Lockstep

Eighteen

“IT’S ALL ABOUT THE interface,” Miranda was telling Corva, “and the things it can do for you.”

“‘You’ being a McGonigal,” Corva pointed out.

“Well, yeah. Which is why I can only show you this mock-up. Toby can’t share it with anybody else. It’s the biocrypto, you know.”

Toby watched them out of the corner of his eye as he kicked through the remains of a recent battle. Having spent several weeks together now, the two women were chatting like old friends, despite the fact that one of them was a fourteen-thousand-year-old game personality. He’d found a way to port data from the government strategic models to Consensus and had given Corva an account in that. Now they both could see the whole vast network of Thisbe’s planetary civilization spread out around them, icons and pointers and information flags standing like giants over the horizon; or they could zoom it all into a handheld map. They could manipulate the time lines, slide back to review or forward to project outcomes—though only he could enter any commands into the real interface.

“I can’t believe the army gave you an account,” she’d said when he first booted it up for her.

Toby had laughed. “The alternative was letting me blunder around with no firm data. What would you have done?”

“Here,” said Miranda now. “See how you can monitor the cicada beds? There’s health status, power levels, number of sleepers…”

“I don’t see any names. How can you tell who’s who?”

“You can’t. That information is in the government’s emergency database, which you, and Evayne, don’t have access to.”

“And that was the key to the whole plan,” said Toby; but he wasn’t watching the other two anymore. He had knelt by the remains of a burned-out bot to examine its design. “Damn.”

The bot was cylindrical, not human shaped at all though it did have legs. It was about the size of a refrigerator, but he couldn’t tell whether it had been armed. Of course, it was hard to tell much from the landscape of churned ground and twisted metal that spread over about a square kilometer of grassland. The forest fire started by the battle was still going, a few klicks east of here; Thisbe firefighting bots were water-bombing it with monotonous regularity. If they didn’t get it under control in the next day or so, the lockstep system would be forced to wake up everybody in the neighboring town so they could evacuate.

Which would be perfect.

“Did you find something?” Corva came over, her feet crunching on the burnt, black ground.

“I can’t tell what model this was,” he said, poking at the downed bot with a stick.

“And that’s a problem because…?”

“It’s a problem if Evayne’s got a reserve of non-McGonigal bots. That would mean she can get around the network problem.”

“I still don’t get that,” Corva said to Miranda.

“It looks as though Toby has an administrator’s account to the lockstep system, but Evayne is just a user,” said Toby’s virtual shipmate. “He’s been able to override all of her commands to lockstep technology. That includes any of Evayne’s systems that he can communicate with.”

“Which is why she cut herself off from the planetary network,” Toby said. Standing, he brushed ashes from his knees and looked around for more clues. “She can’t take over my bots, but I can take over hers. I could even have taken over her ships and shut her down in orbit, if only I’d known about this sooner!”

“I’m sorry,” said Corva sarcastically, “but why didn’t you?”

“It’s the interface.” Miranda shrugged. “It’s kind of … cryptic. Lots of things it doesn’t tell you. Like, for instance, the identity of a given sleeper. There are emergency systems that can track who sleeps where and can wake a sleeper remotely. For example, you can set an alarm to do that if somebody close to you dies or some other personal emergency happens. Your ship’s manifest cross-referenced names with the cicada beds the passengers were in. But by themselves, the beds don’t keep that kind of information.”

“Which means I’ve been able to use both Orpheus and the beds to winter over. Doing it with Orph is incredibly exhausting for both of us. If I was able to use only denner hibernation, we wouldn’t have been able to just randomly jump through time the way we’re doing. Like I said, that’s what makes this plan possible. And, I mean I can’t be positive, but this”—he gestured at the mechanical carnage—“sure looks like it’s working.”

Bots had fought bots here: networked Toby machines versus locked-down marauders from Evayne’s ships. Hers had been on a search-and-sweep of the local town, breaking into houses and reading IDs off the cicada beds. Evayne had human troops doing the same thing, but Toby didn’t go near them—and, so far at least, Evayne hadn’t harmed any of the helpless Thisbe citizens whose homes she was invading.

“I was expecting a tug-of-war,” he said. Orpheus and Wrecks were waiting at the edge of the burnt ground, and Toby’s denner sniffed dubiously at Toby’s pant cuffs as the humans met them. He and Corva shouldered their packs and waded back into the tangled brush.

“I thought we’d both be issuing orders to the lockstep system. She’d command it to do one thing, I’d tell it no, she’d say yes. I was expecting a game of global Whac-A-Mole, but it hasn’t worked out like that.”

“Whack-a-what?”

