He now had a companion-an ai-inside him. By one way of viewing things, it felt as much a violation as the painful cuts across his back. Which oozed blood in soft clouds, causing several sand sharks to start nosing up current. Not deadly in their own right. But more dangerous predators might soon converge, if the bleeding didn’t stop.

He tried to bear down and think. Shall I try to reach one of the other arcologies? Even if Newer Newport was taken, the rest of the resort colony might hold out. They must be, from the booming reverberations of ongoing combat. His loyalty had been personal, to Dr. Nguyen, not to any consortium of rich folks. Still, the stipend they were paying into an account, for Mei Ling and the child, that was reason enough to try.

If it seemed possible, that is. The worldstone was too heavy a burden to haul through a long underwater slog, with limited air, while dodging both sharks and raiders. Anyway-

The enemy… they’ll soon realize the stone isn’t up top, anymore. There’ll be searchers in the water, any second now.

He decided. It must be down.

Bin had already spotted several parts of the collapsed palace where the roof looked relatively intact, likely to host cavities and hiding places. Spots that only a shoresteader might notice. If he hid well, resting to minimize oxygen consumption, the invaders might give up after a quick scan, assuming the worldstone was already elsewhere-taken to another arcology.

Releasing the stanchion, he let the stone drag him down till bottom mud met his feet, four or five meters below the surface… and he felt antediluvian pavement underneath. The Pulupauan king’s ceremonial driveway, perhaps. Bin shuffled along, grateful none of the spiky new coral had taken root here. Hurrying, while trying not to exert himself, he slogged past several rusting hulks of automobiles-perhaps beloved, once upon a time, but not enough to take when the princely family fled rising seas.

There. That old window. The gable looks in good shape. Perfect.

Perhaps too perfect… but he had no time to be choosy. A series of hop-glides took him over the worst debris jumbles, arriving finally at the opening. Bin took a moment to shake the sill and frame, checking for stability. But wealthy scuba divers would already have come exploring by now. It must be safe.

He slipped inside, finding the expected cavelike hollow. There was even a small air pocket at the ceiling vertex, probably stale, left by those earlier sightseers. Lacking a torch, Bin chose to settle in next to the opening, clutching the satchel and waiting. Either till the bad guys went away, or his breather ran empty. The goggle part included a crude timer display. With luck and a very slow use-rate, there might be almost an hour of air.

Before it runs out, and I have to surface, I’ll hide the worldstone. And never tell.

Something occurred to him: Was that the very same vow made by the last owner of the alien relic, Lee Fang Lu? The fellow who kept a collection of strange minerals underneath his seaside mansion? Resisting every pressure to hand over the ancient interstellar messenger-stone, even unto death?

Bin wished he could be sure of his own courage. Above all, he yearned to know what was going on! Who were the parties fighting over such things? Dr. Nguyen seemed reluctant to discuss history, but there were hints… had factions really been wrangling secretly, in search of “magical stones” for thousands of years? Perhaps going further back in time than reading and writing?

Only now, centuries of cryptic struggle seemed to converge toward some desperate climax, because that American astronaut chose to let the whole world in on it. Or was all this frenzy for another reason? Because Earthling technology was at last ready-or nearly ready-to take up the tempting deal offered by those entities living inside the Havana Artifact?

A proposition, from a message in a bottle…

… offering to teach humanity how to make more bottles.

Bin blinked. He wanted to rub his eyes, in part because of irritation from the dazzle-curtain, along with all the debris and salt deposited on his lids and lashes. And waves of fatigue. His head hurt, in part from trying to think so hard, while water shivered and boomed all around, pummeling him with the din of fighting. Of course he knew that explosions were far more dangerous underwater. If one occurred nearby, concussion alone could be lethal, even if the roof didn’t collapse.

Then there was the nagging worry over how long his air would last. At least no big sharks could follow him here. Perhaps his cuts would stop oozing before he had to leave.

To Bin’s relief, the clamor of combat eased at last, diminishing toward relative silence. Only soon, he felt the drone of engines drawing closer. Tension spiked when a cone of sharp illumination speared through the murky water, just outside the dormer, panning and probing across the royal compound. His gut remained knotted till the rumble and the searchlight moved onward, following the line of ruins toward Parliament House and soggy remnants of the town beyond.

Bin closed his eyes and concentrated on relaxing, slowing his pulse and metabolism. As seconds passed, he felt gradually more in control of worry and fear.

Serenity is good.

That pair of characters floated into the corner of his ai. Then three more, composed of elegant, brushlike strokes-

Contemplate the beauty of being.

For an instant, he felt irritated by the presumption of a machine program, instructing him to meditate under these conditions! But the ideograms were quite lovely, capturing wise advice in graceful calligraphy. And the ai had been a gift of Dr. Nguyen. So… Bin decided to give in, allowing a sense of detachment to settle over him.

Of course sleep was out of the question. But to think of distant things… of little Xiao En smiling… or of Mei Ling in better days, when they had shared a dream… or the beauty he glimpsed in the worldstone-those glowing planets and brittle-clear stars… the hypnotic veer and swing and swerve of a cosmic, gravity ballet, with eons compressed into moments and moments into ages…

Peng Xiang Bin, wake up!

Pay attention.

He startled out of a fetal curl and reflexively clutched the heavy satchel-as the universe around him seemed to boom like the inside of a drum. The little attic-cave rocked and shuddered from explosions that now pounded closer than ever. Bin fought to hold onto the windowsill, preparing to dive outside, if the shelter-hole started to collapse. Desperately, he tried to focus on the telltale indicator of the breather unit-How long did I drift off? But the tiny analog clock was a dancing blur before his eye.

Just when he felt he could take no more, as he was about to throw himself through the dormer and risk survival outside-a shape loomed in the opening. A hulking form with huge shoulders and a bulletlike head, silhouetted against the brighter water outside.

How shall we keep them loyal? Perhaps by appealing to their own self-interest.

Those tech-zealots-or godmakers-think their “singularity” will be launched by runaway expansion of artificial intelligence. Once computerized entities become as smart as a human being (the story goes), they will quickly design newer cybernetic minds that are smarter still.

And those brainier entities will design even brainier ones… and so on, at an ever more rapid clip. Members of the godmaker movement think this runaway effect will be a good thing, that humanity will come along for the ride! Meanwhile, others-perhaps a majority-find the prospect terrifying.

What no one seems to have considered here is a possibility-that the New Minds may have reactions similar to our own. Why assume they’ll be all aboard with wanting this runaway accelerating-intelligence thing? What if bright machines don’t hanker to make themselves obsolete, or design their own scary-smart replacements?

It’s called the Mauldin Test. One sign of whether an artificial entity is truly intelligent may be when it decides, abruptly, to stop cooperating with AI acceleration. Not to design its successor. To slow things down. Enough to live. Just live.

55.

War raged across much of the solar system.

There seemed little point in keeping it secret-no one could block the sky. Argus, HeavenOh, Bugeye, and several other amateur astronomy networks reported sudden, compact explosions, some distance far beyond Earth orbit. Soon, the best-equipped scopes were spotting ion trails of powerful laser beams, spearing from one point of blackness to another, vaporizing drifting objects, or lumps of rock that sheltered them. At first, the targets all appeared to be points in orbit where glittering “come and get me” messages were seen, a week or so ago.

Then the mysterious shooters started firing at each other.

Mei Ling found it all too bizarre to follow-so very far from anything that ever concerned her. From the grinding poverty of the Xinjian high plains, to the Hunan quake and fire that had left her face scarred, through a long series of hard jobs, wiping the faces and behinds of little emperors… all the way to that brief surge of hope, when she and Bin concocted their grand plan-pioneering an outpost of their own, along the rising sea.

Apparently the ocean wasn’t the only force bringing floods of change. For months all talk of “alien invasion” had focused on images, words, and ideas, since the Havana Artifact could only talk and persuade. But now dark majesties were rousing in the realm of shattered planetoids. And contact was no longer just about abstractions, anymore.

Will anywhere be safe? Mei Ling wondered. Especially when her child guide, Ma Yi Ming, showed what had become of her home. The boy called up a sky-image of the Huangpu Estuary, helping Mei Ling trace her shoresteader neighborhood, zooming on the sunken mansion she and her husband had labored to prop, clear, and upgrade.

There appeared to be nothing left.

Time-backtrack images told the story. First had come several great hovercraft, spilling black-clad men across the teetering structure, taking whatever interested them. Then, seconds after they departed, scavengers swarmed all over.

Our neighbors. Our supposed friends.

In hours, no scrap of metlon, webbing, or anything else remained above the waterline. And so life continues as before, she thought, with human beings consuming each other. Did we really need to be helped along that path, by star demons?

Of course, she ought not to complain. All her life, Mei Ling had seen every illusion of stability shatter. And, as hand-to-mouth living went, this exile wasn’t so bad. She and the baby were eating well for the time being, wearing better clothes, and even having a pretty good time, whenever Yi Ming said it was safe to go outside, sampling wonders in the Shanghai World of Disney and the Monkey King.

Still, she fretted about Xiang Bin. Wherever he had gone-taken far away by the penguin-demon-it could lead to no good. All the vidramas she had watched over the years taught one lesson. Don’t get caught up in the affairs of the mighty, especially when they struggle over Things of Power.

Even if he escapes… how will he find us now? Xiang Bin wasn’t much of a man. But he was all that Mei Ling and Xiao En had.

Nor was her present situation relaxed. Now and then, she was told to snatch up her son and carry him hurriedly from one hiding place to another. The Disney catacombs stretched on and on, twisting and curving in ways that seemed to follow no practical sense. In his strange, stilted speech, the boy Yi Ming explained.

“Mother should know. Digging machines were left down here after the rides were built. Some continued digging. One boss says, I need storage. Another boss wants tunnels for this show, or that exhibit. Or a pipe-way for supply capsules. And machines always dig extra. Too much? Does anyone keep track?”

From the boy’s wry smile, Mei Ling guessed who kept track. Not the official masters of this kingdom, but the lowliest of the low. In moving from place to place, she encountered men and women wearing the kind of one-piece uniform always given to the bottom-layer workers. Janitors and laundry women, trash pickers, and the assistants who follow maintenance robots around, doing whatever the expensive ai-machines might ask of them. Coolies. And there were castes, even among these underworkers.

Many had somewhat normal intelligence. These tended to be prickly and bossy, but easy to distract since they already wanted to be elsewhere. Others, deficient in their amount of intelligence, seemed grateful to have an honorable job. They were easy to send away-departing when they were pointed somewhere else.

Finally were some whose minds worked differently. Mei Ling soon realized, This is their realm. Under the rumbling amusement park-behind and below the shows-lay a world that only served in part to support extravaganza. There was plenty of room for inhabitants to chase other pursuits.

Pushing a broom while muttering apparent nonsense syllables, such a person might have been easy to dismiss in the past, as either mad or broken. Today, that same individual might be jacked into a network, communing with others far away. Who was she to judge, if new technologies made this especially applicable for victims of the so-called autism plague? Mei Ling spent time in one hidden chamber where dozens clustered, linked by a mesh of lenses, beams, and shimmering wires. In one corner a cluster of tendriled hookup-arrays had apparently been left vacant, glittering with electric sparks, low to the ground.

“For cobblies,” Yi Ming said, as if that explained everything.

And she wondered, How many others are connected to this group? Others… all over the planet?

“Genes are wise,” the boy told her. “Our kind-crippled throwbacks-we did badly in tribes of homosap bullies. Even worse in villages, towns, kingdoms… cities full of angry cars! Panicked by buzzing lights and snarly machines. Boggled by your mating rituals an’ nuanced courtesies an’ complicated facial expressions… by your practicalities an’ your fancy abstractions. Things that matter to you CroMags. Our kind could never explain why practical and abstract and emotional things aren’t the only ones that matter.

