VRTP://@INTERPOL/SECURE-SERVER/HUMANE-HOLDING-CELL.VR
Months later, after the dust had settled, Rubi would see the Sable Hare attack—the murder of the sailor and the suicide of his attacker aboard the SeaJuve flagship vessel—as a sort of starter’s pistol for worldwide conflagration.
She never meant to suggest to Luce that he ought to escape from @Interpol custody or go public with his story about the Pale. Could she have known he was capable of escaping?
Surely, she’d just made an idle comment, one born of her despair as footage of the murder aboard ship spread, as the surface and the Sensorium both caught fire and ocean-restoration efforts threatened, once again, to founder.
The Sable Hare murder kicked off a half-dozen violent actions elsewhere, the worst a gory attack by three machete-wielding remnant @Trollgaters in Old Moscow. As murder feeds exploded through the newscycle, gig acceptance dropped off. In Shanghai and Australia, morning shift pickup dropped to 10 percent. Automated drones picked up slack where they could, but without pilots to do nuanced work, service levels faltered.
Workshops went into shutdown. Carbon remediation rates bottomed out for the first time in sixty years. The Saharan reservoir management project, an effort to encourage natural replenishment of underground aquifers across the continent, had to shift into autopilot. Desalinizers cycled down: desperate oasis managers offered up to ten strokes to any new trainee willing to speed-level.
Soapboxers demanded that the SeaJuve fleet turn back, imagining the ship was full of terrorists.
In the hours after the attack, ten thousand individuals were accused of being @Freebreeders, both by casual acquaintances and, sometimes, @CloseFriends. Users requested their conversational transcripts and comms, auditing for signs of conspiracy.
Counterstrikes went in. Malicious gossip complaints were filed. Friendships broke up and comms bans were erected. Cloudsight’s request queue for nuanced adjudication ran to over a million. Live adjudicators couldn’t keep up with demand. AIs, of course, were only as good as their algorithms.
In something that looked suspiciously like panic, Cloudsight held a stakeholders’ vote, opting to freeze the automated social marketplace for a day. Suddenly, nobody could give or get strikes unless there was a human operator to assess the complaint.
#Flashmobs, real and virtual, broke out. Users kamikazed a handful of burning thingbots into Dover, managing to set one of the elderly ferry docks afire. As city managers locked down drones, including the Greater London car fleet, thousands of striking workers began marching toward Dover with the apparent intention of demolishing the port … as if that would somehow stop SeaJuve ships from making landfall.
Across the channel, Calais closed down all oceanic traffic, the better to protect its shiny new facilities and precious carbon investments.
Wage offers skyrocketed. Requests went unanswered. Service queues got catastrophically long.
Rubi and the Mers Barnes were seconded to a secure pop-in, old apartments for film executives, offered up to Juanita Bell by McDiz, Tampico’s primary corporate sponsor.
Rubi was tasked with asking Luce a list of questions that Juanita Bell and her @GlobalSec superiors had generated for Luce, everything from What do the Pale look like? to specific technical queries about the incoming survey fleet’s military capabilities.
She remembered his first response to the question about vulnerabilities: We travel the fucking galaxy. You need me to tell you that your vintage rockets can’t stop us?
Comparing firepower wasn’t the answer. If the Pale could invade on the pretext that humanity was near self-extinction, Earth needed to know their sustainability criteria.
Rubi’s crying fit in the shower had relieved some of her internal pressure, but even so, she was tired, upset about the murder aboard the Sable Hare, and worried about Drow. Concerned, too, about Frankie—who’d come back from the so-called Happiest Place on Earth subdued and withdrawn. And about Gimlet, who had glazed into a long family conference about their sick partner’s medical situation as soon as Frankie was out of sight.
Then there was Luce.
She was still in freefall over that one.
Human narratives about first contact offered no breadcrumbs for this. Invading alien hordes were supposed to make a big entrance, fry a few iconic monuments, and then lose their bid to take over Earth to a plucky human air force. Or to #malware. Or … #measles?
Aliens weren’t supposed to call ahead. They didn’t commit identity theft, fire off selfies, cruise the app marketplace. You didn’t rule the planet by taking food-delivery jobs while sabotaging prosocial kickstarters.
Where did Luce get off, setting up public profiles, drawing minimum income, and soapboxing about the flaws of rapid-response democracy?
Was he, truly, still her client? Cloudsight project managers were too busy to answer her pings. Polly, her tutor app, was coming up dry on relevant case law.
