Pennsylvania Omnibus (38 page)

“Okay.”

That night, worn out and dirty
from a day’s work, and while they were delivering the evening milk to the
neighbor, Jed asked Tom Hochstetler if he could sleep in his barn again. He
didn’t mind sleeping on the floor of Matthias’s little house, but Jed thought
back to how comfortable he’d been in the Hochstetlers’ hayloft, and he wanted
to get online to see if there were any messages from his brother.

Once the milk was unloaded, and
after Eagles and Ducky had turned the wagon around to head back to Matthias’s
place, Jed took a sponge bath in some of the frigid water he drew from the
springhouse. Not long after, shivering while he drip-dried in the evening air,
he climbed into the hayloft for the night.

The sun was just dipping down
below the horizon out to the west as Jed sat down in the hayloft door and took
in the beauty of the evening. It was the gloaming; dark blues and shadows were
becoming one, and fading pink-orange fingers of light touched the few puffy
clouds still visible in the sky. Jed watched as the last sliver of the golden
orb disappeared below the high walls of the Amish Zone—the tops of which barely
poked up over the hills in the distance. The first stars—he couldn’t name them,
and after what his brother had told him, he wasn’t sure if anyone could—were
blinking on in the deepening sky, and a soft breeze made him shiver again, but
not really from the cold. The weather was perfect, and taken altogether it was
a scene out of a picture book, and Jed reveled in it, so exactly did it bring
back to his memory the halcyon days of his youth.

From down below he heard a mild
disturbance coming from the chicken coop as the Hochstetlers’ hens established
their own sleeping roosts for the night. Even the simplest of God’s animals
argue and fret over position and authority… asserting, sometimes with force,
just who deserves what. The difference is, of course, that the wars of the
chickens won’t ever break the world.

After he’d taken in his fill of
the beautiful evening, Jed opened the small package—a meal wrapped in rough
brown paper—which Dawn had given him when he told her he was going to stay in
the neighbors’ barn for the night. He spread the paper with his hands and
examined his supper. There was a piece of cornbread, with home-churned butter
already spread on it, and three thick slices of bacon too. There was a
pint-sized mason jar, with lemonade sweetened with the very smoky
caramel-tinged sugar that was made by another one of Matthias’s neighbors.

Jed prayed over his meal and
then chewed in silence as he watched the world get bathed in darkness. He lit
one of the small lanterns and hung it on a hook from an overhead beam, making
sure to be extra careful with it. Barn fires were still quite common in Amish
country, so he was always very aware of how he worked with fire in any
structure such as this one. In his mind’s eye, just for a moment, he was back
in the old barn… back in the old world. He could see himself hanging a lantern
on a hook up in the hayloft, and when he turned, he could just make out the
window in the gabled end, and the coffee-can pane winking at him from the lower
right-hand corner.

But he wasn’t in Old
Pennsylvania. Wherever he was now, it was a different world altogether. He
popped a Q pill in his mouth and chewed it up, and while the drug began to take
effect, he prepared himself a little pallet and made it into a bed for the
night.

There weren’t any messages from
Amos, so Jed decided to take a look around in Transport’s files to see if he
could get any news about what might be happening in the world of the
English.

He searched through some file
areas he was familiar with, and started to ask himself questions. This is how
he sometimes made breakthroughs. Because even if he didn’t know what he was
looking for, if he asked himself enough questions, usually he’d get onto an
interesting trail at some point in the journey.

Is Transport’s Internet
system still up and running at full capacity?

It seemed to Jed like it was.
He did some cursory checks around many of the major hubs he knew about, and he
didn’t see any serious problems with the flow of data.

What is Transport doing now
that they’ve fled beyond the Shelf?

Jed found the data routes with
the most traffic passing between points to the west, and tagged
along—disguising himself as an innocuous email—until he found a portal where
the messages were being distributed. Once there, he used some of his previous
methods (along with Dawn’s pre-placed camouflage tactics) to hack in and begin
scanning some of the raw data.

He brought up his viewscreen
and had the data projected onto it, but even then the sheer amount of
information was overwhelming, so he decided to improvise. He hacked a nearby
hub and borrowed some of the processing power to implement some word searches.
Every “war” word he could think of he then programmed into the search, and he
fed “hits” to the main screen. This worked a lot better, and slowed down the
mammoth amount of data by vetting most of it out, but it still didn’t give him
a clear enough picture of what he wanted to see.

Now he had to really think. He
wasn’t hamstrung by artificial or self-imposed limitations—that was the main
reason why his brother had recruited him. His gift was that he didn’t know what
he could do until he did it. He solved problems more like a farmer than like a
technician, who can often be limited by artificial protocols or learned
patterns. A farmer had a tendency to just try things until something worked,
and the task was the main thing, not the method.

As Jed pondered on problems or
obstructions, the words he needed (along with their definitions) and
instructions would appear to him floating in the darkness. This was part of the
program Dawn had placed into his BICE from the beginning.

The term
multi-task
appeared in the ether, and the definition explained to him that he could use
the computing power to do several things at once. Without even a second of
doubt as to whether his ideas could even be accomplished, he thought about it,
and instantly the screen expanded and then divided into nine smaller screens
laid out like panes of glass in a window. Now he could watch data stream by,
and his eyes just naturally followed it all. Then he focused again and assigned
a certain amount of his BICE chip’s computing power to each of the nine
screens. Soon enough, he was flying through the data as it flowed by, and he
was understanding everything he was seeing.

Drones
.

The word caught his attention,
so he focused his whole mind on it. He re-established all of the search
parameters on all of the screens until they were all focused on finding
anything and everything being said about drones.

