Orphea's Song

Calle Dybedahl

Friday, 20 May 2067

Just a few minutes to go until the concert would start, and the arena was absolutely packed. Maria had thought that the place was full when she arrived an hour earlier, but that had been nothing. The noise level was incredible, and there was an almost tangible sense of expectation in the air.
She was sitting high up on one side. Only a handful of seats separated her from the low wall where the roof met the bowl of the arena. Normally, the place hosted various kinds of sports events, from plain old soccer to the newer gladiatorial games. But every now and then Paris was visited by a musician famous enough that none of the normal concert venues could hold everyone that wanted to see them, and so the aging Olympia Stadium was used instead. Not that even that huge building could hold everyone that wanted to see Orphea, particularly here in Paris that was the closest thing to her home town that still existed. The ticket prices had been near-astronomical, and the cramped seat just under the roof was all that Maria's employer was willing to pay for. Even for that, she'd had to cash in three years' worth of old favours and promised to have a review article ready to go live within minutes after the concert ended.
Sighing, she activated her computer and closed her eyes for the few seconds it took her contacts to sync to it. She always got some weird-ass static when she turned the thing on, and it bothered her when if it overlay her real vision. She probably should get it fixed, but the computer worked fine apart from that little glitch so it didn't seem worth the bother. Closing her eyes a little helped her concentrate, too, so it wasn't like it was a problem, really.
With eye movements and the occasional twitch of a finger, she brought up the file named simply "Orphea". Not the review, this was the private project that she really wanted to come her for, the one that she hoped would make her famous enough to land a contract with a better newssite than the minor-league one she worked for now. The exposé of the world's most famous artist's background, revealing... Well, she wasn't sure yet what it'd reveal. She was going on her mother's old stories of the the evacuation of Britain and a gut sense that something wasn't right when an artist managed to dominate all genres and all age groups at the same time.
Orphea had rocketed to stardom when she was a mere seventeen and stayed there ever since. A classic example of the rags-to-riches story, she came out of the refugee camps outside Paris an orphan owning nothing but the clothes she was wearing, and those donated by UNESCO. She started out singing in semi-legal drinking holes in the camps, and might have died there if not for a couple of slumming rich brats with early wearable computers. They uploaded a couple of songs to the net, and forty-eight hours later Orphea had signed up with a major content provider and was on her way to riches and stardom.
The arena's PA system came online with a click and a hiss. The lights dimmed, and silence fell. A chill raced down Maria's spine. Partly because there was something spooky about sixty thousand people all being absolutely silent, and partly because she was about to see Orphea in real life for the first time. As much as she suspected weirdness in the woman's background, she wasn't unaffected by her music. Far from it. She'd grown up with those early hauntingly grieving tunes that seemed so perfect for mourning an entire lost nation. She'd had her first kiss while an Orphea song played on her radio, lost her virginity accompanied by another. So had most of her friends and, she suspected, just about everyone else her age.
A hologram lit up above the smallish stage at the center of the arena, Orphea: the Memento Mori Tour 2067 in meter-high letters glowing in midair said. As they faded away, a single spotlight hit the stage and the woman suddenly standing there. The hologram reformed, now showing a much-enlarged copy of the stage. Maria kept her eyes on the hologram, she was much too far away to see the stage clearly.
She knew the appearance of the woman on the hologram well, of course. The tanned skin, the slightly hooked nose, the long black hair, the full lips, dark eyes and strong jaw. Orphea wasn't very traditionally beautiful, although she had shifted the idea of "beautiful" quite a way towards the more imposingly Greek all by herself. Born in England from Greek parents, she looked like a tragic heroine from an ancient play.
"Tonight is the twentieth of May," Orphea said. Her voice filled the arena and made Maria break out in goose bumps. "It is thirty years exactly since the Nanoclysm began and stole Britain away from us. Let us remember her. Let us remember that all that we have can at any moment be taken away from us. Let us remember that we are mortal."
She began to sing. Maria knew the song. Everyone did, probably. It was the first song Orphea had released after signing up with AOL/MSN and it had become a kind of anthem for all the millions that had lost their homeland. As she sang, holographic images formed and faded in the air, showing pictures of things lost and remembered.
Maria put away the Orphea file and opened a new one. "There is something special to seeing -- or, more importantly, hearing -- Orphea live," she wrote. "We know the songs she sings. Even the ones we've never heard before, we know. As the true master of her craft that she is, she picks them out of the roots of our hearts and dreams and sings them. And when we hear her sing them right here and right now, live in front of us, those dreams and fears and loves that she sings binds us together. For a while, we are not sixty thousand individuals sitting in our seats or standing near the stage, we are a people, a community. When Orphea sings, she doesn't sing from herself to us. She sings as one of us. Hers is the voice of us all."
So what if the concert had just started. So what if the text was overblown tripe. After only a minute, Maria felt emotions stirring within her, and she suspected that she'd better get some copy ready to upload before tears made it impossible for her contacts to track her eye movements.

"Thank you!" Orphea shouted to the audience. It had been a good concert, but she wanted it to be over now. Sweat made her clothes stick to her skin and she was so tired that it took an active effort of will to keep her knees from buckling. The audience was applauding and screaming incoherently, obviously wanting more. She smiled and bowed and thanked, but she had no more to give them. Not now. Not tonight.
There would be more, later. There was always more. If there was one thing she'd never found difficult, it was coming up with more.
"Thank you all!" she shouted one last time. A look at an icon projected in her field of vision, a double blink, and the section of stage she was standing on started sinking. The stage vanished above her, the hole through which she'd vanished closed up and the sound level sank to tolerable. The platform stopped, and she stepped off it into the control room under the stage.
A black woman sitting in a padded chair surrounded by electronics pushed back the hood covering most of her head and smiled towards Orphea. Next to her, assistants at more traditional control boards were shutting things down and keeping an eye on the exodus from the arena.
"Nice gig," she said. "If we can do every concert like this one, this tour is going to be one for the history books."
Orphea smiled back at her. "Thank you," she said. "But you know just as well as I do that this was the easy one. This is Paris, they'll love us no matter what we do."
The black woman got up from her control chair. She was dressed in a blue jumpsuit covered with wires and electronics. As she got up, several thick wires disconnected from her suit and retreated into the chair.
"They'll love you, you mean," she said. She put her arms around Orphea's waist and kissed her lightly on the lips. "Everybody knows Orphea. Nobody knows Iruwa," she said.
"Just let me put your name as well as mine in the announcements and we'll change that," Orphea said. "Half the show is your doing, you should get the credits for it."
"Nah," Iruwa said. She led Orphea to an empty chair and gently pushed her into it. "I'm quite please with not being famous," she went on. "Being able to go out without being mobbed by fans does have its advantages."
Orphea sighed. "Yeah," she said. "I guess." She broke open a bottle of water. "Is the limo ready?" she asked when she'd emptied the bottle. "I want a bath and a bed."
One of the assistants at the control boards turned towards her. "It's ready and waiting, miss Orphea," he said. "Just down the corridor."
"Right," she said. "Do you want to change out of that techno-thing before we leave?" she asked, looking at Iruwa.
Iruwa shook her head. "It's more comfortable than it looks," she said. "And I can jack it into the limo's systems to check out the reviews."
Orphea snorted. "I thought you didn't care about fame?" she said.
Iruwa smiled at her. "I don't care about my fame," she said. She took Orphea's hand and pulled her up from the chair. "I do care about yours."
She took Orphea's arm under her own and led her down the corridor to the waiting limo. It was a big, white vehicle with darkened windows. It stood alone in a large space that would normally hold dressing rooms for the teams competing in the arena, but that had been cleared out for the concert. A man and a woman stood leaning on the car. They were dressed in inconspicuous street clothes, and you had to look closely to spot the bulges of their hidden weaponry. The man nodded at Iruwa and Orphea.
"Miss Orphea, miss Iruwa," he said. "If we get going right away we should be able to get out before the fans block the garage exit."
"Thank you, Christos," Orphea said. "Sounds fine to me."
He opened the door for them, and they climbed aboard. The two bodyguards got into the front of the limousine, and it started to move silently and smoothly forward.

The interior of the limousine was made out of different kinds of leather and wood. Orphea couldn't tell if it was taken from real live animals and trees or if it was all genehybrids grown in tanks. She hoped it was the latter, but she suspected that it wasn't. The sort of people who usually bought this kind of vehicle would probably insist on it being the real thing, even if they couldn't tell the difference. She took her blouse off, leaving her with only a tight top. She was still all hot and sweaty.
Next to her, Iruwa had jacked her suit into the limo's systems just as she'd threatened to do. The VR hood again covered her head and her face down to her nose, and her hands moved in strange patterns while operating control environments only she could see.
"So, are the reviews good to us?" Orphea asked.
"Yes," Iruwa said. "Very good. Almost lyrical."
"Well," Orphea said. "Home ground. I bet more than half of the audience tonight grew up in the refugee camps just as we did. They'll love us no matter what we do. We'll see what they say in Istanbul. Or Rome. Particularly Rome, after what the Pope said about us."
Iruwa peeled back the hood and disconnected the suit from the limo. "The Pope is a doddering old fool," she said. "Rome will love you too."
Outside the one-way window, the streets of Paris slid by. It was a warm night, on the cusp between spring and summer. Lots of people were moving about, out partying after a long week working. She didn't really like isolating herself from them like this. She belonged out among them. Sometimes she wondered if it was as Iruwa had said, if she really would be completely mobbed by fans if she went out among them. It had been assumed for her that it'd be so ever since she got signed up with a major content-provider and became famous. She automatically got the entire rock star treatment, with private limousines and being shuffled from hotel garages to luxury suites by way of cargo elevators. For sixteen years it'd been like that, and she'd never really questioned it. Never tried it to see if it was true.
The limousine moved silently into the Hotel Ambassador-Concorde's garage and came to a halt in front of an elevator where the other two of her regular bodyguards, Aphrodite and Johann, waited. The four of them had been in her employ for variously between five years and a decade, and they were as close to friends as employees really could get. Over the years, they'd taken on many of the tasks she'd used to have paid servants for. Christos and Aphrodite from Greece, where her own blood came from. Alexandra from the Ukraine, the black sheep in a family of bankers and brokers. Johann from Austria, just as pale and silent as the mountains in his homeland.
Aphrodite opened the car door. "Welcome, miss Orphea" she said. "Your suite is ready and waiting, of course. We've checked it out, but in general we trust the hotel's security. Is there anything in particular you want tonight?"
She made sure to pay them abundantly. She could well afford it, and they would be difficult to replace. None of them had families or homes away from her, and as far as she'd been able to determine they liked being always more or less on duty.
"No," she said. "Just a shower and a bed."