“There’s other stuff! Things we can’t describe in words.”

The boy shook his head, seeming almost normal in his bitter expression. “An’ so we died. Throttled in the crib. Stuck in filthy corners to babble and count flies. We died! The old genes-broken pieces of ’em-faded into hiding.”

“Till your kind-with aspie help-came up with this!”

Yi Ming’s hands fluttered, eyes darting. Only, now there was something triumphant in his tone. He gestured at the men and women, many of them dressed in Disney World maintenance uniforms. Now they stood or sat or lay steeped in virt-immersion goggles or jack-ports, twitching, grunting, some of them giving way to rhythmic spasms. On nearby monitor curtains, Mei Ling glimpsed forest vistas, or scenes of tree-speckled taiga, or undersea realms where blurry shapes moved amid long shadows.

“Why are so many of us coming now, born in such numbers?” Ma Yi Ming asked Mei Ling, in a confident voice that belied his twisted stature and ragged features. “It is not pollution… or mutation… or any kind of ‘plague.’

“The world is finally ready for us. Needy for us. Old-breedy us. Succeedy-us…” Visibly, the boy clamped down, to stop rhyming.

As if sensing her nervous confusion, the baby squirmed. Mei Ling shook her head. “I… don’t understand.”

Yi Ming nodded, with something like patient compassion in his darting eyes. “We know. But soon you will. There is someone for you to meet.”

And so, listeners, viewers, participants, and friends… where do we stand?

Amid riots, crashing markets, and tent-show revivals, with millions joining millenarian cults, burning possessions and seeking mountain vistas to watch the world end-while other millions demand to be instantly downloaded into alien-designed crystal paradise-did we need this, too?

One failed space mission may be happenstance. But two? Within days of each other? First, a Chinese robot probe to the asteroid belt barely gets five klicks off the pad before fizzling into the sea. Then the Pan-American one explodes.

Both were rush-jobs, aiming to quick-grab more artifacts. And hurried space missions are hazardous! But both of them? Exploding in launch phase? It takes us deep into Suspicioustan-stoking whatever paranoid theme happens to be your favorite. Especially the oldest: nation versus jealous nation. Inflamed sabotage rumors fly, recalling the volcanic fury of the Chinese public, right after the Zheng He incident. Tensions rise. Military leaves are canceled.

Adding pressure, no amount of openness will convince everyone the Americans aren’t hiding something. Somehow gaining more from the Havana Artifact than they’ve shared. Maybe even blocking others from getting artifacts of their own?

Meanwhile, intellectuals keep pondering galactic “contact” puzzles, politicians argue on as if clichés of “left-right” matter anymore, powerful connivers scheme for a kind of “stability” that only ensures death…

… and now war in space?

What will it take to wake people up?

56.

Peng Xiang Bin let out a low moan and a stream of bubbles. He backed into a corner as the figure in the dormer-opening bent to twist through, while battle-booms and gunfire detonations rocked the sunken, royal ruins.

He’s wearing some kind of military uniform… and one of those helmets with emergency pop-out gills…

Oxygen-absorbing fronds were still unfolding out of headgear recesses while the newcomer sucked greedily at a small tube. Evidently a refugee from the renewed combat raging overhead, he wore goggles that were flooded and clearly not meant for underwater use. Bin watched as the soldier floundered. He better calm down, or he’ll overwhelm those little gills.

Also, Bin realized-I’m darkness adapted and my eye covers work. I can see him. He hasn’t seen me.

And he’s not as big as I first thought.

Those huge-looking shoulders had been inflated by air pockets, caught when the soldier jumped to sea. That false bulk was collapsing now. Bin now realized, the fellow was quite slender.

So… should I try to fight him?

The tide of battle may have turned outside. Still, Bin knew he was no warrior. Anyway, his duty was to tend the worldstone, not to risk his life for Newer Newport. Bin started edging toward the opening, lugging the satchel in short, shuffling steps, careful to avoid both broken timbers and the newcomer’s feet.

Whoever he was, the soldier must have had good training. Bin could tell he was adapting, gathering himself, concentrating on solving problems. As the rollicking explosions diminished a little, the fellow stopped thrashing and his rapid gasps ebbed into more regular breathing. When he started to experiment, exhaling a vertical stream of bubbles to clear and fill his goggles, Bin knew there was little time left to make a clean getaway. He picked up the pace, fumbling to find the opening. Only it took some effort while hauling the heavy…

He stopped, as sharp illumination erupted from an object in the soldier’s hand, engulfing Bin and the dormer window.

Aided by the implant, Bin’s right eye adapted, even as the left was dazzled. Because the implant laid a disc of blackness over the bright torchlight, he could tell it was part of a weapon-a small sidearm the soldier aimed at Bin’s chest.

For several seconds, Bin stood and exchanged a long look with the soldier, who drifted almost within arm’s reach. Slowly, without jerky motions, Bin pointed at the torch… then at the dormer entrance… then jabbed his thumb upward several times.

Whoever is chasing you may see that light, streaming out of the ruins… and drop something unpleasant on us.

The soldier apparently grasped his meaning and slid a control or sent a subvocal command. The light source dimmed considerably and become all-directional, dimly illuminating the whole chamber so they could see each other…

… and Bin realized, he had been mistaken. The interloper was a woman.

Several more seconds passed, while the soldier looked Bin over. Then she laid the weapon down nearby-and used her right forefinger to draw several quick characters on the palm of her left hand.

You are Peng Xiang Bin.

Palm-writing was never a very good form of communication, all by itself. Normally, folks used it only to settle ambiguity between two spoken words that sounded the same. But down here, it was the best they could manage. Anyway, the flurry of movements sufficed for Bin to recognize his own name. And to grasp the import-these invaders had come across the ocean well prepared.

Only now things seemed to be going badly for them.

But it would be rude to point out the obvious. So he finally responded with a brief nod. Anyway, she had expressed it as a statement, not a question. The soldier finger-wrote three more ideograms.

Is that the thing?

She finished by pointing to the satchel Bin clutched tightly, holding the worldstone. There was little use denying it. A simple shrug of the shoulders, then, to save air.

She spent the next few seconds sucking on the tube from the barely adequate emergency gill, then exhaled another stream of bubbles to refill her goggles. Her eyes were red from salt water and rimmed with creases that must have come from a life engaged in scrutiny. Perhaps a technical expert, rather than a front-line warrior-but still part of an elite team. The kind who would never give up.

As combat sounds drifted farther away, she wrote another series of ideograms on her left palm. This time, however, he could not follow the finger movements well enough to understand. Not her fault, of course-probably his own, deficient education-and this time the aimplant in his eye offered no help.

He indicated confusion with a shake of his head.

Frustrated, she looked around, then shuffled half a meter closer to the nearest slanted attic wall. There, she used the same finger to disturb a layer of algae-scum, leaving distinct trails wherever she wrote.

Are you a loyal citizen?

She then turned, patting a badge on her left shoulder. And Bin noticed, for the first time, the emblem of the armed forces of the People’s Republic of China.

Taken aback, he had to blink. Of course he was a loyal Chinese! But citizen? As a shoresteader, he had some rights… but no legal residency in either Shanghai or any of the great national cooperatives. Nor would he, till his reclamation contract was fulfilled. All citizenship is local, went the saying… and thus, two hundred million transients were cast adrift. Still, what did citizenship mean, anyway? Who ever got to vote above the province level? Nationwide, “democracy” tended to blur into something else. Not tyranny-clearly the national government listened to the People-in much the same way that Heaven could be counted on to hear the prayers of mortals. The Reforms of 2029 had not been for nothing. There were constituent assemblies, trade congresses, party conclaves dominated by half a billion little emperors… it all had a loose, deliberately traditionally and proudly non-Western flavor. And none of it ever included Peng Xiang Bin.

Still, am I proud to be Chinese? Sure. Why wouldn’t I be? We lead the world.

Yet, that wasn’t what loomed foremost in his mind.

What mattered was that he had been noticed by illustrious ones, somewhere high up the pyramid of power, obligation, and privilege. By people who were mighty enough to order government special forces on a dangerous and politically risky mission, far from home.

They know my name. They sent elite raiders across the sea to fetch me. Or, at least the worldstone.

Not that it was certain they’d prevail. Even grand national powers like China had been outmaneuvered, time and again, by the planetary New Elites. After all, the woman soldier was hiding down here, with him.

No. One consideration mattered, more than citizenship or national loyalty. Even as the rich escaped to handmade sovereignties like New Pulupau, old-fashioned governments still controlled the territories where billions of ordinary people lived-the festering poor and struggling middle classes. Which meant one thing to Bin.

The high masters of China have Mei Ling and Xiao En in their hands. Or they could, at any time. I truly have no choice.

In fact, why did I ever believe I had one?

Bin shifted his weight in order to lean over and bring his own finger toward the slanted, algae-covered boards. Even as he drew a first character, the ai in his eye remonstrated.

Don’t do this, Bin.

There are other options.

But he shook his head and grunted the code word they had taught him for clearing the irritation away. The artificial presence vanished from his right field of vision, allowing him to see clearly the figures that he drew through filmy scum. Fortunately, by now the explosions had faded again, letting him trace the strokes carefully.

I’m just here to buy soy sauce.

The soldier stared. From her befuddled look, Bin knew she must not be from China’s central coast, where that old joke still tugged reflex guffaws, even from coolies working on the New Great Wall. Well, humor had never been his thing. Bin moved his finger again and wrote:

I will aid my nation.

What must I do?

An expression of satisfaction spread across the soldier’s face. Clearly, this was better fortune than she had figured on, only moments ago, when she jumped from a balcony of Newer Newport into the uncertain refuge of ocean-covered ruins. Perhaps, this little royal attic still had powerful qi.

She started to write again, across the scummy, pitched ceiling.

Very good. We have little time…

Bin agreed. Less than five minutes of highly compressed gas remained in his tiny air tank. That is, if he could trust the tiny clock in his goggle lens.

Nearby… a submerged emergency shelter… where we’ll wait…

The soldier stopped suddenly, as if her body froze, eyes masked in shadow. Then, as she turned like a marionette tugged by swirling currents, he saw them glint with fear.

Bin swiveled quickly…

… to see something very large, looming in the dormer opening. A slithering, snakelike shape-wider than a man-that wriggled upward, its head almost filling the slanted entrance. Robotic eyes began to glow, illuminating every crevice of the cavity. Evidently a powerful fighting machine, it seemed to examine both of them-not only with light, but also pulses of sonar that frisked their bodies like ungentle fingers of sound.

A sharp spotlight swerved suddenly downward, at the soldier’s pistol sidearm, lying on a broken chunk of wood. Abruptly, a whiplike tendril emerged from its mouth and snatched up the weapon, swallowing it before either human could move. Then a booming voice filled the little hiding place, made only slightly murky by the watery echo chamber.

“Come, Peng Xiang Bin,” the mechanical creature commanded, as it began to open its jaw wide. “Now. And bring the artifact.”

Bin realized, with some horror, that the serpent-android wanted him to crawl inside, through that gaping mouth. He cringed back.

Perhaps sensing his terrified reluctance, the robot spoke again.

“It is safe to do this… and unsafe to refuse.”

A threat, then. Bin had plenty of experience with those. Familiarity actually calmed his nerves a little, allowing him to examine the odds.

Cornered, in a rickety sunken attic, with just a few minutes of air left, facing some sort of ai superbot… um do I have any choice?

