THE SURFACE—WESTEURO
GREENWICH OBSERVATORY
It took two exhausting hours of Q&A, plus a fencing demo, to disperse the #flashmob. Two hours of deflecting questions about possible sizzle and sexy storylines with Gimlet in Bastille. Afterward, the whole @PoxWorkingGroup headed to Greenwich. Rubi begged to take a public tube and got compromise: Anselmo agreed to skip the privilege of a private ride but insisted on having a train car to themselves.
“Any word from your client?” Anselmo subbed. He had found time to shave; he was more cleanly cut than his toon.
“You’re in my feeds; you’d know.”
He replied with a fixed smile. “Just being polite.”
“Very prosocial.” Fencing with journos had left her spoiling for a fight. She couldn’t help feeling he’d been toying with her, letting her bust her brain trying to proving Luce wasn’t an AI when his real theory had been …
What?
And had it been wrong of him to keep a few options open? Wasn’t that, in fact, what investigators were supposed to do?
She blocked the nagging inner voice. It wasn’t merely that full disclosure might have saved her own time and resources. What if it could save Luce from the #triage program’s relentless attacks?
Rather than coast in a combative state, she checked in with Happ, looking for mood hacks. It threw up a map to their destination, charting out a stroll from the subway to the Observatory.
“See the sights!” Happ said. “Focus on here-now-present! London visit, unplanned, once-in-a-lifetime opp!”
Good advice. She’d been in London for three days and hadn’t seen anything.
“Attend to the present. Got it,” Rubi said.
Happ duly imposed hopscotch patterns on the sidewalk as they exited the tube. She and Frankie played through them, stomping illusory moji for points, racing as the complexity of the course grew.
“Pardon my asking,” Gimlet subbed, “but why are we talking to this astronomer?”
“If we must go to Florida,” Anselmo replied, hitting the last word in a tone that most would reserve for a sewage treatment plant, “I want to confirm we aren’t … how do you say? #hoaxhunting?”
“Understood. But why meet the astronomer in the flesh?”
“Kora prefers face-to-face.”
Rubi made a silent note to thank Kora, whoever they were. The Royal Observatory was a stunning stone edifice with a dome atop, a human-built clamshell exposing the huge lens of its telescope to the night sky.
Once-in-a-lifetime sight, indeed! She captured postcards and selfies.
The interior of the planetarium was a theater of sorts, with coiled seats pointed at the ceiling and a huge white dome above.
“What’s this?” Frankie asked, fiddling with the hem of a tattered pullover skirt she’d picked up while Gimlet and Rubi were doing the press conference. Old goth aesthetic; Rubi recognized it as a print from the Whine Manor gift shop.
“This space projects the night sky,” Anselmo said. “It’s vintage sim tech.”
“Selmo!” Rapid-fire burst of Spanish, out loud, defied Rubi’s translator app. A voluptuous woman rose from a cross-legged position on the floor. She was clad in a tunic that appeared handwoven, made from scavenged rags.
“Crane, Whooz?”
Korafor Yang, came back the answer, they/them, Head of Transmission Analysis. They had a fixed Cloudsight rating of 60 percent. The lock probably indicated an unspecified social disorder. Serious #allergy tags came up: the planetarium was filtered for scents, all #soy products, and #latex.
Korafor asked, “You’re here about the Amsterdam hospital hacking?”
Anselmo nodded, sending NDAs and warrants.
Korafor snapped their fingers, and an image from a comms satellite filled the vast screen. Earth resolved above them, Africa wheeling by, wisped in cloud. Pretoria’s massive Sahara Pushback Project was visible from space. The blue beads of its freshwater reservoirs, haloed by green, threaded through the plate of golden sand.
“This footage comes from a standard Gaga I–model satellite used for Sensorium comms. Beijing and Moscow retrofit and launch about ten a year, as the legacy supply of Madonnas ages out. There’s nothing special about the tech, do you see?”
A round of nods.
“This particular sat transmitted eleven unapproved programs to the implantation hospital in northern WestEuro. It wrote them into the upload queue for new accounts, temporarily offlining an equal number of preadolescents. What happened with them, by the way?”
