Chapter 28


The guards were the first direct evidence of her long-suspected support organization. Only one person in ten million qualified. Selected for mental rigor and strict obedience, they had shed their freedom the way parasites shed body parts. Now the stream of orders was finally ending.
  Anonymous's biggest problem had been compressing her old memories to make room for new ones. As her past folded away, she was constantly entering oblivion. This would be her final transformation.
  The escape was traced back to a capsule hotel next to the municipal building. The halls were so narrow the guests had to walk sideways, and it was always crowded. The tiny rooms were evacuated at 13:15, and the manager swore nothing alive remained inside.
  She left a cryptic note on a closet, which contained a single complex molecule weighing a hundred kilos, a savage, chainsaw-sculpted crystal. She had been compelled to create the strange intruder. It would be disposed of as industrial waste.
  In the next building, the guards prepared to serve their final purpose. There were no last words or strong emotions. One of the partners would pretend to be Anonymous, pretending to be a partner, while the guards simulated a small army.
  Glowing arrows on the hotel ceilings led to the emergency exit. She opened a door, letting in the heat. Then came the three most dangerous seconds of her life.
  Finally there was new video, taken from a nearby rooftop. An outline in a medical uniform crossed the ten meter gap to an empty transit station, shaped like a typical human, perhaps moving faster and more efficiently.
  Behind the hotel was the town's main hospital, a jigsaw of white and gray panels. This was the age of genetic diseases. The trauma center had a landing pad with flashing lights and stripes. In the back of the hangar stood a Pizza-Jet, an egg with four transparent wings. It came in many sizes. This was the smallest, made for unmanned delivery flights. It would sometimes fly inverted to descend. As thin as fabric, its smooth skin was under constant tension. Support wires resembled a network of cracks. The small Coanda engine scooped the air. The seat and restraints were a converted pesticide tray.
  Investigators would later determine that someone had slid underneath at 17:59, lifted him/her self inside, and pulled up the hatch with their feet. The craft settled five centimeters on the tarmac.
  The fan revved up, and the plane rolled outside like a cross between a blender and a Spitfire. Boosted take-off occurred at 18:02, when the plane was assigned a traffic code.
  It was a strange trip through Qiyuan. Flying just above street level, the fanjet banked through an obstacle course of walls, cars, and trees. Each turn revealed new scenery, gone in a blink. The flexible wings never touched the ground, as the craft soared over an abandoned traffic jam, and a row of houses. The few bystanders were frozen in place.
  Unseen in the bright sky, a flying can spotted the fanjet's shadow. Sliding on invisible rails, its airflow strakes droned like an Australian didgeridoo. The general couldn't bring herself to fire as the plane passed in front of a succession of occupied buildings. Then came another alarm.

  Standing on a small hill, Rick watched a line of cops in riot gear approach a group of marchers. They had arrived within the past five minutes, with virtual banners and real noisemakers. He couldn't understand the man with the bullhorn, but the crowd roared back with the repressed ardor of a Korean riot.
  Circling the center of town, he had found a park with high trees and rolling hills. Set between four intersections, it looked bigger than it was. Now it had become a troop supply base.
  Earlier, he'd heard several large explosions from the direction of 8Topia. Tina tried to find out what was happening. Apparently the soldiers had destroyed a large vehicle.
  "There are civil disturbances," she said. "If the army has to rescue you, they'll drop you off outside town."
  "This is a stronghold. It looks safe here." It was always difficult to watch history from up close.
  "Keep moving," Tina reminded him.
  "If she wanted to kill me, I couldn't stop her."
  A man in an immaculate white suit was climbing the hillside. Rick had changed outfits in the train, and now wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, a "calming disguise". He still had his backpack and some light body armor, his face hidden by an Army gas mask.
  The man transmitted his ID from the Chinese UN liaison office, the "Blue Shadows".
  "I looked everywhere for you," he said. "You unknowingly crossed two security lines. I would like to make things easier for both of us." He transmitted an inspection proposal that would give Rick shared control over fifteen cops.
  He studied the agent. No one ever helped anyone, they just wanted them to act a certain way. That was all right. No one ever conformed anyway, they only pretended to.
  Rick had mastered the art of noncommittal. "No thanks," he said. "You'll need all the resources you can get."
  Rick had become a small element in the battle plan. The army knew were he was at all times, would protect him if necessary, and might even risk lives to fix his mistakes. They had driven him part of the way here in what had looked like an armored coffin.
  The government agent didn't seem to notice the protesters below. "Our investigators are checking a list of suspect sites. You could join them."
  "We believe in random inspections. I trust you will preserve any evidence you find." Mistakes were inevitable. If something happened to Rick, Donitz would investigate.