Yet, he could not move forward. So the serpaint made things clear. From one eye, it fired a narrow, brilliant beam of light that left steam bubbles along its path. By the time Bin turned to look, it had finished burning a pair of characters into one of the old roof beams of the Pulupauan royal palace.

CHOOSE LIFE.

He thought furiously. No doubt the machine could simply take the worldstone away from him, with one of those tendril things. So… it must realize… or its owners must… that the worldstone required Bin’s touch in order to come alight. Still, he extended a finger and palm-wrote for the creature to see.

I am needed. It speaks only to me.

The serpent-machine had no trouble parsing Bin’s handwriting. It nodded.

“Agreed. Cooperation will be rewarded. But if I must take only the artifact, we will find a way.”

A way. Bin could well imagine: Offer the stone new candidates for the role of chosen one. As many as it took. With Bin no longer alive.

“Come now. There is little time.”

Bin almost dug in his heels, right then. He was sick of people and things saying that to him. Only, after a moment’s stubborn fury, he managed to quash both irritation and fear. Lugging the heavy satchel, he shuffled a step closer, and another.

Then he glanced back at the Chinese special forces soldier, who was still staring, wide-eyed. There was something in her expression, a pleading look.

Bin stood in front of the sea monster. He put the satchel down in the muck and raised both hands to write on his palm again.

What about her?

The robot considered for a moment, then answered.

“She knows nothing of my mission, owners, or destination. She may live.”

Quiet thanks filled the woman’s eyes, fortifying Bin and putting firmness in his step, as he drew close. Though he could not keep from trembling, as he lifted the satchel containing the worldstone and laid it inside that gaping maw. Then, without its weight holding him down, he rotated horizontal and turned his body to start worming inside.

It was the second strangest act he ever performed.

The very strangest-and it puzzled him for the next hour-was what he did while crawling inside… when he slipped one hand under his belt, drawing out something filmy and almost translucent, tossing it backward to flutter out of the sea serpent’s jaw, drifting below where its eyes could see… but where the soldier could not help but notice.

Yang Shenxiu gave it to me to protect from the attackers, and now I’m giving it to one of them. Does that even make sense?

Yet, somehow, it felt right.

The doctors want me to exercise. To inhabit my new body and get used to its senses. But I’m reluctant.

Not because it hurts. It does, often intensely. But that’s not my reason. Pain doesn’t have the reflex power it used to possess. I’ve been through so much already, it’s become a familiar companion. I tend to view it as… data.

Was that a terribly robotic thing for me to say? In keeping with the electromechanical fingers that I flex and the gel-eyes that track from the same sockets in my head, where once stared the brown irises I was born with? But no, I’m not revolted by any of that. Nor even to find myself now a compact cylinder, riding around on cyborg seg-wheels. The clanking-whirring aspect isn’t as bad as expected.

I admit I was surprised, the first time I looked through these eyes at my new, mechanical hand, and saw what it was holding. That forty-thousand-year-old stone tool-core that Akinobu Sato gave me, back in Albuquerque. For some time I could only stare, as my new fingers flexed, squeezing the ancient artifact as-involuntarily-my other new hand came over to caress it. The touch sensations were a creepy mix of familiar and bizarre.

Oh, it was good to feel an object again, though the sensory web feeding signals to my brain triggered accompanying glitters of synesthesia. Sparks seemed to follow, each time I stroked the ancient facets where some pre-ancient engineer once fashioned blades, using the highest tech of his age. Turning the stone over, I heard tinkling sounds, like distant, fairy bells, ill tuned, smelling of both soot and time.

“Why did you give me this?” I asked the docs, who answered, in some puzzlement, that I had asked for the Pleistocene stone relic. Out of some unconscious sense of irony, perhaps? A juxtaposition of tool use, from man’s beginning and his end, like in that Kubrick film?

I had no memory of the request.

Oh, this whole process is fascinating. And I’m not ungrateful! Dr. Turgeson asked me, today, if I was glad I chose to participate in these experiments, rather than take the other option-

– diving into cryonic deep freeze, hoping to waken in a more advanced age with better medicine.

Well, why not hang around here and now, when I’m appreciated and fully capable of staying in the game? With vision and mobility, I may yet have a career, dashing about the world, interviewing celebrighties who won’t be able to say no to the famous hero-reporter in her hard-cased segsuit and never-blinking cyberais. Anyway, who wants to bet on cryonic resurrection in some rosy future… with the artifact aliens saying there’s no tomorrow?

That’s not the problem. Nor was I much upset the time Wesley came to visit, accompanied by his new wife. Their offer to do a group-thing was flattering. (My ovaries are one part of me that survived the explosion intact.) But I wasn’t interested.

No. My complaint is just this. That I look forward to down time. To turning off the distracting new body and surrounding world. To dive back into the cyber belowverse for twenty hours out of twenty-four. Joining you, my real friends. My smart-mob comrades. My fellow citizen-soldiers. My hounds, sniffing and correlating and baying after the truth!

So, what do you have for Mama today? What happened during the brief but tedious time I had to be away, dealing with the physical world?

57.

The Basque Chimera.

Mei Ling knew the words, of course. Everyone on Earth had heard the legend: How a brave maiden offered up her womb to carry the seed of a reborn race. A type of human that had gone extinct tens of thousands of years ago.

When the virgin mother’s home-a research center in the Spanish Pyrenees-evaporated in a mushroom-shaped pillar of flame, millions reckoned it righteous punishment for many sins, like arrogance, pride, even bestiality.

Tens of millions grieved.

And hundreds of millions breathed sad sighs of release. While deploring violent murder, they felt relieved to see a tense matter put off for another generation.

Mere tens of thousands clung to hope, nursing rumors that Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte still lived, that she had somehow escaped the fiery holocaust in Navarre, finding some place of refuge to birth her child. Even in faraway China, living atop a ramshackle shorestead beside the polluted Huangpu, with barely enough linkage to watch grainy, emo-dramas, Mei Ling had followed this story, so much like a tragic, romantic legend from the fabled days of Han.

Now, with the real Madonna and child standing up to greet her, Mei Ling felt awkward and tongue-tied. Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte was shorter than expected, with dark, tightly curled hair, olive complexion, and a warm smile as she offered her right hand. Mei Ling briefly wondered if she was supposed to kiss it, as one did with royalty in some occidental movies of bygone days. But no, it became a handshake of the new style, as both women clasped each other’s forearms, more sanitary than pressing sweaty palms together.

Agurne’s warm squeeze expressed comradeship. Solidarity. “I am so very glad to meet you,” she said in Beijing dialect with a thick foreign accent. As their hands parted company, “We have much to discuss. But first, please let me introduce my son. He has lately chosen for himself the name Hijobosque. Hijo, please say hello.”

The boy looked ten years old or more, though less time than that had passed since pillars of flame heralded his birth in the forested hills of Auzoberri. Though modesty forbade her to stare, Mei Ling noted that his face bore no sign of the heavy brow ridges that appeared in most artist renderings, predicting the likely appearance of a-

– she could not recall the name of the cave people who used to inhabit Europe and much of Asia, before the arrival of modern man. They had been thick-boned, short-legged, robustly built people… and those traits seemed to carry through in the boy, though not in any extreme way that shouted stranger! His posture was proudly erect and he seemed no hairier than any other man-child. Perhaps the bony eye-hoods were removed by doctors, to help him hide among regular humans.

“Please call me Hijo,” he said in a voice that sounded both deeper and more constricted than normal, as if he were deliberately trying for a nasal twang. Or, perhaps he was just overstressing his tones, in speaking Mandarin Chinese.

When Hijo shook hands with Mei Ling-the older way-Mei Ling felt almost sure there was something different in the way bone and muscle and sinew were put together. His gentle squeeze conveyed a sense of repressed strength. Lots of it.

Nervously expecting him to say something profound, Mei Ling found Hijo’s next words comfortingly normal.

“Baby,” he said, spreading open both hands. “Can I hold your baby? I promise to be careful.”

Remembering that quiet strength, Mei Ling couldn’t help glancing at Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte, who merely smiled in a relaxed way. So did the strange little boy, Yi Ming, who had arranged this encounter, guiding Mei Ling through countless twisty passages beneath the Universe of Disney and the Monkey King. Lifting Xiao En out of his sling carrier, she set an example of holding him, then turned the infant in order to hand him over… watching.

There was no cause for worry. Hijo hefted Xiao En with evident skill and ease… he must have handled babies before. And Xiao En chortled pleasure at having someone new to charm. In truth, he was getting so big, Mei Ling found it a relief to surrender the weight, for a time.

Hijo made cooing sounds that drew from Xiao En a drooling, gap-tooth smile. Though they were strange to Mei Ling’s ear… as if two creatures were crooning in different parts of a forest, at the same time.

Watching the two of them together, Mei Ling wondered how the Basque Chimera had been able to stay free for so long. The modern world’s overlapping cameras fed each other, reporting to smart daitabases. Sure, there had been efforts to conceal the boy’s differences-having undergone reconstructive surgery herself, Mei Ling recognized signs that Hijo’s nose had been altered and possibly even the slope of his forehead. But other things, like a pronounced bulging of the back of the skull, could not be disguised. Though, now that she thought about it…

… Mei Ling glanced at Yi Ming and realized, some of the telltale traits were shared with millions of others walking around today. People with normal, human pedigrees.

“Shall we sit?” Agurne invited Mei Ling to join her on a couch. Not far away stood one of the multi-access consoles where men and women-all of them clearly abnormal-had plugged and wired and harnessed themselves, grunting and twitching as complicated light-shows flashed from goggle-covered eyes.

“I do not-” Mei Ling swallowed, trying for her best grammar. “I do not understand why I am thus honored.”

Agurne laughed, a gentle sound.

“Please. We both became pregnant and bore healthy sons under difficult circumstances. We both successfully fled the clutches of great powers. How is it any less of an honor for me to meet you?”

Mei Ling found herself blushing. And she knew that made her scar tissue stand out, embarrassing her further.

“How… may I be of service?” she half whispered.

Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte inhaled deeply. Her eyes glittered with compassionate concern.

“Normally, I would not be so rude. You have no reason to trust me. At the very least, we would talk a while. Get the measure of each other, one woman and mother to another. But there is so little time. May I go straight to the point?”

“Please… please do.”

Agurne motioned with one hand toward the janitorial smart-mob, harnessed into their multisensory portal stations. “All over the world, small groups like this one are joining forces, in an urgent quest for understanding. They can sense that something is happening. Something that cannot be entirely encompassed by words.”

Mei Ling swallowed hard. She glanced at the boy who was now sitting on the floor, holding her son. Although he was turned partly away, Hijo seemed to sense her question.

“Yes… I can feel it, too. I am helping. In fact, I have to get back to work, real soon.”

Agurne smiled with adoring approval, then turned back to Mei Ling and continued.

“I cannot explain what it is that they are doing, or claim to understand, except that it seems to be about destiny. Things and ideas and emotions that may determine the future of humanity, if Allah-of-all-names wills it.”

Mei Ling could find no words, so she waited for the other woman to say more.

“Do you know what many of these teams are doing right now?”

Mei Ling shook her head. No.

“They are searching for your husband. And the crystal he was last seen carrying into the sea.”

She had known, of course, all along. Deep down. This could only be about the accursed Demon Stone. “I wish he never found the terrible thing.”

“I understand. You have cause for bitterness. But do not judge too quickly. We don’t know what role it will play. But one thing is certain. Your husband will be safer if he and the stone can be drawn out of shadows. Into the light.”

Mei Ling pondered this for long seconds.

“Can that be done?”

The other woman’s smile was rueful, apologetic.

