Better Angels (37 page)

Time to puncture their oblivion, Mike thought.

“Hello, Richard,” Mike said from the big screen holojector unit in Schwarzbrucke’s den. He watched the smiles fade as he spoke. “Hello, Messers Hilbert, Davis, and McCurdy. Perhaps you don’t remember me. We only met once, and you were incognito. I remember you, though—particularly your voice, Big Ed—”

“What is this?” Ed Hilbert roared over the storm. “Shut that damn thing off!”

Schwarzbrucke tried, but it was far beyond his control.

“Maybe this will help jog your memory,” Mike continued from the entertainment console and from all the radios, TVs, and stereos in the house. He flashed before the men a CAT scan movie of a partial skull, a head naked of both hair and awareness. A skull dented in on the left temporal side in exactly the shape of a shotgun butt. Mike blew that image up and highlighted it for them.

“This was what it was about, wasn’t it, Dr. Schwarzbrucke?” Mike asked, flashing up PET and NMR and interferometric images, not only of his own injury but also the subtler drug-induced damage done to others. Images from CMD’s own data files. “They bashed in the left side of my skull, in accord with your general directions. Blue Spike wasn’t eating up enough Broca’s areas fast enough for your research, or not doing it the right way for you, so after I annoyed these gentlemen with my investigations you decided to kill two problems with one shotgun butt.”

“This can’t be happening,” Schwarzbrucke said quietly, shaking his head.

“Oh, but it is,” Mike insisted over all the household media. “Congratulations. Your seamless interface works. Machine-aided action at a distance. MAAAAD, as your friend Dr. Vang calls it. Yes, I know about Tetragrammaton and ParaLogics—all of that. They are not my concern at the moment, however. I’m more interested in the weather. Perhaps you should be too. Given enough simulation power, it’s possible to accurately predict and even control storms.”

Ed Hilbert suddenly broke for the door, but the electric locks had long since slammed tight. Richard Schwarzbrucke picked up the phone and found it, not dead, but jammed by a curious sound, rather like a modem’s carrier wave.

“I wouldn’t try to go out there if I were you,” Mike advised Hilbert and all of them, his words reinforced by the electric fence of lightning bolts spearing all around the house. “Not good to be on the phone in such nasty weather, either. You see, lightning follows the distribution of electric charge in space. Right now, that distribution is densest around the house and hill where you are. There are stepped ladders of charge all around your location. Each is capable of moving 10,000 coulombs of charge per second.”

Schwarzbrucke banged impotently at the receiver with a clenched fist

“Forget about calling out, Richard,” Mike said. “My ‘associates’ are using your lines. Allow me to introduce them.”

Innumerable tiny, morphing, kaleidoscopic machine-creatures swelled into light and life before the trapped men, until Schwarzbrucke and his guests had to shield their eyes. As the light from the screen faded somewhat, a new boom sounded and the power went dead.

“The fuel oil tanks,” Mike said simply, after the security system had switched to auxiliary batteries. A section of the house was engulfed in a wall of fire. Forces Mike even now barely understood—the living embodiment of his rage for justice, and something more, a singularly powerful something moving through him from far away—distorted the air around the men in the den, warped the fabric of reality itself. Those forces Mike had unleashed were smoothly and fatally flattening the men into two dimensions, subtly twisting them into shapes out of a topologist’s nightmare, until suddenly Mike and the power moving through him released the men, allowed them to return to three dimensions. Instantly the men fell apart, so rapidly that they seemed to explode, turning wrong-side out in the process. The force or power from far away departed from him then, leaving Mike alone with his dark triumph. All that was left after that was the fire burning the bodies, the belated arrivals of fire, police, and news services, each and all filing their reports.

“Three of the victims,” said a blonde newswoman from Channel 32, “Edward Hilbert, Martin McCurdy, and Wayne Davis, are known members of the Mongrel Clones Motorcycle Club. All were under surveillance as part of the ongoing investigation into the so-called Blue Badge Conspiracy. Possible linkage of their deaths to drug-trafficking activities, or cover-up of the same, has not be ruled out by police. Their relation to the fourth victim. Dr. Richard Schwarzbrucke, has not yet been determined.”

