bBook Author's Pixie

 

 

Jik Dain Bedlip

     Dain wished for a window. He interrupted his pacing tour of the gray floor of his quarters, his chyme bottle knocking gently against his bare hips, and envisioned the landscape around Byukan-Hamil Direvnya. Toward the southwest, the peaks surrounding Lake Norma presented a rich mixture of rock and trees, the very solid dead and the vivid living, still alive by virtue of dogged endurance. But which wall would he have to cut into? His lousy sense of direction betrayed him here. Accepting that deficiency, he turned to another blank wall, hoping for inspiration.
     Awareness suddenly rushed in, scattering these thoughts like naughty children. A window? Why do I want a window? Why would I ever want a window? Self-disgust shook him, and he quickly reached into memory for his next task, another step toward his goal of controlling the continent.
     He retrieved nothing! Instead of his customary long list of things to do, boredom's glib pall rustled within him. It threatened to take over once more and lead his thoughts toward mush. He spun away from the silly window urge and strode toward activity.
     Along another gray wall, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder now, stood the seven Region-specific versions of Kär, very busy, their opaque eyes slurries of purple and gray. Nearby, his private Kär watched Ganj Dareh for him, just a moderately demanding task; its eyeballs rotated visibly.
      Others did labor, but Dain could do nothing but wait.
     He had set everything in motion. He had delegated — as suggested by one of the few management patterns he accepted. He had devised his own ways of managing corporate infrastructure — totally new ways once he'd been given the authority to do so. He just had to wait for all those sallies to produce results.
     After long, long seconds of working toward this end, constant, intense work, he found himself idle. And it taxed even his great patience!
     He'd heard people say that all emotion arose from fear or from love. Fear — and its bastard child, anger — he knew and understood. Love bonded him to Jikki and by pattern, to all innocents abused by his society. But where did that leave this ... this frustration that gnawed at his resolve until boredom rolled in and scattered his mind? This fretting that threatened to scuttle everything he'd worked for? Did it arise from fear or love?
     What, another reflection on Life? Another detour from work? Is boredom so powerful? Or — he searched for the reek of sandalwood — was that officious bud of an alter ego playing mind games again?
     "Bah!" he blurted. Such simplistic explanations of humanity deserved no more. Neither did that bud.
     Talking to myself, he realized. Abruptly ashamed, he marched to the clustered Kärs as he had many times already today. "Region Number One," he ordered, "Report!"
     "Nominal," a dry, explicit, ultimately frustrating status, meaning nothing for Dain to do here. He went down the line, provoking six more, identical answers.
     After the better part of seven days, each of Dain's avatars knew its tasks very well, and those tasks nearly encompassed a Regional Partner's duties. Handed his life's ambition by Norma after a fury of corporate intrigue, Dain had immersed himself in the infrastructure of an entire continent's critical businesses. He had delved into the miasma of staff management. He had risked the minutia mindset of a bureaucrat. And he had discovered patterns.
     A Regional Partner coordinated myriad projects, directly and indirectly, with mind-numbing loops of sending instructions and reading reports about how those instructions were carried out. A Regional Partner orchestrated thousands of people, directly and indirectly, in much the same, repetitive way, setting objectives, gaining agreement to goals, then checking on results. A Regional Partner handled other numerous and petty tasks, pulling in data, pushing out orders, adding very little to the loop in the way of thought or experience — how could they? no report ever substituted for zhuhndí — unless perverse distortion counted.
     Once Dain mastered the apparent complexities of the job and the relatively simple patterns comprising them, he trained specific instances of Kär to handle them. Automata, very capable and quick automata, were the perfect instruments of management. They worked diligently, accurately, and without ambition. Any task he could not automate, he delegated to a person somewhere on the continent — and turned it into just another feedback loop. Dain retained authority while the automata and subordinates culled responsibility from him, and every delegatee worked independently under the supposedly watchful eye of a Partner. So, everyone's goal was maximized. He wondered why none of the other Partners had taken this route to avoid the mind-crushing roteness of the job.
