“I need you,” she said.
“For?”
“Lear wants the computer servers in the Tulip destroyed.”
“They’ll have backups.”
She shook her head. “We don’t think so. They’re so paranoid they keep several systems cut off from one another. We’ve had access to many of their networks, but some of their computers are entirely unreachable from the outside. No Internet links at all. No phone lines. They might as well be something out of the 1980s.”
He nodded, accepting this as a likely fact. “It’s a large building. They are well guarded. This is not a movie; I could not do it alone, or do it even with your people.”
“How could you do it?”
“By destroying the entire building.”
She stared at him. He watched her eyes. Interesting. Her pupils had expanded. A pleasure reaction. But then her eyes had narrowed, and she had drawn away. Of course: she was conflicted.
“Destroying …”
“There will be natural gas pipelines in the basement. If you were to fill some of the sublevels with that gas and ignite a spark, it would very likely collapse the entire structure.”
“Like …”
“Like what, Sadie?” He knew like what. He had a pretty good idea what was being done to her. He could guess Lear’s direction. But he wanted Sadie to say it.
“Like the World Trade Center. Like 9/11.”
“Yes,” Caligula said. “We could obliterate the building itself. It would kill everyone inside. Which is what you would want, Sadie. You would want all the scientists in there to die. It would set back nanobot technology several years at least. It would be the practical end of Armstrong Fancy Gifts. By the time they recovered, someone else would have developed the same capacity. Someone perhaps a bit less … visionary?”
There was a TV on over the bar. It showed what every screen in the world was showing: the Nobel madness. Cut to the American president’s suicide. Back to the Nobel madness. Cut to the Brazilian president.
Plath was shaking her head. “No.”
“If you destroy the servers and let the scientists walk away—”
“It’s not just scientists in that building. There are regular people. Clerks and janitors and people who just answer the phones.” She was pleading with him to find a different answer.
“It would be mass murder. It would make you one of the greatest terrorists in history.” He watched her eyes. She was repelled. She was sickened. But she was not surprised. So that idea had definitely already occurred to her.
And she did not get up and walk away.
Jesus Christ, Caligula thought, this is the new way, the new reality. Sixteen-year-old girls could be made into terrorists. They could be wired for mass murder.
Plath, for her part, could see it in her imagination. She could see that phallic monstrosity of a building collapsing into the fire that raged at its base.
My God, she thought, it could be done.
“We can’t do that,” she said. To emphasize her point, she reached most of the way across the table and pounded it with her index finger. “There have to be limits. There’s a line.”
“Do there? Is there?”
The table was lacquered wood. To Keats’s biot eyes, it was a bit like an aerial map of someplace like Afghanistan. There were steep, deep valleys below formed by the grain of the wood. But filling in those valleys was the smooth lacquer finish. The result was a feeling like skimming along over mountains, flying at the height of the peaks.
The great problem with biots moving over large distances—distances measured in centimeters or meters rather than millimeters—was finding your way. A biot’s view of the macro world was fuzzy and distorted.
Caligula felt safe on his side of the table. There were two feet separating his arm, resting on the edge of the table, from Plath’s arm on the opposite side. A long run for a biot, and worse, a hard target to keep track of. Then there was the wall of water left by Caligula’s deliberate dragging of his beer.
But Plath, too, had been playing games with the tabletop. Seemingly fidgeting pensively, Plath had picked up the saltshaker, picked at some dried-on food, then put it down on the table.
She put it down toward the far left end of Caligula’s water obstacle.
From the point of view of Keat’s biot the saltshaker was the Tower of Babel and the Empire State Building all rolled into one. He saw it as a distant shape, a feature of the landscape like some impossibly symmetrical mountain.
He saw it from there. But he also saw it through the tap he’d placed on Plath’s eye using his other biot. One of Plath’s own biots was standing beside him there. Plath made her biot tap Keats’s creature and make a gesture meant to convey going around the saltshaker. Biots could not speak to each other, so this was a primitive but effective way to convey basic signals.
On the table surface Keats’s other biot rolled farther left, moving at top speed, racing to get around the saltshaker and avoid being slowed by the water.
Had Caligula noticed? That would be the question.
Keats cleared the saltshaker tower. He spotted the wall of water off to his right but was well clear of it. Ahead, far in the distance, was a wall of indeterminate color.
Keats’s first biot, K1—the one inside Plath’s brain—turned awkwardly to Plath’s P2 and made a gesture using two claws meant to convey that he was closing in.
In the macro Plath was dragging the conversation out to give Keats time.