“But it sort of has,” he went on, oblivious. “Better, really. I wake up a whole town, Evayne freaks out and sends her people to find out if it’s an army group assembling. Random beds come awake all over the planet, and she can see that in the interface but not who it is who’s waked up. She never knows whether one of them might be me, so she has to send somebody to investigate each and every one. Which takes fuel and people—and means she has to have people awake all the time. But I can sleep for years if I want.”

He’d expected that he would have to manually wake people, because if he scheduled wake-ups ahead of time, Evayne could find them in the interface (though not who they were) and investigate before they woke, or just reset them. Toby’s plan had involved being awake more than sleeping. As it turned out, that hadn’t been necessary. He had Evayne’s forces dancing to his tune all over the planet, which freed him to mess with her in other ways.

Corva shook her head. “Sooner or later she’s going to start killing people. She’s gonna call your bluff. What are you going to do then?”

“If she pisses me off, I’ll wake the whole damned planet. She knows that.” He could tell she was far from satisfied by that answer, so he said, “How’s the story end? There’re a bunch of possible ways:

“If I wasn’t Toby, but let’s say some pretender who’d convinced the local government I was the messiah, then Evayne would have waited until most of the planet was wintering over. Thisbe just doesn’t have the resources to replace all the McGonigal cicada beds in time. So she’d be able to dig in, take out the military’s installations, and threaten whole cities with destruction unless they turned me over. That was your brother’s nightmare ending to the story.

“But if I really am Toby McGonigal, then I can have the whole planet up and running before she can get herself established. Then we have enough force to put up a good fight, maybe even win. In that case, the outcome’s not certain—and that means there’d probably be a pitched battle. I might die, you might die, but probably Evayne would lose. If she survived, she’d end up our prisoner. And with her as our hostage, the road to Destrier’s wide-open.

“That’s Halen’s dream version.”

“That’s the one you agreed to,” she pointed out.

“Corva, a lot of people die in that case, and me … I end up just like Evayne, locked into playing my role in a myth I didn’t invent. It sucks, I was never going to do that, and I’m sorry I had to let you think I would.”

“Okay,” she said with a slight smile.

“The thing is, this thing about me being able to override her commands changes the story. But for this twist on it to work, I had to make sure she committed herself now, when she doesn’t have that extra force. I had to lure her in.

“So when she arrived, the planet was wintering over. She thought it was safe to come out of orbit, so she set some ships down by the capital and headed in with a big force to wake up the government and throw down her ultimatum. A force of soldiers was waiting there—the ones who hadn’t been using McGonigal beds. There was a confrontation, but I’m sure the Thisbe soldiers were confused and demoralized at that point. They figured I’d betrayed them. So they were facing each other tensely in the middle of the Grand Plaza when one of Evayne’s aides came running up to her. I wasn’t there, by the way; I watched it all later on the security footage. Couldn’t quite make out the expression on her face, though, when her people told her that McGonigal beds all over the planet starting to wake up—including other army bases.

“If I’d wakened the whole planet, we’d have been in Version Two of the story again—a pitched battle. But it wasn’t like that. There were just enough Thisbe military awake now to keep Evayne from safely leaving the planet. Also enough to put up a good defense if she tried some stunt like threatening to wipe out a town.”

“Wait—but why?”

“It was a message from me to her.”

“Yes, but why? What did you think she was going to do?”

“Exactly what she did do. I know Evayne. If you dangle something just out of her reach, she’ll keep jumping at it until she collapses. She’s always been like that, but who knows it aside from me and Peter? In forty years, nobody’s ever done this to her. She’s probably totally forgotten that this is her vulnerability. So I made myself the bait, and said, ‘Here I am, come get me.’”

“You set the rules of the game! If she breaks them by escalating—”

“Then I escalate, too. If she hurts anyone, I wake the bombers, the mechs, and missile battalions. She could play a different game, but only by denying her essential nature—”

Corva reached out and gave Toby a hard shove. As he stumbled, she shouted, “That’s crazy dangerous! She could swoop in and catch us at any time! Then what?”

He laughed. “Then I lose everything. But only me.”

“And me, you jerk. You dragged me into this.”

“Are you saying you thought you were safe when you came with me?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Evayne may know about denners, but she doesn’t know we have Orpheus and Wrecks. She suspects I’m using non-McGonigal beds; some models don’t have to report their status to the lockstep network. I know she thinks this because she’s got her people scouring the planet looking for those beds. She rousts anybody who’s in one and then destroys it. Meanwhile, she’s watching the network. Any McGonigal bed that’s activated—either waking up or going under—could be me. So she has to investigate. And that’s sapping her strength. Even worse: it’s using up time.”