     Maybe they feared boredom.
     Enjoying even the semblance of work, Dain took another deliberate pace and confronted his Kär, so close they almost overlapped. He had tasked it with Ganj Dareh, tracking Incidents there, ollomani activity, zhee-tely reactions within the direvnya's will-hear, now purged of his anonymous pictures of death.
     In these recent days, with nothing but bureaucratic morass to occupy him, Le Coeur running its plan without his attention, that morbid penetration of a town's collective consciousness had provided his only diversion. Reviewing images, freezeframe after freezeframe until just the right perspective presented itself, JDainB snickering and commenting in the background. Snipping and cropping, then laying that lucid reminder of loss and vulnerability into the will-hear where anyone — anyone at all in Ganj Dareh — could stumble across it, well, that reprieve had enabled him to keep returning to the drudgery of Partnership, made his management breakthrough possible.
     He regretted the loss. He could have re-instated the pictures easily, but leery of implying a trend, he resisted. Mangling the psyche of an entire Collective was a delicate business.
     Now, he simply monitored that psyche — or rather, Kär did.
     Dain pursed his lips toward the word "Report."
      Kär's eyes cleared. It barked, "Lugar calls!"
     Dain's heart throbbed. In his throat, that pulse as wide as the organ itself bounded up both arteries. With an effort, Dain turned the resulting jerk of his head into a nod. "Go ahead," he said calmly.
     Kär replaced its head with Lugar's. Blond hair askew, arctic-blue eyes wide and staring, the man nearly shouted, "Derkinit just charged in here, demanding to see me."
     "Who?"
     "Director of the Rendezvous of Futures!"
     "Right," Dain acknowledged. How boredom has scattered me! "What did he want?"
     "I don't know. He charged in, llevar clutched to his fat belly like a shield. He called my name twice, then spooked. He almost got out the door before my bodyguards brought him down."
     Situation contained then. Handle it yourself, Strategist! Dain started to turn that thought into words, but boredom circled like a ratonero in the gray vault of his room. Instead, he asked. "Did your ollomani kill him?"
     "No, no, I didn't let them. Who knows what that would trigger? He's a Director, after all!"
     "Why the panic, Lugar? It could have just been a routine can-feel."
     "Without scheduling it first? Strategists don't just drop in on each other, Dain, not out here in the hinterlands, anyway."
     "Why the panic, Lugar?" Dain bent the words with exasperation.
     "Our prospects here in Ganj Dareh remain doubtful, Dain. While you've been playing Regional Partner there in the mountains, I've been juggling conflicting tides of opportunity. As Le Coeur's chief executive-in-residence here—"
     Dain understood the situation. His Kär kept him updated on its public aspects. jDub kept track of Dain's private status versus the continent.
      =Anything new, jDub?=
     jDub didn't offer his summary abacus. Instead, the alter flashed a quick line graph showing the same downward trend in incidents. Other images followed in quick succession. A pair of cancelled contracts waggled sorrowfully. Le Coeur executives no longer ran those businesses. A chain of Competition Notices rustled alongside. Le Coeur executives might lose those, too, lose their influence over events in Ganj Dareh. Only the Em-Deh Combine stood in the Collective's good graces, and Dain had ordered that capitulation himself. Nothing new then.
     Fear goosed Dain anyway, as it had each time he reviewed this critical arena. He'd attained victory within Byukan-Hamil, but he must escape that consortium with all those assets in order to achieve the power and freedom required to change society. Without a legitimate contract to leverage into a full-fledged consortium, he would lose everything when Norma's deadline expired — and only Ganj Dareh's anshin selection fell within that timeframe. He hadn't wanted to compete before without assurance of full victory, and now there just wasn't enough time for Le Coeur to form combines and compete for those other contracts, much less to win them. Dain resisted an impulse to glance at the regional Kärs. They would be gutted when Byukan-Hamil's policyware aborted his authority to command and control.