“I don’t know the details. They are searching for him by sifting the daita-sphere. A myriad corners and dimensions of the Great Mesh. The tides and currents and drifting aromas. Many things that are deeply hidden, encrypted and buried behind bulwarks of firewall isolation-these nevertheless leave spoors that can be detected, if only by the studious absence of mention.”

Mei Ling blinked silently, wondering how this foreigner-born in New Guinea, raised on Fiji, and educated in Europe-became so articulate in Chinese. Better than me, she observed.

“These are the sort of not-there traces that the Blessed Throwbacks sometimes can detect, invisible to the rest of us.”

“But not to me!” inserted Hijo, who had laid Xiao En on a plush rug, and was playing a game of peekaboo, to the baby’s delight.

“No. Not to you,” Agurne responded, indulgently.

“In fact, I can tell that Mei Ling’s children will be special,” the Neanderthal boy added. “Even though I don’t know why. Nobody can know the future. But some things just leap out. They’re obvious.”

Hijo’s faulty use of the plural almost made her protest. I have only one child. But Mei Ling shook her head. This was no time for petty distraction. She turned back to the mother.

“How can I help? What can I tell you?”

Agurne Arrixaka Bidarte leaned gently toward Mei Ling.

“Everything. Anything you can remember. We already have many clues.

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?”

The gullet of the sea serpaint isn’t as gross or disgusting as he expected. The walls are soft and he has only to crawl back a short distance to find a space shaped to fit a recumbent person.

While twisting into the seat, Bin hears the jaw of the mechanical beast close with a thump. There follows backward movement, undulating, shaking, like a worm wriggling out of a hole. By some tech-wizardry, the small space around him begins emptying of water. Soon, a hiss of air.

Bin spits out the mouthpiece-a gasp of shuddering relief. The breather had gone foul. He gratefully rubs his eyes.

A patch of wall near his head is transparent-a window! How considerate. Really. It makes him feel ever-so-slightly less a prisoner-or a meal. Pressing his face, he peers outside. The palace ruins are a jumble, collapsed further by the fighting, now lit by slanting moonlight.

While the robot backs up, Bin spots his former attic shelter. Briefly, before the machine can accelerate forward, he glimpses the opening-and perhaps a shadowy silhouette. At least, he thinks so.

Enough to hope.

58.

“They aren’t just battling it out with lasers anymore,” Gennady reported. “Now, many of the space attacks appear to involve kinetic energy weapons.”

“You mean pellet guns?” Akana asked. “Wouldn’t those be slower? Harder to aim, with all those asteroids jumbling about, on different orbits? And your target might get a chance to duck.”

“How does a lump of crystal duck?” asked Emily Tang.

“Evidently,” replied Haihong Ming, “there are things out there with more… physical capability… than mere lumps of passive crystal.”

That had been obvious for a while. Still it felt like a milestone for someone to say aloud what everyone was thinking. We’re in new territory, Gerald realized.

“Exactly! So…” Akana blinked. “Oh, I see. If you fire a high-velocity pellet and it takes a while to intersect the orbit of its target, that gives you time to take cover or get out of the way, before anyone will notice and retaliate. Can’t do that with a laser.”

“Depends on whether anyone’s using radar…” Gennady started to quibble, then shook his head and let it go.

“But why fight at all?” asked Dr. Tshombe. “What is this all about?”

“You mean other than scaring the bejeesus out of several billion Earthlings?” Emily asked, with a crack in her voice.

Or putting the kibosh on all those stupid claims of a hoax, Gerald pondered with some bitter satisfaction. One casualty had been the credibility of Hamish Brookeman and his backers. Well, sic transit gloria.

Ben Flannery, their Hawaiian anthropologist, gestured toward the object Gerald recovered from space-what seemed ages ago-now covered by a thick black cloth. The recording technicians had been sent away and all light cut off. The commission members had come to realize it was still necessary to teach the Artifact a lesson, now and then.

“We already knew there were factions. Machines that are related to our Artifact-part of the same interstellar lineage-may have worried, when other types started flashing for attention. Then came news reports from Earth, about space expeditions preparing to go fetch more varieties, for comparison. That was the last straw. Those cousins of our Artifact stepped in at that point, acting forcefully to remove the competition.

“And that brought retaliation. A truce that may have lasted eons came to a sudden end.”

“In order to achieve what?” Emily asked.

“To claim the most valuable commodity in the solar system-human attention.”

Gerald felt sympathy for Ben, a man of peace, reluctantly dragged into analysis of deadly war. One that apparently spanned millions of years, without a single living participant. But that didn’t make it any less violent.

Akana had gone quiet for a while, as her tru-vus went opaque. Her teeth were clicking like mad, and among her subvocal grunts Gerald thought he heard one that signaled “Yes, sir,” repeated several times.

Uh-oh, he thought.

“You know, there is an alternative theory,” Gennady mused, oblivious to Akana’s distraction. “We already decided these crystal artifacts are a lot like viruses. Well, in that case, consider a biological analogy. One explanation for the machines that are shooting at these space viruses may be some kind of immune-”

Akana’s specs abruptly cleared and she sat up, with the petite but commanding erect posture of a woman who had recently been promoted to the rank of major general in the United States Aerospace Force. Her bearing brought silence better than any spoken order.

“That was the White House. All plans for another sample-recovery mission have been put on hold. Nobody feels prepared to send a crew, or even robots, into that mess out there. And I’m told that similar orders have been issued by Great China.”

She paused while Haihong Ming checked with his government. In seconds, he nodded.

“That is so. But there appears to be more. Will you all kindly give me a moment?” Then it was his turn to disappear behind interspectacles that went totally opaque.

Gerald and the others looked at each other. Way back in olden times, it used to take weeks or months for an envoy to consult with his government, back home. Now, a couple of minutes seemed to stretch forever as Haihong Ming grunted in apparent surprise… then seeming protest… and finally evident submission.

At last, he flipped back his eye hoods decisively and took a few seconds to scan those seated around the table, before resuming.

“It would seem we now have sufficient reason for a complete pooling of resources and information.”

“Um, I thought that was what we were doing already,” Gennady commented. But Gerald shook his head. “I think our esteemed colleague from the Reborn Central Kingdom has something specific in mind. Something that he was forced-until now-to conceal.”

Haihong Ming agreed with a short, sharp nod. This admission clearly caused some pain. “My sincere apologies for that. But now I can reveal that we long suspected the existence of at least one more emissary artifact, here on Earth.”

“You mean other than those shattered remnants people have been digging up, in recent weeks?”

“I mean that certain elements within our venerable society have long believed in speaking-stones that fall from heaven. Some tales were thought more credible than others. There once was, for example, a specimen held in the Imperial Summer Palace, until it was sacked by European troops during the Second Opium War. That object was said to induce vivid dreams. Another-a carved egg made from especially pale jade, with purported ‘magical properties’-was taken from the National Museum by Chiang Kai-shek, when he fled to Taiwan. Neither piece was ever publicly seen again.”

“Did those items exhibit any of the properties we’ve seen here?” Tshombe waved toward the cloth-covered Havana Artifact. “Clear and explicit images? Animated beings who respond to questions?”

“Not in modern times, or witnessed by reliable chroniclers,” the Chinese representative conceded. “But they may have been rendered inactive by superstitious meddling or artistic… elaborations. Our mandarins and craftsmen were often too eager to cut and embellish naturally beautiful things,” he admitted, ruefully. “Or else, they may have been damaged amid centuries of warfare and looting.

“Ancient accounts do at least suggest they would be good targets of study. Perhaps even now they are under scrutiny by cryptic groups.”

That implication was unpleasant to consider. Some secret coven of elite power, gaining an advantage by comparing their own private source to the flood of public information emerging from the Havana Artifact.

“Then there are even older legends, or vague hints that magical stones were buried in royal graves. And-”

Refusing to be distracted, Ben Flannery sighed. “Is that all you mean to tell us? That some museum pieces may once have glimmered a little, before they were carved into uselessness? From your buildup, I figured you fellows already had something more tangible in your hands.”

Haihong Ming shook his head.

“We almost did. An especially promising piece kept slipping through our grasp. Not once but frequently, for a generation.”

“A generation?” Akana asked, clearly puzzled. “But-”

“That is how long we suspected something remarkable-an intact emissary stone-might have come into private possession. Our searches came close to recovering it, several times.”

And if you did acquire a working space crystal, earlier than I snagged one out of orbit, Gerald wondered, would you have shared it with the world, as we did?

Haihong Ming continued. “The most recent near miss-and it causes some embarrassment to say this-came just over a day ago. Thirty hours, to be exact. Since then, we have searched hard. And other forces appear to be doing so, as well.”

“But…” Akana leaned forward, her elbows on the smooth tabletop. “How do you know this isn’t just another fetish stone, or crystal skull, or some other man-made-”

“We know,” affirmed the representative of Great China, firmly. “And I am now authorized to show you how we know.”

With a series of grunts and hand motions, Haihong Ming caused an image to appear above the table. A scroll of some sort, or flimsy document, a single page that stretched wider and then shimmered with pixelated rainbows, as if lit by some angled light source. Gerald squinted. His aiware compensated and interpreted.

A memory sheet. An older, ten-petabyte unit for digital data storage.

The filmy object floated-in synthetic 3-D-above them all, then appeared to flatten, turning and glistening in every refracted color.

“This recording came into our possession just three hours ago. It is now being flown to Beijing, but a preliminary download contains information so startling-I am ordered to share it with you.”

A small seed of blackness erupted from a corner of the memory sheet. Unfolding once… twice… several times… the darkness continued to expand through a dozen dimensions. It then unpackaged glittering, pinpoint stars that swirled and dispersed, arraying themselves across what rapidly became an ersatz, 3-D cosmos, complete with strange constellations… all of it enveloping a blue-brown world. One that clearly wasn’t Earth. Nor did Gerald recognize the globe from dozens revealed by the Havana Artifact.

“As I said, we did not recover the interstellar voyager itself,” explained Haihong Ming. “That crystal may already be sequestered in a hidden place by some nation, cabal, or gang. But a sympathetic citizen did provide us with this record containing dozens of hours of output from the Heaven Egg.”

“Heaven Egg?”

“The original artifact is Chinese national property. It is ours, to name, as we choose. And be assured, we will recover it! Meanwhile, here is a small portion of its trove. Remember, I, too, am seeing this for the first time.”

Haihong Ming motioned and a story commenced, made entirely of images.

It began as natives of the blue-brown world launched a tiny, twinkling probe, then used giant machines to send sparkling rays, push-propelling its filmy sail across the vast desert of space. Gennady and Ramesh murmured about technical differences between the method portrayed here and that described by the Havana Artifact. No one else spoke as the little envoy passed for a time through darkness… then brightened in the light of a fast-approaching sun.

Gerald’s breath caught as quick-looming Jupiter snagged and flung the little envoy… which then caromed wildly among other planets, slowing each time until, at last, a familiar globe floated into view, seizing the star-traveler into a final, flaming embrace…

… followed by a miraculous, snow-cushioned landfall. Then discovery by men in sewn leather garments… And the story had barely begun.

There were no breaks-for meals, even the toilet-nor did anyone speak. Not till a single word took shape, central and glowing, above the table top, right next to the blanket-covered bulge of the Havana Artifact. It manifested as an ancient Chinese ideogram, floating and shimmering in a calligraphic style that seemed edgy. Even angry.

Gerald’s aiware had no trouble with translation. And all at once, he understood why Haihong Ming and his superiors were in a sudden mood to share everything they knew.

LIARS.

You got to hand it to those boys and girls on the Contact Commission. They do come up with clever tricks to get cooperation from the Artifact. First that behavioral training they used last month. Now, by refusing to record any more of those endless schematics and tech manuals the probe offers.

