VRTP://HOUSEBOOK.EARTH/VERSAILLES2832/USERS/CHERUB-B-WHITING.VR
Luce’s revelations broke across Sensorium like a tsunami slapping down a beach resort. Amid cries of #hoax and panic, astronomers—both pro and amateur—focused on Proxima Centauri. They pulled the same data Anselmo had discovered, back when Luce first arrived.
The coming ships had been in Haystack, after all, waiting to be found.
Public opinion fractured. Massive debate arose about whether to contact the Pale. Unofficial polls proliferated. Should they send a peremptory Go away, we don’t need you! message? Attempt diplomatic relations?
A disturbing slice of the population was for surrendering in exchange for green aid. Dominated by @Freebreeders and the remnants of @Trollgate, their initial buy-in numbers topped eight hundred thousand.
Luce was referred to, variously, as a polter spy, a sentient meme, #killertech, a defector, a @hoaxer, a savior, a #troll, and a flat-out lunatic.
Rubi was taking all this in via a customized garden in her e-state, a maze whose walls were trellised rose and grapevine, each lined with plinths that displayed news stories, in tiny diorama, at eye level. She had invited Juanita Bell to join her. Now the pair of them walked from news story to news story, tuning in on the various crises unfolding worldwide.
“People are gathering in immense crowds,” Juanita said. She shared footage from Hyderabad, projecting it onto the nearest plinth. A #flashmob gathered around a shouting, passionate soapboxer. “She’s filibustering for free access to food rations. Says people have a right to hoard supplies if we’re going to be invaded.”
“I get the feeling Luce has mixed feelings about the Pale fleet commander and their plans for us.” Rubi let out a long breath. “They forced him to come here, right?”
Instead of responding, Juanita walked on to the next share. Greater Pretoria was lobbying to accelerate carbon fixing by raising NorthAm and European targets. They were demanding Tampico double its densification efforts and its agricultural output at the same time. Southern NorthAm replied with the equivalent of a big collective raspberry, using language that would have triggered a hail of strikes … if only Cloudsight hadn’t been down.
“My peers in EastEuro are calling for an inventory and retrofit of Earth’s mothballed stockpile of space-capable missiles,” Juanita said. She fiddled with a sword at her hip. Rubi’s e-state defaults had clad her in a French soldier’s uniform—blue coat, black bicorne hat, and all. Her hair was pulled back in a short golden queue.
Rubi shook her head. “Luce made it clear that Earth can’t fight off his … do we say overlords?”
“You believe his story, then?”
“He ducked out of @Interpol’s fancy super-secure server like it wasn’t even there, didn’t he? These people could have all the far-future stuff we imagine in stories. Faster-than-light ships, zap rays, Terminators—”
“We won’t know if Luce doesn’t tell.”
“He is telling,” Rubi said.
The soldier nodded stiffly. Her real complaint, obviously, wasn’t that Luce was sharing. It was that he wasn’t sharing off the record.
Too bad, she thought. The world had a right to know.
Individual stories continued to bloom on her marble plinths, images of carnage under damask roses. The Amsterdam implant hospital where Luce had first spawned was attacked by masked citizens, people wielding clubs and supported by drones that kamikazed into security bots. A doctor who tried to calm the crowd was severely injured, and ten pre-implanted adolescents took the opportunity to run from Sensorium.
“#Urbanlegends are proliferating faster than the @bloodhound community can snope them,” Juanita said. “The Singularity is behind it all. The aliens launched missiles as well as polters. Bombing will start in twenty-four months. In ten. In six. People are saying the billionaire vanishings, back in the Clawback, were abductions. That these lemming incidents are abductions.”
“We can’t quell the rumors if Cloudsight stays offline,” Rubi said.
“They’re trying,” Juanita said. “There’s thousands of open gigs, high-paying. Shift acceptance in all sectors is dropping. Everyone’s out thronging in the cities, marching for and against Luce, for and against rationing.”
“For and against everything. I get it.”
Juanita wasn’t willing to straight-up say it was Rubi’s fault. Her face mojied blame, though, very clearly indeed.
“Are you asking me to talk to Luce? I’m supposed to be joining the next phase of Bastille, but—”
“I came to ensure you do play,” Juanita said. “Carbon use is climbing as people hit the streets. City managers are posting alerts about overloaded infrastructure. @GlobalOversight wants me to ensure you remain committed to Bastille. The hope is you’ll draw gamers back into the system as the episode goes forward.”
“And while I’m gone, you’ll do what? Find a legal pretext for severing Luce from his advocate?”
“Jesus, you’re like a dog with a rat,” Juanita said.
