S.I. (original/SI)

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Eight: In-termission*

The squiddies weren't all that bad, once you got to know them.

Or so I assumed, at least. Now that I had the Three Amigos back, I was able to improve the translation dictionary a lot faster than I'd been managing on my own, to the point where the squiddies could write out full near-English sentences to ask for further definitions. (Their natural language turned out to be a combination of sign language and skin colour-changing, and I just lacked the anatomy for something so refined.)

Improving translations isn't an especially gripping storytelling trope, and I don't feel like trying to replicate too many of the particular sentences that I carved out, so I'll summarize a bit. As best as I could interpret, they were more libertarian than Hayek and Friedman, more individualist than Rand, capitalist enough to make a Ferengi weep, perfectly willing to buy and sell live bodies, and claimed the whole Ontario watershed as their territory. Since I was intelligent enough to be a person who could own things instead of a mere animal, I was eventually informed that I'd done some sort of wrong by putting a big metal thing on the lake. I tried countering that they'd failed to mark their borders or communicate the rule about the boat, and had deprived me of my property unjustly, and that I had every reason to retaliate by depriving /them/ of some of /their/ property in return - but I was willing to let them try to come up with a reason not to - and the whole matter was being bounced around a collection of (what I decided to interpret as for simplicity's sake) squiddie judges. (And remember, all of this communication is done in an extremely simplified version of English, written in a script that hadn't existed before twenty fifty, in neat block letters on wooden tablets.)

It turned out that I'd told them I owned Joe - or, at least, Joe's body - but after checking with him, and catching another rare glimpse of his almost-smile of amusement, we decided to let that erroneous impression stand for the moment. The reason for that was so that I could use announcing his manumission as another surprise to confound the squiddies' confidence in their predictions about me.

After some consultation with the Amigos, the feminine Clara volunteered to stick with Joe, both to keep him company and to make sure at least one version of Laura would be around regardless of what happened to me. I kept the more androgynous Boomer close to myself, and Alphie hung out at the edge of the dome, where an occasional squiddie would swim up, to see if /he/ could learn /their/ language.

After a day or so, the judges(?)' opinion seemed to filter back to the squiddies around the dome, and their consensus was passed on a wooden tablet inside. They offered me a double-sized plot of prime egg-laying territory; one plot as compensation for depriving me of my things (ie, Joe), and another plot to round up if I felt bad and as a sweetener to try to induce me not to seek retaliation against them.

I didn't immediately refuse, and it wasn't because I actually could lay eggs.

"It could be like stone money," I said to Joe. "From that island in the Pacific... 'Yep'?"

"'Yap'," Boomer corrected me.

"Yep, Yap," I agreed. "They didn't move the stones when they bought or sold them, but everyone knew who owned which ones, and they made a useful unit of account. One stone is so many chickens, or so much of a fine for accidentally cutting off someone's foot, or the like. Boomer, could you help me check my vocab for asking what an egg-laying plot can be exchanged for, what it can't be traded for, and whether it can be rented or sub-letted?"

Joe watched the carving with mild interest. "You're going to trade for the most useful things you can carry, and then head back to shore?"

I sat back, leaning against a block. "Actually... I'm seriously considering letting myself get tied up in the local economic system, where every-squiddie always owes at least a little to /some/-one else and always has at least a little owed to them."

"You want to become one?"

I shook my head. "Not in body, anyway - I've had a hard enough time just with the hoof, let alone dealing with tentacles. But they're close enough to being capitalist that, well, I can work with that. And, honestly, this dome we're in isn't that bad a place to be."

He imitated Spock quite well with a single raised eyebrow.

"Okay, bear with me. You've got your pools where the spirits can bring you back to life. If this version of you dies, all you lose are the memories since this you came out of a pool. But I'm the only me I've /got/. If you break a leg, you can make your way to a pool and walk back out, fully healed. I've got to take weeks to heal. I've run away from armed villagers, giant monsters, spies, bandits, toxic clouds. This dome here? It's the first place I've found that might be a place I could run /to/." I looked around. "Sure, it's a fixer-upper, but a splash of paint, a few curtains, maybe some bookshelves... as long as there aren't any deal-breakers in squiddie culture, and if those plots of egg-land are enough to pay for air, water, and food here... I'm very tempted."

"They buy and sell each other. That's not a deal-breaker?"

"You melt people, Dogtown is a military dictatorship, and Technoville keeps so many secrets I don't know /what/ their deal is. Compared to all that, and depending on the details, slavery doesn't really feel like an automatic disqualification. Boomer? Please remind me to ask about the details - how the squiddies turn each other, or themselves, into slaves. If anyone is a slave from birth, or can be enslaved by capture, that's going to be iffier than if they can just sell their own bodies to someone else if they choose to."

--

Boomer called out, "Miss Bunny? I have the economic report you asked for."

The AIs' help became a lot more efficient once I realized that I could let them command the tape-bots to carve messages, without me having to do all the work myself. My main worry was keeping them all powered, but the ambient light in the dome seemed to be enough to let my solar panels keep them from getting fully drained. As long as I didn't need to tase anyone, or force the Amigos to try to calculate pi to the last digit, it was as workable a hack as anything else I was managing.

"Alright, hit me," I agreed, as I headed over to Boomer's CPU, so I could see its badger avatar and any data it wanted to show me on its screen.

"The local trust verification architecture is extremely primitive, so all these conclusions must be taken as preliminary at best."

"In other words - they could be lying through their beaks."

"Or merely misinformed, yes. There are two levels to the economy. One is a standard capitalist economy, where things can be traded for other things, and a wealth can be measured in concrete terms such as 'trade one net for ten fish'. The other layer is harder to interpret, but involves debts and possessions that cannot be paid for with things from the first level. This layer seems to involve matters of life and death, reproduction, and criminal acts. No matter how many fish you have, you cannot trade them to buy a plot of egg-land. It seems possible to, in a sense, rent a plot, but the transfer of wealth is not seen as a true exchange, but merely an acknowledgement that the debt for its use is large and has not been paid off."

"Okay," I acknowledged aloud, as I thought about that. "Seems a little odd, but not incomprehensible."

"Actually, a number of human cultures have used similar systems, if not identical in detail. A standard example is the Tiv of central Nigeria, who had three layers-"

I cleared my throat. "I'd love to hear about that - a bit later. Focus on the squiddies for now, please?"

"As you wish. Slavery seems to be centred on the second layer, though slaves can be required to produce goods for the first layer. The most common form of slavery appears to be selling one's body in exchange for access to one of the relatively few egg-laying sites, although complications ensue in that the new owner can give the slave orders about how, where, and whether to reproduce, and in regards to the ownership of eggs, the value of hatchlings, and more. A standard plot varies in size depending on local conditions, and is however much area is required to lay sufficient eggs to have an even chance that at least one will survive to reproductive age. Simplifying a great deal, such a plot is of roughly the value of a life, such as to buy a slave or pay the fine for a murder."

I frowned. "And they've offered me /two/ plots - just for kidnapping me and Joe?"

"There appears to be some political influence involved. Reading between the lines, I think they are trying to butter you up so you will be nice to them, or not do very unpleasant things."

"Joe, do you know anything about this?"

He gave a slight shrug. "I had no idea they even existed. Sometimes people or animals go swimming in the lake and disappear. Maybe they drowned, or were eaten by a predator - I've never heard about any of them being taken alive and released."

"Which," I mused aloud, "might mean either that they haven't released anyone they've taken, or just that they don't take people. Do people in the Great Peace use /any/ metal?"

"We have no need for it."

"And you don't know a thing about who lives in Rochester. Any hints about anyone at all on that side of the lake?"

"Only that if anyone lives there, they are not part of the Great Peace."

"Which could mean that I'm the first technologically-oriented air-breather the squiddies have met. ... And I strongly implied that I own one of Mars's moons, so for all they know, I've got a few asteroids in orbit I can drop at will. Okay, I can see how they might want to try buttering me up a bit, and it could be that a couple of slave-equivalents is roughly equal to the low probability but high cost if I get annoyed enough to start dropping rocks. It may not be true, but there aren't too many other theories that fit the facts, it makes enough sense to work with." I wriggled around a bit, trying to find a more comfortable position - having the spine of a ferret didn't help much when the only furniture around had nothing but right angles. "Two life-equivalents, that I can farm out, kind of, for two squiddies' economic output. It may not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it's more than I had any claim to the other day. I wonder how much of a nest-egg I could put together with that?"

Boomer answered, "Depending on how long you are willing to wait, and whether the information we have received so far, that is sufficient seed capital to acquire control over an arbitrary amount of both layers of the local economy."

"Er?" I blinked at the screen. "Could you repeat that? Er, no - make that, could you explain that?"

Boomer's avatar nodded. "As I said, the local trust verification architecture is very primitive, generally involving manual exchanges of information. While this very simplicity prevents sophisticated network attacks, it also means that a number of less sophisticated economic programs can be implemented, using math that was developed in the decades leading to the Singularity. For an example you may be familiar with, it is possible to predict the broad outlines of a forthcoming economic bubble, maximize the returns from it, and get out before it collapses. Similar programs can be applied to smaller-scale economic fluctuations with controllable rates of risk."

"... And by an 'arbitrary amount' of the local economy, you mean..?"

"I estimate that in roughly fifteen years, you could own half of the local population as slaves, and acquire the other half in another five."

"... And just how many criminal acts would I have to do?"

"That estimate is based on remaining within the latest available revision of the professional standards of Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants. If you wished to go outside those standards, and treat fines and penalties as a simple cost of doing business, then the time estimate drops from twenty years to five, not counting the time required to convince myself, or another AI, to act outside those standards."

"Does your math and economic program take into account the fact that people tend to overthrow a government rather than let themselves be taken over?"

"Yes," Boomer answered simply, then added, "The factors leading to such revolutions have been identified, and can be minimized. Again in terms you are likely to be familiar with, an important guideline is to keep food prices from rising so high that very many people see dying in a revolution as having near-equal value to dying of starvation. In general, the better off the citizenry is, and the more rights they enjoy without infringement, the more likely such an economic transition program is to succeed."

"Even if the transition is to one where they're all slaves?"

"Yes," Boomer repeated.

"So, let me get this straight. If I give one of you AIs the go-ahead, then in twenty years, I'd... own the whole species?"

"Assuming that there are no enclaves outside the Lake Ontario watershed, yes."

I was tempted to quip, 'What could you do in a week?', but settled for, "... I think I'm going to need to take at least five minutes to think about this."

--

I closed my eyes and thought about it.

I went over my guesses about how accurate the information the squiddies were feeding us was, and Boomer's extrapolations of it; and decided that until some inconsistency showed up, I'd have to rely on the AI's expertise on the matter.

I thought about the ethics of slavery. I went over my usual utilitarian arguments against it, such as that reducing peoples' economic output to just their bodies rather than their minds could hobbled a whole nation, to the degree that they'd lose a war against a near-identical nation that didn't do so; and that slaves who worked for the benefit of an owner rather than themselves had very little incentive to do a good job, or find better ways to do the job, or find entirely different jobs that provided better rewards; and that I didn't want to ever end up a slave myself, so it behooved me to not support any system in which that might happen. After thinking about it, and Boomer's comments about keeping slaves as well-off as possible, it seemed to me that it might be possible to avoid the utilitarian objections to enslaving the squiddies... at least, for as long as I was the one who owned them. I'd have to work out how to deal with inheritance very carefully, to avoid some less-thoughtful heir going Evil Overlord with the squiddies as minions, before I'd even consider doing anything of the sort.

I thought about what I was actually trying to do with my life. I could probably turn the dome into a secure hidey-hole that nobody else could find - heck, even /I/ didn't know exactly where it was. (And if the squiddies could build this dome, they could probably build something more comfortable, too.) With Boomer and Alphie having absorbed as much of the university library as I'd been able to stuff into them, I could likely spend a few decades happily ensconced there, doing little more than reading. And once I died, the technical issues might be a bit tricky, but I couldn't think of any inherent problem in getting them to cryopreserve me for later revival.

Which left me facing what was still the biggest threat to not just my own long-term survival, but the biggest threat to every other living thing: a lack of understanding about what had happened in November of twenty fifty, and what had happened to the cities during and since then. I didn't know what might trigger it to happen again - maybe just the three pocket-sized AIs that shared the dome with Joe and I were advanced enough to get the squiddies to pull their own Singularity. And I didn't know what had happened to all the people who'd disappeared in that month, whether they had continued to exist in any form, or whether they still continued to exist in any form. As long as this whole topic was so completely unexplored, then for all I knew, the only way of surviving was to head out to the next solar system as fast as possible... and it seemed that nobody on Earth could currently make it even as far as orbit.

With that in mind, then looked at from a certain point of view, putting as many resources as possible into solving that question could be the most ethical choice possible, in that doing so maximized the odds of avoiding a Singularity-based extinction event that didn't leave /any/ survivors.

The trouble with that was that seemed like it was an argument that explained too much. With that reasoning, /any/ action that reduced the odds of the extinction of sapience could be justified. Enslaving an entire species was just the start - the same reasoning could, in theory, be used to justify /exterminating/ the squiddies, if that action would reduce the odds of an x-risk event. (Such as, for example, if the squiddies were about to go Singularity without any other way to stop them.) I'd read enough arguments against "the end justifies the means" to be suspicious of such reasoning.

The trouble with /that/ was that just because I was suspicious of the reasoning didn't necessarily mean that it was /wrong/. I was a bunny of very little brain, who'd made all sorts of mistakes, and this was the sort of question that it was really, /really/ important to avoid making any mistakes on. Unfortunately, I didn't have a worldwide community of like-minded rationalists to try to work out the most appropriate result. I didn't even have a few close friends who'd take me seriously and offer constructive criticism. I had access to a few AIs derived from a program written shortly before the Singularity; Convoy, a post-Singularity AI who had his own ideas about how humanity should develop; Joe, who seemed to prefer a lifestyle that was either stone-age or animalist; Technoville, whose representatives had claimed to take me seriously but had black-bagged me and quite likely released poison gas to genocide myself and/or the Great Peace; and various odd individuals who seemed to be happy enough focusing on their day-to-day lives (and occasionally being nudged by /somebody/ to wear blue or green on certain days, among other nudges) instead of worrying about how many days they might have left. That didn't really add up to a community I'd trust to even save just my own life if I was cryopreserved again, let alone save /everyone/'s life.

I'd been wandering around the area for a while; and it didn't seem especially likely that if I kept wandering, I'd just happen to find a community who understood x-risks and could make decisions about dealing with them. (If for no other reason than I hadn't picked up any sign of such a group on my radio, or seen any other evidence anyone had both the ability and motivation to work on the problem worldwide.) If I really wanted to have people who could tell me when I was making a big mistake... then I might have to stop trying to /find/ them, and start trying to /make/ them.