     But the danger was only apparent. Le Coeur had not lost those other contracts — Byukan-Hamil had. The Ganj-Dareh Collective only seemed to be controlling their own destiny. When that assumption proved faulty, they would beg for Le Coeur's help to restore order to their direvnya. As long as the ollomani sortied against Ganj Dareh's state-of-mind, as long as they assailed physical and cerebral peace, Dain stayed on track toward that final goal.
     Dain quickly scolded himself: If I struggle to bend perception to reality, Lugar surely fails.
      With a tolerant smile nudging his lips, Dain returned to Lugar's version of the situation.
     "... On the positive side, as an anshin competitor, I'm fielding a lot of feelers from combines and individuals here in Ganj Dareh. People are hedging on both Byukan-Hamil and Gatogrebok. They—"
     Re-inforce progress toward our mutual goal, Dain reminded himself. I'm always re-inforcing progress toward the goal. Why can't he just get on with his job? "That's good news, Lugar. We just have to win that one contract, and we achieve our long-planned success. Focus on that job!"
     "Yes, yes, you're right, of course, Dain." Lugar twisted his skeletal face with wryness and waved a dismissive hand at the world. To encompass the gesture, Kär switched to a normal holographic projection, then slipped away to its regular chores. "It's just that the other executives in the direvnya, well, they—"
     Dain pushed a palm at the life-sized image of Lugar. "You called about Derkinit. Let's handle that situation first. Can you spin the ollomani attack into his own physical failure? Get Pizi to warp your med-tek into making Derkinit think he had a seizure or something?"
     Lugar sneered. "Pizi won't help. I already asked."
      "You called him first?"
     "You delegated this direvnya to me, Dain, remember? I wanted to know what Derkinit had set up on his llevar, so I asked our pet gleest. He refused. Something about dirty things being done with his handiwork."
     jDub offered a Bouncin' Betty. =No,= Dain replied. =He's fulfilled his contract, even if he does cower at the implications of his own handicraft.= Still, Dain had assumed his link to Pizi would remain active, a virtual pocket containing a gleest in case they needed one. Where do I turn for that kind of work now? he thought before pressing beyond this, yet another detour. "Forget Pizi then. Why do you want to get into Derkinit's llevar?"
     Lugar held up one finger to start a list. "Because I don't know why he came here. He could just want to reprimand me for not minding my seminars back in the Rendezvous. But that's a can-see at most. An actual can-feel implies something more serious."
     Behind a second finger-as-list-bullet, Lugar said, "Because he usually slings his llevar, like most people do, except when he's using it."
     Finally, Lugar used a sheepish grin to replace his list. "Because I don't know how to get out of this situation. My people attacked Derkinit — on my orders, I admit — rendered him unconscious. You probably don't understand how important he's become around here, what with Ganj Dareh gifting his Rendezvous the land for a campus and releasing all their gong-she for his use. How do I go on from here? I was hoping something on his llevar, some clue to his state of mind, would help me out of this bad spot."
     Dain nodded to acknowledge Lugar's points. He also restored some credit to the mental account by which he tracked this man's eventual fate. Then, Dain headed back onto the main track — once more. "Where is Derkinit now?"
     "Lying unconscious here in my office. I activated the Negroponte cage. Keeps the llevar's Em-Deh connection going, but neither Cliff nor it will be able to complete any transaction that way." Lugar easily yielded control to Dain, relative positions more comfortable for both of them.
     "It also keeps his Auto-Locate pointing straight at your office!" Dain snapped. "How long ago did this happen?"
     "Maybe three-hundred seconds."
     "Not too much exposure then." Dain drove after data. "Where's the llevar now?"
     "Never lost contact with his body. Still there, in fact. I made sure of that."
     "Have you checked its screen?"
     "None showing."
     =jDub, what do we do?= An image came to Dain, a clumsy consortium-issue llevar, an arrow pointing to its screen-on button.
     "Let's look at its screen, Lugar. Go to the llevar."
     Lugar wrinkled his face with disgust, then shooed someone Dain couldn't see.
      "No, Lugar, you do it. No more intermediaries than necessary." That includes me.
