Lord and Lady Vexel were sitting by the fire one evening, relaxing after having just wrapping up their latest case which their Boswell, Jane Gray, insisted upon calling "The Escape of the Mad Boffins". Lady Vexel held her tea cup - Chamomile, one teaspoon honey - in one hand, the Journal of Applied Thaumaturgy in her lap, while Lord Vexel lazily scanned through the many copies of the Times that they had not had the chance to read for leisure while racing along the moors earlier in the week.
"Hogwash," Lord Vexel said, through his walrus mustache (it so needed to be trimmed, Lady Vexel thought, but her hints to that effect hadn't yet penetrated her husband's brain).
"What's that, Robert?" Lady Vexel said, looking up from her journal.
"All this society rubbish ... pure, unadulterated hogwash, the lot of it!"
"Oh?" Lady Vexel said, sipping at the still hot tea.
"Listen to this, Emily," Lord Vexel replied. "Daring Adventurer Wins New Beauty's Hand:
Wealthy Dame Theosophilia Von Trapp recently announced the betrothal of her beautiful daughter Moss to Capt. James De Woldt, after a daring race pit the decorated fighter ace against scion of society Sir Alan Pathe."
"Oh yes," Lady Vexel smiled, her eyes lighting up as she remembered the society gossip. "It was a truly romantic story. Moss was ... a wallflower, not truly hideous, mind you, but certainly very plain, and Dame Von Trapp despaired at ever finding a suitable match for her. In time, she finally summoned up her courage (and her carriage) and called our colleague Dr. Eigenstatd to their estates at ... um, Tor Trapp. For several weeks, he worked his magic upon the young girl: a nip here, a tuck there, a few strategically placed saline balloons, and by the time he was done, he'd positively transformed her. She was beautiful, and so ready for society."
"Soon Sir Pathe and the good Captain both fell under her spell, and things were coming to a head, especially since the Captain, while well-decorated, was certainly not the social catch that a peer of the realm would have been. However, I have been given to understand that Moss actually preferred the dashing captain, and rather shuddered at her mother's choice. So, before being locked into a marriage that she didn't want, young Moss came up with a most ingenius test - both of her prospective beaus were to start at the other end of the island and race to their home. The one who arrived first would be the one to receive her hand in marriage.
"The story was in the paper for several days - each day with the press eagerly following both men, through swamp and over mountain and across arid desert land. For a while, it looked like Sir Pathe would win out regardless, but on the last day he ran afoul of pygmy hairdressers and the good Captain was able to reach the doors of Tor Trapp first."
"Hah," barked Lord Vexel, who was rather more enamored with the values of his own class than Lady Vexel thought good for him, "it was just pure luck that this chappie won out."
"No, my dear husband," Lady Vexel said, her voice sweet with romance, "It was destiny, pure and simple."
"Destiny? Hogwash!"
"No dear. Surely it is obvious ..."
"Eh?"
"Oh, yes," Lady Vexel purred. "You see, if you build a better Moss Trapp, then De Woldt will always beat a Pathe to the Tor."
"Er ... um ... yes," Lord Vexel muttered. "Geoffrey, where is my brandy?!"
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Launching Kurt Cagle's Notebook
I've always written, but never really intended to be a writer. In fifth grade, our teacher would pass out spelling words to study for the week and we, her rambunctious students, were to use them in sentences to illustrate that we in fact knew what it was we were working with. A few weeks after receiving these, I got tired of writing seemingly disconnected sentences one numbered sentence after the next, and decided then and there to make use of each word in the context of a story, usually about a ten year old detective character that I had envisioned. My teacher was a little bewildered at first but decided that it wouldn't hurt, and over the course of the next year I ended up writing forty stories, including my magnum opus final story that spanned about ten pages ... each and every one of which including that week's spelling words. I was a strange kid, even then.
I wrote poetry in high school, and essays on trains that won the Illinois State Student Historical contest, and wrote tales from the world of Jorde. The latter was my first real taste of writing fantasy - I had finished the LotR series in 8th grade and had encountered the just published Dungeons and Dragons in the 9th, and so of course was primed. I started telling my youngest brother - at that time just entering elementary school - about the Lady Tanea, mage and healer, the charismatic Ren the Bard, the valiant and ultimately tragic knight Ten Aguar, and their adventures in the wilds of a world called Jorde, based on the Swedish word for Earth. A quarter century later, my brother has now written extensively for Wizards of the Coast, and I like to think I may have had something to do with that.
During my college years, I wrote fairly prolifically (most of the stories that are now extant on the web from me came from that period), and eventually ended up publishing and editing a small fantasy magazine called Arcane which actually saw three issues in print before we finally pulled the plug. It proved a useful experience in later years - I have spent far more time working for publishing companies of one stripe or another than I have for "formal" companies, and have been a managing editor for both magazines and, later, websites. Yet over the years I also transitioned away from writing fantasy and towards writing technical analysis or computer programming books, though the goal of getting a paperback series in print has always been one of my major ones.
Fast forward a quarter of a century. I'm establishing web policy with the W3C, helping to build the US National Archives electronic records archives, and have more than a dozen books in print ... and yet ... I still occasionally write fiction, and the storytelling urge is perhaps stronger in me today than it has been in years. I'm republishing a lot of my older work that has faded - sometimes chapters of incompleted stories that I still need to finish, sometimes existing shorter works - but am also going to start publishing my latest works here.
Why not write a book? I've already decided that I will, but it will likely be self-published. Why? Because the traditional book publishing infrastructure in this country is on its last legs, because there is very little "value-add" that I feel a traditional publisher can give me, and because my goal is not to become fabulously wealthy from my writing, but simply to have a vehicle where I CAN write and be published.
On the other hand, writing on the web has two advantages - it provides a ready made audience who will likely make their own comments, and in some respects it's far more likely to be read. This was one of those realizations that is far from obvious. A few years ago, unless I had a blockbuster, I might reach an audience of 10,000 or 20,000 fans if I was very lucky, over the brief shelf-like of the book. If I wasn't - the book might very well sit in limbo, waiting to be published, as likely to be cut as not if there was a long enough queue, or the market didn't look right, or the company in question suddenly found themselves well believe third quarter projections.
I'm far more likely to have people read it, far more likely to develop a fan base, if I publish it to the web. Some of my stories, have been read more than 100,000 times. Not all, by any means, and there are a few stories that have also disappeared into the sinkhole of time, but I believe that in this day and age, if you want to be read, then writing for the web is ultimately the best option.
So this is my home for experiments - chapters I'm working on, short stories, even character sketches and ideas. It'll be where I sell eBooks or physicals when I get that far. Feel free to comment - I can't know what people think unless I hear from them.
During my college years, I wrote fairly prolifically (most of the stories that are now extant on the web from me came from that period), and eventually ended up publishing and editing a small fantasy magazine called Arcane which actually saw three issues in print before we finally pulled the plug. It proved a useful experience in later years - I have spent far more time working for publishing companies of one stripe or another than I have for "formal" companies, and have been a managing editor for both magazines and, later, websites. Yet over the years I also transitioned away from writing fantasy and towards writing technical analysis or computer programming books, though the goal of getting a paperback series in print has always been one of my major ones.
Fast forward a quarter of a century. I'm establishing web policy with the W3C, helping to build the US National Archives electronic records archives, and have more than a dozen books in print ... and yet ... I still occasionally write fiction, and the storytelling urge is perhaps stronger in me today than it has been in years. I'm republishing a lot of my older work that has faded - sometimes chapters of incompleted stories that I still need to finish, sometimes existing shorter works - but am also going to start publishing my latest works here.
Why not write a book? I've already decided that I will, but it will likely be self-published. Why? Because the traditional book publishing infrastructure in this country is on its last legs, because there is very little "value-add" that I feel a traditional publisher can give me, and because my goal is not to become fabulously wealthy from my writing, but simply to have a vehicle where I CAN write and be published.
On the other hand, writing on the web has two advantages - it provides a ready made audience who will likely make their own comments, and in some respects it's far more likely to be read. This was one of those realizations that is far from obvious. A few years ago, unless I had a blockbuster, I might reach an audience of 10,000 or 20,000 fans if I was very lucky, over the brief shelf-like of the book. If I wasn't - the book might very well sit in limbo, waiting to be published, as likely to be cut as not if there was a long enough queue, or the market didn't look right, or the company in question suddenly found themselves well believe third quarter projections.
I'm far more likely to have people read it, far more likely to develop a fan base, if I publish it to the web. Some of my stories, have been read more than 100,000 times. Not all, by any means, and there are a few stories that have also disappeared into the sinkhole of time, but I believe that in this day and age, if you want to be read, then writing for the web is ultimately the best option.