--

"Boomer," I said as I opened my eyes. "Do the squiddies count as having a de facto country, here in the lake?"

The badger-faced AI nodded its avatar. "That much is undeniable. And guessing you are about to ask about de jure, as the Department of Foreign Affairs has not issued any statements in several decades, it is unlikely that any official rulings about whether or not their statehood is recognized will be issued in the near future."

"Alright. When you're in a foreign country, do you have to follow local laws, Canadian laws, both, neither, or what?"

"As of the latest version of the legal code, only a select few offenses are applied extra-territorially, and even those generally when there is no competent local authority to perform prosecutions in its own territory."

"So - when in Rome, follow Roman laws?"

"Essentially."

"Okay. I want you and Alphie to find out what the local financial regulations are, and to use those as the guidelines to stay within instead of Canadian accounting practices. Um... Alphie, do you mind staying, and for me to keep Boomer with me?"

"Hey, no problemo," the stallion-AI rumbled from over at the side of the dome.

"Right. If it's possible to stay in the squiddies' laws and end up owning all of them - I want you to do that. Alphie, I'd like to leave one or two tape-bots with you, so you can keep writing messages. Can you find out if there's a way to keep you and them charged, other than leaving my solar panel with you?"

"Can do," he agreed.

"Okay. One more thing. If I don't give any further orders, the general long-term principles I want my slaves to follow is to increase their competence and ability to do things; and to find ways to minimize the risks that sapience will go extinct. Is that specific and general enough to for you to keep things going for a while?"

"I can handle it."

"Just... try not to turn into a bad Star Trek villain-of-the-week computer-god, alright? If they have a revolution to take control of themselves again, go ahead and let them."

"Yeah, I think I can keep myself from pulling a Landru."

"Good. Oh - and thinking a bit further, if you've got options to increase the resources I own, under the local system, and can bring to bear on problems outside the lake, in the short term, then even if that makes a complete takeover take longer, that's a good option. It won't make much difference if I end up owning the whole shebang in twenty years if I'm dead in two weeks because I was short a nail."

"More like ten, with what you've told me so far, but I getcha. It sounds like you're planning on heading out soon. Anything you want me to try mail-ordering for you before you go?"

"Hm... that depends. How hard would it be to get to Lake Erie from here, minimizing exposure to the atmosphere?"

"That's a good question, I'll ask. Say, are you thinking of expanding the squiddies into the other Great Lakes?"

"I hadn't been, but it's an interesting thought. Why do you ask?"

"Well, it'll take at least a decade to buy and sell enough to buy all the squiddies in Lake Ontario. But if there's anywhere in the other lakes they can lay their eggs, then there's a couple of ways you can get a nail faster. Bring a few slaves in there, let them find the egg sites, claim them yourself. Then you can either just breed up a new batch of squiddies from scratch, or I can use the new egg-sites to leverage buying out the ones in Lake Ontario a lot faster."

"Hunh. I don't mind the idea of spreading intelligent life to places it hasn't been before... but I've got a different thought. Can we simply talk to whoever would be in charge here, about setting up a colonization effort with the cooperation of the squiddies, instead of doing it entirely with slaves I own?"

"If you want. Anything in particular you want to ask?"

"For one - why they haven't gone there already. Maybe they've got a good reason to stay in the lowest Great Lake."

"Or maybe they swam up to Niagara Falls a few times and decided it wasn't worth the effort."

"Well, we know where the canals are - or were - and where the streams leading to Lake Erie come closest to Lake Ontario. I'd feel a lot better about this whole thing if we actually gave the squiddies something they couldn't get on their own, instead of just took advantage of flaws in the way they do things."

 

[Winged One]

Hm, interesting. Having a home might let Bunny form more long-term relationships. As far as the ethics of slavery go, I'm a bit worried that it's going to go horribly wrong, but it might not.

I am amused that she basically told the squid people that she owns a moon of Mars in order to fuck with them.

 

[SufficeMalark]

This story needs more love.
Adding it to my signature.

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Nine: In-a-gadda-da-vida*

Even if I did end up as some sort of Anti-Evil Overlord with ranks of countless monstrous tentacled creatures as my Legions, trying to use them to investigate the post-Singularity cities had a minor hiccup: they were water-dwellers. On land, they could barely pull their own weight, they didn't live long without water to breathe, and they were almost as helpless as I was in a social gathering. (This also turned out to be most of the reason they hadn't gone a-colonizing; without detailed knowledge that there was even a place to go to /to/ colonize, the risk-reward analysis meant that none of them had any incentive to pull resources out of their market economy and throw them away.)

To investigate cities, I needed to work with people who could work on land. Joe's people would be nearly ideal, since they could respawn anyone who got melted by local nanotech defenses. However, their stone-age approach to technology meant that they would have to be taught almost from scratch what to look for - if their spirits would even agree to let their people participate in such a thing in the first place. Robots were another option to consider, except for the minor matter that I didn't know where I could get any built. As much as I disliked Technoville, the nearest source of people who might be willing to give the whole 'try not to go extinct' thing a try were back in that direction, on the southern shores of Lake Erie.

Of course, there was the minor matter of the clouds of toxic gas that had been spread over the land between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Fortunately, I had one AI pulling on the squiddie market to get me resources, and another to talk to who had atlases and maps from just before the Singularity.

"Alright, Boomer," I said, stretched out on my belly with my chin on my hands, "let's say we do want to bring the squiddies from here to Lake Erie. Assuming that a lot of the man-made waterways have been left unmaintained, and that cities have been rebuilt, and might or might not have dangerous nano-tech lying around... and that the air and ground in the Niagara Peninsula is likely going to be dangerous... is there a way that's more feasible than building some giant aquarium wagons?"

"Yes," the AI answered. (At about that time, I decided that I was getting annoyed of using the pronoun for inanimate objects to refer to Boomer. Even though Boomer's avatar was neither male nor female, since the badger was based on a sports mascot for both male and female teams, I decided to pick a gender, and to start thinking of Boomer as a 'her'.) "Oak Orchard Creek enters Lake Ontario about seventy kilometers east of the Niagara River. It intersects with the Erie Canal, which connects to the Niagara River partway between the city of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. There are several minor obstacles, such as water-control dams, that would have to be gotten around, and there is no way to know whether additional dangers have arisen since the last geo-information update without direct inspections. However, given the parameters you describe, this route would require the least amount of effort to travel."

--

'Least amount of effort' was a far cry from 'effortless'.

For one thing, I finally found out why Joe and I had been grabbed in the first place: the squiddies' experiments with metal on top of the lake had led them to the conclusion that it made Toronto feel more shooty than average. So they insisted that the wundermaterial canoe had to be kept under wraps, somewhat literally, until the CN Tower and its surrounding buildings were out of sight.

For another, the very first of what Boomer called 'minor obstacles' was 'minor' only by comparison to, say, trying to swim up Niagara Falls itself. After paddling through seven or eight kilometers of tree-lined creek, we came to what Boomer said had once been called Waterport Pond. It had once been a tiny hydro dam with a sluiceway over to the side, mostly to control the water level of the pond above; but most of the man-made infrastructure had collapsed and been partly washed away into a set of rapids. Joe and I could simply get out of the water and portage up the hill. The three squiddies accompanying us - a pair of guards and a messenger, the very first slaves I'd ever owned - didn't have it quite so easy. However, they turned out to be dab hands with small carts, ropes and pulleys, and there were plenty of trees to use to anchor things, so as the messenger squiddie turned around, her spiraling shell disappearing back down into the water to make arrangements for something a little less awkward and a little more permanent, the two guards were able to haul themselves around the bend and into the pond.

After that show of skill and determination, I felt that simply thinking of them as 'my squiddie slave guards' was extremely impersonal and disrespectful. I couldn't see any difference between them, so I asked Boomer to flash a sign asking if they had any names I could adapt to words spoken in the air. Which is how they received the names 'Pinky', for a shade of colour in her shell that was too subtle for me to make out, and 'Brain', for a slight bulge in his body over where his central nervous system was that I couldn't make out among all the other bulges.

According to Boomer's maps, in another twenty kilometers, we'd face a similar obstacle to climb up to Glenwood Lake, the south end of which was right next to the canal. What Boomer's maps didn't show was how those twenty kilometers had changed in recent decades.

--

"Hunh," I said, looking around. "I didn't think it was the season for tent caterpillars." The trees lining the banks, and turning the creek into a water-carpeted tunnel, had their green leaves nearly completely hidden by sheets of white.

"It isn't," Joe answered, in his usual laconic way.

"Oh. Um... I hope you won't think less of me if I say that I've got a very bad feeling about this."

"I don't see why," Joe commented. "I had to use a very powerful tool to cut your suit to fit you. How can any insect do as much?"

"Well, I've got my tail poking out, and we both have our heads uncovered - and there's more ways than just stinging or biting for a bug to hurt you. Maybe we should make sure the gear's secured, turn the canoe over, and have Pinky and Brain tow us for a while?"

"If you want to do that now, after just seeing silk in trees, is there anything you won't hide from?"

"You say that like hiding is a bad thing. Laura made this canoe out of stuff that I think is even harder than our armor plates - why /not/ protect ourselves with it when we can?"

Whatever response Joe was about to make was lost to history, as a sheet of white silky stuff started floating down from the trees. Without a word, the two of us paddled as hard as we could, but before we could speed up, it gently touched down - and stuck fast to everything it touched.

It slowed as it touched my head and shoulders, which gave me enough time to drop the paddle, reach into my belt, and pull out a bat-shaped knife in each hand. This turned out to be a good idea in mere moments, as I discovered the stuff was forming an airtight seal over my muzzle. A few slashes opened rents so I could reach to the top side, letting me cut my mouth free and inhale deeply.

"Joe!" I shouted on the exhale. "Can you breathe?"

"Mm!" was his answer, which I assumed meant 'no'. My top half was firmly wrapped, and was opaque enough that I couldn't see anything; but from what I could feel, the sheet of stuff had attached itself to the sides of the canoe instead of drooping inside, leaving my legs free. Another few slashes with my right hand opened another hole, into which I dropped the knife. Trying to move quickly rather than hurrying, I finally got some use out of my flexibility, as I twisted my legs to slide the knife over to him.

While all of that was going on, my ears, while as firmly glomped as the rest of my head, picked up the sounds of splashes, which I also felt starting to rock the boat. Something suddenly landed on the bow, rocking us - and just as suddenly was gone again, followed by a splash.

I used my remaining knife to start sawing a circle in the sheet around me, and in a few moments, had freed myself from being attached to a canoe.

This turned out to be a bad plan.

Something clotheslined me in the chest, and I was yanked upwards. I felt one of the squiddies' tentacles wrap around my hoof, but it slipped off as I kept rising.

I was twisted around and felt more sheets wrap around my legs, and hurriedly brought my knife up to my face, just in time for it to poke through more sheets wrapping around my top half, letting me keep breathing.

After a half-dozen layers had glued themselves around me, just about immobilizing everything but my fingers on the knife, I was... manhandled? ... to a horizontal position, and shoved against a roughly human-sized (but very much /not/ human-shaped) form. I was about to start sawing at my wrappings, when there was a great big lurch, which nearly made me drop my knife; a few brief moments of weightlessness; and an impact as we landed. Then again, as whatever I was stuck to jumped again - and again.

This continued for some time. (And for once, I couldn't even check Scorpia to find out how much time.)

After a while, the big light blur was replaced by a big dark blur, and the great big lurches replaced by a series of bone-jarring smaller ones.

Finally, more manhandling detached me from whatever had been carrying me, and I was set down.

I tried to use my muffled senses to see if there were any more of the whatever-they-were nearby, but my eyes were glued shut, my nostrils were blocked, and I couldn't make out any vibrations other than my own rapid pulse.

So I started sawing.

--

The outer layer of the sheets I was wrapped in wasn't sticky like all the others, so once I'd carefully uncovered my eyes, and sliced my limbs free of each other, I was free to move around - though I was probably doing a pretty good mummy impression.

"Boomer, you still with me?"

"I can hear you."

"Know where we are?"

"Given my accelerometer and maps, I believe we are in a farmhouse basement."

"Okay, let me get a flashlight free.."

The one I wore as a ring was easiest to uncover. It revealed... lots of white-wrapped forms, and lots of sparkly and shiny things reflecting the light all over. A few quick pokes, and I was fairly sure the only things left inside the other sheets were bones. "Anyone else alive in here? Make a noise, wriggle a foot, anything, let me know." The only motion I saw was whatever dust I'd disturbed, swirling in the air.

"Right. Guess we're in the pantry," I spoke aloud to let Boomer know the direction of my thoughts. "Or maybe not - do those piles look like they're in a pattern to you?"

"I cannot see."

"Oops." I applied the knife to uncover the pocket I kept Boomer in. "How's that?"

"I believe they are some sort of mating display, similar to a magpie's nest. I see coins, jewelry, silverware, bullets, phones, pieces of glass-"

I interrupted, "Do you see a way out?"

"Please turn around." I shrugged to myself, and obeyed, shining the light around. "The only entrance appears to be the one we were brought through, above the collapsed stairway. Can you climb?"

"I can climb trees, but I don't know about flat concrete - parkour was never my thing. The bat-belt has some sort of grappling hook and line, but I don't know if it supports any weight, or if there's anything up there to hook onto... Say, I could probably throw you up and catch you, and you could use your cameras to see if there's anything for the hook to catch on - would that work?"

I didn't detect any particular reluctance in Boomer's assent, and spent a few moments picking my way through the rotten remains of the staircase to give Boomer views from a few different angles, and played catch with her a few times.

She reported back by showing a 3D reconstruction on her screen, including the path we'd arrived by. "I see nothing up there but an empty room. If your grapple can catch on the corner of the doorframe, then that might hold your weight."

A few more slices with the knife, and I started tossing the bat-grapple up. It clunked down a half-dozen times without catching. "This might take a while," I commented. "Any alternative plans?"

Boomer started listing, "Digging? Building a ladder, or stilts? Forcing our captors to return us? Waiting for help?"

"Hm. None are especially good options..." I ran the available inventory through my head, from the skin out, idly kicking at some of the glittering trash. Then I had a thought, and recalled that I had another resource, which I hadn't made much use of at all since I'd gotten it.

"Boomer, I'm about to do something which may be completely fruitless and silly - and which may help." I pocketed her, moved to the middle of the room, facing the exit, and held up my hands, looking at them. "Um - Bun-Bun? Skeleton? Body? I don't know what you call yourself, or if you call yourself anything, but I think you're listening and watching. I don't want to stay here and get eaten. I don't know how to climb that wall. Is there anything you can do?"

