Rainbows End

When the Network Stops

The Library had chosen. For an instant, Timothy Huynh and all the night crew were silent. The crowds of real humans were quiet, and even the millions of virtuals took part in a coordinated stillness.

The Library had chosen — and it had chosen the Scoochis.

On the Hacek side you could see the realization of defeat spreading. The triumph was real. How would the Hacekeans take it? There had been a few debacles in the late teens, when major belief structures had produced some awful art. Some were so bad that the circles themselves had shriveled and died. Who heard of Tines anymore, or the Zones of Thought? But tonight the Hacekeans had lost at the hands of others; they must do something … maybe even something gracious.

The silent stillness of the mob continued a second more. Then Dangerous Knowledge suddenly turned away from the library. Its gaze swept fiercely across them all. After all, playing loser wasn't in its repertoire. But whoever was behind all the creativity was flexible: After a moment, Dangerous smiled gently and turned back to the library. Its voice made concession sound like the granting of a favor: "We bow to the wishes of the Library. Here you have won, O Scooch-a-mout."

Wails arose from the Hacek side, but Dangerous raised a hand and continued. "We give up our claims here. We remain as guests only."

Sheila — > Night Crew: The Hacek people are in heavy discussion with the university administration. They're begging for whatever scraps they can get.

And the Greater Scooch-a-mout was conciliatory in victory, though it didn't step away from its embrace of the library. "You are welcome as guests, in a library with real books."

Hanson — > Night Crew: Admin is squealing about that, but the publicity should pay for extra floor space. We've won, gang!

For some minutes, everything was cool. Ending a riot without a police confrontation or a physical debacle was a little bit anticlimactic, but the riot designers had even more special effects to wind things down. Katie Rosenbaum gathered the spider bots all together, then sent them out to Huynh's mechs for a bizarre "peace dance" — that incidentally cleaned up most of the night's garbage. Tim sensed negotiations going on between the two sides, things being traded, promises made. Dangerous Knowledge retreated into the sky, and both sides played with special effects that were new on this night.

But now, when things should have been getting smoother, there were network problems. Here and there, service was unusably slow or all jittery. It made everyone look bad. Scooch-a-mout still stood by the library, embracing the pillar that had "walked." You hold a heroic gesture that long and you just look stupid. Huynh looked at his mech status board. There hadn't been a Scoochi update for almost seven seconds. That was no way to drive a mech.

Huynh — > Hanson: Hey, Sheila. Who's driving the Greater Scooch-a-mout?

Hanson — > Huynh: Dunno. He was good, but now he's dropped the ball. It's okay, we're winding down now. Just take control and walk the robot out. No need to look cool. Then she was messaging the whole night crew, trying to tidy up and get all her GenGen people and gear back where they belonged.

Huynh drove his forklift toward the Greater Scooch-a-mout mech. He walked along behind and tried to figure some nice way to get the two off the field. His robot's "Mind Sum" mists weren't matching its movements anymore; they looked like crap. Okay. He'd take control of the Greater Scooch-a-mout, and have the two robots give a last high five, and then rumble out together. That would be cool, if not fully so.

Maybe it didn't matter. The network problems were getting a lot worse. There were strange latencies, maybe real partitions. Blocks of the virtual audience were being run on cache. Single-hop still mostly worked, but routed communication was in trouble. Huynh stepped a few feet to the side and managed to find a good diagnostic source. There were certificate failures at the lowest levels. He had never seen that before.

Even the localizer mesh was failing'.

Like the holes in threadbare carpet, splotches of plain reality grew around him, eating out the mists and crowds, revealing the armies of everyday lab mechs. Where there had been hundreds of thousands of players, now there were open stretches of dark lawn, and the crowds of real humans, standing in shock.

"Tim! Your forklift!" The shout was real sound, from Sheila Hanson, just a few feet away.

Huynh turned back toward the library. He had lost contact with Mind Sum! He ran toward the mech. The forklift had continued autonomously for just a couple of steps. But this was not a flat lab floor, and the localizer mesh was failing around it. The robot had tripped on one of the ornamental boulders that fringed the terrace. It teetered off-balance, shrieking location queries in all directions. But now the mesh was gone, and the forklift was in trouble. Its onboard systems were designed to cope with instability: the failure mode consisted of stepping quickly into the fall, lowering its center of gravity, and dropping stability limbs. That would have worked down in the clean environment of the labs. Here, its lunge took it to the edge of the north-side grade — and there was no localizer mesh to alert it to the drop. The stability limb settled into thin air, and the forklift tipped over the edge.

There were screams.

Huynh ran out onto the robot battlefield. All the epic imagery was gone, but the robots still had local coordination. They rolled out of his way. He scarcely noticed. All his attention was on his forklift. He had direct contact now. He surfed across the forklift's cameras… and felt sick. There was someone pinned underneath. He climbed down the hillside and fell to his knees. The woman was trapped there, still screaming. Her leg, up to above the knee, was crushed by forklift composite.

Someone scrambled down beside him. Sheila. She wriggled under the blades of the forklift, reached down to grasp the woman's hand. "We'll get you out. Don't worry. We'll get you out."

"Yes!" said Tim. He had full control now. Between his own vision and the cameras, he could see how it had fallen, and where the woman was pinned. Be cool and everything will be okay . The forklift put its weight on knees that didn't touch the woman. There was solid support, no surprises. From under the blades he could hear Sheila comforting the woman.

Okay, just shift the weight back, push off into a low sitting posture. Easy…

But now there were other screams, and the sounds of people running.

Smale — > Huynh: Help us, Tim!

Huynh glanced through a camera on the other end of the forklift: The robot that had been the Greater Scooch-a-mout was still standing by the library, but now its center of gravity was absurdly high and someone had overridden all its safeties, to push against the nearest pillar. The mech's foot pads were grinding into the concrete cladding of the terrace. There was the sound of motors on emergency burn, but in an off/on/off rhythm that sounded almost musical. The robot looked like a child trying to prop up a teetering bookcase.

Huynh turned the camera to look up and up… at the sixth-floor overhang, almost directly overhead. There were gaps in the concrete, and places where the floors tilted and swayed. It was a building that had the smarts to stabilize itself, even to move a little. But now that intelligence was cut off from location information. Like Timothy Huynh's forklift, the library was doing its best to remain standing… and on its own vast scale, it was failing.

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