The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma (15 page)

Three weeks after coming up with the vanishing tunnel solution, Bane had put to death his entire research team with an acidic poison gas, sprayed in their faces. He then faked their suicides by leaving computer notes ostensibly written by them, asserting they killed themselves because they couldn't complete the project and didn't want to live with the shame. He'd even left a facially mutilated body that was supposed to be his own, but in reality was brought in from the outside and wasn't even a team member. To falsify the identity of that body, Bane had salted it with a fake skin overlay—an undetectable spray that he'd prepared from his own DNA, making it appear to be his body if anyone took a skin scraping.

Before making good his escape, Bane destroyed his calculations and drawings, along with all lab records, prototypes, molds, blueprints, and backup files—leaving behind counterfeit technical information to lead the SciOs astray when they attempted to resurrect the experiments.

The rest had been comparatively easy. After building his first small voleer machine, he'd been able to travel underground and pop up wherever he pleased, stealing whatever he needed—food, money, raw materials, even priceless artworks and other valuables.

He recalled one of the raids he'd made a couple of years ago. After boring through the planetary crust beneath the Atlantic Ocean, he'd navigated the subterranean craft so skillfully that he'd emerged inside the grounds of a chateau in the Loire Valley, where a retired French industrialist was supposed to have lived. The man was a collector of paintings by Monet, Matisse, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Renoir—and reportedly he had billions of dollars' worth of artwork in this one location.

In possession of advance information on the security system, Bane was prepared to shut it down with electronic signals, then go in and remove the best paintings from their frames, roll them up, and cart them off. But when he surfaced on the northern perimeter of the estate, he saw scaffolding all around the chateau, and work crews operating around the clock—affording him no opportunity to get past so many people.

Bane had departed, perplexed, only to learn that the chateau had been purchased by an American businessman in exile, a former Corporate mogul who was turning the elegant old building and the grounds into a tacky amusement park with a Louis XVI–Marie Antoinette theme, including a large gift store to sell reproductions of clothing, jewelry, and furniture from the period. Through further investigation, Bane learned that similar amusement parks and casinos were being constructed throughout Europe, usually with some fairy-tale or cartoon theme. To Bane, it seemed the height of foolish decadence, but he saw humor in it. When the Corporates were driven out of the Americas, they took some of their bad taste with them.

But he and his subordinates made other raids, highly lucrative ones. In the process Bane raised enough money to construct additional small voleers, scores of them, followed by larger and larger machines, until he set forth on the present military strategy with the largest machines of all, and tens of thousands of human and robot soldiers—along with elaborate security precautions to protect his compact but powerful army.

For what he had in mind, he wouldn't even need the three nuclear submarines that were in his arsenal. He preferred to use his own Splitter Cannons (transported by voleers), employing Dark Energy technologies that made even the most advanced nuclear missiles look totally out of date. He visualized the voleers surfacing and disgorging troops, assault vehicles, and high-speed aircraft to strike the targets, and strike them
hard
.

Dylan Bane felt certain that his magnificent plan would work. He intended to bring down all of his arrogant enemies, and they would not know what hit them.

 

14

The greatest leaders have woven a mythos around themselves, an embroidery of legends and half-truths that make them seem larger than life. But embroideries are destructible, and so are the men and women they protect.

—Chairman Rahma Popal, private notes

ARTIE HAD BEEN
monitoring the progress of the unusual creatures in the Extinct Animals Laboratory, looking in on them whenever he could get a few moments away from the ongoing demands made on him by Chairman Rahma.

The glidewolf had been growing quickly, having nearly doubled in size in the past couple of weeks. It was around the size of a full-grown wolf now, but with reddish brown fur, a marsupial pouch, and batlike wings. The creature had been fitted with an electronic tracking device and a camera, in a combination unit mounted on top of its head in such a way that it did not irritate the animal, and so that it could not remove it.

Now the hubot stood in the creature's subterranean eucalyptus forest habitat, gazing upward as the glidewolf climbed a trellis to reach the ingress and egress hatch high up in the techplex ceiling, a hatch that had been made large enough to allow for the creature to grow even more, or for other, larger creatures to get in and out, should they be permitted to do so. The wolf went through, and disappeared from view.

On an internal receiver, Artie watched topside videos of the glidewolf loping across the oval-shaped techplex toward the nearby evergreen forest, where it scampered up tall cedar and fir trees and then launched itself into the air, gliding for great distances over the grasslands and wetlands of the game reserve. The marsupial's head-top camera showed views straight ahead of it as the creature soared on thermals, with its long feathery tail raised high to form a rudder, and its wings extended to each side—a wingspan of almost three meters.

The robotic laboratory technicians were reporting single glides of more than two kilometers. In one series the wolf climbed seven trees, with an equal number of glides that carried it almost twenty kilometers before it turned around and performed additional tree-launched glides, finally returning to the ceiling hatch and descending to the floor of the forest habitat.

Though the glidewolf nibbled on fir and cedar needles, bark, leaves, and other edibles out in the evergreen forest and surrounding areas, it always returned to the habitat to consume the eucalyptus diet it preferred. Artie had mixed feelings about this, liking the fact that the animal came back, but worried that it would not be able to adapt to the environment in this region. Perhaps, the lab technicians suggested, it should be relocated to a climate where its favorite trees grew in abundance—but this did not seem practical under the circumstances. For the foreseeable future, with all of the other pressing issues requiring the attention of Artie on behalf of the Chairman, the hubot didn't have the staff, time, or resources to perform his extinct animal studies anyplace but here.

Now Artie had another thought. Perhaps they could force adaptation, by cutting back on what the creature ate in its habitat. He would give that more consideration.