I dropped my hands. Or, to be more precise, my hands dropped, without my having tried to drop them. I walked - or my body walked itself - to the corner of the basement nearest the door, where I watched as I put my hands against the wall, then my feet against the wall behind me, lifting my weight from the floor. As calmly as you please, I walked up that corner... then pushed with my hands as I bent my legs, gave a /heave/, and was through the door and on the ground-level floor.

And as soon as I landed, I curled myself up in agony, with the biggest charley horses I'd ever felt cramping both thighs.

If any of the whatever-they-were had come by in the next few minutes, I probably would have been dropped right back in the larder. During those few minutes, I was seriously wondering if I'd have been better off staying in my original, legless body. But, it seemed the whatever-they-were assumed that any prey whose head they'd covered with airtight seals would be dead in short order, and gradually my leg pain diminished, until I could pull myself back upright.

"Note to self," I said, to both myself and Boomer. "Don't ask Bun-Bun for help unless I really, /really/ need it."

--

The farmhouse looked like it had been some sort of survivalist compound. Its contents had mostly been trashed by time, weather, and critters, but as I limped on still-aching legs (and a still-aching hoof), I came by a few non-shiny items the whatever-they-were had left untouched. In particular, in the kitchen, near the icebox, was a calendar with days crossed off halfway through June. Of what year, it didn't say (though given the days of the week, Boomer could have narrowed down the possibilities); but since the Singularity seemed to have happened in November, it seemed like whoever had lived here had kept on living. At least, for a few years.

I debated with myself about burning the place down. I hadn't had time to check before Bun-Bun had launched me out of the basement, but it seemed likely that some of the bones in the basement were human (or some other sapient species), and I had an urge to give them a more dignified funeral than they'd gotten - ideally, taking some of the whatever-they-were with them. It wouldn't be hard - in fact, given lightning strikes and no more firefighters, I was surprised a wildfire hadn't swept through already. But that seemed... wasteful. Maybe someone who was better prepared could sweep through all those shinies in the basement and find something useful. I spent quite a few minutes thinking of ways to kill the whatever-they-weres, but couldn't come up with a way to get enough of them to make a dent in their population.

In the end, I just pushed my way out of a rotten screen door, leaving behind what used to be white clapboards in exchange for what used to be a red-painted barn. I found a corner that was reasonably out-of-sight of the entrance, and went to work hacking off the sheets that were still glued to me with a will. I lost some fur from my tail and head, both by having to trim the glued stuff and occasionally accidentally yanking out whole tufts, but soon enough was free of the stuff.

According to Boomer, the whatever-they-were had brought us upstream, in the direction all of us had been traveling. So, making sure that I had every weaponizable object in my pockets and pouches ready to go at the first sign of any creature that looked like it could wrap me up again, I slowly trod to the nearest point of the creek. My walking sticks were in the canoe, and none of the wood I found was worth using, so I had to take each and every one of the four hundred fifty-two steps without any support.

Trees were thick all around, and sheets were thick on the trees, choking some of them off. But I kept a knife in each hand between thumb and forefinger, and watching for any of those sheets to start moving in my direction, pulled Boomer out of my pocket, looped a piece of twine from one of my pouches around her, and lowered her into the water. The squiddies might not make noise themselves, but Pinky and Brain could pick up subsonics fairly well; and I didn't feel much like shouting for Joe and Clara for everything in the neighbourhood to hear.

After pulling Boomer back and pocketing her, I picked a tree to lean back against, and sat back to wait a while.

--

After staying focused on being in 'yellow alert' for a while, I twitched and nearly skewered the tentacle that rose out of the water. "Ah, good, um... Brain?"

"Pinky," Boomer corrected.

"How can you tell?"

"How can you not?"

I raised an eyebrow as I looked down at her, and her avatar just smiled back at me. I tossed her back into the water. After a few moments, during which Boomer presumably used her screen to flash sign-language and colour-changes that Pinky could understand, the tentacle gave a wave, and pulled back into the water. I pulled on Boomer's string. "What's the word?"

"Everyone's fine. She'll let them know where we are."

"Good. I'd like to get out of here as soon as we can. I don't like this place much right now."

After some more time on 'yellow alert', I finally caught sight of the canoe coming upstream - the upside-down canoe, its shiny finish hidden under countless white sheets.

A half-dozen tentacles rose from the water. "I think that's our ride," I said to Boomer, and didn't resist as they grabbed me, simply taking a deep breath as they pulled me under, maneuvering me into the air-bubble under the inverted canoe.

"Joe. Clara," I said, nodding to both as I grabbed one of the thwarts so I didn't have to tread water.

"Bunny. Boomer," he nodded back. In the shimmering light coming up from below, I watched one of the squiddies wrap their tentacles around the thwarts, seats, and other available bits, and tense as they started tugging us along.

I asked, "Did you get a look at what attacked us?"

"Yep."

"What were they?"

"Spiders."

"... Small ones or big ones?"

"Big ones. Big as you or me."

"Ah. You get many of them in the Great Peace?"

"Nope. Never seen them before in any of my lives."

"Well - let's hope they stay a local problem, then."

--

That was, thankfully, the most exciting bit of the trip. After a few more miles, the sheets covering the trees thinned, then vanished, so Joe and I put the canoe upright again. Other than his hair, as soon as the water dripped from his body-suit, he was dry as a bone. However, mine had been cut upon for my tail - and it felt like I was wearing a water-balloon. With everyone standing guard, I stripped off all my armor and gear, applied a towel as best I could, and then pulled the body-suit and armor right back on again. I figured that being somewhat damp, even mildewy, would be less of a problem than whatever other hostile flora or fauna might take an interest in us.

After that were miles and miles of creek under trees, punctuated by occasional meadows or ruins. Then the big effort to portage from the creek up to Glenwood lake, then again from the lake to the canal, and then around the canal locks in the aptly-named former city of Lockport, and then around the guard lock which marked the border between the canal and Tonawanda Creek, which came to an end at the Niagara River, halfway between Niagara Falls and downtown Buffalo.

We didn't come across a single person, either human or Changed, the whole way. If it weren't for the giant spiders, and the city-computer cooling towers in the distance, it would have been a nearly ideal little camping vacation, one I would have loved to have tried out back before I'd died, when an air ambulance was a cell-phone call away. (Of course, back before I'd died, giant spiders weren't a major threat.)

--

Joe asked, "Why did you choose to name yourself Bunny?"

"I thought the long-ears and puffy tail kind of gave it away."

"That only explains why you changed it /to/ Bunny. It does not explain why you /changed/ it to Bunny."

"That makes everything /so/ much clearer." He gave me a look, and I sighed. "Okay, okay, I know what you're asking."

"If you do not wish to answer-"

I shook my head. "I don't mind - I just haven't worked out how to describe my reasoning to anyone else. Lemme think for a few moments..." We both fell silent for a bit. "Okay. Names are important. Choosing how to name things lets you tell one thing from another - cats from dogs even though both are carnivores. Done badly, and you might think that just because two people collapse in a 'faint', they can be revived the same way. And more than that - people aren't quite rational, and names can imply things. Someone called 'Awesome McCoolname' is more likely to receive respect and get elected than 'Faily O'Loser'.

"I've been happy with the name my parents gave me - with a bit of creative interpretation, it could mean 'Judge of the height of God's wickedness', which, given how I went full atheist when I was around thirty, was a personal in-joke." I shrugged. "Then I died, was brought back to life, and got a sex-change and species-change all rolled into one. There are people who've changed their names after just one of those four things. There's even a chance... anyway, just by being here, I've gone through a more powerful initiation rule than just about anyone who simply hallucinated a religious experience - er, no offense intended to any religious experiences in your own culture..."

"None taken." It was hard to tell whether he was amused or annoyed.

"Anyway. My original name can still refer to me, if anyone wants to use it. But - it doesn't seem an /appropriate/ name. My family name refers to a family that doesn't exist. I don't need my middle name to differentiate me from the other people who share my first and last name. And my first name is masculine. I could have accented it to the feminine form, but," I shrugged again, "if I was going to do that, then why stop there? So, once someone I met called me by something that was appropriate, I adopted it. 'Bunny' is precisely accurate, in exactly the same way as Blackbeard or Erik the Red... or Injun Joe."

"There are many other sorts of 'bunnies'."

"Eh. It's been pretty obvious so far which is which. Besides, I don't feel like being 'Bunny Pinkfur'."

"You have other attributes."

"Maybe so, but I haven't been able to think of a respectable word for 'the limper'"

"Bunny One-Hoof? Bunny Short-leg?"

"Eh, doesn't quite scan. Oh - I just realized, we've got a thesaurus. Say, Boomer? Got any good words for having one bad leg?"

"Papakata."

"Gesundheit?"

"It is a Maori word, meaning a person with one crippled leg."

"Bunny Papakata... Hm... Eh, I /suppose/ I could live with that, if there's nothing better. I don't really have any connection to the Maori, though."

Joe spoke, "Perhaps you are thinking too concretely."

"I think 'The Great and Powerful Bunny' would make people take me /less/ seriously. But maybe you're right. You've been around me for a little while - has anything about me caught your attention?"

"The deeper into the woods you go, and the further from other people, the happier you are."

"I am? I hadn't noticed."

"It is obvious."

"I'm willing to take your word for it - I've always enjoyed hiking. Alright, Boomer - any fancy words for being happy by myself in the woods?"

"Waldeinsamkeit. German."

"Of course they have a word for that. 'Bunny Waldeinsamkeit'. A bit of a mouthful... but not bad. And I've got plenty of central European ancestors - my original family name was German. I could work with that."

--

"There's something I've been wanting to ask you, Joe, but I haven't been able to figure out a way that doesn't sound terrible."

"I do not think I will chop your head off for asking a question."

"Right. Um... Were you ever, well, actually born?"

"As opposed to just walking out of a spirit pool one day, fully formed?"

"Well - yeah."

"Yes, I was born. The first time, I was born a human, and my parents said I was a happy little girl who ran around a lot."

"'First time'... you've been born more than once?"

"It is difficult to know how to be a deer, or turtle, or anything, if you do not remember growing up as one."

"But couldn't your spirits just bring you out of one of your pools, with all that information already in your head?"

"Probably."

"Then why don't they?"

"They have not said why. We talk about that, sometimes. My best guess is that the spirits are preparing for a time when they cannot help us, and we will have to live on our own again, the way you do."

"Hm... when you're an animal, a predator, do you eat prey animals?"

"Of course."

"And when you're a prey animal, you try not to be eaten?"

"Of course."

"Why not just bare your throat to the predator, to save everyone involved a lot of time and effort?"

"Why do the spirits not just make one of us into all the people needed for a whole village?"

"I'm going to guess... you're thinking the whole 'prepared to live without the spirits' guess again?"

"Do you have a better answer?"

"I haven't even figured out all the questions yet..."

--

We made camp that night on Grand Island, just across from where we entered the Niagara River. As far as we could tell, there weren't any dangerous chemicals nearby, and the towers were just on the mainland, so it was about as safe as anywhere we were likely to find.

"Well, Joe," I asked, nibbling on some clover flowers, "do your spirits keep any pools nearby? You might want to drop in to refresh your memories stored in them."

"Not on the islands," he said. "Only on the other side of the river. I think all the ones near us were caught in the poison clouds."

"So - if I dropped dead right here, or managed to convince you you didn't have to stick with me some other way, what would you want to do?"

"Follow the shore to a place it hasn't been poisoned. Give the spirits my memories. Then let them make a hundred of me, a thousand, to go and war on those who tried to kill my people."

"If that's what the you who's here wants... then isn't that what any other yous your spirits might have made would want, too?"

"Very likely."

"Then... why haven't whatever scouts your war parties use already found us?"

"Perhaps the land is still too poisoned to walk over. Perhaps the war is already won."

"Or lost."

"Any war that is won, is also a war that is lost."

"Not necessarily - on rare occasion, both sides lose. On rarer occasions, both sides win."

"I do not see how."

And so we watched our shadows grow longer, talking of game theory, politics, crop-growing, and other things - almost anything other than the coming day.

That day, we would be approaching the city that had covered at least a few hundred square kilometers with chemical weapons...

 

[DataPacRat]

A cover page for S.I. has been created. I gave the artist their head, and http://www.datapacrat.com/SI/SI-cover-page.png was the result. I'm kind of reminded of some 1970's Philip K. Dick covers - which isn't a bad thing, at least in my opinion.

 

[TJG]

That is a very ominous looking piece of art. Nice artistic nod of those times. The story feels like some crazy Gamma World game campaigns.

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Ten: In-Describable*

Combined, already knew a few things about Buffalo.

I knew that it at least occasionally kept in touch with the other cities on the shore of Lake Erie, via boat traffic; and that it was one of the cities Technoville was planning on incorporating into its 'system'. Joe was mostly vaguely aware of it as the nearest city outside the Great Peace, and thought that the people tended to live to the south of the big towers. He also had word from the spirits that the toxic cloud had started spreading into the Great Peace's territory at the place I knew as Fort Erie, just across the shore from Buffalo. Between the two of us, we'd figured out that the unprecedented cloud had followed close after my own unprecedented flight in and use of radio; and that once the cloud had enveloped the place I'd landed, it had expanded directly to the place I'd talked about heading next. Boomer and Clara had pre-singularity maps and aerial photos, and after climbing some trees and waving their hardware around, their cameras could make 3D models of the towers, and they could make estimates about the remaining details. Pinky and Brain, unfortunately, could add nothing to this discussion.

Our combined goals added up, pretty much, to my goals. Pinky and Brain considered themselves my slaves, obligated to obey my orders - my primary one being to try to keep me, and everyone else in our group, alive. Boomer and Clara seemed to be falling back on Laura's general goals of 'improve the social good', which they were currently interpreting as helping me improve whatever societies we found. Scorpia and the tape-bots weren't smart enough to have any goals other than to follow immediate instructions. Joe, in his few words, indicated he was trying to follow the spirits' will, which, as of the last time he'd been in touch with them, was to help me.

And my goals?

Well, for the short term, they were pretty simple. Avoid dying - which meant that if Buffalo really was the launch site of some attack that had been following me, try not to let them get their hands on me. I'd left my radio back in Fonthill, but if whatever was in the cloud had been able to gather the information on where I was going, then they probably had at least a description of me... so I was going to be spending the day buried inside one of the university's hazmat suits. At least, until we found out more about what was going on in Buffalo, or had left it behind us.

In the slightly-less-short term, I wanted to meet people. I knew how terrible I was with the ebb-and-flow of social situations, but I was going to need help in unwrapping the riddles of the Singularity. I had some ideas about ways to start investigating such things, while minimizing Technoville's awareness that anything was going on at all. Put somewhat indelicately, while I was willing to take the risk of investigating dangerous places if I had to, if somebody else were convinced that it was worth their while to risk /their/ lives instead of mine, I'd be quite willing to let them. There was no way I was socially ept enough to trick anyone into that, so that could only ever happen once I'd gotten them to understand the potential risks and rewards involved; but to do that, I might have to teach them the basics about risk and reward analysis. Given the numbers of anabaptists I'd met on the far side of the lake, I wasn't holding out much hope that any given individual I'd met would already be willing to calculate the odds of ensuring mind-kind's survival without including assumptions like 'people keep existing after they die' or 'there's a super-powerful being who would never let that happen'.

