Rainbows End

The Minimum Sufficient Response

Mus MCog

The Stranger's pdf said that "Mus" was short for "Mus musculus ." Mice! The mouse arrays stretched away into the dark. If anything, the place seemed even bigger than it had the first time Robert had been here. So where to go?

Miri hesitated only a second, then ran in the direction of the loudest noises. They trotted down two aisles and over one. Yes! Here was a cabinet with doors swung wide. Pneumos were delivering white cylinders into the crystal forest on top.

Miri skidded to a stop in front of the opened doors. Inside the cabinet were glassy racks; it was like some kind of old-time snack dispenser. The slots behind the glass were a silvery honeycomb, hundreds of perfect hexagonal cells. Hundreds of tiny faces looked out of the cabinet. Tiny faces with tiny pink eyes, on tiny furry white heads. A high-pitched chittering came through the glass.

"They can't move, they're wedged in so tight," said Miri. "Their rear ends must be plugged into little — " She paused, perhaps looking up background on her local cache? " — little sucking diapers." For a little girl who had no interest in pets, there was a strange sadness in her voice. "It's a standard thing really."

Miri tore her gaze away from the array of chittering faces. "Each of these cabinets has mice cells arranged twenty by thirty by ten. So there are nine more arrays behind this one we're looking at. Hear the crunching noise? Smart-Aleck's friends are wrapping up some of them for shipment."

"But where?" None of the mouse cells were moving.

"That must be in back — "

There was a sound like a goblet breaking. Colored mist floated down from the crystal forest. It barely wet his face. But Miri was standing right beside the cabinet. He reached out and drew her back. Above them, the rest of the fluidics shattered. There was the faint scent of unwashed socks. Robert moved them farther back, stepping on the broken glass. "Miri, that could be nerve gas."

Miri was silent for a second and then her voice piped up confidently: "They're trying to scare us. This part of the lab isn't designed for simple poisons." But Robert remembered the shipping cartridges just arriving here. We were suckered into stopping at this cabinet .

Miri slipped out from behind him and ran around the cabinet. "Ha! There is a transport tray back here." By the time he caught up, she was hosing the tray with aerosol glue. Tiny motors whined, unable to load from the cabinet. Miri reached out, patted the almost invisible boundaries of the gel. After a moment the crunching sounds within the cabinet came to an untidy stop. "Nothing's going out from here!"

They stood, listening… and now the familiar sound of cargo prep came from all over the cavern.

"How many mouse arrays are there, Miri?"

"Eight hundred and seventeen when I cached the lab description." She looked up at him. "But there's no way Smart-Aleck's friends could be using more than a few arrays. There's too much security and too many other projects down here…" The sounds of packaging grew louder. Dozens of cabinets were playing the game of Come Stop Me. Miri stepped back and gazed into the distance. The lab was a miniature city, its alleys laid out in a rectangular grid, stretching off into the dark beyond their single street-lamp. "I've got a good map, but… what can we do, Robert?"

Robert looked at her map. "I came through here with Tommie. We set down gadgets by particular cabinets."

"Yes! Which ones?"

Robert looked again at the map floating in the air before him. The place was a maze, and the cabal had come in from a different direction. "I, uh — " In 2010, Robert had gotten lost in a shopping-mall parking lot. After an hour, he still couldn't find his car; he'd ended up at mall security. That had been the first undeniable encounter with his mental decline. But the new me shouldn't have trouble remembering ! "The nearest is two rows thataway, then jog right."

They raced past two aisles, then over one to the right. Almost all the cabinet doors were open, their transport trays working to prep cargo. Miri waved at the pneumo tubes that branched above the cabinets. "But see, nothing is actually shipping from here. Where's the next place?"

And they were running again, off toward his best guess.

Ahead of them something loomed against the ceiling. The GenGen launcher.

Miri skittered to a stop, and began shaking her spray can. "Which one, Robert?" All the cabinets around her were behaving like suspects.

"It's still two more rows, then five cabinets down."

"But I thought you said — never mind." Miri walked past two more rows. Robert followed.

She looked up at him.