The shower was, of course, the best and most luxurious that money and power could get. The Ambassador-Concorde tried really hard to be the classiest hotel in the world, and even if they something strayed over into the tacky or just plain obscene they mostly succeeded at it. She took a very long, very hot shower. Somewhere in the middle of it, Iruwa joined her and they made love under the steaming streams of water, horniness easily overcoming post-concert fatigue. Sated and clean, they ate a light supper and went to bed.
Sleep caught her within moments of her head hitting the pillow, and catapulted her into her land of dreams.
In her dreams, Orphea was a disembodied awareness floating over a land of ashes. For as far as she could see, there was nothing but a featureless dark gray plain under a sky covered with roiling leaden sky. No rain ever fell, and only an occasional gust of wind disturbed the ashes of the plain.
Somehow, it always struck her as restful rather than depressing.
Above her, between the point of her awareness and the clouds, there were other awarenesses. Some of them she just knew that they were there. Some of them she could see, as small points of brilliant light moving through the air like fireflies. Some she could feel like a cloud of static brushing against skin she didn't have.
All of them sang to her.
Their voices were as many as raindrops in a storm and as varied as the snowflakes in a blizzard. They sang beauty, and love, and fear, and despair, and hunger. They sang ecstasy. They sang torment. They sang words and pictures and memories and senses and experiences for which Orphea knew no name. She listened to them, reveling in the rush of pure sensation they brought her. She tried to remember their songs, so she could in her turn sing them to the waking world.
Orphea dreamt, and her dreams were music.

Saturday, 21 May 2067

The files she wanted were stored on paper, Maria had been told, stacked in a large number of boxes in a cellar under one of the Sorbonne's less interesting buildings. There were plans to transfer them online so historians could get at them, but the money needed to actually do it had never survived through the yearly budget process. So they stayed on paper, year after year and decade after decade.
"Is you ask me, I think the memory is still too fresh," the old man who showed her the way to the cellar and unlocked it for her said. "Thirty years isn't very long, compared to a disaster that eats an entire nation. As we get more historians who were born after the Nanoclysm, the pressure will increase to make all the record available. For now, most people just want them forgotten."
Maria made vaguely agreeing noises and promised she'd let him know when she left so he could lock up after her. And he didn't mind working on a Saturday, he lived in a University flat nearby just so he could do that.
When they'd said "a large number of boxes" they weren't exaggerating, she quickly found out. There were hundreds, if not thousands of them. Row upon row of old archive bookcases of the kind that slid on rails so you could only get at one of them at a time. She started by walking along the narrow aisles between the rows of bookcases, reading the labels glued to their sides. They appeared to be ordered by time primarily, and by refugee camp number secondarily. There was one single bookcase covering 21-26 June of the year 2038, the first few days of the Nanoclysm. The first days, when it had still been believed that the disaster could be contained and that only the people closest to the research facility would have to be evacuated, and those only to other parts of England. The record from that week were mostly available online, since the relatively few refugees that came over via the Channel Tunnel were still within the capabilities of the French authorities to handle.
The number of boxes increased sharply once the panic started and refugees began to arrive in the tens of thousands. The 27th was the first day to need a bookcase all to itself, and it got rapidly worse after that. When it got into June, there had been the nuclear strike that had only semeed to spread the nanomachines further and faster, and the panics had taken hold for real. The evacuation of an entire nation had begun. Every available means of transportation, civilian as well as military, had been commandeered by the British government, and much more volunteered by other nations of the NATO and the EU. Over the following three weeks, until the Nanoclysm deconstructors covered the entire island, almost forty million people had been evacuated. For reasons of geography, the majority ended up in France. All official systems collapsed under the task of trying to keep track of who went where, and out of self-preservation the administrators running each refugee camp fell back to older technologies: pens and papers.
Papers that had eventually ended up here, under the University of Sorbonne, forgotten by almost everybody. She supposed the old man was right. The wound was still too fresh, too raw, to invite serious introspection and analysis. One couldn't try to study the exodus from the Britain without remembering the twenty million or so people who didn't make it out, but became building material for the ravenous nanomachines.
She knew that Orphea had been on one of the last ships to ever leave England, and that she had ended up in Refugee Camp 33 outside Paris. Maria returned to the bookcases holding the records for 26-28 June 2037. The 26th was the day when there was nothing but Northern Ireland left of the UK, so Orphea should have arrived then or later. The number of records dropped off very sharply from the 27th and forward, since they only had to cover people that left on the 26th or earlier but took some time arriving. Refugee Camp 33 wasn't a very large camp, but neither was it one of the smallest. Maria turned the crank on the end of the bookcase she wanted, moving the gap so she could get at the boxes, located the ones for Camp 33 and started leafing through papers.
It was, of course, a litany of tragedies. Mostly it just listed names of the people that arrived at the camps, and the names of those who died in them. Those who left of their own accord were too many and the ways in which they left too varied and unsupervised to keep track of. Many of them could probably be found in the arrival records of the large ex-British colonies in Canada and Australia, but a lot of them simply vanished without a trace.
She found Orphea in the twenty-sixth box. Girl, six years old. Said her name was Orphea. Did not know her last name or the names of her parents. Questions about where she used to live and what her parents used to do for a living were met with confusion and an entire lack of understanding. For lack of time to do any kind of investigation, the girl was just sent to the orphans' section of the camp, with the hopes that her parents would look for her there, in case they arrived.
Maria smiled to herself. Yes. This was it, or at least the beginnings of it. She activated her computer and quickly scanned the papers.

Iruwa sank back into her seat and closed her eyes. She liked the feeling when an airplane accelerated for takeoff. The pressure pushing her back, the sudden furious howl of the jet engines. It made her aware of the raw power of the vehicle she was riding in, of the ingenuity of its construction. The power of the machine.
She liked machines. She had liked machines for as long as she could remember. One of her earliest memories was of trying to pry open the plastic covering of a light switch back in the orphanage so see how it worked. She had succeeded, and got a nasty shock and a blown fuse as a reward. Somehow the nurses never figured out that it was she who had done it, or she would've had to go without dessert for weeks.
Outside the plane's window, Paris receded. The acceleration eased off, and was replaced by the much less exciting tilting of the plane as it continued to climb. In a few hours, they would land in Istanbul and start unloading and preparing for the second concert of the tour. Or, rather, the technical crew would start unloading and preparing. For the most part, Iruwa's part of the preparations had been done months before, while she and Orphea were designing the concert sets. All she had to do now was to monitor things and adapt them to the variations in Orphea's singing, and to make whatever modifications she or Orphea wanted done.
Nothing more.
She put on her display glasses and unfolded her keyboard. She didn't like using display contacts, they never seemed to get resolution good enough for her needs. So she stayed with tried-and-true glasses or goggles. She nudged Orphea with her elbow while the schematics for the light show loaded.
"So how do you think it worked last night?" she said. "What needs fixing?"
"Hm?" Orphea said. "Oh. Right." She looked thoughtful for a few moments. "I think it mostly worked well," she said. "Except maybe the bit with the butterflies. I think there should be more of them, so they obscure me entirely."
"Right," Iruwa said. "That'll be easy enough to do."
She turned her attention to the schematics.

Monday, 23 May 2067

The Social Security office at Lilla Grevie Refugee Camp was, as all such offices tend to be, dreary and spartan to a fault. Three decades of hopelessness and despair had sunk into the walls, and just walking into the waiting room was enough to make otherwise healthy people feel depressed.
Richard Cairnduff wasn't a very happy man at the best of times, and early morning meetings at the Social Security office ranked very far from the best of times, in his opinion. It ranked just barely over a good, solid kick in the nuts, usually. Today felt pretty usual.
"Well," the counselor said, tapping on his ancient keyboard. He was a middle-aged man whose name Richard had never bothered to find out. He'd probably said it the first time they met, or something. "I see here that you didn't manage to get a job this week either. That makes it ten months since you last had one, and that was two days of picking up trash at Kastrup. I think that's a personal best for you. Or worst, rather."
Richard himself was 22, and had lived his entire life in the refugee camp in southern Sweden. His parents had ended up there after hitch-hiking their way up from Rotterdam, where the ship that took them from Liverpool had put them off. They'd had some idea that getting further away from the places were everyone else was would make it easier to get by. It wasn't a bad idea, really, and it might have worked if several hundred thousand people hadn't had it too.
"I applied for some," Richard said.
"Yes, I see that," the counselor said. "For three, exactly. As usual."
"So? I don't have to apply for more than that to get my money."
The counselor sighed. "And I see that you safely applied for jobs that require the ability to speak Swedish," he said.
Richard smiled. "Yeah," he said. "And I got properly turned down for every one of them."
"How can you stand living in a country and not learn to speak its language?" the counselor said. "If nothing else, don't you wonder what people are saying about you?"
Richard shrugged. "Like I care."
The counselor shook is head in tired despair. He hit a couple of buttons on the keyboard. "Well, you do manage to follow the rules," he said. "So you get your money. They'll be in your account by tomorrow, as usual."
"Thanks," Richard said. He got up and left, not caring if the counselor replied or not. He still had some money left since last week. Not much, but enough to get pretty drunk down at the pub. With some luck he'd be able to scam enough off his pals to get really smashed.

