Gene called for an autonomous, single-rider electric car to get from the hospital to the train station. He could have taken it all the way to the office instead of just the three minutes to the train station, and that would have been easier. His agency clearance would have prevented it from counting against his household emissions quota. However, wasting energy like that made him uncomfortable, and for that matter, the train was faster.
In his seat on the train, he switched to subvocalizing instead of speaking commands aloud. He wanted privacy while he looked for Samantha.
He messaged Will first: Good morning! I hope I’m not waking you up. Did Samantha get in touch with you?
Ugh, what time is it? Will messaged back. I haven’t talked to her since last night. Is she all right?
She’s fine. The hospital released her. I was hoping you could help me figure out where she is.
You can’t ask her?
We had an argument. She’s not talking to me.
Ohhhhh, Will messaged. Sorry to hear that. Don’t worry, she won’t stay mad long.
Could you try getting in touch with her now?
Sure, hang on.
Gene waited. On both sides, towns flashed by: housing clusters, gardens, streets lined with stores, parks, warehouses, construction printers erecting new buildings, trees ...
She didn’t pick up when I called, Will messaged. I sent her a note. I’ll let you know when she gets back, OK?
Thanks, Will, Gene messaged.
He’d hoped that would work. Samantha would never cut off Will. At the same time, there was no guarantee she’d get back to him soon, and even when she did, Gene wasn’t optimistic she’s share where she was or let him put her in touch with Gene.
“Ollie, I need you to get in touch with Samantha’s friends,” Gene subvocalized. “Everyone you can come up with that she might be in contact with these days. Ask them if Samantha’s gotten in touch today or if they’ve seen her. Can you make it sound casual? I don’t want to make it sound like she’s missing.”
“Although, she is missing,” Ollie said.
“Just don’t let it scare anyone, please,” Gene said. “Oh, and keep an eye on arrest records and ... other hospitals in the area, I guess. Any public source of information where she might show up.”
“Sure,” said Ollie.
“And what about places she goes ... school, any of the businesses at Zora, that cafe with the cats ... Is there anything you can check for those? Anything public?”
“I can confirm she hasn’t been to Zora today,” Ollie said. “I checked the gate logs. I’m not finding any indication she’s been to any of those other locations today, either, but there’s not much I can check for that. I’ll widen the search, but there’s not much information available to us.”
“Do whatever you can,” Gene said.
Probably Samantha would get back in touch soon on her own. At least, Gene could hope.
Then again, if she had gone to the Louvre, Gene wondered if she might cut ties for a time. He couldn’t abide not knowing where she was, though, not at a time like this. Not when he’d learned what kinds of games she was playing with her own life, and not when Cascadia itself might soon become a much more dangerous place.
Gene’s first order of business was an urgent message from Tom Sato. When he reached the agency, he directly to Tom’s office and took a seat as Tom looked up.
“Do you want some coffee, or some green tea?” Tom said. Gene had never once sat down in Tom’s office without being offered coffee or green tea. He had the sense that if the building was collapsing and Gene rushed in to get Tom to safety, Tom would offer him coffee or green tea.
“Thanks, I’m fine,” Gene said. “I came as quickly as I could. What did you find?”
“Is your chair comfortable?” Tom said. He didn’t wait for the answer, which was just as well, since it actually wasn’t a very comfortable chair. “So, when I read your report, I started doing some research. I borrowed RDR Cole to help.”
Cole was one of the high-caliber AIs the Cascadian government made available to each agency and department on a limited basis. RDR Cole was the partition or instance of Cole that was available to Gene’s agency, the ARDR.
“What kind of research?” Gene said.
“Hmm, anything that stuck out,” said Tom. “You know, anything suspicious. I kept feeling like we had missed something—you know, to do with the war.”
“Suspicious?”
“Cyber attacks against the agency, disasters occurring under unusual circumstances, that kind of thing.”
“Oh,” Gene said. Cyber attacks against government agencies weren’t uncommon, though they were usually batted away without difficulty by government-owned protector AIs. Also, there was no reason to imagine that any of those kinds of attacks had anything to do with the Americans, as far as Gene knew. As for disasters occurring under unusual circumstances ... it was hard to know what Tom had been imagining he might find.