“All patients unharmed,” Anselmo said. “Most of the programs were trashed by Azrael #triage. One got through, into Sensorium.”
Kora nodded, as if this confirmed their expectations. “What @Interpol asked me is where did the packets originate, physically? Mer Javier’s initial hypothesis was that an off-the-grid terrorist server sent them to that satellite, bouncing them back down to Holland.”
“Could you find a server like that?” Rubi asked.
The image of Earth lit up with technosphere infrastructure—huge Sensorium data reefs, on- and offshore, transmission stations, and undersea cables. The megacities were bloodred, with radiating pale areas showing their support networks. The evacuated wilds were clear but for lines to outlier communities.
“So, we eliminate this, this, this—” As Kora spoke, possible sources of the transmission went gray, like a circulatory system succumbing to necrosis.
“And?” Frankie was on her tiptoes, a clear tell that she was excited.
The whole sim leached out. “Nothing.”
“That’s impossible,” said Gimlet.
A red dot appeared. It looked, oddly, like it was coming from behind the sat, from higher orbit.
“Impossible?” Kora scoffed, then began drawing a line … away from the planet entirely. The sim shifted its scale as the line shot outward, blasting past the moon, the orbital paths of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. In about a second’s time, it was out of the solar system entirely.
“Have we got probes out that far?” Gimlet asked.
Rubi fact-checked. “No.”
The line continued to stretch, until the solar system shrank to a dot. It terminated short of a star tagged Proxima Centauri.
“Beyond,” breathed Frankie.
Rubi’s barely banked anger burst out. “Seriously? You’re saying it’s little green men?”
Kora shrugged. “I know how it sounds.”
“Do you? Because I live with a straight-up #hoax-chasing founder of the @bloodhound channel, and this isn’t something he would give five minutes to.” She couldn’t even say why she felt so mad. Anselmo looked pleased, which made it worse.
Sure, Rubi, maybe your client’s the Singularity, Rubi. Or you think it’s a polter? Fine!
Kora put up a hand. “The source of the transmission is out there. I can’t change facts.”
“But…”
“Facts! I thought like you, Mer. A #hoax, surely. One of our own probes must have been used to spoof the sat.”
“Right!”
“Alas, none of our tech is in the right location. The signal came from there.”
“An unlisted military probe, then,” Rubi suggested. “Vintage war tech, repurposed by terrorists to load #malware into Sensorium.”
“Now we all sound like @hoaxers.”
Rubi’s thoughts churned. Kora was saying Luce had originated offworld. Was that possible? Was all of his apparent dysfunction less an antisocial disorder and simply the behavior of an … an alien?
An alien trying to pass?
Gimlet’s jaw was hanging open. Frankie seemed elated.
Rubi swallowed. “That was WestEuro. But now there’s been a second upload?”
Kora circled the offending sat. “We offlined this, loaded its datacaches, ran forensics. We looked at the intrusion and ran securities upgrade on all the Gaga-class sats. Even so, it loaded another module to the implant hospital in Tampico.”
“Loaded … from the same transmission source?”
“Well…” They drew another line, almost same as first, except …
“That one’s closer to the solar system,” Frankie said.
“Smart girl,” said Kora approvingly. “Wins the prize. Closer? Yes. Heading towards us. Do you see the significance? Even a military probe would be moving outward, not in.”
“It couldn’t turn around?”
“Turn 180 degrees and get back up to speed? In six months?” Math whiteboarded across the dome, apparently noping this theory.
“Then the source of the transmission is approaching our solar system,” Gimlet said.
“Indisputably.”
“How far out?”
“With two datapoints, I’m forced to assume constant speed. If that holds, it will reach us in fifteen years. If it’s accelerating, sooner.”
They stared at each other, at a loss for words.
“So,” Anselmo said finally. “Our lead theory about Luciano Pox, suddenly, is that the Martians are coming.”
“More than that,” said Gimlet. “The Martians are bloody friending us.”