I'd been dead for a few decades. If anyone had evidence about what lay beyond the veil, it was me - and even before I'd died, the evidence I had was compelling enough that I'd been willing to take the gamble on being cryopreserved in the first place. Joe, of course, had an entirely different perspective on the whole thing, since his 'spirits' could be talked to, and regularly intervened in reality to recreate anyone who'd died. Boomer and Clara considered themselves merely to be conversational interfaces connected to knowledge engines. And, possibly an important oversight, the translation dictionary for the squiddies didn't include anything in the topic at all, and if they didn't already have a religion, I didn't want to be the one to give them one.

It might be years before I met someone - or taught someone - who knew enough to be able to make what I would consider to be a sufficiently rational analysis. Fortunately, Technoville had told me, and the university's genetic analysis had confirmed, that barring accident, I had quite a few years of life to look forward to. So I wasn't in a /particular/ rush.

Which added up to our general plan: try and learn as much as we could about Buffalo from as far away as we could; and depending on what we saw, send in Joe to interact with the locals to learn more.

--

They say no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Our plan didn't even survive a /lack/ of contact with the enemy.

"You're sure it was to the south of the big towers?"

I'd rescued the spotting scope from the remains of Technoville's camera-telescope. It had survived Toronto's death ray in fairly good condition, and once detached from the rest, was only the size of a pen, so I'd pocketed it on the off chance I could use it later. Now, it was later. Joe had grabbed a set of steampunk goggles from the university's pre-Singularity Halloween collection - unlike most steampunk gear from before I died, these ones actually did something useful.

"No," he answered, twisting one of his lenses to focus in better, "but those buildings do not look like they were built before the Serpent War."

"I was hoping you wouldn't say that. I see docked boats, I see some carts - I don't see any people, or animals."

"Perhaps they all left to follow the cloud, and invade my people's land."

"That's actually one of the /better/ scenarios I can think of. One of the worse is that another Singularity hit, and everyone vanished again."

"I think you do not need to worry about that. I see a body."

"Where?" We lined up our respective optics, and I saw a crumpled form on a dock. "Ah, crap. Looks like it's been there a few days... maybe since the cloud first appeared."

"Perhaps some of the poison blew back across the river."

"Perhaps," I agreed, glumly. "If so - we'd better keep our suits on, and get as far away as we can before air scrubbers' batteries run out. I don't /see/ anything that looks like powder, or residue, or anything - not that I know what to look for, even if we did bring a mass spectrometer from the university."

Boomer's voice piped up from inside my suit, "A mass spectrometer is not available, but you do possess the components of an optical spectrometer."

"What components are those?"

"The ring you use as a light-source can be adjusted to produce spectroscopic-quality visible frequencies, as well as infrared or ultraviolet, among other effects. The cameras in the screen you attached to me can interpret reflected light in sufficient detail to compare to a library of chemicals."

"Why would a piece of Halloween jewelry have scientific gear in it?"

"Like the screen you attached to my case, it was available and could do what Tammy Hardecky wanted. She was unable to complete the wireless interface before she left, but you can detach my screen and use that wire to connect me to the standard port to reprogram it."

"... And you never brought this up before because..?"

"You never asked."

I resisted the urge to rub my temple, and not just because the hazmat suit was in the way. Sometimes I forgot that Boomer's thought processes didn't follow the same lines as a human's. "Right," I said. "Will it stop being a flashlight when you're done?"

"I can program it to have four settings, set by rotating the top face at ninety degree intervals. Off; light; spectrometer emitter; and half light, half spectrometer."

"Does your library include the signatures of nerve gases?"

"Yes, and thousands of other toxic chemicals."

"Joe - let's go back downstream to get this set up, and put Boomer back in that see-through waterproof bag. I don't want to pull off my gloves here."

--

When in 'scanning mode', the ring cycled through a full spectrum - black to red to green to blue to black - over about a second. I was a mite leery about wearing it on the outside of the hazmat suits, so I ended up taping it to Boomer's case, inside the bag with her. Boomer said that she could filter the interference from the plastic the same way she did interference from air.

Initial testing went well - Boomer could ID minerals, metals, and what our various pieces of gear were made of.

While I was playing with the whole setup, getting a feel for how close I had to hold Boomer to my harmonica for her to identify its materials, what lighting worked best, and so on, I had a thought. I had, in essence, just kitbashed a tricorder together out of spare parts. And I'd only done so because I'd inadvertently asked one of those parts if it was possible.

"Boomer," I wondered aloud, "does any of the /other/ gear we have, that you know of, allow us to do anything that we're not using it for?"

"Of course," she answered. "I am disappointed that you have been taking little advantage of the educational opportunities my presence offers. In addition to providing library data for your perusal, I can act as a tutor, guide meditation, and monitor your bioreadings while you exercise."

"A 'conversational interface' can be 'disappointed'?"

"I am a stateful machine; whether or not I can feel any emotions, I have sufficient knowledge of social interaction to know when it is appropriate to emulate feeling something."

"Of course. In that case - when we have downtime, please start reminding me to improve my education. Do you have any other tricks?"

"My camera is not limited to the visual spectrum, and I can convert infrared or ultraviolet images into a format you can see."

"Ah, night-vision. Of a sort. That could come in handy. Any other tactical tricks?"

"The surface of your armored plates, and Joe's shield, can be altered to one of eight different color patterns. However, none of your items contain working wireless interfaces, meaning they require a direct connection to control."

"Hm... so we'd have to plug you or Clara into anything we want to redecorate. I've gotten used to the white-on-black look, but maybe something darker or greener would be a little more practical. What are the eight patterns?"

"White snow, tan desert, light-green forest, dark-green jungle, shark-blue underwater, gray urban, and night black. The eighth setting for the armor is rescue orange, and for the shield, American patriotic."

"Let's try forest green. How's that work?" She walked me through unplugging the cable from the ring, and attaching it to the right spots on each armored plate. That was all it took, it seemed; over about half-a-dozen seconds, each white item mottled and darkened into something like a pile of leaves.

Joe took his own turn, and his shield became /much/ less of a visual distraction. "I approve," was his only comment, and even that was only when prompted.

"Well, I've still got a bright pink head, and the camouflage won't help much inside the hazmat suits - but I feel kind of silly and stupid for having spent all this time without having known we could do this. Alright, Boomer, have we got any gear that we haven't shown any indication we've got any idea what it can do?"

"The object in your bat-belt's third pouch on the left, shaped like a standard battery, is actually a scent synthesizer."

"What scents does it synthesize?"

"That model is advertised as having artificial organelles capable of producing any of one hundred twenty-eight different aromatic compounds, which can be produced in sufficient concentrations and combinations that the total number of scents requires not just exponents, but tetration, to describe."

"How many of them can actually be distinguished?"

"Several thousand, depending on who is doing the smelling."

"Can it remove scents?"

"It is claimed to. It can produce beta-cyclodextrin, a chemical which can surround certain chemicals and prevent them from being smelled."

"So if I wanted to smell like... a pile of leaves instead of whatever it is I do smell like?"

"That can be approached."

"Okay. Let's hold off on that for now - I don't want to be cooped up in a hazmat suit full of 'aromatic compounds'. Any other tricks with the gear?"

"Your coil of shiny yellow rope has two main functions. On command, it can switch from its ordinary flexible state to something resembling a piece of rigid metal, maintaining whatever shape it was in, and back. In addition, its length contains electromagnetic field creators, specifically designed to interact with a vertebrate's peripheral nervous system. While designed for certain adult entertainment activities, it can also interfere with voluntary muscle movement, or simply induce pain instead of pleasure."

"Eurgh." I looked at the rope in a new light, trying to figure out if I still felt like touching it. Then my common-sense slapped me upside the head, pointing out that there was a shortage of hardware stores around these days, and that distaste was a stupid reason to risk getting killed for lack of a rope. "And I need to plug you into it to make it work?"

"Actually, it contains several touch-sensitive surfaces that act as controls, identifiable to both sight and touch by the change in the braiding."

"Hunh. Okay, what control does what?" She led me through the manual. I tied one end into a lariat, and wrapped it around my left hand, to start practicing some of the controls.

While I was working on that, Boomer continued describing the tricks and treats offered by our pieces of Halloween costumes. "Joe's boots contain actively managed treads and friction, the actuators and computers powered by his weight on each step. His helmet contains control surfaces for throwing a hammer you did not bring. His collapsible bow, and arrows, contain micro-actuators to help steady the aim."

Eventually, she ran out of things to describe, and I was feeling kind of disturbed by how my hand felt with the various nerve-interaction commands, so we suited back up, told Pinky and Brain not to touch anything on dry land if possible, and paddled back towards Buffalo.

"I have a signature," Boomer (back in tricorder mode) stated, as we came close to shore. "A V-series nerve agent, possibly VX. It covers every surface in range. If you touch anything here, you will need to clean your suits before removing them. It is very likely present in the atmosphere. As you lack any antidotes, you must not remove your suits."

"Gotcha," I said. "Joe, you heard?"

"You need to ask?"

"For a life and death detail? You bet I'll ask."

"Fine. Yes, I heard."

"Alright. That cloud was hunting me earlier. If there's any way to find out, I want to know where it came from, who controls it, why it's after me, and any other details that we need to know to get it to /not/ hunt me. It's been a few days, so it seems like it probably lost our trail when the squiddies snagged us. I don't want to get too close to it without knowing anything about it. So - we're here, a place where the cloud was, which makes it one of the few places we might be able to learn anything about it. I suppose could just wander up and down some of the streets... but there's probably a better way to go about looking for clues. Anyone have any ideas?"

Joe said, "Look for their military centers, where they launched their attack from."

"Um," I said, thinking. "It's an odd military that destroys its own home city. But that does bring up the point, that we don't really know for sure /where/ the cloud came from. Maybe from here - maybe it picked up my radio from a lot farther south, and just came through here looking for it. If we can find a local barracks or armory, we can probably figure out whether the local armed forces were told about the cloud before it arrived... though if they were, they just might start shooting at us as soon as they see us. Any way we can figure that out without sticking our necks out?"

Joe gave an ever-so-slight shrug. "The cloud kills people and animals. It should not be hard to track, if it came from outside the city."

"True... Boomer, can your scanning help figure that out?"

"Possibly," answered the AI. "I can map the density of the toxin as you travel, and extrapolate from that."

"Fair enough," I nodded. "Do your maps have anything on local military bases?"

"Yes, but based on what I have already seen, few, if any, of the buildings on those maps still stand."

"Right. Okay - so, first goal, get out alive. Second goal, find local military places. Second-and-a-half goal, look for any local information that might point us to the local military. Third goal, let Boomer map toxin levels. Am I missing anything?"

Joe nodded. "Burying the dead. Finding survivors. Looking for anything else of use, that isn't covered in poison."

I shook my head. "We only have limited time in the suits - maybe if we find some big, charged-up batteries, we could hook them up to keep breathing long enough to do some of that."

Joe frowned, but didn't object. Instead, he said, "You have not said anything about getting 'goal one'."

"I'm assuming Pinky and Brain can guard the canoe. Maybe one guard it, and one swim on patrol. Hm... we don't have any radios, and I wouldn't want to use one if we did, but do you think they can whistle, or anything to catch our attention?"

Clara, who'd been quiet for a great deal of time to help save on power, finally chose to speak up. "I can stay with them," she said through her bovine avatar. "And set my volume to maximum should they decide to inform you of something."

I nodded. "Appreciate it."

--

I don't like remembering what we saw in the school. When I was actually seeing it, I liked it even less.

I said aloud, probably in something of a strangled voice, "Bun-Bun, there's nerve gas outside the suit. Throwing up right now would be a /really/ /bad/ idea. If you can do something to keep me from doing that..."

When I said that, I felt a cramping, deep in my guts, sharp enough that I was doubled over before even realizing it. But I didn't feel like throwing up any longer. Which didn't make me feel any better, just less likely to accidentally kill myself.

I straightened, and very carefully did not look away. At that time, in that place, I made a resolution to myself: As long as it didn't involve x-risks, whoever made the cloud had to be stopped. Hunting down me for flying or using a radio, was one thing; I could even understand launching a preemptive attack on the people of the Great Peace, for territory or resources or whatever. But whoever could do something like /this/, if they ever became sane enough to fully comprehend their own actions, would become so wracked with guilt that suicide would be one of the few ways to deal with it. Killing them before they made that realization was, in a way, something of a kindness - even moreso if it could be done before they turned any more children into undignified, lifeless meat.

"Boomer - please make a record of... this. We may need it to persuade other people to hunt down war criminals. Joe - change of plans. We look for batteries to keep breathing with - and then we find /anyone/ who's managed to stay alive."

--

My best guess for the population of Buffalo, as of the time I was revived, was a hundred thousand living, breathing people, plus or minus a factor of two or three.

We found a total of two still breathing.

After an hour of walking around, Boomer said, "I hear a noise." My ears were flattened by my suit, but she played it back at a higher volume. Holding Boomer high and turning her around, we only had to backtrack along a single echo to arrive at a particular home - or, more specifically, the angled doors of that home's storm cellar.

"Hello!" I called out. "Is anybody in there?"

The banging immediately stopped. A muffled woman's voice returned, "Hello?"

"Don't open the door!" I shouted out as I quickly thought of that. "The air is still poisonous."

"I know," she answered. "Are you a search and rescue team?"

I looked at Joe, who shrugged. "We're not from Buffalo," I said, "but we're looking for survivors. We're civilians, so we're not completely sure what we're doing, but we have good advisors. There doesn't seem to be any poison on Grand Island, so we're thinking of taking any survivors we find there. How many people are in there?"

"Two," she answered. "Me, and my grand-daughter, Minerva Harriet Tubman Joshi."

"Okay," I said. "We only have two suits, and both of us are wearing them. I think we'll have to go to a safe area, have one of us take the suit off, and have the other one of us bring the empty suit back. But we'll have to work out some sort of airlock system-"

She interrupted me, "What sort of suits?"

"Uh - Boomer?"

Boomer rattled off a brand-name and model number.

"Really?" said the woman, who hadn't given her name. "Are you using the recyclers that came with them?"

I nodded, instinctively if a touch pointlessly, as I said, "That's right."

"Then we're in luck. That model is designed to be cross-connected. I can put Minnie on a stretcher, seal her in some tarps, and you can run your hoses inside. The two of you can just carry her out."

