A flash, and all at once the image jolted, people cowered, covering their heads, and the glassy roofs around them shattered and flew like dust dispersed by breath. There was something in the sky, shrapnel and spider smoke strings raining down, while upward—upward was a column of cloud-smoke-chaos like a volcano’s eruption with no volcano, if you could imagine Vesuvius concealed by Griffincloth so all you see is the smoke and fire rising toward the clouds. Cars streaked through the black cloud-cone, smearing and striping it as a spoon stripes the frothy top of cappuccino, and as the footage tilted up I saw the top of the cone was rising, pillowy and round, and I thought the word ‘mushroom’ and felt like an idiot: a car crash. You read about the onboard reactors, how even cities don’t devour power like the engines that hurtle us a city-width in seconds, but you can’t let yourself think about it, antimatter live and close—if you think about it you could never ride a car again. The safety system directed the explosion upward, more power than all the sunshine that hits and feeds the surface of the Earth released in one spot, but upward, sparing the city with a merciful forethought that made engineers feel more like gods than ever. There was some downward shock wave, and a spot of black on the ground, burned roof and vaporized car indistinguishable, ash stirred by deadly blurs of more cars streaking the sky, too dense, too close, swarming like locusts, combing the smoke with their paths. There was a swarm of cars swirling in a shell over the city, and I understood now why we could not just flood Cielo de Pájaros with peacekeepers to protect the system all Earth needed. Had that crash been accidental? Two cars sweeping too close to each other? Or a calculated warning from whoever was controlling them? Or had a brave someone tried to force a car to land and help defend this heart which pumps the transit bloodstream of our sprawling world? The cameras turned downward again, showing fresh gunfire, advances through the wildflower trenches, closer to the vital central bash’house, and I understood why Earth needed its Anonymous. A conference call had waited blinking in the corner of my lenses, and I joined it.
« Maître ! » That word I understood, but not the rush of savage French that followed it. I had not called up video, but, even without a face to match, the grating wildness in Dominic’s voice carried a passion beyond fear. Begging?
“Do not get in a car, Dominic! You hear me? Do not get in a car!” This shout was Martin’s, punctuated by emphatic panting.
“Presume not to command thy prior!” Dominic’s English was more savage than their French.
“You won’t reach ad Dominum nostrum if you die, crash, or vanish!” Latin leaked out in Martin’s frenzy. “We’ve no idea who’s controlling the disappearances. We’ve no idea when every car on Earth might crash!”
Using French to exile Martin from the conversation is a traditional Dominic tactic. While they addressed the silent Prince, I skimmed what instahistory the news offered. The cars had rebelled, that’s how people described it, as if they were an ally that betrayed us. People had been getting into them as usual, taking off, but some never landed again. There had been no crash reports, no streaks of smoke, just certain people’s tracker signals went quiet in transit, and that was the last we heard of them. The first disappearances had been reported within two hours of the Olympic Closing Ceremony, but in the confusion after the Atlantis Strike, it took more hours for the word to spread. In those hours, thousands of Humanists had vanished mid-transit, possibly tens of thousands, and possibly not just Humanists. Vivien (whom I must get used to hearing called Humanist President Ancelet) had demanded that the Alliance forces holding the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers admit Humanist police to investigate what was happening to the transit system. Some Alliance spokesperson had refused and, worse, accused the new President of faking the disappearances as a pretext to seize the transit computers, and, worst, done so in savage, Hiveist language. Lesley Saneer had called for violence, and Cielo de Pájaros obeyed.
« Non. » Jehovah Mason’s calm made me feel better for the moment before I remembered They sound calm even with the world on fire. « Je te l’interdis. » (Context let me guess that one: “I forbid you.”)
« Maître! » Dominic’s voice cracked.
“Think, Dominic!” Martin pleaded. “We have no idea what enemy may control the cars now. The Hiveguard mob’s three trenches from the house, and they’ve advanced four in the last twenty minutes!”
“They seem to have a plan,” I said, my voice cracking as it broke through a film of sleep gunk. Six months ago I couldn’t have spotted pattern in the clumps of skirmish on the video, but Achilles put us Myrmidons through enough mock battles that something in my gut now knows the difference between planned and unplanned chaos. “Obvious it was going to get hit first, I guess. If I lived near Cielo de Pájaros, I’d have made a plan.”
“Exactly!” Martin cried. “The cars are controlled by an unknown enemy now, and a known enemy will have them in twenty minutes, and that’s if they don’t bring the whole system down. You have to face this, Dominic. Tōgenkyō’s an hour from Alexandria. Get in a car now and it may take you to the middle of the ocean, to capture, or to death, but it will not bring you ad Dominum, not in time!”
“An hour from Alexandria,” the Prince repeated in Their light but lifeless voice. “Untrue.”
Martin: “You’re on an island. You can take a boat.”
“A boat? Three weeks!” Dominic pronounced it like a curse.
The Prince again: “Three weeks. An hour. No. Distance divorces time now. They had been so long conjoined, these enemies; no more. Thou art not two hours from Me, My Dominic, nor two days, nor two weeks. Thou art half a world from Me; We know no longer what that means measured in time.”
I doubt the sounds that broke from Dominic were language, but it might have been some broken, whimpered French.
I fired up the Hâte Anonyme. I’m less comfortable than Vivien using this instant feed. I still think too much like an editor to feel anything but terror as billions watch my thoughts (and typos) appear character by character even as I write. But if any minutes in my tenure as Anonymous justified haste, these did:
<If you are more than 20 minutes’ flight from where you want tos pend the war, relax.> (By this point 11 million had cued up my feed) <You have no choice to make today.> (81 million.) <You can’t reach that destination before the cars fail, even if you try.> (303 million.) <Think instead about what friends, what shelter, and what helpful work you can find to do wherever you are now.> (Crossed the billion mark.) <That is your short-term.>
« Mon chiot Déguisé. » Even in crisis the Prince did not think to abbreviate the peculiar Title They use for me; time is so much less real for Them than words. “The inner peace you gift to your readers is only smaller than the outer war when measured by those who err by imagining that the mental sphere is bounded by the physical circumference of heart or brain.”
It took some moments for my mind to translate that to ‘Good job.’ It shook me. That’s the trouble with the Prince in daily life: They say everything too fully. Now I couldn’t just put the feed count in the corner of my lenses and pretend it had a couple fewer digits. My message had made even Dominic’s ragged breathing ease a little, but being reminded of my own power only made it scarier as I plunged on, watching my words etch themselves into the wide world: