Rainbows End (42 page)

“Gotta go,” whispered Juan, and the session was ended.

 

Lena was silent a moment, just watching the familiar dark landscape slide by. “I want to see those kids. They’re needing a smart grilling… Any chance the link was faked?”

 

“Juan is a careful boy. It would be almost impossible to fake his Epiphany’s cert — ” Lena harrumphed. “And as far as I can tell that was their voices, but talking in whispers and not saying much except that everything is boringly safe.”

It was strange, if the children needed stealth and a low bit rate, that they had not used silent messaging. Maybe someone thought they could fool a pair of old ladies. In fact,
with Juan’s wearable, I could fake sessions like this
! She glanced at Lena. “Maybe you should call in the marines.” Bob and Alice. “Yes, but if it’s a small emergency, they can’t do anything more than you or I. And if it’s a big emergency — well, they might have to do something awful.” Lena hummed a few bars of something nervous. “And Miri says everything is fine. Just fine.”

“Maybe we should call the police.” “Ha! Nowadays you don’t have to call the police; they just happen to you.” Lena was staring at the hillside, her fingers trembling against her lips.

The last couple of months, Lena Gu had been such a reliable source of certainty.
What if we both wimp out
? Xiu thought. Now, that was a frightening idea. She tried to think of something really forceful to say: “um, your ex has been ‘doing nothing’ for almost half an hour. Don’t you think that’s too long?”

Lena’s head bowed, and she said softly, almost to herself, “Oh, Robert. You’re up to something terribly stupid, aren’t you?” She stared into the dark. “Let’s give Miri five more minutes. Then we’ll call 911.”

“Okay.” They tooled along the valley floor, slowly enough that the windows could roll down. The resinous scent of manzanita drifted in. On their left was southbound Highway 5, a lightless torrent of fast-moving vehicles, edged by the blaze of the manual lanes. On their right were steep, dark hills, violet light flickering along the ridgelines. Xiang brought up a local network view, looked back and forth between that and the physical world.

Their little automobile was speeding up again. A pleasant male voice spoke within the passenger cabin: “This portion of Valley Bottom Drive is misfunctioning. You may return after ten a.m. tomorrow.” “What? Now we can’t even circle back! There has to be some override, Xiu.”

Xiang shook her head. This would be their last drive through here tonight. Xiu had helped design the hardware security layer. It solved so many problems. It made the Internet a safe and workable system. Now she was its victim… She thought again of the bag of tricks that sat on the floor beside her feet. She had spent the whole semester building those gadgets, her mechanical daydreams. Maybe —

“Xiu! Traffic!” Lena was pointing up the hillside.

Xiu leaned over and looked out Lena’s side. She saw two spears of light that just now were turning away from them. “It looks like a car on manual,” or maybe it was on automatic, but driving on unimproved roadway.

“It must be on the service road.” Lena paused, and a map appeared on Xiu’s view-page, showing the road they hadn’t been able to get on. The road that led to Huertas’s old back entrance. The lights turned back toward them, then disappeared behind an outcropping. Xiu’s view-page didn’t even show a nav marker for the other vehicle.

“What are they up to?” said Lena. Their own car was almost to the T-intersection. “Car!” said Lena. “Turn right.” “Sorry. That’s not an existing road. The only legal turn is left.” “Turn right! Turn right!” “I’m sorry. I’ll have you in safe traffic in less than five minutes. Please think about giving me an ultimate

destination.” Xiu bet herself that company logic had decided it was dealing with a DUI customer. If they didn’t come up with something sensible, the vehicle would take them all the way back to Rainbows End.

Lena sucked in a breath. “We’re so close. Wait. I got a ping response. It’s from Thomas Parker’s outfit. They
are
up there!” And then much louder: “Hey, car, I wanna speak to your supervisor — I mean a
human beingf

“Certainly, twenty seconds please.” Twenty seconds would put them past the T-intersection.

Lena Gu seemed to shrink down in her wheelchair. Her gaze swept back and forth between the hillside and the approaching intersection. “We’ve got to stop them, Xiu. I’ll wager they could tell us what’s going on.”

“You’d come out from cover? Let You-Know-Who see you?” “I’d lurk in the background.”

