Myanmar trembled on the edge of chaos, beset by a multi-ethnic mix
of Karens, Kachins, and Shans in various political postures, all
fierce, all contemptuous of the central government. They fought
with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack
missile, and they only quit when they died.
A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the air.
Within seconds a silver swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge
rectangular wing loaded with a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came
low over the dark mass of forest. Its running lights flashing red
and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop above the field, wings
tilting to the perpendicular and engine sound dropping into the
bass. Its spots picked out a ten-meter circle of white light that
the aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over
Gonzales in a whirlwind. The inverted fans' roar dropped to a
whisper, and with a creak the plane kneeled on its gear, placing
the cockpit almost on the ground. Gonzales picked up his bags and
walked toward the plane. A ladder unfolded with a hydraulic hiss,
and Gonzales stepped up and into the plane's bubble.
"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked. His multi-function
flight glasses were tilted back on his forehead, where their
mirrored ovoid lenses made a blank second pair of eyes; a thin
strand of black fiberoptic cable trailed from their rim. Beneath
the glasses, his thin face was brown and seamedno cosmetic work
for this guy, Gonzales thought. The man wore a throwaway
"tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy blue
background.
"That's me," Gonzales said. He gestured with the shock-case
in his right hand, and the pilot toggled a switch that opened the
luggage locker. Gonzales put his bags into the steel compartment
and watched as the safety net pulled tight against the bags and
the compartment door closed. He took a seat in the first of eight
empty rows behind the pilot. Cushions sighed beneath him, and
from the seatback in front of him a feminine voice said, "You
should engage your harness. If you need instructions, please say
so now."
Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where shoulder
and lap belts connected, then stretched against the harness,
feeling the sweat dry on his skin in the plane's cool interior.
"Thank you," said the voice.
The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control as
the plane lifted into twilight over the city. The soft white glow
from the dome light vanished, then there were only the last
moments of orange sunlight coming through the bubble.
The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and shadow,
with the temple and pagoda spires reaching up toward the light,
white stucco and gold tinted red and orange.
"Man, that's a beautiful sight," the pilot said.
"You're right," Gonzales said. It was, but he'd seen it
before, and besides, it had already been a long day.
The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked left
and headed south along the river. Gonzales lay back in his seat
and tried to relax.
They flew above black water, following the Irrawady River
until they crossed an international flyway to Bangkok. Dozing in
the interior darkness, Gonzales was almost asleep when he heard
the pilot say, "Shit, somebody's here. Partisan attack group,
probablyno recognition codes. Must be flying ultralightsour
radar didn't see them. We've got an image now, though."
"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.
"Just coming for a look. They don't bother foreign
charters." And he pointed to their transponder message flashing
above the primary displays:
THIS INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY.
IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE
UNDER U.N. ACT OF 2020.
It would keep on repeating until they crossed into Thai airspace.
The flight computer display lit bright red with COLLISION
WARNING, and a Klaxon howl filled the plane's interior. The
pilot said, "Fuck, they launched!" The swing-wing's turbines
screamed full out as the plane's computer took command, and the
pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding, just hanging on.
Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and fell,
corkscrewed, looped, climbed againsmart metal fish evading fiery
harpoons. Explosions blossomed in the dark, quick asymmetrical
bursts of flame followed immediately by hard thumping sounds and
shock waves that knocked the swing-wing as it followed its chaotic
path through the night.
Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged around
it, its pilot in blazing outlinea stick figure with arms thrown
to the sky in the instant before pilot and aircraft disintegrated
in flame.
Their own flight went steady and level, and control returned
to the pilot's yoke. Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as the
night returned to blackness. "Collision averted," the plane's
computer said. "Time in red zone, six point eight nine seconds."
"What the hell?" Gonzales said. "What happened?"
"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.
Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of cold
air from the plane's air conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt.
He glanced down to his lap: no, he hadn't pissed himself.
Really, everything happened too quickly for him to get that
scared.
A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived in front
of them and circled in slow motion. Like the ultralights it was
cast in matte black, but with a massive fuselage. It turned a
slow barrel roll as it circled them, lazy predator looping fat,
slow prey, then turned on brilliant floods that played across
their canopy.
The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.
Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade;
behind the transparent shell Gonzales saw the mirror-visored
pilot, twin cables running from the base of his neck. The Loup
Garou's wings slid forward into reverse-sweep, and it stood on its
tail and disappeared.
Gonzales strained against his taut harness.
"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.
"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and shaking.
"What do you mean?"
"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice tight,
face red beneath the flight glasses' mirrors. "They set us up, the
pricks. They used us to troll for a guerrilla flight." The pilot
flipped up his glasses and stared with pointless intensity out the
cockpit window, as if he could see through the blackness. "And
waited," he said. "Waited till they had the whole flight." The
pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced Gonzales, his features
distorted into a mad and angry caricature of the man who had
welcomed Gonzales ninety minutes before. "Do you know how fucking
close we came?" he asked.
No, Gonzales shook his head. No.
"Milliseconds, man. Fucking milliseconds. Close enough to
touch," the pilot said. He swiveled his
seat to face forward, and
Gonzales heard its locking mechanism click as he settled back into
his own seat, fear and shame spraying a wild neurochemical mix
inside his brain
Gonzales had never felt things like this beforedeath down
his spine and up his gut, up his throat and nose, as close as his
skin; death with a bad smell burning, burning
2. Anything I Can Do to Help You
As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the stained
glass, and the room's interior went to gloom. Only monitor lights
remained lit, steady rows of green above flickering columns of
numbers on the light blue face of the monitor panel.
A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose, worked
slowly across the floor, nuzzled into the room's corners, then
left the room, its motion tentacles beneath it making a sound like
wind through dry grass.
