Deep Time. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ among the nearer stars as well. The ocean of information flooding in at every moment was too large and complex by far for any one man to follow, information of which the president of the USNA needed to be aware. The current PICKL was created by a metanetwork of super-AIs operating within the government, the military, and for the various national intelligence services—Konstantin, on the Moon, was a major participant—and in large part was the network responsible for boiling that ocean down to teacup size.

      Koenig ran down the list of briefings. At the top of the list was the capture of the alien starship, code-named Charlie One. It would be hours yet before America’s SAR tugs would catch the vessel and begin decelerating it. Until that happened, it was still hurtling outbound, now well past the orbit of Neptune and out into the Kuiper Belt. Details were sketchy, but evidently a fast-thinking fighter pilot off the America had used a drone to interfere with the alien’s singularity projector. Something important had clearly burned out; if it hadn’t, Charlie One would have slipped into metaspace long ago and been gone.

      I’ll have to commend that pilot later, he thought. Another urgent point on the list caught his eye. It had to do with Charlie One’s apparent destination, in the constellation Cancer. He decided to study that later, too.

      He moved to another item: closer to home there was a revolution against the Confederation government in South India, clashes between Chinese special forces and Russian troops in the Siberian maritime province, religious riots and demonstrations across the Theocracy, and massive flooding from a storm surge in the Philippines that almost certainly would foment unrest.

      It went on:

      A breakthrough in communicating with the Slan at Crisium … suspected sabotage in the Mt. Kenya space elevator … yet another formal protest by the Papess in Rome denouncing the White Covenant … government collapse in Geneva … possible Sh’daar activity at 70 Ophiuchi …

      In short, very much business as usual. With the USNA walking the proverbial knife’s edge between survival and disaster on a dozen fronts.

      “The big thing on the docket for today,” Whitney said, interrupting Koenig’s perusal of the list, “is the Washington dedication.”

      Koenig groaned. “I don’t suppose we can put that off?”

      “Not easily, sir. It’s an enormous affair, and there may be a hundred thousand people attending. It may turn out to be a lot bigger than that, as the news about Verdun moves down the Nets.”

      Koenig sighed.

      Washington, D.C., the former capital of the old United States, had been partially submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the twenty-first century. The capital had been moved to Columbus, Ohio, where it had remained for the next nearly three and a half centuries. Washington had slowly been claimed by swamp, mangroves, and forests of kudzu, which enveloped the exposed marble buildings and monuments. A part of the Periphery, it had been abandoned by the United States, then ignored by the new United States of North America. Tribes of Prims continued to hang on to a marginal existence there, fishing over what once had been the Mall, and fighting off periodic attacks by raiders out of the Virginia Periphery.

      Late the previous year, not long after the beginning of hostilities in the civil war against the Confederation, the Pan-Europeans had attempted to take over Washington and several other parts of the North American Periphery. A sharp battle with local forces had broken the Confed attack. Since then, USNA help and technology had been pouring into the area, reclaiming the swamp, clearing old buildings and growing new ones, and freeing walls, monuments, and domes from the clinging riot of greenery.

      Today, President Koenig was scheduled to fly to Washington and dedicate the reborn city, formally reinstating it as part of the USNA. Within the next six months, it was hoped, Washington would once again, after three centuries, be the North American capital. Preparations were already under way to move the physical apparatus of government from Toronto south.

      Koenig wasn’t convinced that the move was a good idea. Since most of any government now was its electronic infrastructure rather than specific buildings, one city was pretty much the same as any other, and there’d even been suggestions that SupraQuito would be a better site. It had been centuries since government was dependent on a specific place. Washington, Columbus, and now Toronto all were symbols—potent symbols, perhaps, but only symbols, symbols of tradition and continuity and history. The real business of government long ago had been taken up by various AIs running in places as diverse as New New York, the Angelino-Francisco Metroplex, SupraQuito, and Tsiolkovsky, on the far side of the moon.

      Humans were vital to the running of government, of course; with hardware purpose-grown in their brains from the time they were born, with in-head electronic memory and the ability to link with other people anywhere in the world, or to link with AIs possessing superhuman intelligence, government processes could be micromanaged by politicians as never before. But Koenig felt that the purely organic components of government—fallible, prone to corruption, prone to uninformed choices and bad days and just plain bad decisions—were fast becoming obsolete, save for when they were performing some of the more traditional duties of politicians …

      Like presiding over the dedication of the opening of a once drowned city.

      Koenig was tempted to cancel, but Marcus had a point about the crowds and Verdun. The victory in Europe had the looks of a final triumph over the Confederation. Celebration had already begun across North America … and in Europe, too, where the civil war had become increasingly unpopular. Starlight had been hammering the theme of peace for the past several months.

      “Are we still on for having Constantine d’Angelo put in an electronic appearance? I gather he was pretty popular the other day in Geneva.”

      “We are. They’ve grown a ten-story tall vidscreen in Washington overlooking the Mall, just like the one in the Place d’Lumiere.”

      “So why can’t I put in an appearance the same way?”

      Whitney shrugged. “I guess you could if you really want to, sir. But people are expecting to see you in the flesh and ten stories tall.”

      And, of course, the single key difference between the president of the USNA and the leader of the new Starlight religion was that “Constantine d’Angelo” didn’t really exist—not as flesh and blood, at any rate. He was an electronic avatar, a construct created as a public face for Konstantin.

      Most people with in-head electronics carried their own e-secretary with them, a pocket-sized personal assistant AI that could front for the human in handling incoming calls and routine business and be completely indistinguishable from the human prototype as it did so. These business and social stand-ins were referred to as secretaries or personal assistants or avatars and they existed only as electronic patterns of data, as images and sounds built up pixel by pixel and bit by bit by the AI generating them.

      “Constantine d’Angelo” was no different, save that he claimed to be a real person. An elaborate and completely fictional background and biography had been carefully pieced together for him, and records had been put in place by USNA Intelligence proving that people had seen the flesh-and-blood d’Angelo. His parents were still alive in a Kuiper Belt greenhab; reportedly they were very private people who’d declined to be interviewed …

      D’Angelo had appeared at the Place d’Lumiere projected on the giant screen overlooking the plaza in front of the ConGov pyramid and given a powerful speech decrying the Confederation’s war crimes and urging a cessation of hostilities. That speech, Koenig knew, had been meticulously crafted through recombinant memetic techniques to prepare a war-weary population СКАЧАТЬ