  "In that case I'll find another inspector," the liaison shrugged. "Perhaps we'll meet again. Remember, we can't be responsible for the actions of crazy people."
  Rick read the constantly updated Qiyuan Report, a piece of government propaganda. He bought what turned out to be alcohol-free sake from a vending machine. Below, the demonstrators circled the cops, taunting them. On the other side of the hill, soldiers were setting up a gray box. Could he provoke Anonymous into showing herself? The Rush Hour network would cooperate.
  "Target acquired!" Tina shouted in his earphone. "Anonymous is flying over Qiyuan in a light aircraft."
  "Patch me through to Space Command," he said calmly.
  "Negative, they're fully automated. If they shoot her down, you'll share the credit. Three more and you're an ace."
  "Her odds improve by the second."
  "Get off that hill. You can't see anything from there."
  Cut off from the command chain, in sporadic contact with perhaps half a dozen associates, Rick was unarmed and alone. There were only three ways he could fight Anonymous, starting with his proven ability to cause panic. The Back Room had already done most of the hard work, and the rest of the world would help.
  The media was ready. They had been following the story since the Zondyne incident, which had ended the most boring news period in history. The last unpredictable event had been a giant truck rampage five years ago. The past year had brought vague rumblings of doom, but nothing concrete till now.
  Each Chinese force on the scene had an embedded Millipol agent, and Tina could access their data. She released the video of the escaping plane, designated "Sun Dragon", to the waiting networks. During the next sixty seconds it affected most active screens in existence, popping up before almost five billion eyes.
  Rick had no idea this would turn out to be the breaking point.
  The plane seemed to slide on its own shadow. At low speed the wings bulged like parachutes.
  "This is crazy," Rick exclaimed.
  "Did you expect her to walk?" Tina asked.
  "No, to kill herself."
  All across town, residents saw the plane turn and weave against a surging background. Some came outside in time to see the intelligent bullet streak past. Civilians launched toy planes from their balconies, smashing windows on the other side. Several unofficial gunshots were never reported, but Anonymous heard them.
  An attack vertol circled the town at medium altitude. The pilot was on board as extra motivation. He couldn't target the escaping plane, and wondered if it even was real. Lights blinked on both sides, the radar net tracking rising projectiles. He felt a crack in the vertol's armor and a musical hum from the rotor, as if he'd hit a drone. No, a fragmentation shell. Someone was firing a portable cannon from the municipal building.
  "Suppressing enemy fire." He rotated his cannon. The time difference between three ground microphones became a point on the map - listed as a hospital. He pressed a combination of buttons, and the rotor blades reversed pitch. The vertol fell faster than gravity, stopping ten meters above a trembling field. The blades flapped like sails, blowing over a bystander. In the distance, Anonymous's plane vanished behind a building.
  The next attack was more successful. It took twenty seconds for a huge antenna 1700 kilometers over Japan to reorient itself, and aim a narrow radio beam at Qiyuan.
  Riding her barrel, Anonymous was ready for anything. In the windowless cockpit, a threat screen lit up. Her sliding wave scanner had been copied from F-50 plans, and printed for seventy dollars. A targeting radar had locked on to the small plane, but the buildings would provide cover. The fanjet made an impossibly tight turn, rotating 90 degrees in two planes, but the signal stayed strong.
  Paralyzed in place, Rick imagined a worldwide gasp. Twenty kilometers away the communications plane detected the same beam, and began its own plunge. Radars lit up on the ground, enough beams to walk through the sky.
  The general ordered the launch of a Rapid Missile. Rick heard the booming roar and looked around. So that was what that gray box did. Climbing rapidly, the toy rocket left no smoke trail, falling like a headlight behind the trees.
  "Why is it turning?" Rick wondered. Tina started to speak. "Watch . . ."
  Rick was the first one down when the shockwave hit, falling hard on his side. A sphere of smoke hung in the distance. The airburst left an afterimage in his eye. He was clearly out of his league. The soldiers' oversized helmets sank behind the available foliage. Two people were sprawled on the grass below. A tank raced down the street.
  "Does this park have any tunnels or caves?" he asked.
  "Lie under a bench and cover your head."
  Rick got up and started to jog downhill, ready to keep running until he passed out. His borrowed flak vest would absorb or bounce kinetic projectiles. He was breathing heavily when he reached an otherworldly lake shaded by huge ferns. Mist often filled this small valley.
  The next shell detonated as he passed a precariously leaning sculpture. He felt a shudder, and then he was back on the ground. Leaves fluttered down. The canal between the hills looked close enough to touch. When the shockwave passed, it had shimmered like a lens, but now the water was flat again.