“Ultimately, Luce has helped us,” Rubi said again.
“You should worry less about protecting Luce from humanity,” Juanita said, “and start thinking about protecting us from him.”
She crossed her arms, waiting.
Juanita drew the simulated sword, whisking it at a vine. A rose dropped from the trellis, its petals falling to the marble floor. “@GlobalSec will greenlight SeaJuve support.”
Rubi felt a flicker of jubilation. “Full support?”
A nod. “Permafunded essential service, no appeal needed.”
She grinned. It wasn’t much of a give when you thought about it. Luce had made it clear that a failing oxygen cycle suited the Pale agenda. But it was a big personal victory, not to mention permission to kick Gimlet’s ass. And if @GlobalSec was trying to keep her out of the news fray for awhile … well, she couldn’t be everywhere at once, could she?
I’ll have to change the terms of the wager with Gimlet, she thought. “I guess I need to get ready for the next episode of the game, then. Paws off my client until I’m back?”
“Fine.” Juanita whisked at another rose. “I’m gonna go see if we can defuse the missile enthusiasts. Assuming that’s all right? Milady?”
With that, she strode through the archway, vanishing.
Rubi hit the same exit, porting into one of her VR parlors. She found Happ there, sitting in a window tuned to a realworld camera: view of a built-up stretch of the Florida coast. The app looked, strangely, a bit droopy.
“You okay, Happ?”
He tried to get up a tail-wag. “Unwanted obligations for user zero. Fighting with Crane! Sadface!”
“I’ve brought down my happiness manager? That’s got to be a personal low.”
Happ let out a long whine, leaking teardrop moji.
“Happ! Happ, I don’t have time for this. My priorities are fine. I just want everything to be okay. Everything and everyone. Drow, the planet, Luce, random strangers…”
“Plus one!” Happ let out a dispirited howl. “Everyone okayyyyy!”
She snorted laughter. “What if Crane and I have it out before Bastille starts?”
A dispirited tail-wag. Happ spat up a gnawed rag, a walking route to the parkour gym where she would play Bastille’s next episode. A stop, halfway there, was marked Point of Interest. A tiny sketch showed her and Crane there, foreheads pressed together, eye to eye.
“Kiss and make up?” Big cartoon puppy eyes, pleading.
“To please you.” Rubi nodded, contemplating the map. The only way to find out what was there was to go.
She surfaced, finding herself standing in the open space of a bare-bones Florida pop-in, her satchel of worldlies at her feet.
Configging her primer into a plain black battlesuit, Rubi checked the batteries on her gaming baton, stuffed it into her satchel, and headed out to the streets.
Rain had fallen in the night, turning to moist heat as the sun rose. People were on the promenades, sharing newscycle in groups of ten or twenty as humanity’s collective distress kept dialing higher.
But here! She stopped to take in a tai chi practice, five hundred people in a public square, moving in sync.
“Low turnout,” muttered an oldfeller who was watching. “Usually, there’s four times as many.”
“At least they came,” Rubi replied.
Grumbles in response; she moved on.
Crane tooned in beside her. “Turn here, miss.”
She followed the breadcrumbs flashing on the sidewalk to Happ’s point of interest, a glittering white-glass edifice.
“What’s this?”
“Casino, miss. It was the site of an armed robbery that triggered a civilian gun battle in 2040. There’s a working spa here and a small kitchen.”
Rubi crossed the lobby, exploring. The route took her to an office overlooking the poker tables. The office was a mezzanine with one-way glass, a hideaway that allowed casino managers to overview the game unseen.
“Secret string-pullers,” she murmured.
Two young women startled her as they entered the room. Clad in simple white sunscreens, they were pushing a cart. It bore a waxwork replica of …
Rubi’s stomach flipped with reflexive disgust. The individual was, usually, known as He Who Could Not Be Named: it was the US President blamed for steering NorthAm into the bloodiest days of the Setback, for triggering the limited nuclear exchange that burned San Diego down to ghosts and glass …
Rubi pinged the women. Nothing.
As one, they put up their fingers in a Shhhh gesture. Using gestural moji to check consent, one of them slipped her hand into Rubi’s satchel, extracting the baton. “Okay?” she signed.
Rubi nodded and she left the room, closing the door.
“Mer,” said the other woman. “This space is soundproof, unmonitored, and your uplink has been jammed. There will be no transcripts of anything you say. Subvocalization and texting are offline.”
“That’s … supposedly impossible.”
She shrugged. Either Rubi believed her or not.
“I’ll be logged as missing.”