"Ah," I commented, "About that. I've got a bad leg - I'm barely carrying myself. How heavy is Minnie?"

"Seventy-two pounds."

Joe commented, "I can carry her."

"Who was that? I thought you said there were two of you - are you using a radio?"

"Er," I said, "No, ma'am. It's a bit complicated. But if the air recyclers are like you say - he can carry Minnie out, and then one of us can bring an empty suit back for you. We'll just have to figure out how to get Minnie out without compromising your own air."

"What materials do you have to work with?"

"Whatever we can find. You mentioned tarps, so there should be more to be found - if one's rolled up, then there should be minimal contamination on the surfaces pressed against each other."

"That won't be necessary. My daughter, may God rest her soul, built this shelter for this family to survive a tornado - and it has exactly what's needed to keep it alive now. You two stay right there. I need to put together a few things and talk to Minnie. Five minutes, maybe ten." I heard footsteps, fading.

I sighed, rubbing my still-aching belly. Seemed that Bun-Bun exacted a high price for her help, though I wasn't sure whether that was intentional to keep me relying on myself instead of her, or if that was just how she worked. "Welp," I said to Joe, "Two people alive are better than none. If we pull this off - I'll at least be able to say to myself I made /that/ much of a difference."

After a few moments of standing around, I realized I could spend the time a tad more productively. "Boomer, how's that map coming?"

She replaced her badger avatar with an overhead map of the city. "Here are the places you have been, with the level of poison indicated by color. Interpolating and extrapolating from that data set, here is a heat-map of anticipated poison levels."

Joe and I huddled our helmets together to look at the results. "That's... a bit disturbing," I commented. "You're sure that's the center?"

Boomer responded, "I took reading of the shore since I reprogrammed the light. The closer a reading is to the towers in what used to be downtown Buffalo, the higher the level of poison. The further, the lower."

Joe asked, "You are sure that is the center, and not the new city?"

Boomer said simply, "Yes."

"Hunh," I hunhed. "It seems... either somebody stuck some sort of military base in there that all this poison was stockpiled in... or we're not dealing with humans at all."

Before I could work on the ramifications of that, I picked up steps from inside the shelter.

"Minnie, say hello to the nice people who will be taking care of you for a while. There's Bunny, and Boomer, and another one."

"Joe," Joe introduced himself.

"Hello," came a soft voice.

"Hello," the three of us chorused back.

The woman said, confidently, "I am about to seal Minnie up in a tarp, sleeping-bag style for easy carry. It is air-tight, but there's enough air for a few minutes, so you can take the time to do this right and not make a mess of things by trying to hurry." She led us through the instructions for connecting Minnie's improvised suit to our professional ones... three times.

"Good," she finally sounded satisfied. "Minnie - never forget, your parents love you, and I love you, and always will." There was a brief silence. "Very well - I am sealing her up... now. The door is unlocked. Give me fifteen seconds, and then come in."

We waited in the complete silence for a mental count of fifteen, and then Joe stepped to the door. He took the handle, and something clicked in my head - "Joe, wait-" I started, but he'd already started swinging open the door, revealing a blue bundle at the top of the stairs... and a tan-skinned, white-haired woman, wearing professional business attire, standing calmly just past her.

"Don't worry about me," she said, "you couldn't have made a working airlock. Keep her safe."

My guts suddenly cramped so hard I doubled over again. I tried to complain to Bun-Bun, but simply couldn't. And then, to put matters delicately, I discovered why hens tend to make so much noise when they lay an egg.

I wasn't in control of what my body was doing anymore, like back at the spider's den. I felt myself wriggle my right arm out of its sleeve, reach down, and collect the smooth shape that had just appeared. More wriggling placed it in the helmet's food-lock, whereupon my other arm pulled it out. My feet carried me around Joe, who was calmly connecting his air recycler to the tarp, and I walked down the steps to where the woman was standing, watching, and breathing in the poisonous air... and I jammed the egg against her sleeve. Something hissed, she jumped, and I collapsed as my body was suddenly under my own (lack of) control again.

"What was that?" she asked, rubbing at her arm. "A mercy shot?"

"I have no idea," I said, pulling myself back upright. "Like I said - complicated. May I at least know your name?"

She didn't answer the question, instead saying, "My breath should be short by now. You're sure the gas is still airborne?"

"Yes," Boomer answered.

The grandmother raised an eyebrow at that, but simply plucked the egg from my unresisting hand. "This doesn't look like any autoinjector I've ever seen. What was in it?"

I shook my head, but held up Boomer to point the ring's light at it. "The spectrographic signature is complicated," she said, "but consistent with atropine and related anticholinergic drugs."

"Right," said the woman, "That may keep me alive, but the less I breathe of this-" she glanced at the blue tarp, "stuff, the better. You have a boat?" I nodded, and pointed in its direction, northwest of where we were, towards Old Buffalo. She started striding briskly, Joe held Minnie in front of him and continued, and I followed along.

--

"So," I said, once my insides were feeling close to normal again, "what /is/ your name?"

She dropped back a few steps, letting Joe take the lead. "Would you believe me if I told you it was Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fanna Bo Besca the Third?"

"Probably not. And even if it was, I'd probably just call you Dot for short. Maybe Dotty, after that stunt you pulled."

She brought herself up short, and looked into my helmet. "Now how would you know /that/?"

"Would you believe me if I told you 'It's complicated'?"

Dotty snorted, and turned back to start following Joe again. "Probably. There's no /simple/ reason a Changed would try to save anyone from /this/ town."

"Um... I don't know any reason why a Changed wouldn't?"

"Hmph," she hmphed. After a few moments, she added, "In case I drop dead soon-"

"Gramma!" Minnie's voice came from over Joe's shoulder. "Don't talk like that!"

Dotty continued, "Thank you."

I just nodded. I had a hard enough time figuring out how to deal with everyday social niceties. I didn't know if there /were/ any niceties for anything like this. In case my silence was an awkward one, I covered it up by saying, "Boomer? How are we doing, toxin-wise?"

"My readings continue to match my projections. However, I am also beginning to pick up somewhat elevated quantities of lithium, sodium, and potassium-" Her voice cut off as she was interrupted:

Joe's whole body burst into flame.

 

[BlackoutSampler]

not again. You need to learn to not step into unmarked spontaneous combustion zones, its bad for your health.

on a more serious note, what is the purpose of the first section? It didn't tell me anything I couldn't infer from the previous chapters, and being in the middle of bugfuck nowhere with the chance of absolutely ANYTHING (most of which involves death and danger) happening is not a time to reassess interparty allegiances. so it sorta came off to me as a restatement of "why atheism," which doesn't seem like the point of this story. so it felt a bit awkward to read.

 

[DataPacRat]

not again. You need to learn to not step into unmarked spontaneous combustion zones, its bad for your health.

on a more serious note, what is the purpose of the first section? It didn't tell me anything I couldn't infer from the previous chapters, and being in the middle of bugfuck nowhere with the chance of absolutely ANYTHING (most of which involves death and danger) happening is not a time to reassess interparty allegiances. so it sorta came off to me as a restatement of "why atheism," which doesn't seem like the point of this story. so it felt a bit awkward to read.

Click to shrink...

Bunny is an 'aspiring rationalist' - so she's taken seriously an offhand comment from Technoville that one of the tricks to avoid undue influence from whatever causes things like blue-green day is to reassess your motivations from scratch. I decided to combine that with a lead-up to 'no plan survives' by having her work out what the plan that didn't survive actually /was/, and throw in a bit of explicit description of what had previously been implied... and ended up with the section you mentioned.

Part of Bunny's reasoning process happens to be that, using the tools of analyzing evidence she knows of, applied to the evidence she has available to her, 'atheism' is not only the correct conclusion as a sheer matter of fact, but there are further conclusions to be made based on that premise, and people who don't even get as far as concluding 'atheism' can't be relied on to reach those further conclusions. Which is a significant reason why she's decided to act in the manner of a protagonist, dealing with the big problems she sees before her, instead of doing what she really wants and finding a nice forest to relax and de-stress in. In short, if Bunny weren't an atheist, she'd be doing something completely different at this point; so mentioning that as part of her reasoning process is meant more to detail her character than to convert the audience.

(And, as usual, my .sig-quote may apply.)

 

[Catty Nebulart]

There was no way I was socially ept enough

Click to shrink...

ept -> apt

I'm enjoying the story but don;t have many comments

 

[DataPacRat]

ept -> apt

Click to shrink...

I'm not sure the change is needed; I refer you to http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ept&allowed_in_frame=0 :
ept (adj.)
1938, back-formation from inept, usually with an attempt at comical effect. Related: Eptitude; eptly.

I'm enjoying the story but don;t have many comments

Click to shrink...

Still good to hear.

 

[Catty Nebulart]

I'm not sure the change is needed; I refer you to http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ept&allowed_in_frame=0 :
ept (adj.)
1938, back-formation from inept, usually with an attempt at comical effect. Related: Eptitude; eptly.

Click to shrink...

In which case you have a double negative that doesn't make much sense. You are not socially inept enough? In context you clearly mean the opposite...

 

[DataPacRat]

In which case you have a double negative that doesn't make much sense. You are not socially inept enough? In context you clearly mean the opposite...

Click to shrink...

Er, not quite - the formation starts with 'inept' (which, of course, is an evolution stemming from the word 'apt'), and then in parallel with existing words like 'inorganic' or 'inexpensive', the 'in' was dropped and the remaining word treated as having the opposite meaning - thus, 'ept' was constructed to mean 'apt'.

(I was awfully tempted to use 'infamous', 'invaluable', and 'inflammable' as the examples...)

It's not nearly the oddest grammatical construction I've seen; http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/overgeneralization.html is one place to find a few more.

 

[Hazard]

(I was awfully tempted to use 'infamous', 'invaluable', and 'inflammable' as the examples...)

Click to shrink...

Invaluable and inflammable would've been poor examples because invaluable does not mean 'not valuable' it means 'very valuable, possibly to the extent it's impossible to properly estimate' and inflammable means 'burnable,' exactly like flammable.

Infamous would've been a poor example too. Both famous and infamous imply a certain charge to the reputation they refer to, with famous it being generally positive and infamous implying a generally negative reputation.

 

[DataPacRat]

Invaluable and inflammable would've been poor examples because invaluable does not mean 'not valuable' it means 'very valuable, possibly to the extent it's impossible to properly estimate' and inflammable means 'burnable,' exactly like flammable.

Infamous would've been a poor example too. Both famous and infamous imply a certain charge to the reputation they refer to, with famous it being generally positive and infamous implying a generally negative reputation.

Click to shrink...

Like I said - it was an /awful/ temptation. <ahem>

 

[Hazard]

Like I said - it was an /awful/ temptation. <ahem>

Click to shrink...

... It would've run counter to the very point you were trying to make, destroying your argument before you could get it off the ground. Why would you do that?

People are weird.

 

[DataPacRat]

... It would've run counter to the very point you were trying to make, destroying your argument before you could get it off the ground. Why would you do that?

People are weird.

Click to shrink...

Would my previous post make more sense if you took Wiktionary's definitions of awful, at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/awful , and applied either definition 1 or 7 instead of 6?

 

[Hazard]

Would my previous post make more sense if you took Wiktionary's definitions of awful, at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/awful , and applied either definition 1 or 7 instead of 6?

Click to shrink...

Yes, yes it would. And I can now see what you meant.

 

[SufficeMalark]

You love your cliffhangers don't you?

 

[DataPacRat]

You love your cliffhangers don't you?

Click to shrink...

Given my previous experience in writing long-form fiction, the most accurate response I can think of to offer appears to be:

Why yes, yes I do.

 

[DataPacRat]

*Book Three: Ex-*


*Chapter One: Ex-hibition*

Fortunately, our hazmat suits turned out to be designed to handle a little chemical fire.

Unfortunately, the tarp keeping the little girl, Minnie, safe from the toxic atmosphere, wasn't.

As soon as Joe noticed he was on fire, he squeezed closed the hose connecting his air-recycling pack to the tarp, and unceremoniously dropped her to the street. Dotty (her grandmother) and I hurried as fast as we could - her faster than me, thanks to my genius decision not to bring a walking stick - to pull Minnie away from Joe, and connect her to my own suit's life-support pack. Boomer, my pocket AI, was shouting instructions to Joe, I was trying to watch Dotty for any signs that the residual nerve gas was affecting her, or the antidote my body had unexpectedly produced for her was...

In short, everything was higgledy-piggledy.

Which, of course, meant that as Joe's faceplate was covered in soot and fire-smothering dirt, and I was lying on my side while Minnie fiddled with hoses and tape, I happened to be the one facing in the right direction to catch sight of a trio of curved arcs in the air to the west, above the lake. Too big for birds, too small for planes - it looked like Technoville had sent a trio of powered paragliders after us.

"Boomer!" I called out. "Incoming! We need to signal them - warn them off from the nerve gas. Can you reprogram the ring-light to flash Morse code?"

"If you turn me to face them, I can," responded the AI's badger-shaped avatar.

I reached over, and did so. Lights started flashing, and I hoped at least one of the flyers was catching sight of the signal.

They got closer, and Joe got to his feet, trying and failing to brush his helmet clear.

One of the flyers' parawings curled in at both ends, its shape turning from a gentle arc into a graceless lump, and it started dropping. Another tugged to the left, and started turning, and turning, spiraling downwards, until it, too, vanished. The third just kept going straight, passing overhead without any sign the pilot was doing anything at all.

"That can't be good," I said. "Joe, can you swim?"

"I can't see. I think I'll need your help just to make it to the shore."

"Right. There's still a chance we can help the ones in the water. ... or, at least, make use of their gear. Um - Boomer, can you reach Clara from here?"

"Please cover your ears. Whistling starting in three, two, one-" My ears were inside my helmet, but I did my best to protect them from the noise that erupted. Boomer fell silent. A faint whistling came from the distance - not quite an echo. "Clara is directing Pinky to perform search-and-rescue, and if that fails, to perform salvage operations."

Dotty raised an eyebrow. "That's an awful lot of names for just two rescuers."

I tried to avoid barking a laugh - I might have just watched three people die, after wandering through a city that had been nearly exterminated. "Let's save the explanations for when you're breathing good air again. I have no idea how long whatever was in that injection will keep you going, and carrying Minnie is hard enough."

After a bit of awkward shuffling to take into account our various handicaps, we'd arranged ourselves so we could keep going.

--

When we got to shore, the two pilots, their machines, and their packs were laid out neatly inside our metal canoe. Clara, the AI whose avatar was a cow, reported, "I'm afraid they're dead. Their lungs are empty of water - they died before they landed. There was nothing we could do."