On the other hand, as hard as Gene always found it to know what Tom was thinking, the man was consistently brilliant at anticipating problems and marshaling resources to address them. Also, as terrible a job as he was doing getting to the point, he clearly was worked up about something. Tom had only received Gene’s report late the previous afternoon, which meant he must have spent most the night looking through data with Cole.
“And you found something,” Gene said.
“Not just one thing,” said Tom. “Two. First: that mudslide in May, in Santa Barbara?”
“You think the Americans were responsible for that?”
Tom shook his head impatiently. “No, but we found things.”
“What things?”
“Bugs. Little bug drones. Most of them were burned out—we couldn’t figure out why. One was intact, but it had been wiped.”
“What do bug drones have to do with a mudslide?”
“There just seemed to be a lot of them. It was strange, so I looked into it, but at the time, I couldn’t come up with anything, and it didn’t seem important enough to requisition time on Cole. But last night, I had RDR Cole look at them, and they say the bugs are almost certainly American-made and that they were designed to self-destruct if they were damaged. The one that didn’t self-destruct ... I guess that one malfunctioned. But we found sixteen remnants from self-destructed drones, and if those were just the ones that were damaged by the mudslide and that we found, there could be hundreds more. Maybe thousands. Maybe more than that.”
“You’re saying the Americans sent tiny bug drones to hide in a hillside here in Cascadia?” Gene said.
“I know, it sounds weird,” Tom said. “But that’s what it looks like. Cole thinks they were designed to attack electronic equipment. If you had a swarm of them hidden somewhere, they could attack computers, power stations, communications equipment, vehicles, drones, robots ...”
“Why would the Americans hide drones here ... in Santa Barbara? Especially when we’re not at war yet?”
“If we start being at war, we’ll be watching for things like that, though, right?” said Tom. “Up until now, they’ve had time to sneak all kinds of things in. Probably not just in Santa Barbara—probably all over. Who knows how many they’ve got sitting around and waiting for orders? The drones crawl over from America, moving slowly so that nobody detects them, and when they get to their assigned location, they dig in and go dormant until they’re needed.”
“That’s ... but if America’s doing that, that means they’ve been planning a war for a long time, that they’re intending to invade—”
Tom shrugged. “I don’t know that,” he said. “Maybe they are, maybe not. Maybe they just have them in case there’s a war. But if they’re military drones, which Cole thinks they are, then sending them over here is an act of war, technically. So even if there’s no fighting yet—”
“Did you report this?”
“Of course: military command and President Muñoz’s office. I gave them everything I had. They said it fit with some other recent discoveries.”
“You said there were two things?”
Tom nodded. “Yes. You remember that virus that almost got through last month, the one somebody had engineered specifically to crack our systems?”
“Of course,” Gene said. It had been a close call. A brand new protector AI had discovered the virus just in time to prevent it from infecting the computer it was aimed at. If they’d missed it, it could have settled in and compromised the entire agency with no one knowing anything about it.
“American military,” Tom said. “They’re probably sending them over to all kinds of agencies and businesses here, to have some control over our systems if war breaks out. If so, probably some of them got through and are just sitting and waiting, like the bugs.”
Cyber espionage existed in a kind of gray space. No country wanted to get caught at it, but many countries were doing it, and it wasn’t necessarily a precursor to war. At the same time, as Tom had described, it very well could be preparation for war.
“We’re in more danger than I thought,” Gene said.
“And there’s probably a lot more we don’t know about,” Tom said. “Who knows what else they’ve got out there that we didn’t catch?
There wasn’t much time that morning to process what Tom Sato had shared, or even to worry about Samantha. If Samantha hadn’t gone to the hospital the night before, Gene would already have drafted messages to the other senior personnel in his organization about the danger of war, so there was that to catch up on and much else. Preparing for war refugees or human-driven disasters, as well as responding to current natural catastrophes and anticipating future ones, meant that Gene needed to mobilize all of the personnel he had and add more, which meant he needed additional space, infrastructure, and staff, which meant getting the government to approve additional funding. All of this needed to be done immediately. Even so, Gene checked in with Ollie at least five times, even though Ollie would have contacted him the minute anything turned up.
By lunchtime, Gene had begun to feel Samantha wouldn’t turn up any time soon. Despite having nothing new to go on, he’d was also convinced by that time that she was working with the Louvre, which if true probably meant that the boyfriend was there, too. She hadn’t checked in anywhere, which meant she was somewhere she didn’t want to be found.
