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 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?

[Chapter 5]