     Disgust brought a hestitation, then with a sigh, Lugar swung his own llevar aside. The tracking viewpoint in Dain's holoscreen wobbled as Lugar took a few steps and bent over. Then it stabilized on the floor next to an outstretched arm and a meaty hand loosely supporting the type of llevar jDub had shown him.
     With Dain's guidance, Lugar gave a quick touch that ignited a holoscreen. "A password," Lugar cursed. "He used a password. I jump around making sure touch-fiducia is maintained, and he uses a password."
     "Never you mind," Dain murmured reassuringly. Without consulting jDub, he gave crisp orders to Kär who raided the consortium for personal data about Pla Cliff Derkinit, date of birth, wife's name, wife's date of birth, date of hire, and on and on. Awkwardly, Dain relayed each possible password to Lugar who hunched over the llevar's keyspace and typed it. Cliff's torso, arm, and hand provided a satisfyingly morbid backdrop. Round after round, they moved from the obvious to the obscure, until a frustrated Lugar stormed out of sight.
     Dain stared at the simple scene left behind, man and machine, both mute, both obstacles, both opportunities. Frisson sparkled in Dain's mind: opportunity meant fortune and danger. He briefly considered med-tek to give him a chance to work on the man, then decided the machine offered a safer recourse. He asked, =jDub?=
     A channel opened in Dain's mind, linking his cerebral reality with his alter's. Dain suddenly felt a need for data, a focused urge for a technical fact he never knew existed before.
     Assurance flowed along the web of connection. Surprised, Dain asked, =You're a gleest?=
     jDub answered with a scramble of hefty images, virtual trails followed, infraware infiltrated, a Bouncin' Betty, and more. Obvious now, but hidden before in the depths of Dain's brain that hosted jDub and his work.
     Quietly pleased with himself, Dain said to Lugar, "We have to get that llevar's situ."
      "A what?"
     "It's a physical identifier. Every device connected to and comprising the Mirnaya Direvnya is given a unique identifier. Physical supports everything else, Lugar, logical, virtual, even cerebral reality, you know."
     "We're running out of time, Dain. Someone's bound to come looking for Derkinit. He's a director! Lots of people are probably looking for him right now!"
     A simple procedure appeared in Dain's mind as an ordered list of steps. He walked Lugar through it. A small door in the llevar's base came loose to reveal a small, zhuhndí keypad with sixteen digits, 0 through 9, A through F. jDub provided a series of numbers. Dain relayed them, and Lugar poked them into the keypad with a stylus. In reply, the keypad winked back at them, lighting up one of its keys at a time, a sequence of eight digits it repeated three times. As Lugar read them off, jDub translated them for Dain: processor model and date and location of manufacture along with details on internal structures including data-path width and instruction parallelism.
     Seven more times, Dain told Lugar about doors and codes to unlock their keypads. Seven more times, jDub interpreted the component identifiers that revealed internal pipes, external pipes, transient storage, permanent storage, diagnostic configuration, and infraware style and revision along with vectors to the strata of user-oriented logiciel.
     His need for data quenched, Dain told Lugar to stand-by and let up on his own concentration. He rocked back on his heels, and the gray box of his quarters intruded on his attention. It undulated slightly, the walls distant, the floor and vault unreal, his accoutrement unimportant.
     Inside him, though, those identifiers hung brilliantly above his mental landscape. He could easily recall each digit sequence. A mere tweak of effort and it rattled through his mind, full of meaning, giving off a distinctive chime. Assembled, they completely described that particular device lying on a carpet so far away physically, yet so near virtually. Dain ran the gauntlet again, enjoyed its unique tune.
     jDub seemed eager to solve the technical question before them. He intruded with another procedure, a precise set of calculations that would convert the identifiers into the llevar's situ.
     =It's just like DNA,= Dain said as the similarity dawned within him.
     jDub threw up a parts list in disagreement and started the first calculation. His part of their brain popped with numbers.