If he wanted to find Samantha and warn her of the danger, then, Gene needed to find the Louvre. That would be easier said than done.
There was no time for an actual lunch. Gene ordered a nutritional smoothie to be brought up by an office robot, the carrot-kale-pea protein flavor he usually got when there wasn’t time for solid food. While he waited, he allowed himself a few minutes to consider whether there was any earthly way he could reach the Louvre.
There were government agencies that had their eye on the Louvre, but Gene had no authority to request help from those agencies, especially given that this was a personal matter. The group was covered often enough in the popular press, but they were always careful to control the information they gave news sources, and Gene couldn’t think of anything he’d find that way that would let him get in touch. He was beginning to consider ways he might try to publicly get their attention, maybe even an “advertisement” he could pay to have posted on an American news site, when he remembered Mi Zhao.
Gene knew Mi from an interagency panel they’d both been on a few years ago. Mi worked at the Cascadian Cybersecurity Agency, an intelligence organization concerned mainly with hackers and AI. Mi and her then-husband, Tianyu, had come to dinner at Zora a few times with their young daughter, Lindsey, whom both Samantha and Will had adored. Some time after Mi and Tianyu divorced, Gene and Mi had fallen out of touch.
Mi worked in the section of the CCA devoted to defending against rogue AIs, so she wouldn’t be likely to have intelligence on the Louvre—and even if she did have anything, she wouldn’t be able to share it. However, there had been one specific conversation he recalled, one he was fairly sure had been about the Louvre. Mi hadn’t been comfortable naming the organization she was talking about because a friend and former coworker of hers—Gene had the sense that the man in question had been more than just a friend—had joined the organization.
A notification appeared in Gene’s lenses that the lunch robot had arrived. He waved the door open, and the little unit rolled in. It had fifteen or twenty meals and some miscellaneous items tucked into compartments in its body, and it reached into one of these with a multi-jointed arm and produced Gene’s shake, which it set on his desk.
As it turned in place and cruised back out the door, Gene was already composing his message to Mi.
Gene had a regular daily meeting with Bennet after lunch, a meeting Bennet had inherited from his boss, Gene’s permanent Chief of Staff, Daniela, who had been on parental leave for two months so far with her new twins. Without intending it, Gene had found himself taking on some of Daniela’s work that otherwise would fall to Bennet.
It wasn’t exactly that Gene didn’t like Bennet, and Bennet had always been reliable and done everything that was asked of him ... but Gene couldn’t quite figure out what the man’s priorities were, and that made him cautious.
Meanwhile, Gene had a strong sense that behind Bennet’s surface courtesy, the man didn’t like him personally. Gene’s predecessor, Andy Olsen, who to be honest had left the agency a mess, had been a kind of mentor to Bennet. Olsen’s Chief of Staff had abruptly left the agency for a similar position in Immigration, and Gene gathered that Bennet had pictured being appointed Chief of Staff at about that time. He probably would have been, if Olsen hadn’t decided to retire around that same time. That was when Gene had been appointed to run the agency, had considered applications for the Chief of Staff position, and had chosen Daniela, an outside candidate. She turned out to be excellent at her job: a masterful communicator, impeccably organized, with an enthusiasm for and understanding of Cascadian politics that outstripped Gene’s and that of anyone else he could think of. Bennet’s skills, honestly, weren’t in the same league, but Bennet had apparently considered the job already his before Gene took charge of the agency.
“Hi Gene,” Bennet said when he arrived. “Drinking your lunch again?” He shut the door behind him.
“It’s about all I’ve had time for,” Gene said.
“Tell me about it,” said Bennet. “I have your briefing ready, but I wanted to know first whether you wanted me to get more involved in the war preparations.”
Gene winced. “We’re referring to that as the ‘Safe Haven Project,’“ he said. Bennet already knew that the war information they’d discussed was not approved for release to the staff at large. Gene wondered if Bennet had been trying to get a rise out of him. “For now, I need you to keep on top of all of the agency’s normal obligations. I’ll pull you in on Safe Haven as needed.”
“Great,” Bennet said flatly, and he launched immediately into Gene’s briefing.
