Yet, at the last moment, Hacker revised his priorities again.
I’ll call Lacey soon. She’s probably worried sick. But a few minutes won’t make much difference.
First, there are other urgent matters.
He was about to call his manager and broker-before they had a chance to declare him dead and start liquidating his commercial empire. But then Hacker stopped. Even that was doing stuff in the wrong order.
He looked back up the hall, where splashes could be seen, rising from the pool, and an occasional leaping gray form. The Tribe. The friends who had saved his life.
Hacker paused a second or two longer. Then he keyed the private access code for his attorney, hoping to get through, despite the lack of phone-ident.
After a lengthy ring, Gloria Harrigan answered, but at first she sounded brusque, distracted.
“Who the hell is this and could you call back later? The whole world is watching TV right now.”
He blinked in surprise at her non sequitur. The whole world was what? He rapped his jaw, in case the implant had malfunctioned. Concentrating, Hacker spoke aloud. Even though he could not hear air-carried sounds, he could feel his larynx buzz and his mouth shaped sounds.
“Gloria-”
“Anyway, this hi-pri line is set aside for the search and rescue. So if it doesn’t have to do with-”
“Gloria…” He spoke carefully, as if trying to recall a disused skill. “You can call off the search… It’s me… Hacker Sander.”
There was a long pause. Then a shriek that carried up his mandible to resonate his skull.
“Hacker? Is that really you?”
He only got in two more words, before the shouting recommenced and would not stop for a while. Gloria kept punctuating joyful yells-calling others to gather around-with outright sobs. “This is goddam more important than any fucking aliens!” she hollered.
It had a strange effect on Hacker, almost making him feel remiss, embarrassed over having caused such emotion and inconvenience. Another novel sensation. I didn’t know anybody liked me that much, he mused.
At the same time, he also wondered.
Aliens?
Carrying the phone back to the dome’s atrium, he arrived in time to witness the water polo game conclude in a frothy finale. Dolphins pirouetted and squawked, either celebrating or protesting the score… as Gloria finally calmed enough to confirm that… yes… they now had his location pinned down… and help was on the way. About an hour… no, make that forty minutes, she revised in a hurried update, as a tourist minisub offered to divert from a nearby beach resort for a reasonable fee.
“That’s fine…,” Hacker said, though with a strange flurry of mixed feelings. “During that time, though… right after you phone my mother with the news… there’s something… I want you to do for me.”
He then gave Gloria the World Mesh codes for Project Uplift, and asked her to find out everything about it, including the current disposition of assets and technology-and how to contact the experts whose work had been interrupted here.
When Gloria asked him why, he started to reply.
“I think… I’ve got a new…”
Hacker stopped there, having almost said the word hobby. But suddenly he realized-he had never felt quite this way about anything before. Not even the exhilaration of playboy rocketry.
For the first time he burned with real ambition. Something that seemed worth fighting for.
In the pool, several members of the Tribe were now busy winding their precious net around the torso of the biggest male, preparing to go foraging again. Hacker overheard them gossiping as they worked, and chuckled when he understood one of their crude jokes. A good natured jibe at his expense.
Well, a sense of humor is a good start. Our civilization could use more of that.
“I think-” he resumed telling his lawyer.
“I think I know what I want to do with my life.”
Hello? Is anyone there? I’m counting a handful-just half a mega or so. Well, four hundred and thirty thousand participants will have to suffice. You are the types who would rather do than passively stare at feed from the Artifact Conference! We posse members sniff the edges. So let’s follow some scents.
Hey, despite talk of aliens, the regular news cycle goes on, with ever-rising tensions about water, energy, food ’n’ phosphorus, or rising seas… or else more squabbles between guild and civitas and manse. Let’s have a capsule update from my favorite summarizer, Walter:
* Syr-Isra-Pal has threatened to ramp up coolwar if Turkey keeps sequestering snowmelt in the Great Anatolia Reservoir. Downstream neighbors blame this for worsening the Near Eastern Drought, plus an upsurge in quake activity across the Levant.
* Rumors suggest several reffer cabals have agreed on a joint, renewed assault on the “decadent institutions of an obsolete, so-called Enlightenment.” Most such tales are generated by peevish ai-bots, unleashed years ago by long-dead nihilists. But ever since the failed D.C. zeppelin attack, security anticipators are taking them all seriously, kicking their prefrontals into overdrive.
* A recent spate of small-scale earth tremors, all over the world, has accompanied strange reports of underground or underwater detonations, all reaching a crescendo in the last few hours. Though some fret nervously about terr or reff attacks, a new correlo-study shows that few events are near human habitations. Most seem to be happening far out to sea.
* And the top-linked thread: many reports in the last few hours of glimmering lights, bursting from chunks of formerly quiescent stone. The most notorious episode took place half a day ago at Islam’s holiest shrine. Others include a piece of Chinese imperial jewelry in the Taipei Museum and a paving stone in Hyderabad. Now, scientific instruments laid out to watch scintillations on the Antarctic Plateau, report at least twenty faint, localized glimmers, deep within the ice sheet, implying there might be hundreds more beyond sensor range.
Thank you, Walter. Well? Which of those stories set you all a-quiver with excitement? We want something that regular media is likely to screw up! That’ll benefit from half a million baying bloodhounds.
What’s that? Okay, I expected this. Several throngs of you are intrigued by those stones that started lighting up, around the world. The obvious guess-it’s
How about this alternative some of you suggested? What if that recent flurry of micro-quakes is somehow related? They’ve been at the lower end of detection range and almost hidden by normal temblor background. So far, it’s all been largely dismissed as “normal fluctuations.” But does anyone else see something strange about the data?
Yep, that’s a good prelimalysis, Amsci Genovese. The energy profile really does stand out. Most of the extra quakes seem to occur in a narrow range of power release. Down around a sixtieth of a Richter. Far too narrow to be natural.
And yes, Insight-filled Hmong Science Collective, I see your point-how most of these events have the sonic shape of explosive detonations, and not natural fault slips! Will someone please probe security channels, in case the protector caste thinks these are terr or reff attacks? And why no damage reports? You’ll lead that effort, Anne Dobson of Cape Town?