Rainbows End (41 page)
Wómen shāsi le nàgè jīqìrén
. We killed the robot, Dr. Parker.”
Tommie grunted acknowledgment, even as he rocked back and forth on the ground. “We’ll get you out of here, Tommie,” said Blount. He looked up at Robert. “No more games.”
Mysterious Stranger — > Robert:
Robert looked past the greenish letters and nodded to Winston Blount. “No more games.” Tommie still lay twisting in pain. His voice came out between spasms. “Keycard… in my pocket.”
The voice from the laptop — Alfred? — was silent.
Carlos looked down at where the laptop sat on the concrete floor. “We should break this. It’s the eye of the enemy.”
I’m
coming from! So what if Alfred can still snoop? It’s me you need. If you cut me off then well damn I’ll have to
Mysterious Stranger — > Robert:
— and popped the optical fiber out of the laptop.
Winnie looked down at Tommie. “We’ll get you out, Tommie. You’ll be okay.” He lifted Parker under the shoulders, then reached to support him under the knees. Parker didn’t weigh that much, but Blount was staggering.
Miri ran around Blount and slipped her hands under where he was holding Tommie’s left arm. Winnie didn’t object; maybe it was because she didn’t ask. Robert took both legs and they started off along the wall. Carlos followed, carrying the cutter and what other gear might still be of use.
“Me too,” said Carlos, his voice faint. “In the end, Sharif-whoever got to all of us, didn’t he?” “All but Tommie.”
Winnie’s lips pulled back from his teeth. “I sure as hell won’t tell you.” He hesitated and the snarl became a twisted smile. “But I bet I know what your deal-with-the-devil was.” When Robert didn’t reply, Blount’s smile broadened and he continued, “You tried to disguise it, Gu. All the times we met in the library, and never once did you pull your old tricks. At first I just figured you were setting me up for one of your extreme traps. After I learned about Sharif, I thought maybe
you
were running
him
.” Winnie laughed. “But then I began to suspect the truth. You’ve lost your killer edge, the way you could look inside people and see what would hurt them the most, and then do it to them. You’ve lost that, haven’t you, Robert?”
Robert lowered his head. “Yes.” The word came out softly, without anger, almost a sigh. “And I bet you can’t write poetry anymore, either.”
“It’s the poetry I want back, Winnie.”
“Oh.”
And now that Robert was looking, he saw something else. Not more green lettering, but a blinking icon that meant pending mail. One last message before Miri had cut the fiber link. Almost without thinking, he shifted his grip on Tommie’s leg, and tapped a go-ahead on his waist box.
A pdf, by God
. He hadn’t seen anything like this since his teaching days. The table of contents floated in the air above him. The critic in him couldn’t resist scanning down the page. The ToC was impeccably formatted, with perfect spelling (at least, if you ignored context). The bullet headers were a mishmash of unparallel constructions and grammatical infelicities. It looked as if it had been thrown together by a gang of par-aliterates in a hell of a hurry.
But what it said was… important:
FIXME: This needs to be replaced with proper formatting, actually doable, but not now.
While We are out of Touch
or
How to Survive and Prosper during the Next Thirty Minutes
by Your Friend, the Mysterious Stranger Dedication:
Executive Summary
[none provided]
Table of Contents
Chapter 2, Your beknighted wearables…page o Not really
hecho en Paraguay
, unfortunately for you o The knockout gas — ah, but I already told you about that o What you can and cannot trust about these gadgets
Chapter 3, What Alfred is up to…page o And why you
really
don’t want Alfred to succeed *The animal model — or, world domination out of little fruit flies grows o Why calling 911 is not fast enough to stop him o If you don’t believe me, just show this file to Miri!
Chapter 4, What you can do to help…page o Map of Huertas territory o Map of GenGen MCog arrays. Alfred owns this territory, networkwise — but I’m there, too o How to get back to the MCog arrays o What you can do to defeat Alfred o Come be my hands in this glorious struggle!
But we need the nerd as much as ever
.
Tommie did his best to count Winnie’s paces. But there were distractions. There was this rock concert playing in Tommie’s chest, and every screech of the beat sent fire across his shoulders and down his arms. This wasn’t a real heart attack. This was just his pacemaker fallen into wild chaos. The last few years, Tommie hadn’t been too envious of other people’s diddling medical miracles. So what if his vascular system was falling apart; the pacemaker would keep him going till classic science-fictional immortality arrived. But now all his plans for living forever were in trouble.
