Small Miracles Read online

  Her phone sensed only company LANs, and weakly at that. The metal door didn’t help, and the walls—she had seen enough internal partitions going up during the build-out—had steel studs. There might be good reception two feet away in any direction and she would never know amid all this metal. She had to leave her hideout.

  When Kim turned off the lamp, the dark was more oppressive than ever. She stuffed her coat back on the shelf, put her hand on the doorknob, and took a cleansing breath. An ear pressed against the door heard nothing.

  I’m done hiding.

  Heart pounding, hands trembling, Kim opened the door an inch. Nothing happened. She crept out and looked all around. No one. Her phone still showed only company hotspots.

  Garner Nanotechnology sat alone at the top of a hill. She pictured herself standing in front, facing the complex. The only nearby structures were to her left and rear; testing for wireless access to them meant plunging deeper into the factory. She scurried on tiptoe about twenty feet down a broad corridor. No new signals. Another twenty feet. Nothing.

  Kim managed a quick run-through of most of the manufacturing area, avoiding the loading dock on which the sounds of activity were unmistakable. The factory floor, unattended, felt like a ghost town.

  She threaded a path through several interior aisles. She ran from the faintest sounds and the merest hint of shadows. She happened upon scattered areas without any WiFi reception, but nowhere did her phone detect noncompany LANs. Storerooms, closets, stairwells, and the shadows of large machines offered the worst reception.

  She was terrified the entire time.

  Drained by her effort, Kim went back to “her” closet to rethink the situation. She had not found a way to communicate, but a new idea was beginning to come to her.

  * * *

  “Enough is enough, Charles,” Brent said. He stifled the yawn that had come out of nowhere. How could he be exhausted and angry and wired all at the same time? He had finally tracked down Charles to this break room. An armed guard stood nearby. Protection against who? Me? “Surely there’s been enough ‘distraction’ to cover our activities.”

  Charles continued doctoring a cup of coffee. Sorry if I’m boring you.

  Brent seethed more at being answered by IM. He had not been the one rejecting all comm. To the point, Charles?

  Charles: Let’s leave that decision to the expert.

  As if it weren’t clear Charles was now calling the shots. Fine. Where can I find Morgan?

  Charles stirred, tasted, and grimaced. Can you make coffee?

  Where, Charles?

  Busy doing the things that need to be done.

  Brent’s retort bounced, the channel again severed, as Charles turned to leave. “Charles! Let’s make our exit with a minimum of blood on our hands.”

  Charles walked away, trailing his bodyguard, ignoring Brent.

  Brent yawned again, bone-weary. It was suddenly all he could do to stand. He chugged two cups of coffee as fast as their heat allowed and set out, still yawning, to find Morgan.

  * * *

  In the crowded quiet darkness of a wiring closet, Kim struggled to turn a fleeting thought into a plan.

  The idea of comm had gotten her out of the fetid janitor’s closet. That first idea hadn’t panned out, but something about comm tickled the back of her mind.

  The ones behind today’s madness had to communicate, too.

  If she could tap the transhumans’ communications, maybe she would learn something useful. Obviously they were too savvy to communicate in the clear. Merry was freaking brilliant to begin with. If bots and VR had bootstrapped her intelligence as much as had happened to Brent—

  Kim gave herself a good mental slap. She had to stay on task. Suppose the VR specs did network over encrypted links. Could she crack the code? Not without a supercomputer and far more time than she was likely to have. Could she guess the encryption key? Not unless the supermen were being cooperatively obtuse. Could she steal a logged-on pair of specs?

  Interesting.

  The closest she came to martial arts was Pilates—it was ludicrous to imagine she could overpower anyone. Still, stealing a pair of specs in an active session didn’t seem impossible. She leaned against the door, trying to work out the details. Something else was tickling her intuition. Comm. Comm.

  Lack of comm.

  The WiFi dead zones she had found scattered across the factory. She needed to surprise her quarry in a dead zone so they couldn’t signal out for help.

