Chapter 18


Wide and dark, the forest edge swallowed him whole. Running through the underbrush past the first trunks, his enhancer showed a world of submerged colors. At least the trees weren't lined up. Musty smells rose with each step. Horseflies and gnats rustled and fluttered.
  He stumbled to a halt on a shallow slope, and watched a camera view from the bunker. A dozen trucks and ATV's were parked near the road. They couldn't cross the intelligent mud protecting the forest alley, but the collapsible soil would support humans. Mercenaries crawled through the high grass, waiting for the robot to act. It could flatten itself, but was currently handwalking across the field, stalks turning and waving.
  Another truck arrived, and a tiny drone climbed skyward. All trees looked the same from above.
  Rick sealed his Mask and attached the air filter before calling Tina. "I'm pinned down," he said. "Stand by." He retreated past ancient trunks the color of rock, dead branches cracking underfoot. A clearing was filled with undergrowth. He wanted to plunge in.
  "I tried to call Mustaphal," Tina said. The Chief Inspector was a minor god in the hierarchy. "He's persuading the Russian security minister to stand down." Doing nothing was often the biggest favor.
  "Try to keep the cops away," Rick told Tina. "Let's keep this simple." His public coordinates had a five kilometer error margin.
  "Don't worry. The nearest marshal is guiding water bombers two valleys to the north." Satellite reception worsened, her voice breaking into syllables.

  The mercenaries assembled into three squads, and headed north along the tree-line. One carried a lightweight magnetic detector that unfolded to the size of a small house. From some angles it looked like a giant head, swinging with uncanny speed. They stopped to test a parabolic microphone. Chen followed, seeing only wilderness around him.
  Rick leaned back against the moss-covered remains of a fallen trunk, and tried to radio his attackers. With only his hands exposed, this was his new office. They were jamming the robot's nonexistent control signal.
  He was so focused he ignored the first detonation. Blue smoke drifted between the trees, fading against the sky. Seconds of silence, then a more distant blast. Somehow he had started a small war.
  Around 2020, mankind had realized they were part of the Net, instead of the other way around. As elements in a simulation, they had more apparent choices. The Net simplified conspiracies and provided the courage to carry out elaborate plans. Once a group became large enough, no member could predict his own actions. Ideas became real before anyone was ready.
  He stumbled down a branch-covered slope to the remnants of an old riverbed. A maze of dry culverts meandered between low hills, occasionally bridged by a fallen tree. As he jogged, his feet sank in dry compost, and he was soon covered with dirt. He climbed past another hollow trunk, through a fence of dead branches, and under some tree-sized shrubs.
  The spider robot stood at the edge of a small clearing, its smokeless cannon pointing at a bright patch of sky. It fired another chain of pellets. The branches sneezed, and leaves buzzed and twirled down. The puff of smoke he'd seen earlier was a deception. Then came a distant bang, and an echo.

  The detonation chain passed directly over the specialists, who dropped down at once. The drone crashed nearby.
  Some of the mercenaries carried unlicensed rifles. They aimed with well-trained, unthinking coordination. Bullet chains drilled holes through trees, or climbed and fell with pin-point accuracy, almost colliding on the way down. Fragments ricocheted unseen in the darkness. An owl climbed against the sunset.
  Nothing landed near Rick as he ran downhill and rolled under the trunk. It felt like relying on his own incompetence to survive.
  Now he understood how Roger felt. Death was the void that formed half of reality. He was about to be hit by a universe in which he didn't exist. If every star in the galaxy exploded, it would be nothing by comparison.
  Waiting for another shot, the mercenaries tried to backtrack the mortar's position. The commander watched a tracer rise into the clouds, as bullets spread over fifty hectares. Some landed fifty meters from Rick.
  An automatic mistake, the engagement lasted only ten seconds. The commander ordered his troops to spread out, away from the forest edge. Sitting in meter-high grass, he mapped the area. An inner circle bounded the mortar's location. Still no police alarms.
  "He'll respond rationally," Chen said. "We must be unpredictable." This was a time for risk.
  "Parkland can see us," the emotionless commander replied. "He left sensors in the tree canopy, or transparent flyers."
  "Can we target his robot?"
  "We can't track chaotic shells. They roll up or down, spin around corners. If we claim self-defense against the UN, the prosecutor will ask why we didn't run."
  "Because we witnessed Parkland steal valuable state property. He wears sensors he can't remove. I want to get within feedback range to open a private channel, or maybe even throw him a note." Or use a skywriter. Chen looked relaxed. The reality didn't match his fears.

