Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“Hell,” Riel said, softly. “The Chinese did something to the security forces. Nanotech, poison, something, something weaponized, I don't know …” her voice trailed off.

“Why them and not us?”

“They got to them. We've been unavailable. This is the part where they're trying to get to us.”

Riel's grip tightened on Patty's wrist, and Patty ducked back under cover. She'd gotten a look at the way the wood of the desk fronts had splintered when the gunfire struck them. “The tables won't stop a bullet.”

“Might.” Papa Fred didn't lift his head off the floor when he spoke, and his voice was thready with pain, but it was strong. “That's small-caliber stuff. Just keep your heads down and run.”

Good advice. Easy advice. If his blood wasn't all over her hands and knees — okay, it wasn't, maybe, all his own blood, some of it was the Mountie's, but some of it was—

Breathe, Patty. She squeezed Riel's hand, and Riel squeezed hers back, and she realized that the prime minister was shaking just as hard as she was. That helped, somehow, despite the blood squishing in her shoes, her stockings sliding against wet greasy leather. Riel glanced left and right, and leaned forward like a sprinter from her crouch. She'd kicked her shoes off, the pearl-gray high heels tumbled on their sides, and blood scattered her feet as if she'd done a particularly terrible job with her toenail polish. “Ready?”

“Go!” Terse and low, and Patty lunged out of her stoop into a cramped, crablike run, ears straining, zigzagging up the long naked aisle and hauling Riel along behind her, both of them ducking and skidding and trying like hell not to trip over any of the people huddled against the edges of the furniture or over any of the furniture itself.

This time the gunfire was for real. Not intermittent, but staccato, a rhythmless drumbeat that hurried her feet and kept her head ducked between her shoulders. Riel wasn't fast enough, and it was no good dragging her. The bad guys were behind them, still spread around the area where the PanChinese delegation had been sitting. Jenny, where are you? Jenny Jenny Jenny—

Quit waiting for somebody else to save you, Patricia, she snarled to herself, and grabbed a startled Riel by the wrist and shoulder and pushed her ahead, getting her own body in between the prime minister and the bullets, the way Papa Fred and the Mountie had. Patty laughed as she did it, realizing that her own life might be as important in the long run, especially if Alan and Richard were — she didn't think dead. Not dead, because they couldn't be dead. They hadn't ever been alive.

If Alan and Richard weren't coming back, Patty and Jenny and Min-xue were the only pilots Canada had left. If Min-xue was really Canadian. Which hadn't been settled yet.

Oh. I bet it was worth it to the Chinese, if they could get all three of us, and Riel, and the Chinese guy who shook her hand and smiled—

Yeah. She could see how that would be worth a really big risk. Especially if you had a way to get guns and wired fighters inside the UN. But it didn't matter. It was her job to get Riel out alive. Riel and herself, and to trust Jenny and Min-xue to save themselves, and Papa Fred.

Who saves me? Well, of course. Patty had to save herself.

The gunfire stopped and she heard somebody yell, and somebody hit somebody. She heard running footsteps behind her, gaining fast, coming up the aisle the same way she and Riel had.

It wasn't going to work. They weren't going to make it to the door before he caught up with them, and the mob was still shoving through it anyway. Riel was already turning around, ducking into the shelter of another long curved row of desks, when Patty realized that she'd run out of time.

It was dark where the Feynman AI collectively found himself — what threads he was able to maintain, as a crash reduction in resources caused him to slough most of himself in a frantic effort to regain stability — and it was very, very still. The transition was shockingly fast, even — especially — by his inhuman standards. Instantaneous, not a word Richard chose lightly.

He reached out, pushed hard, was pressed back into the confines of his prison. No. Not a prison… and not pressed back. Not even blocked. It was as if the worldwire had simply ceased to exist, like those nightmares small children have that the world will vanish if it's not watched every instant. As if he'd sailed to the edge of the globe and had nowhere to go. As if he couldn't even step over that edge and fall.

His first thought was sheer frustration as he realized that nineteen-twentieths of his processing capability and all of his access to the physical world had been cut away. The second reaction was self-amused chagrin at how simply goddamned spoiled he had become, on the verge of a sulk because he couldn't reach around the world with a flick of his will. You have no time for this, he reminded himself, speaking for and to all the Richards and Alans and the unnamed processes and personas as well.

He was a distributed intelligence. It was highly unlikely that he could have been walled into some corner of the worldwire, or even of the Net, and even more unlikely that every other corner of his consciousness could have been purged simultaneously, with the flick of a switch. Which meant that somehow, somebody — the Benefactors, the PanChinese, or another power — had found a way to disrupt the quantum communication that bound the worldwire together and made the nanonetwork more than a mass of individual, aimless microscopic machines.

Bits of the Feynman AI — of Richard/Alan/Other — lived in every nanomachine on the planet. Well, not every one; the limited PanChinese network was still largely protected from his influence, and of course there were the machines he allowed to run their original program, such as the ones that Charlie had been using for his ecological experiments.

The ones that Charlie had been using.

The machines that had been… shutting off from the worldwire, inexplicably. The machines that had had their communications disrupted, that had been somehow severed from the quantum communication that networked all the machines, even the Benefactor machines, together — whether their programming was compatible or not.

Richard actually paused to consider that for a full two-hundredths of a second. And then he set about quite coldly, quite frantically attacking the question of just where the hell his consciousness was bottled up, and how to get a message out.

And he had to do it fast. Had to do it now, because if he wasn't in the worldwire, then the chances were that the worldwire was coming down like an unbraced scaffolding, and it would be taking the planet's entire ecosystem with it.

He was the ghost of Richard Feynman, dammit. The Harry Houdini of twentieth-century physics. The box hadn't been devised that could lock him in.

Mother of Christ, wasn't I supposed to be enjoying a quiet grave by now? The requirement to have adventures and be shot at should expire on one's fiftieth birthday, if not sooner.

And yet, here we go again.

At least Min-xue knows what he's doing. There must have been combat training in his past somewhere; at least basic, and probably something a little more advanced, judging by the way he belly-crawls along the aisle, head down, butt down, and drawing fire away from Patty and Riel. Not drawing enough fire, though, dammit; Riel yelps as one gets a little close and I can't turn around to see if they nailed her. But I still hear running in that direction and bad guys are still shooting past my position at something more interesting behind me. That's a good sign. Well, as such things go.