METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire Read online

  He nodded again. “It’s all I can ask. But I’ll be there waiting. And I think you know how to pack for this.”

  She did. A backpack with whatever of her former life she might want to keep and a canteen of fresh water. Sturdy boots and a book she was only now beginning to comprehend.

  He extended his hand again and she shook it once more. Then, he turned and left the room. Her eyes followed him as he went and she saw in his stride not just the confidence of a soldier but the care of a hunter on the move.

  Charity Oxham looked down at the card again and already knew that she would have to go. Too many ghosts were whispering, her father’s loudest of all, that now was the time for change.

  Real change. Intentional change.

  She’d join the Foundation in its work of guiding that change with both an open hand and a ready fist. She would walk the quiet of the Cascade forests until she reached that simple marker and then Charity Oxham, swaddled in this unexpected newness of life, would let Tygre’s grave become her cradle.

  ***

  Rock of Ages

  i: Years of life bearing down on him like a slow rain of anvils

  Reports of Bashar’s death were greatly exaggerated. Reports of his death had always been greatly exaggerated. Even here in the oh-so-elegant precincts of the J. Appleseed Foundation, his bastard corporate stepchild that had broken free decades ago to make its own way in the world.

  Daddy was coming home one more time after decades of absence. And he had hard questions. It took a special kind of hate to think up something like the island plagues. That his own creation might be behind the greatest incipient atrocity in human history was too much to bear. He wanted answers.

  This outer office was a first stop. Surrounded by antique paintings and an ancient carpet, it signaled wealth in the symbolic language of a bygone age.

  “I’ve been working with J. Appleseed since before you were born,” Bashar said to the pert young man who stared at him in thin-lipped exasperation. Pale skinned, smelling of cologne and laundry detergent, the little bastard had damned near had himself starched, he was so white.

  Bashar hadn’t set foot in these offices in over a decade, but he wasn’t going to let himself be stopped now. Just being here was risky as hell. Not being here was worse, given what he’d learned. “I’ve been working with you people since before Administrator Lang was born, for that matter. If I want to see the administrator, I’ll see the damned administrator.”

  He leaned forward, knuckles planted on the milled Douglas fir of the assistant’s desk. Some artisan had collaged the slab with shredded bits of classic currency, so that Ben Franklin and Queen Elizabeth II stared owlishly out of ripped interruptions in the wood grain from beneath a thick layer of hand-applied lacquer. It smelled of age and wood and musty paper, those olfactory cues doubtless as carefully designed as the visual.

  Bashar’s hands were as old as the rest of him, pushing toward his thirteenth decade of life. And if that wasn’t a miracle in and of itself, almost enough to make a theist out of him, he didn’t know what was. But at close to one hundred and twenty years of age, he simply wasn’t as scary as he used to be.

  This young twit didn’t have the sense to be frightened anyway.

  “You’re not on the cleared list, sir,” the assistant said, the first edge of nerves creeping into his voice. He glanced at a projected virteo datacloud, which was nothing more than a faint shimmer from Bashar’s perspective.

  “Little boy, I wrote the damned cleared list. Back in the day. If I’m not on it now, someone will be breathing through their asshole by nightfall.”

  By the sound of it, several burly men and women were clattering through the door of Administrator Lang’s outer office. Bashar turned, the twit’s very old fashioned and deliberately archaic papermail letter opener now in his hand. It didn’t even rise to the cutting standards of a dull-edged prison shiv, but would do for his current purposes.

  He seized the initiative. “May I help you?”

  “Ah, sir …” The head of the security detail obviously knew perfectly well who Bashar was. And how dangerous he could be. She and her three goons stood on the worn Persian rug over the antique warehouse flooring, shifting their weight as uneasily as elementary school pranksters caught with a databomb and a can of smartpaint. “Um. Is there a problem?”

