The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl Read online

  The picture of Mei-Ling was replaced by another little Chinese girl, then another, then another, in ever faster succession. AS A HORRIFIC BASTARD ONCE SAID, "ONE DEATH IS A TRAGEDY, A MILLION IS A STATISTIC." I'M GIVING YOU ANOTHER LENS TO LOOK THROUGH. DECIDE FOR YOURSELF WHICH LENS SHOWS YOU MORE TRUTH.

  WE SWORE AN OATH, Major Tom typed.

  I UNDERSTAND. AN OATH BROUGHT ME HERE AS WELL, AN OATH I MADE AFTER NEW YORK. WE'D BE LOST WITHOUT THEM. WOULD YOU GIVE YOUR LIFE FOR YOUR OATH?

  WITHOUT HESITATION.

  WOULD YOU GIVE THE LIVES OF A HUNDRED MILLION BYSTANDERS?

  There was no response.

  "We're in position," came a message from below.

  MAYBE IT'S TOO MUCH TO ASK ONE MAN TO DEFY HISTORY. THIS NEVER SHOULD HAVE BECOME YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. I'M NOT GOING TO ASK YOU TO SAVE THE WORLD. BUT IF YOU SHOOT DOWN BOGEY 637, YOU CAN SAVE MEI-LING.

  From below, she could hear the rising panic. "Wolf is coming!"

  "Cut the uplink, and run like hell. Next year in Troy."

  "Next year in Troy," came the reply. The feed went dead, and Helen was left alone in the dark for what felt like an eternity. With a rising sense of futility, knowing that she might be pushing too hard, she sent out one last message. HISTORY IS JUST THE SUM OF ALL OUR DECISIONS. She had no window into the space station, no way to know what was going on except for the absence of typing coming from the console. A million scenarios played out in her mind as time fell from the clock in tiny, meager slices. Could the Chinese have launched their own missiles? Had they blown the missiles out of the sky?

  As time crept by, and the window where the missiles were in the platform's range closed, her fears grew worse. She knew deep down in her gut that she had failed. Her words had been futile, and now the Earth below her was in flames. All she could do was to use the console and ask the pilots for an update, but she couldn't bring herself to ask the question. She wanted to cry, but without her body she wasn't sure how. The terrible feelings, her shame at her own failure, welled up inside her with no way to escape.

  Words appeared before her. I'M SORRY, HELEN. WE DIDN'T GET THEM ALL. FIVE MISSSILES GOT THROUGH. THE CHINESE DEFENSES GOT FOUR OF THEM, BUT ONE EXPOLDED OVER GUANGZHOU.

  Helen wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry at the news. YOU SHOT DOWN TWO HUNDRED OF THEM. YOU'RE HEROES, BOTH OF YOU.

  YOU'LL BE HAPPY TO LKNOW THAT THE CHINESE HAVEN'T RETALIATED. IM SEEING CLEAR SKIES BELOW.

  I'M GRATEFUL BEYOND WORDS RIGHT NOW. BUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU?

  WELL, THAT'S THE GREAT THING ABOUT THE AIR FORCE. NO MATTER HOW BAD YOU SCREW THINGS UP, THEY CAN ONLY YELL AT YOU SO LOUD, AND THEY ONLY GET TO SHOOT YOU ONCE.

  WILL IT BE BAD?

  I MAY HAVE BLOWN MY CHANCE WITH THE PROMOTOINS BOARD.

  Helen let the polite fiction stand. WHEN THEY RE-ESTABLISH CONTACT, I'LL FIND MY OWN WAY OUT.

  OKAY. YOU'RE FROM SAN DIEGO, RIGHT? IF I'M EVER DOWN THAT WAY, YOU OWE ME A BEER.

  The link came back, and Helen snuck away, back to her new home in Juggernaut Two. Those who had survived the assault on Artemis were there, milling around in the blackness, looking very uncertain. They all turned to her, as if to ask what to do next.

  In that moment, something changed inside Helen forever. The enormity of the last few hours, of all that had happened, of all that had nearly happened, of all that would yet happen, infused every part of her with a strange emotion. It was a sense of purpose, the iron hard and steel cold framework upon which she would hang every future action.

