Virch code, p.19
Virch Code, page 19
The shrugging emoji popped up in reply.
Daelia sighed and got out.
The main building seemed the most logical place to start. The few cars in the lot were clustered close to there, as was the light-rail stop. Probably where everybody congregated. Easier than trying to search all the boat tie-ups one by one.
It was a cheery little place, a triple-wide with white wood siding and blue shutters, a far cry from the brutish concrete of downtown. There was no architectural overlay here, no additional imagery, nothing beyond what was needed simply to sustain contact with abiota.
Daelia fought the urge to take her visor off; doing so, anywhere in this place, would leave her blind. She did undo the face straps and push back her hood, pulling her messy tangled ponytail through its hole.
Judging from the lack of obvious augmented reality here, she didn’t want to look any weirder than she already did.
There was a little hallway that ran the length of the building front, with an empty reception desk. A paper, taped to the front, offered directions. Bathrooms that way, gear storage this way. Clubhouse in the back.
Daelia could hear voices.
“You picking anything up?” she asked Raven. “Is Sean anywhere close?”
Red circle. A head shake.
“Good. Keep your feelers out,” Daelia muttered, and headed toward the voices.
The clubhouse was as intimate and warm as the Singularity’s Wisdom had been grand and cold. A dozen tables with mismatched chairs were scattered through the room, an old sectional turned toward an even older TV. There was a bar on one side of the room, nobody behind it but a few bottles out on the composite counter.
A wide bank of sliding doors led out onto a patio, which overlooked the water. The voices were drifting through from there.
The place reminded her of the 121st’s heritage room. The walls were covered. Photographs, plaques, old metal signs.
A memorial, she realized, looking at the closest set. There were people, names, time of death. All the dates were the same.
January XX, 2026.
Day Four. The day the dams were hit.
“Did you need something?”
Daelia pulled herself away from the memorial, looking back over toward the person who had spoken. It was an older man, just coming in off the patio. His skin was creased, deeply tanned, his hands rough. He had the look of somebody who had spent his entire life outside.
“I’m looking for Pete,” she said, deciding that straightforward was the way to go. “I was told he might be willing to take me upriver.”
The man chuckled. “Told by who?”
“Doctor Jansen,” she said. “Please. It’s important.”
He nodded and gestured for her to follow. “Come on, Pete’s out here.”
There were three other men outside, lounging with their eyes to the water. Two of them had Texas Fish and Wildlife Department uniforms on. The other had a baseball cap pulled down over thick curly hair. They were talking loudly, one of them telling a joke whose references Daelia didn’t understand. One of the Fish and Wildlife guys was vaping.
It reminded her—suddenly, painfully—of the Ops Group’s own flight line deck, the sort of casual ease everyone had with each other, the camaraderie based on nothing more and nothing less than shared purpose. Even on the most boring day, they all had that together.
Daelia realized then, far away from all of it, that she’d started to hope she could be part of it too.
“Pete,” the older guy announced, rapping on the table. “You got a guest.”
The guy in the baseball cap turned around.
It had to be some kind of joke.
If he was seventeen, Daelia would have been shocked.
“Yeah, what’s up?” the teenager asked.
Daelia tried to pull her scattered thoughts back together. “I—”
“She said your grandpa sent her down here. Needs a ride.”
“Yeah? Where to?” the teenager asked, as casually as if he had women in battered panoply suits show up and ask him for favors every day of the week.
“Upriver,” she said. “To, uh…” And she found herself gesturing at her own head with her good hand. “You don’t have a monocle.”
“Never mess with that shit,” he said.
“This place,” she said, and pulled up the location and logo for him on Raven’s small screen.
All the men on the patio were watching her now. Tension filled the air.
“What?” she asked.
“You know what this place is?” the old guy said.
She took a chance. “Aaru. Right?”
The old guy was nonplussed. “And you know what they do there?”
And, thinking about the conversation with Jansen, Daelia offered something on faith. “Yeah,” she said, and pushed up her visor. “It’s where they’re processing the Unity candidates before sending them down to my base to get shipped off.”
One of the Fish and Wildlife guys leaned in toward the other. “See, I fuckin’ told you the Guard was going to get involved.”
“Orders from Dallas?” the other one asked Daelia pointedly. “I hope? After that space lift launch last night?”
“You can’t tell anybody about this,” she said, cursing internally. Shit. Argo would have handled this better. “It’s, uh, not something that I, we, can talk about publicly yet.”
“You ought to start talking. Damn military. Defuse this shit before it gets any worse,” the first guy said. “You see the protests going on in Houston or Dallas right now?”
What? “No, no,” she said. “I’ve been kind of busy.”
“I’ll take you,” the kid, Pete, said, and got up. “Close to afternoon patrol time anyway, right?”
There were a few people out on the small floating docks, but for the most part, the marina was quiet. The boats, however, ranged from crappy to high-end, and the high-end ones were definitely in the majority.