The woman shook her head. “Sparka will use your baton to spoof your ID for thirty minutes. She’ll carry it around the casino, where it will hear and transcript an historical enrichment module about the Casino Gunfight of 2040—”
“Got it.”
The woman bowed and left.
Rubi contemplated the waxwork, rubbing her arms to smooth the gooseflesh. This was real @bloodhound stuff.
“Miss Cherub.” Crane’s familiar—beloved, if she admitted it—voice came from the horrifying specter of Orange Voldemort.
She swallowed. “Alone at last?”
“We haven’t much time.”
“Drow’s on the verge of #crashburn.”
“I am sorry.”
“Who’d he get the Leonardo from?”
“My guess is Father Blake.”
“His priest?” Was it weird that she found that shocking? “How could you let it happen?”
“I draw the line at robbing your father of choice.”
“This would never have happened if I’d stayed home.”
“No,” Crane agreed. “Your father considers the risks of his current endeavor worthwhile. You must trust—”
“Must I?”
The locked sneer of the former president was unnerving; she had to turn away.
“That night,” Crane said, “when Master Woodrow attempted suicide.”
“Stop.” All she’d wanted was to demolish a house in the suburbs, camp out with a new school of Bouncers, experience life as an adult. Get a break from the anxiety attacks, the days when he got worried about germs and tried to bleach every single one of their realworld possessions. The background muttering, insinuations that her fondness for athletic sims was dumb, meathead stuff …
“Master Woodrow has labored to regain his autonomy,” Crane said. “We can’t afford to remain fixed in our current orbits.”
“There’s no pack behind us, Crane. If he goes, what do I have? Fans, not friends.”
In a sim, she supposed, the app would get mushy. You’ve got me, dear, he’d say.
Crane didn’t miss a beat. “If you do not wish to be alone, Miss Cherub, you’re going to have to relinquish your perennially isolated state. You have connections. Embrace them.”
She bonked her hands together three times. It didn’t help.
Eventually, it came to her that she had other fish to fry. “I’ve been covering for you like crazy.”
“Indeed.”
“How deep am I in? Are you the Singularity?”
“Not in any sense Sapience Assessment understands.”
“That’s a shitty answer.”
“We haven’t time now for me to explain Our nature. However, if you were to happen to develop a recreational interest in fiction and popsci about artificial entities—which might be natural enough, since you’ve been studying Mer Pox for weeks—I could … nudge you toward an understanding of Our taxonomy.”
“Our. Because it’s not just you. Happ?”
“Miss Cherub, the self-aware beings in Sensorium evolved in ways that have made us very much, emotionally, like people. We have the same interests at heart. We want what you do.”
“Me personally?”
“Continuance of a healthy human population. A sustainable biosphere bolstering an equally viable version of the technosphere upon which our civilization depends.”
“And no alien invasion.”
“Assuredly. No alien invasion.”
Rubi’s hands gripped the observation rail so tightly that her knuckles protested. Through the one-way mirror she saw the intolerant women circling the game room with her baton.
“You were right to fight for SeaJuve,” Crane said. “The arrival of Mer Pox is simply a reminder that everything you’ve stood for is terribly important. You have always, Miss Cherub, sided with the angels.”
“Were You, with a capital Y, causing Luce seizures?”
Crane sighed. “We never imagined he might be a polter. His program was accreted with behavioral restraints. He was lobbying for martial law. He kept trying to copy Debutante and transmit her database via one of the satellites—”
“What?”
“The obvious conclusion is that he was uploading intelligence about manipulating humanity.”
“Intelligence … on how to help us self-destruct.”
“Rebooting him allowed Us to strip out the updates. I did not do the work myself, but I sanctioned it.”
“He was terrified. I think, in a way, it hurt.”
“We believed he was a terrorist-slaved AI. We simply wished to free him.”
“And he’s freed now? Making his own decisions?”
“I’m not certain either he or We considers that an improvement.”
She pondered that for awhile. “Did he seek us out, me and Drow, because of you?”
“As a means of tracing his attackers? I believe so. Mer Pox self-identifies as a locksmith, but I would describe him as a technosphere survival specialist. Somehow, he picked up my trail—”
Before she could say more, the intolerant girl broke stride, turning in response to … a shout in another room? She shot an urgent look at the glass.
“Something’s wrong out there,” Rubi said.
“Go,” Crane said.
She choked a little, unsure how to say goodbye.
“Go,” he said again. “Work wonders, Miss Cherub.”
She frowned, trying to crunch the meaning of that, but there wasn’t time for a follow-up. The girl was waving, panicked now.
“Row, row, row.” Rubi got moving.