Chapter 6


The vaults were conning towers in a field of thorns. The air had a metallic taste. Five hundred tons of zinc solvents were buried nearby. A billboard promised a future cleanup. Rick's notes floated where he focused, always changing.
  Twenty workers on barstool bikes arrived within a minute. An electric truck approached with a simulated engine sound like breaking glass.
  Inspectors had to be unpredictable. Rick clipped a scanning camera to his cap, the blue badge to his suit, and approached the crowd ready to take charge. They already knew what to do.
  He joined the engineer commanding the robot, doing many things at once. In two steps, the walking table vanished in the thorns.
  "Scanning the vault. X-ray CT, ultrasound, and chemical all negative. We won't use the laser, but intrude memory metal into the lock, breaking it from within."
  The Haz-Mat team in yellow beekeeper suits held flame-throwers instead of fire extinguishers. Rick crouched behind a building and waited. The Depot had more dead-ends than an old missile base. An announcement in Russian lasted as long as an acceptance speech.
  The video from the robot shifted, and the vault's door bounced on the ground. The sound arrived like a cough. Everyone waited. The robot stepped closer on flexible legs, peering into the darkness.
  "Curtain scan," the engineer said. "No microwave induction from weapons."
  The interior was magnified in 3D: alien junk close enough to touch, packed tightly like an Egyptian tomb. When the lights came on, one form seemed to leap forward.
  "Illegal conjunction. The mainframe has an optic connector. Any volunteers to take a closer look?" the engineer asked seriously.

  In a two hour choreography, a tunnel was cut through the thorns, and the vault's contents were moved to a silver tent. As elaborate as a living cell, many connections had to be cut.
  Police commissioner Andrei Simansky of the Amur/TNZ district took charge with his lieutenants. He wore a gray suit from more austere times. In the winter he preferred a brown greatcoat, an homage to the lost past. After years of bottom-up self-management, old-style discipline had made its final comeback. His assistant was a Millipol intern from Arabia.
  Simansky approached like a man bearing bad news. He started files on everyone he met. He tried to question Rick in Russian, before switching to his version of English. There would never be one world language. Maybe two. "The documentation for vault twenty is great fiction" Simansky said. "Five tons of stolen hardware were stored there after Zondyne's bankruptcy."
  They heard banging from the tent. He looked at Rick: a prominent badge, a combination training/biohazard field uniform (the letters UN in high-visibility orange on the back), a backpack suitcase and metallic wraparound shades. Each item as standardized as his face, but many inspectors still managed to look like slobs. As the Net evolved, the real world became blander.
  "What do you know about vault twenty?" he asked.
  Time to tell the truth. "I found two types of unregistered software related to that mainframe, Thunderstorm and a recycled version of Starter 25. They're boundary-constrained, but self-evolving."
  "A new lifeform?"
  "I still have much to learn."
  "You look a bit nervous."
  "I'm finding problems faster than I can solve them." He saw darkness under the trees.
  Simansky asked seemingly irrelevant questions while overcast blew in from the Sea of Japan. "The altered software is better than anything on OpeNBx or T0NOt," Rick said. "Someone stole all the best ideas."
  "To sell or to use?"
  "To hide."
  Simansky's hopes for a quick arrest faded. He'd just been called away from a dispute with youth-commune hooligans. He assumed they were mocking him, while he searched their converted mansion for a pretext. A vertol had landed noisily in the street. Simansky got in without a wave, and read his new orders during the flight: safeguard the Depot until State Security arrived.
  "Let's see what you found," he motioned Rick. They approached the tent, walking past a parked police van. Workers stood still when Simansky passed.
  Inside was a modern warehouse, which would be gone in a few hours. Gleaming, tangled hardware was draped over workbenches and shelves. The mainframe dominated the joined tables like a steel totem. X-rays showed hollow drill bits and manipulator arms with skeletal fingers folded inside. It had even updated itself. The top of the big cylinder was in shadow, beyond sleep.