"I… I'm not sure." He glared over the tops of the cabinets, trying to orient on the launcher, trying to force memory.

She hesitated and then touched his arm. "It's okay, Robert. Sometimes, you can't remember. But things will get better for you."

"Wait," he said. "I'm sure this is right." The pneumo tube behind the nearest had just received a shipping cartridge. Mouse boxes were rolling on board.

"So that means, um" — and Miri's hand slipped from his arm. She looked around and then up at him: "Where are we?"

Maybe it hadn't been nerve gas. Maybe it was something worse. And Miri got the bigger dose . Above the cabinet the pneumo hatch had closed. There was a pillowed thud and the cartridge sped away.

Another cartridge pulled into the siding above the cabinet. Another batch of mice rolled to meet it. It was out of reach, But I still understand what has to be done . Robert looked down at Miri and did his best to smile and lie. "Oh, we're just on a tour, Miri. How about it, would you like to climb on top of that cabinet?"

She looked up past him. "I'm not a little girl, Robert. I don't climb on other people's property."

Robert nodded, and tried to hold his smile. "But Miri, this… this is just a game. And… if we can stop the white thing with your, your game gun, then we win. You want to win, right?"

Now that brought a smile, full of pert intelligence. "Of course. Why didn't you say it was a game. Huh. This looks like some kind of bioscience lab. Nice!" She looked at where the transport was sliding the mouse boxes along. "So what do you want me to do?"

Once she's up there she'll forget all over again . "I'll tell you when you get up there." He lifted from beneath her arms. "Reach up! Grab the edge and I'll push."

Miri giggled, but she did reach up, and Robert did push. She slid through the gap beneath the siding. Her spray can was just inches from the transport tray.

"Now what?" her voice came down to him.

Yes, now what? You go to all the trouble to do something, and then you forget the point. Only this time, he knew the point was something very important. Robert flailed, beginning to panic. "Cara, I don't know — "

"Hey, I'm not Cara. My name is Miri!"

Not my sister, my granddaughter . Robert stepped back from the cabinet and tried to make sense: "Just shoot the spray can at the moving things, Miri."

"Okay! No problem."

A sound that was pain spiked into his head. Over the cabinet, he had a glimpse of a strange hole that split the side of the UP/Ex launcher. Nothing to do with Miri ! The thought had barely registered when he was slammed backwards.

Array One was in the GenGen launcher! The stealthed launch vehicle had a good chance of making it out of the the U.S. cordon. Array Two? Alfred's cameras showed that his strategy with the Gus was working. Somehow they had found the one Mus cabinet that really mattered, but his improvised gas attack was taking effect. The two were moving with a kind of aimless uncertainty.

He had time to prep the second load; he could get both out!

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: USMC elint has detected ballistic launcher power-up in the labs! What can that be, Alfred?

Damn USMC. Alfred's analysts hadn't thought American electronic intelligence would be so sensitive.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: It's just bad luck. The GenGen launcher is cycling through its nightly calibration. That was a lie, but Alfred had his story ready. He launched a flurry of faked analysis, showering conclusions across Keiko and Günberk's teams. After the fact, he'd blame the launch on a resurrected Rabbit.

Mitsuri — > Braun, Vaz: But will the Americans believe that? She popped up some windows, her best estimate of just when and how the USMC might respond to the launch prep.

No time for the third cartridge. The GenGen launcher was loaded, the capacitor within forty-five seconds of launch. If only the Americans would just dither a bit.

Vaz — > Braun, Mitsuri: I'm finished with cleanup. Heading for rendezvous. Alfred took a last glance around. In fact, all his checklists were finally green. Across the room, the Orozco boy was sleeping peacefully. He would remember nothing of tonight, and his personal log had been artfully corrupted.

Alfred stepped out of the room, and proceeded down the hallway. There was lots of area lighting, the sort of thing you'd expect in a major system failure. Ah ! The marines had finally detected his network. They had killed his stealthed aerobot. He still had contact with half a dozen mobiles scattered in the brush to the north. They were hunkered low, mainly trying to be very quiet and still maintain a net. The American assault grid was sweeping the area, destroying them one by one. The USMC mechs drifted down like a kind of black snow, unnoticed by the crowds, and visible to his robots only in the last instant before their destruction.

