Rainbows End (46 page)

Huynh drove his forklift toward the Greater Scooch-a-mout mech. He walked along behind and tried to figure some nice way to get the two off the field. His robot’s “Mind Sum” mists weren’t matching its movements anymore; they looked like crap. Okay. He’d take control of the Greater Scooch-a-mout, and have the two robots give a last high five, and then rumble out together. That would be cool, if not fully so.

Maybe it didn’t matter. The network problems were getting a
lot
worse. There were strange latencies, maybe real partitions. Blocks of the virtual audience were being run on cache. Single-hop still mostly worked, but routed communication was in trouble. Huynh stepped a few feet to the side and managed to find a good diagnostic source. There were certificate failures at the lowest levels. He had
never
seen that before.

Even the localizer mesh was failing’.

Like the holes in threadbare carpet, splotches of plain reality grew around him, eating out the mists and crowds, revealing the armies of everyday lab mechs. Where there had been hundreds of thousands of players, now there were open stretches of dark lawn, and the crowds of real humans, standing in shock.

“Tim! Your forklift!” The shout was real sound, from Sheila Hanson, just a few feet away.

Huynh turned back toward the library. He had lost contact with Mind Sum! He ran toward the mech. The forklift had continued autonomously for just a couple of steps. But this was not a flat lab floor, and the localizer mesh was failing around it. The robot had tripped on one of the ornamental boulders that fringed the terrace. It teetered off-balance, shrieking location queries in all directions. But now the mesh was gone, and the forklift was in trouble. Its onboard systems were designed to cope with instability: the failure mode consisted of stepping quickly into the fall, lowering its center of gravity, and dropping stability limbs. That would have worked down in the clean environment of the labs. Here, its lunge took it to the edge of the north-side grade — and there was no localizer mesh to alert it to the drop. The stability limb settled into thin air, and the forklift tipped over the edge.

There were screams.

Huynh ran out onto the robot battlefield. All the epic imagery was gone, but the robots still had local coordination. They rolled out of his way. He scarcely noticed. All his attention was on his forklift. He had direct contact now. He surfed across the forklift’s cameras… and felt sick. There was someone pinned underneath. He climbed down the hillside and fell to his knees. The woman was trapped there, still screaming. Her leg, up to above the knee, was crushed by forklift composite.

Someone scrambled down beside him. Sheila. She wriggled under the blades of the forklift, reached down to grasp the woman’s hand. “We’ll get you out. Don’t worry. We’ll get you out.”

“Yes!” said Tim. He had full control now. Between his own vision and the cameras, he could see how it had fallen, and where the woman was pinned.
Be cool and everything will be okay
. The forklift put its weight on knees that didn’t touch the woman. There was solid support, no surprises. From under the blades he could hear Sheila comforting the woman.

Okay, just shift the weight back, push off into a low sitting posture. Easy…
But now there were other screams, and the sounds of people running.
Smale — > Huynh: Help us, Tim!

Huynh glanced through a camera on the other end of the forklift: The robot that had been the Greater Scooch-a-mout was still standing by the library, but now its center of gravity was absurdly high and someone had overridden all its safeties, to
push
against the nearest pillar. The mech’s foot pads were grinding into the concrete cladding of the terrace. There was the sound of motors on emergency burn, but in an off/on/off rhythm that sounded almost musical. The robot looked like a child trying to prop up a teetering bookcase.

Huynh turned the camera to look up and up… at the sixth-floor overhang, almost directly overhead. There were gaps in the concrete, and places where the floors tilted and swayed. It was a building that had the smarts to stabilize itself, even to move a little. But now that intelligence was cut off from location information. Like Timothy Huynh’s forklift, the library was doing its best to remain standing… and on its own vast scale, it was failing.

