Chapter 4


Rick circled the Depot parking lot in his rented car. Behind the endless perimeter fence, dust motes floated in sunbeams between the trees. He saw only a few of the low buildings. A distant skyscraper towered over the horizontal woods like an incongruous sundial.
  He had reached the core of the Depot Zone near Chelbyink, the world's attic. It had outposts everywhere, but only here were the buildings close enough to put a fence around them.
  While the car looked for a parking spot, Rick pretended the droning lawyer on the phone was a recording. One of a thousand partners, the attorney was discussing presumed liability, and threatening to call the Secretary General. Good luck with that.
  In a remote corner the car found an empty space. Switching off the engine, Rick remembered an earlier call. O-Group director Mark Donitz had just shut down his most promising case. Six months earlier, the World Bank had released a report read only by those paid to do so, "2030-2040 European Trust Fund Comptroller's Excise Revenues and Outflow". It included what looked like a crank article, but wasn't. A real crank had persuaded Rick of this fact.
  Apparently, the stock market was not chaotic enough. Some big trades were slightly delayed, others shouldn't have happened at all. Only the world's governments were rich enough to play this game.
  Two days ago, Donitz had told him the stock manipulation was not worth investigating. Rick replied he could investigate Donitz's porn collection if he wanted to. Then things got rude. Donitz had cut off all O-group support, and Rick was on his own until Tina found another sponsor. No problem. He worked best satisfying his own curiosity. The few hundred people who were most like Rick lived quiet lives, artists and independent contractors.
  Inspectors were supposed to get in trouble. Their pay was performance-based, and they couldn't be fired. Rick called Donitz the "deputy deputy". Tina called it a hate/hate relationship.
  He checked his pockets. Maybe Player-0 could explain the stock manipulation.
  "Parkland, are you listening?" the lawyer shouted. Rick already liked him. Minds were meant to drift. He opened the door, and was startled by the fresh air. On the other side of the fence a deer ripped a flower out of the ground.
  "Sorry, I was speechless." Rick read fast. "Your client owns a storehouse in the Depot, which, unknown to his creditors, contains a spacecraft engine he forgot to register." The engine forced air through a tank of cooled hydrogen, which liquefied the oxygen in the air, so the spacecraft could take off with less oxygen and more fuel. This version worked so fast nearby observers heard a whoosh, followed by the splash a swimming pool of liquid oxygen made.
  Rick promised that (tempting though it might be) he wouldn't inspect that vault, despite whatever Donitz might have told him. He recommended the Trust-Fund Comptroller as a source of venture capital.
  Slamming the door, he suspected Donitz had tampered with his plane yesterday. It was warm outside, but not oppressive. Years ago, he'd spent a strange day and a night here. Now the place looked almost normal. Over the streamlined car roofs, he spotted Officer Makarov of the Tri-National Zone.

  China claimed Russia had stolen this land from them, and they wanted it back. To defeat invaders, Russia traditionally traded land for time, but the invaders were much smarter now. The Tri-National Zone allowed the Chinese, Koreans, and anyone else to buy property here. Wealth had brought resentment.
  Rick had considered registering as a Chinese speaker (standard dialect), but his Trainer had given him too much false confidence. He'd been embarrassed by subtle nuances. Basic would eventually replace English as the world language.
  "Hi!" he waved.
  Makarov was in a hurry. "Parkland, I request you delay your search. All available officers are in the coastal district."
  "What about you?"
  "I have orders to leave also."
  "What's happening?"
  "I can't say," Makarov said. All the cars had cameras.
  The media reported the army was dismantling the cobalt casings of their old neutron bombs, now under UN control. He saw no reason to touch those expired cookpots. "I won't do any more damage than necessary," Rick joked.
  Makarov seemed to solidify. He stared at the gate. Fifty pages of chlorine compounds alone. Last year, a spill had spread an invisible cloud through the lowlands.
  Parkland had a UN inspection order, clearance from Zondyne's owner, and a search warrant from Khabarovsk district court. Only the first was necessary.
  "You don't know what's in there."
  "Thanks for your concern," Rick began the prepared speech. Makarov grabbed him. "There are people here," he hissed, pausing between words.
  Rick wasn't sure what caused his reply: "Don't worry, your clients are safe."
  That gate led to the afterlife. Half a million frozen brains were stored in vats of liquid helium throughout the eastern taiga. To protect their interests, the dead had hired people like Makarov.
  He released his grip, his expression somewhere beyond punishment. "Stay on your side," he said, too vague to be a threat.
  Rick picked up his backpack, "Thanks for waiting," and walked away.

