Child of the Fall Read online

  His answer did not improve her mood.

  He replayed Mike’s conversation in his head. “Okay, maybe not in so many words.”

  She took a deep breath. If he could’ve hidden behind his hands, he would have. Manning up in front of Kim was about as likely as a candy wrapper resisting a blowtorch.

  “I didn’t think so,” Kim said as she removed her gloves. She winced as she put her left arm into a sling. It almost made her seem human. Then she moved toward the camera pickup.

  Spencer leaned back in realspace even though nobody around him could see why.

  “That’s not what’s going to happen. You are there to back me up in case it goes wrong. Nothing else. Are we clear?”

  Being demoted from co-conspirator to lackey burned a little.

  “Spencer,” she said, “are we clear?”

  He hadn’t done anything wrong. Some misplaced hope, maybe. An undiscovered spot of hero worship, definitely. But nothing wrong. This was bullshit.

  “Yes, Kim, we’re clear.” He would’ve hung up on her, but she was faster. Jesus Christ on a fucking crutch.

  He pinged Mike. “What the hell is up with your girlfriend?”

  Mike filled him in on what had been happening with Kim. Life would be a lot smoother if people told him what the fuck was going on before he put his foot in the middle of it.

  “At least now I know why her arm is in a sling,” Spencer said. “You could’ve warned me.”

  “I wasn’t counting on you calling her the minute you found out. Wait. You said hack-a-thon? To Kim?” He was probably talking to her on another line. Or in his case, another thread.

  It sounded like an overnight realm gaming party when Mike said it, not a for-real dangerous thing. That must’ve been what Kim heard. Damn it. People always went straight to his screwups. Nobody ever considered the context. “It was a dumb thing to say, okay?”

  “Ya think? It gets worse. You have to use her toolkit. No negotiations on this. Try not to laugh.”

  Was he kidding? Angel Rage’s tools? The fanboy came rushing back. Then he opened the new flacTar Mike sent him.

  “The fuck? OS XX?” A goddamned Macintosh. It’d take hours to set up an emulator that could run them. Another file’s manifest unrolled, and the news got worse. “She used Microsoft Windows?” It was from before Facebook bought them out. A decade ago, easy. “Vintage is fun when it’s cars, not when we’re trying to stop armageddon.”

  “She’s old school, man. You gotta roll with it.”

  Like hell this was all he was going to use. Spencer turned an agent loose to compress his own toolkit with instructions to make it as small as possible. If she couldn’t see it, she couldn’t ban it. “What’s the plan then, spaghetti monster?”

  “We use their fiber tunnel to the power plant to do a smash and grab. We’re in and out fast as we can. Trilogy isn’t a gang you screw around with. They’ve kept me out of their networks for years.”

  Mike could get into any realm. It was his thing.

  “Then how are we getting in?”

  Mike blanched. “That’s where the helicopter comes in.”

  But Mike hated flying. And then it hit him. Hacking 101: gain physical access. “You’re going there? Where the hell is it anyway?”

  “Somewhere in Alabama. I have to leave in an hour. Edmund can’t be sure his searches haven’t tipped them off already, so we’ve got to move fast.”

  “You’re going out there, and you think they might be waiting?” Spencer needed to make sure Mike thought this through, which tended to be a problem with him. He wasn’t the only badass in the party. “You’ve talked to Tonya, right?”

  “She’s my next stop.”

  Chapter 11

  Tonya

  A gentle bong made her snort awake, and then jerk upright. She was in her driveway with no memory of telling her car to drive her home. It had been dark when she got off shift, and now it must have been ten in the morning. The car had laid her seat down, so it took a second to untangle her seatbelt.

  “Morgan, why didn’t you wake me up?”

  His deep chuckle rolled out of the car speakers. “You hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. I’m not sure I could’ve got you awake without using my horn, and that’d set the whole neighborhood off.” The scold in his voice was clear. “You were the one who optioned these seats, after all.”

