Mother of Storms (11 page)
Authors: John Barnes
Di shrugs. “We could be urging people to get ready for bad news. That’s about all. Heat is energy, and more energy in the system means whatever happens, it’s going to be a big one. Hope I was some help.”
“You always are. You’re the flattest big brother I’ve got. Say hi to Lori and the kids.”
It takes Di a second to remind himself that flat is a positive word.
When they hang up, there is no “broken connection” as people imagine; throughout their long call, each little piece of data has been running through the trillions of possible pipes all on its own, only rejoining at the other end. All that happens is that no more of them go running through the maze.
At the substation near Di’s office, where Jesse’s incoming words and picture were assembled and where Di’s outgoing words and picture were fragmented, there were more than thirty interested datarodents.
When ordinary voice-visual phone went to digital packetized transmission, the newspapers had been full of the dangers and potentials for “viruses”—the boomtalk pejorative for self-replicating software—on the phone system.
As usual, the word was far behind the news. The replicating code that carried messages to reprogram nodes could be duplicated and modified, intelligence added, and the whole turned into a datarodent (so called because it listened and ratted on whoever it could). Datarodents crouch in the nodes near anything important and listen as the little data-pieces come back together to form the conversation; they make copies of messages to send back to their masters.
Within a decade of the first datarodents showing up, human masters were no longer needed. The masters were programs themselves, artificial intelligences that could recognize enough to tell important from not.
After a while longer, datarodent and master alike began to replicate themselves and to move about on the net, always looking to colonize a node they had not yet infected. In 2028, the datarodents have gnawed away every bit of privacy.
As long as
los corporados
got paid when datarodents did this, the only people who cared were the sort of isolated nuts who sent paper mail to congressmen complaining about “invasions of privacy.”
los corporados
got paid when datarodents did this, the only people who cared were the sort of isolated nuts who sent paper mail to congressmen complaining about “invasions of privacy.”
It’s obvious to a lot of different organizations—especially after the Global Riot—that important things come out of NOAA. So the listener programs have been breeding in the nodes around NOAA like mosquitos in a swamp. In a way it’s a miracle that only thirty families of datarodents run out to carry the news elsewhere.
One little gang dashes only a scant mile or two—though it does it via nodes in Boston, Cleveland, and Trinidad, in part—into the FBI’s phone analysis program, which scans quickly and concludes that Di has divulged nothing that should be confidential, then calls up the dossier on Jesse, spots the connection to Naomi, concludes that she can make no use of the information either except to gain influence among the campus organizations, connects that with the FBI assessment of her as uncharismatic and therefore harmless, or at least preferable to several other possible campus leaders. It makes the note, records the data and the assessment, and closes the file.
Most of the other datarodents work for data-gathering organizations, and these clip the relevant parts of what Di said, note that it’s semantically all but identical to material that NOAA sent over the wire as a press release forty-five minutes ago, and gain from it two useful pieces of information: the name Di Callare and the fact that NOAA is not currently lying.
At about the point where Jesse is unsticking his phone’s camera and screen from the compartment wall of the zipline, and Di has had time to exhale and look back up at the chart—those facts are weighted, included into the database, and priced. If anyone wants them, they’ll be there, for a fee.
Three small and crude datarodents—ones that bear all the marks of underfunding—scuttle off with data for the three presidential campaigns. The only conclusions they lead their masters to are that the campaigns are still being kept in the dark. The Republican candidate’s office fires off a plaintive letter complaining to President Hardshaw and appealing to her party loyalty. It is such a routine matter that they have a form letter for it.
One purely commercial, barely tailored datarodent fires off a record of the whole conversation to Berlina Jameson, currently at the Motel Two in Point Barrow, Alaska. It lacks even the intelligence to decide whether a thing is important or not, but because so many things it is looking for were mentioned frequently, it tags the record as top priority.
One datarodent is not like the others—it’s very big and very smart. It fragments itself into a million chunks for the journey to GateTech headquarters at Cape Canaveral, and slips into the net a chunk at a time like a water moccasin swimming out from a bank. Besides a full recording of the conversation, the attached indexing and cross-referencing to other calls, and the snippets of material from it, there is a whole structure of thoughts and questions, and it is about the size (if it were somehow written out in text) of twenty of the old, paper Encyclopedia Britannica.
Eleven milliseconds later, at Cape Canaveral, one of the artificial intelligences that Glinda Gray has created and put to work drops a note into her electronic hopper, saying it may have found a significant piece of information. By now it has written a summary report of only five pages, though it still contains the name “Diogenes Callare.”
Another datarodent belongs to Industrial Facilities Mutual, a large industrial insurance consortium, and it is perhaps the second smartest datarodent in the substation. It hurries off to headquarters in Manhattan, carrying with it the assessment that the risk of severe weather has been badly underestimated.
Artificial intelligences there study the issue, agree with the datarodent, and re-prioritize. Engineer inspections are scheduled based on priority—a factory in a dry California canyon is inspected for fire risk more often than one on the Oregon coast, for example—and thus they step up the priority on all severe weather risks: broadcast towers, aboveground power lines, factories with flat roofs where snow tends to accumulate, shops in floodplains … .
The new priorities go out four seconds later to the individual engineers. The engineer for Hawaii is still asleep while his software receives the new orders, checks through the list of places he inspects, and sends out a notice of early inspection to NAOS, the corporation that operates the new Kingman Reef Heavy Launch Facility.
The notice of an early inspection is thus the first thing seen at breakfast by Kingman’s two heads. Akiri Crandall, chief of general operations, who is overseeing both the remaining construction and the daily operations, is exasperated; not for the first time, he wishes he were back in the Navy with
his old destroyer command. The inspector will be climbing all over the station for a full day, and wherever he goes, all work will cease, and rumors will fly.
his old destroyer command. The inspector will be climbing all over the station for a full day, and wherever he goes, all work will cease, and rumors will fly.