  Rick circled the tables, taking notes on his glove. An optronic FNIntari with micron waldos. Form GG/4600 - Illegal Calculations. This machine had never been aware, but it was smart enough to repair a car. There was a funny smell, probably unique in the universe.
  "Micro-drills, incubators that make nutrients from air, aerosol sprays," Simansky said. "It would be banned under dual-use laws." He looked at the back of the enigmatic cylinder, where its serial plate should be. Could it self-destruct? "We're digging under the vault. See the yellow excavator on screen two? We find automated drug factories every month."
  Underground was a new universe, a trillion cubic kilometers ready to exploit. Most of the Depot was in reinforced shafts: unlimited storage out of sight. Permafrost was laser-cut into blocks, melted into slurry, and pumped to "Mount Geiger", now 200 meters high. There were at least three generations of mass graves underneath, a layer cake leaking "Stalin Soup". Simansky had once defended the (finally vaporized) dictator while he was drunk, saying he had rarely killed anyone in person.
  "The mainframe was built by an Illegal Solutions firm," Rick said. "You haven't heard of them, but they know you. They sell codes, identities, secrets."
  "What should we expect, Parkland?"
  "A simulated toxic leak would make everyone hide in their bio-bubbles." He lifted a metal disk, looking at his warbling reflection. "Whoever built this thing could pretend to be a cleanup crew."
  "Sounds like a scifi movie." He pronounced the c.
  "Perhaps," Rick said. The metal in the tent seemed to communicate in high tones. "I need to find the mainframe's builders. There's only a limited combination of specialists." He almost touched the cylinder. "I need to wake it up." The UN made the rewards bigger than the penalties.

  Simansky didn't reply, and Rick thought he'd said something outrageous. The commissioner was estimating the worst outcome. Russian intelligence was so good it had only failed once. The destruction of Moscow was known as the Explosion, while the rest of the world called it the Shock. Once it was possible to make a bomb, it was almost as easy to make a really big one, using cheap isotopes and depleted uranium. 5000 Hiroshimas had released a hundred times the fall-out of Chernobyl. The energy of the sunlight the earth received in one second, concentrated in ten square meters.
  The inevitable triumph of indifference: most Russians wanted to belong to, but not necessarily be part of, something bigger. Soviet socks made your feet bleed, and it had taken eight hours to buy a pair. Those were the good old days.
  During that first terrible minute, thousands of high-rises had been knocked down, cloud banks were inverted, and even satellites had been fried. One of Simansky's great-uncles had been hit by an Evergreen A380 fifty kilometers away, the fifteenth crash.
  Best not to think about the aftermath. There had been no organized evacuation for nearly a week. The last fires weren't extinguished until three months later, when a collapsed ice dam caused massive flooding. The most famous news video had actually shown a neighboring town burning. Some of the waste had been buried in a former valley near here.
  As usual, the true motivation had been revenge. Too many frustrations had combined at the wrong time. Rampant copyright and patent violations had led an American software company to inadvertently finance "Big Joe". The biggest bomb ever built had at least four stages: conventional implosion, fusion-boosting fission, fission-boosted fusion, and fission again, each explosion destroying the previous one. A journalist had discovered part of the plot in advance, but had been intimidated by a libel lawsuit. The news channel had unsuccessfully tried to replace the word murder with "made dead", before settling the suit. They could have pursued the story, but lost interest. They had already been punished, so why take the action that would have prevented it?
  There had been no direct retaliation, but the explosion helped cause the demise of the United States, which lost its two newest states as reparations. There had been massive political changes, foreshadowing the small world war sixteen years later. The post-US territory became apolitical, a complex mixture.
  The intervening years had seen three fake nuke threats, including a massive evacuation of NYC. Simansky thought about the sprawling hillside Catastrophe Monument, a tourist attraction now. Some good had come of it, in his mind: millions of radiation victims had sped up cancer research, and humanity began its great dispersal into the countryside. The world was turning into an extended suburb, as old parking lots reverted to fields. Environmentalists were horrified, but he was sure nature would eventually adapt.