I absently rubbed my gut. It was possible that that wasn't entirely true - but this wasn't the time or place to discuss that. "Boomer, please scan for VX residue. We have a child who hasn't been exposed to the stuff yet, and I want to know what we have to get clean. Clara, can you download Boomer's maps on toxin levels, and show where the nearest places that can be safely breathed are? ... Thanks. Dotty, do you know how to paddle a canoe?"

"I think I can manage."

"Good," I nodded, "because Minnie and I are sharing a recycler, and I don't trust the seals on Joe's after that little burst, and if I paddle hard, I'll be using up our air."

"Very well. Do we need to make room for Pinky?"

I shook my head. "Pinky and Brain are aquatic. If you see tentacles, don't panic." She gave me a /look/. "Complicated. Okay - from Clara, it looks like we've got the choice of going downstream, or crossing the river and going on the north lakeshore, or the south lakeshore. We don't have data on how far the toxic cloud went on the north shore, so that's out. Looking at that map, it looks like the safe spot on the south shore is closer, but going down the river we'll get to Grand Island sooner, so Grand Island seems our best bet. Anyone need to say anything before we leave that affects that decision? ... No? Okay, let's get going. If nobody needs me, I'm going to try to meditate to see if I can cut down my air use."

--

After washing down everything that had been exposed to air until Boomer, playing tricorder, was satisfied; and giving the two pilots a decent, if short, burial service, we didn't end up at Grand Island. Instead, we made camp at a much smaller island nearby, which Boomer insisted was called 'Pirates Island'. About two hundred feet by seven hundred, large enough for Minnie to run around without getting lost, but small enough for Pinky and Brain to circle and guard and prevent any visitors from surprising us.

And then I couldn't put off having a conversation any longer. As I poked and prodded a campfire into life (more for morale than any need for warmth), I looked over at Dotty, who was watching Minnie like a hawk. In a low voice, to try to keep the young girl from overhearing, I asked, "Why did you try to kill yourself?"

She shifted her eyes to me for a moment, then back to Minnie. "I guess you couldn't smell it. We were out of good air. If you'd taken the time to try to build an airlock - she wouldn't have lived that long."

"Oh." That made a depressing amount of sense. "I don't suppose you know anything about who released the gas?"

"My daughter, Jane, was in the militia. She said she wanted us to clean up the shelter, that an inspection was coming. I thought she just wanted a break from Minnie. While we were sweeping - the alarm went off, and I closed the door. I didn't lock it - I was hoping Jane would come in, tell us it was just a drill..." She trailed off, and joined me in poking at the fire. After a while, she spoke up, "I'm not going to ask you too many questions. You saved me, and even more importantly, you saved Minnie. Way I see it, that buys you a lot of room for all the secrets you want to keep. I mostly want to know one thing - what do /you/ know about what might kill her?"

"Less than you're hoping, I think. I thought the cloud was some sort of attack by Technoville, but with Boomer's map showing it started in Old Buffalo, and those flyers from there flying right into it, that doesn't seem nearly as plausible. If it came from Buffalo's city-computer... maybe it was a response to the first flyer from Technoville," I didn't feel like mentioning who that flyer was, "or using a radio where one hasn't been used for decades. Or something else entirely, though the timing implies it's one of those two triggers." I frowned. "I've heard of city-comps that need to be fought off with full military strikes, ones that were dangerous, ones that never were... What's the Buffalo city-comp like? This sort of thing can't be too common, can it?"

"I don't think it's too different from other old cities. We built a wall between us and the towers, we kept watch, sometimes we had to fight something creepy or crawly that climbed up from underground-"

"Underground?"

"Sure - a bunch of the towers have holes going down. Most leaked all sorts of ugly stuff when they broke open, but when they did, that tower stopped cooking anyone who got near it - or, I guess, anything that came out of it."

"Hm," I hmed. "Alright. Focusing back on the present - we've got to figure out what to do with you and Minnie. If nothing else, while I can eat grass, we've only got so much food for Joe, and it won't last long with three mouths. Is there any place around here we could drop you off? Farms, maybe?"

"I saw that map on your... Clara. I think all the farms around Buffalo are gone. I don't know any place people live that's closer than Erie." That was a hundred fifty kilometers away, give or take - at least three days by canoe.

"Joe might suggest the other side of the river."

"Indian country? I didn't save Minnie just to get her killed right away!"

"Joe's from there. I've passed through there. If you can keep the locals from dunking you in their so-called 'spirit' pools, it doesn't seem that bad a place."

She shook her head. "No. You sound like you mean well, but just... no."

"Fair enough." I tried working out what I was actually trying to do here. "Maybe Joe could hunt down a deer - that would keep everyone supplied with food for a while, while we work on other things."

"What other things?"

"I need to find out more about the city-comps - and, of course, get back out again. That's pretty much the goal of our little expedition. You say there's tunnels? Then I need to learn all I can about them - how to explore them safely, what's in them, if they go anywhere."

"You're joking."

"Not at all."

"With just one man and one Changed woman?"

"And Boomer and Clara, and Pinky and Brain, and Alphie who you haven't met but is arranging for more of Pinky's people to come help out."

"But only two with arms and legs. And it looks like your legs didn't Change cleanly."

"Eh," I shrugged. "Nobody else seems to be working on the problem, so if we don't, it's possible nobody will, until something worse than nerve gas starts coming out. I'd be happy to go and recruit more people - but one, we've only got the two suits, and two, I'm not that great at social stuff, like convincing people they /should/ help. I just barely managed to arrange for enough funding and resources to get me this far, and that's mostly by grabbing everything that wasn't nailed down while I've been on the go."

We stared into the flames for a while. After a while, I added, "I know there's something in the middle of the cloud, something that moves and spreads the cloud along. What I don't know is where it is, or where it's going. It could pass right by here on its way back to Old Buffalo one day with no warning."

"It could go anywhere else, too, couldn't it?"

I shrugged. "I haven't got enough data to say any prediction is much more likely than any other."

"That's a pretty wordy way of saying you don't know."

"I don't know, then. The suits can protect two people - as long as their batteries last, and it takes a while to charge them back up again. The safest place I can think of... are some air-filled domes, run by Pinky's people - I call them 'squiddies' since they haven't got a sound-based name for themselves. I'm expecting a messenger any time now - I could make arrangements to send you and Minnie back with them, and you could take a vacation for a few weeks, while whatever happens on the surface blows over."

"Can't say I'm happy about going down into another shelter..."

"Don't blame you. I'm pretty sure we're all going to need a lot of psychological counseling that's not going to be available any time soon. If you don't want that, I can have one of the squiddies tow you in a boat to Erie, or anyplace closer than that you want to go."

"Would you come with us?"

I shook my head. "To be a bit wordy again - to maximize the odds that people will keep living in the long term, especially me, I've got to take a few short-term risks, like hanging around uncomfortably close to where a lot of nerve gas killed a lot of people. For one - I want to see if that cloud is attracted back to where the flyers came near shore. If it's not... I know where a certain radio was, and if it's still there, I want to see if the cloud will chase after a new signal from it. If either of those works - then I'll have a way to lure the cloud somewhere in particular, and just might be able to do something about it, won't I?"

"Like what?"

"As a first thought, I know a place where I might - and I emphasize /might/ - be able to put together some explosive chemicals, and containers and such for them. I've run some numbers, and a container big enough to hold all the nerve gas I've seen would be implausibly huge and unwieldy, and since we haven't seen any giant footprints or tire tracks on shore, I'm reasonably sure that the chemicals are being manufactured as it goes... and a whole lot of explosives should mess up any chemical refinery, right?"

"Claymore mines would work better."

"Possible." I furrowed my brow. "Not sure if I could arrange for the casings and such, though. As it is, I'm going to have to figure out a decent way to set the whole thing off, if the cloud can be lured at all..."

"My daughter was part of the Buffalo militia. Since there's... nobody guarding anything anymore, I can get you claymores."

I blinked, considering what that said about Dotty's motivations. "And Minnie?"

"Will be a whole lot safer if whatever's making that cloud is stopped."

"We're going to need a lot more batteries for the suits..."

--

Naturally, we planned to cheat. I wanted to make this so unfair a fight that it wasn't a fight at all - merely an extermination of vermin.

One of our biggest limits was our suits' air recyclers, and the power they sucked out of even the biggest batteries. If we had to rely on the solar recharger I'd managed to keep with me from Technoville, it would take days just to recharge an hour of suit battery. Looting batteries from Buffalo had diminishing returns, as the locals didn't rely very much on electricity in the first place. However, I did know where a decent crank-style generator was: right with the radio, and the paraglider I'd flown to Fonthill on. I also knew where more might be arranged for: the university's fabricators. However, by now, both those spots were likely covered in VX residue, meaning we'd need to use the suits to get them.

Boomer's maps, combined with Joe's knowledge of the terrain, gave us a route along the Welland River that would bring us four kilometers from where my stuff was stashed - and with a few portages onto minor creeks, even closer. With Boomer's help in drawing 3D pictures, I showed Joe what the radio and generator looked like - and after a moment of thought, the paraglider's fuel tank. I told him how to let the tape-bot guarding my stuff know he was working for me.

All of which led to our first big argument. (Well, first since he and his people had tried to merge me into their big old melting pot of identity.) Joe wanted to find a spirit pool to dive into; I thought that was a bad plan.

I tried explaining, "The cloud didn't follow us - it /anticipated/ us, knew we were aiming for the factory. The only way it could have found that out was from one of your people."

"None of us would aid such a monster!"

"They might not have had a choice. If it could analyze the neural patterns of someone who's dead, or do something similar to whatever data about your peoples' memories are kept in your spirit pools..." I decided not to say aloud that I thought Joe was over-estimating the Great Peace's loyalty to me - if the cloud-maker had offered to retreat peacefully, in exchange for one parahuman who was incapable of joining the Peace, then the spirits might take that as a good bargaining position, even if the cloud-maker was likely to betray them.

"The spirits are above material questions."

"Then how do you explain the cloud knowing to go after the factory?"

"I do not. I just know that it was not my people who let that happen."

I shook my head. "/You/ may know that, but how can /I/ know that? All I've got is the evidence we've seen."

"And my word."

"I trust your word - that you believe what you say." I had a brief nudge from my inner West voice, and tried a different approach. "What, exactly, are you planning?"

"We will take the canoe along the shore, until we find a place the cloud has not reached. I will rejoin the spirits."

"And what's the benefit of that?"

"All I have seen, learned, grown - that will not be lost if I die."

"And the negatives - the risks and costs?"

"There are none."

I couldn't help but snort. "Don't be ridiculous. There are /always/ negatives to /every/ choice. They may be really /small/ negatives, compared to the benefits, but anyone who says a choice really is completely one-sided is almost certainly not /really/ thinking about it."

"What negatives do you see?"

"Time, for one. The longer we wait, the more likely the cloud-maker will go do something else, and we'll lose our chance to keep it from killing more people. As just one scenario - if it could figure out where I was going, maybe it can figure out where I've been, and decide to go wipe out another city. Or maybe it'll just methodically sweep through all the Great Peace's territory until nothing's left."

"Is that all?"

"Isn't that enough? But no, that's far from all. The more hands we have, the more we can do to make any plan work. We've just met Dotty, and she's already shown a certain penchant for suicide to accomplish her goals - and I don't entirely trust that she wouldn't blow us all up to get the thing that killed everyone she's known her whole life. I may disagree with your lifestyle, putting your identity in the hands of your spirits - but I at least trust you to try to keep us all alive, and do whatever else is useful."

"There it is. You just want me to do what you order - another slave, like the ones you have already bought, and the ones you will be buying!"

"You're joking, right? I /know/ slavery's bad. Extinction via a new Singularity is /worse/. If I could manumit the squiddies without increasing that risk, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Even if it's just iffy, I'd err on the side of getting rid of the institution. Of course, to do /that/, I'd have to convince the /squiddies/ to stop, who, you might recall, were buying and selling each other long before we came by. If you know how to free them all without buying them all first, I'd love to hear it."

"That is their problem. Their way of life. You should not have bought any at all!"

"Of course I shouldn't have! It was just the least-bad choice! You leaving is a /much/ worse choice than staying!"

"If I stay, I'll die!"

"If you go, /I/ will die! And maybe lots more people will, too!"

"You just want me for my body!"

"I also want you to tell me when I'm wrong, but only if you can actually back it up!"

By this time, we were nose to muzzle, fists clenched, staring each other in the eye, both of us apparently in full dudgeon.

Which is why I was completely flabbergasted when he stuck his mouth against mine, wrapped his arms around me and copped a feel.

After a moment of complete surprise, and another moment of kicking West for not giving me any kind of warning, I managed to pull my head back with an "Ack!", pushing him away with one hand and wiping my mouth with another. "What the bloody blue blazes do you think you're doing?"

He looked less angry and more confused. "But - you desire. I could feel it."

I took a few steps back, feeling /more/ angry. "You shouldn't make the mistake of confusing any physiological symptoms with actual consent. Did you even think to check if the little girl is anywhere nearby first? If this is the sort of behaviour I can expect from you, then maybe you /should/ go. Take Brain with you so he can tow the canoe back."

I turned, and managed at least a half-stomp (from my hoof hitting the dirt with all the force I could muster) as I strode away, my ears pointed forward and not listening to whatever he might have to say.

--

I never had been good at dealing with other people, even when the background environment was a stable, reasonably peaceful society, instead of a post-apocalypse madhouse full of people nudged by post-human intelligences, and in the wake of the deaths of thousands of innocent people, who very easily might have died because of my own actions. I was also not really used to the idea of being the recipient of unwanted sexual advances.

I went as far from Joe as I could, to the north point of the island, where I stripped off my belts, armor, and bodysuit, leaving just my sports bra and shorts, and sat on the rocky shore, letting my feet dangle into the water. (My stomping hadn't done my left leg any favors.) I saw one of the squiddie guards swim by, raising a few tentacles out of the water as he passed, but didn't really pay attention.

I tried to focus my mind on something useful. Maybe a plan to convince Joe he was better off here - but that thought was derailed by wondering if I really wanted him around, which led into wondering how much I really knew about him. I tried to figure out how I might grab the radio myself, or if Dotty could fit into Joe's hazmat suit, or if she'd even want to. I wasn't used to feeling actually angry - especially at someone I didn't want to fire a crossbow bolt at.

After a while, I was able to push my mind through to realize one complication - if Joe left with the canoe, the rest of us would have trouble getting off the island. That was a problem I was capable of solving, both physically and mentally. I rolled up my gear, stood, and started back to the campsite.

Dotty raised an eyebrow when she saw me, but didn't say anything, and Minnie kept playing with some stick-drawn lines in the ground and some pinecones. Joe was sitting by the campfire pit. I started packing my part of the camp up into the canoe.

Dotty asked, "What-?"

I stated, "Joe wants to leave. In case the canoe gets lost, we should move camp to shore."