  Gaps in the trees overlooked a wide valley. Today's fourth gate led through a caged walkway. The smell of pine needles was like honey in the air. Dappled sunlight was scattered across dry earth.
  Walking past a stream lit by a gap in the trees, he thought about the morning's long drive. The Depot promos had managed to omit the trees. Long robot vehicles towed anonymous trailers past checkpoints with barricades, sniffer stations, and bins of contamination foam. Service intersections vanished into the shadows. Many of the worst polluters had moved north of the permafrost line. It was useful to have them all in one place.
  Ahead, the vast Depot lay half submerged, thousands of roofs separated by new-growth forest. Twenty-five years ago, this area had been wasteland, clear-cut for lumber after the destruction of Moscow. That flash had started the worst suffering since the dark ages.
  Today, the Depot was home to thousands of inventors trading ideas. Here they were only allowed to blow themselves up. Sometimes, they changed the world instead. The catalog included cheap drugs and software, small factories no one could explain, ideas and procedures. A large box unfolded into a small house, ending homelessness where local governments allowed it. The Depot was part of a separate engineering tradition, the closest thing to an alien civilization.
  Rick overlooked the valley. Falcons circled the horizon. The clouds were wild and complex, full of shadows. He might be safer with Makarov watching.
  He emerged from the treeline, and headed for the nearest structure.

  "You can't go there," a voice said. Turning around, he saw everything in his field of view. That distant group of men looked suspicious. The woman standing behind him was somewhere between thirty and fifty, drab but sharply outlined, as if standing in shadow. She looked up at a bird circling a branch.
  "This forest smells like soap," Rick said.
  "That's a restricted area, Parkland," the woman replied. "I'm Olga Kozlova. I'll take you the rest of the way."
  The dagger on her toolbelt (intended for men only) identified her as a member of a traditional tribe. Olga was the Depot's main problem solver, a systems engineer who had visited every point at least once. Her heavy-duty overalls even worked underwater. Often, her main job was to tell the tenants to shut up, but she never lost her temper. This was a bribe-based economy.
  Her boots crunched uphill without delay, to a paved cart path.
  "Thanks," Rick said, catching up. "I can go anywhere, you know. No one tells the UN what to do."
  "We're all your boss."
  He looked back. "Is that a Pharma lab? They make Ntran5, the most addictive substance known. Very popular with users. Why are there prisoners behind that fence?"
  Kozlova glanced at the stained concrete buildings, meant to look abandoned. Their taboo drugs were intended for dying patients. Sometimes, reality could be like burning garbage in a tornado. These drugs turned it into an exquisite melody. Unlike the rest of medicine, emotion control had been perfected.
  "They're volunteers with the Chinese work-release program." An army of prisoners convicted of anti-social deeds, including having a bad attitude. The Chinese entrapment police could get anyone to do anything.
  She saw a lot in a glance. Rick wore a tailored training suit with too many pockets. Only a professional or an idiot would look that disruptive.
  The marble cart path turned the forest into a garden. They approached two small transporters. Later, he would remember Olga whistling to summon hers. She pointed at the nearest transporter, a heavy disk with an upright flag. When he stood on it, the wheeled track felt like a tongue. He leaned against the canvas, almost falling, but the fabric conformed into a chair. He suddenly felt very heavy. A lot of molecular rods had latched on like glue, but they somehow ignored his skin.
  It was like sitting on a throne. He was mildly embarrassed. Olga's transporter resembled a no-nonsense barstool with a weather bubble.
  The electric transporters started to hum. Designed for mud and snow, the tracks effortlessly slid over the path. Even at car speeds, the wind was smooth. They passed another transporter with a man standing in a cylindrical web.
  Olga pulled alongside, her druid eyes seeming to download his intentions. "You're investigating old nanochips a thousand times slower than Generation 10," she said, her voice amplified by Box radio. "What's the risk?" She had heard it all before, once too often.
  Even Donitz didn't believe Rick's cover story. "The biggest crime ever," he replied. "A trillion dollars - infinity rubles since the credit reform - were stolen in Russia this century." Bribes became too easy with micro payments. "Most state property changed hands dozens of times, including a Stealth assembly line misplaced to India. Those who benefited most are still covering their tracks. Zondyne contains chips from that era."
  There were no apologies for Russia's past. It might be a memory problem. The end of communism hadn't helped. For a while, the economy had been smaller than that of some families, not even third world.
  Time had run out in the biggest man-made explosion ever, a fifteen kilometer fireball that turned the center of Moscow into a shallow crater. Their own criminals had been paid to do it. Converging shockwaves had caused blast damage as far away as St. Petersburg, and the blast was audible in the South Pacific. Three million people were vaporized or incinerated, four million killed by the blast or immediately thereafter, five million more since. The bomb was hidden in a modified boxcar, and detonated in a railroad tunnel ten blocks from the Kremlin. The subsequent agony had lasted ten years.
  Olga seemed to stare through him. Passing a row of fir trees, Rick saw strips of bark torn by bear claws. No, by robot trucks.
  "I'm the most qualified RL/OG, it's an international crime, and low priority."
  "I hope you succeed."
  So far only Rick, Tina, and their Boxes knew the truth. At least twenty people worldwide were using an updated version of Thunderstorm. The software was so advanced this group had to be much larger. Their minds overflowing with ideas, a reverse pincushion in their heads could stimulate or suppress any brain sector, and turn the most boring tasks fascinating.
  Tina found clues on "The List", the roll call of mankind. The counter would reach eleven billion by 2050, or a hundred cities per year. Every day thousands of people disappeared, but the Net never forgot anyone.
  Rick learned more during the overnight flight, losing five hours switching time zones. The plane had private compartments, but he sat in the small bar up front. After cross-referencing Net logs, and a shadow-List of secret identities, Tina had learned dozens of people had spent years researching Thunderstorm, before using it to vanish altogether.