So this is my home for experiments - chapters I'm working on, short stories, even character sketches and ideas. It'll be where I sell eBooks or physicals when I get that far. Feel free to comment - I can't know what people think unless I hear from them.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
The Bells of Ys Chapter 8
[Beginning of Story]
Kira
The bar had seen better days, though Kira suspected that they had probably been in her great grandfather's time. Ancient beat-up pickup trucks, many sporting the old Ford logo from a time before it had been bought up by GM, formed an obstacle course in the mud-soaked parking lot. Even out there the country fusion could be distinctly heard, and the smell of mud competed with beer and piss in equal measure.
This was not what she had in mind for getting dinner, but the long, slow depression had hit especially hard in these areas. The mom and pop eateries were all gone now, as gone as the small towns that supported them. Those people who were left were generally too poor or too stubborn to leave, and so spent the evenings spending what little they did have at dives like this one.
She couldn't do anything about the car other than part it out of the light - it practically screamed that she was from a different social strata than anyone here, but she was able to pull on a grungier sweater and pair of jeans, leaving the electronics in her purse. She'd not pass for a native, but at least she wouldn't look like she was nouveau rich slumming.
The noise and smell hit her like a while as she opened up the screen door of Nick's Bar and made her way inside, stale beer and sweat and urine and hopelessness masquerading as a good time. She wasn't the only woman, thankfully, though she suspected, given the amount of skin exposed, that more than a few of the women here used this as their professional base of operation. She made her way through the crowd and found a small table in the back just being vacated, and she took it just as the waitress came to clean up the last couple's mess.
"Do you have anything to eat?" she asked, practically shouting to be heard.
"Grill's still open," the waitress replied, a faux blonde who looked like she also occasionally moonlighted on the side, but she returned Kira's haggard smile with a ragged one of her own. She pulled out a laminated menu, still slightly damp from being recently wiped down, then hurried off in summons from a bellow in the kitchen. "I'll be right back, sweetie."
It wasn't the Four Seasons, but Kira was vaguely surprised at the fact that the menu actually had more than popcorn and peanuts. When the blonde waitress, Charlene (according to the nametag just visible in the low light of the bar), came back, Kira ordered a mushroom omelette and some coffee. She normally wasn't one for eggs and coffee this late at night, but a bad feeling nagged at her that she'd need the calories and caffeine in the hours ahead.
Her escape had been too easy. The ruse that she'd used was intended to buy her time, nothing else. They wanted to avoid arresting her in a way that she'd have some chance of at least notifying her protectors that she was in danger. They'd forced her to react, to run to the most obscure place in the region, and she could easily meet with an accident along the way. She was probably paranoid for thinking like this, but paranoia was an easy thing to succumb to right now, especially as the feds had a habit of "disappearing" people who asked too many questions.
Charlene came back with her dinner/breakfast a few minutes later, and even in the dark she could tell that the waitress was no more a blonde than she was. In many ways it was comforting; the blondes that she knew were too California for her, even Tina. It was a part of what had eventually ended their relationship. Tina was intelligent, much more intelligent than she gave herself credit for, but the journalist was what she thought of as a "sun-person", someone who deliberately played down her intelligence to appear perky and sunny to fit into the whole female news-anchor schtick.
Kira ate in silence, deliberately not thinking about her current predicament. Even if the crest wasn't coming, Tina wouldn't have a job for much longer. She did ask questions, the wrong sort of questions, and more than once she'd lost out on that chance at being picked up by one of the nationals because she was something of a rarity - a journalist who actually who actually did investigate things, rather than being a talking head.
She glanced up at one of the TVs playing a news feed from FOX. They used sims for most of their "desk" reporting, computer generated news agents that had been carefully constructed to appear more perfect than humanly possible, with teams of marketing psychologists tailoring these news droids to appeal to this demographic or that one. They weren't obviously CG - she had to give their programmers credit for that at least - but to an eye trained for dealing with modeling and simulations they were obvious. And as the kinks were worked out on the high end, they would come down in price, and Tina, intelligent, thoughtful Tina, would be yet another victim of the great race to virtualization.
Kira would have missed the story, having turned back to her dinner, except that she caught Charlene suddenly freeze mid-stride as the waitress glanced at the TV. Following her gaze, Kira watched stunned as she saw her own face looking back at her on national TV, with the caption "Suspected Terrorist" written in large letters above and below her visage. Straining, she could just make out the male sim's deep authoritative voice.
"... wanted in connection with an explosion at the University of Washington that killed three students, Kira is considered armed and dangerous ..."
A shot showed Kraner hall, with major blast damage as paramedics carted away sheet covered bodies away from her ... her office, visible from the outside. The screen then switched to photos of the three students, and Kira couldn't help the gasp that left her. Her students. Janice Wright, Lisa Blane, and Mark ... oh, god, not Mark! The fork slipped from her hand and clanged too loudly on the plate, but she just sat there, paler than a ghost.
Then there was an arm shaking her, Charlene's arm tugging at her while trying not to be obvious about it.
"Come on, we need to get you out of here. Several police cars just pulled up outside."
"Wha-?"
"Girlfriend, move it!"
Shaking the shock from her face, Kira let the waitress pull her to her feet, then they both lurched toward the bathroom. Once the door locked behind them, Charlene pulled the blonde wig off her head to reveal a close-cut haircut, her natural hair a coppery red, and handed the wig to Kira. She also slipped off the apron, and, palming a key from the apron's pocket, stuffed it into one of the small storage lockers that were obviously used by the waitresses to store their clothes.
"Why?" Kira started to ask, but Charlene held her hand up.
"No questions, not now. We're two punk chicks, out for a little fun, and neither you nor I saw the waitress or the wanted terrorist."
"I - ... yeah," Kira said, quickly stepping into the role.
They went back outside, holding hands, and walked right past the three policemen that had just walked inside. One of the gargolyes, stood at the bar, backed turned to her, talking to the bartender, and Kira hurried faster. She had no doubt that he would recognize her, wig or no, and Kira felt an urgent desire to put as much distance between her and the gargoyle as possible.
They walked past a couple of other cops, Kira listening intently to a story Charlene was telling about her brother's latest escapades with the rain, which involved, among other things, waking up after a flood to find that his bed had floated out of his trailor and was now perched atop the hen house. One cop eyed them briefly, but then shook his head and went inside.
They made it to Charlene's truck, a battered old Buick that was probably on its third antique restoration job, and after an agonizing minute of listening to the ancient starter turn over, the truck kicked into gear. Charlene drove it casually out of the lot until there were out of sight of the bar, turned onto a small side-road, then she floored the accelerator until the truck's old analog speedometer was pushing the hundred mile an hour marker.
All this time, Kira sat silently, not really even aware of the breakneck speed they were making over the gravelled roads. A few turns later, Charlene stopped the truck, reached under her seat, and pulled out a petite, and no doubt very lethal, revolver and pointed it at Kira.
"I've just made myself an accessory to a felony, Kira Livingston. Tell me you had nothing to do with what I just saw on the TV, or we go back, and I add kidnapping to the rap sheet."
"I just lost three students, among them a very close friend, to ..." Kira swallowed hard. "I ... I didn't do that. Oh, God, I couldn't do that."
The wave of grief hit her then. Mark was gone, Janice and Lisa. Janice was ... had been ... a very shy but bright young woman who was studying to be a physicist. Lisa had been bitten hard by the weather bug, and was studying ecological science. Mark ... her personal computer nerd, a friend who'd helped her program some of the simulations for the paper, and who was due to graduate this year. She was their teacher, their mentor. Was she responsible for their deaths?
She looked up, with tears in her eyes, and realized that Charlene had lowered the gun and was threatening to cry as well. "What happened?"
Kira collected herself, wiped her tears on her sleeve. "I'm a professor at the University. I wrote a paper recently warning that the earth's climate system was in imminent danger of collapse, probably within no more than a few months tops. Someone in the government apparently realized that if I went public with this, all of his business ventures would collapse, and so he sent some agents after me today to make me disappear. Several of my colleagues that I've been collaborating with have died mysteriously, and I suspect I was next."
Charlene looked at her, nodding. "Go on."
"They came for me, but I'd installed surveillance systems in my office because my dad had been killed by some of the same people, and they were afraid that they'd be picked up on record and cause more than a minor political embarassment. I left shortly after they showed up, managed to elude pursuit. I suspect they planted a bomb to wipe out any recordings of them, and to provide a convenient excuse to pick me up legitimately. I swear, I had nothing to do with ...."
Without another word, Charlene put the gun back under the seat and started the truck back up.
"Where ... where are we going?"
