Chapter 29


In the next half hour, Qiyuan changed forever. The mayor ordered a census of those portions of town still under his control. He worried about rumors, especially true ones. Fifty thousand neighbors checked on each other. Many believed Anonymous had controlled their lives, and they were suddenly free. A cloud had vanished, or never existed at all.
  Rick was lying down in an examination room when Tina called. The hospital had a distracting smell, the opposite of decay. His hearing and eyesight had been degraded by the final detonation, but both injuries were reversible. A reflected ultraviolet flash had singed his left cornea, and his ruptured eardrums felt hollow. Ordinary sounds were drowned in a dull sea roar. Both injuries would heal in a few weeks. He wouldn't take off his visor for a while.
  He used subtitles to make it easier to talk to Tina. Waiting for answers he couldn't imagine, he tried to be as patient as Anonymous. The first black dwarf star wouldn't form for another trillion years. He knew only a fraction of what she could do.
  "I called after the third shell, but no reply," Tina said. "Did you fall off the hill?"
  "I may have had a mini blackout," he admitted. "The soldiers put me on a stretcher." The medic had asked for a list of all the drugs he took.
  "No need to shout. Don't take any more wake-up pills," she ordered. "They make you too smart." Overuse could cause false memories and confusion. There were some missing hours he still wondered about.
  "Who's in charge of the coal mine?" he asked. "Demillia won't take my calls."
  He could already see where this was going: skeptics claimed her escape had been a hoax. A remote controlled probe would soon enter the mine, there would be an explosion, and they would never find her body. Anonymous would have successfully erased herself. Except he still believed he had won.
  "Surprisingly, you are, until the inspector-general arrives. No one wants to investigate too closely. The Chinese worry about second-order effects. Some of the locals are going wild. I don't have all the facts, but it sounds like mass psychosis, substance abuse, orgies."
  "Too bad I'm here on business." They had an ongoing joke contest.
  Anonymous had established many new contacts during her final tenure. Rick wanted a revelation. The half-empty hospital had kept him for hours, while Beijing had imposed a news blackout.

  After filing a ten-sentence report to prove he remained functional, he took a federal bus to the mansion. In his curious, disconnected state, he noticed everything. Signs of disorder, a toppled bus shelter, a sidewalk littered with safe shards. The evening sky was turning brown. One citizen had gone catatonic, but the world had seen stranger things. War was like a galaxy - or life itself - no more understandable for having passed through it. His work here was done.
  The dark neighborhood called 8Topia was sealed off with portable fences, towed cars, and improvised earthworks. A furrow had been torn through the gardens, a line into the darkness. Tiny shards of reactive armor lay at the sides. The pulse tracks hadn't adapted to the surface here. Elsewhere, they had left undamaged flower beds.
  The converted mining excavator, a hundred-ton block of metal, had slid effortlessly through two empty buildings without basements, and toppled a large footbridge. Its armor was a layer of nanofoam that vaporized artillery shells faster than they could explode. A defensive technology, not necessarily illegal. The excavator had almost reached the municipal building hours before Anonymous's escape. When her plane finally took off, the partners had distracted the soldiers before surrendering.
  Anonymous's two guards had fought on. The final airburst might have been aimed at Rick, but he doubted it. Surrounded by hundreds of soldiers desperate to capture them alive, the guards had incinerated themselves in a frightening display. Rick wrongly believed not a single conventional bullet had been fired today. That was something to be proud of.
  Journalists watched the mansion through their night-eyes. They recognized Rick, and suddenly he was surrounded by blue sky, the strobo-flicker of ultra-fast bulbs. Laser scanners recorded every pore, his visor scattering the beams haphazardly. He couldn't hear their shouts. This could be the end of his career.
  Rick didn't want to show his face, but higher levels had decided the UN needed to make an appearance. He carried a suitcase with the latest scanners, and wore urban jungle fatigues with a rubble pattern. Rick felt phony, going with the flow. Some of the journalists still thought he had died in Multiverse, despite the unexplained radio prank. Qiyuan's security cameras had recognized the way he walked.
  Chinese and UN flags flew on the roof. The mansion would stay haunted until the forensics teams carted away the last brick. Every hotel in town was full, even the sleeping crates and inflatable tents. Tina would call a taxi to take him to the nearest Beijing airport, where he would change outfits in the VIP lounge.
  A cabinet minister took a tour while Rick leaned against an ordinary-looking wall. Only the shadows seemed strange. The soldiers guarding the inner perimeter weren't talking. He checked the latest Net rumors, almost as sensational as the truth. Apparently Anonymous had killed a platoon of marines in their barracks with her bare hands. In her basement were vats with living brains. Not true, but they had found a squid that glowed in the dark, and some strange deep-ocean creature, a scissor-jawed bonefish.
  An official in ornate dress uniform beckoned, and Rick walked down the bright path. He couldn't help but feel thrilled.