The Bells of Ys Chapter 6

Kira

“One of these days, Kira, ” her father had said as he bent over the Audi’s sensor block, odd waveforms appearing on his laptop next to the car, “you’re going to find yourself running afoul of the establishment.”

He spoke quietly, the very intelligent, slightly Canadian university clip seemingly at odds with his words. She was seventeen years old, and this was her first car.

“Dark times are coming, Kira. I think we’ve moved past the point of no return, and right now there are a lot of people who are jockeying for position after the apocalypse, absolutely convinced that if they have enough power that they will survive it. ”

“Dad, don’t be silly.”

“Kira, listen to me. I probably won’t survive even to that point. I have made more than a few enemies, and sounded the alarm once too many times for them to feel comfortable.”

She noticed the waveforms suddenly shift from being very noisy to being vaguely sinusoidal, then into a rather odd decay pattern. Her father popped a chip out of the sensor block.

“Okay, we have about a minute before the satellites will register that its not picking up the signal that it should be getting.”

He dropped the chip onto an odd box, pressed a key onto his laptop, and the patterns returned to the original signal over the course of thirty seconds. The moment the status bar indicated that programming was done, he practically slapped the chip back into the sensor block.

“I have a mechanic that I trust who will be able to migrate this chip over to any new care that you have, and I will leave you directions on how to use it under your Tethys account - if the care ever gets totalled or the sensor block goes out, take it to Phil and nobody else, because the contents of that chip could very well put you into the Big House for many, many years.”

---

Her father had proved prophetic often enough that Kira now trusted implicitly everything he said. He had been on a Greenpeace boat when the Antarctic Weddell shelf had collapsed, calving an iceberg the size of Washington State. He had also seen something he shouldn't have seen when that happened, because his ship was torpedoed by a Free Republic Navy destroyer in the company of a Nautilis Resources tanker ship -- there had been live video sent over the Tethys connection, one of the last things so sent in more than a decade, showing the ships and the sinking of the Amphitrite from that ship's perspective. The camera had continued to film and broadcast even after it sank under the waves, until the lens had shattered from the pressure and seawater shorted out the unit. There had been no attempt at a rescue; the torpedoes had taken out the side with the boats, leaving none of them seaworthy, and marksmen had apparently used those floating on the water as target practice.

Her mother had died in a car accident when she was eight, though her father had been convinced that it wasn’t an accident. She had become an orphan with the sinking of the Amphitrite, a decade later, when she had been a precocious junior specializing in Climatology at the University of Washington. That was when she discovered that she had also inherited a dozen patents from her father’s security innovations, patents that would pay her way through school and, if she was thrifty, would guarantee she could get by without an income if she didn't want to. The patents would in fact end up paying her a great deal of money over their lifetime, but most of that money went into investing either in her tech gadgets or into diversified foreign accounts and resources. When the dollar had collapsed five years later, she was largely protected, something which hadn't been true for most of her contemporaries.

Kira considered that again as she drove into the heavy rains, hoping that it would provide a degree of obscurity against her trackers. She was at something of a loss to understand exactly what it was that had brought down upon her the wrath of the feds, and more that limited them from just arresting her outright. Obviously they didn't like the surveillance systems, which meant that were afraid (rightly) that there was some kind of failsafe in place that would have identified their actions, perhaps causing political problems for them here in Washington State. Had it been Texas, they could have done it with impunity; the semi-autonomous country gave Soviet-era Russia a run for its money in state-sponsored terrorism, but here there was an independent streak that had countered the national trend toward fascism, and made people wary of giving the government too much say in their lives.

After having left the UW campus and crossed over the new 520 bridge, Kira headed off the highway into Redmond, pulling around to a parking lot which obscured her from passing traffic while giving her a viewpoint (she'd half seen a cop sitting there a few times in the past, and figured it was about ideal for what she was about to do). She pulled up the car's diagnostics on her dashboard, keyed in the password to override the core systems (taking her into the administrative mode for the car), dropped into a prompt, then ran an application that she was hoping she wouldn't have needed.

Using the onboard navigational system, the car left the lot she was in, heading past the old Microsoft campus and south to I90 west, eventually to head back to I5 and south. At least that's what the GPS system would be reporting ... in reality she was still in the parking lot. It was a gamble - they could have put a tracker on the car, though the car's proximity alert system would have sounded to her systems if they had come close enough - but she was betting that they were underestimating her enough to assume that she couldn't control the GPS.

