Greg Bear - Mariposa

"Let's boogie," Kapp said.

"You going to lynch me?" the boy asked. He was only fifteen but had been through a lot in the last year.

Before William could answer, the boy slumped and almost fell. The jailers in Lion City had given him a time-release sedative for the duration of the trip, to keep him quiet right up until they strapped him to the gurney in the Walls Unit.

The second round was kicking in.

"We're not going to lynch you," William murmured as Curteze helped slide the boy into the rear seat of the Tahoe. "We're going to drive you out of state."

"He can't hear you," Kapp said.

They strapped him in-seatbelt only, no cuffs.

They had nothing to fear from Little Jamey.

Nobody did, actually.

"We won't get far unless we cut that chip out of him," Curteze said.

"There's an abandoned field just outside of town," William said. "We'll do it there."

That field was the closest they were likely to get to the Smoky, Price's ranch-a mile and a half. Satellites had located Fouad. He was being kept in a bungalow a hundred yards behind the main complex.

The snake bots had an operational round-trip range of no more than seven miles.

Pendleton

They walked around the shack, then cut across to the blockhouse, avoiding the scrub. The blockhouse's southern wall had a narrow inset door accessed by a short flight of steps sunk a couple of feet into the earth.

"Maybe this was some sort of communication station," Camp said. "Loran or Alcan or something."

"Alcan's a highway."

"They'd have buried the power lines, right?"

"Maybe."

"Could still have juice."

A small black camera eye poked from the concrete over the steel door. Someone had tried to hammer their way through the door and failed-it still looked strong and secure.

But as they approached, this door also clicked open, just like the gate and the door to the shack.

"Maybe he's here after all," Camp said.

The interior was simple, old-dusty. A dark brown couch, upholstered in worn velour, had been planted in the middle of the floor.

More interesting, a low, putty-colored box about the size of an early-model Jones 1.0 sat on a wooden bench. Behind the table, a metal connection box had been set flush with the wall. A thick pipe dropped from the box through the concrete floor.

Competors like Jones were the next step up from computers. They used competitive algorithms to solve problems-some called them evolution engines. The Turing Seven were probably the best in the world at thinking up such algorithms, a very specialized mathematical discipline.

The Quiet Man had once said that the next step up from competors would be called "thinkers."

"Is that what it looks like?" Camp asked.

"Don't go near the table. It's probably rigged to explode."

"Right. Game logic," Camp said. "But there is a couch. Unfair to blow up a couch. Gamers like to sit. We should sit."

They inspected the couch, lifting the cushions-nothing suspicious-then sat, slowly.

A sensor under the couch clicked, making them both jump up, cursing-but a voice spoke from a small speaker mounted in the wall directly ahead.

"Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that I am no longer able to guide your quest," the voice said. "If everything here still works, you will soon learn why."

It was the Quiet Man-unmistakable.

At the tap of a tiny solenoid, a small piece of plaster fell from the wall. Four shiny black lenses pushed through the hole, angling with tiny whirring noises to find faces, focus on eyes.

"Please sit."

Again, they settled in.

The projectors painted beams of laser light directly onto their retinas, reproducing an image for both of them-a live image, Nathaniel guessed.

The projected point of view was of someone about six feet tall standing in the lobby of Mind Design, facing panoramic picture windows. Mind Design's main building sat on a bluff overlooking the ocean, southwest of their present location-in La Jolla.

"Wow," Camp said. "How old is all this shit? Why not just hand us spex?"

He had a point-the blockhouse interior had been designed and built at least a decade ago. It definitely smacked of spare time, paranoia-and some sort of outmoded cool factor.

Which fit well with what Nathaniel knew about the Quiet Man.

"You seeing what I'm seeing?" Camp asked in an undertone. "Mind Design. Great view."

"Yeah. Shh," Nathaniel said.

"I was there once, four years ago," Camp said. "So is the Quiet Man here-I mean, there-or hiding nearby-or somewhere even safer?"

Camp's caviling about POV was disorienting Nathaniel. Here, there… past, future, present. Numbers and coordinates.

The lasers were forcing him to see and thus think a certain way. He was having real problems controlling memories evoked by the remote images.

"I'm getting a nasty premonition," Camp said. "That sucks. I don't know how to react."

For Nathaniel, the image suddenly tangled up with memory, imagination, suspended fear.

He tried to turn away but could not.

Mind Design was a sixties-style suspended rectangle of white and stainless steel, hanging out over a bluff above the brilliant blue ocean.

Every wave…

Nathaniel knew their numbers. He knew these buildings inside and out, backwards and forwards; he could visualize every room just by closing his eyes.

Stop that. Keep it together.

For a few seconds, he relived parking in the shadow of a grove of tall eucalyptus-maybe two years ago. The Mind Design parking lot held no more than twenty cars, and at least ten spaces had been roped off after a storm had brought down big branches. Folks liked their legacy trees. Southern California-and in particular La Jolla -was nothing without eucalyptus.

Nathaniel got out of the car and leaned against the door. The purple of the ice plant on the slope in front of the car was so intense he had to avert his eyes.

Keep your mind on the couch. You are here. You are not in the lobby.

But his mind was fanatically searching for significant patterns, numbers, novelty-and so the memory rolled on. He could make out every single purple flower, every fleshy green blade. If he wanted, he could know their numbers and what those numbers would mean for thousands of years to come.

He had worked at Mind Design four years before the company had sent him to Talos in Lion City, and then to Jordan, and then to Arabia Deserta, and after a few months' hiatus, finally to Dubai, to create a backdoor into MSARC.

On the couch, Nathaniel's muscles twitched as if they were moving, carrying him forward. Walking. Every twitch was like a little orgasm. The muscles reveled in their new multidimensional freedom from time, space, reality.

His body felt younger, unconstrained.

My flesh and blood and bone before the firefight. Before the scars and the pain-physical and mental.

My brain before Mariposa.

He looked with longing at the fast, sleek hybrids parked in the lot, including his: red and silver. Hooked up and plugged in, charged and ready to race down Torrey Pines Road at a hundred and forty miles an hour: just as green for Gaia as for the well-paid programmers and designers.

He walked up the sidewalk to the half hidden glass door, punched in his old security code, added a suffix that the Quiet Man had not mentioned, but that he knew would work.

Mind Design was open to him once more. He would know its numbers.

The building welcomed him as an old, secret friend.

"Nathaniel? We should get going. This is starting to feel like a trap."

He ignored Camp. Camp's mind wasn't yet wrapped around the impossibility of that body laid out behind the tumbledown shack.

Back at Mind Design: deep in the sub-basement, around the corner from the freight elevator, through a door in a half height wall topped with panes of thick glass, an early version of Jones lay spread out on the concrete floor like an art installation: oddly patterned and spaced cubes of plastic and steel hooked up with thick fiber optic cables and pipes carrying nutrient fluids.