     =It's a code that exactly and completely defines this device. With it, you can build the thing.=
     jDub flashed garishly colored models of atoms, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, with a scattering of others. These simple building blocks swirled together into a double helix that sucked in more atoms, then spat out copies of its parts. He wrapped this dynamic display in a deep respect for the brilliance of Life. He implied that Man's work paled in comparison. He processed more numbers.
     Nettled, Dain argued, =That's a difference of degree, quantity, not quality. With a wave of my hand, those numbers could define me. At the most fundamental level, we match.=
     Another number — a situ, physical identifier of Derkinit's llevar and a means to connect to it — appeared in their shared memory. jDub's medulla modem suddenly whined, tugging at Dain's web of connection like it never had before. Dain lurched with apparent motion, and sight, sound, taste, smell, feel — the normal senses — suddenly were challenged, scrunched together, joined by a rival sensation, a rush filled with position, parallels defined by sequences, a present easily connected to past and future. Without moving, jDub went, taking Dain with him. Sorting, judging, choosing, they navigated the infrastructure of cyberspace with a quickness gifted by infraware, but earned by jDub's talent and experience with that quickness. Instantaneous flicks, data then decision then more data, another choice. Over and over, with a joy of motion that supported purpose. They had a destination, and they went there. In no time, they rode the deluge of data that comprised the Mirnaya Direvnya.
     jDub's joy with this kind of work washed over them both. Amazed, Dain realized that none of his alters, including himself, experienced joy, at least not like this. Pleasure, maybe, a limp amusement. Except maybe Jikki ... as he remembered exploring the world virtually while physically safe at home.
      And JDainB? His twisted jubilation in the wicked? Is that what happened to my innate joy?
     With a thump of inertia quenched, they stopped. Through jDub, Dain recognized the calculated situ, the only and specific portal into Derkinit's llevar. Remarkably simple and incredibly fast, the situ was at once a place and a capability. It dangled from the cyber-cataract that ran the world, sipping only what belonged to it, spitting out its unique contributions in turn. A mere alcove, crammed with comings and goings of binary digits, flashes of presence and absence, it nonetheless supported a gigantic structure of complex data and even more complex control — the llevar itself.
     =Cell membrane,= Dain construed. Biological analogies flowed easily into his mind. He identified with these structures, so new to him, yet — he understood abruptly — so familiar to jDub.
     jDub shrugged disagreement and launched them up out of the colorless austerity of the situ. They arrived instantly in a jumble of what appeared to be eyeless, noseless brains topping sinuous spines. Their gaping mouths sucked eagerly at specific nipples erupting from walls of cold circuits and hot motors. Here, the logical/soft met the physical/hard. Simple-minded, quick-moving, these primitive coags of calculation — as jDub interpreted them — converted zhuhndí into perception. jDub inventoried them, confirming that everything he expected in this layer actually existed in its proper location. Comfortable with that agreement, he prepared to move on.
     Despite the bizarre images — or maybe because of their hinted anthropomorphism — Dain analogized, =Brain stem.=
     jDub deflected the comment. He scrambled up the nearest spine and traced that primitive's connection with the llevar's virtual reality, the layer in which mechanical requirements ceased and human ideas started to prevail. He snapped out decisions faster than Dain could perceive choices. He sprang from vector to interrupt to entrypoint like they were stepping stones breaking the surface of a wide and wonderful stream. Dain did recognize some constructs below them. Files and pages, for instance, that stored data in all sorts of forms. Queues that joined things together in a variety of orders. jDub swarmed that way, down apparently instead of up, but direction did not really apply here.
     With one last fling of appreciation, Dain declared, =Cerebral cortex!=
     jDub just immersed the two of them in a system queue. He let Dain see the swarm of agents the llevar made possible to its user. Messages of text, sounds, and images. Meetings/will-be-heard, -seen, and -felt, and another agent for can-see and -hear meetings. A plethora of ways of managing, manipulating, and massaging data. Most of these agents hung idle.