Three minutes later, she won her bet. A 2023 Lincoln Towncar (did anyone but the Feds actually buy them, she wondered) passed by the lot on its way south, the two agents clearly identifiable by the black glasses, with a third man in the rear seat. She waited for a minute after they passed then scooted back onto the highway going east, knowing that she was vulnerable sitting there. The GPS tracking systems were self-correcting, and it wouldn't take long before the discrepancies in signal strengths would be noted. She was also completely on manual now; the moment that she queried the navigation system her car would show up like a beacon on the net, and she wanted to wait a while before she switched her car over to her alternative (and highly illegal) secondary identity.

Kira let her mind go on autopilot while she drove, noticing not for the first time the paradox that when her car was driving for her she always felt tense and found it difficult to concentrate, but when she drove she was able to think clearly about other things …  yet another example of labor-saving technologies that in fact seemed only to add to the cost of the car and give more power to those who already held too much. The rain had let up as she moved further into the foothills of the Cascades, now on winding roads that looked as bucolic as they had when this territory was first colonized.

She was a threat to someone, and the Blues Brothers were there to make her disappear. Kira had, over the years, done the occasional favor for a few of the power brokers in the state, enough so that her "arrest" would have raised a lot of flags. It was another lesson she's learned from her father. Unlike many of the radical environmental left who seemed to feel that poor manners, hygiene and dress were de rigour for the up and coming activist, her father had learned how to camouflage himself in the dress and manners of his enemies and make them his friends, or at least his grudging admirerers. Had he lived, he would have been a formidable politician, and Kira knew she had the same instincts for power that he did.

She had stumbled onto something, or revealed something, that shouldn't have been made known. That the effects of global warming were entering a critical phase could possibly have been that thing, but she wasn't the only, or even most vocal, speaker on this. Though as she thought on it, a chill began to form at the base of her spine. Kira had been collaborating with Dr. Malcolm Short of Cambridge University on a climatology textbook when she had received an email from him indicating that he was going on sabbatical for a month or so. She had sent back a rather frustrated reply but then heard nothing from him, and assumed that he had in fact already left. She put the project out of her mind and only today realized that she still hadn't heard from him.

Kira pulled off the road again, this time to try to pick up the net on her glasses. Outside of the blanket coverage from the Seattle area, the net's speed dropped off dramatically, though it was still strong enough here to allow her to get the base carrier signal. Her glasses easily spoofed across the IPv6 address space, temporarily becoming a Coke machine in Vladivostok, and she was on.

Short was still listed on sabbatical at Cambridge, but she was beginning to have her doubts. With a whisper, she sent out a bot to so a search, and went on to other climateologists that she knew. Dr. Ingrid Iversson at MIT had died, apparently of a stroke, a month back -- she was 52 years old. Dr. Akira Misagawa at Stanford had died in a car crash two weeks ago. Dr. Steven Franklin of the University of Chicago had died in a house fire three days ago. The cool front at the base of her spine was rapidly becoming a winter storm.

She was on a first name with each of them, colleagues if not not necessarily friends, yet they had all disappeared without her being the wiser. Each of them knew the truth - Steven had run the numbers on his Beowulf that she had given him, had walked through every possible scenario that she could envision and some that she hadn't thought of, and knew the finality of the situation. Ingrid had been the one to bring to Kira's attention her theory about the role of the magnetic change in global warnming, including what would soon be called Iversson pulses, sudden, rapid changes in the magnetosphere of the planet that had been gaining strength just in the last five years. Kira was the stronger programmer - Ingrid had been an experimental physicist, not a computer jockey, so between them they had begun the modelling that had so alarmed them both when the results returned. Akira had been the editor for Climate, the pre-eminent peer-review journal in the field and a man who had recommended strongly that Kira submit her findings when he learned of them. A quick surf to Climate's site proved even more frightening ... it had 404'd, and even the googlecache was gone.

“Don't take it personally, ” she said to herself, in a very frightened, little girl voice, “It's not personal ... they're killing off all the weathermen.”

She was about to put her car back in gear when the bot returned with confirming news, and worse. Malcolm Short had committed suicide, self-inflicted gun-shot wound to the head, two months before on May 23rd. The bot had pointed her to an announcement from the web site that he used for his students of one of his classes, giving little more than a brief notice that the class was cancelled due to Dr. Short's untimely death and the time of the service, some two months past.

The site had not yet been taken down - from personal experience universities moved slowly on web sites unless they were an embarassment - so the site also contained the video of his last lecture, apparently put up before his death. She figured that the link was probably dead, so was surprised when his virtual image appeared in front of her, a virtual ghost frozen in the substrate of the web.