Bob Contemplates Nuclear Carpet-Bombing

Bob coasted across the UCSD campus, his landing dart now as slow and quiet as the network munitions that were raining out of the sky. This was a classic network-superiority assault, absent significant defenses. There were many many things to do and only seconds to do them, but for these few moments he had a paradoxical sense of security. There weren’t many places in the modern world where a human could be as self-sufficient — if only temporarily — as when in command of such an assault. Bob Gu’s expeditionary group had its own network, its own power supplies, its own sensors. Even if all his remote analysts were to disappear, his marines would still be in business.

At the moment, thousands of assault nodes were nestling into trees and bushes, fastening themselves to vehicles and ledges and the sides of buildings. Even before they touched down, they asserted primacy over what civilian network hardware still functioned. That takeover was almost complete. He already had access to almost all the embedded controllers in the area. In combat, those local systems were often unsalvageable. Here, there were a few seconds of intense interrogation, DHS authority was asserted, and he had control. The cars and wearables, the medicals, the viewpoints and financials and police systems, they were all responding. Police and rescue workers were reconnecting via the combat net. Already he could hear their voices picking up the operation. With just a little luck, there would be no loss of life, just a very bad and strange network outage. He would leave the combat net in place, just as in a foreign operation. Over the coming days it would be replaced — not by administrative forces but by the gradual reassertion of the civil system. None of that was really important. “The labs. Have they responded?”

“Yes, sir,” came Patrick Westin’s reply. He was on the ground with the first squad, near the GenGen main entrance. “We have access to the labs’ backup security. It’s agreeing with the primary, claims the underground is secure, no sign of perver — “

Civilian status alarm:
Building Failure
. The letters streamed across a corner of Bob’s view. The university library was going down. In combat bad things happen, but tonight the cause looked like stupidity plus bad luck — first the rioters making their library “dance,” then network outage destroying its smarts. Whatever the reason, people would end up just as dead.

Bob threw the problem to his reserve squad, which just now was four hundred meters up, coming down with assorted hardware… including the rescue lances. He was vaguely aware of the lance canisters popping their fins, turning to point down into the library. There was the flash of a hundred tiny rockets, and as many hardened nodes were rammed downward through the concrete and steel of the elderly building. Inside, action would be faster than any human attention, the composite flechettes guiding themselves between walls, doing their best to minimize damage to old-style wired utilities. Once in place, they would displace the control codes of the dead building system, and attempt to contact the stability servos. Waves of compute and recompute flickered from the squad’s status board. Success depended on just what had survived and how fast it could engage the marines’ localizer mesh.

But rescue was not the mission. His attention was on Patrick Westin —

 

“Understood,” Gu said. “Make it clear to biotech management and automation: They are to stand down and seal off the labs. Nothing goes in or out.”

 

“Warn and embargo. Yes, sir.”

Maybe the Xiang message was some bizarre fraud. Maybe, yeah. He gave Westin another squad and engaged police backup. GDC inspectors would be here from Denver in about thirty minutes and then they could contemplate making a safe entrance into the labs.

Bob glided in a silent arc around the south side of the campus. It was time to land himself and his third squad. Where?

If this was enemy action, there should be Local Honchos on the enemy side. He popped up the suspect lists. There was the usual population of foreign students. The interesting ones would be interviewed by the end of the evening. The library festivities had been almost a total surprise to the press — so why had that Bollywood contingent just happened to be in town and on-site? Surely the Indo-European Alliance wouldn’t try anything really destructive. But the European cert collapse seemed at the heart of the destruction here in San Diego. The analysts and Bob’s own intuition put the Bollywood crew at the top of his interest list.

He stalled his dart in a clearing among the eucs, and crunched down on a litter of branches and dead leaves. The third squad dropped at twenty-meter intervals east and west from his position. There were shouts and lights from up the hill toward the library. The building was still out of plumb, but stability servos were engaged and — if nothing else failed — it should maintain a standing state. Police vehicles had come alive; direct loudspeakers were making calming announcements. If things worked out, they might even be able to disguise the fact that there had been a military response. Local public safety could pat itself on the back for heading off one of those rare but inevitable system glitches… Just ahead was the cluster of game and film people from Bollywood. They had already received a hold notice. None of them were attempting to leave.
Just a few words with you, ladies and gentlemen, that’s all we want
.