As usual, the information Bennet presented was complete and useful. He summarized reports Gene had no time to read, highlighted decisions that needed to be made, and checked in on Gene’s priorities. Bennet had blind spots, though, especially in his habit of emphasizing dangers to wealthier communities. Gene was fairly certain Bennet believed himself to be absolutely objective, and to date Gene hadn’t brought the issue up, partly because he wasn’t optimistic that Bennet would listen.
After the briefing, Gene gave Bennet the bare minimum of information about war preparations so far, leaving out Tom Sato’s findings. For now, those would be just for Tom, Gene, the military, and President Muñoz’s office.
As Gene wound up, Bennet smiled, maybe assuming there would be more. When it became clear that there wouldn’t, Bennet cleared his throat. “How’s the family doing?” he said. “Heard from Mark lately? He’s still in France, isn’t he?”
“Oh, well ...” The real answer, Gene thought, would be My daughter went to the emergency room last night, and it turns out she was pregnant, but it wasn’t viable. I know nothing about the boy she was with, and she’s involved in a dangerous hacker organization and by the way has disappeared. I can’t find her, and God only knows what’s happening to her right now.
A call notification icon from Mi Zhao blinked in his lenses, saving Gene the trouble of covering his feelings by sharing some innocuous piece of news about Mark. “Sorry to cut us off, Bennet, but I have a call coming in,” he said. “Let’s touch base tomorrow.”
“Sounds good,” Bennet said, rising. He took his time putting back his chair and leaving the room. Gene had to gesture will answer in a moment over the icon while he waited. When Bennet departed, he left the door open behind him, and Gene had to gesture to close it before picking up Mi’s call.
Gene’s gave the icon a long gaze to start the VR call, and Mi’s office merged half and half with his. She was at her desk in a navy dress with an iris embroidered up one side, clutching an old-style ink pen with both hands.
“Mi, thanks so much for getting back to me,” Gene said.
Mi smiled tightly. “It’s not good to talk about this, Gene,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t have called back if it wasn’t about Sammi.”
“Did you find her? Or get in touch with ... those people?”
“I didn’t do much,” Mi said. “I just sent a message to my, uh, friend. He passed it along, and I guess someone is going to get back to you. I gave them your contact information. I hope that’s OK. I can’t be in the middle of this.”
“No, that’s fine,” Gene said. They could get much more than his contact information if they wanted, he was sure. “I really appreciate this. When? Will they call, or ... ?”
Mi shook her head. “I don’t know. They just said—my friend just said—they’ll contact you. So you’ll hear from them.”
“You should come see us when this is over,” Gene said.
Mi smiled a little less tightly. “That would be nice, but you know, there’s a lot going on. I’d like that, though. Listen, I have to go—”
“No, absolutely. I don’t want to keep you,” said Gene. “I’m so grateful ... I wouldn’t have bothered you if I had anywhere else I could turn.”
“Yeah, I get it,” said Mi. “But if I ever need someone to do some really awful favor for me, now I know who to call.”
“Yes, you do,” Gene said. “Give Lindsey a hug for me.”
“Sure, I will. If she sits still that long. She’s doing gymnastics and flag football and kids’ dance team. I don’t think I’ve seen her motionless for more than five seconds since she was seven. She even wiggles in her sleep.”
Gene laughed. “Thanks, Mi.”
Mi shrugged, waved, and cut the connection.
Gene arrived home around 9:30 that night, and he found the house atypically empty. Kiara and Vi, he guessed, must have concluded the danger was over now that Samantha was out of the hospital and resumed their vacation. Will might be at a late class or he might very well be out on a date, even considering the recent breakup. Still, it felt strange for yesterday’s crisis to be followed by this silence, with everyone scattered to the winds. What he would have liked, what he normally would have done, would have been to call Kiara and Vi and talk things through, but he couldn’t tell them anyone Samantha’s involvement in the Louvre. Well, he’d told Mi, or at least strongly implied it, but he’d had to, to have any chance of getting in touch with her.
So he would have to work things out with Samantha by himself. In most things, the six of them—Gene, Samantha, Mark, Vi, Kiara, and Will—functioned as a family, but there were limits to their family ties, and the person he most wished he could to talk to no longer existed.