Count the paces. Count the paces
!
And then there would be seconds when the pain would let up, and his heart was a butterfly flutter in his chest. For a few seconds his thoughts would clear, and then he would black out… They were carrying him still, though the ride was bumpy. Ol’Robert was shifting around like he had business with the box on his belt.
“Okay. Stop,” he whispered. He would have shouted, but the whisper was all he had just now. They heard him. And then he was lying on the cold, hard concrete.
Winston’s voice came down from high above him. “So where is the door?… I see!” Sounds of Winston fumbling with the keycard. Something big slid aside and there was a wall of faint light, maybe the night sky. He felt cool breeze on his face. The sound of the freeway was like distant surf.
“No alarms,” said Winston.
“Maybe… silent alarms?” he managed to wheeze. This exit had been such a wild-ass escape option in his original plan.
“I told them. I just called 911 myself.” That was Robert’s granddaughter. Her feet were right beside his head. Now she stepped away, became a second shadow, beside Winston. She turned this way and that, the way kids do when they’re playing games with their wearables. “I don’t like this,” she said after a moment.
The girl’s words floated in and out of hearing: ” — is an emergency. They should airlift. And the net is screwy. I can’t route to my… friends, not even sming. I think someone’s spoofed the local nodes and — ” Tommie rolled from side to side, pain blotting out the rest of the sentence.
Someone was cradling his shoulders. Carlos? “It’ll be okay, Professor Parker.” The voice turned away from him. “I’m having some access problems, too. But the error messages make sense. I think the library riot is soaking up too much resource.”
The little girl’s voice was scornful. “So much that I can’t even sming?”
“How about laser direct to the freeway?” That was Robert.
be
a car! If one doesn’t show up in five minutes, we’ll — we’ll carry Tommie down the hill ourselves.”
Tommie’s heart had stopped. No, it was back in butterfly mode. He’d have a few seconds of clarity. The girl was probably right, but there was no way he was going down that hill. The others should go, see if they could get far enough to put out a real alarm. Or maybe they should go back
into
the labs and give the enemy a big surprise. Darkness was rising inside him. In a moment or two this would not be his problem. And his friends were too stupid to leave him here. Maybe he could set some of them loose.
! But Tommie’s words came out scarcely louder than a sigh: “Guys… we gotta split up.” And then the darkness had him.
The Revocation Attack
Xiu Xiang looked out from their car, at the dark hillsides. “I feel pretty useless, Lena.” “
You
feel useless?” Lena Gu shifted irritably in her wheelchair.
Their plan had been to be a mobile presence across the places where Robert was most likely to show up. Tonight they would be
on the scene
and no one could balk them. Instead, all the action was elsewhere. Even the transportation was uncooperative, operating under “special event rules” in all areas near UCSD. Their car was moving as slowly as they could make it go, but in another thirty seconds it would reach the south end of this old bit of asphalt, at which point — no matter how loudly they demanded otherwise — it would turn left at the little T-intersection, away from the hillside, and take them back to the freeway. Then, if they wished, it would drive north to the Ted Williams Expressway, turn and come down here still again.
There was some real light. It silhouetted the hilltops and lit the low overcast; around the library, insanity still reigned. A few minutes earlier, Lena had guided Xiu through some of the views. Celebration, riot, whatever it was, the network stats were impressive. Now Xiu couldn’t see any of it.
Okay, I confess defeat
. She reached into the backpack on the floor by her feet. The pack contained her shop-class projects. She had told herself they might come in handy tonight. How, she couldn’t really imagine, but the gadgets did prove that X. Xiang could still create. There was something useful there, even if it wasn’t one of her gadgets. She pulled out her view-page, sat back, and enjoyed the clunky comfort of its old-fashioned inter-face. What a fall from grace this was — but just now, she was too nervous for Epiphany.
The boy’s voice was almost a whisper: “We’re still in Pilchner Hall. We’re waiting for Miri’s grandpa to come back from the basement.” Miri’s voice came faintly to the microphone: “They’re not doing
anything
.”
Xiu listened to the two for a moment. They couldn’t get any video, and Miri’s Epiphany had suffered a 3030 error. (Xiu had looked that up; “3030” was a catchall code for a system deadlock caused by licensing conflicts.) Meantime all they had were these very occasional, very brief voice messages through Juan.