  The robot had no muzzle flash. The silence from his sound-canceling earphones felt like fainting. Rick's power icon flickered.
  A voice repeated a brief message with synthetic authority: "Local channel 631436".
  The sound was old-style analog, direct induction in his earphones and VF-receiver, like an ancient crystal radio powered by its own antenna. He couldn't easily record it, but took notes. To other radios nearby, the compound signal would be interference. For him, it would function as a one-time pad. He dialed the number and received a Net file: it was his own voice, saying things he didn't remember; something about Net forensics.
  Then came more orders: how to mix a real message with his recorded voice, using a virtual keyboard powered by the changing charge differences between his fingers. His Box would ignore the hidden typing as radio noise, which he would unobtrusively mix with the recording, and send back out. The Script made it almost too easy. Rick had done this before, and allowed a few people to find out.
  He used a satellite relay to send his response half a kilometer. "Stop acting like fools!" Now they had exchanged codes. A bird shrieked in the distance.
  "Do not fire again," came the reply. "We are not your enemy. We represent victims of the Method. He stole our souls. We want to help you bring him to justice."
  Amid the layered vegetable smells of the forest, Rick became the world's most corrupt UN inspector. His reputation helped him. People tended to trust inspectors, even when they admitted they were liars.
  "Perhaps we can cooperate," he wrote. "My investigation is blocked." A high patch of golden moss caught the last sunlight. According to legend, there was a mystic "open field" near here. "Tell me what you want, and I'll tell you when you've gone too far," he wrote.
  Now the reply came as selected bits of Net static. "Roger Xyrghyz informed us about DEEFx," Chen's simulated voice said. "He agreed to share his knowledge with us. We want to participate in your investigation, to make sure the Method's knowledge doesn't fall in the wrong hands. You don't know what you're dealing with."
  "My standard bribe is ten million dollars." The more outrageous, the better.
  "If we find, capture, and appropriately neutralize the Method, we will pay you twice that, untraceable Xcrow, in return for your continued cooperation."
  "I want it in the form of information." He sent a list (estimated value twenty million BlackNet credits). Name fifty people (C/5+) who were not what they seemed. The ten most underpaid scientists.
  "Who is the Method?" he asked.
  A long silence was followed by a distant shout. "We have a deal," Chen said. He sent a contract naming neither party. "The Method is the person or group who created DEEFx. We want to secretly detain him, under Amendment 9 Section 85.b, to use his knowledge to repay his victims, and reverse the damage he caused. With no other alternative, he might be persuaded to help mankind. You could oversee this process yourself."
  "I will," Rick wrote. "If you don't break too many rules, I can promise immunity under Amendment 5. We'll have to share our data."
  This was going well. The way to infiltrate a tribe was by giving up control, which could be more dangerous than being shot at. He sent a sixteen digit access code, which led through Tina's office to a secure part of the UN network. Intended for the case manager, the files were software-edited, with new ones added every minute. His unintentional attackers might use them to find DEEFx before he did. The Back Room had forty agents working the case. Hopefully, at least one of them was a real spy.
  An important UN principle was "reverse suppression". Information that wasn't dangerous should be distributed widely. Rick wanted to bundle the unknown. He could also claim the stress had affected his judgment.
  The floor of the forest was turning black, and the darkness felt cold. The silence was like a sigh. Chen was reading case summaries. Last night, UN profiler-AI O8 (known as Octopus Dancer) had tried to contact DEEFx. Someone, perhaps Roger, had launched a crude infiltration attack and shut down the exchange. During the one microsecond duel, O8 had analyzed DEEFx's architecture. It used a type of quantum encryption that only worked short distances. O8 guessed the Method lived in a contiguously linked urban cluster, about 1000 people per square km. That ruled out 99 percent of the earth's surface.
  "Breaking news," Tina announced.
  "I need the distraction," Rick replied. They had to keep moving, before their conceits collapsed. He felt cold sweat. An old Sony sign lay buried in the mulch.
  "The man you are talking to is Zhu Chen, a member of the Church of Ultimate Truth. He runs their secret PR campaign. He has the skills, is in the area, and vanished at the same time as several suspected mercenaries. I have a list that works against cults."
  Rick considered religion a useful safety valve. His own prophet was Sartre: the universe was absurd. That was the starting point.
  "I can hear a large animal making noise behind the trees," he said. "It's getting closer."
  "Probably a moose. Don't worry, they're herbivores."
  He tried to control his breathing. "I don't think that moose went to college."
  "I could check its tag. It's not mating season yet."
  "Never mind, it went away."
  She sounded alert, but more remote. Tina had been under stress lately. He suspected a family problem.
  "Meanwhile, I also have good news," she said sharp as ever. "Roger Xyrghyz has agreed to help us once again, while pretending to work for Chen. In return, he wants to be briefed on any new software we find."
  "A triple-cross, unless he's fooling us again?"
  "No more risks for him. He's hiding in a fallout shelter the communists forgot. Legal-G says they need evidence against the church."
  "I'll keep Chen talking." Sinking into accumulated moss, he smelled many types of wood.
  A minute later, Roger sent his first report. Watching Chen's search method, he predicted the events of the next five hours.

