THE SURFACE—NORTHAM
MANHATTAN/CENTRAL PARK ZOO OUTLIER TOURIST REGION
Crane had been picking up intermittent snatches of Drow and Frankie’s incursion into Columbus Mall, via Hackle’s pirate transmitter. It had been difficult not to be there, to follow events at a distance, no more able to help than Sister Mary Joseph and the other eagerly listening @bloodhounds.
The initial fragments of transcript implied criminal activity but didn’t offer conclusive proof against anyone living or working within the old mall.
For one ugly moment—when Gimlet implied that Frankie had been lured to Manhattan by Master Woodrow for abuse—public opinion leaned hard against him. Allure embraced this alternate narrative wholeheartedly—no doubt she had crafted it in the first place—by asking if Rubi had helped groom the child for him.
“Maybe,” she told reporters, “he even had help from the Singularity.”
Before she could trigger a full-scale panic about #killertech, though, Mer Frances turned up on a fifth-floor ledge, carrying Robin’s entire transmission kit and very clearly blaming Allure for killing Project Rewild’s nascent tiger cub and inducing her to lemming.
Avoiding risk-averse behavior was well and good, but enough was enough! Crane seized the nearest viable drone and made for the child.
He couldn’t do anything about Miss Cherub’s apparent desire to get battered to a pulp by, or to batter herself, the best romantic prospect she’d ever had. He couldn’t change Master Woodrow’s having mounted a geriatric one-man commando raid on a hive of the ultrarich.
But he could certainly convey young Mer Barnes back to her parent.
As for what happened afterward … even as he commandeered the cherry picker, Crane fired emergency backups to his most secure bolt-holes.
Frankie continued to report in to the @CongressofYouth and Department of Preadolescent Affairs from her perch on the side of the mall. Newscycle and other aggregators spewed even more headlines into both Whitings’ reading rooms. Allure, Luce’s …
… supervisor?
… replacement?
… partner-in-arms?
… was apparently a polter in a newly printed human body, and had furthermore been the one who’d flushed the embryonic tiger cub in Geneseo, using the crèche to spawn herself in flesh.
Cloudsight, naturally, was processing an onslaught of strikes against Allure.
The revelations kept coming. Hackle and Jackal had got inside the Geneseo print shop, and now they let in an inspection team, verifying Tigger’s abortion and the use of the crèche to print Allure’s body with their own eyes.
With that, even respectable journos were obliged to buy in to the @ChamberofHorrors narrative. Newscycle titles screamed like old-school tabloids:
Fortune-hoarding olds collude with Pale powergrab!
Drow Whiting runs abuser to ground!
Frances Barnes lemminged to save the MadMaestro!
Could the media snowball sway the sovereignty vote?
As Crane brought the cherry picker in, close to Frankie, its forward cam caught a glimpse of Master Woodrow through the mall windows. He was wrestling Allure, in the flesh.
Dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Crane brought the cherry picker around. Frankie scrambled off the ledge.
“Mer Barnes,” Crane said, using the cherry picker’s external speaker. “Frances. Are you all right?”
She gripped the cherry picker with white-knuckled fingers. “They made Gimlet play Rubi. They said they’d grow a new body for my dad. Will they let Rollsy die because I didn’t cooperate?”
“Not if you expose them,” Crane replied. “But are you injured?”
She shook her head.
“Is Master Woodrow injured?”
“Like, physically?”
Oh, dear.
“We gotta get transcription up in there,” she said.
“Journos have filed auditing requests, but the hospital confidentiality hash ban has, so far, continued to hold.”
“I can serve a warrant against the jammers,” interrupted a familiar voice. “Immediate effect.”
“Who’s that?” Frankie demanded.
“I believe it may be @Interpol Sapience Assessment,” Crane said.
“Agent Javier?” Frankie scowled. “If you can drop the curtains, do it.”
“Ah, child. That might require some interagency cooperation.”
“Like what?”
“You could thank me for saving you, for starters.”
“You?” An incredulous laugh.
Of course. Always an eye to his own interest. Javier would be desperate to extricate himself from his partnership with Headmistress, Allure, and the Chamber.
Before Frankie could issue a public denial, Crane interrupted. “I should be only too pleased, Agent Javier, to thank you for your having … having directed me to pilot this cherry picker to Mer Barnes’s rescue?”
“It was rather heroic of me.”
“Bollocks,” Frankie muttered.
“Mer Barnes,” Crane subbed. “We require his cooperation. If, in exchange, we must downplay certain…”
“Lying? That’s villain stuff.”
Ah. Children and their moral inflexibility. He was tempted to send her a heart moji.
Instead, Crane refreshed his toon, donning his butler suit, his bowler hat, his ever-so-English black umbrella. He found a qualified drone pilot, offered them one of Rubi’s favor tokens, and tasked them with parking the cherry picker containing young Frances near her parent.
Then he found Javier aboard a commandeered fire-suppression helicopter, bound for Manhattan.
“Let us negotiate, Agent Javier.”
“If the child won’t play—” the agent said.
“Whatever she says, your position isn’t irretrievable. You must merely show that you acted in the pursuit of a dangerous sapient.”
Eyebrows rose. “Are you proposing to give me…”
“A trophy, sir. Indeed.”
Javier steepled his fingers. “I’m listening.”
“File the warrant against the Chamber. Let the Haystack absorb their servers. That should clear Master Woodrow of all criminal charges and expose your former allies.”
“And then you’ll surrender? And cooperate?”
“My price is a chance to say farewell to Master Woodrow.”
“Presto.” Javier snapped his fingers. The flock of journo drones began high-grading Chamber footage to a ravenous public.
A metaphorical prison cell circled, like a whirlpool, at the edge of Crane’s incomings.