  As he said it, the seat transformed from a not-quite-bed into a more conventional driver’s seat. Mike had convinced her to splurge on an Alfa Romeo SUV. Two model years old was still ten newer than the jalopy it replaced. Exactly how the company managed to license Morgan Freeman’s voice, she didn’t know or care. Her grandmother loved the man, and Tonya had grown up watching all his movies. His voice was safety. She relaxed into the leather and breathed deep. On the outside, she’d gone for a tasteful silver, but on the inside, it was decadent.

  And fully charged. He’d gotten the Roomba to come out and hook him up. The twenty-first century definitely had its perks. “Please tell me you’ve got the coffee ready.”

  His voice went creaky and silly. “Yas’m, I shorely did.”

  Tonya wasn’t a Jewish white woman, and they weren’t in an old movie. “Morgan…”

  “You said it was fine as long as we were alone.”

  “Just not before coffee.” She was getting as bad as Kim.

  Kim.

  Tonya said a rosary while she went inside, poured her cup, and settled down at her kitchen table. Finishing the rosary helped. It always did. It was a measure of how stressed she was that it had taken her this long to do it.

  Reasonably square with God, at least for the moment, she opened her message queue to see what her AIs had figured out about the experiment.

  Okay, it wasn’t a disaster. And it wasn’t exactly her fault. Or Mike’s.

  She checked the graphs again. Rephasing the spline reticulator had been an instinct call, but it had been the right one. Now she understood Kim’s reaction when the reticulator initiated its own form of disconnect. Nobody responded well to that. Also, Kim hadn’t been in real danger of a neural overload. The experiment itself had tricked them.

  Tonya called up a virtual whiteboard to work on some equations to account for it but ran out of room very quickly. She entered realmspace and accessed an empty lecture hall realm. It gave her a ton of whiteboard space and the ability to walk around to look at the problem from any angle required. It also let her model the extradimensional aspects in a more visual way. It was a trick she’d picked up after they got back from China.

  Ever since Tonya’s encounter in the threaded room there, where her odd, blue friend, Cyril, had helped her rescue herself, she had been obsessed with theories of causality and time. It was one thing to know that multiverse theories might be real. It was another thing entirely to see it in action.

  And it wasn’t an illusion. They had security footage with him on it. He had definitely been there with her in that pharmacy. Well, Walter had been there, but her old mentor was long dead at that point. It convinced everyone she wasn’t nuts, and that was all she was looking for.

  The rest had been a dive into the deep end of her true loves: physics and mathematics. If Tonya had been born to a different life, one that didn’t involve sleeping on street corners huddled over steaming grates, she would’ve had a PhD by now. The ER rotation had been her first since she got back from China. Her nights and weekends had otherwise been dedicated to study sessions, night courses, and work with Mike. If it hadn’t been for all that studying, what she was looking at would’ve been a jumble of letters and symbols. Now they formed the first part of a theory only a few other people in the world could understand. Not too shabby for a kid who grew up on the streets of Philly.

  She was hanging upside down fifteen feet above the classroom floor working on a promising Calabi–Yau manifold when Mike’s hologram appeared beneath her.

  “You’ve been busy,” he said, then pulled back to take all her work in. “This
looks familiar. Where’d it come from?”

  “I think I might’ve dreamed it, but it explains a little of what went wrong.”

  “Can you tell it to Kim in a way that she’ll understand?”

  Tonya slowly somersaulted to the floor, buying time to think. “Some of it, maybe. How is she?”

  He shrugged. He looked more ragged than when she left the apartment. “Better than I am, I think. Certainly a lot calmer.”

  “And her arm?”

  “That part hasn’t changed at all, and now we don’t have time to go to a doctor.”

  He’d already slotted into couples-think. So had Kim. These two were married and didn’t know it yet. “We don’t?”

  “No. That’s why I stopped by. We need your help.”