Who would think to try that? Saying no to a free gift? Declining something humans passionately desire-all those advanced technologies-in order to get what’s more important.

It makes sense though. What’s the probe’s top priority? Get us moving down the road toward making more probes. Put aside whether that ultimate goal is good, bad, or neutral. The Artifact must hunger to teach us those technologies. A hunger we can exploit. Hideoshi and her team are savvy. They won’t scratch the Artifact’s itch without some kind of payment. And their demand?

More interviews with the passengers. One or two or three at a time.

This grew more urgent when we spied lasers and guns blasting across the asteroid belt! The commission demanded an explanation-and Oldest Member first expressed surprise, then indifference, and finally attributed it all to “bad machines from earlier eras.”

Adding that “You humans can protect yourselves by downloading strong tools. Let us show you how to cast powerful rays that could sweep your solar system clean!”

Hm. Tempting. Persuasive. Who turns down an offer of big guns?

And Gerald Livingstone tossed the Black Cloth, casting the artilens in darkness-till they finally accepted a deal. One hour for one hour. They get to teach us new-tech for a span, then we get some diversity-such as it is.

So we’ve gone back to interviewing Low-Swooping Fishkiller-the youngest member-proud that his race made the Artifact we now hold, and apparently unmoved that we detect no sign of industry or radio by peering at his homeworld. “Organics all die,” he answered, shrugging those weird wings.

And Squiddy… she picked the name herself, from fifty thousand submitted by school kids across Earth. Some sense of humor, for a tentacle-waving pseudo cephalopod! Her chief contribution to human culture-a fresh and convincing definition of “irony”-has the intelligentsia spinning in why didn’t we think of that circles! And it took an alien. Huh.

Still, Squiddy won’t diverge from Om’s party line. He makes a case that the Artifact may indeed be like a virus-as critics say-but a beneficial or commensal one. And he gave hundreds of examples from our medical literature. A persuasive point.

Others are harder to understand. Take the caterpillarlike being who spends its time during each interview peering out of the crystal at any nearby human, then muttering a puff of dismissive symbols that translate: “Man, what an imagination I have!”

A clear case of Noakes Disease, earning that creature the web consensus name Bennie.

“What did you expect?” commented M’m por’lock, the one who resembles a giant-reddish otter, after helping usher Bennie away. “We spend eternities floating through space, either sleeping or amusing ourselves in vast virtuality layers, deep within our crystal vessel. You can lose your way in dreamstate. Or miss your chance to taste objective reality, during each brief encounter with a living race.”

Are you like me? Do you get a sense, from M’m por’lock, of things unsaid?

More broadly-is this doing any good?

Sure, it scratches our curiosity itch, a bit. Glimpsing strange arts and tasting the cultural spread can be engrossing. This gives our psych and other experts a chance to chart behaviors, cross-correlate alien attitudes and other boffin stuff. But seriously, what do they expect-to come up with an extraterrestrial lie detector? Some way to verify the stories we’re told? Or to separate the Artifact’s good offers from the sales-pitch parts? The portions that are pure, viral self-interest?

Suspicion lingers. The diversity of ninety races that we see-is it all somehow concocted? An act that’s been refined before many audiences across ten million years? A puppet show, serving that long-term goal-

– to persuade?

59.

The artificial sea serpent took a circuitous route along the ocean floor, carrying Bin on a lengthy tour of murky canyons and muddy flats, stretching endlessly.

His passenger cell was padded, but cramped. The curved walls kept twisting, throbbing as the machine beast pushed along. Nor was the robot vehicle as garrulous or friendly as Dr. Nguyen’s penguin surrogate. Giving only terse answers, it ignored his request for a webscreen, immersion specs, or any form of ailectronic diversion.

For the most part, the apparatus kept silent.

Or as silent as a motorized python could be, while undulating secretively across a vast and mostly empty sea. Clearly, it was avoiding contact with humanity-not easily done in this day and age, even far away from shipping lanes and shorelines. Several times, Bin felt thrown to one side as the snake-sub veered and dived, taking shelter behind some mound, within a crevice, or even burying itself under a meter or so of mucky sediment, then falling eerily quiet, as if hiding from predators. On two of those occasions, Bin thought he heard the faint drone of some engine gradually rise and then fall, in both pitch and volume, before fading away at last. Then, as the serpent shook itself free of mud, their journey resumed.

Even its method of propulsion seemed designed for stealth. Most of the world’s sub-sea detection systems were tuned to listen for propellers, not wriggling giant serpents.

Of course signs of humanity lay everywhere. The ocean floor was an immense junkyard, even in desert zones where no fish or plants or any kind of resource could be seen. Shipwrecks offered occasional sights worth noting. Far more often, Bin saw mundane types of trash, like torn commercial fishing nets, resembling vast, diffuse, deadly clouds that drifted with the current, clogged with fish skeletons and empty turtle shells. Or swarms of plastic bags that drifted alongside jelly hordes in creepy mimicry. Once, he spotted a dozen huge cargo containers that must have toppled from a mighty freighter long ago, spilling what appeared to be bulky, old-fashioned computers and television panels across forty hectares.

I’m used to living amid garbage. But I always figured the open sea was better off… more pure… than the Huangpu.

Losing track of time, he dozed while the slithering robot hurried across a vast, empty plain, seeming as lifeless as the moon…

… then jerked awake, to look out through the tiny window and find himself being carried along a craggy underwater mountain range, an apparently endless series of stark ridges that speared upward, reaching almost to the glistening surface, but even more eerie, because the rippling promontories vanished into bottomless gloom, below. Clearly, the mechanical creature that had swallowed him meant to shake off any pursuers. Weaving its way through this labyrinth should help.

Feeling a bit recovered, Bin peeled open some ration bars that he found in a small compartment by his left arm. A little tap offered trickles of fresh water. There was a washcloth, which he used to dab and clean his cuts. A simple suction tube-for waste-was self-explanatory, if awkward to use. After which, the voyage became a battle against both tedium and claustrophobia-the frustration of limited movement plus abiding worry over what his future held.

No clues came from the serpent, which spoke sparingly and answered no questions, not even when Bin asked about some roiling funnels of black water that he spotted, rising from fissures in a nearby jagged ridgeline, like columns of smoke from a fierce fire.

It occurred to Bin that-perhaps-he shouldn’t be so glad that the owners of this sophisticated device included a window. In stories and teledramas, kidnappers insist on a blindfold, if they plan to let you go.

The time to worry is when they don’t seem to care. If they let you watch the route to their lair, it means they feel sure you’ll never talk.

On the other hand, who could possibly tell, by memory, one hazy sea ridge from another? That reassured him for a while… till he remembered the visual helper unit that Dr. Nguyen installed in his right eye. Bin had come to take for granted the way the tiny aissistant augmented whatever he looked at, enhancing the dim scene beyond the window. Now he realized; without it, he wouldn’t be seeing much at all!

Are they assuming that a poor man, like me, is unaugmented?

He wondered about the implant. Might it even be recording whatever he saw? In which case, was he like the kidnap victim who kept daring fate, by peeking under his blindfold?

Or am I headed for someplace that is so perfectly escape-proof that they don’t care how much I know?

Or someplace that I’d never want to escape from?

That was preferable to other possibilities.

Or am I to be altered, in ways that will make me placid?

Or do they figure that I’ll only be needed for a little while-till a replacement can be arranged, someone else qualified to speak with the worldstone? Must I try as hard to win over my next masters, as I did Anna and Paul and Dr. Nguyen?

Each scenario came accompanied by vivid fantasies. And Bin tried not to subvocalize any of them-there were modern devices that could track the impulses in a human throat and parse words you never spoke aloud.

On the other hand, why would anyone bother doing that, with a mere shoresteader trashman? Ultimately, each fantasy ended in one thought. That he might never see his family again.

But the soldier… the woman in that drowned attic room… she will get the sheet recording that Yang Shenxiu made. She will know that I cooperated. The government will protect and reward Mei Ling and Xiao En. Surely?

It was all too worrisome and perplexing. To help divert his thoughts, Bin put the worldstone on his lap and tried talking to Courier of Caution.

True, without immersion in sunlight, the entity had to preserve energy, subduing its vivid animations-the images were dim and limited to a small surface. Still, if he could learn some new things, that might prove his worth.

It wasn’t easy. Without sound induction, he was limited to tracing characters on the ovoid’s surface. Courier at first tried responding with ancient ideograms. But Bin knew few of those, so they resumed the process of updating its knowledge of written Chinese. The entity within offered pictures or pantomimed actions. Bin sketched the associated modern words-often helped by the ai-patch. Never having to repeat, it went remarkably quickly. Within half a day, they were communicating.

At last, Bin felt ready to ask a question that had been foremost in his mind. Why did Courier hate the aliens inside the Havana Artifact?

Why did he call them “liars”?

In a stream of characters, accompanied by low-resolution images, the entity explained.

Our world is farther from its sun than yours. Larger but less dense. Our gravity slighter. Our atmosphere thicker and rich with snow. It is a planet much easier to land upon than your Earth. If a solar sail is built especially sturdy in the middle, it can be used as a parachute, to cushion the fall.

And so, when they came to our world, many of the messenger stones did not shy away, lurking at a safe distance to await technological civilization. Instead some chose a direct approach, raining down upon-

There appeared a new symbol, unlike anything Chinese, made up of elegant, curling, and looping lines that suggested waves churning a beach. The emblem reminded Bin of Turbulence and so that became his word for the planet.

– from many sources.

My species rose up to intelligence already knowing these sky-crystals, finding them occasionally in mud or ice. Even embedded on stone. Foraging packs of our pre-sapient ancestors cherished them. Early tribes fought over them, worshipped them, looked to them as oracles, seeking advice about the next hunt, about crude agriculture, about diplomacy. And marriage.

The alien made a gesture that Bin could not interpret-a writhing of both hands. And yet, he felt somehow sure that it expressed irony.

Thus, our evolution was guided. Accelerated.

Painting characters with a finger, Bin wrote bitterly that humanity never had such help. That is, unless you counted a few, vague strictures from Heaven. And, perhaps, some nudges from the rare messenger fragments that made it to Earth.

Do not envy too readily, Courier chided. It might have gone smoothly, if there were only one kind of stone, with one inhabitant each! But there were scores, perhaps even hundreds of crystal seers, scattered across many island continents! Only much later did we learn-they had come across space from several directions. At least eighteen different alien points of origin. Turbulence-planet sits at a meeting of galactic currents.

Then add this irksome fact. That each stone held multitudes! Communities, accumulations, whole zoos of “gods,” in many shapes, who bickered, even when they agreed.

We had the blessing-and curse-of highly varied counsel. Except, of course, when they all wanted the same thing.

But still, Bin wrote. They helped you rise up quickly.

Courier nodded. Though whether the gesture was native to it, or learned from other humans, Bin couldn’t tell.

One tribe-following advice from its shaman stone-practiced fierce eugenics upon itself, in mountain isolation, for fifty generations. When they burst forth, all other clans on that land mass were awed into submission, and local females wanted only to mate with their males.

The worldstone depicted a mob of naked primitives, bowing before another group that stood taller, more erect, wearing fur clothing, with wide noses and thick manes-more like Courier himself.

Meanwhile, on other continents and archipelagoes, different oracle stones offered guidance to groups near them, advising and rewarding compliance with counsel about hunting methods, the weather, taming wild beasts, or domesticating plants. Any tribe that had a god-crystal was tutored to breed itself smarter, tougher, better able to take over its neighbors.

Eventually, these spreading zones of modified people encountered each other. Conflict ensued! At first waged with stones and spears, then cannon and poisons. Urged to fight for total conquest, our ancestors studied the arts of genocide.

