She raised an eyebrow. “I take it you have an idea.”
He hesitated. “I do. But it would take too long to explain it. You’ll have to trust me.”
And then, for a moment, he just stood there in silence. Fixing her face in his memory. If he really did pull this off, the fallout would be ugly. It was the kind of ugliness you wanted to spare a friend from, even if that meant distancing yourself from her so that no one could ever claim she was part of it.
This may be the last time I ever see you.
There was no time to say more. Which was good. It would have been too painful to voice what he was really feeling.
That’s how it worked sometimes, when a person headed off to do something insanely stupid.
What is reality, if not shared illusion?
Osho Yun-Si
Without Limits
HARMONY NODE
HARMONY STATION
THE CORRIDORS of Harmony Station were filled with revelers, many of them masked. Some were blatantly ignoring the station’s prohibition on public intoxication, Micah noted. Was this the kind of bacchanal that Dresden had intended to host? All Micah knew for sure was that if something wasn’t done in the next few hours to stop Icelus, this might be the last innocent celebration his station ever enjoyed. Or any station. Only in the colonies would people be safe from Icelus’ manipulations. There was irony in that, wasn’t there? People like Ru risked life and limb to enable lost colonies to rejoin human society, but it was that very society that made a digital pandemic possible. Those colonists who had rejected the outworlds, preferring to remain isolated—refusing any connection with humanity’s shared networks—would beyond Icelus’ reach.
It’s all on me now. If I can’t stop Icelus, I need to find someone who can. The weight of responsibility was suffocating, but who else could take it on? Ru was the only other person who understood the stakes, but she didn’t have his knowledge of the cybersphere. Or of the politics that governed it.
He called up his chrono to check the time and was dismayed when he realized how long it had taken him to get to the hotel where Vienna’s hackers were staying. He could hear minutes counting down in his head, a pulse of inevitability. If they failed him, there would be no time to look for other solutions.
The hackers were staying together in a large suite. He remembered the many times he’d traveled with them, how they used to set up headquarters in such a suite, linking their portable units together to replicate the speed and power of their home system. Sometimes Vienna had asked them to do questionable things with that power. Sometimes they had just explored the local network, challenging its safeguards, testing its limits. One never knew when such knowledge might be needed.
How innocent those times now seemed, in hindsight. How blissfully uncomplicated.
When he reached the door to the suite he took a moment to steel his nerves, then knocked firmly. A moment later the door slid open, and he could see that yes, Vienna’s team had transformed the place. Portables had been set up on all available surfaces, with various cables and devices attached to them, and the four people in the room seemed busy. He recognized them all, which was a relief; he wouldn’t have to waste time establishing his credentials. On the other hand, the last thing they’d heard about him was that he’d tried to blow up a waystation and had gotten himself killed as a result. How would they receive him now?
“You can put it—” Roz looked up halfway through the sentence and stopped. “You’re not room service. Who are you?”
Micah stepped forward far enough for the door to shut automatically behind him, then lifted off his mask. The hackers swiveled around in their chairs to look at him, and one by one their eyes went wide. Roz, Bakshi, Hellbane, and Sisi. Once they had been his colleagues, his friends. How would they receive him now?
After a few stunned seconds, Roz broke into a broad smile. Her two rows of filed teeth made it a fierce expression. “Micah! You son of a bitch!”
Bakshi grinned. “Now playtesting Resurrection 1.0.” His seven-fingered hands gave him an advantage in manual programming, so as usual, his station was the most complicated. “Looks fully operational.”
They all came to him one after the other and embraced him like he’d never been accused of a heinous crime. Like socializing with him couldn’t possibly get them accused of aiding and abetting a terrorist. After all the fear and uncertainty of the last few days, it was pretty overwhelming. He wiped a hand across his eyes, hoping no one saw the tears forming there.
The door chimed. “Now, that’s our pizza,” Roz announced. She waited for Micah to put his mask back on before opening the door and waving the delivery bot in.
The pizza smelled good. It smelled normal. It reminded him of a hundred other pizzas on a hundred other stations, back in the days when his life had made sense. Bakshi carried the food to a counter already strewn with the debris of past meals, and cleared a space for it. Empty cups, crumpled napkins, a colorful wrapper from someone’s Rainbow Burger: the team rarely bothered with cleaning duties while they were working. “So what the hell happened to you?” Bakshi demanded. “To hear the media tell it, you’re practically the son of Satan.”
No, more like the hunter of the son of Satan. Where should he start? He’d rehearsed this speech in his head on the way here, in a dozen variations, but there hadn’t been a room full of people weighing his words then. Would his story sound rational to them? Would they trust that the insane things he was telling them were true? Would they be willing to put their reputations on the line, based on no more than a crazy tale about sentient viruses and mass insanity?
At least they knew him. They knew he was inherently sane. And they knew he would never bullshit them about something like this. He prayed all that would be enough.
“Wow,” Hellbane said when he was finally finished. “Just . . . wow.”
“A sentient AI that wants to destroy humanity.” Roz whistled softly. “That’s not good.”
“An independently evolved AI,” Bakshi reminded her. “That means it hasn’t got any of the safeguards or restrictions we build into normal AIs. That’s pretty much the textbook definition of ‘not good.’”
Sisi put down the crust of her last slice of pizza. “So you want our help dealing with this thing, right? Within . . .” She consulted her chrono. “Forty-five minutes? Damn. You do like to cut it close, Micah.”
“What can we do?” Bakshi asked him.
“Figure out some way to block the protocol change,” Micah said. “Or even just delay it. Anything to buy us time to deal with the bigger picture.”
Hellbane exhaled sharply. “Screwing with the functioning of a waystation is a serious offense, Micah. Not that I’m adverse to offending someone for a good cause, but are you sure there’s no other way? We’re talking about something that would affect the data feed to all other nodes, and that’s a serious infraction.”