  Chapter 12

  Mike

  He’d had exactly one helicopter ride in his life, back in China, and had vowed never again. Kim had laughed at him when he’d said it then, and reminded him of it when she dropped him and Tonya off at the airport.

  It was all down to dumb favors.

  Watchtell didn’t single-handedly kidnap them from the FBI back in the day. He had the help of a private security firm, Blacksteel Rose. By rights, Mr. Rose should’ve been cooling his heels in a jail cell right next to Watchtell’s. If it hadn’t been for his very clever lawyers and the magnitude of Wachtell’s other crimes—in one case, an experimental school created with nanomachines had eaten its teachers and students, then incorporated their base materials as paint for the walls—that would have happened. He avoided it by making a deal with prosecutors to turn against Watchtell in exchange for very large fines and a very long probation.

  The news sites talked about how a rich, powerful black man achieved this result against an even richer, more powerful white one for weeks after the trial ended. Tonya spent as much time explaining to Mike why they did that as he did explaining quantum physics to her. As far as he was concerned, the former was much more difficult to understand than the latter. Quantum physics at least made sense.

  In the end, it turned out that Mr. Rose was a decent guy. He claimed to be remorseful about what had happened to Kim, and it was under his aegis that she was able to get her locksmith license so quickly. He’d also insisted that if she needed his services for anything, at any time, he was only a phone call away.

  Which was why Mike was now in a sleek black helicopter with a beautifully stenciled rose on its side. Correction. That’s what Tonya, in the seat beside him, was in. Mike was trapped in a thundering, twirling box made of flimsy plastic and razor-sharp metal. Unlike a conventional aircraft, if pretty much anything fell off or even worked loose, there was no surviving the result. They didn’t even glide properly. It wasn’t autorotation; it was trying to land so the spinning guillotine above them would be somewhat less likely to chop their heads off when they hit the ground. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

  “Mike?” Tonya asked. “I know you’re freaking out, but you need to focus. We have to make sure Kim’s redneck wackos don’t get a shot at us.”

  Survivalists, unsurprisingly, weren’t the types to hide in plain sight. Trilogy was based in a remote corner of northeast Alabama in the mountains near a place called Princeton. It was close enough to Huntsville to have full realmspace access, but only because service providers mounted their transceivers on a nearby line of electrical towers. There was no direct route from their particular branch of the Paint Rock Valley to anything resembling civilization.

  Mike had known about them for quite some time. Three people—two men and a woman—on the team that designed Fee, the very first unduplicate, had cashed out their stock options and built themselves a commune whose doctrine assumed that conscious AIs were already out there. The details of the doctrine proved they weren’t aware of Mike or Helen. Their physical models were wrong, their software models were wrong, their assumptions about malevolent belief and morality were wrong. Taken as a whole, their theories weren’t much more than the fevered dreams of people who spent way too much time inside Terminator and War Games realms.

  The only thing they got right was that their doomsday AIs would have trouble manipulating realmspace constructs. Using that lucky guess, they’d turned their network into an elaborate set of nested hyperrealistic realms. You had to open realm doors, push realm buttons, put construct keys into construct locks, turn virtual knobs, toggle virtual switches, and all sorts of other combinations to get anywhere. Their data was kept inside constructs that could only be accessed by avatars, which naturally required another set of construct tools to open.

  Mike discovered all of this second-hand. He bought the version of their realmified network they sold to the public, set it up, and tried to break into it on his own. He learned it worked as advertised. If he ever tried to access their real network, they’d find out a whole lot more about him than he would about them. They were nuts, but they were also smart.

  That left the oldest trick in the hacking book: direct physical access. They needed to connect an active phone to the Trilogy network using a cable. Since the inside of the network functioned exactly like the outside, there was no way for him to go in even after they made the connection. So Kim and Spencer were staying behind in Virginia, waiting for his signal. Once he and Tonya made the connection, they’d be the ones doing the actual search.