GenGen said the labs were sealed tight, ready for the proper authorities — when? Ha! The CDC inspectors were ahead of schedule; somehow they had gotten superballistic transport. They’d be on the ground in ten minutes. He had support extending up the chain of command. And downward, too. Some very large, very competent groups were reworking the odds that the labs had been converted to factory-of-death mode. They agreed that the probability was less than one percent — that is, science fiction.

Now his analyst pool was larger than Bob Gu had ever seen, perhaps fifteen percent of the analytical power of the entire U.S. intelligence community. All that support should have been comforting, yet there were places where the connectivity looked thin. Maybe that was just the way the associations flowed when a crisis was totally bizarre.

Others thought it strange, too. He saw lots of paranoid colors. Finally someone got desperate:

I have a sanity check. We’ve lost communication with five percent of our original threat analysts since the revocation attack began. This should be impossible. All analysts were internal to the U.S. intelligence community. If Credit Suisse certificates were necessary for any of those participants to maintain connectivity, then there was at least a design failure… and maybe the enemy had been part of Bob’s own support staff.

There was an immediate counterargument: You’re mistaking loss of connectivity for loss of trustability.

Then parts of the analyst pool got jammed in the controversy. It was the kind of deadlock that only a miracle-worker could quickly untangle… and Alice is off in some hospital ward.

Another alarm flashed across the lower part of his vision. His combat network lay all across campus now, and it did more than manage communication. Altogether, it was a two-thousand-meter-wide snooper-scope, and its report:
GenGens private UP/Ex launcher has just gone hot. A
counter showed sixty seconds till cargo boosted out of the labs.

Even as USMC sensed the launch capacitor charging up, GenGen’s own network continued to assure the world that all was safely sealed.

Something was trying to break out of GenGen.
This is way too much like Asuncion.

Bob glanced at the nukes and death-fog dispensers and HERFs and HEIRs floating down through 10,000 meters. To the journalists, those weapons should look like random aerobots — but they gave Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., the physical power to annihilate
any
threat in this corner of the U.S.A.

So what was the Minimum Sufficient Response?
Thirty seconds till UP/Ex launch. Chaos still reigned in the land of the analysts.
Verified contact with DoD/DHS had been lost.
Sometimes decisions come down to one poor slob on the ground.

The Minimum Sufficient Response
Mus MCog

The Stranger’s pdf said that “Mus” was short for ”
Mus musculus
.” Mice! The mouse arrays stretched away into the dark. If anything, the place seemed even bigger than it had the first time Robert had been here. So where to go?

Miri hesitated only a second, then ran in the direction of the loudest noises. They trotted down two aisles and over one. Yes! Here was a cabinet with doors swung wide. Pneumos were delivering white cylinders into the crystal forest on top.

Miri skidded to a stop in front of the opened doors. Inside the cabinet were glassy racks; it was like some kind of old-time snack dispenser. The slots behind the glass were a silvery honeycomb, hundreds of perfect hexagonal cells. Hundreds of tiny faces looked out of the cabinet. Tiny faces with tiny pink eyes, on tiny furry white heads. A high-pitched chittering came through the glass.

“They can’t move, they’re wedged in so tight,” said Miri. “Their rear ends must be plugged into little — ” She paused, perhaps looking up background on her local cache? ” — little sucking diapers.” For a little girl who had no interest in pets, there was a strange sadness in her voice. “It’s a standard thing really.”

Miri tore her gaze away from the array of chittering faces. “Each of these cabinets has mice cells arranged twenty by thirty by ten. So there are nine more arrays behind this one we’re looking at. Hear the crunching noise? Smart-Aleck’s friends are wrapping up some of them for shipment.”

“But where?” None of the mouse cells were moving.
“That must be in back — “