  Behind the trees he glimpsed plastic walls, pipes, stacked modules. With an inexhaustible supply of spare parts, the local scavengers could build anything. They probably kept steam engines around here somewhere. When the supply chain was short enough, even the Amish could make a PC.
  Approaching the Core, the buildings got stranger. A row of house-sized eggs caused a surreal moment. The hills were full of fences, trenches, tunnels. A few persons turned away when he passed, and he laughed at an anti-UN sign.
  The Depot was a world of garage workshops. The amateur inventors often lived inside, its most valuable resource. Someday, an old skill would become vital again, an obsolete antibiotic or a type of management experience.
  UN traditions had the force of law. Inspectors could be as creative as they wished, but they weren't authorized to fix the problems they found. That was a job for local authorities, under the oversight of Millipol, the world police. The necessary evidence would be on fifteen year old computer chips. Zondyne, an old recycling company, had bought planeloads of obsolete European Union projects when had Russia joined.
  The path narrowed, the leaves blurring into a steady draft. Suddenly they were surrounded by futuristic buildings, a glittering city under a chaotic sky. He soon realized the skyscrapers were no bigger than him, but they hid the surrounding forest. Only the inevitable bird sounds and a distant chainsaw spoiled the illusion.
  From a group of windowless cones came the sound of drunken sewing machines, and the smell of burning pesticide. Their reflections warped in passing.
  "What are they making?" Rick asked.
  "Hydroponic greenhouses that fit on mobile homes, for desert climates."
  "I want one." A recent memo had warned about "retreatist tendencies". There were too many remote locations. The Tibesti Massif in the Sahara might as well be on Mars, except for the strange monastery at its center. Perfect recycling and zero tolerance.
  The forest wall returned, the sun flickering out. They crossed several more factory islands, each one different.
  The inner perimeter fence loomed with carbon spikes. A Russian sign read "Core". He had come ten kilometers so far.