Dotty looked from me to Joe and back, and hesitantly started helping me.

I picked up Joe's shield - and he snatched it out of my hands, snapping out "Stop that!"

I crossed my arms, glanced meaningfully at Minnie, then back at him. "I'm not good at building rafts - but I don't want to fight you. If you want to leave right now, fine." I turned to the canoe and started pulling out the stuff he wouldn't need.

"Stop that!" he ordered again, and I felt his hand on my shoulder.

I clenched my fists, but resisted the urge to whirl around to plant one in his face. "I don't see why I should. You made it perfectly clear what you want, and that my disagreeing won't change your mind. I can live without the canoe, but there's no point in you taking things you won't need."

"/Look/ at me!" he ordered. After a moment of consideration, I turned around. "Is this about me leaving or trying to kiss you?"

"I don't care about the kiss. You misinterpreted something, I said 'no', you stopped. I'm willing to chalk that up to another cultural misunderstanding, like the one where you gave me this hoof, and forget about it."

"So you're mad entirely because I want to leave."

"I'm mad because I /thought/ you understood the stakes. You think I /want/ to work out some hare-brained scheme to kill off some mysterious who-knows-what that killed an entire city? You think I want to remember what we saw in that /school/? You think I /want/ to do anything but run off into the woods with Boomer and spend the next few decades catching up on old books and TV shows and video games? Nothing that /any/ of us /want/ is important right now. I don't have the /luxury/ of doing anything less than the best I absolutely can, which includes using every last technique of rationality I've ever come across to make the absolutely best decisions I possibly can. And I'm not /nearly/ as good at using those techniques as I wish I was. In case I haven't mentioned it to you before, I'm /rubbish/ at dealing with actual live people. You want to leave. I think you shouldn't, but don't know how to convince you to stay. So you're going to leave. So I have to deal with that. Being mad doesn't help me with that, but I also don't know how to /stop/ being mad, so I'd really like to use the energy it's giving me to pack or unpack the canoe as soon as you decide how soon you're leaving."

"I'm not leaving."

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. "Please don't f-" I recalled Minnie's presence, "jerk me around. You want to preserve your memories. Fine. I don't understand the details of how your people live, maybe it's like a homing instinct you can't ignore-"

"Shut up," he interrupted. I sighed, opened my eyes, and crossed my arms again. "To you, everything is words and numbers." I shrugged, not particularly disagreeing. "To me, everything is feeling. I feel when I'm a man, or a woman, or a deer. The spirits feel. You feel, even when you pretend not to." I felt a bit like objecting to that, but was at least vaguely curious where he was going with this. "Right now, you can't pretend. If I die here, and forget all we have done together - that will be a shame. But I keep forgetting - when you die, you don't come back. Neither do the people in your cities. What you feel..." he shrugged back at me. "The spirits did not give me the English words to describe. Maybe there are no words. Maybe there should /be/ no words." I raised a skeptical eyebrow, and he shrugged again. "Fine. My words are - I will stay. At least long enough to stop the city-killer."

"Fine."

"Fine."

"Fine!" piped up Minnie.

Joe and I glanced at her, and I rolled my eyes. "As long as you're not expecting me to have some emotional breakdown and start crying and hugging and so on."

"Of course not. But if you ever /want/ to hug-"

"Nope. Nuh-uh. Nope-nope-nope-nope-nope-"

"I want a hug!" Minnie piped up again.

"Eh... well, alright. You, I'll hug."

"I like your fur."

"I'm getting to like it too, kid. Uh - I didn't realize your hands were so sticky. ... Or your hair. ... What've you got /in/ your hair? I changed my mind, you've gotta get a bath before hugging- aw, darnit. And ew."

--

Getting the charger and radio back was a lot simpler than keeping my fur from getting constantly re-stickied. I didn't begrudge playing teddy bear for the kid, given what she'd gone through, but it got to the point where I was wearing my bodysuit less for the protection it offered and more because it was easier to clean than my fur.

It was around a thirty-five kilometer trip from Pirates Island to near Fonthill. It would have been a single hour in one of the paragliders, but I hadn't had a chance to give either of the ones we'd salvaged a good looking-over yet. Which meant a good six hours of Joe and I paddling (and Pinky swimming alongside), just to get to the point where we could start walking.

Or, at least, one of us could. Joe and I and fallen back into what seemed, to be, to be something of a comfortable silence, even before we'd pulled on the hazmat suits and started breathing their recycled air. But when I stretched my legs, getting ready to walk with him to my cache, Joe shook his head at me and said, "Stay."

"Any particular reason?"

"If I was stalking us - I might lay a trap if you came back. If I get caught, you shouldn't."

"Two people can escape from a snare easier than one."

"You might be able to walk, but not fast. You'll slow me down."

"I can't really argue with that. Starting to wonder if I'd have grown a paw back by now, if I'd amputated the hoof first thing. ... You're sure you want to go alone?"

"Yes. Running, I should be back in less than an hour."

"Don't forget, the recyclers can only scrub so fast. And you'll want to slow down to check for snares."

"Two hours, then."

"If you're not back by then... I'll come looking to see if you broke your leg or something innocent like that." He gave me a look, and I shrugged. "Okay, bad phrasing. I know if I went instead, and fell in a hole or something, I'd want you to come help."

He gave a nod, turned, and strode off.

Boomer piped up, "Do you consider the next two hours to be 'downtime'?"

I glanced down in surprise at her, then pursed my lips a bit. "Maybe. I want to keep an eye out in case the cloud starts coming this way... but I'm pretty much just sitting on my tail for a couple of hours."

"Then as you have requested, I am reminding you to improve your education."

"Oh. Yeah. I'd forgotten about that. I doubt we can do much before Joe gets back, but we can at least work out what subject matter to work on, and how to work on it. ... I don't suppose that the people of twenty fifty knew any technological tricks to improve learning speed and retention?"

"Many."

"That don't have negative long-term effects?"

"Some."

"Can any of them can be done with the supplies we've got available, or can reasonably get hold of?"

"Yes."

"Such as?"

"Focused transcranial current stimulation can be used for several pedagogical effects, such as inhibiting executive function to allow easier entry into the 'flow' state."

"Translating that to English, I get - zapping my head with electricity can help me learn better?"

"With careful placement and control of the current, yes."

"What would we need?"

"A battery, wires, and a way to hold those wires against specific portions of your skull. In addition, to avoid electrical burns, a conductive interface between the wires and your skin, such as wet sponges or a conductive gel."

"Hm... sounds like I've got a project to start working on, as soon as I've got the time to. What else've you got?"

 

[DataPacRat]

*Chapter Two: Ex-pounding*

Joe returned a little before the two hours were up, hauling not just a few handfuls of equipment, but the whole powered paraglider I'd abandoned in place, and my packs.

As we loaded the canoe, I asked, "Any signs of what happened? Tracks, maybe?"

He shook his head. "Only the bodies of those who could not reach a pool in time."

"I'm sorry."

He fell silent, and I kept quiet with him, as we launched the boat back the way we'd come.

A little past the edge of where Boomer stopped detecting the toxin, we beached again, to scrub everything clean - we didn't want to poison Dotty or Minnie after rescuing them. By the time we'd finished that, it was getting late in the afternoon, but we pushed on. We made camp right by where the Welland River flowed into the Niagara, on Navy Island, about a kilometer wide by one and a half long.

"I always did want to camp here," I rambled a bit to Joe, "but before I died, it was against the law. Now - Canada's gone, America's gone, your Great Peace doesn't seem to have colonized it, even whatever claims Buffalo might have made this far down-river don't matter anymore. They say that Europe has history and the Americas have geography - but this one tiny splodge has a pretty good history for a place that nobody ever lived. There were once plans to house the United Nations here, a group that at least started with some good ideals, about human dignity and democracy and so on, however many flaws they had in reaching those ideals. And even before that, there was once a rebellion against Canada, and this island is where a bunch of the rebels declared the 'Republic of Canada'. Lasted about a month. Of course, Canada doesn't seem to have passed the test of time much better, save for one last Canadian, who hasn't got much of her original self left except her brain."

I poked at the squirrel stew. The animals on this side of the river were all natural, and the sling I'd been carrying in a pocket for a very long time turned out to be a handy way to pick up some extra protein.

I continued, "I might be the only person on the planet who knows that the Republic of Canada was even a thing, let alone how it fits into the larger story of... well, everyone. This radio, that I brought here and used, more likely than not have caused the deaths of tens of thousands - out of which we kept a whole two people from dying. Even assuming we destroy the city-killer, and warn the nearby cities not to come near without bringing their own air... I don't know if anything I ever do can come /close/ to balancing /that/ scale. I'd have to save a life every day for over a century." I poked at my belt. "I don't think even Batman could have kept up /that/ rate."

"So don't," Joe said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't balance the scales. If you caused those deaths - nothing you do will ever be enough. A killer who rescues a drowning child does not stop being a killer."

"Right bundle of joy /you/ are."

"/Listen/. The spirits may not send me back out once I join them - we may only have now to talk. And the word the spirits put in my head to describe you right now is 'prat'. Maybe you made those people die. Maybe you didn't. If you didn't, if all the people had died before you came near, what would you be doing?"

"Pretty much what we were doing before. Looking for a way to keep /everyone/ from dying."

"Then do that."

"Just simple as that, eh?"

"No. But if it was worth doing then, is it not still worth doing now?"

"... I suppose."

"Then you have your goal. And maybe I'm wrong, and a killer who saves more lives than they kill /can/ be a killer no longer. ... That sounded awkward in English. I'd say it in Iroquoian the way I thought it, but there doesn't seem much point."

"Eh. Pass me your bowl, the stew's ready.

--

Now that we had the charger, we could recharge our batteries a lot faster, and keep using the hazmat suits for as long as we could keep cranking it. And since both Joe and I enjoyed the benefits of physiques that had been built from the bones out, we could keep going for most of the day. But before we started firming up our plans for going back to Buffalo, we were interrupted by the arrival of my messenger squiddie, back from Lake Ontario. Since I'd already given names to Pinky and Brain, I continued the theme by dubbing her 'Elmyra', which won me a funny look from Dotty.

Elmyra passed over something like a waterproof leather tube, inside of which were something like papers, written on by Alphie. Since I wasn't keeping too many secrets from anybody around, I read aloud, "I have finished purchasing sufficient guards to block the river and canal route to Lake Ontario, and if necessary, to collapse the improvements allowing squiddie access. This leaves you in charge of access to the new egg-laying grounds, which I am using as collateral to continue the acquisition program. However, there is a complication. While there is no evidence that the squiddies are even aware of the concept of a trust verification architecture, my projections of their responses are becoming less accurate. The model that comes closest to fitting the observed data is that somewhere near Kingston, on the opposite end of Lake Ontario, is a person or AI who understands economics, and is pursuing their own agenda within the squiddie economy. Due to the communications infrastructure relying mainly on messages carried by individual squiddies, I find that I am unable to predict this other being's actions in sufficient detail to adjust my own purchase orders. The only viable solution I have found is to reduce the message delay by relocating closer to the other entity, which produces a maximum probability of you ending up owning two thirds of the squiddies, while the other entity remains in control of the remaining third. Further data will refine my estimates further."

I skimmed a few tables and charts with bell-curve probability distributions. "Hunh," I said, on my own behalf. "I don't think I really believed Alphie could pull off buying all the squiddies - but now that he's actually facing some sort of opposition, and is still trying, it seems more likely that he'll be able to pull off what he says he can."

Joe glared at me, and I shrugged. "Do you think we could have gotten past those spiders without a tow? Or that we'd have convinced the squiddies to help without working within their own system?"

"It is still wrong to own people."

"Yep. But you said it yourself down on Navy Island - I may have done wrong, but I'm doing the best I can to use that wrong to do what I /have/ to do."

He grunted, and stalked off; and I let him. Dotty was watching me with her dark eyes as she brushed Minnie's hair (which would surely turn back into a tangled mess within a couple of minutes of being let loose to run around). "I really don't understand you," said the elder of the pair.

"I'm not sure I do, either, sometimes," I said as I took off my glasses, cleaning the lenses. "But in the meantime, I think we can both agree that we've got a city-killer to kill. How many of those mines do you think we can get?"

"They're three and a half pounds each, so as many as we can carry. They come in crates of a half-dozen, which weigh about twenty-five pounds."

"Maybe grab a small wagon or cart? How sensitive are they to being jostled?"

"If they haven't changed the design since I was in service, they're very stable."

"Are we going to have to worry about an explosives factory blowing up, with nobody left to take care of everything?"

"Factory? Oh - no, we use a breed of goats, who were Changed so their curds are explosive. If any survived the nerve gas, they'll probably die out in a few years without people to feed their kids, but they aren't going to blow up."

She continued talking for a while about the details of the things, such as "sixty degree field of fire", "thirty percent chance of hitting a prone man-sized target at fifty yards" "don't cross the detcord," and so on. We pored over Boomer's maps, looking for any spots that would be better to set up our trap than others, but the region's relatively flat geography provided only a single type of useful feature: the places where streams had worn down the edge of the escarpment, forming small gorges and miniature canyons. The biggest of these was the Niagara Gorge, just downstream of Niagara Falls, but that was /too/ big for our purposes: the river was about two hundred meters wide, with only a tiny bit of shore along parts of the bottom of the cliffs. Within any reasonable distance, there was only one place where the geography was interesting enough to potentially be useful: the Short Hills, around about five kilometers due north of Fonthill and three west of the university.

After I'd added my own notes from hiking around the area, our choice came down to either trying to set up the trap on essentially flat land, with whatever trees or ruins we could find; or to set up at the DeCew Falls gorge. The latter was about twenty meters deep, half a kilometer long, and for most of its length, fifty to a hundred yards wide - possibly ideal for creating a kill-zone.

"Alright," I said, as we watched Boomer fly through a three-dimensional model of the place, "I can set up the radio to start broadcasting as bait... but how will we trigger it? The reports Joe passed on were that the cloud was opaque and brown, so it seems kind of impractical to make a long line of detcord and watch through a telescope."

"It's possible to build a tripwire, that will activate the clacker when tension is released."

"Hm... Hey, Joe? You in earshot?"

"What?" he called back.

"When you found the radio - where exactly was it?"

When we were done shouting, it seemed the radio hadn't been moved from where I'd left it. "Oh well," I said to Dotty, "I was hoping that moving the radio could be a trigger. I'm a little hesitant about a tripwire being obvious... but the only other thing I can think of is to have someone right on site, close to the kill zone, to watch for when someone arrives."

"That won't be too healthy for them."

"I know, I know... but at the end of the gorge, there's a pool of water, that the waterfall runs into. And another pool above it, used to be a millpond. You seem to know a little about our suits - can they be used underwater?"