  What else? Not an armed guard, of course. Hopefully someone Kim’s own size, like Merry Ramirez.

  If wishes were horses then beggars could ride.

  What else? Something more about the recent reconnoiter. Kim did a mental inventory of the areas she had checked out, every factory aisle she had scanned, every storeroom and closet into which she had stuck her head. A surprising number of storerooms were unlocked. In fact—

  Every storeroom had been unlocked.

  It made a weird kind of sense. Security was part of this conspiracy—witness Alan Watts’s behavior. Everything—except the outside doors—would have been unlocked for the looters’ convenience. That certainly explained Merry being inside the company’s holy of holies.

  So: Assume everything was unlocked. What would help her steal some in-use VR specs? Nothing Kim had come across seemed useful. Maybe in the storage areas nearer the loading docks, places she hadn’t checked out? And then she had it.

  A bulletproof, camouflaging nanosuit.

  * * *

  Final vat being crated, read the IM from Tyra.

  At last! It was the milestone for which Charles had been waiting. To disconnect and seal the reaction vessels was hardly rocket science. To do so without introducing contamination? That required painstaking care. Read: time.

  Excellent, Charles answered. And the spares?

  All retrofitted.

  He immediately directed Tyra and the technicians to preparing the bot inventory. The entire inventory would comfortably fit within a single canister, but such precious eggs were not to be entrusted to one basket.

  Tyra didn’t question Charles giving her orders; he didn’t offer any explanation. Every committee has its head. It need not be a big step from first among equals to first.

  One final set of things required collecting. The guards were only so many extra hands and strong backs; Tyra and the technicians no longer needed their assistance. Charles sent the guards new orders: Bring the nanosuits to the loading dock.

  * * *

  The nanosuits! Invulnerability had to be the answer, didn’t it?

  Kim sat on the closet floor, her back against the door, working through the possibilities. She would get only one go at this.

  Invulnerable wasn’t invincible. A nanosuit would protect her from guns, knives, and fists; it would not make her stronger. She could still be overpowered. Not as easily as if unprotected, perhaps, but still—be honest—easily.

  But maybe she didn’t have to fight anyone! She could steal a nanosuit and break out of the building. Forcing a door or breaking a window would set off alarms or be seen on the outside security cameras, but now that was okay. A quick sprint into the snow and, with her nanosuit set to white, she would be invisible.

  Not so the trail of footprints she would leave struggling through the snow.

  Every insinuation of a plan assumed Kim got her hands on a nanosuit. Without a nanosuit, all the planning in the world was only procrastination. She took a deep breath and crept from her cramped sanctuary.

  Faint sounds drifted around the building; the beating of her heart seemed louder. She darted from one scrap of cover—crates stacked on a pallet, an idle forklift, a bit of machinery—to the next. She reached the end of a corridor, turned the corner, and repeated the process. Hammering continued on the loading docks; when the hammering paused, she heard engines humming. Finally, she reached the nanosuit storeroom. It was unlocked! She shut herself inside and flipped the light switch.

 
Twenty-five nanosuits had been ordered for the Army field trial. Kim didn’t take the time to count, but twenty-five suits looked about right. About half were worn by mannequins. The rest of the suits lay draped across cardboard boxes, over chair backs, whatever. Black predominated, but some suits had been left in other colors. More mannequins, unclothed, stylized and faceless, their “skins” arty silver, stood communing in a back corner. The mannequins came in all sizes, for the full range of nanosuit sizes to come, Kim supposed.

  Too loose a nanosuit might not protect as fully. She held up a nanosuit, telling herself this was just like eyeballing an outfit from the rack. Way too long. She threw it back over a chair and gauged another suit for size. A third. A fourth. She found one that might fit, if anything a bit small for her, before she had to resort to wrestling nanosuits off mannequins.

  Gritting her teeth—the damn suits could inject bots!—Kim slipped an arm into a sleeve. The jet injector poked her biceps and her skin crawled. It’s inert, she told herself. Without detecting an implanted medical sensor, the suit couldn’t activate its first-aid modes. She’d be safe from bots even if this suit happened to be loaded with them. In theory.