With no opinion forthcoming from above, Rubi had resorted to researching the legal rights of polters.
The early adopters of life-extension tech had hoped—naturally enough—to discover a biohack that would let them exist in a perennial prime-of-life state. Some of the most successful pioneers milked their lifespan out to two hundred years. Prime-of-life health had eluded them, though. The life-extension pioneers evolved into crepits, then @jarheads, eventually moving into fulltime Sensorium existences. Their bodies flickered on, tethered to aggressive life support.
It was a logical next step to dream of cutting the meat loose—uploading a human consciousness to the Sensorium. What @jarhead wouldn’t want to break out of their medical cocoon, to live online as a digital immortal?
Nobody had managed, yet, to break the tie between a user account and its earthly flesh.
That hadn’t stopped the first rich, privileged @jarheads from legislating full rights for the hypothetical polters they hoped, one day, to become. Preemptive rights grab: an attempt to ensure they would continue to be considered people, voting stakeholders in every sense of the word.
Within that flurry of legislation, nobody had bothered to specify that a polter had to be either human or Earth-born. Why would they?
Rubi could, therefore, argue that rich human @jarheads had given Luce a nigh-indisputable right to legal representation, at least until someone filed a challenge.
Which wouldn’t happen, with the courts down.
She tooned in to find Luce amusing himself, within his prison’s malleable environment, by building a series of stalagmites from its floor, limestone fingers in pink, beige, wax-white, and pale green. They rose in intervals, creating walkways and chutes, low fences, nothing as high as a proper wall. Each glistened like water-slicked marble. She touched one; it had a wet, gritty texture.
There were no stalactites descending from above: the roof of the sim was black sky, studded with the gems he’d been making earlier.
Luce banged his hands together as she arrived. “More questions?”
Rubi indicated the stalagmite forest and said, “Why this?”
“I’m trying out dog strokes. My version of Drow’s comfort fidget.”
Did he miss Drow?
Luce said, “I’d forgotten about … this terrain.”
“It’s home?”
“Yes and no.” He scratched his head, a surprisingly human gesture. “Will this conversation get shredded?”
“Uncertain,” she said. “Given that you’re claiming to be…”
“The advance picket of an invading hostile force?”
“Commodore Bell won’t necessarily respect your right to confidentiality.”
He flicked a stalagmite with a fingertip, triggering a low bong, as if it was a tuning fork. “If it’s not hashable, why’d you come alone?”
“I’m sick of everyone’s face. Why? Was there something you wanted to say?”
“I don’t have any secrets to share.” He huffed. Laughing? “I just wondered about the parameters.”
“Until we verify your story, I’m not sure there are parameters.”
“Nothing happens until they know I’m no @hoaxer?”
“Yeah.” Now they were toon to toon, she was calmer. He was outnumbered and in trouble. “I hope there aren’t #consequences for you. If we keep up SeaJuve and pull off sovereignty.”
“Shouldn’t gloat—you haven’t won yet.” That was certainly true, more than he even knew.
This is the invasion, in its way, she thought. If Luce is to be believed, what we do now is the thing that matters. And there’s only a few dozen people who know it.
Disquieting thought. That was how warring nations had worked before the Setback. Specialist power brokers quietly running the world. Keeping secrets, lying to keep the population in line. Had she become one of them?
People were staging public murders. As spectacle! Would it get even worse if they knew the truth?
That had always been the rationale for secrecy: that idea that stakeholders couldn’t handle full disclosure. That the world was made of innocent lambs needing a shepherd, someone who would lie about wolves, keeping the livestock in the dark for their own good.
Trouble was, the second you granted blanket rights of secrecy, someone dragged that blanket over all sorts of antisocial things: resource hoarding, crime, persecution, genocide …
Rubi shook away the momentary wobble in her faith. The Clawback had drawn back the curtain. The harsh light of mutually assured disclosure had its drawbacks, certainly. But it had prevented human extinction and wiped out a host of other age-old atrocities.
Unflinching truth was the right path.
“May I?” She pointed at one of the stalagmites.
“Be my guest.”
She ran a finger over the spike, finding a gritty texture that defied the evidence of her eyes.
“Comfort fidget, you called it. You find it calming?”
Luce shrugged, shaping another knobby protrusion.
