Chapter 46


A chime rang and he fell into darkness, then blue sky through a glass tube. The cart soared over a webwork of tracks strung between the buildings. He felt a thrill beyond anything he could hope to accomplish today.
  The cart used a physical principle discovered in 2020 to become part of the tracks as it moved over them. It was shunted sideways, and dropped like an elevator. After a series of turns, the cart linked up with five others, and the chain entered a fast track, surging through a barely glimpsed tunnel as other chains flashed past.
  Daylight returned, a green fog outside his window. He saw a crowded highway below, cars sliding backwards under a vacation sky. With a bump, the carts separated onto diverging tracks, and he was alone again.

  After outwitting the fastest members of the crowd, and knocking out four stragglers at the cart station (they never even knew they were under attack), Knil went to work. It was considered an honor to belong to the Prophet contact list. Erasing the mall's security videos was almost trivial. During a brief call to the transit director, Knil implied an unspeakable outcome if he didn't cooperate. The director screamed at his subordinates to carry out the orders.
  A targeted delay soon rippled through the light rail network. Rick noticed he was making too many turns, and the traffic got lighter. The cart stopped for ten minutes, until the Back Room intervened.
  The collision alarm sounded, and he automatically accelerated. A three-cart train was approaching the wrong way on parallel tracks. Knil and two new guards stared back from behind reflective canopies. The carts split up and approached on both sides. The nearest station was a kilometer ahead.
  Rick tested the controls. As in a game, the software was designed to compensate for his errors. He wished it could also make his mistakes for him. He braked, and slammed into Knil's cart. The undentable plastic rebounded, Knil slowing while the guards pulled ahead.
  Rick's cart belonged to track maintenance, and it needed only a second of separation. It slid sideways off the thin rails and onto the grass, rolling downhill on friction wheels. The gyro-stabilized descent was almost as smooth as the tracks, with an occasional bump. His pursuers couldn't even slow down.
  In his rear view screen he glimpsed a distant traffic jam. Almost a kilometer of stopped carts had blocked the tracks in three directions, summoned by Damon's latest alert. Riders got out and ran along the rails, trying to override the stop signals. The police was nowhere in sight.
  The fence folded around his cart like shattered glass. A small manipulator arm pushed it off. The sun shone in his eyes as he rode down a quiet suburban street. Knil had probably alerted every Prophet in the area, but the subdivisions were full of gates and fences. He steered onto a driveway, coasted to a stop in a native garden, and opened the canopy.
  The silence seemed to roar. Hidden cameras stared through layers of green. A dog barked nearby.
  The truck wasn't here. After shouting in his microphone, he removed a briefcase from under the seat, and began to walk. He kept his head down climbing a fence. His uniform would stop tranquilizer darts. The Prophets were brilliant improvisers. Any attack would almost be worth it.
  The trees ended, and there was the silent truck, waiting at the curb. Rick climbed in the back.
  "That was insane," he shouted.
  "You look like you rode a rocket sled through a nuclear explosion." Damon observed dryly.

  The two-lane commuter road was smoothly monotonous: intersection, sidewalk, repeat. Rick sat in the passenger seat of a large armored box with its own suspension and air supply. Knil was still chasing false signals to the north. Eventually, the cops would be persuaded to arrest him, at which point he would become a model of cooperation.
  Rick and Damon had switched trucks in an empty warehouse, and put on bulky armor suits assembled from soft segments. The world seemed simpler inside the suits, which also made their movements more precise.
  The driver sat in a connected cabin. Two Resistance members had invited themselves along. An unshaven, rough looking man in his late twenties, and a wide-eyed female nerd with hair like black plastic, who reminded Rick of a fake wallflower only seen in movies, a comic relief who was usually ignored by the leading characters.
  They worked in rear-facing seats, trying not to disagree too hard. Wearing bulky street clothes over his armor, the man looked bigger than he was. Instead of the black catsuit and bizarre weapons on her Net profile, the woman seemed to fade into the background with gray layers, a new stealth fashion.
  "Trust them with your life, not your money," Damon muttered.
  He looked angry while reading the reports, but wouldn't move until he had forced a decision.
  "The blood samples have been analyzed," he announced. "None of us have the plasmids, but Knil does not own himself. Many of his Y-2 eosinophils are lighter than normal. Our experts used LeFi leukocyte microns to remove anomalous RNA."
  Like green streetlights in a fog, some of his cellular DNA didn't belong. "Ribosome halos," Damon said. "A fail-safe control mechanism, implying government involvement."
  The stubble on Knil's face hid needle marks. He sometimes stopped moving for minutes at a time, as if he was listening to secret instructions.
  "As predicted, the plasmids mostly live in white blood cells and bone marrow SP3C cells. They can change shape in a nanosecond, and will penetrate solid bone and neurons, but are slow replicators. It takes a big exposure to get infected, at least a milligram. The neuroprotein Echo-I-3 only strengthens connections that are similar in three ways or more. It caused Player-0 to overspecialize, probably making him more devoted and obedient. The plasmids compete to spread between minds, regulated by hormone, neurotransmitter, and RNA cycles. Together, they could rewrite and transmit enough data to form a shared intelligence. Originally they were probably natural parasites, part of our cells, maybe even our memories."
  "Did the Prophets use the Biosphere Project to modify them?" It would eventually control every single-celled organism on Earth. Creatures too small to see would obey man's will.
  "Negative, that's an open project. The Prophs keep to themselves, stealing ideas from everyone else," he said admiringly. He should have been in charge of the conspiracy.
  "What do they want?"
  "Your pal Tarek claimed that soon we won't need encryption, because different groups won't want to communicate. In a century, they won't be able to. The plasmids have the potential to make everyone more alike, or kill those who refuse to submit to the group will."
  "We'll declare a world emergency, impose quarantines, trick the plasmids into self-destructing."
  Rick forgot he was in a moving vehicle. Quieter than most buildings, the truck crossed vast, changeless neighborhoods. Nostalgic for nostalgia, the houses had cornices and curlicues, stonework and formal gardens. Nothing could look newer than the year 1900. The street and highway signs were metric: Mission Viejo 10, San Clemente 10.
  "We may require everyone's blood sample before this is over," he continued. In the Depot he'd seen warehouses full of frozen medical vials. Trees flickered on the window screen. The suggested speed limit was always changing. "If Knil finds us, he'll make it look like an accident. At this speed it would be easy."
  "A head-on collision is no worse than hitting a wall," the heavyset man calling himself Pike said. "In both cases, you stop immediately."
  "Nonsense," said Janet, the demure woman. She found an obscure footnote about ballistic pendulums and Thomas Parkinson's theory of air resistance. "Hitting the wall is twice as bad, because you bounce back in an elastic collision, while two vehicles cancel out. Twice the energy means four times the damage."
  "Not as bad as listening to this," Damon groaned. He realized they were preparing to sacrifice their lives, and couldn't help but feel proud.
  "In a game of 'chicken' you should always agree to swerve in opposite directions."
  "That's a sign of weakness." The two Resistance members continued updating the truck's systems.
  "In fifteen minutes we'll be safe," Damon said. "Unless the Prophets try to absorb us before then."
  Into hell, he added under his breath.