"We need to put as much distance between us and your friends as possible, and need to find new wheels. It won't take them long to realize that they let the two of us walk out under their noses, and when they do they'll be pissed."
"You ... believe me?" Kira asked, fighting hard to regain her composure.
"Sweetie, I believed you the moment I saw your face staring at that damn TV set. I got my own issues with the Man, going way, way back."
She didn't say another word, and they drove into the night.
Kira
The bar had seen better days, though Kira suspected that they had probably been in her great grandfather's time. Ancient beat-up pickup trucks, many sporting the old Ford logo from a time before it had been bought up by GM, formed an obstacle course in the mud-soaked parking lot. Even out there the country fusion could be distinctly heard, and the smell of mud competed with beer and piss in equal measure.
This was not what she had in mind for getting dinner, but the long, slow depression had hit especially hard in these areas. The mom and pop eateries were all gone now, as gone as the small towns that supported them. Those people who were left were generally too poor or too stubborn to leave, and so spent the evenings spending what little they did have at dives like this one.
She couldn't do anything about the car other than part it out of the light - it practically screamed that she was from a different social strata than anyone here, but she was able to pull on a grungier sweater and pair of jeans, leaving the electronics in her purse. She'd not pass for a native, but at least she wouldn't look like she was nouveau rich slumming.
The noise and smell hit her like a while as she opened up the screen door of Nick's Bar and made her way inside, stale beer and sweat and urine and hopelessness masquerading as a good time. She wasn't the only woman, thankfully, though she suspected, given the amount of skin exposed, that more than a few of the women here used this as their professional base of operation. She made her way through the crowd and found a small table in the back just being vacated, and she took it just as the waitress came to clean up the last couple's mess.
"Do you have anything to eat?" she asked, practically shouting to be heard.
"Grill's still open," the waitress replied, a faux blonde who looked like she also occasionally moonlighted on the side, but she returned Kira's haggard smile with a ragged one of her own. She pulled out a laminated menu, still slightly damp from being recently wiped down, then hurried off in summons from a bellow in the kitchen. "I'll be right back, sweetie."
It wasn't the Four Seasons, but Kira was vaguely surprised at the fact that the menu actually had more than popcorn and peanuts. When the blonde waitress, Charlene (according to the nametag just visible in the low light of the bar), came back, Kira ordered a mushroom omelette and some coffee. She normally wasn't one for eggs and coffee this late at night, but a bad feeling nagged at her that she'd need the calories and caffeine in the hours ahead.
Her escape had been too easy. The ruse that she'd used was intended to buy her time, nothing else. They wanted to avoid arresting her in a way that she'd have some chance of at least notifying her protectors that she was in danger. They'd forced her to react, to run to the most obscure place in the region, and she could easily meet with an accident along the way. She was probably paranoid for thinking like this, but paranoia was an easy thing to succumb to right now, especially as the feds had a habit of "disappearing" people who asked too many questions.
Charlene came back with her dinner/breakfast a few minutes later, and even in the dark she could tell that the waitress was no more a blonde than she was. In many ways it was comforting; the blondes that she knew were too California for her, even Tina. It was a part of what had eventually ended their relationship. Tina was intelligent, much more intelligent than she gave herself credit for, but the journalist was what she thought of as a "sun-person", someone who deliberately played down her intelligence to appear perky and sunny to fit into the whole female news-anchor schtick.
Kira ate in silence, deliberately not thinking about her current predicament. Even if the crest wasn't coming, Tina wouldn't have a job for much longer. She did ask questions, the wrong sort of questions, and more than once she'd lost out on that chance at being picked up by one of the nationals because she was something of a rarity - a journalist who actually who actually did investigate things, rather than being a talking head.
She glanced up at one of the TVs playing a news feed from FOX. They used sims for most of their "desk" reporting, computer generated news agents that had been carefully constructed to appear more perfect than humanly possible, with teams of marketing psychologists tailoring these news droids to appeal to this demographic or that one. They weren't obviously CG - she had to give their programmers credit for that at least - but to an eye trained for dealing with modeling and simulations they were obvious. And as the kinks were worked out on the high end, they would come down in price, and Tina, intelligent, thoughtful Tina, would be yet another victim of the great race to virtualization.
Kira would have missed the story, having turned back to her dinner, except that she caught Charlene suddenly freeze mid-stride as the waitress glanced at the TV. Following her gaze, Kira watched stunned as she saw her own face looking back at her on national TV, with the caption "Suspected Terrorist" written in large letters above and below her visage. Straining, she could just make out the male sim's deep authoritative voice.
"... wanted in connection with an explosion at the University of Washington that killed three students, Kira is considered armed and dangerous ..."
A shot showed Kraner hall, with major blast damage as paramedics carted away sheet covered bodies away from her ... her office, visible from the outside. The screen then switched to photos of the three students, and Kira couldn't help the gasp that left her. Her students. Janice Wright, Lisa Blane, and Mark ... oh, god, not Mark! The fork slipped from her hand and clanged too loudly on the plate, but she just sat there, paler than a ghost.
Then there was an arm shaking her, Charlene's arm tugging at her while trying not to be obvious about it.
"Come on, we need to get you out of here. Several police cars just pulled up outside."
"Wha-?"
"Girlfriend, move it!"
Shaking the shock from her face, Kira let the waitress pull her to her feet, then they both lurched toward the bathroom. Once the door locked behind them, Charlene pulled the blonde wig off her head to reveal a close-cut haircut, her natural hair a coppery red, and handed the wig to Kira. She also slipped off the apron, and, palming a key from the apron's pocket, stuffed it into one of the small storage lockers that were obviously used by the waitresses to store their clothes.
"Why?" Kira started to ask, but Charlene held her hand up.
"No questions, not now. We're two punk chicks, out for a little fun, and neither you nor I saw the waitress or the wanted terrorist."
"I - ... yeah," Kira said, quickly stepping into the role.
They went back outside, holding hands, and walked right past the three policemen that had just walked inside. One of the gargolyes, stood at the bar, backed turned to her, talking to the bartender, and Kira hurried faster. She had no doubt that he would recognize her, wig or no, and Kira felt an urgent desire to put as much distance between her and the gargoyle as possible.
They walked past a couple of other cops, Kira listening intently to a story Charlene was telling about her brother's latest escapades with the rain, which involved, among other things, waking up after a flood to find that his bed had floated out of his trailor and was now perched atop the hen house. One cop eyed them briefly, but then shook his head and went inside.
They made it to Charlene's truck, a battered old Buick that was probably on its third antique restoration job, and after an agonizing minute of listening to the ancient starter turn over, the truck kicked into gear. Charlene drove it casually out of the lot until there were out of sight of the bar, turned onto a small side-road, then she floored the accelerator until the truck's old analog speedometer was pushing the hundred mile an hour marker.
All this time, Kira sat silently, not really even aware of the breakneck speed they were making over the gravelled roads. A few turns later, Charlene stopped the truck, reached under her seat, and pulled out a petite, and no doubt very lethal, revolver and pointed it at Kira.
"I've just made myself an accessory to a felony, Kira Livingston. Tell me you had nothing to do with what I just saw on the TV, or we go back, and I add kidnapping to the rap sheet."
"I just lost three students, among them a very close friend, to ..." Kira swallowed hard. "I ... I didn't do that. Oh, God, I couldn't do that."
The wave of grief hit her then. Mark was gone, Janice and Lisa. Janice was ... had been ... a very shy but bright young woman who was studying to be a physicist. Lisa had been bitten hard by the weather bug, and was studying ecological science. Mark ... her personal computer nerd, a friend who'd helped her program some of the simulations for the paper, and who was due to graduate this year. She was their teacher, their mentor. Was she responsible for their deaths?
She looked up, with tears in her eyes, and realized that Charlene had lowered the gun and was threatening to cry as well. "What happened?"
Kira collected herself, wiped her tears on her sleeve. "I'm a professor at the University. I wrote a paper recently warning that the earth's climate system was in imminent danger of collapse, probably within no more than a few months tops. Someone in the government apparently realized that if I went public with this, all of his business ventures would collapse, and so he sent some agents after me today to make me disappear. Several of my colleagues that I've been collaborating with have died mysteriously, and I suspect I was next."
Charlene looked at her, nodding. "Go on."
"They came for me, but I'd installed surveillance systems in my office because my dad had been killed by some of the same people, and they were afraid that they'd be picked up on record and cause more than a minor political embarassment. I left shortly after they showed up, managed to elude pursuit. I suspect they planted a bomb to wipe out any recordings of them, and to provide a convenient excuse to pick me up legitimately. I swear, I had nothing to do with ...."
