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PDB Name: Gregory Benford - The Man Who W
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The man who wasn't there
Issue 2 of COSMOS, August 2005
by Gregory Benford
Illustration by Dan Blomberg
Years from now, the war on terror will be as high-tech as it is merciless.
Sentinels of Islam in a suburb of Paris. Around the firefly buzz hung a
weekday midnight silence.
"
Merde du jour
," he muttered. The Islamic Front could afford the butterflies. They fed on
endless money from the Saudis, part of the campaign to restore Islam to Europe
after the "regrettable" Christian Era.
Not restored by the sword, of course - they were hopeless on a battlefield.
But now, in softened consumerist Europe, their shopworn push-pull strategies
of terror and political demand still worked.
Islamic Front had plenty of followers in the immigrant masses. Their code of
strict secrecy - talk and you die, unpleasantly - made them potent. Against
them the French government deployed lawyers. Thinking of them, he spat on the
floor of the apartment he had rented.
"Ready, Ajax?" He got a coded blip in answer - OK.
Time to move. Nobody knew where the Front would strike next with bombs,
kidnappings, violent protests. Plus the usual rhetoric about being repressed.
Very effective.
They had made such claims back in Lyon, after a street brawl on Montclair
Boulevard. That was years ago, just as the Front started to use advanced
technologies. All cameras, videos, and other recording systems near Montclair
Boulevard had been blank, so the Front could claim that the fighting and the
car bomb that followed were the work of others. So it had gone now for years,
an arms race of technologies.
Unless, of course, the plans of the Islamic Front could be tapped. But that
meant getting in fast, silent, deadly. Tonight.
Inside the shadowy compound ahead, the Head was at work. Under the shield of
the looming mosque, he sent agents forth. He hid behind some holy title, but
French Intelligence had pinpointed the Head's movements, and now was the time
to strike. Remembering Montclair Boulevard.
Jean said softly, "Take out the microwaves."
Silently, the side teams did.
The details registered in his left eye, fed from his wearable computer. The
Front was using the minarets at the square's corners to mount their detectors.
Jean could see their snouts peeking out of the corbelled designs that wrapped
around each artfully curved dome atop the minarets. The surveillance cameras
were the usual IR motion-sensing type. But they were all connected to a
central security centre - the usual control-freak arrangement. They could be
defeated by intersecting their microwave links, saturating them, blowing the
electronics down the line.
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The security 'bots zoomed around the looming mosque like supersonic fireflies
it the cold air. Jean watched them with his infrared eyes as their tiny plumes
darted over the bare zone, blazing high-tech fireflies. They patrolled
silently over the wide plaza, watching for movement up and down the spectral
bands.
Jean ordered the teams to open up. Soundless beams lanced instantly into the
broad square of the
compound. They were aimed at receivers, jamming the link back to the security
centre that squatted down on the mosque's roof.
Simple, really - flood them with a high-power noise-spectrum signal. Their
cameras looked in all directions, their sensors wide open in the winter dark -
so they could be attacked from any direction, jammed from any angle. Thank God
- whichever version you liked, Jean thought - the Front hadn't thought to use
laser links: easier to find, but far harder to block or saturate.
"Their links are cut," came a whispered comm message from a nearby apartment,
diagonally across the square.
"Now the security 'bots."
Microwave pulses transfixed each of the fireflies darting around the mosque
square. Short bursts of microwaves flooded their diodes. The butterflies
abruptly tumbled to the cobblestones.
He rasped in a short breath and beeped Ajax into action. "Send in the silver,"
Jean said. His buddy Ajax was in a "silver" suit, though why it got that name
Jean never knew.
He switched to another spectrum, far beyond the visible, and searched for
Ajax. Silver suits were layers of optical fibres and sensors, ever-watchful in
all directions. "
There &
"
Ajax was a shifting blob of shimmering blue light in Jean's UV goggles, well
beyond what ordinary cameras could capture. Each square centimetre of the
silver suit took incoming light and routed it through chips, moving the image
- say, of a wall - around the body, on its way to the directly opposite side
of the suit. There another optical fibre emitted the same image in the same
direction. It was as though the ray had passed through Ajax's body. Any guard
looking toward the suit saw only the wall, as though nothing stood between
them.