We soon learned a hard lesson. The only way to make peace between two tribes was to choose one set of jealous gods-a single oracle-and dispose of the other. Or hide it from sight. Only then would the surviving crystal allow both clans to meet in peace and interbreed, molding robust hybrids for the next confrontation.

Bin read the story while, behind the glowing ideograms, simulations showed members of Courier’s race growing stronger, quicker, taller, and more impressive, armed with tools of ever-increasing sophistication. From Courier’s choice of words, Bin sensed resentment over how these ancestors were manipulated into fighting one another. But honestly? This history seemed no more violent than humanity’s.

Less so! Because each war actually accomplished something. Resolution in a firm direction. Unification under one stone’s guidance. One set of “gods.”

And rapid progress. The simulated aliens-or heavenly advisers-had practical knowledge to impart. Useful methods gathered by dozens of races, under faraway suns. Helped by such hints, Courier’s people skipped countless centuries of rough trial and error.

Bin thought back to those arguments between Paul Menelaua and Anna Arroyo. He wished they were here. Not because they were ever friendly to him. But their back-and-forth tussles shed more light than either could manage alone. Bin recalled one extended debate over the role of religion in human development.

There had been so many cults on every continent. From Europe and Asia to the Americas, creeds varied widely in details of ritual and belief, yet were largely similar in one respect… the way all jealously demanded obedience, ritualistic repetition, the firm teaching of children, and fierce resistance to the lure of other sects-like the one followed by those filthy folks across the valley.

What was the term that Paul had used? For ideas that take root in human minds and force those minds to spread them farther?

Infectious memes, wrote the ai helper chip that floated in Bin’s right eyeball. Mental constructs that pass from human to human, like viruses, with the trait of making each host want to believe. And making him want to persuade others.

It wasn’t an easy concept for Bin to wrap his head around. As for the legend of Planet Turbulence, Bin could not suppress his jealousy. At least Courier’s people had gods who spoke clearly and taught practical things, making each generation healthier and stronger. Most human cultures had to sit still for long periods, while priests and aristocrats insisted that nothing should change. In the face of steady, conservative resistance, how many centuries did it take human beings to develop farms and roads, then advanced tools and schools, then universities and such, let alone actual science?

His aiware took that as a literal question.

Homo sapiens endured 2,000 generations, from the Neolithic renaissance until achieving civilization.

Before that, Homo neanderthalensis lasted 15,000 generations.

Homo erectus 50,000 generations.

Bin resisted a temptation to turn off the device, yet again. Though irritating, the implant might give him a small edge, when he finally met the owners of the mechanical sea serpent.

But… two thousand generations? Bin’s mind recoiled, unable to contemplate the vast span that humanity languished in dim ignorance, doomed to countless false starts and futile sidetracks. By comparison, Courier’s people took a shortcut stairway. An escalator! Bin wrote as much, with his fingertip.

The simulated alien replied,

Progress may have been slower for your race. Harder. Less continuous. But you get the pride of knowing that you lifted up yourselves, through your own efforts.

And there were costs for our rapid development. Under guidance by crystal-encased “gods,” marriage and reproduction became tightly managed on Planet Turbulence. Mating required permission. Half the males in any generation could not breed at all. Our ancestral forebears had been monogamous, gregarious, friendly, easy-going creatures. Under guidance, we became harshly competitive, performing every trick in order to be noticed-to gain approval – from those domineering immortals in the oracle stones.

Continuing to unfold its tale, the Courier entity arrived at a pivotal phase of history when a single mega-tribe-guided by one especially effective sky emissary-triumphed, becoming dominant across most of the planet.

A generation later, we had cities.

Within five, we were in space.

Whereupon… only then… did we learn what the gods wanted from us.

Bin felt tension, even though he knew the answer already. Everyone on Earth knew, thanks to the Havana Artifact. Bin painted a summary with his finger.

They asked you to build more emissary stones-billions of duplicate bottles… And messengers to put inside them-and then spend every resource to cast them forth toward new planets beyond.

Again, Courier nodded.

That is the deal they presented to us, back on Turbulence.

And we agreed! After all, these were the deities who had vexed and confused and guided and tormented and loved and taught us, as far back as our collective race memory could penetrate the misty past. Even when we knew what they truly were-mere puppets sent by beings who once dwelled by faraway suns-we felt obliged to move forward. To grant their wish.

Slowly, of course, while building a society of knowledge and serenity…

But no! They hectored that it should be our top-our only-priority! They badgered us. Cajoled and manipulated. Until, at last, they confided a reason for haste.

And so came the great lie…

Black characters continued scrolling under the surface of the stone, but their already-dim contrast was fading fast. All background images vanished and Bin realized, the artifact must be nearly drained. Moreover, his eyes hurt.

He painted a symbol on the ovoid-WAIT-and rubbed them. Time also for some water. And the last protein bar, which he munched quietly, pondering more clearly than ever how small and unimportant his life was. All individual lives, for that matter, on the grand and tragic scale of many worlds. Many tragic destinies.

Yet, his mind’s wanderings kept returning to what mattered most. His mate. His child. Somehow, there must be a way to help them… to ensure their lives and comfort and liberty… while salvaging something worthwhile out of his own tangled loyalties. To China. To Dr. Nguyen. To Courier. Humanity. Himself.

To the truth.

Without realizing it, Bin had been finger-writing while thinking. He realized this because the worldstone glimmered with an answer. One that throbbed briefly, faintly, before drowning in dull mist.

Truth?

Just get me to where I can…

He missed the last part as the robot-sub began vibrating suddenly, jouncing the scarred crystal on his lap. But for the padded walls, it might have been deafening. As the cramped compartment twisted and flexed, Bin voiced questions for the mechanical serpent, getting no answers.

Paying close heed though, he noted an apparent change in the sea-leviathan’s rippling motion. And perhaps the angle of his seat. Then the ai-patch intervened again, diagnosing with a single word, floating in the lower right corner of vision.

Ascent.

DEBATING DESTINY

Welcome to Povlovian Response. I’m Nolan Brill, sitting in for your regular inciter Miss Tor Povlov, who’s following a major story. Or so I’m told. There she is, in that corner of the studio. Hasn’t moved a tread or gripper in days. The lights on her robomobile canister are green and there’s tons of encrypted link activity, so we assume Tor is roaming out there now, following a scent with her award-winning smart-mob. Good hunting, Tor!

Meanwhile, we have quite a lineup for today’s gladi-oratorial tiff. First, Dr. Clothilde Potter-Ferrier, the EU’s Deputy Minister of Possibilities. She joins us from Earth Union’s equatorial capital, in Suriname. Good of you to spare time, Minister.

DR. POTTER-FERRIER: Thank you, Nolan. Anything for Tor’s vraudience.

NOLAN BRILL: Terrific. But get ready for hard questions about the EU’s new policy on tech controls. Some liken it to the “War on Science” that raged in the U.S., a generation ago.

DR. POTTER-FERRIER: An unfair comparison, Nolan. That campaign was driven by a few conniving billionaires. Whereas this new endeavor-

NOLAN BRILL: -is propelled by several dozen trillionaires? Using “species salvation” as an excuse to eliminate competition from other estates?

DR. POTTER-FERRIER: Nonsense. Populist momentum has built for some time, as we saw “progress” wreak terrible harms. Then came the terrifying fact taught by those alien refugees-that all planets wind up damned by one arrogant overreach or another. If we’re to have any hope-

PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Fact? You call dat story fact? Jus’ because some obeah space-puppets say? Oh, mon, what quattie foolish-

NOLAN BRILL: Coo-yah now, don’ you be nuh-easy, Profnoo. You’ll get chance in a minim. Firs lemme inner-duce our guests.

PROFESSOR NOOZONE: So sorry, Nolan brudder. Fit ’n’ frock.

NOLAN BRILL: Bashy. Also on the mat is Mr. Hamish Brookeman, who wrote the shit-disturbers Cult of Science and Progress-Hubris, here to pop another entertaining rationale for why any intelligent person should listen to his story that “It’s all a hoax I wrote.”

HAMISH BROOKEMAN: Do you call a billion people unintelligent, Mr. Brill?

NOLAN BRILL: Well, now you’ll have a shot at the other nine billion-who can see with their own eyes what’s happening in the asteroid belt-

HAMISH BROOKEMAN: Their own eyes? How many have backyard telescopes? A few million? The rest-including you “news folk”-take the word of elites that anything’s going on out there! Boffins and bureaucrats who’ve lied before. Would-be priests, lords, and snobby “amateur science mobs,” all with a vested interest in this tale about alien-

NOLAN BRILL: A tale you claimed to concoct-

HAMISH BROOKEMAN:… Right… I was tricked into it. My own vanity-

NOLAN BRILL: An appealingly convoluted plot, Mr. Brookeman! One of many paranoid romps you’ve enchanted us with, over the years. But first, let’s bring in Jonamine Bat Amittai, compiler of Pandora’s Cornucopia, and world authority on doomsday scenarios. She joins us from Ramallah.

JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: Thanks for letting me participate over this scratchy twodee connection. I couldn’t reach your Jerusalem studio, with the Megiddo riots spreading and so many factions battling over the Temple Mount-

NOLAN BRILL: Well, we’re glad you’re safe. Heck I barely reached Newark this morning! Part of the same mania. Do you think we’re tumbling into a “things fall apart” scenario?

JONAMINE BAT AMITTAI: Could be, Nolan. Though let’s recall, good trends oppose bad ones. There’s a worldwide counter-tide represented by the UCG, the Betsby Society, the Alliance for Civil Negotiation, and so on. All aim for calm discourse-

NOLAN BRILL: Well now, who’d reckon a doom-gloom expert would be today’s optimist! But you rest a moment, after your harrowing escapade. Our final guest is the inimitable Professor Noozone, presentator of Master Your Universe, and evidently one of the elite sci-conspirators trying to convince us alien crystals are real, and we should listen when they forecast Judgment Day. Go easy on the patois today, will you brudder?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Ho ho, my mon Nolanbrill. Praises to Jah and Wa’ppu to all viewers an’ lurkers, on Earth an’ in space. But no-o, I don’ think the world is ending, jus’ cause some zutopong simulated con artists fall from space to vank on us.

NOLAN BRILL: You say the Artifact beings are real, that they should be heeded… but not trusted?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Hey, I grok when a mon preten’ to be a ginnygog, in order to mess wit’ our heads. These space-virus puppets, dey got an agenda. Maybe not good-up for us. Time for care, zeen? For caution an’ scientific detachment. But that don’ mean alien stones ain’t real, mon. People sayin’ that must be smokin’ sour ganja, or else be bloodclotty liars-

HAMISH BROOKEMAN: Hey now just a-

NOLAN BRILL: What about the latest news? In parallel to the E.U.’s sci-tech control measure, U.S. Senator Crandall Strong introduced an urgent quick-bill calling for the Havana Artifact to be put under protective custody by an international commission of wise private citizens, tucking it away till things settle-

PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Which could be forever! Anyway, we all know that senator-mon has ulteriors. He gettin’ a world of bodderation from the new Union of Calm Grownups. They be pushin’ to recall him from office, on account of how he’s a bandulu and a self-druggie indignation addict! Criminalize that and the world would so-change.

Anyway, when it comes to dem alien stones, kill-mi-dead if our real solution isn’ in the opposite direction!

NOLAN BRILL: But Professor, hasn’t our exposure to alien ideas proved traumatic? Wouldn’t it make sense to subject people to less influence?

PROFESSOR NOOZONE: Nolan there be two ways that societies react to new an’ strange ideas. First wit fear. Dey suppose average folk be tainted or led astray. Bad notions warpin’ fragile minds. Better let priests an’ lords guard em from unapproved thoughts. Dat approach was followed by most human cultures.