He wanted to get comfortable in
a way he couldn’t really explain if someone asked him, so he made up a grassy
hillside in his mind, and he sat down to study the data as it arrived.

Drones, manufactured in the old
world, and brought here using a secret portal somewhere beyond the shelf, were
being prepared for an attack…

An attack on what?

Hard to say. Overall, there was
a gist… a
leaning
… in the chatter that seemed to make Jed think that
perhaps an attack on the east by Transport might be imminent. He paused his
searches and pulled up his communications interface. He sent a message to Amos,
and then went back to his work.

Amos
.

He wondered if his brother was
watching him work, so he looked around in the corners of his vision to see if
he could see the AT10S code anywhere. He didn’t, so he just shook his head and
laughed.

Well, if Amos is watching
me, he probably wouldn’t let me know at this point. He only did that before
because he was using the information to drag me into this world. It was only
bait, and I was the fish.
Now
 look at me, swimming in this ocean of the
Englischers’ data. My brother is the high prophet of the worldlings, and I’m
his little prize.

He wondered then if he could
catch his brother spying on him. In those previous iterations, Amos had made
the code visible in order to ensnare him; but what if the code was still
there—only invisible—when Amos
didn’t
want to get caught? Was Amos a
good enough hacker to hide from his younger/older brother?

The next thing Jed did was to
disguise himself. He left an avatar of himself sitting on the hill, and made
himself invisible to his own rendering system. He hid himself in the numbers
and code, until even
he
couldn’t see where he ended and the data
began.

Jed looked up into the corners
again, but now he looked even deeper. Of course, the “corners” were not really
there. All of this—everything he could see—was just part of the interface that
the BICE and his brain had concocted to help him understand the bits of data
that were flooding through his mind. So he looked still deeper. He made himself
an invisible part of the code and began processing it all, looking for anything
that was out of place. Combing through bits and elements, scanning for
something that stood out.

And that’s when he found it:
another entity. Another code looking down on his avatar, spying, taking it all
in. But this time it wasn’t his brother. Even his brother was not this clever.
This entity was watching Jed’s avatar watch the data he’d hacked, and up until
now, the entity had been totally invisible.

Jed studied the entity’s data
with intensity and caution. He parsed all of the code that made up the entity,
and examined it until he knew what data was part of that code, and what data
the entity was using outside of itself. Then Jed wrote a quick program, using
his imagination with some help from Dawn’s helper program, and created an
avatar for the entity. An avatar that only he would see. He didn’t know what
made him think of it—of the figure he’d bestow upon this being. He didn’t know
if this entity was good or evil. He didn’t know if it was friend or foe. But
Jed created an avatar based on one of the most hated antagonists of his youth:
the mahogany wasp. The rendering was done so quickly, and so perfectly from his
memory, that Jed actually shivered and shrank away when he saw it.

Now, he could pull back and
watch the wasp watch the avatar he’d made of himself.

I have to find out who is
controlling this thing
, Jed thought.

So he caused his BICE to stop
rendering the drone data. Then he walked his own avatar back through the
process that he’d used to break into the hubs in the first place. And as he
pulled back, the wasp followed. The wasp appeared to be heedless of the drone
information. It didn’t care about preparations for war. It was following
Jed.

FRIDAY

A red light in the corner of his
vision and a chiming sound woke Jed from his sleep. It was around three a.m.,
and it took him a moment to figure out what was happening. But then he
remembered that he’d made sure to set up an alert in case Amos tried to contact
him during the night.

Jed shook the cobwebs from his
head, and then, when he was fully awake, he pulled up his BICE control
interface. He hadn’t taken a Q since early in the previous evening, but the
system still seemed to work pretty well for him.

Once he’d logged in and entered
his control room, he found Amos there waiting for him.

“I got your messages, brother,”
Amos said.

“Then you know?”

“I know. But I’d like you to
brief me.”

“I hacked into Transport’s—”

“Just… please,” Amos said, “get
to the part about the drones.”

Jed paused, and then nodded. “I
put it all into the files I sent to you, but here’s the gist of it: Transport
has an armada of aerial attack drones, white spheres much like the ones I saw
when I was in the City. They have other support and attack craft readied as
well. They’re preparing an offensive as we speak.”

“Any ideas about their
targets?” Amos asked.

“Your ship, for one,” Jed
replied.

“Of course. Any other
targets?”

“I saw general plans for
searching out and destroying your attack aircraft using something called a
Corinth
hack? I didn’t have time to figure out what that meant. All of
this is in the file I sent you.”

Amos nodded his head. “The
Corinth chip was hardened after we discovered their hack. That must have been
old information. Any terrestrial targets you could identify?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Although these drone orbs can
be used in air-to-air combat, that is not their primary purpose,” Amos said.
“They’re designed for police work and population control. They were made to
engage terrestrial based targets: cities, ground units, convoys… that sort of
thing.”

Amos put his hands in his
pockets and rocked back and forth in place. It was obvious he was nervous, and
maybe a little scared. “As you can imagine, we’re on a war footing here now. I
don’t know how our enemy got this far without us discovering his plans. But I
thank you, Jed, for this information. Hopefully we can use it to save lives.
Our people are going through the files you sent as we speak, and we’re
preparing to meet their attack…” His voice trailed off. He knew that Jed didn’t
care to hear about the specifics of the war that raged around them all. “Is
there anything else you need to tell me, Jed? Anything at all that isn’t in
your file?”

Jed looked down for a moment,
thinking. A few seconds later, he looked up at Amos and nodded his head. “I
found… Do you… Do you remember when I said there might be a third party
involved in all of this?”