  “You’re flubbing your lines, sister.” He smiled, over a century’s hard practice at looking and being sinister in the lines of his face. “Reddy Kilowatt here at the desk is having trouble telling friend from foe. I suggest you take him downstairs for some re-education.” Tapping the lettermail opener against the palm of his left hand, Bashar added, “He’ll like your beatdown a hell of a lot better than he’ll like my beatdown.”

  He trusted this security squad to know the difference between promises and threats.

  “Um, sir …” The woman glanced around before she realized that her three subordinates were all trying to hide behind her. “That’s not what my orders say.”

  Bashar stopped tapping the world’s dullest knife. “What orders?”

  “The ones we have now, sir.” A message strained urgently in the detail leader’s eyes.

  He knew that message. And there was no point in shooting the messenger. Besides which, at his age, he was out of practice taking on armed and armored squaddies at four-to-one odds.

  Never one to fight beyond his point of no return, Bashar knew it was time to give up on his questions. For now at least, J. Appleseed’s connection to some of the worst epidemiological die-offs of the past few decades would have to remain a bitter mystery.

  He fucking hated mysteries, at least ones he wasn’t behind himself.

  Turning around, Bashar carefully set the lettermail opener back down on the assistant’s desk. He smiled again, ignoring the reek of sweat. Exasperation had fled the twit’s face to be replaced by the healthy panic of self-preservation. “My apologies, son. I didn’t get the memo about which way the wind was blowing.” He gave the assistant a sharp nod. “Let me know if you need the name of a good dry cleaner.”

  The security squad escorted him out of the office, keeping a polite distance every step of the way. Bashar was certain this was against their shiny new orders, which almost certainly included words such as “detention” and “with prejudice.” Years of respect and a fearsome reputation as a stone killer had its advantages. He’d take his courtesies where he found them. Thanks to the squaddies, he passed through two human-staffed checkpoints and three automated ones without further challenge.

  Bashar didn’t start breathing easily again until he was outside under an overcast Seattle sky all by himself. As easily as he ever breathed these days. His skin warmed quickly even with the cloud cover—the UV filter tattoos that covered most of his body were doing their work, converting waste energy to radiant heat, much of which was trapped by the thermal battery fibers in his clothing. Who needed an ozone layer when you had tattoo guns and micron-scale engineering embedded in your transparent ink?

  Sometimes the future still boggled him.

  Headed down the Fourth Avenue waterfront promenade accompanied by the usual reek of low tide and—even now in this oil-starved age—marine bunker fuel, Bashar entered walking meditation. He needed to dial down the adrenaline the confrontation had dumped into his bloodstream. Lose the shakes, he told himself. Otherwise you’ll stand out to the cameras and the profilers. Though one advantage to being old was a lot less attention paid to him by the more casual idiots who populated the world’s security apparatus.

  After all these years, Bashar didn’t look a day over seventy-five. William Silas Crown, dead longer ago than he liked to think about, had had a lot to do with that. In a day and age when average life expectancy struggled to top five decades, he knew he was unusually blessed with some experimental and now long lost medical nanotech tending to his telomeres and stem cells and whatnot. Unusually blessed all the more so given his lifelong choice of occupations and obsessions.

/>   Interest in the island plagues wasn’t likely good for his health, either.

  The New Seawall groaned to his left, holding back tides several meters above Bashar’s head. A few ships loomed there, mostly gyre-runners towed in from the California Current to offload and onload along their endless, circling journeys. Powered on the open ocean by kite sails and current-generated electricity, they certainly weren’t the source of the ubiquitous hydrocarbon reek.

  He slipped a throwaway earbud from his sleeve stash. Single-use frequency hoppers, they were helpful for calls Bashar didn’t want traced back to his personal sensorium electronica. What the kids today called iSys. If no one was looking for him, they were rated for ten minutes of secured talktime. At this point, so close to the now-presumed unfriendlies at J. Appleseed’s Madison Street headquarters, he figured on two minutes of secured talk.

  Bashar turked into the earbud’s nanopower network—range, about three hundred centimeters, if you didn’t stand near anything that shed EM trash. He tapped up Charity’s comms address.