Without another word, Charlene put the gun back under the seat and started the truck back up.
"Where ... where are we going?"
"We need to put as much distance between us and your friends as possible, and need to find new wheels. It won't take them long to realize that they let the two of us walk out under their noses, and when they do they'll be pissed."
"You ... believe me?" Kira asked, fighting hard to regain her composure.
"Sweetie, I believed you the moment I saw your face staring at that damn TV set. I got my own issues with the Man, going way, way back."
She didn't say another word, and they drove into the night.
Sunday, September 26, 2004
The Bells of Ys Chapter 7
[To Beginning of Story]
Tina
After more than a hundred years of dealing with rain in all of its various forms, Seattleites become connoisseurs of the stuff, just as they have become experts at coffee and micro-brew beers. Like the Innuit and their twenty four different words for snow, we in Seattle recognize the distinction between rain, drizzle, mist, light mist, light drizzle, showers, storms, rain-breaks, heavy fog, deluges, and so forth. It's not just a matter of how much rain is coming down, but what the clouds look like, how much light is available, the smell in the air, how intermittent the rain is, even the shape of the rain drops.
It was still raining when I pulled up to Hal Lindstrom's condo, but this was a heavy mist rather than the steady deluge of earlier in the day. The area, about a mile south of Medina off the northwest edge of Lake Washington, had the curious juxtaposition of partially submerged buildings that had made up the former waterfront a decade ago, along with buildings at the lake's edge that had never been intended to be waterside property. The moniker of "lake" was no longer really true either - rising sea levels had caused both Lake Washington and Lake Union to merge into a single Kidney shaped body of water, wiping out much of the tony real-estate that had built up along their edges, and only an all too temporary dam kept Lake Washington from joining up with the Puget Sound on the south. When that happened, and Kira had told me that it may be some time this year, Seattle would be an island.
And now we were seeing mermaids. I shook my head in spite of myself. Kira was a good friend but more than a little bit of an alarmist, convinced that we were seeing the end of the world in what was probably just some really bad weather. Floods were troublesome, especially for the idiots that wanted a waterside view of the beach, but people adapt. We weren't all going to need to sprout fins and start singing like Ariel any time soon.
Lindstrom's place was surprisingly nice, as was the Mercedes visible from within the open garage. A man was working at the end of it at some kind of bench, and it took me a moment to realize that he was working a potter's wheel. He briefly lifted up his hand in acknowledgement that I was there, then went back to the very delicate ewer that he was shaping there. On the walls were other shaped pottery, some already fired and glazed, others apparently awaiting some rework. The small of baking clay made me suspect that he had a kiln around as well, probably in the semi-walled off alcove behind him.
He finally slowed the wheel and looked up again, a not unhandsome man in his mid-thirties.
"I'm sorry about not getting up immediately, but this was coming along too nicely and I didn't want to damage it," Hal Lindstrom said, "Let me clean up a sec - the last thing you want to get on your hands on a day like this is clay."
He walked back to a sink and wished the wet clay off his hands and face, dried off with a clean work towel, then came up to me with his hand extended, "Hal Lindstrom."
"Tina McCarthy," I replied, shaking his hand.
"Come on inside. Can I get you something to drink?"
We headed into the condo proper, an obvious bachelor pad though a tasteful one.
"Throwing pottery must be profitable," I said as he handed me a glass of tea, a beer in the other hand for himself.
"It is if you have a couple of IPOs under your belt," he replied with a grin. " I used to manage resource companies, then VC'd my way through the last decade and let everyone else do the real work. Let me get some clean clothes on or I'll get this damn potter's clay everywhere. Make yourself at home."
Hal headed off to his bedroom, pulling off his shirt on the way, and I averted my eyes reluctantly from a well muscled back. Throwing pottery also was apparently quite good for developing abs and shoulders.
The man had taste, there was no question about that, and apparently enough money to indulge that taste. Paintings, some of recognizable Seattle landmarks, some more abstract in nature, were scattered on the walls, and a book shelf to one side seemed to be filled with books on economics, political theory and philosophy. Like most of the houses I've been in of the independently wealthy, there was no television, though a very high end sound system, and she noted a computer console and keyboard tucked discretely off in one corner. It took me a moment to realize that there was also music, something by Bach, I believed, playing in the background. Very nice sound system.
He emerged, considerably cleaner and wearing a black turtleneck sweater that suited him perfectly ... yummily, in fact. Settling into thick, padded (and seductively lulling) chairs, he grinned at me.
"You probably weren't quite expecting this, if you got your report from the police."
"Um ..." I started, brilliantly. He was entirely too good looking, and I had to fight down some very deep seated instincts. "No. Not really. I was kind of expecting some idiot of a kid who'd had a little too much to drink to be honest."
"Nah, just taking advantage of one of the few sunny days left. I like sun, and we get so little of it anymore," he paused. "I'm afraid that you've probably come out here for nothing."
"Oh?"
"I saw her again ... the mermaid. She showed up at my door last night, with a bundle of my clothes, dry cleaned. She was most sorry she'd taken them, but apparently she had need of them when she took them."
"I take it she had legs."
"Sadly, yes. Very shapely ones, from what I could see in the skirt she was wearing. She was pretty, I knew that from the first time that I saw her. I invited her in, but she got skittish and ran off."
"Could you describe her to me? She's apparently been pulling the mermaid stunt elsewhere in the area, and I'm a little concerned that she may be dangerous to herself or others."
"I can do even better than that," he said, springing out of his chair and heading to the console. "I have a surveillance system for the house, and it gets pictures of everyone who comes in and out."
He came back with an intellipage of her, photographs on the top - front, side, and back, and a full motion video of her talking quietly with Hal. She was pretty, in a way that reminded me a great deal of Kira, even though this girl was blonde to Kira's dark brunette and a decade younger. They both had the same big dark, seal-like eyes, though, the same gracefulness of movement, though in the girl there was something else - a slight bobbing motion in the way that she walked that made her seem more like she was swimming than walking.
"Any idea who she is," I said, after looking at the pictures.
"Not a clue. Strange girl. We talked a little bit, she said that she had lost her clothes sack while swimming and was afraid her father would be upset if he found out. I'd be more concerned about identity theft, but I immediately switched over cards and put a watch on the ones that were taken, and there was no activity on them - they'd be useless to her anyway, as they're bio-activated. She apparently did just need the clothes."
I looked at him, and could sense that there was something that he wasn't quite telling me. "What did her tail look like?"
He sat back in the chair, and thought about that for a bit. "It was expensive, whatever it was. It blended into her skin, and there were no obvious seams from where I saw. The tail fin itself was semi-rigid, fluted, and a little ragged along the edges. Very organic looking. My first thought was that it was a film crew from Vancouver shooting for a movie and she'd become separated from them, though there were none registered or in the news. Still might be a crew of indies with daddy's money financing them."
"So you don't think that she was really a mermaid?" I asked.
"Don't be ridiculous ... mermaids aren't real. In this day and age, you'd even have to ask that?" he asked with a smile. "Naw, I was the victim of a harmless prank, one of life's little wonders."
He stopped, still charming, but with this sudden sense that the interview was over. I've learned to be very sensitive to such queues ... he wouldn't tell me anything else.
"Well, thank you for your time, and I'm glad you were able to get your things back. I should get going before the skies open up again."
He walked me out, though I noticed as we passed the exquisite pottery that most of the newest ones, the ones that hadn't yet been fired, had a sensuousness to them that the others lacked, sinuous curves that reminded me of sirens tumbling one over the other. I thanked Hal again and headed into the rain, though not before seeing him in the rear camera view standing there, looking troubled and, if I had to point a word to it, haunted.
[Chapter 8]
Tina
After more than a hundred years of dealing with rain in all of its various forms, Seattleites become connoisseurs of the stuff, just as they have become experts at coffee and micro-brew beers. Like the Innuit and their twenty four different words for snow, we in Seattle recognize the distinction between rain, drizzle, mist, light mist, light drizzle, showers, storms, rain-breaks, heavy fog, deluges, and so forth. It's not just a matter of how much rain is coming down, but what the clouds look like, how much light is available, the smell in the air, how intermittent the rain is, even the shape of the rain drops.
It was still raining when I pulled up to Hal Lindstrom's condo, but this was a heavy mist rather than the steady deluge of earlier in the day. The area, about a mile south of Medina off the northwest edge of Lake Washington, had the curious juxtaposition of partially submerged buildings that had made up the former waterfront a decade ago, along with buildings at the lake's edge that had never been intended to be waterside property. The moniker of "lake" was no longer really true either - rising sea levels had caused both Lake Washington and Lake Union to merge into a single Kidney shaped body of water, wiping out much of the tony real-estate that had built up along their edges, and only an all too temporary dam kept Lake Washington from joining up with the Puget Sound on the south. When that happened, and Kira had told me that it may be some time this year, Seattle would be an island.