That would not do, Mike thought. With netizen help he quickly compiled a second, smaller tipster document compiled from the months of further digging he and the netizens had done since that first “tip.” The second document appeared on the desktops of law enforcement officials quite soon after Schwarzbrucke’s death. Among other items, it contained many of Schwarzbrucke’s recent bank records. Those revealed several intriguing recent payouts to high-ranking political officials in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., the pattern of those payouts indicating that Schwarzbrucke was providing legal and political cover for a number of individuals in northern California and southern Oregon—several of whom happened to be Mongrel Clones.

The Clones’ Blue Spike trade collapsed soon thereafter. Crystal Memory Dynamics tottered and fell apart, its reputation badly tarnished from its connection with the scandal. One of its Board members, Dr. Ka Vang, eventually bought up CMD at a bargain-basement price.

Mike also leaked to local authorities a carefully edited tape of Richard Schwarzbrucke’s last business meeting with Hilbert, McCurdy, and Davis, as a final touch. The tape was never released to the public, but Mike knew the authorities understood at least part of it.

“Prior to their burning,” the supposedly confidential police records read, “all four victims appear to have been not so much eviscerated as everted, turned completely inside out. Waves of pressurization and depressurization, related to a possible tornado touchdown, have been proposed as the likeliest cause of the observed condition of the bodies. Peculiar weather was noted to have passed through the area coincident to the times of decease. No close precedent exists for such injuries as those observed, however. Investigation continues.”

Mike felt only a grim, exhausted satisfaction when at last his work of vengeance was done. The netizens were confused by the entire episode, however, unsure as to how all the events fitted together in that other world outside their electronic life. Some actually dared to voice the thought that what Mike had done was an evil thing.

How could Justice possibly be evil? was Mike’s retort—a conundrum which seemed to silence the netizenry’s misgivings, at least for a while.

* * * * * * *

Disgruntled Employee

Lydia Fabro was angry—so angry she didn’t even nod, as she usually did, to the ancient busker at his accustomed station. The fact that the man was strumming his guitar and singing ballads for small bills was something she usually found reassuring, a sign that everything was finally back to normal. Not today.

In her hands she clasped faxoid cheapsheets with lurid headlines—“Fossil Angel Found in Tar Pits!” (Weekly World Web), “Christmas Miracle: Angel or Alien?” (Global Investigator), and “Fossil Yields Alien Super Tech!” (Universal News). Worse were the messages flooding her voice and virtual mail systems, several of which she had printed out and now also held clenched in her hands. Most of those were queries from far more legitimate print, broadcast, and holo news outlets. Worst of all were the queries from scientific journals ranging from Archeology to Physical Review Letters E to Micro-engineering News and Defense Technology Research.

Why was this happening to her now? she asked herself as she entered the fully restored Page Museum. Her life and career goals—which the CSA revolution had threatened to derail forever—had finally seemed to be back on track. None too soon, either. While she hadn’t been looking, the years had flown past. Since she’d stayed in good shape and colored her hair and had no growing children to remind her of time’s passing, she hadn’t been chronically aware of the speed-up in the years’ flow-rate. Only rarely did she for an instant become acutely aware that, as she was growing older, time was flowing faster—as when she came across old acquaintances from her early days in graduate school, with a son or daughter Lydia remembered as a toddler but who was now already in college.

She was at the upper end of fertility extension technology herself and due to be married in twelve days, for heaven’s sake! She did not need to be caught up in the roiling vortex of a media firestorm. Not now!

Lydia banged open the door to the microscan lab, where Jiro sat, in rumpled white lab coat, blue shirt, and wear-baggy brown corduroys, surrounded by monitors showing electron micrographs. He looked up as she came in, then glanced away.

“You did this,” Lydia said, tossing down onto the table in front of Jiro the question- and exclamation-titled sparks rising from a burgeoning public-relations wildfire. “Didn’t you?”

“I’m not a journalist or publisher,” Jiro said quietly.