But the question was moot. The intersection was just fifty yards ahead. In a few seconds they’d turn left, and be conveyed ignominiously away.

Or… maybe not. Xiu lifted her backpack onto the seat beside her. She picked up the curved tube with the can of diamond flakes; she had improved her first shop-class project out of all resemblance to the original transport tray. This new model was very much designed with destruction in mind; sometimes you needed to get the machines’ attention. She knelt on the back-facing seat and set the tip of the cutter against the dashboard. Given Robert Gu’s example, she had a good idea of what to expect.

Oops. “Lena, scrunch down!”

 

Lena looked at the tube in Xiu’s hands. “Yes!” She laughed even as she tried to flatten herself out of Xiang’s way.

Xiu pressed the start button — a real physical button! — and a roar ripped through the cabin. Her transport tray, now a very fine accelerator, drove three thousand diamond flecks into the dashboard every second. The recoil was a soft, steady push. It was easy to keep the tip pointed. Some of the diamonds bounced up, embedding in the acoustic ceiling, but most drove straight into the dashboard. She wobbled the cutter’s tip and the hole widened. Now she was drilling through drive internals.

The car slowed smoothly to a stop, parking itself just short of the intersection. “System failure,” it said. “Emergency backup engaged. Please depart the vehicle and await emergency assistance.” The doors popped ajar on all sides.

 

“Hah!” said Lena. “I was hoping for a real crash, and you having to cut the doors open.” But she was already backing out of the car.

 

Xiu was speechless.
Did I really do this? Timid little X. Xiang
? Lena wheeled around to the front of the car. “We have a hill to climb,” she said.

For Alfred Vaz, there had been various pieces of good news. He had completed his fake investigation of the GenGen labs and provided Günberk’s clever analysts with evidence that would eventually lead them far away. And
finally
Alice Gu had collapsed. That had come very late, but it was more spectacular than Alfred had expected; Keiko’s people claimed that DHS surveillance was blinded, in chaos. That chaos was unexplained good fortune to her and Günberk. For Alfred, it could mean complete success. Give him a few more minutes and his private research program would be safe not only from Günberk and Keiko, but also from the inevitable American investigations.

And then things went very wrong: Miri Gu had found the stooges. He had lost his one mech in the labs, and also his fiber link to the stooges. And now —

 

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Mr. Rabbit has penetrated our mil-net.

It was a fantastic claim — and manifestly true. For the last ten minutes there had been minor comm glitches, error retry packets happening a little too often. The statistics were well below the level of reasonable suspicion. But then in a grand gesture — typical Rabbit madness — the creature had sent a two-megabyte jumbogram straight through the milnet and off the end of the fiber.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Just before we lost the fiber, it seemed the local stooges intended on escape. How much time does that leave us?

 

Numerical estimates floated up for “Time till stooges can reach 911” and “Time till DHS responds.” But Keiko’s people had an idea:

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: For the moment, DHS is distracted. I can be very crude. I can fool the stooges into believing
I’m
the local police. Such a masquerade would mean hijacking a significant part of the local net. Within the highly regulated networks of the modern world, that was about as subtle as an infantry assault. DHS was truly in disarray.

For several minutes, there was no manager-level traffic. Alfred was aware of Keiko masquerading as the California Highway Patrol. His own attention was on a number of tasks he hadn’t dared try while Alice Gong was still around. Günberk’s analysts were assessing how deeply Rabbit’s intrusion had gone. Their conclusions were tagged a soothing green.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: I wonder what Rabbit was doing? There were much easier ways of betraying the operation than this. As far as the network analysts could tell, Rabbit had managed little more than to rattle the metaphorical doorknobs of their milnet. The psych people had their explanation: Rabbit was known for its childish ego. It simply couldn’t pass up a chance to show off — hence the jumbogram. Such antics could not be taken as a sign of overall betrayal. After all, Rabbit was still doing a magnificent job with the library riot.