And now we were seeing mermaids. I shook my head in spite of myself. Kira was a good friend but more than a little bit of an alarmist, convinced that we were seeing the end of the world in what was probably just some really bad weather. Floods were troublesome, especially for the idiots that wanted a waterside view of the beach, but people adapt. We weren't all going to need to sprout fins and start singing like Ariel any time soon.
Lindstrom's place was surprisingly nice, as was the Mercedes visible from within the open garage. A man was working at the end of it at some kind of bench, and it took me a moment to realize that he was working a potter's wheel. He briefly lifted up his hand in acknowledgement that I was there, then went back to the very delicate ewer that he was shaping there. On the walls were other shaped pottery, some already fired and glazed, others apparently awaiting some rework. The small of baking clay made me suspect that he had a kiln around as well, probably in the semi-walled off alcove behind him.
He finally slowed the wheel and looked up again, a not unhandsome man in his mid-thirties.
"I'm sorry about not getting up immediately, but this was coming along too nicely and I didn't want to damage it," Hal Lindstrom said, "Let me clean up a sec - the last thing you want to get on your hands on a day like this is clay."
He walked back to a sink and wished the wet clay off his hands and face, dried off with a clean work towel, then came up to me with his hand extended, "Hal Lindstrom."
"Tina McCarthy," I replied, shaking his hand.
"Come on inside. Can I get you something to drink?"
We headed into the condo proper, an obvious bachelor pad though a tasteful one.
"Throwing pottery must be profitable," I said as he handed me a glass of tea, a beer in the other hand for himself.
"It is if you have a couple of IPOs under your belt," he replied with a grin. " I used to manage resource companies, then VC'd my way through the last decade and let everyone else do the real work. Let me get some clean clothes on or I'll get this damn potter's clay everywhere. Make yourself at home."
Hal headed off to his bedroom, pulling off his shirt on the way, and I averted my eyes reluctantly from a well muscled back. Throwing pottery also was apparently quite good for developing abs and shoulders.
The man had taste, there was no question about that, and apparently enough money to indulge that taste. Paintings, some of recognizable Seattle landmarks, some more abstract in nature, were scattered on the walls, and a book shelf to one side seemed to be filled with books on economics, political theory and philosophy. Like most of the houses I've been in of the independently wealthy, there was no television, though a very high end sound system, and she noted a computer console and keyboard tucked discretely off in one corner. It took me a moment to realize that there was also music, something by Bach, I believed, playing in the background. Very nice sound system.
He emerged, considerably cleaner and wearing a black turtleneck sweater that suited him perfectly ... yummily, in fact. Settling into thick, padded (and seductively lulling) chairs, he grinned at me.
"You probably weren't quite expecting this, if you got your report from the police."
"Um ..." I started, brilliantly. He was entirely too good looking, and I had to fight down some very deep seated instincts. "No. Not really. I was kind of expecting some idiot of a kid who'd had a little too much to drink to be honest."
"Nah, just taking advantage of one of the few sunny days left. I like sun, and we get so little of it anymore," he paused. "I'm afraid that you've probably come out here for nothing."
"Oh?"
"I saw her again ... the mermaid. She showed up at my door last night, with a bundle of my clothes, dry cleaned. She was most sorry she'd taken them, but apparently she had need of them when she took them."
"I take it she had legs."
"Sadly, yes. Very shapely ones, from what I could see in the skirt she was wearing. She was pretty, I knew that from the first time that I saw her. I invited her in, but she got skittish and ran off."
"Could you describe her to me? She's apparently been pulling the mermaid stunt elsewhere in the area, and I'm a little concerned that she may be dangerous to herself or others."
"I can do even better than that," he said, springing out of his chair and heading to the console. "I have a surveillance system for the house, and it gets pictures of everyone who comes in and out."
He came back with an intellipage of her, photographs on the top - front, side, and back, and a full motion video of her talking quietly with Hal. She was pretty, in a way that reminded me a great deal of Kira, even though this girl was blonde to Kira's dark brunette and a decade younger. They both had the same big dark, seal-like eyes, though, the same gracefulness of movement, though in the girl there was something else - a slight bobbing motion in the way that she walked that made her seem more like she was swimming than walking.
"Any idea who she is," I said, after looking at the pictures.
"Not a clue. Strange girl. We talked a little bit, she said that she had lost her clothes sack while swimming and was afraid her father would be upset if he found out. I'd be more concerned about identity theft, but I immediately switched over cards and put a watch on the ones that were taken, and there was no activity on them - they'd be useless to her anyway, as they're bio-activated. She apparently did just need the clothes."
I looked at him, and could sense that there was something that he wasn't quite telling me. "What did her tail look like?"
He sat back in the chair, and thought about that for a bit. "It was expensive, whatever it was. It blended into her skin, and there were no obvious seams from where I saw. The tail fin itself was semi-rigid, fluted, and a little ragged along the edges. Very organic looking. My first thought was that it was a film crew from Vancouver shooting for a movie and she'd become separated from them, though there were none registered or in the news. Still might be a crew of indies with daddy's money financing them."
"So you don't think that she was really a mermaid?" I asked.
"Don't be ridiculous ... mermaids aren't real. In this day and age, you'd even have to ask that?" he asked with a smile. "Naw, I was the victim of a harmless prank, one of life's little wonders."
He stopped, still charming, but with this sudden sense that the interview was over. I've learned to be very sensitive to such queues ... he wouldn't tell me anything else.
"Well, thank you for your time, and I'm glad you were able to get your things back. I should get going before the skies open up again."
He walked me out, though I noticed as we passed the exquisite pottery that most of the newest ones, the ones that hadn't yet been fired, had a sensuousness to them that the others lacked, sinuous curves that reminded me of sirens tumbling one over the other. I thanked Hal again and headed into the rain, though not before seeing him in the rear camera view standing there, looking troubled and, if I had to point a word to it, haunted.
[Chapter 8]
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
The Bells of Ys Chapter 6
Kira
“One of these days, Kira, ” her father had said as he bent over the Audi’s sensor block, odd waveforms appearing on his laptop next to the car, “you’re going to find yourself running afoul of the establishment.”
He spoke quietly, the very intelligent, slightly Canadian university clip seemingly at odds with his words. She was seventeen years old, and this was her first car.
“Dark times are coming, Kira. I think we’ve moved past the point of no return, and right now there are a lot of people who are jockeying for position after the apocalypse, absolutely convinced that if they have enough power that they will survive it. ”
“Dad, don’t be silly.”
“Kira, listen to me. I probably won’t survive even to that point. I have made more than a few enemies, and sounded the alarm once too many times for them to feel comfortable.”
She noticed the waveforms suddenly shift from being very noisy to being vaguely sinusoidal, then into a rather odd decay pattern. Her father popped a chip out of the sensor block.
“Okay, we have about a minute before the satellites will register that its not picking up the signal that it should be getting.”
He dropped the chip onto an odd box, pressed a key onto his laptop, and the patterns returned to the original signal over the course of thirty seconds. The moment the status bar indicated that programming was done, he practically slapped the chip back into the sensor block.
“I have a mechanic that I trust who will be able to migrate this chip over to any new care that you have, and I will leave you directions on how to use it under your Tethys account - if the care ever gets totalled or the sensor block goes out, take it to Phil and nobody else, because the contents of that chip could very well put you into the Big House for many, many years.”
Her father had proved prophetic often enough that Kira now trusted implicitly everything he said. He had been on a Greenpeace boat when the Antarctic Weddell shelf had collapsed, calving an iceberg the size of Washington State. He had also seen something he shouldn't have seen when that happened, because his ship was torpedoed by a Free Republic Navy destroyer in the company of a Nautilis Resources tanker ship -- there had been live video sent over the Tethys connection, one of the last things so sent in more than a decade, showing the ships and the sinking of the Amphitrite from that ship's perspective. The camera had continued to film and broadcast even after it sank under the waves, until the lens had shattered from the pressure and seawater shorted out the unit. There had been no attempt at a rescue; the torpedoes had taken out the side with the boats, leaving none of them seaworthy, and marksmen had apparently used those floating on the water as target practice.
Her mother had died in a car accident when she was eight, though her father had been convinced that it wasn’t an accident. She had become an orphan with the sinking of the Amphitrite, a decade later, when she had been a precocious junior specializing in Climatology at the University of Washington. That was when she discovered that she had also inherited a dozen patents from her father’s security innovations, patents that would pay her way through school and, if she was thrifty, would guarantee she could get by without an income if she didn't want to. The patents would in fact end up paying her a great deal of money over their lifetime, but most of that money went into investing either in her tech gadgets or into diversified foreign accounts and resources. When the dollar had collapsed five years later, she was largely protected, something which hadn't been true for most of her contemporaries.