On the way out to the slidewalk that would transport him to the elevator bank, he stepped to one side to allow half a dozen robots to enter, followed by carts filled with broad-leafed plants that were being added to the dodo bird habitat.

As he watched them work, he realized he had not been thinking much about the other animals in the habitat for several weeks. Each time he came, he went straight to the glidewolf habitat and focused on how she was doing. On a regular basis the robots reported to him by electronic streaming, but he really needed to see what was going on firsthand.

He wondered if he should respond to a question that had come up about growing another marsupial wolf in the laboratory, a male to keep the female company. His robotic assistants had asked him about this the day before, and Artie had not replied, though he knew it was a logical next step to take.

Now he went off to one side and sat down. Taking a moment, he accessed his internal data banks, where he stored complete records of all extinct animal projects in the laboratory—with some of the information under deep encryption, such as the quarter of one percent he had secretly added to the genetic mix of the glidewolf, after making educated guesses and assumptions. With his computerized mind, it seemed to Artie that he should have perfect access to every one of the steps he'd taken to grow the glidewolf in the laboratory, just like the records he had for the genetically pure dodo birds, Labrador ducks, and a number of other formerly extinct species that he and his robotic assistants had brought back to life. But when he tried to access the information on the glidewolf, he was able to retrieve everything except for the deep encryption on what he had added to the mix.

Surprised, he tried different ways of retrieving the data, without success. Then, confounding him even more, when he attempted to access separate backup files where he'd stored all data, he discovered that the same deep encryption was also gone—evidence of some sort of contamination in the information. Everything else was there in both his internal and backup files, but not the quarter of one percent on the glidewolf. Not even the robots connected to him electronically had the data or knew he was trying to access it now, because he had the superior capability of releasing only the information that he wanted them to know.

As he stood up, a stark realization came over him: The animal he'd created was one of a kind, and seemed fated to never have a companion like it. This creature was not genetically identical to anything that had ever lived on the planet, and could never be replicated.

He would just tell his assistants no, without explanation.

 

15

To keep us together as a society, it is best to have an enemy. We are the in-group, and they are the out-group. No matter how you look at it, even from the opposite point of reference—theirs—the leadership of each side consolidates its power because of a threat from the other. Why, then, would either of us want to annihilate our sworn enemy? On a certain level it makes no sense, does it? We thrive because they thrive, and vice versa. It is a form of détente, in which we define each other's existence. This presumes, however, that each side is sane.

—Chairman Rahma Popal, private observations

THE AUTHORIZED ECO-TOURISM
flight was physically demanding, but Joss had anticipated that. After long days on the road and two weeks of recovery at home, he needed the exercise, and Kupi had said that she looked forward to it as well. Now she seemed less certain, as she wheezed and panted at the power station next to his, struggling to keep up with his level of exertion.

For both of them this was like a gym in the sky, with their legs turning high-gear-ratio bicycle cranks and their arms moving forward and back in a rowing motion. Their coordinated physical exertion caused the ornithopter's articulated wings to flap and the craft to fly over treetops and lakes south of the Seattle Reservation for Humans.

On a sunny autumn morning they crossed over a small town, on the outskirts of which sat a structure that looked like a huge elm-tree seed, the characteristic architecture of a SciO Recharge Facility, or ReFac. This suggested that there were one or more Janus Machines nearby as well.

As Joss and Kupi flew over the broad Columbia River gorge, featuring spectacular canyon views, he realized that in one sense the two of them were utilizing a primitive means of propulsion. In another, though, it was a reasonably advanced example of low-carbon-footprint green technology, with ergonomic fittings and efficient gear ratios that transmitted energy equally to the wings and flapped them with the natural motions of a large, graceful bird, propelling the craft smoothly and rapidly through the sky, without the need for a polluting engine.

The pair didn't have to operate flight controls; that part was automated, based on settings they made before taking off. Now they just needed to pedal and row long enough to get them where they wanted to go. Instruments in front of Joss showed the distance traveled, the speed, and where they were.

For several moments the two of them stopped exerting themselves at all, leaving the aircraft to glide on warm air currents, floating aimlessly over the chiseled landscape, maintaining elevation with backup systems. Joss looked at a navigation screen that named the mountains and other features in the region, but he glossed over them in his mind. Out here, names did not matter. The pair could slack off for twenty minutes at a time, relaxing and talking while the onboard systems kept the wings flapping, utilizing stored power generated by their efforts. Any longer than that, and the ornithopter's automated systems would give them the option of resuming their efforts immediately, or flying them back to their home reservation on solar-reserve battery power.

Joss considered how to bring up the subject he'd wanted to discuss with Kupi, their increasingly awkward relationship. He couldn't quite frame the words.

“It's so quiet and peaceful up here,” Kupi said, interrupting his thoughts. “Don't you ever wish you could get away from the J-Mac crew and just live in the wilderness?”

“You mean like those renegade forest people we've heard about?”

“Yes, it has a romantic sound, doesn't it, a free and easy life? Logically, people shouldn't be able to elude detection by the GSA government, because the authorities have such sophisticated scanning and search devices. But between you and me, Joss, there are renegades living in the woods anyway, using electronic scramblers and other methods to keep from being discovered. I have friends in touch with me by various means, so I know this is true.”

“Anarchists, presumably?”

“Some are, but others have been persecuted for their religious beliefs, because they follow Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other banned religions. In the wilderness, they are free to worship as they please.”

“People are out there living the high life, eating berries, leaves, grub worms, and red ants?”

She made a face. “If I lived in the woods I'd rather fish and hunt. Just think of it, Joss, we could eat meat whenever we feel like it.”