He came out of the stairway, onto the first floor. Ahead was the main entrance.

Five seconds till UP/Ex launch! He could imagine the chaos on the American side, losing their top analyst right at the crisis point. This was sniper warfare, brought into modern times, and three more seconds' delay would —

His milspec contacts lost transparency and he felt a flash of heat on his face. Alfred dived for the floor. When the shock hit, the building swayed, barely stable in its uncommunicating configuration. He lay still for a moment, watching.

That had been a High Energy Infra-Red laser, punching straight through the roof of the GenGen lab some two thousand meters away. He had a single direct view, a glimpse of trees silhouetted against a pearly glow, a rising cloud of steam and fog. Part of the haze was zapped vegetation. Most was damage-suppression mist, designed to soak up the knife edges of reflected death. The Americans had fired thirty times in less than a second. Glints from those blasts would have splattered kilometers in all directions, invisible to the naked eye, but potentially blinding and blistering those same eyes.

A second viewpoint came online. The target hillside looked like a miniature Mauna Loa, a river of flowing rock that slumped down into the hillside. Flashes of light marked the ongoing work of thermal flechettes. Thunder pounded.

So the American response had been prompt and decisive, cauterizing and sealing the launcher area, with minimum collateral damage. And all my dreams are ashes .

His contacts had transparency again. Alfred came to his feet and ran out of Pilchner Hall.

Ahead of him people swirled in panic, first stunned by network failure, now dazzled by HEIR laser glints. Get into the crowd . Even though he was shoulder-to-shoulder with humanity, for the first time this evening Alfred felt really alone. Some people around him stared upward; some were temporarily blinded. People were crying. Others were counseling the sensible thing: Get under cover, keep your gaze down and away from reflectors. In the midst of network failure, these people were reduced to literal word of mouth. But that word was spreading. More and more people realized that for only the third or fourth time in recent history, their own country was under a military assault. So far none of them had guessed that it was their own military's doing.

Alfred kept his head down, his face covered. It wasn't a suspicious posture; hundreds of others were cowering similarly. He shrank his communications down to a fuzzy static that conveyed only a few bits per second and that routed chaotically through his mechs. His ops gear was heavily shielded; to the USMC probes it would seem like just another Epiphany unit struggling to cope with the sudden failure of the public nets.

All that might buy him ten more minutes. Long before then, the DHS analyst pool should recover from Alice's collapse and run a retrospective surveillance of the local video streams. Analysts obsessing on a dataset that small were deadly effective. He could imagine their gleeful pursuit: See how the enemy mechs are clumped across from Pilchner Hall? Scan back to early in the evening; who-all has been near that building? Why, there's Gu's daughter going in, and a few minutes earlier, an Indian-looking fellow doing the same. Scan forward; no action till a minute ago, when that same Indian-looking fellow comes running out. Track him forward to the present — and my, my, there he is, trying his damnedest to seem an innocent bystander.

In any case, tonight's Indo-European operation was beyond all deniability. And that was the minor disaster. For a few seconds, Alfred Vaz drifted in uncharacteristic despair. What about all my years of planning? What about saving the world ? He had heard enough to know that Rabbit's accusations were in the pdf sent to Parker's laptop. Alfred would never complete his research program. Indeed, Rabbit had been the Next Very Bad Thing. The carrot greens in Mumbai had made the point, but I willfully ignored the evidence, so hoping I was to win with my plan .

And yet… what of Rabbit now? Quite possibly its substantive evidence was indecipherable garbage. Conceivably the minds behind Rabbit were reduced to ignorance. Then maybe, maybe, with all my leverage at External Intelligence, I can survive to try again .

Alfred moved back to the edge of the crowd and cautiously reached out to his network. He'd lost his link into the labs. For half a minute there was nothing except a deadly snick and snack that sounded privately in his ears, marking the steady extermination of his little army.

There . A route through his surviving devices, back into Pilchner Hall. Tiny windows popped up and… he found a viewpoint, a single lab camera that had survived the HEIR attack and looked down upon the Mus array cabinet. The camera had suffered glitter damage, swaths of stuck pixels, but he could see enough.