Kira considered that again as she drove into the heavy rains, hoping that it would provide a degree of obscurity against her trackers. She was at something of a loss to understand exactly what it was that had brought down upon her the wrath of the feds, and more that limited them from just arresting her outright. Obviously they didn't like the surveillance systems, which meant that were afraid (rightly) that there was some kind of failsafe in place that would have identified their actions, perhaps causing political problems for them here in Washington State. Had it been Texas, they could have done it with impunity; the semi-autonomous country gave Soviet-era Russia a run for its money in state-sponsored terrorism, but here there was an independent streak that had countered the national trend toward fascism, and made people wary of giving the government too much say in their lives.
After having left the UW campus and crossed over the new 520 bridge, Kira headed off the highway into Redmond, pulling around to a parking lot which obscured her from passing traffic while giving her a viewpoint (she'd half seen a cop sitting there a few times in the past, and figured it was about ideal for what she was about to do). She pulled up the car's diagnostics on her dashboard, keyed in the password to override the core systems (taking her into the administrative mode for the car), dropped into a prompt, then ran an application that she was hoping she wouldn't have needed.
Using the onboard navigational system, the car left the lot she was in, heading past the old Microsoft campus and south to I90 west, eventually to head back to I5 and south. At least that's what the GPS system would be reporting ... in reality she was still in the parking lot. It was a gamble - they could have put a tracker on the car, though the car's proximity alert system would have sounded to her systems if they had come close enough - but she was betting that they were underestimating her enough to assume that she couldn't control the GPS.
Three minutes later, she won her bet. A 2023 Lincoln Towncar (did anyone but the Feds actually buy them, she wondered) passed by the lot on its way south, the two agents clearly identifiable by the black glasses, with a third man in the rear seat. She waited for a minute after they passed then scooted back onto the highway going east, knowing that she was vulnerable sitting there. The GPS tracking systems were self-correcting, and it wouldn't take long before the discrepancies in signal strengths would be noted. She was also completely on manual now; the moment that she queried the navigation system her car would show up like a beacon on the net, and she wanted to wait a while before she switched her car over to her alternative (and highly illegal) secondary identity.
Kira let her mind go on autopilot while she drove, noticing not for the first time the paradox that when her car was driving for her she always felt tense and found it difficult to concentrate, but when she drove she was able to think clearly about other things … yet another example of labor-saving technologies that in fact seemed only to add to the cost of the car and give more power to those who already held too much. The rain had let up as she moved further into the foothills of the Cascades, now on winding roads that looked as bucolic as they had when this territory was first colonized.
She was a threat to someone, and the Blues Brothers were there to make her disappear. Kira had, over the years, done the occasional favor for a few of the power brokers in the state, enough so that her "arrest" would have raised a lot of flags. It was another lesson she's learned from her father. Unlike many of the radical environmental left who seemed to feel that poor manners, hygiene and dress were de rigour for the up and coming activist, her father had learned how to camouflage himself in the dress and manners of his enemies and make them his friends, or at least his grudging admirerers. Had he lived, he would have been a formidable politician, and Kira knew she had the same instincts for power that he did.
She had stumbled onto something, or revealed something, that shouldn't have been made known. That the effects of global warming were entering a critical phase could possibly have been that thing, but she wasn't the only, or even most vocal, speaker on this. Though as she thought on it, a chill began to form at the base of her spine. Kira had been collaborating with Dr. Malcolm Short of Cambridge University on a climatology textbook when she had received an email from him indicating that he was going on sabbatical for a month or so. She had sent back a rather frustrated reply but then heard nothing from him, and assumed that he had in fact already left. She put the project out of her mind and only today realized that she still hadn't heard from him.
Kira pulled off the road again, this time to try to pick up the net on her glasses. Outside of the blanket coverage from the Seattle area, the net's speed dropped off dramatically, though it was still strong enough here to allow her to get the base carrier signal. Her glasses easily spoofed across the IPv6 address space, temporarily becoming a Coke machine in Vladivostok, and she was on.
Short was still listed on sabbatical at Cambridge, but she was beginning to have her doubts. With a whisper, she sent out a bot to so a search, and went on to other climateologists that she knew. Dr. Ingrid Iversson at MIT had died, apparently of a stroke, a month back -- she was 52 years old. Dr. Akira Misagawa at Stanford had died in a car crash two weeks ago. Dr. Steven Franklin of the University of Chicago had died in a house fire three days ago. The cool front at the base of her spine was rapidly becoming a winter storm.
She was on a first name with each of them, colleagues if not not necessarily friends, yet they had all disappeared without her being the wiser. Each of them knew the truth - Steven had run the numbers on his Beowulf that she had given him, had walked through every possible scenario that she could envision and some that she hadn't thought of, and knew the finality of the situation. Ingrid had been the one to bring to Kira's attention her theory about the role of the magnetic change in global warnming, including what would soon be called Iversson pulses, sudden, rapid changes in the magnetosphere of the planet that had been gaining strength just in the last five years. Kira was the stronger programmer - Ingrid had been an experimental physicist, not a computer jockey, so between them they had begun the modelling that had so alarmed them both when the results returned. Akira had been the editor for Climate, the pre-eminent peer-review journal in the field and a man who had recommended strongly that Kira submit her findings when he learned of them. A quick surf to Climate's site proved even more frightening ... it had 404'd, and even the googlecache was gone.
“Don't take it personally, ” she said to herself, in a very frightened, little girl voice, “It's not personal ... they're killing off all the weathermen.”
She was about to put her car back in gear when the bot returned with confirming news, and worse. Malcolm Short had committed suicide, self-inflicted gun-shot wound to the head, two months before on May 23rd. The bot had pointed her to an announcement from the web site that he used for his students of one of his classes, giving little more than a brief notice that the class was cancelled due to Dr. Short's untimely death and the time of the service, some two months past.
The site had not yet been taken down - from personal experience universities moved slowly on web sites unless they were an embarassment - so the site also contained the video of his last lecture, apparently put up before his death. She figured that the link was probably dead, so was surprised when his virtual image appeared in front of her, a virtual ghost frozen in the substrate of the web.
“There are two forms of weather control,” the portly, bearded professor intoned from beyond the grave. “The first, the one that most people think about when they here the term, is the physical manipulation of weather cycle. Despite all claims to the contrary, this is an enormously difficult proposition at best, because the amount of energy necessary to affect a change is roughly of a magnitude equivalent to that of the weather cycle itself, far more in general than mankind possesses at the moment. Long term environmental effects can have an effect upon the weather, as most people know, but this type of control is usually crude at best, and frequently produces worse side effects than just leaving the system to its own devices.”
“However, there is a second form of weather control, and this is the control of the information about weather. By all evidence, weather prediction was likely the first form of prognostication that man performed ... to be able to sense when it was to rain, or snow, when there would be a drought, or a flood, the early man or woman who could divine this most basic manifestation of the will of the gods was considered holy and necessary. Agriculture emerged in great part because of the ability to predict the patterns of the weather, and those who failed to do so died off. The weather witch, the storm-sensing captain of a boat, the weather advisor to generals and emperors, each of these were considered to be worth their weight in gold when they were right.”
“Even today, with access to satellite maps, megpete clusters and heliographic analyses, the one to see the future in the weather can be either richly rewarded or be a target for censure ... or worse (-kir*) ... should those predictions show calamity. People in power (- kir*) , oil barons and water merchants, pay handsomely for this advice, or they pay just as handsomely to rid themselves if those who would topple their hegemony by accurately revealing the weather.”
“Now, class, open to page 523 of Principles of Climate Change, section 4.2 and we'll ...”
Malcolm paused a second as someone off camera raised a hand.
“Alex ... I'm sorry, uh ... Jason?”
“Professor, that page is in the index ...?”
“Oh ... it is? Silly of me ... I've been working on a new draft of that section, and I must have referenced it wrong (-kir*). Uh, let's try page 461 ...”
The video stopped at that point, as no doubt the session had degenerated into Q and A. The short coughing bursts could have been just what they seemed, but they were too well timed with the other information for her to believe that. Malcolm knew he was under surveillance, knew that he was in danger. The video had a post date the day before he died when she checked the markup, and then came the confirmation for her - the crypitc filename 76a23r212i97k17.mpg, with the numbers removed spelled out her name backwords. A fairly crude cipher, to be sure, but he would have wanted her to be aware that the message was aimed at her.
