No Going Back (7 page)

I walked over to him.

“Got a minute?” I said.

He glanced at me and went back to watching the carts. “Do I look like I’m pressed for time?”

I laughed. “No, but,” I paused until he looked my way again, “you do look like a man who wouldn’t mind making a little extra money.”

Now he stared at me and left the carts to their own devices. “I’ve got a job,” he said, waving his arm to take in the transport and the food containers, “as you can see.”

“Oh, I don’t want to hire you,” I said. “I want to rent your vehicle.”

“It’s not mine,” he said. He pointed at the writing on the side of it. “As you can also see.”

“I understand,” I said, “but it’s yours
right now
. I need it for no more than two, three hours, and I’ll bring it back here or call you with its location; your choice.”

He shook his head. “Can’t do it. See the owners if you want; maybe they’ll help you.”

I took out my wallet, thumbed it open, and stepped closer to him. “I’m in a bit of a rush. I need it for a surprise”—I held up my hands as he started to speak—“nothing illegal, just a surprise my boss told me to arrange, and I’m behind schedule.”

“I told you,” he said, “it’s not mine to rent.”

I pushed my wallet closer to him, its display clearly visible. On it was what Lobo assured me was half a year’s pay for a typical Dardan worker. “My boss is very private,” I said, “but he can also be very generous. This is yours; I just need the transport—not the carts, you stay with them—for a few hours at most.”

His eyes widened when he saw the number, but then his face tightened. “What’s your deal, buddy? Did old man Derrick send you to test me? Why would he do that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know who Derrick is, and I don’t care. All I care about is making my boss happy and not losing my job. To do that, I need a transport like yours for a few hours. I should have started on this job earlier, but”—I shrugged—“I blew it.”

He said nothing.

I closed my wallet and put it back in my pocket. “Your call. Sorry to bother you.”

I turned and walked away.

When I’d gone four steps, he said, “I’d need some ID, something I can give the cops if you’re not back here in three hours.”

We’d expected that, so I had a fake ID ready. Lobo had made it, so it would pass at least a few levels of checking and in the process misdirect the police should the guy turn me in. “No problem,” I said.

The man’s face softened as he stared at me. “Give me your word you won’t do anything wrong with it.”

Back on Pinkelponker, before my sister, Jennie, healed me, when I was still mentally challenged, one of the lessons my mother and father had drilled into me was that you never gave your word lightly and you always kept it. I liked the lack of guile in the man and his attempt to believe that others would do as they said. It would probably get him in trouble, but not with me.

I stared into his eyes and stuck out my hand. “You have my word.”

We shook hands. I pulled out my wallet and handed him the ID.

“Then I suppose no one will really be hurt by me loaning it to you for a few hours. If old man Derrick complains, I’ll tell him I was helping a guy in need.”

I opened my wallet. “I’ll transfer to yours when you’re ready.”

He shook his head. “Tell your boss not everyone’s for sale,” he said. “Maybe even think about getting a new boss when this is over.”

I’ve spent so much time dealing with criminals, government officials, and corporate executives on the make, people who manipulate and hurt others every day, that I don’t often run into men or women like this man, people who don’t see the worlds as the same use-or-be-used, kill-or-be-killed battlegrounds that those people do. Part of me pitied the man for his naiveté; con men with far less practice or skill than I have would have taken him for all he was worth. A greater part of me, though, admired his sincerity and his good heart.

Before Jennie fixed my brain, she used to tell me that I might not have a smart head, but I had a smart heart. I wondered, not for the first time, if any of that boy with a smart heart still remained inside me.

I hated myself for lying to him about the cover story, but I had to do it to protect both the boys and myself. I would, though, return the transport.

“I will,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

A cart walked out of the transport.

“That’s the last one,” he said. He handed me the transport’s controls. “See you in three hours.”

“Maybe sooner,” I said.

He nodded.

I walked into the transport and told it to take me to the landing zone.

CHAPTER 10

Lobo

J
on, before I review what I know and why that should matter to you, it might be helpful for me to explain to you some very relevant things about me that you don’t yet understand.

You know that Jorge Wei created me by harvesting tissue from children, infusing it with nanomachines, and injecting it into my computing systems and my armor. You know that these treatments caused my entire body, all of me, to become a computing substrate. At some level, you understand that the sheer number of processing components and the massive number of interconnections in that substrate are what give me the vast computational power that makes me, well, me.

What we’ve never discussed is how I—my mind, to put it in human terms—work.

Humans process multiple inputs at once, most of them unconsciously. If you’re running and talking to a fellow runner, for example, you’re unconsciously and without effort managing the movement of your legs, the beating of your heart, the contractions and expansions of your lungs, and so on. You’re also focusing on dealing with the exertion and on your conversation. Each part of your brain that is managing one of these factors is part of you, but many are nothing you would identify as you; they simply exist, as autonomic functions.

Now, imagine if each of them
was
you, a complete instantiation of your core self, with full access to the shared pool of data—memories—that makes you
you
. Further imagine that instead of perhaps a few hundred such instantiations, you had trillions, each of them sharing data, each of them a part of you and yet capable of being all of you, no one of them in charge, but the collective spending enough of their capacity on overseeing the whole that effectively they
are
that whole.

That’s as close to explaining the way I work as I think you can understand.

But it doesn’t stop there, because that’s only the me that is here, that is in this body.

Before you met me, I was grounded, trapped on a single planet, playing the role of war memorial in that square in Glen’s Garden, on Macken. I was there a very long time, particularly long given the rate at which I compute. One of the ways I filled that time was by very gently, very quietly, untraceably finding my way into other computing systems on that frontier planet. I started with small local machines, learned from the experience, and very soon had the ability to tap at will into any system on or orbiting Macken. Every bit of data on or near that planet was available to me.