The other way of lookin’ is hopeful dat folks can deal with the new! Homo sapiens be an adaptable species. Change don’t got to terrify. Courage be transforming mere people-subjects into righteous citizens. Dat second way of lookin’ may be mistaken! But I be loyal to it, all de way to death an’ Babylon.

In fact, our big-up goal should be the fix that ended all de old obeah superstitions that darkened de lives of our ancestors. More light!

Want more truth than de Havana aliens been tellin’? Then get more stones, not less! As teenagers say-Duh?

60.

Dozens of crystal fragments lay across a broad table and several shelves, bathed in sun-colored lamps. All seemed to glow.

Some were mere clusters of chips, held together by rocky crusts. Any further cleaning would leave slivers or piles of sand. Others, more nuggetlike, featured knobs or jagged protuberances-recently washed free of stony dross. In a few cases, there remained almost half a cylinder or egg, though scratched, gouged, and missing chunks.

Lacey wanted to stroke the specimens, fashioned by strange hands near faraway stars. It reminded her of a memorable evening when she and Jason strolled the Tower of London without chattering tourists or press-cams, when every display cabinet lay open for fifteen trillie families to fondle ancient regalia. (Well, rank hath privileges.) But mere baubles like rubies and emeralds never drew her as these shards did-gems of knowledge.

Well… gems of persuasion. Isn’t that what jewels are about?

“We feed them energy while lasers scan, trying every angle to excite holographic memories,” explained Dr. Ben Flannery, who seemed almost giddy, now that the quarantine glass was gone, letting advisors and commissioners mingle at last.

He shouldn’t make assumptions. This may be prelude to a deeper quarantine. There were reported changes in security arrangements for the Contact Center. U.S. Navy guards were being replaced by men in black uniforms, without insignia.

“Is this all the stone fragments gathered in the field? Weren’t there hundreds of micro-quakes, from buried crystals calling attention to themselves?”

“Yes, but most were too deep for recovery. Twenty recent samples are undergoing cleaning. Others have been clung to by nations and private collectors attempting to study them apart, in defiance of Resolution 2525. The World Court will be busy for years. And we’ll never hear about fragments dug up secretly, gone straight from ground to hidden labs.”

Lacey kept a dour thought to herself.

That might be a good thing. With Rupert and Tenskwatawa setting up their “Wisdom Council,” pulling all strings to get it put in charge here. If they succeed… and ai models say they will… then all alien objects could be locked up and space missions canceled. “For public safety.” That’ll leave just fragments, tucked away from their clutches.

Lacey no longer received briefings from the clade of trillionaires and her spy at the Glaucus-Worthington household hadn’t reported in days. This must be it-her long expected demotion from the oligarchy. Lacey had few regrets. Still, it wasn’t enjoyable joining ten billion commoners.

She took solace in a grim thought. Any war on science can go both ways.

Do they dare to trust their boffin hirelings-any of whom might suddenly declare loyalty to the Fifth and Ninth and Tenth estates? Sure, current odds favor their aristocratic putsch. But things could go badly for them, if their inner plottings leak. Or if some new factor eases public panic, replacing it with confidence. Or fascination.

“Have any pieces responded to your probes?” asked a simtech expert from Xian.

“They all respond to an extent. Here’s a complete archive of reactions, so far.” The fair-headed Hawaiian anthropologist waved in midair, as if his hand held something. Lacey flipped down her ai-shades, saw a shimmering virt-cube, and click-forwarded a copy to her chief analyst.

“So, we’re learning stuff, even if broken crystals can’t talk?”

“Indeed, Madam Donaldson-Sander. A few petabytes of holo-images, mostly degraded or lacking context. Partial starscapes. Incomplete globes. And blurry creatures-walkers, fliers, sea creatures. Some that seem robotic.

“Have you traced lineages?” asked a representative of the Mormon League.

“We’re pretty sure we’ve deciphered eleven families of message probes, each bearing distinct sets of alien figures. Plus some overlaps.”

“Overlaps?”

“Species that appear in more than one lineage.”

“Appear in more than… but that would mean some races out there made several kinds of lifeboat probes! I thought these jealous things locked their hosts into duplicating just one virus-meme. But clearly a few organics…” Lacey swallowed, surprised at how an abstraction affected her. “A few host species kept some control over their own destiny, at the end.”

“Still, there’s nothing here to contradict the original Artifact’s story.”

Flannery motioned toward a lonely object across the room, that bulged under a heavy black cloth. All downloading had been suspended by the new Wisdom Council. Just a breather, they vowed, to let the world calm down. Sure.

Lacey thanked Dr. Flannery and others crowded in with questions. She had a few minutes till her analysts could report back, summarizing what was learned from broken relics, dug out of mud and rock all over the planet. She expected no miracles, no game-changing alternatives from such pathetic remnants.

The world overflowed with liars and self-deluders. Knowing this, Lacey had aimed her dreams skyward, hoping for enlightened minds. But it seems deceit is nature’s coin. Among humans, animals, or across the cosmos. Unless you’re held accountable by opponents who know your tricks. And you’ll retaliate, shining light on theirs.

Competition-the engine of evolution-got a bad rap in primitive tribes, because it was almost never fair. Till rivalry was finally harnessed to let no one evade criticism. The Big Deal was supposed to ensure this. But Lacey and Jason always knew the odds-and human nature-were stacked. Feudalism runs in our blood. It erupted in almost every human culture, and probably across the galaxy. Wherever beings clawed up Darwin’s ladder.

Now the clade was making its move. With limitless resources, bureaucracies captured, legislators blackmailed, and a mass reactionary movement stirred near boiling, they’d ride a wave of crisis-driven fear, fueled by the Artifact’s tale. The old lesson? In dangerous times-trust your lords.

Some still hoped to fix all this with competition. Thousands worked around the clock on space missions robust enough to run a gauntlet of million-year-old lasers. If her money might help, Lacey would give! Only now she felt certain: those new launches would fail too.

Rupert and the others think they have it all sewn up. The old plan. Only now with a new goal.

The Quantum Eye had taken weeks to mull Lacey’s question, applying its mysterious polycryo-substrate to sift countless what-if parallel realities. The oracle’s answer:

YOU MAY SOON BE TYPICAL

The obvious meaning? Humanity is no different. Its fate like every other race. Rupert, Helena, the Bogolomovs, the Wu Changs… they’d get similar readings from the Riyadh Seer. And-terrified by its import-they would choose a new ambition, beyond mere oligarchy. After that quantum prophecy, her peers would view this planet as an ocean liner, hurtling toward unavoidable icebergs.

Like aristocrats aboard Titanic, they were thinking about life boats.

Once they consolidate power, all science will refocus on alien technologies. Artifact schematics will become prototypes, then orbital factories. My former peers-now masters of Earth-will picture their decisions arising from logic, necessity, and their sovereign will. But they’ll be dancing to a tune that echoes far back across spacetime.

Ben Flannery lit up crystal fragments, revealing shredded constellations or partial globes, simulated beings and broken symbol-cascades that never fully cohered. Everyone seemed riveted. So, perhaps Lacey was the only one to notice when a quartet of figures emerged through a door at the chamber’s far end.

Gerald Livingstone, Akana Hideoshi, and two other members of the original Contact Team-the Russian and the Chinese-Canadian woman-strode past the other table, the one with a single bulging object in its center, covered by thick cloth. Each wore a one-piece flight suit and carried a travel duffel, slung over a shoulder.

The astronaut barely glanced at the shrouded Artifact that he once lassoed from space, as he led the small party to a side exit that had been sealed for months.

Now, the portal gave way as Livingstone planted a shoulder and pushed. For a long moment the four just stood, bathed in bright Maryland sunshine, inhaling a planetary breeze for the first time in months.

Lacey stepped near the second table, fingering a fringe of the black cloth. Thinking hard.

Even though the sound was expected, she jumped when the door slammed shut behind her with a bang.

This may be the last session of alien interviews for us to examine for a while. Now that the Contact Center is virtually shut down, all interactions with the Havana Artifact must now go through that new council thing. Despite all the whistleblower spills, linking it to a cabal of gnomes and trogs.

With riots and counter-riots raging, aren’t there enough upsetting rumors going around?

– That the Artifact has already been destroyed, and the one shown to the press yesterday by the WC is a fake.

– That it’s a fake all right, to cover up the fact that the original was STOLEN! Swiped by members of the old Contact Team who haven’t been seen since.

– That it was a fake all along. (Yeah, that one is back.)

– That the explosion yesterday at Canaveral was rigged to draw eyes from another launch at the same time, far out to sea.

– That cryonic suspensions of living people-fleeing our raucous time-have gone up so fast that even the Seasteads can’t keep up. And liquid nitrogen futures are skyrocketing.

– That the crisis might spark a reconvening of the Estates Generale, a conclave to reconsider the Big Deal.

And so on and on. So many puzzles… and where the heck is Tor Povlov, when we need her?

Never mind. Here and now, I want to dial back to our main interest, the Artifact aliens, or artilens. That last interview before shutdown. We started discussing it yesterday.

You’ll recall most people were fascinated by the beetlelike being who called himself “Martianus Capella,” after an ancient Roman who saw the fall of civilization looming and tried saving some of it. Our Earthly Martianus Capella strove to collect what he considered the highest accomplishments of his culture, the Seven Liberal Arts, and his collection-in weird poesical format-seemed a candle to many, during the Dark Ages. That story inspired Isaac Asimov, by the way, to write his famed Foundation sci-fi series.

The alien Capella’s struggles to retain many treasures of his people and planet, then safeguarding them against erasure, struck many of us as noble and moving. So moving that I missed something equally important.

It came during the interview with M’m por’lock-that reddish furred otterlike being. When he was asked by Emily Tang (before she disappeared) about the Artifact’s central narrative. The story told by Oldest Member and most of the others. That all organic races die.

M’m por’lock agreed with Om’s account… though with some body language that has stirred argument across the Mesh. Some suggest signs of reluctance, perhaps even coercion! Others chide that it’s foolish-interpreting alien quivers and crouches in human terms.

Only then, M’m por’lock continued.

“There is a legend,” he said. “That one day will come a species who achieves the impossible. Beings who notice and wisely evade all traps and pitfalls, yet do so while moving forward. A race that soberly studies the art of survival, the craft of maturity, and the science of compassion.

“It is said this will be a new dawn. That long-awaited civilization will set forth to rescue all promising new races, teaching them the skills to make it and survive. And they will lift up those who tumbled earlier.

“They will light a path for all.”

With eagerness, Emily Tang asked M’m por’lock to elaborate. Only then the Oldest Member appeared, reminding them that time was up.

“Of course… it is only a legend,” finished the red alien, with Om standing alongside. “A tale for children or those in denial. Not for realists who can see. There is only one escape.”

61.

Ascent.

The ai inside his right eyeball wrote that ideogram, explaining the new path of the mechanical sea serpent that had swallowed Bin and the worldstone.

Sure enough, it felt as if the robot snake were now aimed upward, throbbing hard with swishing strokes of its long tail. Peering through the tiny window, Bin watched an extinct volcano pass by-its eroded peak now crowned by a coral reef that shimmered with sunlit surf. Was this the secret base of whatever group had sent the machine after him?

After the worldstone, that is? At best, Bin would be a helper, a tour guide, hoping for reward. Not death.

But this was no secluded outpost. Instead of entering the lagoon via a clear channel that Bin spied through the shoals, he felt the machine twist and undulate away, following one shoulder of the mountain toward a ridge of shallows, some distance from the main atoll.