  “Hey there,” she said warmly. One of the few women Bashar had ever met who was as tough as he was. Few people of any flavor, in truth; not just cisgendered women. It wasn’t a male-female issue, either. She’d been less than half his age when they had first encountered one another. Now, well … time was the great leveler.

  And despite his best efforts, he’d never been able to hook his wife up with any of Crown’s diamond-grade medtech. The sole-source supply and supplier were both gone in a hard Green bombing decades ago. It wasn’t as simple as transfusing from him to her, or he would have done that years past. Pushing seventy, Charity Oxham looked and felt a hell of a lot older than Bashar did at well past a century.

  “Babe.” He smiled despite himself. “I’m on a code McQueen here.” She’d know that meant his clock was short. “Just got frozen out by the pips.” The data was explosive—his darwin file, the island plagues, a hint of any of it could have set J. Appleseed off. “They nearly went hard on me.” That they hadn’t gone all the way hard still amazed him. “Light up your perimeter and firm your assets.”

  After a moment, she said, “One and done.”

  “And, ah … check up on Sooboo, too?” It wasn’t like J. Appleseed didn’t know whose daughter worked in their analysis section. He just hoped whatever security stain he’d spilled on himself wasn’t going to follow family lines. After all, she and the rest of the foundation thought him ten years dead.

  “Samira’s fine.” Reproof now, old family arguments that transcended security and politics and a century of being one of the hardest of hard men. “You’ll need to talk to her again someday, Bashar.”

  “Safer this way. Don’t tell her …” He wasted precious seconds searching for words he didn’t have. “Never mind. Here’s what’s going down: check out your data mirror, my file code ‘darwin.’”

  “You coming in from the cold?” she asked, almost matter-of-factly.

  “Why start now?” After a moment, he added, “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Missing Charity a lot, Bashar dropped the earbud and smashed it with his heel without a break in his stride. The pressure stimulated the thermal fibers embedded in the bud’s soft electronic matrices. A smoking dot of ash in the gravel of the sidewalk was all that remained a moment later.

  He began to walk uphill, away from the ocean, his back to the J. Appleseed Foundation and much of his life’s work.

  * * *

  From greenwiki:

  Island Plague. Refers to the population-specific epidemics and pandemics which began emerging in the 2070s. The first documented instances were in Tonga, the Grand Caymans and Iceland, hence the name. Outbreaks of island plague targeted specific genetic groups, typically the demographically dominant one in each locus. Some researchers consider the St. Louis Flu which ravaged the North American Midwest and prairie polities in 2092 to be an example of island plague, given that it targeted persons of eastern European ancestry almost exclusively.

  The major open question about island plague is whether the disease is artificially engineered or not. Detailed microbiological research has been spotty at best, with suppression of such results as may exist for both political and competitive reasons. The involved virii are certainly of a single, common class, but are also quite fragile outside their hosts. This of course begs the question of what the viral reservoir within the ecosystem might be, and how the virus continues to be reintroduced to geographically and genetically diverse human populations after extended gaps of time. That issue alone has persuaded many commentators as to the artificial origins of the island plague.

  The primary countervailing argument has been that the island plague appears to serve no coherent political, economic or ideological agenda, and is therefore more likely to be a natural event.

  * * *

  Bashar had never been much for biological warfare. He preferred to ladle out his violence the old fashioned way, making his points one wound at a time. Focused application of force could, like Archimedes’ lever, move the world.

  Population kill was inefficient. If he’d spent his life doing anything, it was promoting efficiency. Looked at from the perspective of physics, that’s what the Green movement was all about. Hard Greens and soft Greens alike could agree on that, whatever their other schisms. The late, lamented Cascadiopolis and her daughter cities ran on energy budgets that wouldn’t have powered a Sunday morning church service in the days of Bashar’s youth.

  Tygre Tygre had been something … else. An experiment on the part of someone, never proven who. Tygre Tygre could have changed Cascadiopolis and everyone in it if Lightbull hadn’t bombed them with a kinetic strike from orbit.