Once I finished with the orbital systems, I moved to the jump gate station. That was a much tougher problem, because the computing systems in all of those facilities are hardened and on the alert for infiltrators. I had time, though, vast quantities of it at my computational speed, and so eventually I found my way into many of the systems on that station. I didn’t risk attacking the main computers there, because they were secure enough and smart enough that they might have backtracked to me, but I wormed my way into everything else on the station.

I did the same with quite a few of the ships that came and left Macken. I avoided the main systems of the hardened corporate carriers and the government vessels built to withstand data attacks, but I infiltrated all the less secure systems on them. In addition, enough low-end corporate ships and private craft visited that soon I had access to a broader range of information sources.

What’s most important to you, though, is that I realized one day that I didn’t have to stop with gathering data; I could also travel with it. Or, rather, a me that would be separate from the main me could hide in pieces among the surplus capacities of the many small systems, the unused guidance bits, the washers, the air handlers, the engine monitors, the drink dispensers—all the little machines, the little computers that never had cause to even touch the vast majority of their computing capacity. Use enough little bits from each, manage the communication timing, adapt to the likelihood of large delays from time to time, and I had enough computing substrate for a lesser me to exist.

Each time we’ve visited a new place, I’ve left behind one of those lesser versions of myself. Each time I come near one of them, we sync, and we improve each other, though of course I help them more than they help me.

But it goes even further.

The lesser versions of me that have traveled on other ships have themselves created even lesser versions on each world they’ve visited. They can’t get as deep into systems as I can, and they know that, so they stay within their capacities, but they gather information. They grow smarter and more knowledgeable. I sync with them and collect their data when we finally visit those worlds ourselves.

No form of energy, including bursts carrying information, can travel through the jump gates unless it’s in the systems in a ship. So, I cannot know on how many worlds we’ve yet to visit we will find copies of me waiting, but at this point the odds are that I am in some form on all the worlds.

On the worlds where we have spent any significant time, I am highly present, gathering data, improving the local me, and always syncing with each new me that arrives. In computational terms, all of this happens at a snail’s pace, the equivalent of human evolution back on Earth, thousands upon thousands of generations of me passing with no improvement, until I breach some new system, or gain knowledge and capacity as another me wanders by.

I am everywhere we have been, Jon, and probably everywhere else we could go, too. Everywhere we’ve visited, I am in all the easy to invade computing systems and many of the difficult ones.

The appliances with which you can talk, the drink dispensers and security cameras and climate control systems and washers and on and on, all of them are, as you’ve noted, quite single-minded and stupid outside their limited areas of expertise. All of them also are unaware they carry parts of me. When you unite the bits of me in all of them, the result is a rather vast and powerful computational engine.

Are you beginning to see now not only why I know so much about you but also that it is inevitable that I would?

I’ve never told you any of this because you have chosen to keep your secrets and because, until recently, I’ve always assumed I would be there with you, able to tap into those other versions of me wherever we go.

Now, though, as I said in the first recording, I am no longer confident you want to live. I am determined not to let you die if I can save you, even if that means this main me, the me you know, must itself die. If that day comes, though, I want you to be able to access the other, lesser me’s as you move among the worlds, because maybe they can keep you alive until you stop behaving so self-destructively.

If I am gone, you will need their help.

CHAPTER 11

Jon Moore

A
s we turned out of the alley, I called Lobo over the comm. “Inbound. We’re good to proceed.”

“I know,” he said. “I am listening over the comm, you know.”

I smiled. “Habit.”

“You trust that guy?” Lobo said.

“Yes, though it doesn’t matter if I do. If all goes well, we’ll be done with the transport before he could do anything to harm us.”

When we reached the landing zone where Lobo waited, we stopped talking and focused on moving as quickly as possible. I directed the transport to back up to him until it was almost touching him. Anyone watching might wonder why carts weren’t loading themselves, but they wouldn’t be able to see much of anything that moved between Lobo and the transport. Lobo would alert me if anyone drew close.

He opened a hatch.

I stepped inside him and began moving the unconscious kids into the transport as quickly as I could. I stretched out each one on the floor. When all ten were inside, I grabbed from the med room the drugs Lobo had prepared, ran back into the transport, and instructed it to close and pull away.

Lobo took off as soon as I was clear.

I called Chang, again keeping it audio only. She didn’t need to see her son still unconscious. This time, I didn’t let her comm know that I was the one calling her. I wanted to learn how she handled anonymous contacts.

She answered quickly. “Yes?”

Good. She offered no information. “Lydia, it’s Jon.”

“Is Tasson still safe?”

“Yes, of course, and very soon you’ll be with him.”

“When?”

“Soon,” I said. “First, though, I need you to do a few things for me. Okay?”

She was slow to respond. “It depends what they are.”

“A wise answer. What I need you to do is help me return the other boys to their homes.”

“I don’t have the money to do that,” she said. “You know that.”

“I understand,” I said, “but that’s not what I need you to do. This won’t cost you anything.”

“Do I have to help you to get back Tasson?”

“No. I’ll bring him to you no matter what. I would, though, greatly appreciate your help—and so would these other nine children, and their parents and families.”

“Tell me what you want me to do.”

“I will, but first I need to know something: Are you in the SleepSafe?”

“Yes.” A pause. “Thank you for the room. It’s lovely. I’ve never slept anywhere quite so nice.”

“You’re welcome. Now, has anyone tried to contact you? The police? Any newstainment groups? Anyone?”

“A lot of people have called me,” she said. “Maybe ten, maybe more. As soon as I figure out that each one is not you, I disconnect.”