“It’s a playground,” Pete said, when Daelia asked him about it. He was leading her out to the furthest end of the marina. “Some of the supervisors from Tarrytown like to go boating, and they’ve got the money to do it. The rest of our customers are locals who scrape by. Outlying communities mostly, or living off savings while they wait for placement. We’ve even got a few people who live on their boats.” As if to punctuate this, he waved at somebody who was busy washing the back end of a boat that had a tent pitched up behind the wheel.
“I didn’t think anybody in the booville had money.”
“You tithe ninety percent to Omphalos,” he said. “Keep the rest. With everything being taken care of, that ten percent is all play money.”
Daelia thought about some of the people she’d seen in the inner core. “You sure about that?”
“Out here anyway. Supervisors get paid a lot.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s all bullshit anyway. Most folks just go out on the water to get high.”
“High?”
“Virch, tech-heads,” he said, and pointed at another boat. The hull looked like any flat-bottomed lake craft, but had a gray geodesic dome, seven feet tall and covered with opaque panels, built right into the hull. “They say the rocking motion is a good analog for zero gravity, so most people just come out here to be in those kinds of environments.” He sighed. “It’s so stupid. I mean, look at this place. Why not actually go to space if you want to see it?”
Daelia had done a fair bit of traveling in her younger years, following her parents around to conferences or the kickoff meetings for big projects. She’d been to places like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Hawaii. Compared to that, there was nothing particularly impressive about the shallow canyon that the Colorado River had cut for itself here.
But even with the damage from the postwar flood, it was wild and open and raw. Daelia supposed that it could be appealing, if you lived in a place where everybody spent every waking minute with a visor over their face.
“Space isn’t all that great,” she said.
“You’ve been up there?”
“Yeah, once.”
“What was it like?”
Daelia considered her answer. This kid had offered to take her upriver after all, and he seemed genuinely curious about it. “Big,” she said. “You could go. I think, outside of the Unity expo bullshit, they allow visitors fourteen years old and up. If your parents can afford it.”
“We’ve got plenty of money,” he said, and thumped his chest. “But I’m going to go myself someday.”
There was some nuance here that Daelia was missing, and frankly, she didn’t really care. “Where’s your boat?”
“Right here,” he said, and gestured at the next slip. “Come on. We’ll get her started and get you up there.” He hopped onto the watercraft with expert ease and turned around to offer her a hand. Daelia almost rolled her eyes, but the boat was moving a bit in the water, and with her left hand dead… She let him help her in. “What are you going to do at this Aaru place anyway?”
“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “Gotta get there first. Then we’ll see.”
As Pete went to fire up the engines, Daelia felt Raven buzzing in her pocket. She frowned as she pulled the phone out. “What?” she asked the little abiota.
The triangular warning emoji popped up, huge and yellow, followed by a parade of female face-palms and generic visors.
Daelia realized she hadn’t pulled hers back on and flipped it back down over her eyes quickly. “Danger?” she asked. “Where?”
The train emoji.
And Daelia looked up, back toward the shore and the clubhouse and the parking lot, where the light rail was just pulling in.
“Pete?”
“Yeah?”
“We need to get the hell out of here. Right now.”
29
“What a miserable nightmare,” Boyd commented as they walked up to the euphemistically named Tarrytown Yacht Club. “Who enjoys this sort of thing?”
“Boating?” Elrod replied. “Eh, it’s not so bad.”
“Yeah, I guess that doctor liked it,” Boyd said, and laughed.
Sean had no desire to laugh about the doctor.
The priest at the Singularity’s Wisdom had mentioned that Doctor Jansen had been the last human to interact with Daelia, and the old man hadn’t had a NULI, so he had no excuses for not recognizing her. Then, he had had no excuses for not answering their questions directly.
Sean had barely questioned the man at all. Hadn’t hurt him physically. No, not at all. A few minutes in a virch pod with an interrogation program uploaded by her shouldn’t have been a problem. Nothing should have gone wrong.
But after the man gave up the information about giving Daelia his car and telling her to go to the marina, he had died. Grand mal seizure, right there in the pod.
It was—
necessary
Necessary.
“This place serves its purpose,” Sean said, looking around as his new security detail fanned out. There weren’t many people here today, but enough that the presence of so many kugus was causing alarm. If Daelia was indeed here, they didn’t have much time. “As do we all.”
Boyd just stared around, not responding.
He was beginning to act strange, Sean had noticed. Boyd, normally, was the consummate soldier. A little serious, a little sarcastic, but always on point when the need arose. He’d always been a tech-head, a true believer, but he had always expressed it before in an understated, easygoing kind of way.
Today he was angry, snapping at everything, everybody. It wasn’t like him. It was something that Sean needed to—
No, no, he didn’t need to worry about it at all. Boyd was acting exactly as he needed to, exactly as he ought to. Just as Sean was. They were on the hunt, and that was all that mattered.
do not worry about him
He could almost feel the tendril of thought wipe away his concern.
What was he doing again?
“Boss?” Elrod asked.
“Spread out, search the docks,” he said, pulling himself back to meatspace. “I’ll deal with whoever’s in charge here.”