“Are you saying,” and now she was shouting, “that there’re thousands of people out there who’ve had their beds destroyed? That they’re stranded in realtime?”

He shook his head. “You know the lockstep laws. They can use any available bed if they can’t get to their own. Although the other thing Evayne’s doing is disabling all the empty McGonigal beds she can find, to deny me a resting place. She’s got enough for the refugees—but she thinks she can tighten the noose around me this way.”

A little calmer, Corva nodded to the denners. “Except we don’t need the beds.”

“Right.”

They walked together for a long time, Corva with her head down and hands behind her back while Toby broke the trail for her. He was headed for a road that led to the next town. It was going to take a couple of days to get to it on foot, but he’d been learning patience recently. He could afford the time.

“How does it end?” she said suddenly. “This game you’re playing with your sister?”

He looked back at her, grimly satisfied. “Peter and Evayne started something they think they can control. They can’t control it—but I can.

“The game doesn’t end on Thisbe. This is just the opening move.”

THEY’D BEEN SLEEPING IN houses, but there were none here between the towns. He was pretty sure Evayne had no automated hunters in the sky right now (the Thisbe ground forces having shot most of them down) so he decided to risk a fire.

He and Corva sat side by side on a log and roasted some stringy rabbit that Wrecks had caught. It was comfortable and even romantic for a while. They talked about their vastly different childhoods, finding so little in common that it was amazing to both they could relate to one another at all. After a period of companionable silence, though, Toby noticed that Corva was staring at the sinuous river of stars that crossed the sky. After a time she stood up and put her back to the fire. “I’ve never seen this,” she murmured.

“What, the Milky Way?”

“No. That.” She nodded at the horizon.

Under the sky, there were no lights at all. Beyond the small circle of orange cast by the fire, everything was utterly black and still. The sawtoothed cutout of trees on the horizon reminded Toby of another time he’d stared into black like that. It was on his first waking in orbit around Lowdown, when he’d turned away from that same vision of the Milky Way to find sight absorbed by the vast circular blackness of the planet. He remembered what that had felt like, and coming to stand next to her, he felt a bit of it now.

Except for the occasional crackle from the fire, there was no sound at all. It was as if they were standing at the border to the land of Death, nothing ahead of them but perfected stillness.

Corva shivered. “Is this why we did it?” She turned to nod in the direction of the town they’d left. “Did we have a million years of being faced with … with this every night, and did we invent fire and weapons and clothes and culture and art and houses just so we wouldn’t have to look into it? —That awful emptiness?”

He nodded. “I guess you never camped out.”

She turned to him. “You’re not afraid of it, are you? Not the way the rest of us are.”

Toby shrugged. “I’ve seen it before, I guess.”

“You want to rub her nose in the horror of realtime?”

“Or her men’s noses. Every second that ticks by while they chase me, they age, while the people they left behind remain…”

“Perfect.”

He laughed. “Imagination does funny things. Especially when it’s faced with something like this. Right?” He shouted that last word into the night.

There was no echo. Silence and blackness ate the word and remained untouched.

“Don’t do that!” Corva sat down again, now resolutely staring into the fire. Toby noticed she was playing with her little hologram locket.

He sat next to her. “What is that, anyway? You’ve worn it since I’ve known you.”

It had been a while since Corva had given him her I-can’t-believe-you’re-so-stupid look. “You’re kidding. You’re playing this complicated mind game with your sister’s people, and you don’t even know how they think about time?”

“I know they’re afraid of it. Else why run faster and faster into the future?”

She gave a heavy sigh. “Yeah. Okay, there’re two visions of time—of what it is. The first is the oak in the acorn. You know what that is?”

He wracked his memory, trying to remember how Evayne’s official religion worked. “That everything’s predestined, unfolding according to some kind of plan?”

“Oh, it’s more than that. It’s the idea that the only true creative moment in all of time was the first one—the big bang. Everything that’s happened since is just working out the implications made possible in that first second. The engine was built before time, and now it just runs. Your sister’s taken that idea, applied it to human civilization, and put you at the heart of it. Toby,” she said, now struggling to keep a straight face, “you’re the big bang of the locksteps.”

“Great. Another title to add to my list.”

“The story is that you saw it all in a flash of vision—I mean, how humanity could cheat time and become eternal, even if our individual lives are still short. You built an eternal city of sorts, a real Olympus that would abide no matter what happened on Earth or the other fast worlds. One of the things that means is that there can be nothing new added to the locksteps. No innovation. No revolution. No change of any kind.”

“Kenani’s job,” he said with a nod. “To keep things from changing.”

“Nothing new. And nothing to look forward to. In other words, nothing to hope for.”