Maria du Lac climbed out of the helicopter onto the steel floor of the old rebuilt oil drilling platform. The wind tore at her coat, and the noise from the helicopter efficiently prevented any verbal communication between her and the uniformed man waiting for her. He was about middle-aged, much taller than her 160 centimeters and looked as fit as suited a military man. He shouted something she couldn't hear and gestured towards a door. Assuming that he had suggested that they get out of the noise, she headed for the door.
Inside, it was much warmer and a lot less noise, although still not exactly silent.
"That's better," the uniformed man said behind her. "More than twenty years in the RAF and I still can't get used to the noise of those bloody copters."
She turned around and offered him her hand.
"I'm Maria du Lac," she said. "I guess you're Group Captain Henry Clifford?"
He took her hand and shook it firmly. "Got it in one," he said. "Welcome to Nanoclysm Observation Platform VI, although I'm still not quite clear about why you've come all the way out here. Most people make do with the net feeds."
She shrugged. "Call it a whim," she said. "VR doesn't give most of the secondary impressions, like the cold and the noise. I'm hoping that coming here and seeing things with my own eyes will make it feel more real to me, and that I'll be able to convey that feeling in my reporting."
"Well, good luck with that. Coffee?"
He continued into the building without really waiting for her answer, and she followed. The place look very much like she expected a military technical installation to look. It was entirely made from steel, and amazing numbers of cables and conduits almost covered the ceiling. Her steps echoed as she walked, and all sounds seemed to gain a harsh and unpleasant quality as they bounced between the hard surfaces. It smelled of ozone, plastic, cleaning chemicals and stale sweat.
"I hope you don't mind me asking," she said towards Clifford's back, "but aren't you the commander of this place?"
"Oh, sure," he said.
"So how come you have time to greet nosy reporters?"
They entered a relatively large and cosy kitchen. Pictures had been hung on the walls, there was a sofa and a pair of armchairs surrounding a low table. A few large plants stood in the corners of the room, and a coffee maker burbled pleasantly. Clifford got two mugs from a cupboard and filled them with steaming black liquid.
"Sugar? Milk?" he asked. Maria shook her head. He handed her a mug.
"I have the time to greet nosy people because my job is the most pointless one here," he said.
"I thought being the commander was the most important job?"
He snorted. "Propaganda. Guess how many men and women I have command over?"
She thought about it. Group Captain was a pretty high rank, and the old oil platform was very big. "A couple of hundred?" she said.
"Five," he said.
"Five?"
He nodded. "Five. Not counting myself, there's doctor White who oversees and messes with the design of the observation systems, there's technicians Jones and Mendez who implement White's design changes and there's privates Fairhouse and Wood who do the cleaning, painting, cooking and other such work."
"But this place is huge!"
"And expensive," he said. "Don't forget expensive. It's so expensive that it must have a Group Captain or higher commanding it, for political reasons. But in reality it's just a really big sensor platform with obscene amounts of communications bandwidth. All the analysis work is done in Hannover and Belfast."
"So you being here is, what, a punishment for something you did wrong?"
He shook his head. "Oh no," he said. "This really is what passes for a good assignment in the RAF these days. It's not easy being a military force that's lost most of its country. It doesn't take that much to adequately defend Northern Ireland, and we just don't do international work any more."
"Can we go out?" she asked. "We can see the coast from here, right?"
He finished his coffee. "That we can," he said. "Follow me."
They walked through more metal corridors, took an elevator several stories up and eventually exited through a small water-tight door onto an observation deck. Above them, there were a small forest of antennas and odd-shaped metal constructions that Maria could only assume was observation equipment. Below them was the entire vast bulk of the platform, and even further down the leaden gray of the North Sea's chill water.
In the distance, she could see the fuzzy black line that used to be Scotland.
The wind blew cold, in spite of it being late in May.
"Are we safe here?" she asked. "Can't nanomachines from the coast be carried out here by the winds?"
"Oh, they can," Clifford said. "It happens fairly often. We've got a pretty large collection of Nanoclysm bots."
She looked up at him and frowned. "So why haven't they eaten the platform?" she asked. "Come to think of it, why did they stop at the coast in the first place? Why didn't they just creep along the sea bottom and cover the entire world?"
"In the early days, the nanomachines didn't like salt water. A leftover from the way the first ones were constructed in the ill-fated laboratory, we think. Or, rather, William and the other science types thinks so. I wouldn't know. Anyway, theory says that they should've been able to evolve past the aversion to salt water by now, and the wind-carried ones that end up here never have that problem in the first place. So, it turns out, we have no idea why they don't propagate past the coast. They just don't."
Suddenly, not all of the chill the Maria felt was from the cold wind. All her life, she'd silently assumed that there was a good, solid reason that the Nanoclysm had stopped once it covered all of the British main island. It was not a comfortable illusion to have crushed.
Clifford opened a metal box bolted to the platform's railing and took out a pair of binoculars. "Here," he said. "You may as well take a closer look at the coastline, now that you've travelled all the way here. Not quite your own eyes, I guess, but about as close as you'll get without going ashore."
She accepted the heavy binoculars from him. "Has anyone done that?" she asked. "Gone ashore, I mean?"
"Yes," he said. "Although not for about twentyfive years now, as far as I know. But in the early days there were a number of attempts to send troops ashore with various wildly experimental anti-nano equipment. I think the basic idea was that they should bring back samples of the nanobots that lived behind the omniphage frontlines, so that the science people would be able to design a set of anti-Nanoclysm phages. But none of the troops they sent in ever came back, so eventually they gave that up."
Maria put the binocular to her eyes and looked towards the coast.
At first it was difficult to make any sense at all of what she saw. It seemed to be nothing but a jumble of lines in all the colours of the rainbow, crossing and intersecting any which way and ending up giving an impression of opalescent pale gray. It was difficult to focus on, a little like trying to find and focus on the edge of a fog bank. When she finally managed to make some kind of sense out of it, it reminded her most of all of a coral reef. A coral reef that swayed and moved about.
"It's life of a sort, of course," Clifford said. "It's just not our kind of life. Which is kind of ironic, considering that we built it."
"What do we know about what goes on in there?" she asked.
"Very little, basically. It's hard to observe. Satellite observation and the occasional high-altitude fly-over let ut see some large structures, but that doesn't tell us much except the fact that there are large structures. William here on NOP6 and his colleagues onshore try to make observations using just about every part of the electromagnetic spectrum there is. What few successes they've had are available on the net. It's not much, because at the end of it all we're pretty much trying to figure out the biochemistry of two hundred and forty five thousand square kilometers of alien planet by looking at it through a telescope. Difficult doesn't even begin to describe it."
Maria shivered. "I think I could do with some more coffee," she said.

Before the refugee camp had been built, the building that housed the bar where Richard and his friends used to hang out had been a pigsty. When the Swedish government expropriated it along with the rest of the nearby farms, it was hastily cleaned out, insulated and made livable enough to let fifty people survive the winter. As time went by and most of the refugees drifted into normal society, the old pigsty was abandoned, until Robert the Barkeep's father bought the place and turned it into a pub. It had a rough floor, hardy walls, sturdy tables and chairs, dim lighting, cheap beer and fatty food, just as Robert the Barkeep's father had said that a real English pub should. It was, predictably, called The Pigsty.
As far as Richard was concerned, it was a fine place. A place where he and his pals could reminisce about lost England. Not that he or any of his friends had ever been there, but they'd heard their parents talk. They knew that England had been an altogether better place, with none of the cold and dreariness and bureaucracy of the northern hellhole where they lived now. They knew all the great things that England had done for the world, and they knew that they deserved to be repaid for that now in the country's worst moment of need. But the jews and frenchmen and germans and other jealous fucks wanted to keep them down, and did their damnedest to make sure that once fallen England would never rise.
Richard was half-heartedly watching a football game on the ceiling-mounted monitor and carefully nursing his third pint of the evening when a tall guy he didn't know sat down on the stool next to him. If things had gone according to Richard's plan, one of his mates would already have been occupying that seat and they would both be wey into their sixth or seventh pint. Instead, Richard was drinking all by his lonesome.
"So, what do you think of the game?" the stranger said.
Richard didn't even know which teams were playing. Even though the visuals were turned to the game, the sound was set on an all-Orphea channel. Which Richard didn't mind at all, he loved that woman's music. She was from England, of course.
"It's crap," Richard said.
"Yeah, sure is," the stranger said. "What I wouldn't give to get to watch Manchester United play on Old Trafford again. Those were the times."
The stranger looked pretty old, probably over sixty. His hair was turning gray and his face was craggy. There was something military about the way he carried himself, Richard thought. Something noble.
"I never got to see that," he said. "Born too late."
"Poor kid," the stranger said. "But who knows, if you live long enough maybe you'll get the chance to see it."
Something in the way he said it triggered a memory. A memory of a rumour he'd heard every now and then for as long as he could remember.
"I'm Richard," he said, doing his best to be subtle. "And who might you be, if I may ask?"
The stranger smiled. "You can call me Captain Jack," he said.
So it was him! Right here in the Pigsty!
"I'll be damned!" Richard said. "I've been a fan of yours for years and years. I used to dream about getting to help you. England Reborn!"
The stranger -- Captain Jack -- raised an eyebrow. "Keep it down, son," he said. "We don't want the police to hear that name, now do we?"
"Sorry," Richard said, suddenly feeling as a total asshole. One of his greatest idols show up in his local pub and he went all fanboy on him!
"It's all right," Jack said. "Maybe you can help me with a little problem I have?"
"Oh, sure! Just name it!"
"It's no big thing," Jack said. "I just need to find someone."
"I've lived all my life in this godforsaken arsehole," Richard said. "I know everybody here. Who is it you want?"
Jack smiled. "Well, I don't know yet. Maybe you can tell me. I want to find someone who has worked on Kastrup Airport, and who could be persuaded to help the cause. Suitably recompensed, of course."
"I worked at Kastrup once!" Richard said, almost beside himself with excitement. He might get to help Captain Jack!
"Really? What a wonderful coincidence. Would you mind doing your bit for old England, Richard?"
"You bet I would!"
Jack smiled. "Good," he said. "I'll be in touch."
He finished off his beer. "It might not hurt if you found a couple of pals to help out," he said. "Safety in numbers, you know."
And then he left.

Iruwa plugged in her suit to the control chair and pulled the VR hood over her head. She adjusted the earplugs and goggles and, with that done, activated the systems.
The first thing she saw was a view from just in front of her, showing mostly herself, a too tall and too thin woman dressed in polymers and electronics. A modern-age Frankenstein's monster, she looked like. The chair itself and all its accompanying equipment had been placed in one of the upper galleries of the Hagia Sophia. It looked dreadfully out of place next to the decorated stone walls and floor, built almost one and half millennia earlier. It had been Orphea's idea to give a concert in the ancient mosque, and somehow her manager Sebastian had convinced the government of Turkey to let her do it. It wouldn't be able to hold more than a few hundred people in the audience, but with the unique backdrop and acoustics the net audience was promising to be astronomical.
So Iruwa had better make the netcast work out really well.
She flipped her vision to another camera. High up on the wall in the main space, looking down at the area right under the cupola. In the center of it, a big golden throne surrounded by flowers. Sitting on the throne, Orphea, dressed all in gold and white. Further out, near the walls, were the lucky few hundred who had been allowed to attend in person.
"Are you listening, love?" Iruwa said.
"To you, always," Orphea answered. Through her camera, Iruwa could just about see her lips move. She quickly flipped through the rest of them, to make sure that they all were transmitting properly.
"I'm about to check for sound," she said. "Give me something to listen to?"
Orphea closed her eyes. Her mouth opened, and she began to sing. The song started out deep in the bass, extremely deep for any singer and almost unnaturally so for a woman. She let the music wordlessly climb the scale from that dark beginning to an equally incredible high, with the occasional detours up and down to make a melody worth listening to.
Iruwa listened. She knew this song very well. Orphea had sung it to her the morning after they first spent an entire night together. It had no words, but plenty of meaning. Every note of it, every breath that Orphea expelled as she sang it, was a gift to her. A gift of beauty, an attempt to express a love to large for words. Iruwa never got tired of listening to it.
"All audio pickups are go," she said. "All cameras are go. All projectors are go. PA processors are go. We're ready to roll, and we are at fifty five seconds to set time for going online."
"Security is go," she heard Alexandra say. "Audience is go."
"I'm ready," Orphea said. "We'll fly when planned."
"Forty five seconds to connection," Iruwa's main controller system said. "Thirty. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Connection."
The media streams started pouring out onto the net, into aggregators and caches that sent them on to everyone who wanted to watch and could afford the small amount of money it cost to watch it live. Which, apparently, was an absolutely ridiculous number of people, Iruwa saw when she glanced at the feedback from the aggregators. Never mind. Statistics was for afterwards. For now, she kept a sharp eye on her controller systems, ready to override them if Orphea decided to deviate from their plan. Not that she did so very often, but often enough that Iruwa had to stay alert.
Not that spending a couple of hours watching her lover was a hardship, exactly.
They'd timed the concert to coincide with sunset. Golden sunlight streamed in through the huge stained-glass windows and bathed the entire mosque in many-coloured light. Orphea sat like a statue in her throne, back straight, arms resting on the armrests, eyes gazing fixedly straight ahead. Out of picture streams from cameras placed all around the building, the visual processors synthesized a viewpoint flying down from the top of the dome, circling the throne and the flower arrangements and ending up at eye height of a person kneeling in front of Orphea. Once it got there, she began to sing.
Her voice filled the room, instantly and totally. There was no way anyone in the room could keep their attention away from the woman in the center. The words she sang spoke of desire, desire for beauty and for remembrance. They spoke of great and glorious works, and how a multitude of human hands could create the miraculous. The music accompanied the words perfectly, and the faint glowing images thrown by the hologram projectors served to emphasize and strengthen the impression of the music. By the end of the first song, Iruwa had her viewpoint glide past the audience. More than a few of them wore broad smiles and had tears running down their faces.
Iruwa nodded to herself. This was going well.