“Looks like they’ve decided to come talk to us,” Boyd said, nodding at an older guy who’d just stepped out on the front porch of the clubhouse.
And Boyd was right, he realized. It was a miserable little place. No AR, no Internet, no way of reaching out to that bigger world, the endless expanse of the abiota’s true realm. It was all meatspace, grubby and old, its flaws on display for the entire world, its deficiencies undeniable.
He felt an aversion to it then, something stronger than he had ever felt before.
Why, why was he so damn irritated? He was a Marine, he’d spent plenty of time on boats and at docks and always found them—
No. Of course.
there is only me
“There’s only her,” he muttered, and this time, Elrod wasn’t there to ask him about it.
“Can I help you?” the yacht club manager said, coming down to the sidewalk.
“Yes,” Sean said, pulling his scattered thoughts back together. “We’re with the Austin BUI Mediation Office and we’re investigating a missing persons case.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, she wasn’t present this morning for her factory’s roll call, and we just want to make sure she’s alright.”
Another man, this one in a state Fish and Wildlife Department uniform, came out. “What’s going on, Mike?” he asked the manager. Sean realized that neither one of them was broadcasting metadata. He felt a deep swell of irritation at this fact.
“I have no idea, Rick,” the old man said cautiously. Sean realized they were both looking at him. Shit. It was showing on his face. “People go missing from factory roll call all the time.”
“It is true,” Sean said, struggling to keep himself afloat. He felt like he was in a locked room that was slowly filling up with water. Something was trying to—no. Not drown him. He wasn’t drowning. Everything was fine. Everything is fine. “People do leave the Austin BUI Enclave from time to time, but we have procedures for such things, and all are treated with dignity.”
“Uh-huh?” the old man asked. “Why’d’ya have this many security kugus with you if it’s just some wayward girl?”
Sean felt the irritation again, but this time, it wasn’t threatening to consume him. Good. That was good. “This individual, we believe, has committed theft. Intellectual property theft, the absolute worst kind.”
“So now you care about stealing when it’s your own shit that goes missing?” the old man asked.
“Mike, let me handle this,” the game warden said, and stepped forward. “Rick Olsen. I’m one of the regional leads for this section of the Colorado River. What brings you to the marina today?”
“This girl,” he said, and held out his hand, where Daelia’s image could clearly be seen.
The game warden squinted at him in confusion, and then, with a big sigh, took out his phone. Luddites, all of them, refusing to get NULIs, refusing to accept that the world was different now, Sean thought.
“She’s cute. Smart too, if she had the wits to leave y’all,” the game warden said.
“She has something we need back,” Sean said, and tried a different tack. “Look, we’re both law enforcement and—”
“Don’t pull that law enforcement card with me, Mediator, uh…”
This, Sean thought. This was why AR was so important. If the game warden had been connected to the AR overlay, he would have known this without having to be told. “Robinson.”
“Okay, Mediator Robinson. You aren’t law enforcement, you’re law avoidance, last time I checked.”
“It’s a system that works well for the enclave.”
“And is horrendous for everyone in the outlying communities. I’ve spent years working this stretch of the river. I know what that trickle-down impact is.”
Sean bristled. “We have agreements,” he said. “We have—”
And then a hit came through the security network.
Peter Jansen.
“Go?” The teenager looked at her, confusion on his sunburned face. He glanced back down the wharf. “What the hell are that many security kugus doing here?”
It had to be the ones from the train, Daelia thought, it just had to be. She’d taken Jansen’s car. Of course Sean had tracked her here. There was probably some way to trace it or follow it or catalog its location…
Raven cawed, pecking at Daelia’s right fist, the little control pad there.
“Is your patch going to hold?”
A green check mark.
“Who’re you talking to?” Pete demanded.
“Emergent phone,” she said, and looked at him. “We need to go.”
“We can’t,” he protested. “Getting in trouble with the Mediation Office gets you kicked out.”
“I thought you hated it here!”
“I do, but fuck, my parents would probably shrivel up and die if they were forced to leave.”
The kugus were close now, checking every boat on the quay. There was a human with them. Sean. Had to be Sean. Daelia glanced overboard, but there was no way she was swimming anywhere. Not with her arm.
Instead, she yanked the hood back over her head, pulled the strips back down over her face.
“What’re you doing?” Pete asked.
“I need your help,” she said as she wedged herself into the only cover offered on the bowrider, partial obscurement behind the passenger seat. “They shouldn’t be able to see me. Pretend like I’m not here.”
He frowned. “Why should I?” he said.
Daelia chanced one look back. Shit. That human was only one boat away. She curled up, trying to tuck herself into as small of a package as possible. It didn’t matter, it wouldn’t mean anything if the panoply wasn’t working right, but something about it made her feel better. “Unity’s a fraud.”
Pete’s mouth fell open. “Are you sure?” he hissed back, quiet now.
Daelia nodded.
And then she felt the shadow of one of the kugus fall over her.