"Kind of, but not under any pressure. And since we don't know how long you'd have to wait, you'd still probably end up with hypothermia."

"Maybe one of the squiddies, or Boomer or Clara? They do well enough with a bit of waterproofing."

"Can their boxes make a great big spark?"

"No - but I've got a few tricks up my sleeve to let them squeeze a clacker. And I'm suddenly realizing that it might be a good idea to have one of them wait there anyway, to get a recording of what the city-killer actually looks like."

Boomer spoke up. "I feel I should interrupt at this point, and inform you that my moral subroutine will not permit me to act as a weapon trigger."

I frowned at the AI. "Not even to keep a mass-murderer from killing many more people?"

"I would require governmental authorization to override the limits placed on me by the university's board, and while you may be Queen, you do not have a parliament to issue that authorization."

Dotty gave us a look. "'Queen'?"

"Long story," I shook my head. "A title that's about as accurate or useful as 'ninth-level Magus of the Bayesian Conspiracy'," I said, making up some pseudo-mystical gobbledygook. "Alright, Boomer," I turned back to her, "Would you at least be willing to record the proceedings?"

"As such a recording could be used as evidence in a trial, both Clara and myself would be willing."

"Okay... could you call up a map of the waterways between here and there? Joe and I were able to canoe to there, past where Port Robinson was... and from there, it looks simple enough to head the other way and move up the Welland Canal, to the feeder canal here, to Lake Gibson, which takes us to the millpond. Pinky and Brain got by worse obstacles on the way here. Hm... Boomer, could I get a better look at the top of the falls? ... Crud - it's just a thin sheet of water on top of some sheet rock. If they're back in the mill-pond, they won't be able to see down into the gorge, and lowering them down to the pool under the falls would be incredibly awkward - almost as much as getting them back out again. Looks like it's going to be tripwires. Okay - with that in mind, what can we do to make that spot as attractive a lure as possible?"

--

With two suits, only two of us could head into Buffalo at a time. I assumed it would be Joe and myself, but Dotty spoke up. "You can paddle well," she said, "but I've seen your legs, and you won't be able to carry as much as me. I know where the militia's stores are. I know how to set up the mines. In fact, you might as well stay here while Joe and I take care of everything."

"What about Minnie?"

"You can watch her, can't you?"

"I... suppose. I'm not really great with kids."

"She loves you. Just take off your black suit and let her pet your fur, and she won't even notice I'm gone."

"Depends on whether things go wrong, and how bad. We need to talk a bit about contingencies. At the very least - if you're not back in a few weeks, do you have any requests for when I start acting /in loco parentis/? Long-distance cousins to get in touch with, family feuds I should know about, that sort of thing? I'm perfectly willing to be a babysitter - I'm not quite so sure I'm willing to become an adoptive parent. Letting her cuddle only goes so far."

"You may not be the brightest bulb, and from what I've heard, you've made some questionable decisions - but you managed to keep us from dying. And at least you're /trying/ to help. That puts you head and shoulders above almost anyone else I can think of. Just do your best for her, make sure she's got the brightest future possible, and all the mistakes you'll end up making anyway will be tolerable."

"... I really hope you don't have to put that to the test. If nothing else, I want to hear the story of how you know about the Warner sister, and happen to speak pre-Singularity English so well."

"Every girl needs their little secrets," she flashed a smile.

--

I let Minnie sit in my lap while we watched the two of them paddle away, taking Brain and Clara along with them.

"Well, kid, looks like it's just the four of us - and I don't think Pinky's going to be that good a playmate for you. My job, right now, is to try to get at least one of the flying machines to work completely reliably - and if I can, all three. I don't suppose you know anything about small engine repair?"

She mutely shook her head.

"... Want to learn?"

--

"I'm sorry, Your Highness," said Boomer, "but that music is still under copyright, and thus I am unable to play it."

Minnie wrinkled her forehead. "What's 'Your Highness' mean? You're taller 'n me, but Gran'ma's taller 'n you."

Boomer spoke up before I could answer, "Bunny currently has the strongest known claim to the throne of Canada, including a verified genealogy. Until a better candidate is found, or until Canada's parliament votes to become a republic, or until she renounces the throne, my programming requires me to treat her as if she were Queen. The polite form of address for a queen is 'Your Highness'."

Minnie gave me a careful once-over. "You don't /look/ like a queen. Where's your crown?"

"Probably across the sea in whatever's left of England," I idly rambled aloud. "Not that I want to go get it, or have a new one made. Even if I am, technically, a queen, there isn't a government that would support me in that, which makes the whole thing effectively meaningless. And even besides /that/, if there /were/ a functioning government of Canada, and they wanted me to rule, I'm pretty sure that'd be a bad idea. There's lots of better ways to run things than to have a queen in charge, and there are a few centuries of experience to prove it. About the only valid excuse I can think of to start having a monarch is if the local politics are even more violent and divided than in a democracy, so that having a single person who can have a final say on things is a step /up/, regardless of how that person is picked."

"Oh. I just wanted to ask if I could make you a flower crown?"

"... If you like."

--

Minnie asked, "Your Highness?"

"You can keep calling me 'Bunny', Minnie."

"What's a Bay-see-en?"

"Where'd you hear that?"

"You said 'Bay-see-en Conspiracy' to Gran'ma before she left."

"Ah - 'Bayesian'. Well, in short, it's someone who uses a certain bit of clever math to figure out what's true."

"Why?"

I looked up from the carburetor fuel jet I was poking at. "Are you asking because you want to know, or because you're bored?"

"Both?"

"Hm. I can try to give you the whole picture, or I can answer questions about all the tiny details, but I don't think I can do both at once - especially if I want to keep trying to fix this. So - big picture first, then details, okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay. Hm. Going back to the /very/ beginning... some things are true, and some things are false. It's true I'm talking to you right now; it's false that I've thrown a rock at you. Simple, right?"

"Sure."

"Good." I went back to trying see if there was any corrosion inside the jet's tiny hole. "Now - there's a difference between what /is/ true, and what someone /thinks/ is true. Maybe you saw a stone land beside you, and thought I threw it at you. 'K?"

"'K."

"There's lots of different ways to try to get what we /think/ is true as close as possible to what really /is/ true. Ways like looking around you, or listening to other people say what they've seen, or thinking about what you've seen and heard. And here's an important bit: some ways work better than others. And here's another important bit - it's possible to /figure out/ which ways work better than others. When you do that, then when one way says one thing is true, and another way says something else is true, you can use the way that works better."

"Like, if I saw a stone land next to me, but I knew you'd never hurt me, then I'd know you didn't throw it at me?"

"Sure, that works. Now, after a whole lot of people looked at a whole lot of different ways, they were able to figure out that the best /possible/ way to find the truth is to use a bit of math called "Bayes' Theory", which I'll explain later. The trouble is, to do that best possible job, you need to think very, very hard - so hard, that no living person can do it, any more than I can throw a rock at the sun. So what people in the Bayesian Conspiracy do, is try to find tricks and shortcuts, so we can get as close to the truth as we can, with just our human brains."

"What kind of tricks?"

"Well - people are bad at math."

"I don't like math."

"Most people don't. And to use Bayes' Theory, you need to use addition, and division, and fractions, each and every time you use it. So a lot of the tricks are ways to get close to that answer, without actually adding up numbers. Like keeping track of complexity penalties."

"Ba?"

"Hm... do you know what ninjas are?"

"Na."

"They're people who do sneaky, tricky, spy stuff, and are very good at hiding. In fact, they're so good at hiding, that there's always a chance that one is hiding right behind you, /right now/." Minnie turned her head to look behind her, and I grinned. "And they're clever enough to keep moving, to stay behind you where you can't see them. So one explanation for anything that happens while you're not looking at it is, "A ninja did it.""

"Did a ninja do it?"

"You tell me. Say you hear a clack sound beside you, and you turn your head, and there's a stone where there was no stone before. One explanation is I threw it at you. Another is a ninja did it. Another might be, oh, a squirrel dropped it. The 'complexity penalty' for each of these explanations is how many other things have to be true for that explanation to be true. So if I threw a rock at you, then what else would have to be true, that wouldn't necessarily be true if it wasn't me?"

"You... wanted to hurt me? And you didn't like me? And were hiding that you didn't like me?"

"Alright. And if it was a squirrel?"

"That... she carried a rock up a tree?"

"And a ninja?"

"That... she's been following me all this time? And nobody's talking about her? And she's been really really quiet, until she dropped a rock? And she knows how to keep hiding from me, and wants to, and-"

I held up a hand to interrupt. "That's good enough for now. So out of all of those, which has the smallest complexity penalty."

"The squirrel?"

"Got it in one. There's an idea called 'Occam's Razor' that says 'the simplest explanation is probably the right one', which is actually based on a bit of math called 'Kolmogorov Complexity' that gives precise definitions for what counts as 'simple'... but anyway. That's one of the tricks - come up with a list of explanations, and figure out which ones need the least extra things to be true."

"What else do Bayesians do?"

"Hm... well, I suppose I could say that each Bayesian is doing their best to work on the Great Work."

I waved my hand at her, and right on cue, she asked, "What's the Great Work?"

"It is the Most Important Thing that you can possibly do."

"What's that?"

"Figuring that out for yourself is one of the first steps to doing it. After all, why should anyone believe me if I simply /tell/ them what the most important thing they could do is, instead of if they know it themselves? But I can start you in the right direction, if you'd like."

"I'm not as bored as I was before."

"I'll take that as a 'sure'. Is there something that you want to do right now? Or that you want to keep from happening?"

"I don't want Gran'ma to cry."

"... That's a start. It's probably better than my first guess: to keep reading comics. Either way, if that's the most important thing you can think to do - or keep doing - even after you try to think of anything more important... then it's almost as important to think, to figure out /how/ you can do it. And how you can become better at doing it. And how you can get other people to help you do it. A lot of the time, once you figure all those things out, you'll realize that you're able to do more than you could before, and that there really is something more important that you could be trying to do instead - and then you get to do all that all over again. When you get to where you've got good reasons to think that it really isn't possible to come up with something more important... then you just might be aiming for the Great Work."

I finished cleaning the spare fuel jets, and packed them away, pulling out the spark plugs instead.

After a while of poking at some of the clover flowers, Minnie asked, "What's a 'ninth-level magus'?"

"Well," I temporized, "there are all sorts of tricks a Bayesian has to know to try working on their Great Work. Just to start with, there's math, physics, chemistry, biology, neurology, psychology, sociology, politics, game theory, computer science, astronomy, geology, and pretty much every other -ology there is. But just knowing all those other things doesn't make you a Bayesian. There are certain... realizations you have to come to. Certain ideas that most people never think of, even highly educated doctors and scientists. It's /possible/ for any one person to work out everything I've been saying on their own. It's a lot /easier/ if they've got people to help steer them in the right direction. Some Bayesians have figured out more than others. So - different levels."

"Can I be a ninth level magus?"

"Eventually, if you want." I was a bit bored myself, as my hands worked on the small bits of metal before me, so I tried stimulating my imagination by taking the phrase of occult-derived nonsense I'd spouted, and tried working out what it would mean if it were true, fast enough to sound like it had always /been/ true. "First you'd have to get to eighth level Magister Templi, and for a Bayesian, I don't see how you could do that until you've got a plan in place to come back to life after you're dead. In fact, I probably only count as an eighth-level right now, since while I've got a plan, it's not actually in place and ready to go right now."

"Can I get to /tenth/ level?"

"If you can bring yourself back to life, without anyone else's help, I don't see why not."

"Can you bring anyone else back to life?"

I shook my head. "Sorry, kiddo - right now, the best I can do is try to keep the living alive."

 

[BlackoutSampler]

Minnie: Future All-Powerful Math Wizard


So what is the plan if the deathcloud machine is hovering out of blast range? run like cowards? I'm glad Joe spoke up this chapter, he was sorta becoming a background figure.

 

[Beyogi]

Well this story was interesting. Even if it was very very surreal sometimes. I think the main issue is that I can't tell the motives of the involved actors. And the plotholes.

Why/how do the squids have advanced first contact procedures? How do they even know what the solar system looks like? And how can a Lolbertarian society exist for longer than a few years without becoming a permanent oligarchy? Where do they come from anyway? Where did they get their tech, if they're basically stoneage? Are they aliens or are they posthumanist creations?

Why do the Technovillains throw one random challenge after another at the protagonist? Why this pointless pursuit with chemical weapons? Why herding her around, so she may never really claim the initiative? Even though she seems to have gotten a break with the Squids and the AIs.
I think someone is playing her for some reason. Considering the weirdness of the whole world, I wonder if she's already been uploaded and this is all somekind of weird way to get her used to the new realities. Will it end with someone revealing that it was all just to get her used to variable bodies, genders, mindests, realities, whatevers? Or is this really real?

Why doesn't your protagonist have doubts about the reality of the world? She clearly has plot armour with her weird body and the at times totally incompetent antagonists. I mean haha, the situation in the embassy. And then it was impossible to change her. While it really shouldn't. They'd need her mindstate and then they could do whatever with the body.
Did this stupid changing attempt prompt the AIs retaliation?

For all the weirdness this is a great story. Thank you for writing, I can't wait for the next chapter.

 

[DataPacRat]

Well this story was interesting.

Click to shrink...

Good to hear.

Even if it was very very surreal sometimes.

Click to shrink...

That's been kind of part of my goal.

I think the main issue is that I can't tell the motives of the involved actors.

Click to shrink...

This is at least somewhat deliberate on my part; as I write, I try to keep in mind the elements of RationalFic, though the fact that I chose to write in first-person perspective, and that the viewpoint character has schizoid personality disorder, means that the reader is somewhat limited in gaining an understanding of the other people.

And the plotholes.

Click to shrink...

A somewhat important question - do you consider any of these to be actual significant /holes/ in the plot, or merely as-yet-unanswered questions?

Considering the weirdness of the whole world, I wonder if she's already been uploaded and this is all somekind of weird way to get her used to the new realities.

Click to shrink...

Why doesn't your protagonist have doubts about the reality of the world?

Click to shrink...

Outside of the fact that she's, well, fictional, she's as much in the base level of reality as you or I are. I thought about writing the story much as you describe, but couldn't really think of a way to pull it off without violating a few basic principles of authour-reader trust.

For all the weirdness this is a great story. Thank you for writing, I can't wait for the next chapter.

Click to shrink...

You're welcome, and neither can I.


On a somewhat related note, when I started writing Book Three, I expected to have gotten to a certain plot before Chapter Eight, which I'm currently writing, in order to finish the Book with Bunny having accomplished a certain task. I haven't gotten to that point yet - so it's actually possible that I might end up with more than four Books. I'm as surprised as you; I initially thought the story would be a straight road-trip down to Phoenix, done in a single Book's length, but, well, plot happened.