Collateral damage could be your friend; there might be nothing here to prove Rabbit's accusations! The blast from the Americans' attack on the launcher had knocked over his very special cabinet. The last group of mice had fallen along with it. Best of all, the Yanks' thermal bombs had flooded the area around the launcher with molten overburden. The lava had closed off the hole created by the attack, just as intended, but it had not stopped there. The glowing, tarry tide had pushed out along the aisles and piled almost two meters deep in places. Its farthest extent lapped the fallen cabinet and covered all but a corner of that final batch of mouse boxes.

There was no sign of the Gus. Before the laser attack, they had been standing just beyond the current destruction. If he'd had more viewpoints, he might have tracked them down — but would that matter? Their jumbled memories were a still a threat, but that was now beyond his control. Suddenly, Alfred realized he was smiling. Strange how in the midst of disaster, he could be pleased that his two most persistent antagonists — not counting Rabbit, may he burn in hell — had probably survived.

He was closer to the library now. Civilian rescue workers were in evidence, though the network support was probably provided by the marines.

Interrogation teams were not yet in action. And he'd found a backup aero-bot to relay through! He got one fresh message before it was lost:

Mitsuri — > Vaz: Günberk's analysis is almost complete. Please give us a few more minutes' cover, Alfred. USMC is still focused on the labs. You have a clear run to your Bollywood team. She marked a map with the cinema team's current location, on the north edge of the crowds, in the eucalyptus. The Bollywood crew and its automation were well prepared for tonight's operation, though the on-site people were not knowing participants.

Alfred took a final check all around himself. He walked a few paces through the trees… and he was in midst of his Bollywood crew.

"Mr. Ramachandran! We have lost all connectivity." The video tech's eyes were wide. "Everything was fine, but now it is so very terrible!" The crew were experts on the spectacular, but not the real.

Alfred shifted into the persona of harried cinema exec. "You have your cached videos, do you not? You forwarded the earlier contexts back home, did you not?"

"Yes, but — " They wanted to rush out from the trees, to help the injured down by the library. That was for the best; in moments, Vaz would be one of the group again. Perhaps the DHS analysts were still in chaos. It would be amusing (and amazing, too) if this cover got him past the USMC cordon and out of California. As he followed his cinema crew out into the open space around the library, he had only one remaining link to his mil-net. It was past time to drop that bit of incrimination.

But there was still intelligence streaming in. Terrible, chilling words that Alfred would never have been burdened with if he hadn't still been linked.

"Please. Please don't do this to her. She's just a little girl."

Gu . Alfred searched wildly in his only remaining view. Back in his physical person, he stumbled.

The video tech grabbed his elbow, steadying him. "Mr. Ramachandran! Are you quite well? Were you blinded in the attack?"

Alfred had the presence of mind not to shake her off. "I'm sorry, it's just all this destruction. We must help these poor people."

"Yes! But you must stay safe yourself." The tech guided him down to where the rest of the Bollywood crew was already helping the emergency workers. Her aid gave him cover to look carefully out from his underground viewpoint. The damage to the camera had partially healed; some of the stuck pixels were flickering, and now he could see a little beyond the left of the fallen cabinet… The elder Gu was pinned beneath. Lord, where was the other one?

I didn't mean for this . He should say nothing, but his body betrayed him:

Anonymous — > Robert Gu: Where is your little girl?

"Who is this?" the voice screamed in his ear, then continued more quietly, more desperately. "She's right here. Unconscious. And I can't move her out of the way"

Anonymous — > Robert Gu: I'm sorry. Alfred couldn't think of anything more to say. Dead, these two might marginally improve his own prospects. He looked angrily away from the viewpoint. Damn me . He had accomplished nothing this night except destroy good people. But how could he safely save them?

"Please. Just tell the police. Don't let her burn."

More spikes of overpressure, the sound of a thousand fragile things breaking, of heavy plastic tearing, bones being crushed. Robert didn't really hear it all. The bones getting crushed, that was distracting. Even the follow-up explosions and the heat went more or less unnoticed.