     Agents, jDub labeled them, but it came to Dain that these hunks of code comprised the llevar's alter egos, variations of the system that could run and play independently, then take over focus as required. Each came with a different reason for existence, with a different perspective on the various realities, with different means of accomplishing their design goals. Dain staggered with the parallels here between man and machine.
     jDub scooted toward one of the linked lists that threaded through the system queue. Two agent instances populated this list. They lit up with regular spurts of activity. Open, with specific tasks identified, they waited as only logiciel can, by repeatedly asking for instructions, then when given nothing, pausing for a count of pico-seconds, then asking again, over and over until their wish came true.
     Here, Dain saw work, progress, achievement, goals attacked and accomplished. =That's us,= he said to jDub. =We're nothing but clusters of skills and understanding, trying only to demonstrate them.= But they work together — the realization slipped over him — aware of each other, adapting to each other's needs, a virtual community, diverse and respectful.
     jDub burrowed into one of the instances. He sought its purpose and found messaging. He vectored toward its current state and discovered a message active, waiting to be sent, addressed to "Chief of Anshin, Ganj Dareh." He unveiled its contents: "Phoebe, I found the gangsters. They work out of Rendezvous buildings at the following locations." The list matched coordinates with names and enrollment counts, Tiananmen, Sand Creek, Tuol Sleng, Deir ez-Zor, Broken Glass.
     Should I share like that with my alters? Dain asked himself. Instead of exiling them from this body's senses? Instead of confining them to that gray-matter dungeon until I need them? Instead of jump-seats on special occasions, perhaps we should all share the center of perception, fully ride the web of connection.
     jDub withdrew from the messaging instance. He slipped into the other agent in the active list. He found that it held open the Rendezvous-of-Future's identity database. It maintained full control over a subset of that data with the intent to expunge them. jDub tweaked a property list and noticed that this agent worked as a fat-client, so the database coag itself carried no record of Derkinit's intent here. Abort the transaction in the llevar and no one else would be the wiser.
     Dain allowed the dungeon door to appear in his mental landscape, only it showed as dismal and battered, streaked with gore, symbolic of his past repression. He flung it open and approached its stoop where he stood ready to welcome his alters into the open. Shuddering ever so slightly with excitement and fear, he accepted re-integration.
     JDub sucked up a vector and displayed the data itself. A list of people's names, segregated by something called "base can-feel." That same list of names appeared there: Tiananmen, Sand Creek, Tuol Sleng, Deir ez-Zor, Broken Glass.
     Those names distracted Dain. Their appearance here carried threat. But Jikki stepped out of that doorway, and Dain had to welcome him, so he held out a hand to the boy.
     The wraithe blurted past them! A flash of twisted ghost, a blast of shame and panic, and he ripped across Dain's mind. "Don't you see?" it cried. "They know! They know! They know!"
     Dain cringed. He had never allowed the wraithe out of the dungeon, visited that cell only seldom. For this reason: its panic was his panic, its fear of life was his fear.
     "They know! They know! They know!"
     Dain snagged the web of connection, snatched the wraithe down, snared it to the ground, and glared into its refracted copy of his young face. "What are you talking about?"
      "Look at the names, you old and witless carcass!"
     A connection crackled between them, and Dain understood in an instant almost electrical. He lifted his internal eyes to jDub's display of rows and rows of data, with one column common to those rows highlighted. Repeated over and over, that list contained only five names, the direvnya names faked to bring the ollomani together into five seminars within the Rendezvous, seminars that had served well as Ready Rooms for their missions against Ganj Dareh's Collective. Derkinit had isolated Le Coeur's Propaganda Combine!
      I've lost. His exit route had closed.
     Dain came undone, and like a pouncing tick, the wraithe plugged itself back in. For the first time in years, Dain felt shame. He flinched from the contempt everyone must direct at him. He clapped hands over ears to block their ridicule. He was defective! He embarassed his parents, his two older brothers, his older sister. They — all of them! — had navigated the Network of Learning with success. They found classes according to the curriculum. They marched out into the world from their cozy home and learned. They brought home assignments and learned from them and finished them and took them back with exemplary results. They also brought home praises, commendations, awards, friends, teammates.