Tuesday, 24 May 2067

Doctor William White leaned back in his worn office chair and put his feet up on the edge of the control panel.
"Systems check, please," he said.
His lab was large, far larger than anything else he'd ever had. One of the advantages on working almost alone on a platform in North Sea. Considerable privacy was another. A nearly limitless budget came with working with something that the entire world was deathly afraid of.
"Systems integrity nominal," the system said.
Most of his colleagues at the nanotech lab at MIT had thought he was insane when he'd accepted the job at NOP6. All alone with a handful of soldiers within sighting distance of the Nanoclysm itself? Madness! He'd said something about the value of close personal observation, the need to have someone nearby and that said someone might as well be him. A sacrifice on the altar of science.
He didn't mention that he figured that it'd give him ample opportunity to engage in some extracurricular activity that was hard to do in the USA.
"Privacy lockdown," he said. He heard the bolts in the lab's door slide shut and the just barely audible pink noise from the anti-surveillance system start up.
"Locked down," the system said. It sounded like he thought a proper computer system should sound, dry, emotionless and precise. None of the oh-so-popular personality emulation crap.
"Activate steganographic communications system," he said. "Let me know when people have logged on. Meanwhile, put up the latest set of reports on the simulation on monitor one."
"Done," the system said at the same time as the largest monitor in the room flickered to life. Schematics, tables and text laid themselves out over it. William looked them over, and found them good. The search of the probability space was down to the point zero one level and it still hadn't found any serious flaws in the plan. They could quite safely go ahead.
"Contacts one through six have established contact," the system said.
"Good," he said. "Route connections to voice conference."
"Done."
"Welcome, my fellow patriots," he said. "This will hopefully be our last meeting before the big event. Let's start with a round of reports, shall we? Number one?"
"Right," a carefully depersonalized voice said over the loudspeakers. "All's green on this front. The packages have all been built, and we'll be sending them on to Six later today."
"You're sure they'll work as planned?" William asked.
"As sure as we can be without a full-scale test."
"Good. Two?"
"Target network has been penetrated and relevant features disabled. We're monitoring for premature discovery, but expect no trouble."
"Three?"
"Memetic penetration of core ideas remains low, I'm afraid. But if it didn't we wouldn't be doing this, now would we? Anyway, the Captain Jack meme seems to have been a great help to Four and Five, so we're doing some good. So, in essence, not much progress but no setbacks either."
"Four?"
"As Three said, we've been able to recruit widely and quietly thanks to effective use of refugee camp psychosocial databases and widespread belief in the Captain Jack character. I've even heard reports of stories about the good captain that doesn't seem to originate with ourselves. Anyway, we're basically good. I expect at least eighty percent of our recruits to go through with their actions."
"Five?"
"As Four. Like them, we have a twenty-percent margin of error in the number of recruits, which simulations indicate will be enough. We're ready to go."
"Six?"
"We've received the address lists from Four and Five, and will distribute the packages as soon as we get them from One. Until then we're just waiting."
William looked up from the monitor. "Good," he said. "My whole-system simulations have reached the tenth-percent level of confidence. If nobody can think of a reason not to, we're ready to go. Anybody?"
There was a round of denials.
"Well then," he said. He could feel his heart speed up and his palms get sweaty. "We go. One, deliver as planned. Six, start distributing the packages as soon as you get them. Instruct the recruits to infiltrate their selected airports as soon as possible after sunset on the 29th. I will send the signal to activate them at 21:00 GMT. As soon as I'm receiving reports that the attack has worked, I will distribute our manifesto. Questions or comments?"
Silence.
"Than that is that, my fellow patriots. We will not talk again for some time. Godspeed, and may we live to see England Reborn!"

Orphea leaned back in the sofa in the living room of hers and Iruwa's suite at the Hotel Istanbul. It was a large room, lavishly decorated in the particularly bland mixture of local and international perfected by large hotels everywhere in the world. If she half-closed her eyes and ignored the moslem and byzantine elements, she might have been in any city in the world.
In the armchair across from her, a young turkish woman sat. Her hair was black, and her skin was a shade darker than Orphea's. She had her hair covered in the traditional moslem fashion, although her clothes were far more revealing than anything a good moslem woman would be expected to wear. Orphea found it slightly difficult not to keep looking at her generous cleavage.
On the table between them, a compact audio/video transceiver had been placed, its range carefully adjusted to include Orphea, the turkish woman, the sofa, the armchair and the table but nothing else. Iruwa sat in another armchair further away from the table, out of the transceiver's range and behind her Aphrodite and Johann were keeping an eye on things. Orphea caught Iruwa looking at her, and gave her a warm smile in return.
The young woman -- Sevgi, she'd said her name was, Orphea suddenly remembered -- cleared her throat.
"Are you ready to start?" she asked
Orphea smiled at her. "This is far from my first interview, dear," she said. "I can do this in my sleep. You start when you feel like it."
Sevgi looked a little ashamed. "Of course," she said. She bent forward and keyed the transceiver online.
"This is Sevgi Erdem for Istanbul Now," she said. "I'm sitting in the presidential suite at the Hotel Istanbul with world-famous artist Orphea, who yesterday gave an incredible concert in the Ayasofya. According to Netmeter Turkey, that concert may have have been the most-watched live event on the net ever. So, Orphea, what did you think about it?"
"On the whole I think it went rather well," Orphea said. "The planning of it was slightly more complex than usual, since we didn't have any chance to do a dry run and see if the reality of the place matched our simulations. But our calculations held, it all turned out pretty much as we wanted it and I think we provided an enjoyable show."
Sevgi smiled at her. "I'd say you provided an absolutely amazing show," she said. "And as usual with your concerts, the majority of the material was entirely new and never performed before. Considering that you did another concert with just as much new material only three days before, and I think we can safely assume that you'll do it again in Rome this Sunday, I really have to ask where you get the time to create it all. I have no idea how many songs you've published, but it must be thousands over the eighteen years of your career."
"They come to me in dreams," Orphea said. "Fully formed. I just have to remember them and sing them."
Sevgi looked doubtful. "Well," she said, "I guess we can't really ask that you reveal the secrets of your trade."
A half-strangled snort came from Iruwa in the corner.
"Tell me," Sevgi went on, "what is the message of your tour as a whole? You've called it the Memento Mori tour, but surely there must be a little more to the message than just that we will all die some day?"
"Not much, really," Orphea said. "We're doing the entire tour in places that reminds of fallen greatness. Paris was slightly special, as the closest convenient alternative to England. But after that there is the Hagia Sophia that reminds of Byzantium, the Coliseum that reminds of imperial Rome, Karnak that reminds of ancient Egypt, Angkor Wat that reminds of the Khmer Empire and so on. All of them fell, as will the empires of today."
"I see," Sevgi said. "I believe that we have some viewer questions, if you don't mind."
Inwardly, Orphea winced. "Of course not," she said.
The head and shoulders of a teenage girl appeared in the air over the transceiver, gushing something barely coherent but obviously very positive. Orphea tried to reply with something that wasn't too nasty or divorced from what the girl had said, but she wasn't sure if she succeeded. A stream of teenagers appeared after the first, all with much the same effect. It made Orphea wonder if she really had to do this sort of thing, if she wasn't famous and established enough by now to get by without this sort of pointless exercise in frustration.
"Miss Orphea," an older and more cultured voice suddenly said. She actually looked at the hologram, instead of just pointing her eyes in its general direction. The image was of a blonde woman, maybe in her mid-twenties or so. Her hair was cut short, and she looked serious. Orphea spontaneously liked her, although she had to admit to herself that that might just be because of the welcome contrast to the neverending teenagers.
"My name is Maria du Lac," the woman said, "and I'm a freelance content provider mostly associated with The Silent Word out of Geneva."
"Pleased to hear from you, Maria," Orphea said. "Do you have a question?"
"Yes, I do," she said. "Did you ever wonder why you never remembered your parents?"
Orphea as completely taken by surprise by the question. "Come again?" she said.
"Have you ever wondered why you don't remember your parents?" du Lac repeated. "You've claimed in several interviews before that you don't, and when I went through the old Nanoclysm archives at Sorbonne I found that your admission notice from the refugee camp says that you didn't remember your parents at all even when you first arrived there. Which would've been only days after you left them."
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Iruwa sit up and take notice.
"Furthermore," Maria went on, "there were almost one hundred other girls aged between three and seven who arrived to that same camp on that day, none of them remembering anything of their parents, and one of which was your partner Iruwa. This seems to me to be rather too many to be explained by coincidence. Even if we assume that all those girls suffered from trauma caused by the evacuation, no other camp every showed a similar influx. One would also assume that the gender distribution would be rather more mixed."
"No," Orphea said. "I never really wondered about that. But I do now. I assume that you have a theory?"
"Not really," du Lac said. "But I find it intriguing. That the world's most famous musical artist and one of the most famous visual designers share the same mystery in their childhood."
"Sometimes hardship brings out the best in people," Orphea said.
A warm hand touched her shoulder. She looked up, seeing that Iruwa had got up from her chair and walked into the pickup range of the net transceiver and was standing behind her.
"Miss du Lac," Iruwa said, "have you investigated all of the hundred girls you mentioned or just me and Orphea?"
"I started with Orphea," the hologram of Maria du Lac said. "When I noticed that you came from the same camp, I expanded my search. I've not had the time to do a thorough investigation of the others yet."
"Like Orphea, I never really thought about why I don't remember my parents," Iruwa said. "But your question have made me curious. Could you, as a favour, send me a copy of the information you dug out of those archives?"
"Certainly," du Lac said.
"Thank you," Iruwa said. "I'll be in touch."
And then there were more gushing teenagers.