“Ah.” He reached out to touch the locket. He understood its shape now: a miniature tree inside an acorn. “But if that’s not what you believe…”

“I wear this to remind myself that I don’t believe it. I look at time a different way. It’s physics based. See, when the universe was emerging from the primordial fireball—”

“It’s not every conversation,” he interrupted, “where you get to use the words ‘primordial fireball.’”

“Oh, be quiet. As the … the bang cooled, things began to crystallize out of it. Quarks and leptons, electrons and protons. They weren’t there before and never had been—and then they were. Before they existed, they couldn’t exist, they were impossible. They weren’t stored somewhere in some kind of seed form before the bang. They were impossible, and then they were there.

“Same thing with life,” she said. “Before life existed, how could some immortal observer from outside the universe have seen it coming? It wasn’t one of those things that matter did—until suddenly it was doing it. And then consciousness played the same trick on life …

“The point is,” she said, gently taking his fingers off her locket, “time isn’t the working out of a predesigned destiny. Time is the possibility of surprise.”

Toby had a sudden startled image of the two types of time: one that pushed, with all the terrible weight of the iron-bound laws of history behind it; and one that pulled you forward into a future of limitless possibilities. “So what does believing in surprise get you?” he mused, looking up at again at the stars.

“What do you think, silly? It gives us the one thing that the oak in the acorn never can:

“Hope.”

TOGETHER, THEY DRIFTED THROUGH a landscape empty of any of the agendas of human civilization. In the tangled brushlands, along the edges of overgrown roads, and under the canopies of untended trees they met instead countless beings busy with the tending of their own lives: hurrying bees, chirping beetles, lazily waving rushes in the shallow waters. The frequent lurid changes in color that washed the sky didn’t affect these creatures, who’d adapted and moved on. In time, Toby got used to it, too, only occasionally reflecting on the unimaginable power hinted at by the laser sunlight.

He and Corva moved from place to place, keeping as many steps ahead of Evayne’s searchers as they could. They would curl up on cold concrete in front of some randomly chosen house’s hibernaculum and sleep for weeks or months at a time. When they emerged, the lawns would be more overgrown, the plastic wrapping of the houses a little more frayed, and the Internet news services full of automatically generated alerts and bot-authored reports of Evayne’s activities.

After resting and getting their bearings, they would set out for the next safe position from which to prod Toby’s sister into wasting her energies.

It was among the towers of the capital that Toby’s plan fell apart.

They’d come here because both of them were tired of the wilderness. Toby’s straggly new beard was filling out, and with no bots to give them a proper haircut, both had hacked-up pageboys. They’d stolen clothes as they went, but under them they were flea-bitten, darkly tanned, and covered in little scars from brambles and broken branches. It was just a matter of time before one of them broke a leg, or developed a major infection too far from a cicada bed. So they’d infiltrated the shrink-wrapped towers near Corva’s home, where the bot count was higher but there were also more places to hide. For the turn of a few weeks, and a winter-over of nearly a year, they enjoyed the fabulous luxuries of houses and condominiums whose inhabitants slept like fairy tale princes and princesses, just meters away.

Then one evening as they were crossing a plaza on their way to their latest nest, Toby heard a faint sound above the chirping and buzzing of the insects. He stopped walking and put a hand on Corva’s arm. “Wait.”

The denners had heard it too: a kind of quiet ripping sound, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Toby shouted a curse and began to run, as sleek silvery aircraft suddenly wove between the towers ringing the plaza. They shot past and disappeared, and Toby and Corva managed to make it to the overhang of a sealed subway station. Corva crouched down, watching the sky. “Did they see us?”

“I don’t think so.”

She cautiously stepped out from under the overhang. “Maybe they were on their way somewhere else.” But she ducked down again as four more craft soared overhead. These were bigger: troop transports from the look of them.

Toby’s heart sank. “They’re doing a spot check. And we’re going to show up like bonfires in their thermal cameras. We’re the biggest life-forms in the city.”

“We make for the outskirts,” she said, “or maybe hide in the subway. If we deep-dive there—”

He shook his head. “There’s no refrigeration in the tunnels. We’ll be eaten by centipedes.”

“Then what—”

Toby had fished his glasses out of his backpack, but when he put them on he growled. “No signal here. We need to get into one of those residential towers. Once I’m on the net, I can wake up the city.”

She leaned out, searching the skies. “I think we’re safe for now. We’d better run for it.” The sound of jet engines echoed off the buildings; it sounded like the big transports were landing.

They were about to sprint for the nearest residence when Corva grabbed Toby’s arm. “Wait—wake how much of the city?”

“Corva, the instant I start any beds, Evayne is going to know I’m here. Our only chance now lies in numbers.

“We’re going to wake everybody.”