  A gray triangle fell from the sky like a piece of living debris. The fleeting shadow reached the bottom of its dive twenty meters from where Chen was standing. Rick never saw the unmanned bomber, but the boom rang through the woods, echoing through 360 degrees. The pitch changed as it fell into the sky again.
  The Russians couldn't tolerate gunplay in their territory. A real attack would have come at low altitude. Not that anything had happened yet.
  The mercenaries rose up from the grass and hurried back to the road. Their heavy armor made it hard to tell if they were running. The trucks started at once, and the sound soon faded in the dusk. Mustaphar had persuaded the minister to let them go. In less than a minute, Rick was alone again.
  He looked up, and realized he had experienced much stranger things. He couldn't see the sensors in the trees, but this strip of woodland contained a swarm of them, part of an old defense line. They had pinpointed the mercenaries, and the robot could have targeted them all. He wondered how far it would have gone to protect him.
  Tina claimed he only broke the rules to test them. That was his talent, why he thought he could handle Chen. Their plan to capture the Method remained a remote dream.
  Donitz called while Rick was walking back. "Insubordination can be a good thing," he said cheerfully. "Handing the world's most dangerous technology to a cult is something we all do sometimes. Just checking if you needed help with that." When Donitz found a problem, he became unpredictable. He was sometimes violent, but always creative. On several occasions, he had humored unreasonable visitors to his office, praising their unique insights. The next elevator had then taken them to the detention floor.
  "Sorry, I can't hear you," Rick replied. "I reconfigured my phone. I need more Back Room support." Tina groaned quietly.
  Rick sent a message to reassure Chen, mentioning him by name in the text. He could appear corrupt, but not stupid.
  The forest evening was as smooth as a simulation. It felt like returning home after a long day, but he wasn't even halfway done. His smart lamp erased the shadows. The map showed individual trees. The underbrush got tangled as he forced his way out.
  Back in the open, he stood near the bunker and listened. The silence extended a great distance, the stars blocked by low clouds. He barely saw the outline of the trees fading into darkness. He tried to hold on, but soon there would be nothing. When he had been younger, everything had seemed to die at the end of the day.
  The last outline was the memory of a great fir. He had a vision of how it looked in winter, a snow-covered mountain, waiting for the next moment.
  Then, many searchlights came on at once around him. Rick brushed off the dirt, climbed into his rented car (it might be bugged), and drove along the river road and over the suspension bridge into China.