Some analysts had more paranoid theories. The current favorite was that Rabbit was China; that would make tonight a perfect Keystone Kops comedy, all the Great Powers chasing after each other. But there were also nightmare speculations: Maybe Rabbit had fooled the network analysts and all the lesser paranoids. After all, the jumbogram had been sent just before the fiberlink was broken. Maybe Rabbit was a Grand Terrorist, who had used the Alliance as
its
stooge, installing its own interests within the labs, a quick conversion of the entire establishment into a death factory. And there was that UP/Ex launcher in the GenGen area, what amounted to a delivery system.

Alfred sighed to himself. In the long run, he feared Rabbit as much as the extreme paranoids did, but tonight — well, if they looked too closely, they might see Alfred’s own operation lurking in the shadows. It was best to calm things down.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: I’m with the greens on this. Yes, Rabbit has exceeded our worst estimates. He has broken into our operation’s mil-net. But we have hard limits on his bandwidth and my people still control the changes being made. Just look at the consistency checks. Short of having physical troops on the ground there, we
own
the MCog area.
Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: We also have good control of the topside operation, no sign of Rabbit funny business. The important

Red doubt was hemorrhaging across the analyst pool, spreading from a statistical analysis team at Moscow-Capetown. These were the same chaps who had been consistently right about the Soybean Futures Plot. They had credibility… and they claimed that the views from the north side of the GenGen area were corrupt. Those were not views Alfred had subverted. For better or worse, his colleagues had discovered some
other
deception.

Now the signals and stat people in all the analyst pools had precedence. A thousand specialists, who a second ago might have been looking at a dozen other problems, were suddenly watching the same data. Computing resources shifted from a myriad drudge tasks, began correlating data from the accessible sensors in the labs. It was as if Indo-European intelligence were an immense cat suddenly come alert, listening and watching for sign of its prey.

Only one of the area cams was offline, but others were subtly misregistered. The inconsistencies were scattered all across the area that the Alliance controlled… but analysis made the Moscow-Capetown guess more and more a certainty. A blotch of deception was moving into the GenGen area at the speed of a fast walk.

There
! A fleeting glimpse of the Gu child. The analysts pounced on the location, dredged two sets of footsteps out of the lying silence. So Rabbit did have troops on the ground.

 

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: That damned bunny. We can’t stop him. He just keeps coming and coming and
coming.

For a moment there was no conversation. Then:
Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: I can stop him. I can pull the plug on Credit Suisse.

There was another long pause. Yes. Günberk’s discovery that Rabbit depended on a single apex certificate authority. All power in the modern world, from flying the largest aircraft to moving bytes between components in a single processor, it all came down to the exchange of appropriate markers of trust, as enforced by the Secure Hardware Environment. And far at the top of Rabbit’s operations, via billions of unknown paths, there was a single source, Credit Suisse CA. Revoking that authority would disarm Rabbit. It would likely destroy the fellow’s access to his own most personal files, leaving nothing but what the creature held in his natural mind (unless Rabbit really was an AI, in which case nothing would be left). But the collateral damage would be enormous. Shutting down a top-level certificate authority was a metaphorical weapon of mass destruction. And now it was all that was left to them.

Braun — > Mitsuri, Vaz: Mr. Rabbit must be stopped… I have begun the proceedings. Credit Suisse will begin issuing global revocations in fifteen seconds.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: I’m sorry, Günberk. Ten percent of the trust apparatus of Europe would slide into chaos in the next half hour. The aftershocks would rattle the world. Whatever else came out of their mission here, for Günberk Braun it was a career-ending failure.

Another kind of failure threatened Alfred Vaz. Shooting down Rabbit had been one of his fondest hopes, but
not just now
! Alfred dipped back into the GenGen viewpoints. Downing Rabbit had eliminated all the slack from the schedule.
And I need that time for my own cover-up
. He was reduced to emergency measures: Alfred brought two more secret teams online. One would use the fruit-fly scam to divert what was left of Rabbit. The other would destroy his lab-within-a-lab, destroy Alfred’s work of years. But they would also outship his secret lab’s greatest prize through GenGen’s UP/Ex launcher. For Alfred Vaz, some form of success was still possible.

Gu the Eldest and Gu the Youngest hiked southward out of the Huertas cavern. Behind them the shredda containers and the north entrance were swallowed by darkness. The light that traveled above them shone just a few yards in all directions.