Limit of Vision (27 page)

It was
an hour past midnight when the display on Virgil’s farsights froze.

He lay on a cot, in the treatment room of the medical tent that had somehow become his residence, studying Mother Tiger’s evolving map of
L
ov
development. The three-dimensional image resembled mountainous terrain, with
L
ov
s of different varieties crawling and reproducing on the slopes and summits. The peaks charted the
L
ov
s’ phenomenal growth and spread, as well as their changing structure, as recorded by the
Roi Nuoc
who worked with them every day, and often into the night.

As Virgil soared past sedimentary layers he was amazed again at the
L
ov
s’ versatility, at the speed with which they changed—and he could see only one explanation for it: Somehow the
L
ov
s must have learned to deliberately reprogram their descendants’ genetic structure.

Then abruptly his gliding viewpoint froze. In all of that artificial landscape nothing crawled, or replicated, or faded away.

He propped himself up on his elbow, conscious of the whisper of rain against the tent canvas, the distant crow of a restless cock. He stared at the display, waiting for it to resume.

Nothing.

“Mother Tiger?”

No response.

He heard footsteps, then the rustle of canvas, but when he turned to look the frozen image blocked his vision. He had to slide the farsights down his nose to see.

Ky stood in the door, holding up the tent flap, his farsights in his hand and a haunted look in his eyes. “They have taken out Mother Tiger! It shouldn’t be possible. This
R
osa
runs on over twenty servers around the world. But it has been done.”

As if to belie that, the image on Virgil’s farsights shifted, leaping forward in time. He pushed them back into place. “Mother Tiger?”

The
R
osa
answered with a purr. Ky whipped his farsights on and began making demands in sharp, staccato Vietnamese. The image froze again. Jerked forward. Froze.

Virgil brought his own
R
osa
on-line and used it to dictate a short text message—

♦
Are you being attacked?

—to be delivered to Mother Tiger . . .
now
. He tapped “send” as the image shifted again. This time the
R
osa
remained active for several seconds, long enough to respond in its verbal purr, “
All is well
.”

But all was not well. The image froze again. Virgil used the interlude to dictate another message:

♦
What has caused your intermittent activity?

At the same time he was aware of Ky muttering and cursing at his farsights.

Returning abruptly to an active state, the
R
osa
purred its answer: “Resources have been shifted to support a communications project.”

“What is this project?” Ky demanded, shouting now in angry English. “Where is it?”

Virgil’s screen cleared. Then a transparent map winked into existence, showing a blazing point near a pond complex less than half a mile from the medical tent. “What is there?” Virgil asked.

“Ela Suvanatat.”

“Open a link.”

“No links are being accepted.”

“Show me then! Show me what she sees!”

The map vanished, replaced by an opaque field of blue-green
L
ov
s. Virgil stared at it, uncomprehending. “What is this?” he asked.

“This is what Ela sees.”

Ela
stirred, conscious once again of the night around her: of the rain, still falling at its deliberate pace, and of the hunger in her belly, and the narrow farm road that had become a thoroughfare of
L
ov
spiders. They scuttled past in jerking stop-motion, their footfalls audible plops in the mud. Most stopped every few feet, to tap the ground, or to tap limbs against one another. Only a few spiders were solitary. Most moved in groups of two or three. When they met spiders moving in the opposite direction they would freeze for several seconds. Their globes would sparkle. And then both groups would move on again, occasionally tripping one another as they passed.

Ela’s spider stepped into this bidirectional flow. It did not turn. It simply stepped “sideways”—assuming she had been looking at it face-to-face. But it had no face. It had no front or back. In its radial perspective all directions were equal so that it could move toward any point of the compass without turning. She found something disturbingly alien in this trait, but refused to be swayed by it. Shrugging off her uneasiness, she hurried to follow the spider as it joined a trio of others heading toward the second pond complex. Fearing she might lose track of “her” spider among all the others, she made careful note of its peculiar features: four legs, exceptionally long, the pattern of mud splashed across them, the complex shape of the cage holding its globe above the mud, the unusually fine texture and colorless gleam of its structural
L
ov
s. She instructed Mother Tiger to memorize these traits.

The group of spiders advanced erratically, hurrying forward only to stop, back up, exchange a few taps with one another, or with another group moving in the opposite direction, before scurrying forward again, so that it took several minutes to reach the first pond.

Here the group broke up. The original trio continued on across the flooding dikes, but Ela’s spider plunged into the water, disappearing beneath a surface boiling with rain.

“Ela!”

She jumped, startled by the distant shout. Turning, she peered through the rain and saw Ky Xuan Nguyen running toward her without hat or poncho, slipping as he dodged the toddling spiders that crowded the muddy road.

“Ela! What have you been doing?”

He skidded to a stop in front of her, grabbing her shoulders as if he expected her to run away. There was panic in his eyes. “Are you all right?”

“Let go of me!” She pushed his hands away. “Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Mother Tiger said you were—” He broke off, looking her up and down as if he hadn’t really seen her before.

“Yes?” She wondered if he had been dreaming of some unearthly vision that had driven him out into the rain.