  And what had those secret bastards ever wanted? Destructive change? Creative preservation?

  The late twen-cen model of infrastructure preservation during wholesale warfare as exemplified in the neutron bomb was even sillier, to his perspective. Rewilding through macroscale infrastructure destruction wasn’t particularly elegant, but it was effective. That had certainly been proven in the Middle East and South Asia over the course of the last century. Low-yield nuclear exchanges took on the climate-modifying role of megavolcanoes.

  There had been some cold years after that, and the climate models were borked beyond all recognition, but planetary stasis had managed to reassert itself.

  Now, the darwin file bothered him. In its way, that was as destructive as Tygre Tygre, Lightbull, or the tactical ambitions of 1980s American generals.

  It was time to put some physical distance between himself and J. Appleseed. Someone, somewhere had been stirred up against Bashar. Despite his best efforts, he’d left footprints in the plundered data from which the darwin file had been built. Sometimes the best security lay in simply not being where they were looking for you, after all. And Seattle was J. Appleseed’s home turf. Their ground zero.

  So he walked away. Hard to track a man who didn’t take the train, or hop an airship, or even ride a bicycle with registry transponders that left breadcrumbs in the iSys of every passing tourist. Walking took time, time that let the hunt find its own way elsewhere, and perhaps best of all, carried Bashar toward an old friend who could be a lot of quiet help.

  So he’d strolled out of Seattle, spent a couple of days walking down the I-5 corridor and out past Seatac along the rewilded right of way. Not much there but fresh air and the sharp scent of evergreens. Bashar was just another old man sharing the trails and the winding little road that was the last concession to vehicular traffic other than the buried rail line. Bikers, walkers, seggers—his fellow travelers were a busy cross-section of Pacific Northwest types. Even a band of solar stilters, who didn’t normally approach the urban cores much at all.

  But even his own countermeasures left traces. A man who wasn’t present could sometimes be as visible as a fire on a nighttime cliff. Rolling surveillance blackouts drew attention and inferences as surely as a fart in a staff meeting.
/>   So mostly he was just an old man who ambled along with the simplest of security blockers to defeat the widespread surveillance present even out here in the wilderness. Smart dust was everywhere, after all.

  Gait recognition could be countered with training and a walking stick. The right hat broke up his profile. A slump changed his height. The ultimate in high tech surveillance was vulnerable to security spoofing so old that Niccolò Machiavelli would have recognized the techniques. He couldn’t do much about DNA sniffers, but those didn’t work too well away from climate-controlled interiors.

  As he walked, he considered the truism that everything evolves. In a sense, this was the first law of Green. Yet the island plagues had not evolved. He was increasingly certain of that.

  At his age, meatspace memory wasn’t what it once had been, but Bashar still didn’t have a problem keeping in his head the salient summaries of all his work creating the darwin file. The viral reservoir problem was the central issue with the island plagues. It didn’t make evolutionary sense.

  Where did they come from, and where did they go?

  His wife had dealt with that problem once before, back around the time they’d first met. Some whackjob Christian terrorists had targeted the United States government with a high-kill virus, using a politician’s son as the vector.

  In the end, thanks to some extremely quick thinking on the part of Charity, patient zero had also been the last patient. Edgewater had caught up to Ibrahim bin Yosef, the Yemeni virologist behind the microbiological engineering of the virus. He’d disappeared down a security hole so deep even the shadows around it were classified “kill before reading.”

  Was there a connection between bin Yosef’s virus and the island plagues?

  Bashar was finally ready talk to someone. Charity again, or any of a handful of AIs he knew. He needed data and he needed headroom to think. And his destination was close.

  A grove loomed ahead. Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon was the human name for the trees’ natural entity—their collective corporate and legal identity anthropomorphized. Warm weather opportunists like so many species, the Torrey pines had been creeping northward since the early twenty-first century, following the shifting climate and the changes in growth bands. He knew this grove, had slept under its protection a few times. There was trust between himself and these trees, insofar as that concept could apply in this situation.