Gunnar Redalsen, chief of launch operations, was already in a bad mood; lately he gets up in bad moods. The Monster is the biggest rocket ever to fly, the first test launch is just three months away and already they’re ten days behind schedule, and the last thing he needs is another delay.
Crandall and Redalsen don’t get along, which is unfortunate, and they are known not to get along, which is worse. Within three hours of the day shift beginning, partisans of each side are constructing rumors in which the early inspection is somehow the fault of the other, and petty sniping and harassment are beginning to fly between launch ops and general ops. By lunchtime, Crandall and Redalsen find they have to hold a “peace conference” (for a “war” neither of them was fighting) and order people to cut the crap and get back to work.
All afternoon, those people who are inclined to nurse slights and injuries do, and by evening there are marital spats, upset children, and many people going to bed a little angry.
During the whole long day, the Pacific rolls on outside as it has for thousands of years, but because fine clear warm weather is so normal, and going outside the station so rare, no one pays much attention except a few sunbathers who have the day off. Waves roll in over the western horizon, splash up the sides of the concrete pillars, and roll out over the eastern horizon; with the tides, the water rises a little on the sides of the station, and sinks a little, and that is all. As night falls, the stars in their thousands come out to dance, but no one sees them.
Inside, Crandall tosses and turns, trying to get to sleep. He knows the inspection is going to upset Redalsen and there will be more trouble. The Monster, now bobbing quietly by its launch tower, not to be fueled for months yet, will get off on time—Redalsen will see to that—but Crandall knows there are going to be a lot more squabbles.
Redalsen falls asleep wondering why Crandall doesn’t understand that the point of a launch facility is to launch things.
After he talks to his brother, Jesse Callare leans back in the zipline compartment and considers. Becoming an influential activist on campus is not likely to work. Besides, it will be months until Naomi gets back, and then she’ll have to notice him, and notice he has changed, and—well, it would all just take too long, is the problem. On the other hand, he doesn’t think she’ll appreciate it if he just follows her to Tehuantepec.
But he is an engineering student. And TechsMex, the group that sends
engineers and interns south to teach, always has openings. Going to Tehuantepec might be a bit overt, but he can go somewhere in the same part of the country—
engineers and interns south to teach, always has openings. Going to Tehuantepec might be a bit overt, but he can go somewhere in the same part of the country—
He dials up TechsMex and scans the openings. Not as easy as he’d thought—there are ten jobs he could do but most are in Ciudad de Mexico or farther north … .
The only one that is in the far south, anywhere near Tehuantepec—and “near” is very much a relative term—is tutoring preengineering students at a comunity college in Tapachula, almost at the Guatemalan border. Even by air, that’s 220 miles to Tehuantepec, and there’s no zipline that far south yet.
But another part of his mind points out that he could be down near the equator, doing something valuable in a quiet little border town … and he won’t have to see any of his old friends. Running away after a flopped love affair may be something a character in a book would do, but one reason they might do it is that it might work.
He decides to decide that night. Meanwhile, there’s at least a chance to catch up on the news. For the hell of it, he decides to do something trashy, and he pulls out the scalpnet for his phone and plugs into XV, deliberately choosing a real lowbrow channel. He’s just in time to get to be Rock, and get it into Synthi Venture (he used to love to do that as a teenager) one more time before she goes off on vacation. It’s great, especially once he sets it to pulse back and forth between her and him; there’s so much passion and violence in the ecstasy of the intercourse that when it’s finally over, Jesse can’t help thinking that the Christian XV guys have a point when they say that if the Diem Act were strictly enforced, Doug Llewellyn, the president of Passionet, would long since have gone to the chair.
The doors open at Tucson Station and the zipline wishes Jesse a pleasant day. He shoulders up his pack and walks back into the bright sunlight. It’s hours until the party tonight, hours until he can do anything effective. Maybe he’ll study.
Berlina Jameson has been enjoying breakfast, partly because she hasn’t been paying for it and mainly because she is having company. Haynes Lamborghini, the
New York Times
textchannel reporter, has taken her to breakfast because today is to be his last day in Barrow, and they’ve gotten to be friends.
New York Times
textchannel reporter, has taken her to breakfast because today is to be his last day in Barrow, and they’ve gotten to be friends.
“So do the ‘nobody will talk to me’ story,” he says. “And start thinking about distribution if you haven’t already. You’ve got most of the video footage there is. Just from a standpoint of history, that’s too important to let it rot someplace, or to wait until it’s in an archive.”
“I thought you text guys didn’t like video.”
“Beats hell out of XV,” Lamborghini says. He takes another gulp of coffee. “Boy, one thing I won’t miss is the coffee here. They compensate for the lack of flavor by watering it down. The thing is, Berlina, the camera is not objective, and TV may be for people who can’t read, but it’s still light-years ahead of XV. At least you know what happened in front of the camera and at least people have their own feelings about it instead of having the reporter’s. And potentially a lot more people could access your work than mine, so there will be a few people with an objective view.”
“But a view of what?” Berlina says. “Everyone I talk to here is determined to tell me there’s no story. I’ve burned up most of my long-distance budget on calls to Washington and no one will talk there either.”
Lamborghini raises his hands, palms up, as if he were a magician turning her into a fairy princess. “But you have all that footage of people saying there’s no story. And you have a bunch of contradictory statements about why there isn’t, and enough outside testimony to make it clear that there probably is a story. That’s all you need. ‘Why aren’t they telling the truth?’ is the phrase that’s sold more news than anything else. Kid, you’re home free. Just put the story together into one documentary and distribute it.”
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