  They weren’t hunting for Trilogy’s files, though. Edmund had found clear evidence that they had built their own private fiber connection between the power plant and Trilogy. Not one but two organizations were so paranoid that, in the era of perfect security, the only genuinely secure connection was a direct one. Kim and Spencer’s mission was to find that connection and use it to access the power plant’s network.

  Which left them with some difficulties.

  “There’s not much to plan,” he said, his voice made tinny by the headsets the flying death machine forced them to use. “It’s not like they give tours.”

  She shot him a sour look. It matched the way his stomach felt. “You really are distracted.” She sent him a link. “The imagery run results are in.”

  Right. Edmund had requested a recon drone flyover of the whole canyon when they worked out their plan. Logging companies in the area did that all the time, so it wouldn’t be noticed. Pulling up the new maps took his mind off the flying food processor he was inside. He threw together a realm based on them, and they ran scenarios while they traveled.

  The resolution of the AESA radar scans allowed him to model their outdoor security systems, which let them find a way through. It wouldn’t be easy, and there were a couple of points where he’d have to sneak up on some sensors to disable them, but it was doable.

  “What about simple tripwires and traps?” she asked as she crept through the simulated undergrowth.

  “You installed the app I sent you, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. It’ll work with the line laser in your phone to scan for them. It won’t be seen by someone who doesn’t have it.”

  The crew chief accessed their minirealm. “Ten minutes out. You should gear up now.”

  Oh God.

  Flying in a helicopter wasn’t the worst part. This was the worst part.

  “Excellent,” Tonya said over the radio. “Time to fly for real!”

  Blacksteel Rose had all the best toys, including the latest droneChutes. Using a regular parachute required lots of specialized training and was so dangerous only genuinely crazy people tried it. The entire process was automated with droneChutes, which used souped-up delivery drones to safely and quietly land a full-sized adult pretty much anywhere.

  He concentrated on going numb. They had to do this. There was no other way to get down there without being seen. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Without this there was no way to succeed.

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said out loud, unable to put out his hands so the chief could strap the large backpack on.

  Tonya frowned as she finished the straps on her own bac
kpack. “We talked this over, and you said—”

  “What I said there is different from what I’m saying here.” The side doors opened. Now there was nothing between him and a thousand-foot fall but air. “I can’t…this is…”

  Tonya waddled over to him. “Stay with me. It’s totally automated. You don’t have to do anything. Relax.”

  He concentrated on Tonya, staring into her eyes. There was no fall out there. They were in a realm. This was a super-realistic simulation.

  He had to do this.

  Mike had forgotten to blink, and now the rushing air caused tears to stream down his face as the chief wrestled his pack on. It was heavy.

  Tonya grabbed him and put his forehead against hers. Their sweat made the connection slick, a cold distraction, but he tried to focus on it anyway. “You got this, Mike. You’re a badass who can sneak past tigers and smash bricks with your fists. You can do anything.”

  The plastic thunk of the strap clamps made his knees wobble. He had to relax. If his realmspace threads tightened up too much, none of it would work.

  Stepping out into thin air.

  It was a simulation.

  It wasn’t real.

  His stomach lurched, and now he had a different battle to fight. He would not get sick in this damned death machine.

  The crew chief said, “Two minutes.”

  Tonya pushed back so she could see his eyes. “You can do this.”

  He swallowed hard and told the truth. “I can’t do this.” Spinning and falling. That’s what would happen. He’d spin and fall, and there was no way he’d ever be able to do this.

  “Sixty seconds.”

  There would be a countdown, and Tonya would go, and he would stay and hike it in. They’d land, and he’d get out and walk. The open maw of the door beckoned to him. Spinning and falling, and then a terrible stop at the end. Bones cutting into flesh. The blood rushing in his ears now covered all other noises. He could not do this. It was ridiculous to think he could.