     And Dain couldn't! Each day, he trudged forth, driven by the others' expectations from the home he loved into a chaos of people and shame. Each day, he failed to find answers, questions, even clues to what everyone was talking about. Each day, he found no one like him, no one else who shared his problems, who could help him find his own path through the maze of life and its challenges.
     Abruptly, data showered down on him. Dain peeked through squinted eyelids. jDub pelted him with date/time stamps and associated events: Jik Dain Bedlip graduated from Society for Passage; Jik Dain Bedlip hired as tactician, as strategist; Jik Dain Bedlip promoted to Partner in Byukan-Hamil Consortium.
     How could he? He was still in school. The Network of Learning engulfed him pitilessly. His parents smiled and sent him off to its maw every day. His brothers and sister showed him how it should be done.
     jDub hurled another image at him: the dungeon door, standing high in his mind, a place to hide his failures and sorrows, a way to get beyond the great shame he had brought on his family, a means to survival and revenge.
     Shocked, Dain broke loose from the wraithe, as he had so many years before, and tried to repress that part of him once more. He wielded denial as an accustomed weapon against unwanted truths — and failed to purge those memories. The wraithe no longer existed as an alter ego. It and its history and its emotions mixed thoroughly within Dain, so thoroughly that they exposed other denials, other repressions, ones that characterized the ego who called himself "Dain" now.
     Like believing he could jujitsu an entire world's system. Like trying to finesse Norma in the very realm she'd been born and raised to dominate.
      No longer.
     In self-defense, Dain opened Le Coeur's plot, spread its entire scope before his mind's eye. He praised the breadth of his efforts there, that he had covered all aspects of life: Business, People, and Technology.
     Shame twinged through him, clawing at the pride. Why hadn't they let him do it his own way? So many patterns provided alternatives, enabled choices. Why not here? Were humans so predictable in their paths to knowledge?
     =They could've, you know.=
     Who? Dain asked. Not the wraithe; it no longer existed apart.
     =You know,= the voice teased, then bled away into a cackle. JDainB. =Pattern Languages always enable choice. They just didn't want to give it to you.=
     Anger accumulated within Dain. From Bedlip. From the wraithe. From himself. Not out of fear, the supposedly elemental emotion, but out of vendetta. He demanded justice, not for himself, but for those like him in the future. Anger kindled, grew, spread, drove him.
     Dain refocused on Le Coeur's plot and regretted wasting time on Business and People. He should have focused on Technology. He should have gone to war with his society. He should have bludgeoned his way to victory. He should have embodied the revenge Yeibichai foresook, not the intelligence it tried to draw from him.
     It wasn't too late for that. He had held Thy and her ghost-troops in reserve. For that, he congratulated himself. But it was time for him and them — together — to go to work.
     One last thing. Dain took the first step toward mastering Technology. He reached through shared memory into jDub's chamber and elbowed in. In a cerebral instant, their realities merged. He knew machines now. He just had to incorporate the ancient technology of men and killing. He would do that through Thy, through and around and within. Not as easy as jDub, but he'd get there.
     Starting now. Dain breached zhuhndí, bursting out like Leviathan escaping watery depths. He stood once again in his quarters, surrounded by Byukan-Hamil physically, logically, and virtually. That disgusted him. He would shed these trappings on the way to a greater victory than he ever imagined within the consortium's confines.
     Then he noticed Lugar, or rather, his hologram, waving in the room's shadows. "Where the hell are you, Dain?" he screeched, over and over.
     Lugar! What do with Lugar and his pitiful, ineffective Propaganda Team?
     "I'm here now, Lugar," Dain said.
     "Where the hell have you been?"
     "Fetching that information you wanted. Remember?"
     "You?"
     "I do have resources, Lugar. Do you want to hear what Derkinit knows about your team there in Ganj Dareh?"
     "Yes, of course."
     "Everything."
     Lugar gaped. "How, how could he?" he stammered.
     "He does. Every name. Every Ready Room. He was about to expunge your identities, Exile all of you. He was about to notify Chief Heejanus. You're totally compromised."
