Transcendence (5 page)

“
With joy, I grieve for your certain death in service to our great nation,” he told them. “This hour, this day, this action, the next few decades, we will all die—”

“
Why the fuck do you always do this?” Jhishra growled.

“
Yeah, today was startin’ so good.”

“—
so I offer you my pleasant grief,” Nadir continued, oblivious to the insults. “Peace, and don’t forget you’re alive right now.”

The car reached maximum speed—114 kph, according to feed from the little computer that ran the vehicle. Nadir frowned; that was slower than last action, which was slower than the last, and so on. When they first landed near Algiers, all the cars maxed at 150. Everything dies, some slowly, some in a rush. Entropy is as holy as anything else in this godforsaken universe, but that doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to fight it.

“
Why do you say that every morning?” Paolo asked.

Nadir turned to look at the boy’s pinched face, wind whipping his sandy hair. He was tossed like a puppet as they lurched across uneven terrain. Though the motors screamed and wind howled over the sharply raked windscreen, he could clearly hear Paolo who was seated against his shoulder. This was a basic infantry-transport car, built of a one-piece shell with wheel/motor units linked via a simple suspension bolted to the shell. A dim-witted computer controlled direction, speed, obstacle avoidance, and so on. Spaciousness wasn’t one of its designers’ concerns. So Nadir was able to respond intheflesh despite noise.

“
Does it bother you?” he asked.

“
Ah, hell, subbs! How couldn’t it?”

“
No one escapes death,” Nadir said. “No one. Our marks, they were alive only minutes ago. Remember Sogold? She was alive until zone gamma. No one escapes it, though some delay the inevitable. Some fear death so much they encase themselves in padded tombs and step so cautiously through life that their feet never touch the hard stone of its surface, their lungs never fill with its sizzling air.”

The car lurched left to avoid a half-buried bunker whose gun slit had been ripped wide open. Gleaming fragments of metal lay scattered outward from the exploded side. Paolo nearly fell across Nadir’s lap before regaining balance, holding himself in place with both strong fists wrapped around dashboard wimp-handles.

“
You’ve got to live,” Nadir continued when Paolo looked back at him. “The moment you were born, you began to die. It’s in the genes, warrior. As surely as I’ll die when my blood drains from my cooling corpse, a man hiding from death in his penthouse apartment will also die. Maybe he’ll last a few more decades, but who gives a shit for decades if they’re hollow? I’d rather live a few blazing years overflowing with life than a lifetime of half empty . . . existence.” He spat. “That’d be like drowning, breathing emptiness in lungs accustomed to and needful of vital air. I came here to escape that fate. Didn’t you?”

He looked forward, watched the scattered band of cars and the command truck weave a pattern of tracks like strands of DNA across the desert sands.

Nadir looked back at the boy. He opened an all-unit bandwidth and asked, “What’s life?”

“
Death!” shouted a Polish girl, her 3VRD barely flickering.

“
You’re starting to learn,” Nadir said with a smile. “Life is survival against the forces of death. Death is an ocean all around us, water carving through rock, finding its way into everything. Life as we know it is like a dance across the seaside cliffs, a dance of killing. You kill, you live. You hide, you drown.

“
Live, soldiers!” he said across the channel. “Make your grief the glorious grief of the condemned, the executioner, whose eyes are wide open and full of the blaze of life at the moment before death.

“
Live, so you can see eternity!”

A number of indistinct 3VRDs appeared overlaid one atop another in Nadir’s vision, cheering and howling like wild animals. Paolo’s eyes glittered with uncomprehending admiration, then turned away to watch the target fortress approach. Slanting sunlight set the cool sand afire.

This boy is alive
, Nadir told himself, feeling a hard smile crease his face. He noticed the eye tic was gone.

He sang.

“
I’m alive,

I’m alive;

I’m the burning sun.

I am ev’ryone.

You’re me.”

Not far from Manhattan, Kansas, EarthCo Feedcontrol Central’s skyscraper rose windowless and monolithic white from a vast expanse of fenced-in metal and concrete. It stood more than a hundred stories above the surrounding jungle of antenna towers. Dozens of white geodesic domes sculpted hills within the technological forest, housing more sensitive and powerful antennae that rotated tirelessly. All this shadowed the floor of the manmade jungle, a vast, glinting phased array antenna. Motionless to the naked eye, it simultaneously transmitted hundreds of thousands of separate subscription-channels and received billions of individual orders from around the world and across the Solar System every few seconds.

In orbit high overhead, countless satellites and micro transmitters wove an electronic blanket around the Earth, linking Feedcontrol Central to thousands of local artificial-intelligence ganglia, which processed and retransmitted data back and forth from the consumers themselves. Feedcontrol needed AIs to handle the switching load because harsh experience had shown that relying on dumb processors led to chain-reaction connectivity failures. The Moon’s dozens of terawatt transceivers and phased arrays extended Feedcontrol’s reach far out into the distant corners of the Solar System. Holding it all together like one big nervous system was the Brain, EarthCo’s nerve center, an orbiting computer the size of a large building.

Inside Feedcontrol Central itself, on the 40
^th
floor, Director Luke Herrschaft strutted through his boardroom, flexing the leg muscles of his renewed body, savoring the exquisite pleasure of simply using such supple limbs. He gazed into a mirrored wall and saw a gymnast look back, completely naked. Pistons and pulleys seemed to seethe beneath the tan skin as he walked, and a thick mass of male genitalia wagged against the thighs.