The silver suit gave Ajax invisibility. Jean watched as the blob flexed and
moved across the Islamic
Front's broad open plaza, toward the shadowy, looming mosque. He reached the
first barrier, a cluster of concrete blocks, and just walked around them. Up
in the minarets Jean could see shifting shadows.
The guards had noticed that their gear was down.
"Here comes the glare," he sent on comm.
Searing light swept the compound. Spotlights on the minarets and the main
mosque sent blaring beams into every corner.
Good coverage, Jean noted. Not that it would do them any good.
Because Ajax was inside by now. "
I got it , " Ajax's voice whispered in his ears.
Meaning that he had used the tap-and-read gear strapped to his wrist. It sent
an electrically charged wave through a lock and used the rebound signal to
figure out the lock's codes. The information was buried in the door, so it had
to be user-reachable. Almost like a dog waiting for the right signal from its
master to go fetch a ball.
Well, Jean thought, the ball was in play now. "Follow on," he sent, and two
more silver suits started across the compound's square. They came in from the
sides. He could see them moving fast, wrinkled
UV ghosts.
The guards up in the minarets had their hands full, scanning the square and
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seeing nothing. Not even their motion-sensing cameras could see anything
through the smoky frequencies.
Shouts echoed across the square. Getting the reserve house guard up from their
beds.
Time to get serious. "Blow their electrical."
Microwave bursts curled through the chill air. They were vectored in on the
mosque's power source, where their standard external current hook-up met their
in-house generator. Throw the diodes there into confusion, blowing most of
them with 30 kilowatts of bursty microwaves, and kiss your amperes goodbye.
The spotlight glare vanished. The minor mosque lamps went too. Louder shouts.
Jean was already running out of the apartment building. His IR took in the
sputtering of random gunfire from the minarets. They were shooting blind,
chunking rounds into the cobblestones. It was easy to avoid their sweeps.
But that gave his side all the excuse they needed. Snipers in nearby buildings
took out the men in the minarets within seconds.
Halfway to the mosque, all fell silent. It was so still he could hear his own
whooshing breath.
The main gate was still locked but the side door yawned. He went through into
utter blackness, dark even to him in IR.
In his left eye he received Ajax's map of the interior. It was made by a
satellite, integrating the GPS
feedback from Ajax and figuring out the implied mosque geometry.
Here
- down a corridor and around a small high-roofed room like a chapel. Two men
moved aimlessly around the room, shouting to each other. One fumbled to turn
on a flashlight and Jean punched a button on his right wrist. It sent a
skreeee he heard in the microwave spectrum. That caused flash-over of the
filaments in flashlight bulbs. Sure enough, the tall, swarthy man could not
get the flash to light up. Jean slipped by him.
They were saying something in French but Jean didn't bother to figure out
their panicked sentences as they flung their arms about. He skirted around
them and down a hallway. More men there, armed but blind. The place reeked of
sour sweat and fear.
Ajax had left bootprints that showed up in crimson in his high-UV spectrum. He
followed them through a room crammed with computers, all dead, and down a long
corridor lined with AK-47s in steel wall racks.
Jean had his automatic out in his right hand but didn't intend to use it. The
flash would give the enemy momentary light.
"Found the Head," Ajax sent.
"How is he?"
"Holed up in a safe room, looks like."
"Blow it."
"Already set up to. Punched a hole through at the top, wide enough for the
percussion grenade."
"Go."
The boom rocked down the hallway and slapped Jean in the face. As he ran up to
it he could see the massive door was skewed on its hinges. Ajax was a shimmer
in Jean's goggles, planting a second charge.
They wedged it into place at the top hinge.
Angry shouts came from behind them. Another silversuit came up, firing
backward with a silenced pistol.
The shouts stopped.
They all trotted down the corridor and Ajax hit his hand-held trigger. The
blast was deafening. Fragments slammed into his carbon-fibre body armour.