  When the quick-sliding gate locked behind him, it felt like a mistake. Twenty roads fanned out toward as many vanishing points, 180 degrees of perspective. Olga led him down the leftmost lane into a fenced alley, stopping for unseen traffic signals. Massive windowless walls looked like temples. The warehouses' organic shapes came from prefab panels. The plants beside the path were programmed to grow symmetrically. There might be DNA-monsters here.
  All the best items were stored near the Core. The local entrepreneurs competed hard, with shifting partnerships, exploitation, and outright theft. One glance could make an existing invention worthless.
  He began to notice errors in the security grid. Olga kept looking around. He heard voices on the local net, and enjoyed the tension. A moving target heading northwest could be turned into a fine powder if necessary. They were talking about him, no doubt for his own protection.
  Worse, the Depot no longer recognized his UN beacon. He would trigger alarms wherever he went, losing the element of surprise.
  A face stared back at him from half a meter away, like a white mask. Part of him thought he was dreaming. Then came a bright flash.
  "Sorry Parkland," said the man with the scanning camera. "We had to verify it's you." He accelerated, and was gone.
  Olga stopped their transporters in a blind intersection, speaking Russian in her headset. Rick understood a few words. They had been followed, by someone impersonating him.
  "It was agent Makarov," Olga told him. "Unfortunately we had to use force. We are escorting him out now."
  The logs showed they hadn't actually caught Makarov, only chased him away. "His wife is stored here," Rick saw. "Perhaps he had some crazy resurrection scheme." In a time of strange relationships, people cared less about the details. Mental illness was treatable, but most patients never became normal.
  "That was just his pretext," Olga said. He realized he had mixed Olga and Tina in his mind. They were very different. Olga had more bosses, and far more motives.
  "He wanted to steal his clients' pre-death interviews," she continued.
  Cryonics clients described their lives in great detail, to assist in their eventual reconstruction. The interviews contained their accumulated wisdom, and their banking codes.
  Makarov wouldn't have worked alone. When Rick had crossed the Expert Wing yesterday, he'd noticed tiny flickers as his sensitivity was being tested. He had to have another chat with Lino.
  With a sudden lurch, they began to roll again. Most of the warehouses contained corporate junk, prototypes and tooling. The most common item was information: defunct ad campaigns, utility bills, war records.
  The remaining 1% were unfinished dreams. One storehouse contained a famous one-wheeled car. The flywheel effect even let it slide sideways. Another prototype had no wheels at all. Thanks to superfluidity, it could skid forever over a special roadway.
  "Few people come this far," Olga said.

  They stopped at the first Zondyne module, a huge weatherproof dome with a gray-green patina. Behind a double fence, fallen branches covered an access port. Like all depots, it had an elaborate, furcated grillwork of gutters on the roof. Inside, everything would be pristine.
  Rows of smaller vaults in the back: two more layers to go. A sarcophagus in a crypt in a mausoleum in a necropolis.
  Olga said: "A significant portion of all computer chips made in the Twenties ended up here. Many have factory defects in the sixteenth decimal place, but they don't use much power. They're connected in a synoptic network." The result of an unexpected breakthrough in low-temperature reversible computing. Some newer CPU's only worked when molten.
  They stepped off the transporters, and watched them glide away. Rick followed Olga up a winding path around a hillside. More clouds rolled in, resembling the bottomless cumulonimbus towers in the wider sky of Jupiter, only a thousand times smaller. Clouds didn't care what planet they were on.
  Half-buried in the hill, the vault was covered with moss. For a moment Rick thought the blowing dust was smoke. A somber guard opened the door in a bunker wall. Rick stamped non-existent dirt from his boots before entering the storage chamber.
  The darkness was a sudden barrier. His Box opened a high shutter, the light like removing a mask, and the ceiling began to glow. He saw compositions of stacked crates and colored pipes, with little free space. Touching a plastic box, he felt electrostatic fuzz. No one had visited in years, perhaps ever.
  In a corner stood the Monitor, a vaguely threatening silver sphere with an embossed seal. The mirrored ball-bearing was part of the Remote Locations network, which monitored every dangerous site on Earth, including waste dumps, fusion reactors, and this Depot. Behind a quantum seal, the spheres were safe from tampering.
  "I'll use it to inspect Zondyne from the outside," Rick said.
  "Better than breathing helium." Olga turned to leave. "You can talk to our office through the ceiling cam." There had to be others.
  "Be careful," she said without looking back.