"I want to go out," Orphea had said after the interviewer had left.
So they did.
Orphea put on a pair of dark glasses and a wide-brimmed black hat, Iruwa chose to wear her display glasses and a white scarf covering her hair. She was sure that people would recognize them anyway. It was common knowledge that they were in the city, and two unusually tall women, one looking Mediterranean and one black, were not very discreet to begin with. But no matter. They rarely had any problems with the public at large. What made two-way net appearances so tiresome was the near-rabid fans that sought them out and wanted their attention. The common fan on the street would usually be pleased to see them, but make no big deal out of it.
The streets of Istanbul smelled of dust and spices and sweat and incense and rotting garbage and exhaust from ancient gasoline-powered vehicles. They were narrow and dusty and crowded and hot and utterly real in a way that the hotel completely failed to be.
When she looked back over her shoulder, she saw people point at her and Orphea and whisper to each other. Rumour would already be traveling at unbelievable speed ahead of them, telling the tale that tonight the world-famous Orphea walked the streets of the city. Tonight, the modern-age muse of music herself had descended to the common people.
"It bothers me," Orphea said. "What she told us."
"It wouldn't say that it bothers me," Iruwa said. "But it is interesting."
"I can't help but wonder what those other hundred women are like."
"Me neither."
They stopped at the stall of a man selling spicy grilled meat in pita bread pockets, and bought themselves something to eat. When he saw who they were, he tried to give the food to them. Orphea glowered at him, and forced him to accept her lira bill. They walked on, eating. The spiced meat was tasty, but made them thirsty, so a few streets on, they repeated the scene, although this time with whine. Orphea had a very effective glare.
The wine was sour and invigorating and intoxicating. The bottle became empty in the blink of an eye, and they bought another and another.
"I never even wondered about it," Orphea said. "When I was a child, I mean. There were so many in the camps who had lost their parents that we never mentioned it."
"I know," Iruwa said, "I know. I was there."
"I guess I assumed none of the other orphans remembered their parents either. You accept many strange things when you're little."
"Like the dreams," Iruwa said. "I've been thinking about the dreams, since she mentioned the hundred little girls."
They had a large group of people following them now. Someone had brought a portable music system, and was playing old Orphea songs. There was laughing, and chattering, and dancing.
"The dreams," Orphea said. "Listen to that. I haven't heard that song in ages. I can remember dreaming it. I can remember every fucking dream I ever had."
Iruwa kissed her. There was a sudden outburst of applause and catcalls from the crowd. "I don't think most people do that," she said after they'd separated again. She still had her arms around Orphea.
"I don't let anyone except you do that," Orphea said.
Iruwa laughed. "Not that, silly. Remember every dream they ever had."
Orphea frowned. "But you do too."
"I do too," she agreed. "But my dreams are not exactly like yours."
"No," Orphea said, "you dream visions and I dream this."
She closed her eyes and began to sing. It was a new song, one that Iruwa had never heard before. She guessed that Orphea had dreamt it the night before.
Behind them the crowd fell silent. The music system got abruptly turned off, and children hushed into silence. An eerie, almost unnatural quiet spread over the crowded street. All that could be heard was Orphea's wordless song, a cold sequence of sounds bringing chills to her listeners even in the balmy night.
Iruwa removed the scarf from her head and put her glasses in a pocket. If there had been little point in trying to be incognito to begin with, it was utterly pointless now. Orphea singing was something that simply could not be done by anybody else in the world. She was unique, a phenomenon. Iruwa remembered a doctor saying once that Orphea's throat couldn't have been more suited for singing if it had been built for the purpose.
After what Maria du Lac had said, the memory sent a chill down her spine. She wondered about her own ability to coax imagery out of machines. About her ability to handle machines in general. She'd never really had to learn it, it had just come naturally to her. She'd seen the machines, and after a try or two she'd always known what to do with them. In school, it'd taken her years to realize that not all the other kids learned as easily as she did. That some of them never managed to learn at all.
Orphea finished her song and bowed to the audience, who once again broke out in applause.
"You know we're both unusual," she said when Orphea turned to her again. "I'm going to talk to the du Lac woman and see what she's found out about us. If there is anything to know, I want to know it."
Orphea nodded. "You do that," she said.

Wednesday, 25 May 2067

The rickety old train ground to a screaming halt in front of the gates to Refugee Camp 33. It was a wheeled old thing, running on plain steel rails. Maria thought she'd read somewhere that it had been repurposed from the Paris Metro when they changed over to maglev trains, but she wasn't sure. In any case, the train she just got off was old, badly maintained and its brakes had screamed bloody murder every time the train slowed down. She was more than glad to get off it, and she didn't look forward to getting on it again for the trip back.
The camp didn't really have streets. It was more like sturdier footpaths that ran more or less straight in between rows of buildings that had been intended to stand for ten years and were now going on thirty. There were few signposts, the streets had no names and the houses had symbolic signs instead of numbers. She knew she was looking for Onion House in Rue de la Boue, but knowing that told her nothing about how far from it she was. She tried asking the taciturn children who played in the mud, but got no replies. So she resorted to walking around and trusting to luck.
It was the better part of an hour before she found a sign that said that she was now on the Rue de la Boue, and a good quarter hour before she found a door that had a rather mishappen image of an onion next to it. Tired to the point of being grouchy and belligerent, she knocked on the door.
"Who's there?" a voice said from inside. It sounded like an old man, which was encouraging.
"My name is Maria du Lac," she said. "I'm looking for Edward Jones."
The door opened and an old man looked out. "What d'you want with him?" he said.
"I'd like to talk to him about things that happened thirty years ago," she said. "Or, if that's impossible, I'd just like to sit down for a while before I walk out of this pimple on Hell's ass of a town. Camp. Whatever."
He chuckled. "Insulting a man's home is not a good way to start," he said.
She looked up at him. Like most people, he was taller than her. He was also very thin and had nearly no hair left, which left him looking a bit like a lightbulb on a stick.
"Are you trying to tell me that you don't think this is a pimple on Hell's ass?" she asked.
"Oh, it sure is," he said. "But you don't live here, so you're not supposed to say that."
"I walked through it for ages," she said. "I've earned a couple of insults."
Again, he chuckled. "You don't give in easily, do you, girl?" he said. "Come on in, I'll put the kettle on."
A while later, sitting on a surprisingly comfortable chair in Edward Jones' kitchen with a hot cup of tea in her hand she felt a lot less hostile towards the universe in general. Despite the decrepit appearance of the house's exterior and the area around it, the inside of it was actually quite pleasant. Neither too hot nor too cold, pretty decently furnished and with a feel that said that this was a home, not just a place where someone lived.
"So," Edward said. "Thirty years ago. That'd be the year of the evacuation, I'd say."
"Yes," Maria said. "And I believe that you were one of the first people to arrive at what would become this camp, and the only one who's still here."
He sat down across the table from her and stirred sugar into his tea.
"That I was," he said. "And that I am."
"What was it like?"
"That's a very big question, girlie. Bigger than I can answer. An entire nation dying, that's not really the sort of thing one old man can properly grasp. You'll have to be a little more precise, I'm afraid."
"All of it didn't die," she said. "There's still Northern Ireland, with the King and all that."
He nodded at her. "Aye," he said, "they're still there. But you know what I mean. England as it was is well and truly dead, and it's not coming back, no matter how much those England Reborn cretins talk about getting a new homeland."
"Where did you live before you came here?"
"Manchester," he said. "Not so far from the lab where it all started and not so far from the coast. Plenty of reason to leave early, and easy enough to actually do it. Some of my mates went down to London, but I figured I might as well take the chance to see a foreign country."
He chuckled drily. "Got to see a lot more foreign country than I expected."
"Did you come here voluntarily or were you sent?"
"A little of both. When I first got to France I managed to get a hotel room. But that cost money, and I started running out of that at pretty much the same time that the EU bigwigs up in Bruxelles decided to institute the camps. So I came here, and not only got to a place to stay but also a job helping build the place. Paid for beer, but not much more."
"And then you stayed on."
"For a long time there was no where else to go, and the early camps where a whole lot better than the later ones. We got enough food not to starve too much, and we'd managed to build enough plumbing to keep the place clean. Helped immeasurably in keeping the plagues at bay."
He got up and fetched the teapot, filled her cup and then his own.
"I remember the winter of 2038," he said. "That one was really bad. We'd thought that the year before had been bad, but we really had no idea. That first winter, there still were stockpiles of food and clothes and soap and all that sort of stuff. Not really stockpiles big enough for all the millions of refugees, but there was some."
His face a faraway and haunted look.
"2038, though, was the real hell winter. The storehouses were empty. The harvests had been bad, because of refugees trampling them while trying to get food. The governments were running out of money with which to buy more from the rest of the world, and on top of all that the shoddier built camps were starting to break down. So the people in them tried to come here, and we knew that if we let them in we'd just starve with them. So we got what's usually called the riots."
His teacup stood forgotten on the table.
"They weren't riots," he said. "They were more like civil war. We got together as many men as possible, and we built up the fences around the camp into proper barricades. We bought and stole as many weapons as we could get. I traded two loaves of hard bread and a bottle of piss-poor gin for a Kalashnikov rifle older than I was and as many bullets for it as I could carry. Then we stood guard, and we just shot anybody who got too close and we didn't like the looks of. From mid-december until almost New Year's, there were so many people around the camp that we couldn't get out and nobody got in. Those were hungry days, but we just had to look over the barricades to see how much worse off we could've been. Because out there, that was Hell. They had no food, hardly any clothes and no fuel for fires. They died in droves out there, and every time we had to shoot someone who tried to break in the rest of them would fight like mad over who'd get to eat off the corpse before it froze solid. Because those who starved or froze to death, they usually found after they'd already got too hard to chew."
He shook his head.
"Those were bad times, girl. Really bad. And then, when spring came and thawed out all those dead bodies, we got the plagues. Still, that was better, because then at least it wasn't people killing each other. It was just Mother Nature being her coldhearted self."
"Is that why you've never left?" she asked, keeping her voice soft. "Because of all the effort and pain you spent on this place?"
He nodded. "Once you've killed for a place, you can't ever really leave it. Even if you go away, it stays in your heart. Quite a lot of people left as soon as they could, of course, but none of the ones I met later were very happy. I couldn't figure out a reason to leave, so I didn't. I stayed on."
"And worked with children."
"Yeah. Funny that... I'd used to be a chef back in Manchester, so I ended up taking care of a couple of the mess halls early on. Somehow i drifted from that into taking care of the orphanage. Don't know why, really. A large part of it was that nobody else did, I think. It needed doing, and I was there to do it."
"I've been looking through old archives," Maria said. "And it seems that you had an unusual number of orphan girls."
"All the camps had a lot of orphans," he said. "Girls as well as boys. Parents sent the kid to safety ahead of themselves, and then never made it out at all or just never found them."
"One of your orphan girls were the very young Orphea," she said, not giving up on her line of questioning.
He smiled.
"I thought you'd come to that," he said. "Yes, she was one of ours. And yes, we had lot more girls than most other places, for some reason. They all arrived at once, too, at the very end of the evacuation. A hundred girls in a bunch. At first we thought they'd all come out of some kind of institution, because they seemed a little daft. But I guess that was just shock, because they all got better real fast. As time went by we found that most of them were really damn smart, too, but by then I think most of us had forgotten that they all arrived at once."
"Smart how?"
He shrugged. "Just smart. Clever. Learned stuff really fast, had a really strong talent or two. Like Orphea. She could sing real amazingly well almost from the day she arrived, and she learned to play the guitar and the flute before she was eight."
"When you say that they semeed daft, what do you mean? In what way did they appear daft?"
"It's been thirty years, girl," he said. "I don't remember all that well."
"I understand," Maria said. "Thanks for telling me this, it's been fascinating."
He got up from the chair and started rinsing out the teapot.
"Other people's misery is always interesting," he said. "Basic fact of humanity. Learn that, and you'll never go wrong as a journalist."
"Thanks for the tea," she said. "I think I'd better start trying to find my way out of here, if I'll have any chance to catch the train into Paris."
"Just take left when you get out the door, then turn right when you come to the market square."
"Sounds manageable." She collected her stuff and was on her way out the door when he spoke again.
"They couldn't talk," he said.
Maria turned around with her hand on the door handle and looked at him.
"What?" she said.
"Those hundred girls. None of them could talk, and none of them had any idea about how to handle ordinary eating utensils. Not even the ones who looked to be six or seven years old. Nor could they dress themselves. They all learned those things over the course of a couple of weeks, but when they came to us none of them knew how to speak."
"Thank you," she said, with feeling this time.

