Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [330]
And now that plan, too, was down the tubes.
So I just confessed everything.
‘All right,’ said Reid. ‘All right. I’ll grant you have an argument for starting these things up.’ He gestured at the stacked crates which he’d helicoptered in, long ago, and the stacks of stuff I’d added since. By this time we were all sitting around on the crates, talking and smoking and drinking coffee. (One of the trade-goods I’d accumulated.)
‘But what,’ he went on, ‘do we do about stopping them again?’
‘Simple,’ I said. I searched in Dee’s handbag, with Dee’s hands. I pulled out the plastic box I’d given her, and opened it. Inside were the slides for my clone and Meg’s, and a sealed plastic vial of smart-matter poison.
‘You had it all the time,’ I said. ‘Blue Goo. This shit has been sprayed on stray nanotech for decades, changing all the time. It’s evolved beyond any immunity the fast folk can come up with for, oh, minutes and minutes.’
Reid laughed. ‘“Here’s one I prepared earlier”, eh? And what if their researchers are smarter than our viruses?’
‘Nuke the fuckers,’ I said. I looked around the cavern, vaguely. ‘I’ve got a few kilotons lying around somewhere.’
‘Bit suicidal,’ Reid commented.
I gave him a severe look.
‘You do take back-ups?’
He laughed again. ‘Of course.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Tamara. ‘You’re talking about implementing, what, thousands? of superhuman minds in smart matter, getting them to answer a few questions, and then wiping them out?’
Reid and I exchanged puzzled frowns, and at that moment I knew I’d won.
‘Yes,’ said Reid. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
There was a lot wrong with that, but we did it anyway.
The questions we set the fast folk were these:
What is the way through the Malley Mile, back to the Solar System?
The answer to that was downloaded to the on-board computer of a standard spacecraft, the kind that on New Mars they use for herding comet-fragments.
What can be done to alter the orbital position of a Malley nonexotic-matter wormhole gateway?
The answer to that was downloaded to a hasty extension of the spacecraft’s on-board computer.
Is there a cure for the condition indicated in this blood-simple?
The answer to that was downloaded to a standard medical kit, and injected into Ax.
How can we recover and resurrect the minds and bodies of the stored dead?
The answer to that was downloaded to equipment which we lugged down the treacherous steps to the shore of the cometary lake.
The whole process took us the rest of that night – but then, we were all slow folk. When we had made sure we’d isolated the memory-stores, to repeat the exercise if necessary, we dropped the Blue Goo into the tanks where the fast folk lived. They didn’t see it coming, and I’m sure they didn’t feel anything.
‘Standard computing practice,’ Reid told Tamara and Ax. ‘Save the source-code, and blow away the object-code.’
Meg and I departed from Dee’s mind, down a fibre-optic cable under the canal, and (via various transfers that I still wake up cold thinking about) into the control module of a probe standing on a laser-launch gantry on the other side of Ship City – the same probe to which we’d downloaded the wormhole co-ordinates. Meanwhile, one of Reid’s men took a helicopter across town, with a handful of molecular construction-machinery which we could, if necessary, parley into a whole manufacturing-complex. He packed it into the ship’s tiny hold. We made sure our genetic information was loaded with it.
There wasn’t much room in the control module for VR. We experienced through the ship’s senses, but we did have an optical television link, and through it we watched the people in the cave, and by the shore. Reid and Dee and Tamara and Ax were engrossed in argument, with each other and with people in the city. That Twoday morning, Circle Square was the focus of what sometimes looked like a spill-over of its central island’s wild parties, and sometimes looked