#
The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through the
flight computer, then the swing-wing locked into the Bangkok
landing grid and began its slide down an invisible pipe. They
went to touchdown guided by electronic hands.
The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and said,
"I'll have to file a report on the attack. But you're luckyif
we had landed in Myanmar, government investigators would have been
on you like white on rice, and you could forget about leaving for
days, maybe weeks. You're okay now: by the time they process the
report and ask the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."
At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was spend
any time in Myanmar. "I'll get out as quickly as I can," he said.
Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing in
him like the onset of a dangerous drug. Trying to calm himself,
he thought, really, nothing happened, except you got the shit
scared out of you, that's all.
As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and went
to pick up his luggage from the open baggage hold. The pilot sat
watching as the plane went through its shutdown procedures.
Do something, Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic mount.
He pulled the memex's case out of the hold and said, "I want a
copy of your flight records."
"I can't do that."
"You can. I'm working with Internal Affairs, and I was
almost killed while flying in your aircraft."
"So was I, man."
"Indeed. But I need this data. Later, IA will go the full
official route and pick everything up, but I need it now. A quick
dump into my machine here, that's all it will take. I'll give you
authorization and receipt." Gonzales waited, keeping the pressure
on by his insistent gaze and posture.
The pilot said, "Okay, that ought to cover my ass."
Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat,
kneeled and opened the lid. "Are you recording?" he asked the
pilot.
The man nodded and said, "Always."
"That's what I thought. All right, then: for the record,
this is Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales, senior employee of
Internal Affairs Division, SenTrax. I am acquiring flight records
of this aircraft to assist in my investigation of certain events
that occurred during its most recent flight." He looked at the
pilot. "That should do it," he said.
He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it into
the access plug on the instrument panel. Lights flashed across
the panel as data began to spool into the quiescent memex. The
panel gonged softly to signal transfer was complete, and Gonzales
unplugged the lead and closed the case. "Thanks," he said to the
pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.
Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to himself,
hey, memex, got a surprise for you when you wake up. He felt much
better.
#
A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a
brightly-lit tunnel with baby blue plastic and plaster walls
marked with signs in half a dozen languages promising swift
retribution for vandalism. Red and green virus graffiti smeared
everything, signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages in
Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged with
dialogue balloons saying god knows what. A lone phrase in red
paint read in English, HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL FLOWER. Shattered
boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays of multi-wire cable marked
where surveillance cameras had been.
Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow
portal to International Arrivals and Departures. Faceless
holoscan robotsdark, wheeled cubes with carbon-fiber armor and
tentacles and spiked sensor antennasworked the crowd, antennas
swiveling.
All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and women:
Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai. They spread out
from Asia's "dragons," world centers of research and
manufacturing, taking their low margins and hard sell to Europe
and the Americas, where consumption had become a way of life.
Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he found them: cadres
armed with technical and scientific prowess and fueled by
persistent ambition.
They formed the steel core of much of the world's prosperity.
The United States and the dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis: the
didn't just roll over and die and take the prime North American
consumer market with it. Whether Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese,
Hong Kong Chinese-Canadiansthey bought some corporations and
merged with others, and Americans ended up working for General
Motors Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their
paychecks they bought Japanese memexes, Korean autos, Malaysian
robotics.
Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal, and
Gonzales stepped inside. An Egyptian guard in a white headdress,
blue-and-white checked headband, and gray U.N. drag cross-checked
his i.d., gave a quick, meaningless smileteeth white and perfect
under a black moustacheand waved him on.
Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a small
Thai woman in a brown uniform with indecipherable scrawls across
yellow badges. Her features were pleasant and impassive; she wore
her black hair pulled tightly back and held with a clear plastic
comb. She stood behind a gray metal table; on the floor next to
it was a two-meter high general purpose scanner, its controls,
screens, and read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood. Dirty
green walls wore erratically-spaced signs in a dozen languages,
detailing in small type the many categories of contraband.
The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair in
front of the table, then for him to put his clothes bag and cases
on the table.
She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed in
clear, neuter machine English: "Your person has been scanned and
cleared." She put the soft brown bag into the mouth of the
scanner, and
the machine vetted the bag with a quiet beep. The
woman slid it back to Gonzales.
She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open these
cases" as she pointed toward the two shock-cases. For each,
Gonzales screened the access panel with his left hand and tapped
in the entry codes with his right. The case lids lifted with a
soft sigh. Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic lights
flashed above rows of memory modules, heavy solids of black
plastic the size of a small safety deposit box.
Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data Declaration
Form the memex had filled out in Myanmar and transmitted to both
Myanmar and Thai governments. She looked into one of the cases
and pointed to a row of red-tagged and sealed memory modules.
The translator's words followed behind hers and said, "These
modules we must hold to verify that they contain no contraband
information."
"Myanmar customs did so. These are SenTrax corporate
records."
"Perhaps they are. We have not cleared them."
"If you wish, I will give you the access protocols. I have
nothing to hide, but the modules are important to my work."
She smiled. "I do not have proper equipment. They must be
examined by authorities in the city." The translator's tones
accurately reflected her lack of concern.
Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic
intransigence. For whatever occult reasons, this woman had
decided to fuck him around, and the harder he pushed, the worse
things would be. Give it up, then. He said, "I assume they will
be returned to me as soon as possible."
"Certainly. After careful examination. Though it is
unlikely that the examination can be completed before your
departure." She slid the case off her desk and to the floor
behind it. She was smiling again, a satisfied bureaucrat's smile.
She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a thing of
the past. She looked up to see him still standing there and said,
"How else can I help you?"
#
The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and as
it did, banks of low-watt incandescents lit up around the room's
perimeter, and the patterns of console lights went through a
series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was brought to a waking
state. The room's lights had been full up for an hour when the