The train back from the camp was no more modern than the one she'd been in on the way out. It was bumpy, noisy and it smelled funny. She sat in one of its worn seats looking our through the scratched window at the countryside passing by. It was hard to believe that the fields and forests had once held the horrors that Edward had told her about. Not that she doubted him at all, it was just hard to imagine. It wasn't the sort of thing one wanted to imagine one's fellow humans capable of.
She had almost fallen asleep when her computer system alerted her to an incoming connection. She glanced quickly to see who it was, entirely prepared to tell the system to ignore it and let her sleep until she saw that it was from Iruwa. She sat up straight and told the system to accept it, suddenly all awake.
"Greetings, Miss du Lac," Iruwa said. Her voice was calm and pleasant, and her dark face and gentle brown eyes translucently overlaid the vision of the worn-down train. "I how I'm not disturbing you?"
"No, no," Maria said. "It's fine. I've just finished an interview. And please call me Maria."
"Good," Iruwa said. "From your appearance on the webcast, I guess that you're investigating my Orphea's background."
"I am," she answered.
"May I ask why? The story of Orphea's life is hardly unbroken journalistic ground."
"I believe that I have a new angle," she said. "And while I hope that neither you nor Orphea mind my writing about you, I don't intend to stop."
Iruwa smiled at her. "I do not mind," she said. "And I don't think Orphea cares at all. She's most used to being written about."
"Good," Maria said. "So, if it's not to ask me to stop, then why are you calling me?"
The train passed through a tunnel, and in the momentary darkness Iruwa's face loomed larger than life in front of her.
"Because your question intrigued me," she said. "And I am eager to see what it is that you think you have found out. I would like to know about the parts of my life that I do not myself remember. I have called to offer my help, and to ask that you tell us what you find out in its entirety, even any parts of it that you may chose not to publish."
Maria smiled. "I'd really appreciate any help you might give," she said, "and I think I can safely promise to give you access anything I find, as far as it doesn't conflict with the anonymity of any sources who may ask not to be revealed."
"Reasonable and fair," Iruwa said. "Do we have a deal?"
"We have a deal," Maria replied, a sense of triumph irrationally rising within her. When she'd thought about it before, the best she'd hoped for from the large commercial apparatus that surrounded Orphea was non-interference, active help from Orphea's lover had never even occured to her in her wildest dreams.
"So, Maria," Iruwa said. "Is there anything you wish to tell me or ask of me right now?"
"There is," she said. "Something that I've been thinking about but never managed to figure out a legal way to get. The basic question I'm trying to answer is where Orphea and you really came from. There's a laboratory I know that can do detailed DNA analysis and pinpoint with rather remarkable accuracy where your ancestors for the last couple of generations lived. I'd really like to have them have a go at you and Orphea. But to do that I need blood or tissue samples from the both of you."
"Not a problem. We've got baseline tissue samples in cryogenic storage in Berne, I can have our lawyers send slices to the clinic later today if you'll just give me their address."
"Oh, sure." She quickly picked the address out of her database and sent it on to Iruwa's system.
"Just out of curiosity," she said after she'd got the transfer acknowledged, "why do you have tissue samples stored with your lawyers?"
"Basically, for reasons of identification," Iruwa said. "That's common for the very rich or very famous. As a bonus, the samples can be used for therapeutic reasons should we get infected with retroviral diseases or need organs regrown. We've also got ova frozen, in case we decide to have kids."
"I hope you don't mind me saying so, but that's pretty weird."
Iruwa smiled. "The world of the very rich has always been pretty weird, miss du Lac," she said. "I wish you luck in your search for the truth. You can use this address to contact me at any time."
"I will, as soon as I find something," Maria said. "Have a nice day."
The connection died and the face floating in the air faded away. She rode the rest of the way into Paris in silence.

Friday, 27 May 2067

"Yeah, right," John said. "For sure you met Captain Jack."
The four of them were standing around near the back of the grocery store, trying to figure out which brand of beer would get them the most alcohol for the least amount of money this week. John was a short and squat guy who liked to pick fights. He was a public park worker, which for the most part consisted of clearing weeds and mowing lawns.
"But I did!" Richard said. "He was right there, in the Pigsty."
"And how many pints had you had before he showed up?" Anders asked. Anders was tall and blonde, looks he'd taken after his absent Swedish father. He worked as a janitor at a hospital, which occasionally gave him the chance to augment his income by selling drugs he stole at work.
"Hardly any," Richard said. "It was the day before payday and I didn't have the money to get drunk."
"Captain Jack doesn't fucking exist," Ted said. "He's just a myth spread by the man to give the masses a smidgen of hope and prevent large-scale rebellion." Ted had managed to learn things in spite of the refugee camp education system. He worked as a machine operator at a mechanical design house, and claimed to be a member of a secret anarcho-syndicalist cell. His dark hair he kept trimmed to a few millimeters, and he took karate classes in preparation of the day when the revolution would come.
"So who did I fucking meet?" Richard asked. "He was an old guy, with gray hair and all. He had a working man's hands, too. And he talked about watching football in Manchester, for fuck's sake."
John picked up two sixpacks of cheap Danish lager. "I think these are the best," he said.
"If he really was Captain Jack," Ted said. "What the fuck did he want with you?"
"He was looking for someone to help out," Richard said. "And it so happens that I can do that. Except I need some pals to help out as well, and you idiots don't even believe that he exists."
"Yup, these definitely give the most buzz for the buck," John decided. "Let's go." He set off towards the checkout line, and the others followed.
"So what did he want us to do?" Anders said.
Richard kept silent while John paid and they passed through the shoplifting alarm system.
"He didn't say, exactly," he said when they were outside. "And he wouldn't go blabbing England Reborn secrets to any guy he meets in a bar, now would he? But he said he wanted someone who's worked at Kastrup. Which it so happens that I have. And he needs a few more guys to help out."
The walked in silence for a while, thinking about Richard's story.
"The airport, eh?" Anders said. "Could be drugs. England Reborn has to get funds somehow."
"Could be," Richard said. "Opening up a new distribution channel, maybe."
"Could be profitable," John said. "Could be very profitable."
"Could be weapons," Ted said. "A revolution needs weapons. Or it could be something else, like sabotage. Striking directly at the establishment."
They reached the gates to the old garage, closed down for over a decade now, ever since it the "or die" part of the "upgrade or die" cycle that followed the general changeover from gasoline cars to ones powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Anders unhinged the locked gate and swung it open with the old lock acting as a hinge. The gang entered, and he put it back again. They crossed the parking lot, detouring around the burned-out shells of gasoline cars, and climbed in through a long-since broken window.
"So you're helping?" Richard said. He sat down on the least broken chair. The rest of the gang spread themselves between a moldy old couch and a couple of old mattresses on the floor. John passed around beer cans.
"Sure," Anders said. "I'm on. Heck, even if he's not really Captain Jack it sounds like a bit of fun."
"Yeah, me too," John said. "It's not like we've got anything better to do." He opened his can and drank deeply.
"You could join the fight against the capitalists," Ted said. "But, I'm in as well. I want to see what it's really all about."
"Good," Richard said. He raised his beer can. "England Reborn!"
"England Reborn!" the others echoed.

