Chapter 26


Rick's road trip ended one kilometer from the mansion, his path blocked by an army truck. It was time to enter the command chain.
  "I can visit any public location without notice," he said. "Here's my ID and unit access code."
  The sentry typed something. "Put that where the sun don't shine," he read with a heavy accent.
  "But I just was in Siberia." As he turned around, a group of soldiers pointed four hypersonic rifles at Rick. With their plastic masks, pastel urban camouflage, and heavy shoulderpads, they didn't look that tough, but their diminutive guns could kill thousands. Rick almost fell over. Four robots were folded in a row on the sidewalk.
  "Do you know the way to Tong Hall?" a sergeant asked.
  "Sorry, I don't know," Rick replied apologetically.
  "Thanks anyway."
  "What did they want?" Tina asked.
  "It could have been anything."

  The main street was a kilometer ahead. To his left, the empty highway sank into the ground. Tiers of multilevel apartments cascaded to his right, walls and balconies piled on top of each other.
  The light seemed familiar, the way he'd mixed up Olga and Tina two days ago. Every memory had parts in common with other thoughts of similar situations.
  Except for the absence of traffic, he saw few signs of the ongoing invasion. Some people tried to evacuate down back alleys. He took a wrong turn into a dead end street.
  A quarter of the way around the world, Tina began her fourth consecutive night shift. The news channels had escalated their Qiyuan coverage to near panic levels. Overlapping voices, simulations, and ominously rising music. Grave or ironic anchors questioned vague spokespeople. Reporters were kept away, but a few had managed to infiltrate the area. Hundreds of residents and visitors provided local commentary.
  Tina overheard reports from a liaison in the Operations Oversight Center: ". . . triple encryption. Two incriminating Lu-scanners on Level Three. At least ten locals are missing. She may have forced them into hiding."
  Rick leaned against a wall in the same covered alley Xiao had passed through hours earlier. He watched video of smoke streaming out a window. Ashes and glittering fragments. Inside the mansion, an Op-Trex processor meditated on a torn carpet. Broken doors leaned at crazy angles. The UN would study her home like an archaeological site.
  "Do you know what 'nenes' or 'gemes' are?" Tina asked.
  "The 'bit molecules' that form thoughts," he replied. "They're trendy again, but they probably don't exist."
  "Anonymous discovered new ways to combine them. She used Qiyuan's bureaucracy to modify the world, testing ideas to be copied elsewhere."
  "Does that explain the human remains in her basement?"
  "Those are cell cultures from the human gene library. Trillions of freefloating cysts with everyone's DNA. We're both in there." There was even DNA from mummies and graveyards. The cysts were primitive embryos with a lifecycle of three days. They were used for aggregate testing, to isolate defective genes. Her basement also contained a Monitor.
  "A WHO and CHS no-bid contract," he read. "Stable combinations of social genes. Seems like useful knowledge."
  "We have to isolate and contain all the data coming out of Qiyuan," Tina said. "It's an incubator. She forms sub-critical supply chains. The communists only needed fourteen people to build a working rocket."
  A roar in the air never stopped, the thunder of jet engines and howling beasts. It came from the direction of 8Topia.
  "People will say we'll need to know. Anonymous was mankind's collective unconscious."
  "If she's that smart, I have some questions I want to ask her." Too much improvement could be indistinguishable from death.
  Crossing the empty square under the garden stilts, Rick felt insubstantial. For too many people, Anonymous had become a source of dread. Yet here he was, strolling through her town as if he had nothing better to do. Why wouldn't the first real ghost appear in plain sight, for the whole world to see? Now that was crazy thinking.
  He read reports while walking. "What's the meaning of the 'void theory' in update 165?" he asked.
  "Some fans compare Anonymous to a semiconductor, a material that uses moving gaps in an electron flow to carry a current," Tina explained. "They think she's a hole in reality, circled by ordinary matter."
  "Could she be crushed under a hydraulic press?"
  "Wouldn't work."
  "What about a nuclear device?"
  "Tickles."
  He stared down an empty street with too many windows. A restaurant at the end was still open. "I wonder if they have donuts here. I know they have croissants."
  Some analysts predicted Anonymous would prove to be disappointingly ordinary. She could never live up to her persona. Rick suspected she was several ordinary persons, none of them necessarily evil. The vast resources necessary to create her had absorbed the resources that could have exposed her. They had used non-sentient AI software.
  A new sound tore a hole through the air. The roofs rumbled, and a chorus of alarms went off. "It's not what it seems," he told himself. Onscreen, something gray raced behind the trees, a dragon on the lawn.