People in power, oil barons and water merchants ... the "and" caught her eye. The expression "oil barons or water merchants" would be more proper, and while she understood the power that water-merchants had, they were generally not considered by the average person to be "people in power". So someone in the government who simultaneously controlled oil and water interests. Her first thoughts turned to the Secretary of the Interior, but he was a nuclear power advocate. However, a little digging from her bots brought forth an altogether uglier answer. Alexander Milhouse, Secretary of Intelligence, appointed by President Greggoir, had served a stint outside the normal bureaucratic circles, helming Nautilis Resources, a huge consortium formed from the merger of two of the world's largest oil companies with a water management company shortly after the coup. The mistakes he made, referring erroneously to "Alex", only strengthened the odss on that guess. He knew he was being watched, knew that they were probably interested in her as well, so he couldn't afford to tip his hand. Damn, damn, damn.
Thinking back to the other "mistake" he made, one she was sure he would have edited out before posting the video, she blinked as she realized that the only person who did have that particular section was ... her. He had sent three chapters to her to review and annotate about the time that the video was made. She'd been so angry with him for dropping out that she swore she'd wait until he contacted her again before working on them, an oath that she was now coming to regret mightily.
She needed to go to ground, and the meeting with Proteus was beginning to seem increasingly relevant. It had been a Nautilis Ship that her father was monitoring before the Navy torpedoed them, and it was Nautilis that stood to gain as both the North Pole became passable and water become scarce inland due to global warming. Unfortunately, she suspected strongly that having eluded the agents (federal agents working for the Federal Intelligence Agency, headed up by Secretary Alexander Milhouse ... of course) that her name and identity was now on every terrorist watch list in the country, so getting to the San Juans on a ferry could be tough.
On the other hand, she was not without resources herself, not the least of which being the power of the net itself. She spoke/wrote a short email to Proteus:
Parthenope has slipped the nets of Nemo's sailors, and seeks safe passage to the sea.
Kira sent it, encrypted, via Tethys, where it would go through several hundred anonymous remailers before it would reach Proteus later that evening.
With a sigh, Kira then turned her car back on and drove further into the hills to see if she could find a diner. Fortunately in Seattle, the use anonymous cash (with the State of Washington insignia on it and backed by gold) was still considered a sacrosanct right, and she had learned long ago to always make sure she had enough cash on her to get through a fortnight. She had a bad feeling that she might need it.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
The Bells of Ys Chapter 5
Tina
One effect of rain is that it tends to dampen the more extreme emotions. Murders drop in the rain, as do domestic abuse cases, though suicides tend to increase. When rain is falling people separate from one another, each to their own room, or own corner. The only news is what sporting events get cancelled, not who scored what or bested whom. Rain is a time for coffeehouses and reflection, a time favored by writers and artists, a time for researching and being inventive. Rain brings with it the quiet, passive phase of existence, and is one of the few times when news people relax.
“Here’s a funny one,” I overheard Steve, the Sports anchor, saying to Brian, my producer. “Got this one over the police band. They picked up a guy wandering around naked at one of the beaches. He was digging for claims while the rain let up, he says, and he heard this woman calling to him. He looked up and saw that she was bare naked, pretty tits, and a come-on smile, standing in the water. She tells him to take off his clothes and join him, and the guy does just that, apparently shucking out of his clothes in Olympic time.
“He runs out into the water and she dives down, and then he swears he saw that she had a mermaid's tail. She disappeared into the water, knocked him down into the water enough so that he was floundering around, and up and disappears. When he finally gets back to the shore, all his clothes and his wallet have disappeared, and she never comes back up.”
“Ah, come on Steve … ”
“Hey, I swear, that’s what I heard! They sent out a dive team to check around the area and make sure she didn’t drown, but they’re not searching too hard. ”
“As wet as it’s been, a mermaid in the Sound would be about right,” Brian snorted. “Don’t follow up on it! We’re short staffed enough as it is with everyone out with colds; besides, the granny contingent would pitch a fit if we … uncovered her.”
I stifled a groan. Brian was an incorrigible punster, and should never be incorriged. Still, it got me to thinking back to Kira’s comments about needing to grow tails. I have always had a good feel for sensing when there was a bigger story hiding under an apparently innocuous incident, and something about the anecdote sounded enough out of kilter that my spider sense was definitely tingling.
I was distracted during the broadcast, not making any big fluffs, but certainly lacking my normal "sparkling" personality. Brian didn’t say anything when we took a break, but afterwards he came up to me.
“You all right, Tina?”
“Yeah, Bri. Sorry about tonight. Guess the weather’s just got me down.”
“Just worried about you, ’kay? Get some rest and take some vitamins – last thing I need is for my star newscaster to be out with a cold.”
“Thanks,” I said, and meant it. Brian could be a tyrant at times, but his heart was in the right place. “I wanted to check out the police logs – it’s been awhile since I’ve done it, and it may spark something.”
Brian agreed readily, thankfully having apparently dismissed the mermaid story from his mind. I’d come up with more than a few exclusives by spending the time in the morgue reviewing the various and sundry logs, and Brian wasn’t about to gainsay me when I took the initiative. If we could beat out KOPP in a story and push ratings up a few percent, he wasn’t about to complain
Being a talking head is all about acting, and there were any number of good actors out there. I was a little unusual in that I had the looks to deliver the news but enjoyed the nitty gritty of actually being an investigative reporter.
For the first couple of decades of the 21st century, being an investigative reporter was frowned upon ... you never knew which particular corporation you might offend, and who would consequently bring a lawsuit against you that would bankrupt you and everyone around you. However, the corps have been failing, one after the other, as the depression that came after the coup began thinning the ranks and depleting the resources of the ultra-rich. A couple of revolts in the interrim also happened, in one case turning much of Martha’s Vineyards into a cemetery, and not coincidentally creating several vacancies in the roster of the Fortune 1000.
Somewhere along the lines, between that and the pervasiveness of the Internet, the corporate controlled monopoly on the media fell apart, and investigative reporting came back into its own. Still doesn’t pay worth squat, but you don’t go into journalism for the money. You go into journalism because somewhere there is a story that needs to be told, a wrong to be exposed to the light of day. At least that’s what I tell myself everytime I get my paycheck.
All of the logs were automatically transcribed by voice recognition software, and most of the time it did a pretty good job of converting the screeches and squawks of police band transmissions into something resembling a real dialog. We have a server that picks up most police bands off the airwaves and can be tuned into from our intranet (yeah, its illegal as all hell ... ain’t freedom of the press great?), which is I’m sure where Steve heard it.
I went to the transcripts, doing a keyword search on "mermaid". The cluster from the day before popped up immediately, but I was intrigued to find that there were several such reports that went back for nearly a year. This was the first robbery, but prior to this a couple in a boat had seen a young woman swimming in the middle of Lake Washington well away from any boats (and given that Lake Washington was the size of a small sea this was exception), a fisherman had seen a mermaid about three months ago, though he had apparently also been most of the way through a six pack, and about five months ago a couple of teenage boys had reported seeing a nude woman in the water and thought she was high, but no body was ever found, and it was assumed to be some kind of prank.
Yet looking at the list, the pattern was pretty obvious. The woman was described as being between seventeen and twenty one years of age, medium length platinum blonde hair, fair skin, moderately heavy breasts, and a kind of stocky frame. What was more striking was the description of the tail – starting at mid-waist, smooth, with a dolphin-like tail, and colored a pale blue.
I tried a little experiment at that point. I created a couple of quick polls in different places I frequent on the web, and asked the simple question:
What color is a mermaid’s tail?
I went back to my research, getting names and addresses of the witnesses when possible, then returned to the survey:
- Green. 91%
- Orange. 4%
- Silver. 2%
- Blue. 1%
- Others. 2%
What color is a mermaid’s tail?
About what I expected. If you ask most people what color a mermaid’s tail is, they will tell you green. Not blue. The orange took me by surprise until I remembered the Splash movie from the 1980s. Yet in the three reports that indicated a tail, it was given as being blue, and even more "light blue". So in all likelihood there was a crazy girl showing up every so often in a home-made mermaid’s tail, freaking out the locals and committing minor acts of larceny and identity theft.
Now I had enough suspicions to make a case for an assignment. After cleaning up, I submitted an article proposal to Brian, pointing out the oddities and the recent criminal act – and making the not unreasonable suggestion that the girl in question might be mentally unstable and possibly a danger to the community. While I personally strongly doubted that, those magic words automatically elevated an oddball story into the province of being potentially news-worthy.
A few minutes later Brian came to my desk.