     "Did he?" Lugar whispered.
     "No."
      "Will he?" Louder. "Can he?"
     Dain twitched a virtual muscle deep inside Derkinit's llevar. He aborted those two agents. He expunged all trace of the message from transient storage and dispatched a daemon to write nulls all over its permanent storage. He re-engaged the Rendezvous' identity database using Derkinit's fiducia and confirmed that it had retained the ollomani. He moved to erase all record of the previous transaction, cracking the administrator's fiducia with a few tricks jDub had learned and resetting all log entries. Then, he crashed the llevar, dragging its infraware into chaos, then extinction. No more messages. No more database. No more Auto-Locate. No more anything. All in two seconds.
     "No, Lugar," Dain said. "He won't, not through his llevar anyway. You have to make sure he can't try again."
     "Kill a Director?" Lugar grasped the opportunity with an insolent moue. "I suppose I could do that, make him disappear altogether. No physical trace anywhere." The look in Lugar's eyes turned cagey. "Does anybody else know? Did Derkinit tell anyone?"
     Dain reached out to the Byukan-Hamil coag this time, the medulla modem like another arm, well-exercised by jDub. He sought psychological profiles and located Derkinit's. Verbose, independent, opinionated, it said. Dain also overlaid data from his administration of the Rendezvous. With a blink of surprise, he recognized what Derkinit had done with no authority and few resources and practically no permissions. The Rendezvous flourished, incorporating tens of thousands of people.
     "I don't think so," Dain concluded aloud. "Derkinit liked to run his own show, did very well at it, invested his heart and mind and soul in his work. Do you agree?"
     "Yes." Lugar nodded. "Yes, I do. Still, if he could figure it out, someone else could."
     "I agree. That's why we're bringing in the Persuasion Team now." Pushing past Lugar's budding protest, Dain ordered, "I want you to prepare the way. Maximum sorties, maximum killing."
     "No! I can win the competition, Dain! Just a few more days, and Le Coeur will be awarded the anshin contract."
     Then you'll die before Thy does. But aloud, Dain said, "Anacol," and gave Lugar a smile to go along with that surrender. Designed to put him at ease, it came easily. "Do you think the Collective will come around to our way of thinking?"
     Lugar almost collapsed with relief. "My schedule abounds with appointments, Dain, people seeking alliances and reassurances. I feel the tide turning."
     The Ganj-Dareh Collective. Linked with the thought came an interface to that direvnya's will-hear. He broke into it like snapping a twig. Pictures of death rose from his own database as if they were animated by their own grisly impulses. Too mundane. I can do better than that now.
     Dain said, "I hope you're right. I hope you've stanched this data leak and we'll have time to win this legitimately. In the meantime, how about I give them a taste of virtual insecurity? Shake up their part of the Em-Deh around them? Eh?" And I won't need Pizi's disruption splinter to do it.
     Lugar wanted to object, Dain could tell. He wanted to know how Dain could possibly get something like that done, without Pizi, but didn't go in that direction at all. He seemed exhausted and confused. He did manage to say, "Leave us enough capacity to get my meetings done."
     Dain nodded. "I've got to fly out and check on Thy. Make sure she'll be in position in case we need her. I'll check in with you tomorrow."
     Lugar said good-bye, and Dain waved the holoscreen away. Seven Regional Kärs lined a wall beside him, diligently doing his bidding, keeping the consortium's hierarchy in place until he could gut it. He left them alone, effective and futile.
     His Kär, though — he no longer needed it. He gave the command to terminate its run and watched the child-like hologram dissolve like the past — his own past — crumbling into dust. A grin tickling his cheeks, he removed the empty chyme bottle from his iliac hooks and dropped it carefully down the disposal. As it clattered out of his life, he pondered the remaining full bottles. No, he decided. I'll be resettled in Ganj Dareh before I need to eat again. I'll get more there.
     He dressed quickly in dungarees and walking boots. Then without a backward look, he walked away from Byukan-Hamil, direvnya and consortium, means to end, but useless now, forever.