  Meanwhile, the UN had gained the power to make sure it never happened again. The result was this foreigner acting like his equal, about to break the rules.
  "I'll order my subordinates to cooperate, but to take no additional risks," he said.
  Speaking for the record, Rick said: "UT 05:50, B-21204, I am reactivating the unknown mainframe."
  They emerged under a ceiling of low clouds. Simansky spoke to a lieutenant, while Rick took a folding chair beside a lab trailer hooked to the tent. He lowered his transparent Mask, and activated his invisible keyboard.
  Rick's Box used Psicog-software, endless facts sustaining the illusion of awareness. It began to assemble data about the local mafyas and syndicads. Franchises this close to the Asian tech belt only skirted the law. Passive-aggressive mug shots filled his monitor. Then came tattoo samples, graffiti, software mods. Simansky looked over his shoulder and studied the wildlife.
  Rick combed the mainframe for hints about the unknown programmers, the accents of their thoughts. Using manufacturers' logs, his Box listed eighty groups that could have modified it.
  He might as well be nowhere, and didn't hear the rumble of distant thunder as the breeze picked up. Simansky left to deal with the custodian, Olga Kozlova, who demanded a court order before cutting the Depot power. They argued in the distance, muffled by intervening trees.
  "I am the law," Simansky shouted. The next thing Rick remembered was a flash of lightning, as unwelcome as a bucketful of water. A raindrop passed before him like a second flash.
  Simansky cut the power, disabling many network filters. He wanted to shock the system, make it assert its authority. The network slowed to a human rate of thought. Some chips were so efficient they needed no current, managing their heat flow to herd electrons.
  Tina's spirit crossed the Pacific. She sent light pulses to every chip in the network, comparing their responses with the mainframe. Split endlessly, the light traveled galactic distances. Transformed into audio, it sounded like an orchestra tuning.
  Three of Zondyne's chips had apparently been stolen and repurposed by the same f-group or gang who rebuilt the mainframe, the "Krozs". Rick scanned for code re-use.
  He returned to the tent as rain plunked down, barely noticing the chatter on the roof as the air humidified. It wouldn't be enough rain. Whispers emanated from the mainframe, insulting gurgles and clicks.
  Zondyne's neural net represented a vast plan. "Nothing surprises it," he told Tina.
  "I've completed KoAn pattern matching. Looks like we'll have to take it apart."
  His alarm beeped for the second time in five hours. Simansky slid in the chamber, lifting a metal rod from the table. "Incoming transmission," he said.
  The warning appeared in purple letters on a transparent screen.
PARKLAND
YOU ARE NOT THE SOLUTION
LEAVE OR
  In the corner of Rick's screen, Tina made an angry gesture.
  "I'm not done yet," Rick said. He never would be.
  "We should go to a backup location," Simansky sighed. "They probably expect you to stay here. I don't know if this is an organized process."
  "We don't yield to threats."
  "Sometimes you have to appear weak. We released the communist guerrillas in exchange for the Siberian Express hostages, but we caught the dogs that did it." He could sound tough at random intervals.
  "I'm invoking my Article One authority." Something Rick did often.
  A live picture of him appeared onscreen, framed by cross hairs that guessed his movements. Simansky threw an evidence bag over an equipment table, and the picture went dark. Then it slowly reappeared. Rick didn't look up when a policewoman entered.
  "Haz-Mat declared a Type-B Hazard. Airborne protein fragments near the vault."
  Tina translated. Behind the trees a siren started to howl, and it seemed to get colder.
  "We must leave," Simansky said.
  Rick disagreed: the wind blew away from the tent, and he didn't want to say "prions", but this equipment probably couldn't make them.
  Simansky lifted him off his chair. Agents were trained to become dead weight, but he was about to fall, and couldn't arrange his words in time. "I'm cooperating," he protested.