He wiped at the droplets on his upper lip. “Mother Tiger suffered a failure,” he explained. “A
temporary
failure. Its resources were overtaxed—”

“Mother Tiger?” she interrupted, incredulous.

“Yes. During a communications project undertaken at your direction.”

“Oh.” Ela looked away, shivering a little as a thread of rainwater found its way down her neck.

“A communications project, Ela,” he said, stepping closer, one hand raised as if to touch her again. “What could I think? Your
L
ov
s have expanded into a band across your forehead. Hundreds of them. I have heard how Virgil’s partner died. The woman—”

“Gabrielle.”

“Yes.”

She turned back, and was startled to see Virgil standing behind Ky, wrapped in a black poncho, the lens of his farsights gleaming green beneath his hood.

“I knew there was a danger,” Ela said, looking from one to the other. “But Mother Tiger was with me.”

“Then it was a cognitive circle?” Virgil asked. “With Mother Tiger translating?”

“Yes.”

“And it worked?”

“Yes. It went well.”

“You might have been lost,” Ky insisted. “Overwhelmed. Used up.”

“It didn’t happen.”

“Don’t do it again.”

She gazed at him sadly. “You can’t ask me that. Ky, you don’t even have
L
ov
s.”

He flinched, but what could he say? She could see the fear on his face.

Virgil stepped closer. “What did you learn?” he asked her.

Ela smiled. “I learned we can talk to them. We can understand one another, at least on some basic level. They’re clever, but they’re not like us. They’re nothing like us. From their beginning,
L
ov
s were selected to process information and solve problems. Right?”

Virgil nodded.

Ela felt her smile widen. “I gave them a problem to solve. The communications project that taxed Mother Tiger—that was her effort to translate my ideas.”

In a strained voice Ky asked, “What problem did you submit?”

“I asked if the same structural
L
ov
s used to form a spider’s legs might be used to form something much larger—like a platform to keep my tent above the water.”

For a moment neither man spoke. Then Virgil blinked, stirred. “What answer did you get?”

“The answer was yes.”

Ky tipped his head back, letting the rain slide over his bare forehead, his smooth cheeks. “It goes too fast,” he said. “We do things, having no idea what their effects will be. Dr. Gabrielle Villanti is dead. Did she anticipate that? Did she anticipate that her actions would accelerate the cognitive development of E-3 and ultimately, drive it to destroy itself? There is a limit to how far we can see, but none of us are
even looking anymore
.”

Ela’s mood shifted. It was a
L
ov
-amplified reaction, a flare of heat and fury. “Is that why you’re afraid of the
L
ov
s, Ky? Do you tell yourself that if only you had left me on the beach your life would still be safe and predictable? If that’s what you wanted, Ky Xuan Nguyen, you should not have made yourself big-man uncle to the
Roi Nuoc
.”

“Ela, come on,” Virgil said. “It’s not a simple—”

“It
is
simple. You should not be afraid, Ky, because you are condemned already if we lose.”

Ky’s smile was cold and false. “Unless I cut a deal? It’s what you’re thinking.”

“Shouldn’t I think it?”

“You should think of other things. Like why you insist on rash behavior, always pushing the
L
ov
s on to something more unsettling. More challenging. You refuse to give the world time to accept us. Instead you give them more reason to reject us.”

Ela shrugged, for she could not easily deny this, and still she knew Ky’s assessment was flawed. “You think to win official approval. But we are criminals, Ky. We are dangerous—”

“We are revolutionaries! Not criminals. Once we persuade the UN to recognize our petition—”

“You won’t persuade them! Wake up, Ky. Look around. Look what we have made.” Her own gaze lifted to the landscape beyond him. Under the night’s heavy clouds hundreds of ghost lights could be seen, riding on spider shapes that did not belong to this world. Her own brow glittered with alien thought. “Ky, you will never know what the
L
ov
s truly are until they are part of you. You are a most excellent negotiator. You are the only reason we are still here. But at most you are buying us time. If we do nothing else, we will lose. Finally the UN and the IBC and the officials in Hanoi will stop squabbling and agree it is best—most humane—to be rid of us. We can’t let them do that. That’s why we have to push, and keep on pushing, until they
cannot
get rid of us. Only then will they accept our existence.”

“She’s right,” Virgil said.

All of Ela’s words had scarcely touched Ky, but those two words from Virgil—they hit him hard. She saw it in his eyes.

Virgil must have sensed it too. “You see it, Ky, don’t you?” he asked gently. “There’s no time to do things right.”

Ela nodded. “Really, we are so lucky. We are the first to know a nonhuman mind. An Earth alien. I want to know all I can of what that means, and I want to share it with everyone—whether they approve or not. I want to make it real for them.” Then she smiled as she finally realized her own truth. “And I want to scare the shit out of anyone who thinks we are all there ever will be. What do you want, Ky? Why are you here?”

Bitterly, he said, “Because there were a few things I failed to foresee.” But then he looked past her, his gaze following the spiders that still scuttled between the ponds and waded in the shallows. It was a bizarre vista, its meaning unreachably alien, but as he took it in, his face warmed with a cramped smile. “I never imagined anything like this. It goes to show . . . how poor we must be at prediction.”