Robert surfaced from introspection that might as well have been unconsciousness, except that it hurt a lot more. Miri was on her hands and knees. She was wailing. "Grandpa! Grandpa! Say something, please . Grandpa!"

He twitched a hand, and she grabbed it. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to knock things over. Are you hurt?"

It was one of those questions that had an easy answer. Agony the size of an elephant was sitting on his right leg. "Yes," but the rest of a clever answer was lost in the pain.

Miri was crying, choking, very un-Miri-like. She turned and pushed at the cabinet that had him pinned.

Robert took a deep breath, but that mainly made him dizzy. "The cabinet's too heavy, Miri. Stay back from it." Why was the air so hot? The steady light was gone. Something like an open furnace glowed beyond the fallen equipment, where the sounds were all of popping and hissing.

"Cara — Miri ! — come back from there!"

The little girl hesitated. Under the cabinet were the crushed remains of the mouse array that had been about to load. It wasn't going anywhere now. Miri reached down into the broken glass. Robert cricked his neck and saw a tiny face peering back into his, a mouse loose from its suction trap in the array.

"Oo," Miri's voice squeaked. "Hi, little guy." A laugh mixed with a sob. "And you, too. You each get a free pass." Robert saw more tiny faces as she freed other mice. The heads bobbed this way and that. They didn't seem to see him, and after a moment, they found something that was much more important in the mousely order of things: freedom. They ran around the girl's hands and away from the heat.

Now Robert could see what caused the heat. A glowing white gob of syrup dripped over the wreckage, hissed into redness as it oozed down the side of the fallen cabinet.

Cara gave a panicked cry and came back to him. "What is that?"

The hissing and spattering. If it could make it over that barrier, it must be dammed up several feet deep. "I don't know, but you've got to get away."

"Yes! Come on!" The girl pulled at his shoulders. He pushed with her, ignoring the tearing pain in his leg. That moved him four or five inches; then he was stuck more solidly than before. And now the heat was even more distracting than the crushed leg. Robert's mind hopped from one horror to the other, trying to keep its sanity.

He looked across at his crying sister. "I'm sorry I made you cry, Cara." She just cried harder. "You've got to run now."

She didn't reply, but the crying stopped. She looked at him, uncomprehending, then slid back from the furnace heat. Go! Go ! But then she said, "I don't feel good," and lay down just beyond his reach.

Robert looked back at the oozing rock. It had swamped the bottom of the cabinet. Another inch or two and it would slop onto his little sister. He reached out, snagged a long shard of — ceramic? — and wedged it against the glowing tide.

There were more explosions, but not so loud. Up close there was just the smell and sound of things cooking. He tried to remember how he had come to be here. Someone had done this to him and Cara, and surely they must be listening now.

"Please," he said into the glowing dark. "Please don't do this to her. She's just a little girl."

No reply, just the terrible sounds, and the pain. And then the strangest thing, letters scrolling across his gaze:

Anonymous — > Robert Gu: Where is your little girl?

"Who is this? She's right here. Unconscious. And I can't move her out of the way ."

Anonymous — > Robert Gu: I'm sorry.

He waited, saw nothing more.

"Please. Just tell the police. Don't let her burn."

But the silent watcher was gone. Cara lay unmoving. Can't she feel the heat ? It took everything he had to hold the shard in place.

Then: "Professor Gu? Is that you?"

It was some pestering student! There were so many afterimages, he couldn't be sure, but someone was there, partly submerged in the molten ooze.

"It's me, Zulfi Sharif, sir."

That name was familiar, a weaselly arrogant student. But now his skin wasn't green. That meant something, didn't it?

"I've been trying for some hours to call you, sir. It's never been this bad before. I… I fear I may have been truly hijacked. I'm so sorry." He was mostly submerged in the glowing rock. A ghost.

"You're injured!" said the ghost.

"Call the police," said Robert.

"Yes, sir! But where are you? Never mind, I see! I'll get help straight — "

The glowing rock dribbled over Robert's makeshift dam, onto his arm. He descended into a pit of mindless pain.

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