Chapter 31


Cymbals flashed in the monsoon. The sky was a gray mountain, the land every shade of green. Demillia faced forward in the passenger pod of a cold shuttle bus, back straight, hands on her knees. The rain seemed harder than usual, the colors brighter.
  Thirty years ago, half the population of Bombay State had been functionally illiterate. Now they owned and operated almost a million small businesses. It was a world of tiny apartments and huge debts, eighteen-hour shifts and suicidal competition. The "Nightwalkers" were trapped inside vast buildings, and never saw the sun. The poorest of the poor were almost buried alive. There just wasn't enough room for everyone.
  The Rat Effect had caused new types of segregation. In some offices, workers hung from hooks that were more comfortable than they looked. All Class-3 antisocial people had to live in one neighborhood. They would have preferred easier prey nearby. The ultimate form of capitalism, it was still less stressful than most of China.
  Everyone wanted to earn their own version of heaven. In the Indian Commonwealth, the cost was ten lifetimes' salary. In a secret ceremony, the authorized user swallowed a golden pill, evolved from an exercise motivation system. Newcomers could sample it once, for ten seconds. The pleasure was a form of brain damage. They would do anything to feel it again.
  A famous urban legend, Demillia had believed it was true until three months ago. Ever since learning it wasn't, the world had felt strange, which had helped her prepare for yesterday's events.
  As humanity fled the cities, Bombay had become the last world capital. Coming off the bridge, Demillia saw the traffic as an escalator of lights, a necklace of people who didn't know each other.
  She had kissed her fiancé goodbye, unsure if they would ever meet again. Her peers would disapprove of her actions, even if she succeeded today. They moved in high circles that valued tradition over progress.
  A campus of gray office buildings sprawled across an undulating lawn. Millipol Headquarters bordered two wealthy neighborhoods on Salsette island, north of the towers of Menax A3. The bus stopped, and she entered the real world. There was steam on the pavement, the simulated concrete slick as it absorbed the runoff. Taillight streaks shimmered on the road. A covered walkway draped across the lawn like a pale snake. Water drummed on the portico, and ran down the sides in a film. A distant row of skyscrapers paraded into the sea, widening as they approached heaven.
  Demillia joined a crowd of civil servants marching toward the entrance, their steps merging in the sound of the rain. They passed an ancient statue that had seen a million sunsets. Mid-afternoon was the busiest part of the day. Most of the world was talking to itself, and Millipol listened in.

  The main doors opened like blades. The darkness felt cold, as the dehumidifiers dried her skin like sand. She didn't know the exact moment she first broke the law. This might be it.
  Millipol Headquarters was protected by every security force on earth. Police and military uniforms surrounded the interior entrances, subcompact guns clashing with the banal office decor. Many criminals also passed through.
  Ahead loomed the multi-ton Long Yawn. A guard with intense white eyes led her into the machine. Demillia stepped on a slideway through the ceramic superconductor. The unreal walls glowed softly, and she thought she felt a touch. In the strong magnetic field, all the atomic nuclei of her body flipped over, like a catapult slamming a car into the pavement, but the connecting electrons maintained their positions. Not a hair was disturbed.
  An electrical imbalance circled the torus faster than the speed of light, a virtual current that could count individual molecules. Not even a nanoprobe, if such a thing existed, could pass through. The scanner ignored the implant in her head. Then came blasts of air from a nozzle bank, sniffing for fear or deceit. The airlock opened.
  The sections of Millipol Headquarters were as isolated from each other as America and Europe had been in the year zero. She entered the cagelike halls of Section Six, a series of concentric rings radiating through thirty spokes. It was a long walk to Ravi Jahan's unmarked door. This might well be the worst part.

  The divisions came together in a medieval room in the hub, a circle of displays. The largest was Social Networks, misleadingly called Party Central. A locked door led into Pattern Amplification, the center for false alarms. On another wall hung confiscated pleasure machines, a thousand times better than winning the lottery.
  Demillia sat on a bench in an alcove, following Millipol's second rule: lower your profile. Nothing moved as she prepared for her meeting. Most staff members avoided the central hall.
  The place of honor had been reserved for an old enemy. A lone figure sat motionless under an artificial skylight. Erres Wolman had impersonated a billionaire, and stolen most of his empire in one minute. No shareholder had lost more than 5%, but time really was money, and Wolman's crime was equivalent to mass murder. It had taken millennia to earn the money he had so casually stolen, and less than half was ever recovered.