  And it wasn’t as though she had any better options.

  She was half into the nanosuit when she heard—something. The scrape of sole against floor? If so, it was close. If whoever-it-was looked into this storeroom, she was trapped!

  Laughter pealed just outside the door.

  The nanosuit was leotard snug. In a panic, Kim yanked up the zipper. She tugged the hood over her head and ghostly translucent text popped up on the visor. Her blink of surprise accidentally drilled down into the onboard menu system. Crap! The suit had too many options, and she had no time to search through the verbose online help.

  As a faint metallic click suggested the turning of the doorknob, Kim found the menu entry she needed. She edged, shaking with fear, in among the cluster of unused mannequins. With her back to the door, she froze in an unnatural, arms-away-from-her-sides pose.

  The door opened to louder laughter. Two people, Kim thought. Men. If they saw any significance to finding the ceiling fixture already lit, they remarked only in cyberspace.

  If they noticed her, she could do nothing about it.

  Every muscle ached from the effort of standing absolutely still. She had set the nanosuit color—all but the visor, because coloring that required a second command she had yet to encounter—to silver. If she was very lucky, she might be mistaken from behind for just another naked mannequin. Her pitiful ruse wouldn’t work if anyone bothered to come to this end of the room and saw her face through her still-clear visor.

  Something clattered along the hall, like a grocery cart with a wobbly wheel. A third person entered the room, presumably whoever had been guiding the cart. The laughter subsided. Kim heard shoes shuffling, the swooshing of fabric, other noises to which she could not put a name, and, to fresh laughter, the slap-thud of a mannequin hitting the floor. Collecting the nanosuits, obviously.

  They had not noticed her!

  The work sounds continued, and then, in an unfamiliar, very deep voice, “Alan. Hold the dummy for me while I unzip it.”

  “Sure.” The answer was in Alan Watts’s new, assertive voice.

  Suddenly all three men were talking. Kim wondered if the changelings disparaged vocalization. The storerooms she had surveyed earlier mostly lacked WiFi reception. This storeroom was probably a dead zone, too.

  “The waiting is giving me the creeps,” Bass Voice said. “I’ll be glad when this is over.”

  Shuffle, shuffle, rustle. A rattle in the hallway as, presumably, cargo was loaded onto the cart. “We’re almost ready to go, Sam,” Alan said. “Think what we’ll have then. Bots to transform millions. The most important gear, and the experts, for producing more bots. And these suits.”

  Bass Voice (Sam?) said, “They won’t know what hit them. While they last, that is.” A condescending laugh. “Neanderthals.”

  “While they last,” Alan agreed. “Guys, I’m going to step into the hall and report in. Keep loading.”

  Kim’s arms ached. How long had she been holding them out from her sides? How long could she keep it up? She bit her lip for the distraction. If she could last just a little longer …

  Bass Voice: “How went your report?”

  “Yup, yup, we is the idiot guards,” Alan said in an affected, aren’t-I-dumb voice. He continued in a normal tone, “Our heads are full of computers, too. You would think we’d be given credit for the ability to count. We’re bringing in twenty-four nanosuits because that’s the number we found. It’s not our fault one is missing.”

  There were rattles and thumps in the hall: more items being loaded onto the cart. Alan, Sam, and the third one were leaving. If Kim could will her aching limbs to remain still for just a little longer …

  The light clicked off. The door closed, plunging Kim into darkness. The rattle-rattle of a cart wheel suggested movement toward the loading dock. She sagged onto the floor, swallowing a groan. Sensation gradually returned to her arms.

  Bots to transform millions, she thought. If the transhumans dispersed, if they took that supply into hiding—

  Kim shuddered. If the transhumans got away, it seemed impossible that anyone could stop them.

  * * *

  Sensation gradually returned to Kim’s muscles.