“Okay, you’ve done your homework, and Darryl Hannah is out there flashing the good citizens of the Puget Sound region,” he said in his most sardonic fashion. “I still think it’s a wild goose chase, and I don’t want it interfering with anything else, but if you can chase something down in the next week we’ll run with it.”
“Thanks, chief,” I said.
“Look, just be careful. I agree that it sounds like this is probably a harmless nutcase, but sometimes those nutcases aren’ quite as harmless as they seem.”
Brian rolled his eyes and headed back to the production booth, shaking his head, and getting back to the story about federal investigations into one of the local genetics tycoons.
Even in the rain, the government never sleeps.
21 Tue 10:10
Monday, September 20, 2004
The Bells of Ys Chapter 4
[To Beginning of Story]
Kira had just finished grading yet another spectacularly bad mid-term – you’d think that with a 30 petaflop octet laptop that a student could create a decent simulation, but these were just awful – when an authoritative knock rapped on her door.
Kira had just finished grading yet another spectacularly bad mid-term – you’d think that with a 30 petaflop octet laptop that a student could create a decent simulation, but these were just awful – when an authoritative knock rapped on her door.
Kira jerked, startled, then frowned. That was not the tentative knock of a student, and the head of her department would have just contacted her on her com rather than disturb her lock this.
Rather, it had the feel of an "official" knock, the kind used by policemen or federal agents. A wave on the floating scan icon showed the latter, immaculate gray suits and dark sunglasses. Rumors were that feds had their eyeballs removed and replaced with elaborate scan-units wired for bear ... given that it was still raining buckets outside, she had to wonder seriously.
“Just a second,” she said, disengaging herself from the console, and maneuvering around the pile of books to the door. “Yes?”One of the two zoomed in on her, while the other stared past her into her office, and for just a second, Kira would have sworn that she had seen a red glow above the glasses.
“Kira McIlsey?”
“I’m Professor McIlsey, yes ...”
The man looked non-plussed at the implied correction, though it was hard to tell past the glasses.
“We’re from the Federal Intelligence Agency. We would like for you to answer a few questions.”
“Uh … sure. My office is a little small, but we can use one of the conference rooms.”
“We would rather take you down to headquarters.”
“May I ask what this is about?”
The agent looked at his countepart, and she suspected that they had sub-wires on. Gargoyles, then. Damn.
“We believe that you may have compromised National Security, ma'am. Please come along.”Kira breathed quietly, then squared her shoulders, “Do you have a subpoena?”
Again that half-second of concentrated silence, then a momentary grimace as the agent apparently didn't get the answer he wanted.“We would like to bring you in for questioning, ma'am?”
“Which we can do here, and which we can do with my lawyer present.”
Agent 1 looked at Agent 2, then back at her.“We’ll be back, ma'am.”
With an eerie, mechanical quality, the two agents turned and walked away, down the hallway, their shoes pounding the marble floor in unison. When the door had finally shut behind them, Kira let out the breath she had been holding and leaned against the wall of the university, her legs suddenly jelly underneath her.
She fought the impulse to immediately run away, instead telling her system to transfer mail to her portable then hibernate while she grabbed her coat. She had no doubt that the FIA (?!) agents were outside, waiting for her to panic. Instead, she ducked into the underground tunnels that criss-crossed the campus, and headed to the faculty lounge.This was entirely too strange for her, though she knew she had only herself to blame. She had made the mistake of committing the crime of asking too many uncomfortable questions.
Kira had submitted a paper for review on global climate dynamics to the fairly prestigious Journal of Climatology. It's thesis boiled down to a more elaborate version of what she had presented to her students this morning – the weather system was essentially in an uncontrollable runaway reaction that would send the mean sea level up more than 120 meters within the next year, with little to nothing that could be done to stop it at this stage.
The same behavior that was causing this was also leaving the interior of the country dessicated, as water tables based upon glaciers dried up. This same behavior was going on elsewhere in the world. The sea level had already risen about 4 meters, but the media, for the most part, was playing this up as a transient phenomenon.
She supposed that twenty years ago, before the coup, this would be cause for great alarm and would no doubt have resulted in an attempt to find some kind of solution. Unfortunately, since the coup, it basically had been a succession of corporate barons looking to figure out ways to corner the market in this or that basic commodity. With the end of civilization coming, no doubt these same people had realized that boats would be at a premium, and were willing to wipe out
99% of humanity just so that they could sell those same boats for absurd sums of money. It was that which usually fell under the heading of National Security.
FIA was the American version of the old Soviet KGB, combining the worst features of an alphabet soup into a single super agency with no real oversight, at least out East. They had only limited legal powers here, though, and she had no doubt that they were hoping to just do a fast grab and whisk her off before she knew what was going on. She was sure that these two were gargoyles, however; they could sense the surveilance system, especially the (damn expensive) monitoring hardware that she'd added into her own office at her own expense, and had decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
On an assistant prof's salary alone she'd never have managed the system, but insurance companies had become extreme solicitous of good climatologists, and she was an up and coming one. Her father had been a security expert, among other things, and he'd drummed that paranoia into her (a lesson especially brought home when he was "disappeared" one day when she was in her late teens; a few friends of her father had managed to get word back to her mother that his political views had ticked off the wrong cabinet minister.
She put on her own monitor glasses, slimline VRs that easily navigated the repeater nodes, encrypted outgoing streams, and had a shortwave scrambler from disabling monitor peepers transparently. Normally, she wasn't wild about wearing the glasses - they made her seasick if she tried walking around with them too long, but right now she'd rather have a queasy stomach than be without good info-flow. With a few words she tagged the two agents info signatures – they were either pretty sloppy or deliberately trying to set a trap, and right now she was going to assume the latter – and then set a fairly broad ward around her that would pick up anyone who crossed into the building's scanner range that she couldn't immediately identify.
Kira called up a virtual keyboard and began typing out an e-mail to her lawyer, notifying him of what had just happened. She didn't trust doing a voice message for that - it was a lot harder to read messages from a VR keyboard, especially with the keys rearranged ('thank you Dad,' she whispered under her breath). The encrypted message would hit him wherever he was, but she specifically did not want a reply just yet, not while she was under surveillance.Just before she was about to log out of her message queue, she noticed another message at the bottom, encrypted to her Tethys key. Kira published five public keys – a general one she used primarily as a spam catcher, one for family, one for immediate friends, one for dealing with potential clients, and one she'd only given out once, to Tethys, the organization that her father had helped found. Suddenly she wasn't so sure that her paper was in fact the thing that the agents were interested in.
The key in this particular case was a hardware one, a small memstick transmitter with her private key, in the shape of a small gold shell that she wore on a bracelet. Once placed within proximity of her glasses, the shell transmitted the private key to the receiver, which then prompted the local processor to prompt for the passkey:“It is a curious situation,” she intoned, “that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.”.
A quote, singularly appropriate in the current situation, from environmentalist Rachel Carson, served to decrypt the message in the presence of the key, and Kira phased out the background momentarily to read the mysterious letter.
Kira,
I have been following your work closely, and have seen you draw the same conclusions that I have, though with a much more pressing timetable than even I had feared. I have taken the liberty of monitoring the activity around you, and believe that your life is in immediate danger from key players within the FIA. Do not let them take you anywhere– they were responsible for your father's death, and we believe that they would not hesitate to cause yours.
We are in the end-game now, and humankind must make a profound decision concerning its future before it is too late. We would like to make you a proposal, one of significant import, but require you to take a leap of faith. At the end of this message is an address. Memorize it, then go there at 7 PM on the 23rd of July. Should you not be there by 8:00, we will assume you are not interested in this proposal, or have been captured and compromised.
Proteus
The 23rd was tomorrow night, Kira thought, and the location, in the San Juan Islands, would require a ferry boat trip if she wanted to meet this Proteus.
Proteus was the Old Man of the Sea in Greek myth, she remembered. If you go by the idea of direct mapping that Americans seem so enamored of, Proteus was the god of the changing sea. Capable of taking any form, like the sea itself.
If it had been any organization other than Tethys, she would have dismissed this guy as a crank out of hand, but she remembered the gatherings of Tethys at her house, when she was eight ... all of them passionate about the sea, all very bright but young (she was old even when she was young, and she found the talk to be just so much over-enthusiastic idealism, until the coup occurred and her father was disappeared). She wondered if they were still so idealistic now – even when she was young, she remembered her father being the hard-nosed realist, the paranoid systems manager who kept worrying about how the Man would react.
If she did follow this crazy invitation, she might find the same idealistic cranks, or might get herself killed. Then she looked out the window at the rain coming down, and realized that if she was right in her thesis, they were all dead anyway. Did she have anything to lose?
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