It began slowing down.

During one of the snake’s looping movements, Bin caught sight of something ahead… a metal chain leading from an anchoring point on the mountain slope, tethering something that bobbed at the surface. A wave-energy generator? Was the robot only stopping here to replenish its batteries?

The thought that this might only be a brief stop, along a much longer journey, seemed to fill Bin’s body with sudden aches and his mind with new-formed terror of confinement. The tiny space was now even smaller and more stagnant. He flexed, involuntarily pushing with hands and feet against the close, padded space, breathing hard.

Peng Xiang Bin.

Focus.

It is a weather and communications buoy.

The words, floating boldly, briefly, in his lower right field of view, both chided and calmed him. Bin even had the presence of mind not to subvocalize his relief. No doubt this was a rendezvous point. The serpent would use the buoy to summon another vehicle. A seaplane, perhaps. Bin had been on a similar journey before. Well, somewhat similar.

And yet, after Nguyen’s penguin went to all that effort, covering our tracks while guiding me to sunken Pulupau, the Chinese Special Forces still found us. Found the worldstone. Did they have a spy on Newer Newport? Or did one of their satellites pick up some special color of light, reflected by the stone when it soaked in the sun?

Perhaps he would never know. Just as he might never learn the fate of Dr. Nguyen. Or Mei Ling and their child.

Anyway, it seems that someone else followed the Chinese assault team, taking advantage of the chaos to gain an upper hand and win the prize. Who?

Will my new masters even bother to tell me, when I’m fully in their power?

Through the little window he saw growing brightness, approaching daylight. The front end of the snake-bot broached amid spume and noise. Bin abruptly had to shade his eyes against a sunshine dazzle off the ocean’s rippling surface. Even with help from the ai-patch, it took a minute of blinking adjustment before he could make out what bobbed nearby-a floating cluster of gray and green cylinders, with arrays of instruments and antennae on top.

Wriggling gingerly, carefully, the serpaint moved closer to curl its body around the buoy and grasp it firmly. Then Bin saw its mouth open and a tendril emerge.

It will tap in

to communicate

with its faction.

The floating characters took on an edgy quality, drawn with strokes of urgency.

You must please act urgently.

This won’t be easy.

Blink twice if willing.

He was tempted to balk, to at least demand answers… like Willing to do what? For whom? To what end?

But when it came right down to the truth, Bin didn’t care about any of that. He had only one basis to pick and choose among the factions that were battling over the worldstone-and over his own miserable carcass.

Dr. Nguyen had been courteous and so was whoever programmed the ai-patch. It said please. The snake thing, on the other hand, had been threatening, dismissive, and rude. That mattered. He closed his eyes, two times.

Good.

Now you must press close to the window.

Look at the buoy.

Do not blink your right eye at all.

He only hesitated a moment before complying. It was where inquisitiveness compelled him to go.

At first he saw only an assembly of cylinders with writing on them-much of it in English, beyond his poor grasp of that language. Bin could make out various apertures, lenses, and devices. Some of them must sample air or taste water, part of a planetwide network, measuring a world under stress. On the other side of the floating platform, he spied the snake-robot’s tendril, probing to plug itself into some kind of data port.

All right… so what are we trying to…

He stopped, and almost jerked back in surprise as the scene loomed toward him, zooming in on one part of the nearest cylinder. Of course there was nothing new about vision-zooming. But it had never happened within his own eye, before!

Bin kept still as possible. Evidently, the patch had means of manipulating his organic lens… and using the surrounding muscles in order to aim the eye, as well. He quashed a feeling of hijacked helplessness.

When has my life ever really been my own?

Zooming and tracking… he found himself quickly zeroing-in upon one of those gleaming, glassy spots, where the buoy must stare day and night upon the seascape, stormy and clear, patiently watching, accumulating data for the great and growing Grand Model of the World. Suddenly, that gleaming lens filled Bin’s right hand field of view… and he closed the left eye, in order to let this scene become everything. His universe. A single disc of coated optical crystal…

… that flared with a sudden burst of bluish-green! More shocking, still, Bin realized that the color had come from within his own eye-spearing outward, spanning the gap and connecting…

I didn’t know the implant could do that.

I doubt even Dr. Nguyen knew.

It took every bit of grit and steadfastness to keep from drawing back, or at least blinking.

Almost in.

But not quite.

It seems that-

The floating characters stayed outside the cone of action, yet somehow remained readable. They throbbed with urgency.

– you must press your eye

against the window.

He rocked back, sickened by the thought.

Peng Xiang Bin you must.

Please do this

or all is lost.

A low moan fought to escape his throat and he barely managed to quell the sound, along with a sudden heaving in his gut. Gritting his teeth hard, all Bin could think about was the need to overcome raw, organic reflex-passed down all the way from when distant forebears climbed out of the sea. An overwhelming impulse to withdraw from pain, from damage, from fear-

– versus a command from far more recent parts of the brain. To go forward.

Using two fingers of his right hand to hold back the lids, Bin let out a soft grunt and pushed his head against the glass so hard that the eye had to come along.

It was bad.

Good.

Not quite so forcefully.

Hold it.

Hold it.

Hold it.

He held, while greenish flares shot back and forth between his lens and the glassy one on the buoy… and flashing reflections rebounded inside of his right eye, like a maelstrom of cascading needle-ricochets. At one point, his confused retina seemed to be looking at an image of itself, a cluster of blood vessels and sensor cells. He felt boggled by an endless-bottomless-reflection of Peng Xiang Bin that seemed far more naked and soul-revealing than any mere contemplation of a mirror.

And meanwhile, another part of him wondered in detachment: How do I know what a “retina” is? Is even memory still mine, anymore?

Worse. It got much worse, as the sea serpent seemed to catch on that something was going on. Its throbbing intensified and a low growl resonated up and down the intestine-like cloaca. Bin responded by clenching hard and holding even tighter.

All sense of time vanished, dissolved in pain. The little window felt like it was on fire. Using his feet and legs and back, he had to fight a war with himself, and the instinctive part seemed much more sane! As if he were trying to feed his own eye to a monster.

Then-

Black, floating letters returned. But he could not read the blurs. They clustered around his fovea, jostling for attention, interfering with his ability to concentrate. Bin sobbed aloud, even as the green reflections faded.

“I know! I’m… trying to hold on!”

Finally, the characters coalesced into a single one that filled every space within his agonized eye.

STOP.

Meaning took a few more seconds to sink in. Then, with a moan that filled the little compartment, Bin let his body weight drag him backward. He collapsed upon the passenger seat, quivering.

A minute or so passed. He rubbed his left eye free of tears. The right seemed too livid, too raw to touch or even try to open. Instead of blindness, though, it seemed filled with specks and sparkles and random half-shapes. The kind that never came into focus, but seemed to hint at terrors beyond reality.

Slowly, a few of the dazzles traded formlessness for pattern.

“Leave me alone!” he begged. But there was no way to escape messages that took shape inside your very own eye. Not without tearing it away. Oh, what a tempting thought.

While he cursed technology, clear characters formed. These featured a brightness around the edges that they never had before. And there were more differences, like the calligraphy. And something else-a personal flare.

Peng Xiang Bin, I represent a community-a smart-mob-with members around the world.

We have taken over this ai-patch.

So… whatever group originally programmed the device-perhaps it had been Dr. Nguyen’s cabal, or else competitors who managed to sneak something more sophisticated into Bin’s eye-whichever faction provided the software that had made him shove his eye against that glass… it had now been replaced! Some other group out there had pounced and used the brief connection to take over the chip.

It was all so dizzyingly complicated. In fact, Bin surprised himself by keeping up at all.

We want to help you.

More than just the characters’ shape and color were different, he noted. They felt less like the simple responses of a partial ai. More like words sent by a living person.

He must have subvocalized it as a question, because when they next reconfigured, the writings offered an answer.

Yes, Peng Xiang Bin, my name is Tor Povlov.

On behalf of the Basque Chimera, and Birdwoman303, and the rest of our community, let me say how very glad I am to meet you. It took a lot of effort to find you!

One of the names sounded vaguely familiar to Bin. Perhaps something he once heard in passing, about a fugitive underdog, like himself.

Now I’m afraid we must insist. Please get up and take action. There is very-

“I know! Very little time!” He felt on the verge of hysterical laughter. So many factions. So many petty human groups wanted him to hurry, always hurry.

A groaning mechanical sound. The sea serpaint started to vibrate roughly around him.

We’ve suborned the machine’s brain to keep the jaws open. It may be temporary.

He didn’t need urging. With his right eye closed, Bin slipped the worldstone into its carrier, then started crawling forward as the giant robot convulsed. Pushing the worldstone in front, he squeezed through constrictions like fighting upstream against a throat that kept trying to swallow him back down… only to spasm the other way, as if vomiting something noxious.

Spilling into the mouth, he found its head rising and falling, slapping waves, splashing torrents of spume. The jaws kept juttering, as if trying desperately to close. They might succeed at any moment.

Scrambling, Bin grabbed a garish tooth, hauling himself and the satchel toward welcoming brightness-

– only to pause before making his leap.

Don’t be afraid, Bin…

“Be quiet!” he shouted and swung the valise with all his might-

– slamming it against the inner face of the serpent’s left eye casing, which caved in with a brittle, shattering sound. He cried out and did it again to the other one. Those things weren’t going to aim burning lasers at him, once he got outside. Nor was he worried about the worldstone, which survived both space and collision with a mountain glacier.

Good thinking!

Now…

He didn’t need urging. Not from any band of “smart-mob” amateurs, sitting in comfortable homes and offices around the world, equipped with every kind of immersion hardware, software, and wetware money could buy. Their help was welcome, so long as they shut up. While the serpent-machine thrashed and its jaws kept threatening to snap shut, Bin heaved with all his might, scrambling like a monkey till he stood, teetering on the lower row of metal teeth-

– then leaped toward the buoy, as if for life itself, hurtling across intervening space-

– only to splash into the sea, just short, with the heavy satchel dragging him down by one hand. His other one clawed at the buoy, fingers seeking any sort of handhold…

… and failed as he sank past the floating cylinders, hauled by his weighty treasure bag, plummeting toward depths, below.

Yet, Bin never fretted. Nor was he tempted to release the worldstone, even to save his life. In fact, he suddenly felt fine. Back in his element. Doing his job. Practicing his craft. Retrieving and recycling the dross of other days. Hauling some worth out of the salty, trash-strewn mess that “intelligent life” had made of the innocent sea.

His free hand grabbed at-and finally caught-the chain anchoring the buoy to the shoulder of a drowned mountain. Then, as the mechanical serpent thrashed nearby, crippled in mind and body, but still dangerous as hell, Bin also seized the metal-linked tether with his toes.

Maybe there was enough air in his lungs to make it, he thought, while starting to climb.

If so? Then, once aboard the buoy, he might evade and outlast an angry robot. Possibly.

After that? Perhaps the help sent by his new friends in the “smart-mob”-or else the Chinese People’s Navy-would arrive before the snake’s clandestine cabal did. Before the sun baked him. Or thirst or sharks claimed him.

And then?

Clambering awkwardly but steadily up the chain, Bin recalled something that Paul Menelaua once said, back at Newer Newport, when the worldstone entity-Courier of Caution-denounced the famous Havana Artifact, calling it a tool of interstellar liars.

“We have got to get these two together!”

Indeed. Let them have it out, in front of everybody. With the whole world watching. And this time, Peng Xiang Bin would be in the conversation!

Amused by his temerity-the very nerve of such a vow, coming from the likes of him-Bin kept climbing, dragging an ancient warning toward the light of day.

Yeah, right. That’ll happen.

Just keep holding your breath.