Vortex

We finalized our plans, simple as they were. Allison and I would travel separately to the high tier that housed the military aircraft. We would need one of the larger vehicles to get to the Indian Ocean and past the Arch without refueling. There wouldn’t be a posted guard at the aircraft bays—there was little need for guard details in a tightly Networked community—but civilians or technicians who happened to be present might try to interfere with us, especially if the Coryphaeus figured out what we were up to. Once we were aboard I would attempt to pilot our ship out of the docking bays. If we got that far, it should be possible to isolate the vehicle (and my node) from any signals originating from Vox Core.

During this time Isaac would be shielding us from the attention of the Coryphaeus. Whether he had enough influence to leverage our escape was an open question, but it might at least improve the odds.

Isaac stood up to leave. He hesitated at the door of the suite, fragile child and luminous monster in equal parts, and asked almost wistfully whether we had any more questions. I said no. Allison shook her head.

“Please be careful,” he said, giving me a studying look. “The deeper the node embeds itself, the better the Coryphaeus knows you. On some level, it’s already negotiating with you. Sooner or later it will offer you something you want. And you might find it hard to say no.”

* * *

In the remaining hours I practiced operating Oscar’s Network toys, reassuring myself that I could get the appropriate response from them at least nine times out of ten. I could already interact fairly confidently with the ordinary Networked control surfaces (video feeds, temperature controls, etc.) in the suite. A military aircraft was a vastly more complicated device, but it didn’t need more from its pilot than a reliable communication of intent. I figured I was just about good enough to give it that.

I slept a few hours while Allison kept an eye on the video feeds. The murder of the Farmers had made her somber and deeply wary. Newsfeeds reported minor outbreaks of violence throughout Vox Core: A woman had committed suicide by leaping from the high wall of a housing tier. A man had stabbed his infant daughter with a kitchen knife. Waves of conflicting emotions were propagating almost too quickly for the Coryphaeus to identify and extinguish them. And there was worse news. Allison shook me awake: “You have to look at this,” she said.

I followed her out of the bedroom. What she wanted to show me was fresh video from an overflight of the Hypothetical machines. As the sequence began, the Hypothetical machines were crawling through a dry glacial valley toward the shore of the Ross Sea. No doubt they were closer to us than they had been the day before, but otherwise there seemed to be nothing unusual about the image. The angle of vision altered subtly as the drone continued to circle beyond the safe limit. I wondered what I ought to be looking for—and then it was obvious. Suddenly, simultaneously, all the Hypothetical structures began to deform and dissolve.

Almost at once, there was nothing on the ground where the machines had been but a dense gray fog. The camera zoomed in until fog filled the entire screen, not fog anymore but a granular swarm of small objects. I used my Network skills to overlay a scale gauge in metric units. It told me the objects were all uniformly sized, each one a little more than a centimeter on its longest axis.

Which only confirmed what I already knew: these were the same crystalline butterflies that had swarmed the vanguard expedition in the Wilkes Basin—now in vastly greater numbers. The Hypothetical machines must have converted their entire mass into this form.

The swarm moved like a nebulous arrowhead toward the sea.

“That’s how they’ll come for us,” Allison said. She gave me a look that meant, We need to leave NOW.

2.

We had decided to travel separately to the aircraft docks. Allison had worked out a route that avoided heavily populated neighborhoods, and she left the suite before corridor illumination had ramped up to full daylight. The plan was that I would wait a few minutes before I followed, keeping some physical distance between us and lulling any suspicions the Coryphaeus might have begun to harbor.

But soon after Allison left there was an alert from the door. I opened it to find Oscar outside, smiling nervously. He said, “May I come in?” And I had to say yes.

Back on Earth—Earth the way it had been when I was growing up—I had heard about species of fish that lit up under the sea: bioluminescence, it was called. There was something like that in the way I saw Oscar’s face through my Network-enhanced perception: a soft glow of euphoria, tempered by flashes of fatigue and suppressed doubt and, under all that, an indigo pulse of suspicion, regular as a heartbeat.

I was, of course, just as transparent to him. It was mood-reading, not mind-reading, but he could still catch me in a lie. I hoped any emotional turmoil I couldn’t hide would look like a natural reaction to the crisis.

Oscar said, “Is Treya here?”

“No. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

“I’m sorry. I want to issue an invitation—to both of you. Please, come to my home, Mr. Findley. Come and bring Treya. My family is there.” He was radiating a bright but shallow sincerity, the way a woodstove radiates heat. “Five hundred years of history is reaching a climax. You shouldn’t be alone when it happens.”

“Thank you, Oscar, but no.”

He gave me a penetrating stare. “It’s too bad you didn’t make the decision to join the Network sooner. You’re very close, but I think you still fail to understand how lucky you are, how lucky we all are, to be alive at this moment of history.”

“I do understand,” I said. “And I appreciate the offer. But I’d rather face it alone.”

That was a lie. Worse, it was a mistake. He knew it was a lie. His suspicion flared. He said, “May I talk to you, just for a little while?”

So I had to ask him to come in, to sit down. While he gathered his thoughts I reminded myself that I couldn’t fool him (or the Coryphaeus) with an outright falsehood—it had been stupid to try. The best I could do was to tell the truth, selectively.

“Some of us in the managerial class have raised questions about you,” he said at last. “When you submitted to surgery, those voices were largely silenced. And now that we’re only hours away from— final events, the question is moot. But over time I’ve come to think of myself as your friend.” (He believed what he was saying.) “And as your friend it’s been a pleasure to watch you moving toward a real alignment with Vox. You’re almost there. It’s perfectly obvious. But you persist in hesitating, almost as if you were frightened of us.” He cocked his head. “ Are you frightened of us?”

The truth. “Yes,” I said.

“Vox isn’t just a polity. It’s a state of being. You feel that, don’t you?”

He was drawing a distinction between understanding and feeling, between the fact and my experience of it. “I do feel it,” I said. Also true. I felt it because of what was happening inside my head. The medics had explained this to me. There was a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, not strictly part of the limbic system. It modulated moral judgment, and it was the last area the node would infiltrate and manipulate. I said, “It feels like… well, like standing on the porch of a house on a winter night. There are people inside, and in a way they’re family…”

Oscar liked that: he beamed and smiled.

“But I can’t shake the thought that if I cross that door I won’t be welcome. Because they’ll know me for what I am.”

“What are you?”

“Different. Foreign. Ugly. Hateful.”

“Different in your history, but not in any way that matters.”

“You’re wrong about that, Oscar.”

“Am I? You can’t be sure until you let us know you.”

“I don’t want to be known.”

“Whatever it is you’re hiding from us, I promise it won’t make a difference to Vox.”