  With a flawless understanding of cost and consequence, Millipol had requested the ultimate penalty, and Erres became an exhibit in a place he would have loathed. Demillia ignored the dark shape at the edge of her vision. A notorious racist, Erres had turned dark brown himself. Mummies were fascinating because they had moved once, a brief prequel of their true existence. Now every second lasted a thousand years. They would get rid of it soon.
  She waited twenty minutes, a useful drill. Normally, she researched each meeting ahead of time, anticipating every emotional nuance. A secretary in a gold uniform approached and pointed silently. Ravi's door had opened directly behind her.
  The windowless suite of converted offices was cluttered with screens and extended flowcharts with names crossed out and replaced many times. The furniture and carpet had been installed pre-worn. A corner birdcage held a large butterfly. She saw a small kitchen, a neatly made-up bed behind glass. A wreath of weapons on the wall formed the Millipol symbol. An old man faced a wall screen. No, it was the back of an empty chair.
  Ravi was doing pushups in a corner, counting in his native language. He jumped up, his back still toward Demillia. His head turned faster than his body, and he briefly looked furious. His eyes were the grayish blue of compressed solid oxygen.
  A living legend, Ravi Jahan wanted to bring history to a close. Four years from now, the world's last army would be absorbed by a UN-regulated militia. It had taken decades to negotiate that half-completed treaty. At the start, ninety armed conflicts had raged worldwide. Tribunals, treaties and interventions had helped settle some conflicts, but most could only be abandoned, as the warriors died off or retired.
  Ravi did his best to help this process along, but most militants were only too desperate to finish the job. Their leaders would associate with anyone who could help them. Would they at least do these things publicly? They were sure they wouldn't.
  Of all the persons who had ever lived, the names were known of only one in twenty, all in the past seven thousand years. For every name on the Vietnam War Memorial, human history had produced the violent death toll of the Korean War Memorial. As a defense mechanism, the surviving humans had evolved intense paranoia, a one-way process that was exploited by every Fam. Life was terrible when you added it up, but most portions were tolerable. The worst problems were the easiest to improve, but the hardest to solve. The communists had discovered the most important job was to prevent certain people from acting at all.
  The UN's first goal was to prevent certain unacceptable events from taking place. "Constructive engagement" preserved all existing institutions, while discouraging the formation of new ones. It made every country or region a prisoner of its own character. Eventually, mankind would have to give up politics altogether.
  Only two universal rights would remain: unrestricted inspections, and freedom of location (There was no Article Three, but Amendment 2.4.5 covered exceptions to the exceptions).The details were complex, but in principle anyone could leave the area where they had been born. In some regions, people were still allowed to beat their wives or children, though that would probably change.
  UN inspectors could go anywhere, but they had no local enforcement authority: that was Millipol's job. Ravi and Demillia served the alliance of every armed force on Earth, from underpaid security guards to the police, paramilitary, and combat forces (some in name only), to the Nuclear Reserve, which owned all the plutonium, and still hoped to blow up an asteroid someday. Even the religious police of three small fundamentalist states had joined. Despite their worldwide infrastructure and impressive headquarters, Millipol had no formal hierarchy. No one was forced to contribute, and anyone could benefit.
  Millipol's first rule was: Obey. Agents helped enforce local laws, no matter how disagreeable. Trapped in a snowstorm, one agent had been persuaded to shoot himself to conserve resources. Agents were encouraged to form links between rival factions.
  Their ultimate and most grave duty was to intervene when one nation threatened another. First came a formal UN inquest, then a mediation attempt, then a final warning. So far, Millipol had fought four well-planned police actions. Victory was a matter of supremacy.
  Ravi led the Subjective Intelligence division. Its official function was to find connections that other divisions and agents would later use. Ravi always looked at the data first. He didn't always pass it on to the relevant bureau. Some jobs were just too hard to leave to a division commander or a field agent. He had persuaded several people to commit suicide, killed a few himself, and given many others bad advice. He always felt tired afterward, and made himself forget what he had done. He never got mad, often begging his victim to reconsider. His family had no idea what he did.
  "Sit," he ordered. A bright lamp behind him turned his face into a photo negative. He produced two cups of orange pekoe tea. They had never met before.
  "This is an honor," she said. Demillia was curious if he could really read her emotions. That might ruin his whole day.