Jean stepped through the yawning frame, a smell of something burnt curling up
into his nostrils. Six bodies were slammed against the walls, clad in kaftans.
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Blood trickled from their ears. He had to check three before he was sure that
they had the Head. The leathery face was contorted, grey foam oozed at the
mouth, and Jean reflected that this did not look like someone who had ordered
the deaths of thousands.
Now it was just a shrivelled little man.
The third silversuit was a surgeon, his ID patch glowing in the UV. Jean
pointed and the surgeon knelt beside the Head.
"Pretty bad," the surgeon said.
"Dead?"
"Not yet, but he may have injected himself." Up came the sleeves of the kaftan
and there was a plain needle mark. "Damn."
"How long have we got?" Jean asked.
"Maybe ten minutes."
Out came the tool kit and quick hands started to work.
It took only five minutes. Jean stared at the Head's face and thought about
Montclair Boulevard. Then they started out, carrying the body in a sling.
There was fighting outside but it died down. He monitored the operation on a
screen in his left eye lens, watching the support troops come in from all
sides. Green motes circled and lit on the mosque grounds -
choppers and ultralights. Some automatic-weapons fire rose to greet them. The
return fire lanced down, computer-directed by robot guns in mini-aircraft.
It had been easy enough to take out the Islamic Front guards. Just attacking
was simple, but experience showed that you got very little information that
way. Jean had learned from Lyon, where the Front had many tendrils. Yet they
had few ways to trace the Byzantine network that decades of immigrant
communities had established.
The Front had learned that they could keep no database without risking its
loss, so the only systematic memory was carried around in a few leader's
heads, encoded and rote memorised. So there was only one way to get it.
They hauled the body out on a stretcher. Halfway out the one thing they could
not defend against struck
Ajax - low tech.
Ajax had the lead. A small bomb cut through him. It may have been triggered to
his passage, armed sometime in the last few minutes.
Jean could see Ajax was gone. He used hand signs to get them moving again. He
put Ajax out of his mind for now, a habit he had learned since his brother's
death.
Army troops were securing the rest of the mosque, small arms rattling far down
the hallways. There were still no lights and everyone worked in the IR, moving
carefully.
The chopper waited just outside, squatting on the square with its ultra-rotors
purring. Jean went with the surgeon. There was a lot of medical gear in the
chopper bay and the specialists got the body into it while they lifted off.
Jean looked out across the square at the maze of running men and bodies, the
scene moving in an eerie hush except for the working machines.
Half an hour later he got to see the results. They had the entire top floor of
a hospital. Jean went into the bare white clean room wearing surgical scrubs
and stood at the end of the operating theatre. They were all quiet here, too.
The Head was talking, in its way. The body lay spread out, heart machine
chugging, the lungs heaving to the steady stroke of a breather-driver. The
Head was certainly dead but the cowl of leads blossoming from his shaved skull
was working. There were subtle ways to drive synapses, forcing memory to make
its connections.
On the screens around the operating theatre the data flowed like syrup.
Images, faces, cross-correlations like thickets of yellow-green vines. The
entire Islamic Front was there, layered and bunched in cords and streams.
"This guy was a real savant," a specialist said nearby. "Look how his memory
was organised - like a multilayered filing cabinet."
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"Too bad he used it to store such merde, " Jean said. He saw, in a flicker
across the screen, a scene retrieved from the Head's recollections, of the
farmers' market in Lyon. Off to the left were the maple trees of Montclair
Boulevard, where Jean's brother had been torn to shreds by the car bomb.
Swimming up from cloudy, static-filled memory came the scene before the
explosion, too, frozen in dead memory. The car, moving forward into the crowd,
seconds before the detonation. The point of view swivelled and there in the
room were the faces of the plotters, three bearded ones.
Jean memorised them in a moment. He turned and walked out, getting ready for
the next attack, knowing now who to look for and thinking again of Montclair
Boulevard.
Gregory Benford is a professor of astrophysics at the University of California
at Irvine, and a distinguished science fiction writer.
©2006 Luna Media Pty Ltd, all rights reserved
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