“Don’t play semantic games with me, Jiro!” Lydia said, furious. The man was a newly-made millionaire, but you certainly couldn’t tell it from the way he dressed and kept himself. “You’re the only person around here who knows about all this, besides me. You sent them some half-baked description of our findings!”

Jiro looked as if he were going to—what? Say something about others who might know?—but then thought better of it.

“I sent them a description of my findings, yes,” Jiro admitted with a sigh.

“But this could queer everything!” Lydia said, flapping a cheapsheet headline in front of his face. “Don’t you see that? Haven’t you looked at your bank statement recently? You’ve made millions in months, Jiro! The Patent and Trademark Office fast-tracked those for us—”

“Fast-tracked them,” Jiro said, an accusatory tone rising in his voice, “in exchange for your agreeing to secrecy orders from the Defense Technology Security Administration. I checked. Agreements I was not informed of—agreements which you signed for both of us. For all humanity, for that matter.”

“Humanity?” Lydia said with a look of disdain on her face. “What on Earth are you talking about? You’re damned right I signed those agreements. You were post-docing back at MIT and those things couldn’t wait. Can’t you see? The quicker the military gets through with examining and exploiting that new tech, the quicker it’ll make its way into the general corporate sphere. Then we can start making the really big money. Billions, Jiro! That’s what we’re talking about here. Do you want to just throw that away?”

Jiro glanced off, shaking his head. Lydia thought again that he’d really been letting himself go these last several months—his hair grown out long and unkempt, his beard grown in surprisingly thick and dark, even his fingernails apparently uncut for months. He’d lost weight, making his cheekbones and eyebrows more prominent—angularity that didn’t much counter the ghostly preoccupation growing daily behind his eyes. Looking into them was like looking into the windows of a haunted house—so creepy it almost made her socks roll up and down.

“I only wanted to show you what I found,” Jiro said, distractedly. “Later I agreed to the patenting too, but only to get the word out to everyone. Making our discoveries a military secret was the last thing I wanted to happen. Do you know how potentially dangerous this stuff is? It could be like nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare all rolled up into one.”

“Then who better than the military to handle it?” Lydia said, easing herself into a chair, frustrated and exasperated.

“Who worse?” he muttered in response.

“Come on!” Lydia said, raising her hand to her head as if in preparation for the headache sure to come of all this. “Think of how you’ve benefited. Not only the patents and the money, but the connections, the donations. The LogiBoxes Dr. Vang himself donated to you for your personal research! Do you know how much they’re worth? Where’s your gratitude for that?”

Jiro glanced at her for a moment.

“I’m not ungrateful,” he said, “even if I never asked for any of it. But the word had to get out.”

“Why?” Lydia asked, staring at the pile of headlines and queries in front of Jiro. “Why did you have to be the one to get the ‘word’ out?”

“If there’s an accidental release of something the military makes with this stuff,” he replied, glancing down at the floor, “it’ll be good to have as many brains as possible informed and working on the counteragent—before that release wraps the whole world in gray goo. I don’t want to be responsible for the extinction of life, or even just humanity, from this planet.”

Lydia scowled at him.

“What kind of weird guilt and paranoia is that?” she asked. “So you figured out how to make those little nanobuggers work, I grant you that. Does that make you responsible for saving or destroying the world? Or humanity or anything else? What makes you think you ‘know best’ about all of this, anyway? You’ve got an inflated sense of your own importance, Jiro. ‘Getting The Truth out will change the world!’ Have you gone Cyberite or something?”

Jiro shrugged and turned back toward the controls of the waldos manipulating the material in the field of a scanning electron microscope.

“I’ve been called paranoid before,” he said with a shrug, “but I think I’m right this time.”

Lydia rose from the chair and nervously brushed her bangs away from her face.

“Then there’s no chance I can convince you to stop sending out this information?”

“No,” he said. “Not a chance.”

Lydia strode over to Hiro and began gathering up the reports and queries she had dumped in front of him.

“Well,” she said, frowning, “if you were me, what would you do now?”

Jiro looked up, considering that.

“If you were me,” he said with an odd smile, “I’d join me in spreading the full word about the potential of this discovery for good and ill. As widely as I could.”

Lydia made a disgusted sound.