He wandered up the stairs and into Samantha’s room. Her workout clothes were still in the pile on the floor where he’d dumped them to use her duffel bag, and one of her dresser drawers was still pulled halfway out. He closed the drawer, and then he picked up her workout clothes, folding each item. He stacked them neatly on her dresser, next to the antique jewelry box Edison had bought her for her eleventh birthday.
He looked around the room. There were the physical displays where he’d seen the data bloom. There above the bed was a long, narrow shelf displaying her collection of gecko sculptures, at least 25 of them. A dress and a couple of hats hung on the coat rack near the door. In the corner near the closet was a bag with her baseball equipment, although she hadn’t played in a couple of years. There was an oversized, pink-and-white armchair by the window where Samantha used to curl up and talk to her friends over her lenses. Oversized, active pictures on the wall flashed glimpses of musicians and performing artists in a constant flicker that would have driven Gene crazy but that Samantha had long considered basic decorating sense. At the foot of the bed, a large wooden box with a padded top, which had once been her toy box, held linens and clothes that didn’t fit. To Gene’s dismay, Samantha continued to buy clothes a size or two too small. She described them as “aspirational.”
“Ollie,” Gene said, “did Samantha leave any messages for me?” It was a hopeless question. If Samantha had been in touch, his lenses would have immediately displayed a notification.
“There is a message with her diary,” Ollie said. “Would you like to see that?”
“There’s a what?” Gene said. “When did she leave me a message?”
“Just over a year ago. It wasn’t a direct message. It’s a note meant to go with the diary.”
“Why would she leave me a note to go with the diary?” Gene said. “I can’t read the diary, can I?”
“I couldn’t speculate about what she was thinking,” Ollie said. “And yes, you have permission to read her diary.”
“Show me the note,” Gene said.
Samantha appeared in front of him—a projection, courtesy of his lenses. It was a slightly younger Samantha, her hair still long. She’d been straightening it at that age.
“Hi Dad,” she said. “So, I’m guessing you finally asked Ollie if I had a diary you could read, or something? Or you asked him to help you understand what’s going on in my life? I know you had to ask something weird to get to this point, so I guess I’m surprised if this is happening any time before I’m thirty. Actually, I bet you won’t ask, but I also figure that if you do, you must actually want to know. I gotta tell you Dad, I don’t think you even want to know what I’m doing with my life. I bet you wish I’d just stay ten years old forever. Whatever—what I’m saying is, you haven’t been showing a lot of interest in what’s really going on with me, so since I only have one parent left, and since he isn’t listening, I have to talk to a computer, which is what I do all the time anyway ... Why not, right?
“Anyway, this is my diary. Well, one of my diaries. I have other stuff that’s just for me, but this is everything I’d be sharing with you if you seemed like you actually wanted to know. I hope you do now.”
The projection sighed.
“I sound like such a bitch. I know you love me—don’t misunderstand that, Dad. I know you’re not always comfortable with personal things the way that Daddy was. We all have limitations, right? But I love you—I mean, I really do love you, and here’s proof: this diary, full of all kinds of things that you’re probably nowhere near ready to hear. I’m having the entries I add to it transcribed as text, because I know you’re a geek about old-timey things. So enjoy. And honestly, thank you for reading this. It means a lot that you wanted to.”
Then she disappeared, and an icon came up indicating a new, private document in his electronic library. He sat down on the pink-and-white chair and started to read.
There were about a hundred entries, sometimes two or three for a single day, sometimes going weeks between. He read the last one first, from about a week before. It was about Terence Palmer, the target of the Louvre’s most recent attack, and what a terrible person Samantha thought he was. Reading the entry, Gene found himself pretty much agreeing with her. Palmer apparently treated his workers and underlings with contempt, and his fortune, to hear Samantha tell it, had been built on one cold-blooded, selfish decision after another.
Gene selected an item a few entries back. This one turned out to be about Samantha’s friend Peri, who apparently was now dating a boy named Damien, who based on the entry must have been Samantha’s ex-boyfriend, though she’d never mentioned him to Gene. The gist was that Peri didn’t know what she was getting into and had no business dating Damien.
The entry after that, though, was enlightening. Samantha talked about reuniting with someone named Lan, whom she was clearly crazy about. Was this the father of the ill-fated baby?