  He sat down. "Xiao died a hero," he said solemnly. "I nominated him for the Janus Medal. Your testimony will be crucial."
  "I'm here to decode his Box. After recovering it from his body, I sealed it in a tamperproof bag." Xiao's Box had been implanted near his heart. It contained a record of his final week.
  Ravi hung his head. "Yes, it just arrived at Crypt 50. Xiao encoded all his files, but he gave the key only to you?" Ravi had few expressions, but perfect timing.
  Yesterday in Qiyuan, a wall had suddenly fallen, and a hundred-ton metal wedge had rolled into the light of day. The armor had scattered lasers in blinding fans, as it slid through the gardens on pulse-inflation tracks that only appeared to move. The excavator was programmed to avoid obstacles, but a soldier in a tree had managed to drop a fifty-kilo demolition charge on the improvised tank. It did no real damage, but 100 kilos would have destroyed it.
  Waiting patiently in his truck, Xiao had looked more serene than many people ever felt. He carefully leaned out the side, and fired his cannon through gaps in the trees. A small sun flared on the tank, which began to pour black smoke.
  It was a trap. Not all the neighborhood defenses had been recognizable as such. A surreal scarecrow rose up with a sigh, and a string of bright lines flashed through the air. Xiao spun back, but the disks had penetrated his armor like crossbow arrows. One of 8Topia's few lethal devices then crumbled to dust. A few others might still remain, waiting for orders that would never come.
  "At the time, I was listing violations in the command van 300 meters away," Demillia explained. "Xiao's injuries forced me to break cover. When I arrived, he had been stabilized in an air ambulance, pretending to be semi-conscious. We used data hoods to communicate. Eight minutes later, he died of a stroke caused by the stimulants he had been ordered to take the day before. I prevented an autopsy, but the medics took blood and tissue samples. Xiao gave me important data you won't find on his Box."
  Ravi nodded politely. "Why not?" he interjected.
  "Xiao claimed he found traitors inside Millipol," Demillia lied. "To protect the data, we used brain encryption through my occipital implant."
  "An elementary mistake," Ravi raised his voice without sounding angry. "Now we need your brain to decode Xiao's Box. The data is not expendable." Ravi hated risks more than violence. Both were avoidable. He often said Millipol had two L's, not one.
  In this case, the data didn't actually exist. Demillia had only activated her implant long after Xiao's body had been frozen. Ravi had to consider the possibility she was lying, just as she considered the remote possibility Xiao had faked his own death.
  Careful not to elaborate, she continued: "He completed his investigation last month. His data includes a suspect list."
  "I heard about that," Ravi said. "In fact, I was hoping to pull your ears off. That's a saying from my home state. It means I want to ask you many questions."
  Demillia nodded. Among Chhattisgarh's many expressions, this one did not exist. "He believed he had found the 'Mole'," she said.
  His colleagues could only suspect the depth of Ravi's frustration. For five years, he had hunted a high-level spy inside Millipol. About once a month, during routine sweeps to destroy potentially embarrassing information, the Mole would copy it to the Net instead. It was beyond infuriating. Like a retrovirus, no one knew the department s/he worked for, or where s/he got his/her data in the first place. Hundreds of languages were spoken here, in a thousand active groups. The investigation became so unwieldy Ravi had started a second one to track it. After two reorganizations, the leaks continued. He'd hoped Anonymous was the Mole, but there had been a new leak this morning.
  Ravi hadn't responded to her last sentence, so Demillia continued: "Xiao's data is restricted by default. I can only release it to a Chaperone AI."
  While waiting for Anonymous to reinvent herself, Xiao had worked undercover for Internal Affairs. His data consisted of random observations, poetry about open doors, night shadows and mysterious stains, plus letters to an imaginary monk. Some of his accusations would have to be checked out: Ravi had allegedly helped China oppress its population.
  Xiao's last words had been a brief request to terminate life support. His worst nightmare was to wake up as a Nethead.
  The Back Room had had no trouble modifying his Box. The seal on the black bag meant nothing to the UN, which trusted no one. Demillia would not let them change anything already there, only add information they had found in the past week.
  Ravi closed his eyes. His face twitched as if it was raining inside. People with strong convictions often had trouble deciding what to do next. "Good idea," he said. "We'll use the Chaperone. We can't trust humans, can we?" He laughed once and looked serious. "I could be the Mole!" She nodded sadly.