  The UN knew every weapon ever made, including some that had never been used. Anonymous was using AuHeX field explosives. Supposedly designed for crowd control, the shockwave chains killed insects and bacteria, while humans only wished they were dead. Minutes from now, people over the horizon would still be startled by the blast.
  He rolled onto his back and saw a tiny star, gone in a blink. Entoptics, or more debris falling from the sky. The third and final shell. He got up and ran, leaves brushing against his mask as he crested a small hill. An echo like a Buddhist "Om" rolled against his back, and he skidded down the slope, face-first on his stomach, branches rattling in a cloud of dust. The universe came detached. He remembered an old movie about a spaceship returning to earth after a great quest, crash-landing in the rain in an immense spray of mud. This felt like that. The movie had started with a series of small incidents, slowly escalating to galactic destruction. Different beginnings were seen by different audiences.

  Doing its duty, the Rapid Missile looked up the target online. The town looked peaceful below as it performed a series of dazzling maneuvers. The plane blinked in sight, and the missile began the boosted dive phase, lasting only five seconds. Apparently it had given itself permission.
  A cloud erupted from the fanjet like spilled milk. A cyclothermic chemical reaction drove it outward like a cool fireball. People who had never experienced a major news event thought this was the most dramatic thing ever. It was real.
  The missile was traveling too fast to miss the earth. Faced with a white screen, it could only guess. Reaching the pavement, the missile was smart enough not to explode as it rapidly wound up its affairs, but the impact collapsed a nearby facade.
  "The thing hit the wrong damn street," the general said conversationally. "At least it could have tried." Now where was that plane?
  "Apparently Anonymous changed the time," the major replied.
  Universal Standard Time was the average of 600 atomic clocks worldwide, measuring the lifetime of the universe to the nearest second. Remarkably, it appeared to be three seconds off. For some reason, one of the 600 clocks thought it was half an hour ago, an error sufficient to confuse any guidance system moving faster than walking speed. The mystery was that the errant clock hadn't been disconnected. The missile wouldn't even have launched otherwise. Anonymous had more allies than anyone knew.
  The fanjet soared out of Qiyuan over a side canal, trailing a white roostertail and V-shaped wake. It created a soliton wave that continued to the next town, a gleaming turtleback of water. Reaching an invisible barrier, the plane suddenly turned right, ascending a grassy hillside. Then it was gone.
  The airborne cameras showed scenes of a peaceful afternoon. A camouflaged landscape with crinkled lines, half the hills in shadow. The drone's video compression prevented frame-by-frame analysis.
  The miracle lasted another minute. A few viewers phoned in the answer before the police arrived.
  The error margins of automatic aircraft were small enough to exchange parcels in mid-flight, and runways could be as short as a tennis court. Her plane had jettisoned its wings in the canal, and decelerated inside a haystack at ten G's in two meters. The landing had exposed an angled ventilation shaft in the hillside, once used for underground games. The slide still worked. Something had broken the cobwebs on the way down.
  Chinese real-estate was so expensive that many poor people had to live underground. Entire families were trapped in hidden cities without the luxury of windows. It was easy to build caves for everyone.
  Anonymous's new world was part of a bituminous coal mine, abandoned after an earthquake four years ago. The wall faces glittered like oil, the air deceptively tropical. The right software could turn anyone into an engineer. A one-meter excavated support beam, tougher than concrete, had a hairline crack extending half its length. She used a rig of chains, connected through boreholes to a freight elevator installed by the previous owner.
  Slowly the ceiling sagged, the rock bending like clay. Dust and pebbles rained down, and then a massive slam plugged the longwall tunnel in less than half a second.
  Almost fifty meters had collapsed, making many new cracks in a mountain already full of them. Anonymous closed the reinforced lead door of a side shaft, and welded it shut. It took ten minutes to rearrange some of the boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. Then she sat down in the only alcove, to continue what she had been doing before she was so rudely interrupted.
  Most people couldn't have survived in 300 cubic meters, but Anonymous had the power to imagine her own universe. A trail of receipts and forged permits would indicate the cave tunnel had been equipped to keep one human alive for fifty years. Surface microphones hinted at activity inside. Mushrooms, algae, and hydroponic fruits grew in plastic boxes filled with false sunlight. The spaceflight-rated air and water cyclers were powered by batteries, which also formed the main defense system. If all that stored energy were suddenly released, the damage would spread far beyond the mine. Chinese experiments with slurry mining had created an uncharted network of cracks and seams folding back hundreds of kilometers. The groundwater pollution would pass through twenty municipalities on the way to Bo Hai Gulf.
  No one would enter her cave for at least a week. Until then, Anonymous and the rest of mankind would be no threat to each other.