“Too many variables,” Virgil said.

“And too little data.” He shook his head against the weight of raindrops clinging to his eyelashes and hair. “I am afraid for the
Roi Nuoc
. I thought they belonged to me. I thought they were my project, my social engineering experiment, but they don’t listen. They are exactly what I wanted them to be. Adventurers.”

“Alien,” Ela said.

Ky chuckled in bitter humor. “Yes, I said that, didn’t I? They are alien. Maybe all children are, born into a world so different from the one that welcomed their parents. They don’t fear change. They don’t see the
L
ov
s as a threat to their future, but only as an interesting element among an infinite set of possible futures. An opportunity to be seized and ridden—”

“
Oh shit
,” Virgil interrupted. “That’s right.”

29

Surprise had forced
his words. Now Virgil had to explain. He looked from Ky to Ela. “The
Roi Nuoc
don’t pass up opportunities, do they?” He spoke over the steady sizzle of rain against his hood. “They’ll want to try a cognitive circle too.”

He watched Ela embrace the dilemma in a moment of flash-understanding. Her eyes went wide. Her chin dropped like a fighter’s so that the hood of her poncho shadowed her farsights and hid the
L
ov
s that arched across her forehead. “Hush!” she commanded him. “They’ll hear you.”

“Yes exactly.”

Ky didn’t get it. Ela had unbalanced him. He wasn’t up to speed, and he knew it. Soaked and shivering, his skin unnaturally pale, he turned to Virgil with a resentful gaze—”What exactly are you saying?”

“Just that it took only one cognitive circle to freeze the
R
osa
,” Virgil said. “What will happen if a hundred sessions take off at once?”

It was possible. There were no secrets among the
Roi Nuoc
. What one saw and heard, all others might see and hear too, thanks to their web of farsights.

Ela was part of that web. Her activities must have commanded the attention of any
Roi Nuoc
who was awake. Even now, some among them would be watching, listening, looking for advantage. They were competitive and fearless. It might be no more than minutes before some decided to run the experiment themselves.

“Is there a way to ban these cognitive circles?” Virgil asked. “Ky?”

The fingers of his right hand were tapping furiously. “I’m trying!”

Virgil turned half-away, whispering for Mother Tiger’s apparition. The tiger shadow crawled, dreamlike and immense, up out of the saturated ground. “Show me a scan,” Virgil ordered. “A fast circuit of all active farsights.”

Images flashed past his gaze, scenes set in a darkness that everywhere seemed alive with weirdly glowing blue-green light, cast by the globes, but also by human faces whose eyes had been replaced by ribbons of virtual
L
ov
s. “It’s too late,” Virgil said. “It’s begun. There are cognitive circles everywhere.”

As if to confirm it, his farsights went black. It was a state that lasted only a moment before a sigh whispered through the audio and the screen became clear: no frames, no lists, no icons, no input of any kind were left on the display. The power switch might have been toggled off.

Virgil held his breath, waiting for the system to come back up.

It did not.

Without his farsights, the night was very dark.

“Virgil,” Ky said, “can you contact your original
R
osa
?”

“I don’t know.” He started tapping a string of code. “Mother Tiger annexed it—”

“I can’t see a thing!” Ela said. “. . . except spiders. So many of them! Ky—”

Virgil turned. Without nightvision he could see no spiders at all. Only the globes were visible, floating like ghost lights a foot and a half above the ground, or blurred beneath the water.

“I’m going to follow them back,” Ela said, “and get my other farsights from the tent—”

“
Shit
,” Virgil swore, flinching back and almost losing his balance as his screen flooded with harsh green light. He blinked at Iris’s tiny Greek goddess icon. “Hey, I’m up. Iris is working.”

Ky nodded, his own lens glowing again. “I’m up too, with an outside
R
osa
.”

“I’m going,” Ela said, taking a half step away and sliding in the mud.

“Wait.” Virgil stepped after her. “Do you know what to do? We need to find each cognitive circle, and turn off whatever farsights are involved—”

“That will break Mother Tiger’s link,” Ky said. “But how can we search nine square miles of reservation?”

“The
Roi Nuoc
will search,” Ela said. “Alert everyone you see. They can alert others. Like a chain letter, but by voice. Now hurry! You know what happened to Gabrielle when she stayed too long in a circle.”

Virgil felt a cold trickle of rain against his back. He knew too well.

Ela took off along the little road, running in tiny, mincing, dancer’s steps as she darted from one wandering spider to the next, like a human pencil completing a dot-to-dot puzzle. Ky stared after her. “When the
Roi Nuoc
awake, they are going to panic.” He gestured at the road, in the direction opposite the one Ela had taken. “I’ll go this way. Be sure to tell everyone you see to spread out. Cover as much territory as we can.” He took a step. Then he hesitated, glancing over his shoulder at Virgil. “You’ve seen my mistake, haven’t you? I should never have made the
Roi Nuoc
dependent on a single system.”