Saturday, 28 May 2067

"Please state your name and business," the gate said. Maria looked around and tried to spot the speaker and camera, without success. The gate was almost four meters tall and made out of black ceramic. It attached to thick walls that looked like brick, but which she suspected was something else entirely under a thin facade. The road that led up to the gate was a clean black, and the lawn through which it passed was immaculately kept. On the gate there was a spotless brass sign with engraved lettering that proclaimed that the this was the entrance to Kunst des Lebens GmbH.
"My name is Maria du Lac," she said. "I'm here to see doctor Wittmeyer."
"You're expected, miss du Lac," the gate said. "Please enter and follow the guidelight to doctor Wittmeyer's laboratory."
The gate swung open, soundlessly and smoothly. In the surface of the road inside, a bright red glowing spot appeared. Maria walked through the gate, and the spot moved so that it stayed a couple of steps in front of her. She followed it, unable to shake a feeling of entering a gilded cage. Behind her, the gate closed just as silently as it had opened.
She'd been quite surprised when, instead of the reports on Orphea's and Iruwa's DNA sequences that she had expected to get back from Kunst des Lebens, she got a mail asking her, very politely, if she would mind visiting Frau Doctor Lotte Wittmeyer to discuss the anonymous samples she had submitted for analysis. She didn't mind, so she went. After all, it was no more than a short flight and a taxi ride away.
The guidelight led her through a well-maintained garden, full of bushes and flowers. There were footpaths, ponds, streams and picturesque footbridges. There were butterflies and birds and, occasionally, rabbits. It was all very calm and well-ordered.
The laboratory was situated in a smallish two-story red-brick building with a black roof. The guidelight faded away when it reached the three steps up to the door, and the door opened as soon as she set her foot on the first step. Waiting inside the door was the first human being she'd seen since she stepped out of the taxi. She looked quite a bit older than Maria, probably a bit over sixty. Her hair was long and gray, and she kept it in a neat ponytail. She wore an unbuttoned white lab coat, under which she had a white blouse and a light tan pair of slacks.
"Welcome to Kunst des Lebens, miss du Lac," she said. "I am doctor Wittmeyer. Please come in."
"Thank you," Maria said. She followed the doctor inside, noting the distinct click when the door locked behind them. The interior of the building was not quite as immaculate and well-ordered as the outside, although it was still very neat. But at least it looked like ut was occupied by humans, who left papers in piles on workbenches and left cups of cold coffee on desks.
Doctor Wittmeyer closed the door to her office and sat down behind her desk.
"Please, have a seat," she said, indicating the chair in front of the desk. Maria sat down.
"I take it there was something unusual about the samples I sent you," she said.
The doctor leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers. "You could say that, yes," she said. "I suppose you would not care to tell me who the samples were taken from?"
"I'm afraid not," Maria said.
"I though us much. But maybe you can at least say if they were taken from actual living people? As opposed to, say, some kind of experimental genetic hybrids?"
"They're from real people," she said. "Exactly how weird are they?"
Doctor Wittmeyer took a pair of projection glasses from her desk and put them on. "At first, we found nothing strange at all," she said. "Sample A is from a woman of Nigerian and Kenyan descent with a small amount of Anglo-Saxon. From the particular mixture, I would guess ethnically Nigerian born from parents living in England or an English-dominated area. Sample B is more of a mixture. Predominantly Macedonian, there are significant elements of Italian, Armenian and German. Altogether, a not unusual 21th-century European. I'd say she probably has a Mediterranean look, although we ran no such simulations so I cannot say for sure. That's still a very expensive process."
She took her glasses off and looked at Maria.
"Then we looked at their mitochondrial DNA," she said, "and things got weird."
"Weird how?" Maria said.
"Mitochondrial DNA varies a lot less than cellular DNA," doctor Wittmeyer said. "But it does vary, and the level of difference between two people's mitochondria gives a good measurement of how many generations it has been since they had a common female ancestor. Even full siblings will have a handful of misreplicated base pairs to distinguish them."
She paused for a little while, as if thinking.
"In both samples you sent us," she went on, "the mitochondrial DNA is exactly the same. Not just similar, but exactly the same. Given that they both have very different cellular DNA, this is should not be."
Maria frowned. "So what does it mean?"
"It is not impossible that their parents or ancestors had ordinarily separated mito-DNA, and that this mutated into the same sequence in both these women. It is, however, roughly as probable as all the elementary particles in my desk spontaneously reforming into the Mona Lisa. We ran the tests quite a few times, on different analyzers, before we accepted the result."
"Are you telling me that these women can't exist?"
"After we accepted the result, our first theory was that we were dealing with the results of human intervention. That someone, somewhere had been fooling around with human ova and these two women were the result. So we ran a large-scale search against all known strains of mito-DNA to see which part of the world this might have been done in."
Maria just waited for her to go on.
"After we got the results from that, I decided to ask you to come here so I could ask you myself where these samples come from," doctor Wittmeyer said. "Are you sure that these samples come from actual, living people?"
Maria frowned. "As sure as I can reasonably be," she said. "There is, I guess, some possibility that the samples might have been switched, but I consider that very unlikely. And you're making me very curious about where it is you found them to come from."
"Nowhere," doctor Wittmeyer said. "Their mitochondrial DNA is not from any known human strain. Even worse, it's not from any known strain at all. While possessing apparently ordinary cellular DNA, on another level they are not only entirely unrelated to the human species, they're entirely unrelated to any eucaryote life on the planet Earth."
They looked at each other for a few moments.
"Are you telling me that they're space aliens?" Maria said, her voice heavy with doubt.
"I'm telling you that I have no idea what they are. According to our tests, the last possible common ancestor between them and us was a unicellular organism one billion years ago," doctor Wittmeyer said. "At the moment, we're trying to clone their mitochondria so that we can run tests on them and see how they behave. They must behave like normal mitochondria to a very high degree, or those two would not be alive, but considering the sheer amount of difference between their mito-DNA and ours there must be some differences in behaviour."
It felt unreal to Maria. She'd suspected that there was something peculiar about Orphea's origins, but this was far beyond her wildest dreams.
"What about the chances that someone designed them?" she asked. "Isn't that more likely than... well, them being a natural phenomenon?"
"I'd say it is, but that just shifts the question to who did the design. We couldn't do it, and we are among the best in the business. If there was anyone who was that much better than us, they would own the market."
She hesitated a little. "I'd like to ask you to ask the sources of the samples to come here for tests," she said. "Knowing that there are at least two women walking around out there who aren't quite human will bother me for the rest of my life. I want to investigate this. Get to the bottom of it."
That was a feeling Maria could sympathize with. "I'll ask," she said. "I suspect that the answer will be no, but I will ask."
Doctor Wittmeyer smiled. "Thank you," she said.
"No need," Maria said. "I like to fancy myself an old-fashioned investigative reporter, sometimes. If I find something out that I can tell you, I will."
"I can ask no more than that." She got up from her chair. "Let me show you out," she said.

On the way back to the airport Maria kept looking at the icon next to Iruwa's name in her phonebook and wondering how she was going to tell her what she'd just heard. Hi, you're not human? Want to hear something funny? I'm a closer relative to a jellyfish than to you!
She stared at the back of the cab driver's head, sighed and told her system to contact Iruwa's. A few seconds later, the face of the famous visual designer appeared in her vision.
"Miss du Lac," she said. "I suppose you have news for me?"
"I really would prefer it if you called me by my first name," Maria said. "When you use my surname like that it makes me wonder how I should address you."
Iruwa smiled. "The benefits of not having a surname," she said. "Much less doubt."
"At least as long as you're famous."
"At least then."
Maria looked out at the early summer green of the German countryside. Iruwa's face stayed at it's place in her vision and overlaid the fields and cows instead of the back of the driver's seat.
"Anyway, I have something to tell you," she said. "Something pretty weird."
"I'm all ears," Iruwa said. "Electronic ears, granted, but still."
"I don't want to say it in public," Maria said. "Or over the net, to be honest. I don't doubt that your systems are adequately protected against anything, but I'm using a lightweight portable system and it doesn't have the processing power to be entirely safe from dedicated eavesdroppers. Would it be possible for me to come to you?"
Iruwa frowned. "Not really," she said. "We're just setting up in Rome, and after the concert tonight we'll be tearing it all down again in order to move it to Egypt. It would be better if I came to visit you. My staff can tear down the systems by themselves, so I can be gone for a day or so before we build it all up again. Where will you be tomorrow?"
"I'm in Germany," Maria said. "On my way to Schonefeld airport. I'll get a room there and wait for you."
"I'll be there tomorrow," Iruwa said. "Until then."
Her face faded away, and Maria's system noted that the connection had been severed. She spent the rest of the trip wondering what she'd stumbled into.

It was late when Richard left the Pigsty, and he was drunk enough to wobble quite a bit as he walked. It had been a good evening. He still had money left from this week's Social Security payment, and he'd won some more playing darts, so he'd been able to drink just about as much as he wanted to. Which was quite a bit, usually. Not that the danish piss they served at the Pigsty tasted particularly good, but it sure made you drunk. And that was the point of the exercise. But the guys had to get home at a reasonable hour and in a reasonable state in order to be able to get up and go to their jobs the next day, so for the last hour or two Richard had been drinking alone. Until it got too dull and he decided to go home and view a porn channel. There were plenty of free ones, as long as you could stand the ads, and he was too drunk to mind ads. Yet another point in favour of being drunk.
At the sixth or seventh try he managed to get his key into the ancient mechanical lock and got the door open. He stumbled through and dropped his coat on the floor, cursing the stupid fucking weather in the stupid fucking country he lived in. Late May should be warm enough that one shouldn't need a coat!
"So this is what you do with your life?" a voice he didn't know said from inside his flat.
"What?" he said. "Who the fuck are you?"
He looked around and saw someone sitting in his favourite armchair. A man, looking a bit older than Richard himself, with short dark hair and dressed in a dark leather jacket, blue jeans and combat boots.
"Captain Jack said that you'd help us," he said, "so I came here to give you instructions and some equipment. But all I see is a hopeless drunken sod who I wouldn't trust to handle a pocket knife."
Richard put a hand to the wall, trying his best to appear steady.
"Captain Jack?" he said. "You're from Captain Jack?"
"Not unless you give me a reason to change my mind in the next couple of seconds, mate."
He closed his eyes and tried to think. Damn that he'd chose today of all days to get stinking drunk!
"I'm sorry," he said. "But since I haven't got a job I usually don't have a reason to stay sober."
The man got up from the armchair and approached Richard.
"If I tell you stuff tonight, do you think you'll remember it tomorrow?" he said.
Richard nodded furiously. "Yeah, sure!" he said. "Just let me get a cup of coffee first."
He wobbled into the small kitchen and shoved a pile of unwashed dishes aside so he could reach the coffee maker. Concentrating hard, he managed to load it with water and coffee and turn it on. Soon the smell of brewing coffee filled the room.
"This the best flat you could get?" the man asked.
Richard looked daggers at him. He didn't like his flat, but as long as he refused to work it was the best he was going to get.
"They don't come much better in the camps," he said. "The fancy places are all outside and full of Swedes."
He turned on the tap and quickly washed a couple of mugs.
"I hop you don't take milk," he said, "because I haven't got any."
"That's all right," the man said. "I take black as a nigger bitch's arse. And you can call me Michael, by the way."
A huge weight fell from Richard's heart. If he said his name he almost certainly wasn't about to reject Richard and leave to find someone better. He poured the coffee.
"Here," he said as he handed over a steaming mug. "It's pretty good, considering."
Michael took the mug and sipped the coffee. He nodded appreciatively. "Yeah, it is," he said. "Do you think you can stay away from stronger stuff than this for, oh, about 48 hours?"
Richard frowned. "Yeah, of course I can, but why... Oh!"
Realization suddenly struck him. "That soon?" he said. "I thought I'd have to wait a lot longer to do something."
Michael shook his head. "The shorter the lead time, the less time they get to find out about it and stop it. You'll do your bit tomorrow night."
Richard sipped at his coffee. Shit. Tomorrow. That was a lot sooner than he or the guys had expected. "What do you want us to do?"
"Jack said that you know your way around Kastrup. That right?"
"Yeah," Richard said. "Worked there for a bit, picking up trash. Bloody boring work, but I got to see most of the stuff above ground."
"Good," Michael said. "So you think you could find the cable ditch running from the air control tower to the main terminal?"
"Sure. Piece of cake. That thing trapped lots of crap that blew in from the runways."
Michael smiled. "Great," he said. He took a black lump of material about the size of a cricket ball from his pocket. "Have you ever heard about a vampire tap?" he said.