She sat cross-legged on the cell floor, figuring out how to move one of the active drips to the spot in front of her. The rate of limestone accretion was unrealistically fast. She could see the stalagmite forming with every splash. Calling up pull tabs, she widened it at the base. The splashes became bigger; the center of the action curved like a dinner plate. Some of the particulate was glowing, little luminous flecks.
“We haven’t won yet, you said. We’ll need to know what it takes, Luce. To establish sovereignty.”
“You understand I’m not supposed to help you.” He flopped down across from her, pressing his fingers against the base of the stalagmite. “Commodore Bell’s right about that.”
“But helping is fair play, isn’t it?”
“I don’t view the world as one big leaderboard. Anyway, I already warned you.”
“The Martians are coming,” she murmured.
“Get your shit together, or don’t. You can’t save yourselves; what’s it to me?”
Are you asking me or yourself?
She mirrored his fingers, placing hers in a semicircle on the other side of their shared stalagmite. Virtual water dripped and lapped within the shallow depression. Humidity misted her cuticles. A light frosting of stone formed over their fingernails.
“Is it fair?” she asked, finally. “If it’s only the ten or so of us who know?”
“Don’t forget all the officers, veeps, and CEOs,” Luce added. “People you can’t see, tasked with verifying my story and coming up with idiot questions about ray guns, trying to figure out how to wring me dry.”
Ray guns. There had been a question about that on the list. One they hadn’t asked yet.
Did that mean he had access to mics outside this supposedly sealed server?
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Fair play, stupid.”
Maybe it sucked to live in a fishbowl, your every word and action on display, your sex tapes in the X-rated Haystack. Virtue signaling for strokes, and the threat of strikes when you stepped out of line.
No secrets in a village.
You accepted it. Even Drow said it was better than those bad old days, with their wild imbalances of wealth and power. Transparency was the thing that had somehow stopped the greedy effort to coal-shovel all the planet’s resources in ever-fewer hands.
She couldn’t tell if Luce was still on mission or if he was trying to help.
“If you’re suggesting that you should go public—”
The look of honest surprise on his face stopped her.
“You’re not suggesting that.”
“I was going public. All the strikes, remember? You’re wrong, Luce, you’re stupid, Luce, shut up, Luce.”
She chewed on that. “You proceeded from antisocial principles.”
“What antisocial principles?”
“Lying. Pretending to be one of us.”
“I’m not usually target-facing. I open doors, floodgates, airlocks. I close hatches, windows. I find niches, nooks, alcoves in the archives. I’m a technosphere survival expert, not an ambassador. I made it up as I went.”
“I understand. But you didn’t say Hi, People of Earth, I’m a polter from another world, and by the way, we have gunboats incoming because you need help with your biosphere.”
“Aside from your dad and his @bloodhound pals, who’d believe that?”
“Probably nobody,” she said. “But you were just giving me a hard time about full disclosure. It’s hypocritical.”
“True. Stupid, stupid Luce.”
He pulled his fingers out of the holes the new stone had formed: tiny bubbles of air at the base of the stalagmite.
“I’d give it one more try,” he said. “Be honest, sing it from the rooftops. But then there’s the ads, ads, ads.”
“And the firewalls on this locked server.”
He gave her a weird little grin.
Shit. He had been humoring them, with his stone pillars and his profanity-laced answers to Juanita’s questions.
Was it possible for him to get away? Surely, Sapience Assessment knew how to lock a server.
We travel with FTL; you think we can’t take out your entire military with a garbage scow?
“Whose interests would it serve if you tell all?”
“Whose interests does it serve if I don’t?”
Cabals, string-pullers, secret societies. Drawing power because of this threat, because people were afraid.
She thought of the murdered sailor on Sable Hare, the horrific killings in Old Moscow.
“You know,” she said on a weird impulse, “Cloudsight’s all but offline.”
“Is it really?”
“As your lawyer, I can’t recommend any disengagement from custody—”
He seemed to read her thought. “I’ll tell you this for free. It’s your old infrastructure that’s problematic,” Luce said. “All the tons of helix you didn’t rip out of the walls. Recycled uplinks. Ye oldey building systems. Antique emergency lights with solar panels. Misfortune’s insulin pump, and all the medical redtooth.”
Each stalagmite grew a proliferation of devices: USB smartports in power uptakes, building chillers made of repurposed and reconditioned HVAC systems, bits of fans and compression pumps pressed into service, or simply left in the walls because they couldn’t be recycled.
“Shazam,” Luce said, and vanished.