  Okay, she had a nanosuit. Now what? If the transhumans were about to leave, her course of action seemed simple. Stay put. Wait for the bad guys to make their exit, release Aaron and the rest from the auditorium, and then seek out the authorities and tell all.

  It was wishful thinking, not a plan.

  How, shut here in the storeroom, would she know when it was safe to leave? Could she get the police’s attention amid the bombings? Computers in their heads, Alan Watts had said. Neanderthals, Bass Voice had said. If most transhumans were even half as smart as Brent had become, they would make themselves hard to find. Every minute of head start they got would only increase the challenge.

  What if the transhumans took hostages—or eliminated witnesses—before they left?

  What if, while she sat agonizing in the dark, whoever had hassled Alan Watts came back looking for the missing nanosuit?

  Muscles screaming, Kim staggered to her feet. Working by touch, she properly sealed the nanosuit—she hadn’t had time before. She flipped on the light just long enough to match the suit’s color to the yellow walls. The same sickly shade was used throughout the building.

  She found a visor-centric submenu that let her set the visor color to match the suit body. The same submenu offered image enhancement and infrared viewing modes. Amplified, the bit of light seeping under the door sufficed for searching for something, anything, she might use as a weapon. All she found was the disembodied arm from the knocked-over mannequin. She left the arm where it was.

  Time to go.

  Her breathing was too rapid. Her instincts disbelieved what her mind knew about permeability of the smart fabric—not to mention that she was almost too terrified to move. With a convulsive gasp she controlled her breathing before hyperventilation knocked her out.

  Kim remembered just in time to deactivate the visor’s light amplification before opening the door a crack. In enhancement mode, the bright factory lighting would have blinded her. Nothing stirred in the corridor, but in the distance she heard something rhythmic. Chanting?

  She crept closer, rounded a corner, and the sounds became distinct. “Bathroom, bathroom, bathroom …” The chanting came from the auditorium.

  Kim told herself the prisoners wouldn’t be fussing about bathrooms if someone had been shot within the hour. Aaron and the others must still be safe inside! A ray of hope, finally. She clung to that thought even after a snarl over the PA shut everyone up—without any move to escort anyone to the bathrooms.

  She reviewed the WiFi dead spots that she had identified. Many were close to the loading dock, near too many transhumans to expect safe
ly to ambush just one. Some dead spots were around machinery, visually complex backdrops that the nanosuit’s preprogrammed camo modes could not match. Other areas were too brightly lit, where her own shadow would give her away.

  One dead-zone area might suit her purpose. Her nerves as taut as piano wires, hugging walls the present color of the nanosuit, she set out.

  Kim wasn’t nearly as smart as the transhumans, but—if she had the savvy to use it—she held one definite advantage. They didn’t know—yet—that someone was stalking them.

  friday, 2:00 P.M., january 20, 2017

  Morgan was nowhere to be found.

  The people who knew where Morgan was—and certainly someone knew—weren’t sharing the information. Brent checked the obvious places first. The auditorium perimeter. The Security area. A coat still hung in the closet of Morgan’s office, so he probably hadn’t gone outside. The cleanrooms.

  Brent found a flurry of activity by the loading dock. People improvising crates. People shuttling crates to SUVs, all too low to load directly from the dock. Tarps had come off the snowmobiles, and small items were being loaded into their cargo compartments. A flatbed cart was heaped with nanosuits.

  Still no Morgan. No one at the dock admitted to knowing where Morgan was.

  All the while Brent listened to TV news over his cell. Three dead in the Utica bombings. A dozen seriously injured—the miracle being that none were killed—when an antenna tower crashed into a crowded intersection. Five dead at Griffiss Field. So this was Morgan’s concept of minimal casualties. Brent was sick to his stomach until, unasked, One chemically intervened yet again.

  Midsearch, Brent got a brusque inquiry from Charles: Did you take a nanosuit?

  Brent had had neither the time nor the need. Evidently someone else had felt differently. No. Do you know where Morgan is?