Gene went back to read from the beginning. There were a lot of parties in the early entries, and some disturbingly casual encounters with a series of boys Gene instinctively disliked. Then, four or five months in, the tone of the diary changed. Lan appeared on the scene, a friend of a school friend of Samantha’s. Apparently they had liked each other from the beginning—and apparently, the relationship had become much more exciting when Samantha learned that Lan was part of the Louvre.
Gene was interrupted by an incoming call icon, which he almost brushed away, focused as he was on reading about his daughter’s life—but he was stopped by the strangeness of the symbol. It gave no information about who was calling, which he hadn’t thought was possible, and it required a third party application to answer. The symbol was a black arc on a splash of red. He brought up the information that was available on the application, but it was nothing—some developer’s throw-away learning project, it looked like. This must be the person from the Louvre. He gave the icon a long gaze, aware as he did so that it was not a wise thing to do. The line opened.
At first the icon just pulsed different colors. Gene guessed it was trying to connect. Then Samantha’s room vanished, and everything around Gene went black. It was like he was suspended in ink. The person who appeared across from him was a full-color, animated drawing, a tall, lean woman, probably in her thirties, with skin about the same shade as his. Even as a drawing, she seemed jumpy.
“Hello,” he said slowly. “Are you from the group I was asking about?”
“That’s right. You’re looking for Samantha? She’s with us.”
“Could I speak with her?”
“Didn’t she make it clear she’s not talking to you right now?” the woman said. “In case not: she’s not talking to you right now.”
“I just want to be sure she’s safe.”
“She’s safe and doing fine and with friends,” the woman said. “I’m sure that in time, she’ll be ready to reconnect. Definitely not right now, though.”
“Tell her—”
“I can’t relay messages. She doesn’t want to hear from you. Haven’t you ever been mad at anybody? You have to wait until she’s cooled down. Did you get the impression she was permanently cutting you out of her life? Because I’m pretty sure she’s not doing that.”
“I understand. But what she’s doing is dangerous. It’s more dangerous than she knows.”
“Since when do you have any idea what she knows? And I told you, I’m not relaying messages. Do you want to hear the rest?”
Gene shifted uncomfortably. “The rest of what?”
“I wanted to share some useful information. I’m hoping we can be friends.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“You can call me ... Alice,” the woman said. “Let’s use that. But I don’t mean that I’m hoping you and I can be friends. I’m hoping you can be friends with us all. We might be able to help each other.”
Gene leaned forward. He could feel himself shaking, and he took a calming breath. “Is that a threat?”
Alice laughed. “No! I don’t know what kind of people you think we are, but Samantha’s fine, she’ll get back in touch with you whenever she feels like it, and we really are her friends. But I think that our group and you can help each other—”
“I don’t need any help right now, thank you.”
“I think maybe you do. Listen: we’ve been following this particular individual in the American government who seems to be in charge of an operation in Cascadia. We haven’t found out much about what this person is doing, but we do know that someone connected to him seems to be gunning for you.”
“What do you mean? Who’s ‘gunning for me’?”
“And that’s where the mutual help comes in. We’re not even asking for anything specific, but we do feel like you’re likely to be in a situation where you could help with some of our work. And we know enough about you to understand you aren’t much more of a fan of what the Americans plutocrats are doing than we are ... but you also seem to be the rule-following type. So what I’ll say is that we’d like to do a favor for you now by sharing the information we have, and in exchange, we’ll ask for a favor from you in the future. When that happens, if you don’t want to grant it, you don’t have to. We’ll try another favor later, although you can decide not to grant that, too. We don’t know what we’d be asking for right now, but we feel pretty sure we can come up with something we’d want that you’d be willing to do. And your profile suggests there’s no way you’d guarantee us a favor without knowing what it is, which is why—”
“That’s very generous. No thank you.”
“You should think about it,” said Alice.
“I don’t need to think about it,” said Gene.
“But you will,” Alice said. “We’ll check in some other time and see if you’ve had a change of heart. You might want to hurry up with that, honestly. I don’t know how long you have before the trouble we’ve seen comes knocking for you.”
“Tell Sammi I love her,” Gene said.
“I’m still not passing along messages. But good luck with your father-daughter situation. We’ll talk again soon.”
“I don’t need—” Gene said—but without warning, the blackness dropped away, and Alice vanished.