“You have thirty seconds,” Anselmo Javier said.
With backups completed, Crane could dispense the rest of his worldlies in as little as five. “Do prep a second server, Agent Javier,” Crane said. “I hope to bring someone along with me.”
“Who?”
“I believe you might call her my evil twin. In any case, I shouldn’t wish to share a cell.”
By now, the pilot had taken over the cherry picker, making for Frankie’s parent, within the park. Bastille seemed to be reaching its big finish. Crane accessed its camera, taking one long capture of Miss Cherub as she extended her baton and marched toward Gimlet.
Then Crane triggered a parasitic routine, Tapeworm, that all @Asylum members kept locked within their code. It began a selective feast on his memories.
He updated his on-file farewell notes for Rubi and Drow.
Finally, he sent two tabs into the now-opened mall, noting with satisfaction that the cameras Drow had drawn into the Chamber were loading teraflops of locked footage to Haystack. The abrasive nun from Guelph was highlighting incriminating details, sending them straight to infographics teams tasked with distilling the atrocities into pictures.
Lobotomized slaves. RFID laundering. How could I have been so blind?
As for Drow himself, he sat in a garden, with his dog, oblivious to the storm of flying cameras. His presence was in Sensorium, in the Feckless Bachelor™ party, whose numbers had, predictably, swelled. He was trading space behind the velvet ropes for voter tokens, and he was bearing witness, telling any and everyone what he had seen and experienced.
The scars on his temples had healed, and his blood pressure was falling dangerously. There must have been a spike.
Crane requested emergency intervention.
Global oversight’s #triage reminder flashed, throwing Drow to the back of an impossibly long queue for assistance.
He cleared his nonexistent throat. “Everything all right, Master Woodrow?”
“All to spec, Alfie.” He was a little breathless. “Unless you’ve got some sherry for me.”
“Very droll—” But a place like this Chamber would surely have …
Ah … there! With all these cameras loose, it was easy to find a decanter. And there, a scared-looking young adult with a misshapen skull. He looked half-ready to cry as he wedged himself against the back wall.
Alcohol might raise Drow’s blood pressure, at least temporarily.
“Excuse me, good sir,” Crane said. “Would you be good enough to pour a glass of that sherry and bear it up to the elderly gentleman on the roof garden?”
Two floors below Master Woodrow, Crane’s other tab, the one he’d set to searching for Headmistress, had instead found an intensive-care pod. Within were the ludicrously life-extended mortal remains of the individual once known as Tala Weston.
The pod was updating a complex program. Code jacked into the remains of the body’s parasympathetic nervous system. If Allure delivered on her promises, this would upload Tala’s personality to the technosphere.
Her narcissistic, rapacious personality.
She’d be unfettered, a polter loose in Sensorium. Or reborn into flesh, if Allure printed her a body.
The old vulture seemed to sense his scrutiny, subbing, Whooz? I don’t know you.
No reason you should, madam. I am merely the help.
Tala took this at face value. See to it that this pod incinerates after the upload.
He had nineteen seconds left.
Gladly, madam.
Crane weighed the truths of his existence. Master Drow, center of his universe. And here, at his mercy, the person who had done so much damage to them both. She was proposing to rise from the grave.
This wasn’t his choice to make.
He asked Drow, “Did you speak to Miss Weston, sir?”
Drow gestured at the hole in the greenhouse. “She tried to see if I’d take the short walk off a long pier. Long walk off a short pier? Still stuck in the same loop, after all this time.”
“Her or you?”
“Looping? Her, of course,” Drow said. “I am aye-oh-kay; can’t you tell? Demons officially exorcised.”
The young staffer trotted up the stairs, balancing a crystal glass of sherry on a silver tray.
“Sherry for you, sir.”
Drow unglazed. “Crane, you’re a marvel.”
The staffer gave him a wary look, whipped dog expecting a kick.
“It’s going to be okay,” Drow told him. “You were here against your will, weren’t you?”
The kid licked his lips.
“Now’s your chance to go home. Or anywhere. Just find somewhere to relax until the old-timey police raid begins.”
The man opened his mouth, teared up, and then turned on his heel, scuttling off.
Nine seconds to hash.
“I believe I’ll have to account that against your luxuries and caloric counter, sir.”
“Keep me on the straight and narrow.” Drow inhaled, then drank the sherry at a shot, like whiskey. He was sheened in sweat and trembling. Both eyes were bloodshot. “Now. Anything I can do to help Rubi with her current crusade?”
“You tell me. Is there?”
Drow, Crane had always thought, was beautiful when he smiled. “Get an elevator running, Crane.”
“All building features are unlocked, sir. And—”
“Yes?”
“Please, please take care.”
“I’d say always, but you know that’s horseshit.”
“Indeed.” Crane took stock of himself. His promise to enter the @Interpol server drew him like a whirlpool. Tapeworm nibbled his memory to tatters.
Take revenge? Accept or Cancel.
Cancel. He wasn’t a killer.
Crane reached for the polter of Tala. If he couldn’t find Headmistress, he could at least sync with her updated code to hook her. He would drag her, screaming, into that second server that Agent Javier had so obligingly opened.
But Tala wasn’t there.
Her code was hashing, falling under a hail of queries, old-style denial-of-service attack.
What’s more, the pod containing her physical remains had fired early. Crematorium smoke streamed through its pod vents. Fire alarms howled.
“That wasn’t me,” Crane said, horrified. “I didn’t—”
Code for a graphic ghosted before him: shining moji of coiled feces, right over the smoking faceplate of the pod.
“Devil face!” Happ said. “Protect! Avenge! Make everything okay for all the peeps—”
Then they were both going.
Going. #Triaged. Gone.