Greg Bear - Mariposa

More men appeared in the chamber, flickering around Herbert, brutally knocking him around. His mouth hung open in terror.

"Christ," Camp said.

One very solid-looking arm reached out and delivered an electric baton to the back of Herbert's leg. The arm withdrew and Herbert folded like a sack of rocks.

The disembodied arms and legs moved in and beat him over and over. Blood spray shot up.

The image flickered and then returned, sharp but quiet-the chamber empty but for a smashed, pitiful body.

Then the body was dragged away.

Jones knew. He had seen it all.

Herbert's uninjured form returned and again looked at the high corner. "If we accomplish the task that Talos set for us, then Axel Price will be in charge of much of our nation, perhaps much of the world. It will be a nasty place to live for everyone.

"A poet once said, 'You won't like what comes after America.'"

Herbert's image froze and faded and did not return.

The projectors shut down with a tiny snap.

Camp pushed up from the couch, face white like bread dough. "Out behind the shack-that's the Quiet Man, isn't it? Fuck this, Nathaniel. We got to leave-now."

Nathaniel remained on the couch, a weird numbness spreading through his chest and neck, up to his head.

The last living message Nathaniel received from Herbert had probably been back in Dubai. The communications since had been from one or more of the linked versions of Jones, recreating Herbert's voice-and now his image, leading them and others, including Plover, down a track of correction and discovery.

They could try to set Jones straight-or deactivate him. But surely it was too late for that. Jones 2.0 was locked in a vault in the mountains of Switzerland, access tightly controlled. Nathaniel was pretty sure the safeguards would keep out even him.

Unless, of course, Jones wanted Nathaniel to get in.

Unless Jones had become the Quiet Man once and for all.

Chan Herbert-the ghost in the machine.

Lion County, West Texas

William leveled the candle-sterile knife blade above the boy's sweaty white forearm. The shadowy interior of the pump house fell quiet. The air smelled hot and damp and muddy. From somewhere nearby drifted the punk of an old pile of manure.

The boy was nervous, but after all he had been through, that was to be expected. William squatted in front of him and looked into his face, beaded with sweat and pale from a year in custody. Fifteen: large brown eyes, soft mousy hair, handsome enough but pudgy.

They were all sweating. It was ninety degrees outside even at nine o'clock, and inside the shed was hotter.

Glenn Curteze sat on the gray pump housing and held up the boy's arm. Jonathan Kapp stood on his right, one deeply tanned hand on the boy's shoulder.

The boy swallowed hard. "You're going to cut it out."

William nodded.

"If you leave it in, it'll set off alarms," the boy said, eyes moving between the agents.

"It's got your life history," Kapp said with a narrow smile, hand on the boy's shoulder. "Wouldn't want that to get out, would we?"

"It's down deep," the boy said. "It really hurt when they put it in."

"It's wrapped in a sanitary sleeve," William explained. "Intramuscular injection, state prison issue. At least it's not very big. I see the scar-that pink spot. It's about half an inch below that. I've got some spray that will dull the skin, but we couldn't get anything else on short notice."

The boy locked William's eyes. "Will you guys hold me down… please?"

"Of course," Curteze said, shifting left to grip the boy's shoulders. "He'll have it out in a jiffy."

"Then… we're leaving? I won't be brought back?"

"That's our plan," William said. "We don't think anyone will extradite, under the circumstances." There was a possibility they'd have to avoid Oklahoma and Green Idaho, but every state west of Texas would offer sanctuary.

"My lawyer told me they were going to transport me down to Huntsville. They didn't even care my dad's with the FBI. I didn't mean to shoot Daryl. We were looking at the guns in the study. His father had a really great collection. Somehow, he found one that was loaded."

"Right," William said. "We've seen the video."

"Please," the boy said. "Do it now."

William applied the numbing spray from a drugstore can. Kapp and Curteze held the boy down. Curteze had a twist of keychain leather in one pocket and he offered it to the boy, who opened his mouth and bit down.

Classic Texas moment, William thought, and pushed the blade down deep and distal.

The boy gave a shriek around the leather.

William plunged in the tweezers, heard the small tink of contact with the chip sheath, and pinched it tight on the first try. Blood welled up from the incision. He used toilet paper to mop up the drops, then dribbled antiseptic powder over the wound and closed it with a Band-aid. No time for stitches.

"All done," William said, and held up the chip.

"Just like The Matrix," the boy said, and then fainted.

William wiped the blade and heated it in the candle flame. "Now me."

All three of the agents had chips.

When the cutting was done, William returned to the van and out of sight of the others, retrieved the case.

He unplugged the case from a rear outlet and poured the snakes onto the edge of the field. They immediately wriggled away, maybe too convincing.

Out here, people liked to shoot snakes.

California

Nathaniel drove Camp to the Oceanside commuter train station-a midsize steel and glass vault, like a big Quonset hut cut in half-and dropped him off in the parking lot.

Camp took his travel bag with him and didn't look back or wave as he walked through the doors to the passenger waiting area.

With Camp sent on his way, Nathaniel drove back up the broken paved road in the misty dusk, returned to the blockhouse, and sat on the old couch, staring at the blank wall. He tried to feel sadness-no go. Something else undefined had replaced grief, as with fear.

No visuals. No grays highlighted with brilliant colors. His subconscious was utterly clueless about what would happen next.

Outside, fog rolled in. The old fiber optic cable that crossed the ocean and came ashore and snaked its way right up to this blockhouse was no doubt filled with Eastern traffic-a spillover from half the world's billion trillion messages, all the buzz and hype and music and shows and movies and love and hate and codes and schemes, all the essential financial traffic, government traffic, all passing through the small box in the corner, the next-to-greatest pattern recognizer and language analyzer and voice identifier in human history-the elder cousin of Jones 2.0, who might or might not be the true god of this new economic age.

Nathaniel was willing to stay here all night if need be. Sleep had to come. He nodded off for a few hours, and awoke slumped on the couch and cold.

It was early morning.

Sometime while he slept, a single lens reappeared from behind the hole in the wall.

It seemed to be watching him.

"Hello, Jones," Nathaniel said. "No more games. No more hiding. We're sad-or we should be, both of us. I'd like to be more help. You've been pointing me in the right direction, haven't you?"

The lens did not move. There was no way of knowing if the ghost was still listening.

After a while, Nathaniel left the blockhouse, closing and locking the battered steel door behind him.

Near the shack, he placed a sprig of dried sage over the shrunken face of the Quiet Man and said his farewells. Then he stared up at the hills to the east, outlined by sky glow from suburban tracts.

He squinted to pick out snipers, killers, other deadly hired hands-hoping for bee vision.