Orphea stood stooped in the low walkways under the stage covering the Coliseum floor. It was a lot less tidy and well-designed than she was used to, but she could forgive that considering that the place was only thirteen years shy of its two-thousandth birthday. A heck of a long time to still stand, especially considering that it didn't exactly stand far away from human events. An even longer time to still be in use, even if it was only rarely these days. The restoration work done in the 2020s had made it a lot more able to handle people, but the Italian government was still very careful with its historic monuments. It had taken Orphea's manager a long time to get her permission to hold a concert here, even longer than it had taken him to get her permission for the Hagia Sophia. But in the end he'd managed it. As popular events went, an Orphea concert was pretty much as good as it got, and this was an election year in Italy. They'd asked that she make the concert free for the real-life audience and only charge for the webcast. She'd agreed, and thrown in a certain amount of free food and drink for the visitors. Money hadn't been of any importance to her for many years, and it amused her in an ironic sort of way to know that she was providing bread and circuses to the people of Rome.
"Audio is go," she heard Iruwa's voice say through the transducer in her jawbone. "Cameras are go. Hologram projectors are go. PA processors are go."
Alexandra's voice replaced Iruwa's. "Security is go," she said. "Audience is go."
"Give me a second," Orphea said. "I can't move very fast in this place. The ancient romans were short bastards."
"Holding at thirty seconds," Iruwa said. "We proceed at Orphea's mark."
She made her way forward to the circular platform that would rise up through the floor with her on it. The edge of it was covered with hologram projectors and a few monitor PA processors to give her an idea of what the audience was hearing while she sang. She went down on one knee in the center of the platform, bowed her head and stretched her arms up and forward as if presenting a gift to someone important.
"Mark," she said.
"Thirty seconds to connection," a machine voice said. "Twenty."
The platform shook as the motors engaged. She heard the lid covering the hole where she sat start sliding aside.
"Ten."
The platform was rising and the hologram projectors had started to glow. There was a slight hiss as the monitor PA engaged.
The platform stopped with a slight jerk.
"Connection," the machine voice said.
For a few moments, she stayed as she were. She drew a deep breath, opened her mouth and started singing. For the first song, she'd chosen one that begun slowly and built steadily in volume, pace and complexity. As the music built, she unfurled into a standing position and holograms blossomed around her. Huge stylized versions of the faces of the roman gods floated in the air above her, moving their mouths in sync with her own. She pushed her voice into the places that nobody else in the entire world could reach, and if things worked as she expected it would look and sound to the audience as if the gods themselves were singing to them.
For this occasion, the Coliseum was holding as much people as it has originally been built for, and every seat was occupied. A hundred thousand people, all in all. A hundred thousand listening, breathing, loving humans, all focused on one tall and angular woman standing at the center of it all.
It was one thing to see huge numbers of listeners in the net statistics, and another one altogether to actually see a hundred thousand people having come to hear her sing. It was a fantastic, intoxicating feeling. Singing live was a better rush than any drug she'd ever tried, and she'd never sang to a larger live audience than tonight.
The song of singing gods came to an end and without pause she changed over to one that somehow brought up a vision of endless columns of marching soldiers. The center of platform she was standing on rose even higher, carrying her with it. The holographs played their tricks, and she was a God-Empress standing before a vast army of worshipful soldiers about to march out into the world and conquer it in her name. She sang the joy of surrendering one's will to the greater force, she sang of the hideous strength of the fanatic, and she sang of the ruin that the insane despot can bring to a people.
She forgot where she was. She forgot who she was. She forgot what she was doing. The person that was Orphea vanished under the adoring gaze of her hundred thousand admirers, and all that remained was a blessed thing that transmitted visions from the realms of dream to the waking world. One by one, she silenced her backing instruments. The drums and the flutes and the guitars and the pianos and the computers and the trumpets and the violins and the basses that accompanied her, one by one she ordered them into silence and replaced them with ever more twists of her voice. Moving fingers and eyes to control the PA processors, she made them help her form the sounds of her throat into the symphony she wanted the audience to hear. Her eyes was open, but she was too focused on sound to see anything. Somewhere in the back of her head she knew that she'd left the planned concert far behind, that she was well into uncharted territory. It didn't matter. Only the song mattered, and the song was better and more glorious than ever.
She sang, and she could feel the audience react to her song. Closing her eyes and reaching out some other, unknown sense she probed the listeners and bent them to her will. She sang them to laughter. She sang them to tears. She sang them love and fear and happiness and dread and calm and elation and hopelessness and perfect calm. She sang, and sang, and sang, until finally she felt her knees buckle under her and a huge darkness swallowed her whole.

Sunday, 29 May 2067

"Are you awake?"
It took Orphea a few moments to figure out what the sounds meant.
"I think so," she said when she'd succeeded.
The bed moved as a weight laid down next to her. She opened her eyes and turned her head to see who it was. It was Iruwa. Of course. Who else would be in their bed?
"That was a pretty heavy concert last night," Iruwa said. "Johann told me off for not getting you to quit much earlier, but to be honest I was completely lost in creating the visuals to go with your songs. Mundane things like exhaustion were so far from my mind they might as well have been on Mars."
Orphea grimaced. "Yeah, we went pretty far off track last night, didn't we?"
"Sure did," Iruwa said. "Although I don't mind it at all. I liked where we ended up a lot. It was a bit like when I'm dreaming, only I was awake and you were there with me."
She put her head down and snuggled up close to Orphea. "And you should see the reviews," she said. "I thought the ones after Istanbul were good, but they were nothing to this. They're pretty much proclaiming you the goddess of music, or saying that you're the reincarnation of every famous musician that ever lived all at once."
Orphea squirmed an arm around Iruwa so she could hold her properly. They never really got the time to just enjoy each other's physical presence while they were on tour, so she wanted to take the chance when it presented itself.
"And none of them mention you, I bet."
"A few did, actually," Iruwa said. "I don't know what I think about that. I like not being famous."
The bedroom was luxurious in the particularly soulless way of high-end hotels everywhere. It was huge, and most of the things in it were covered either with expensive fabrics, crystal or gold. The bedsheets were silk, which she found too smooth and slippery to be entirely comfortable. Daylight stole in around the edges of the drapes covering the windows, and a smell of coffee and fried bacon wafted in from outside the room.
"We don't really have anything to do today, do we?" Orphea said. "No interviews or anything?"
"No," Iruwa said. "No interviews or anything. But I'll be leaving for Berlin in about an hour."
"Berlin?" Orphea said. "What are you going there for? We're headed for Egypt next."
Iruwa stroked Orphea's hip and thigh, making Orphea hope that they had time to make love before they had to part for the day.
"The du Lac woman called. You remember her, from the interview after the Hagia Sophia concert?"
"I remember," Orphea said. She turned her head and kissed Iruwa's forehead. "The one who asked about our childhoods."
"I sent her tissue samples from us," Iruwa said. "She had them analyzed in Germany. She wants to talk about the results, but not over the net."
Orphea pulled her head back so she could look Iruwa in the eyes.
"What? Why would she need to be that paranoid?" she said.
Iruwa looked back at her with her gentle brown eyes.
"Intriguing, isn't it?" she said. "Since we have the day off, I thought I'd go see her and talk about it."
Orphea turned over on the side and pulled Iruwa close, so their breasts flattened against each other and their breaths mingled.
"And you have to leave in an hour?" she said.
"Or so," Iruwa said, one of her hands sliding down and squeezing one of Orphea's buttocks. "I'm taking our plane."
"Well," Orphea said, "then you have about an hour to make love to me."
She moved her head forward to cover the last little distance that separated her lips from Iruwa's, and kissed her.

Ted borrowed his dad's car. John brought a pair of brass knuckles he'd made in shop class when they were all still at school, and a couple of solid pieces of steel pipe with duct tape grips. Anders brought a box of surgical masks to hide their faces with.
Richard brought the vampire tap and a set of fake ID cards that Michael had given him. The fake IDs were, supposedly, enough to get them onto the grounds of the airport, but not enough to get them into anywhere really interesting. Safest that way, Michael had said, they watch the trusted employees even harder than the public at large. But nobody cares about the guys picking up trash on the lawns.
They piled themselves into Ted's dad's car and took the bridge over to the Danish side of the strait. The traffic was heavy for a Sunday, which they guessed was because the holiday season was starting. Or maybe just a lot of Swedes were taking advantage of the nice weather to visit the famous Copenhagen Tivoli.
Once over the bridge, they turn onto smaller roads that eventually led them to a back entrance to the airport grounds meant only for employees. The sun was still high in the sky.
"So what do we do now?" John asked. "Do we just sit here until it gets dark?"
The entrance was a big gate in the fence surrounding the airport. Both the fence and the gate was topped with coiled razorwire, and small signs at regular intervals said that the whole thing was sigged with detectors and might carry high voltage at any given time. In the gate there was a turnstile with a card reader next to it.
"Michael said to not put the tap in place until it's nearly dark," Richard said. He'd also been very specific about them not getting drunk on the way to the airport, but Richard didn't feel like sharing that part.
"If we just sit here in the car for several hours," Ted said, "it's going to look mighty suspicious."
"Have you got a better idea?" Richard said.
"What does that thing do, anyway?" Anders asked. "Placing a lump of stuff on a cable hardly seems like it'd be much help to the movement."
"Let's go get something to eat," Ted said. "I don't know about you guys, but the clandestine stuff always gets me hungry."
He started the car and turned it around, heading back the way they'd come.
"It's a vampire tap," Richard said. "It's a very complex piece of equipment, not just a lump of stuff."
"I bet you don't even know what a vampire tap is," John said. "You just use the name to sound important."
"You use it to create bridge between two fiber connections," Ted said. "I read about them once. Pretty advanced stuff. Military. Uses nanotech."
"Nanotech?!" Anders exclaimed. "But that's what destroyed England! Burn the fucking thing!"
Richard hadn't known it used nanotech. If he had, no way he would've just kept it in his pocket like he did now. He was sorely tempted to throw it out the car window.
"Don't worry," Ted said. "It's safe. Most nanotech is, really, and it's used for one hell of a lot of things. It's just that nobody talks about it much any more."
"So the stuff in this thing isn't going to like, eat Denmark?"
"Nah," Ted said as he turned off the main road, following a sign stating that food was to be had in two kilometers. "The stuff in there can't replicate. It can't even function outside of its container. Break it open and all the little nanobots die."
"But what does it do?" Anders asked again.
Ted maneuvered the car into a free parking space in front of the pizza place. "It creates a bridge, as I said. Let's you get signals from one fiber to another," he said. He turned the ignition off and got out of the car. The others followed.
"So how does that help Eng...," Anders started to say, but he was interrupted by Richard kicking him in the shin.
"Don't say that name out loud, stupid," Richard said. "They've got listeners all over public places just to pick that sort of thing up."
They got into the almost empty restaurant, sat down at a table and ordered from the menu.
"I'm just guessing here, right?" Ted said. "But what I think they want the thing there for is to get a connection between an isolated network and a public one. We put the thing over the cables for an isolated high-security network and an ordinary public one and, presto, they can get into the high-security net through the public one."
"That's fucking brilliant!" John said.
"No, it's standard military procedure," Ted said. "Although normally it