“
Note: Have Singh continue to work out this body,” he said for future reference. Even the smile tight across his lips and cheeks felt powerful. Nothing like a well-muscled body to build a man’s personal power. He only had to concentrate for a moment to grow an erection.

A single knock on the walnut door warned him to get dressed. Half a second later, he was clothed in his preprogrammed outfit: a conservative Luciano coat, silver-grey, matching pants, and a pair of Sundown slippers. He electronically altered the suit’s tailoring to show off his new muscles yet not appear overstated. For flash, he added an ultra-red Sentile sash that crossed his chest from one shoulder to the waist, where it was fastened with a gold buckle. Holographic letters read “EarthCo” a thousand times in block letters that shifted to script when seen from an angle.

“
Come in,” he said, satisfied with his appearance.

The door opened and in bustled half a dozen of Herrschaft’s top business managers and feed directors, as well as the presidents of the European Union and the United States, and Herrschaft’s personal secretary, Lucilla. He slowly circled the dark table, watching everyone seat themselves, stepping deep into the cream-colored Snowfur floor covering toward his massive suede and platinum-inlaid chair, a Decke design worth 11,000 credits—a bit more than an average EarthCo citizen earned in an average year.

The men and women began to shift in their seats. The air began to fill with dozens and then hundreds of encoded communication packets, a cloud of information icons blossoming in the air. Despite their encoding, Herrschaft could quickly open any one of them and examine the data contained therein; he commanded vast cryptanalytic resources. In fact, few in the room would be aware that he could even see these packets.

His guests had nearly reached the point at which they would break their trained manner and spoke first. That couldn’t be allowed.

Herrschaft launched the meeting. It was important that they realize he made the decisions here. This room was completely shielded against outside feed—with the exception of Luke Herrschaft’s, of course—so they were effectively isolated from their lives and the power they possessed beyond these walls. Once they left, he would allow them to return to being the decision-makers he entrusted with the entire economy of EarthCo’s businesses spanning twelve worlds and worldlets—including EarthCo’s half of planet Earth that NKK didn’t control—and its nine billion citizen-shareholders.

“
Reports,” he said.

The president and CEO of Chrysler/Ford-Sun/GM, a sweet-lipped fortyish woman Herrschaft remembered well from last night, prattled on about losses in the hydrogen-fuel market and how she needed to make a basic program change to get extra exposure and improve interactive sales during the “Solar Colony” program, a daily drama set on Mercury that featured a total-hydrogen-technology society. The show had fared badly when it was solartech: Passive solar panels just don’t explode, so half the plots seemed painfully contrived. Not as if the sheep who subscribed to the program noticed.

That was an absurd request. The changes already made were bad enough. Scenes with cars and personal jets on the Mercurian surface would seem forced even to lackadaisical subscribers, but Manny’s skin was the sweetest thing he’d tasted in months. He felt generous and wanted to return the favor, if only to teach her the foolishness of her idea.

“
Done,” Herrschaft said. “Stevenson, see about that.”

“
Yes, Director,” the producer of that program replied, manually inputting the order via a tabletop fingerpad that was hardwired out of the room. Seeing his people using such archaic technology because he wished it pleased him.

The director of the Big Sixteen bandwidths, Markus Bouring—“Boring” as Herrschaft liked to label him—began a rambling speech about how Literalists and Retropurists had managed to carry out their threat of sabotaging one of the major fantasy individ channels. They stirred up enough sexual guilt in enough of the population in Kansas City to get half a million franchised citizens to feed back a mutating virus for eight straight hours, overloading the local feedcenter’s systems, crashing its databank.

“
In essence, they permanently cut off hundreds of thousands of subscribers from access to their personalized mates,” Bouring said, banging his puny fist against the heavy wood of the table. “It’s not much different than the murder of so many citizens; those semi-sentient individ programs are dead now, all their experience wiped from storage. It’s terrorism, pure and simple. People have the right to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own minds. The Literalists’ claims of our violating obscenity regulations are ludicrous! No one but subscribers can access—”

“
Yes, Markus,” Herrschaft said, tiring of the diatribe. “You want executive authorization to use all possible resources to catch and punish the culprits. Granted. Next.”

And so the meeting went, each supplicant rattling off information of which Herrschaft was usually aware, then requesting special favors and administrative approvals only he could grant.

The President of the United States of America again asked that his constituency be granted a subscriber-fee cut, this time of ten percent.

“
Out of the question!” Herrschaft said.

“
But Director, rates have risen every year since ’62, and it would be the most moral thing to—”

“
Mister President,” Herrschaft said, his voice sharp-edged. “Are you questioning my moral judgment?”

“
Um,” the man said, eyes darting to each of the others seated around the table, finding no one to return his gaze. Except for the EU President. The two of them exchanged a meaningful glance.

“
Yes, Director,” the US President finally replied.

Herrschaft inhaled sharply and held it. Someone coughed quietly. Lucilla’s chrome fingernails tapped something on her pad. The President managed to lock eyes with Herrschaft, de facto ruler of the EarthCo corporate-politic megalith, de facto ruler of half the Solar System, ageless, omnipotent, omnipresent. He who controls all sales and communications controls everything.

Herrschaft smiled. This man had balls. Too bad he wouldn’t be re-elected. He might even be impeached, if Herrschaft’s people could generate a decent ad campaign. Soon.

“
Ladies, gentlemen,” the Director finally said, but the President drew everyone’s attention first.

The middle-aged man from Louisiana had ignited his lighter—a cheap Snicker—and held it to a cord which hung from the side of his retro-style leather briefcase. The cord began to burn; Herrschaft realized what it was.