“There are two forms of weather control,” the portly, bearded professor intoned from beyond the grave. “The first, the one that most people think about when they here the term, is the physical manipulation of weather cycle. Despite all claims to the contrary, this is an enormously difficult proposition at best, because the amount of energy necessary to affect a change is roughly of a magnitude equivalent to that of the weather cycle itself, far more in general than mankind possesses at the moment. Long term environmental effects can have an effect upon the weather, as most people know, but this type of control is usually crude at best, and frequently produces worse side effects than just leaving the system to its own devices.”

“However, there is a second form of weather control, and this is the control of the information about weather. By all evidence, weather prediction was likely the first form of prognostication that man performed ... to be able to sense when it was to rain, or snow, when there would be a drought, or a flood, the early man or woman who could divine this most basic manifestation of the will of the gods was considered holy and necessary. Agriculture emerged in great part because of the ability to predict the patterns of the weather, and those who failed to do so died off. The weather witch, the storm-sensing captain of a boat, the weather advisor to generals and emperors, each of these were considered to be worth their weight in gold when they were right.”

“Even today, with access to satellite maps, megpete clusters and heliographic analyses, the one to see the future in the weather can be either richly rewarded or be a target for censure ... or worse (-kir*) ... should those predictions show calamity. People in power (- kir*) , oil barons and water merchants, pay handsomely for this advice, or they pay just as handsomely to rid themselves if those who would topple their hegemony by accurately revealing the weather.”

“Now, class, open to page 523 of Principles of Climate Change, section 4.2 and we'll ...”

Malcolm paused a second as someone off camera raised a hand.

“Alex ... I'm sorry, uh ... Jason?”

“Professor, that page is in the index ...?”

“Oh ... it is? Silly of me ... I've been working on a new draft of that section, and I must have referenced it wrong (-kir*). Uh, let's try page 461 ...”

The video stopped at that point, as no doubt the session had degenerated into Q and A. The short coughing bursts could have been just what they seemed, but they were too well timed with the other information for her to believe that. Malcolm knew he was under surveillance, knew that he was in danger. The video had a post date the day before he died when she checked the markup, and then came the confirmation for her - the crypitc filename 76a23r212i97k17.mpg, with the numbers removed spelled out her name backwords. A fairly crude cipher, to be sure, but he would have wanted her to be aware that the message was aimed at her.

People in power, oil barons and water merchants ... the "and" caught her eye. The expression "oil barons or water merchants" would be more proper, and while she understood the power that water-merchants had, they were generally not considered by the average person to be "people in power". So someone in the government who simultaneously controlled oil and water interests. Her first thoughts turned to the Secretary of the Interior, but he was a nuclear power advocate. However, a little digging from her bots brought forth an altogether uglier answer. Alexander Milhouse, Secretary of Intelligence, appointed by President Greggoir, had served a stint outside the normal bureaucratic circles, helming Nautilis Resources, a huge consortium formed from the merger of two of the world's largest oil companies with a water management company shortly after the coup. The mistakes he made, referring erroneously to "Alex", only strengthened the odss on that guess. He knew he was being watched, knew that they were probably interested in her as well, so he couldn't afford to tip his hand. Damn, damn, damn.

Thinking back to the other "mistake" he made, one she was sure he would have edited out before posting the video, she blinked as she realized that the only person who did have that particular section was ... her. He had sent three chapters to her to review and annotate about the time that the video was made. She'd been so angry with him for dropping out that she swore she'd wait until he contacted her again before working on them, an oath that she was now coming to regret mightily.

She needed to go to ground, and the meeting with Proteus was beginning to seem increasingly relevant. It had been a Nautilis Ship that her father was monitoring before the Navy torpedoed them, and it was Nautilis that stood to gain as both the North Pole became passable and water become scarce inland due to global warming. Unfortunately, she suspected strongly that having eluded the agents (federal agents working for the Federal Intelligence Agency, headed up by Secretary Alexander Milhouse ... of course) that her name and identity was now on every terrorist watch list in the country, so getting to the San Juans on a ferry could be tough.

On the other hand, she was not without resources herself, not the least of which being the power of the net itself. She spoke/wrote a short email to Proteus:

Parthenope has slipped the nets of Nemo's sailors, and seeks safe passage to the sea.

Kira sent it, encrypted, via Tethys, where it would go through several hundred anonymous remailers before it would reach Proteus later that evening.

With a sigh, Kira then turned her car back on and drove further into the hills to see if she could find a diner. Fortunately in Seattle, the use anonymous cash (with the State of Washington insignia on it and backed by gold) was still considered a sacrosanct right, and she had learned long ago to always make sure she had enough cash on her to get through a fortnight. She had a bad feeling that she might need it.

[Chapter 7]