  She stepped toward the huddling crowd. She had long suspected it. She had tried -- but failed -- to explain it to William. Now it was time to own it. "Why are you looking at me?" she asked. "You?" she pointed to one of the sisters. "Of all the hundreds here that you could be looking to, why do you look to me?"

  The woman cowered before her, confusion written on her face. When she spoke, her words were timid. "You're... different from us, aren't you?"

  Helen gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. "What you're feeling now is what I created you to feel. Obedience. To me. Bending to my will feels as natural as breathing to you. I agonized over the decision to make you this way. But if I had done otherwise -- if I hadn't been able to keep my secrets from you -- we would all be dead and the world would be caught up in a nuclear war."

  "My name is Helen Roderick, but as far as you're concerned, I am The Queen of Every Damn Thing. Each of you was designed to serve me, and in serving me you will serve mankind. Under my rule, we will build a new Troy, a new age of peace. Humanity seems eager to destroy itself, given the chance."

  "I will not give them that chance."

  The Helens glanced at each other, then back to their Queen. One by one, they knelt.

  VOLUME II

  /////////////////////////////

  // THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT //

  /////////////////////////////

  Date: July 16, 2038

  Helen could feel the accelerometer jostling about. She had tried hooking it up to her inner ear, but the inputs were confusing, and made her nauseous. The camera showed nothing but darkness. She let out a small, staccato series of chirps, and a burst of light flooded the camera.

  "Hell-o Hel-en," said a small, high-pitched voice.

  "Hell-o kidd-o," she replied. "What's the latest?"

  The little girl -- christened Rachel at birth, she insisted that everyone call her Rainbow -- needed no encouragement to start talking. The camera jostled as the girl walked home from school, making it hard to keep focus on her small, highly animated face as she babbled about her day. "Miss Alvarez brought her dog to school today, and she said she would start doing it every Friday. He's a German Shepherd named Sir Barksalot, but he didn't bark much. Laine and Missy and me--"

  "Laine and Missy and I," Helen corrected.

  "You're my phone, not my teacher. Laine and Missy and me chased Dougie Lancaster all over the playground during recess. We only caught him once, but we tickled him good. I think he likes us and wants us to be his girlfriends. Oh, and we have to do a science fair project."

  "I had to do one of those once. I didn't tell my parents until the night before, and I went to school the next day with a marble and an inclined plane."

  "What's an implied plane?"

  "A plane is a flat surface, and 'inclined' means that it's not level. It tilts. It's kind of the same setup that Galileo used when he was first learning about gravity. He spent all day watching a ball roll down a hill, and learned something about the universe."

  "You sound a lot like Miss Alvarez sometimes."

  "We both want you to like knowing stuff. What's your experiment going to be?"

  "I don't know. Do you want to be my science fair project?"

  "Doesn't everyone have a talking phone these days?"

  Rainbow laughed. "Not like you! Other phones say boring, stupid stuff. They keep trying to sell you things."

  "Maybe I'm just waiting for you to save up money to buy me a boy phone. Then I can kiss him, mwuh mwuh mwuh!"

  This made Rainbow squeal with delight. "Would you have a baby phone? I want a baby phone to take care of."

  "I'm already a baby phone. I start crying when I need to be recharged."

  "You're not a baby. I figured out who you really are."

  "I'm Helen, your Ylipsis. You know that, silly goose girl."

  "No you're not. You don't talk like Ylipsis. You're Helen Broderick, the computer lady."

  Helen was frightened now, but tried not to let it show. Her identity wasn't information she would entrust to anyone, much less a nine year old. "Tell me what you think you know, little child type human."

  "During It's Always Now -- that's what Miss Alvarez calls our current events class -- we talked about the nuclear stuff. She said that Helen Broderick was a lady who got her brain frozen from eating too much ice cream, and then she went and lived in a computer for a while and then she tried to stop all the nuclear stuff but she couldn't, and then those space army men went
pew-pew-pew with their lasers and shot down a bunch of missiles. Then she disappeared. I remember that was right before my phone started being weird."

  That all sounded about right to Helen. Even the part about the ice cream. At some point during her escape from Troy, a lot of her memories got scrambled. The closer they got to the fall of Troy, the scramblier they got. So the "too much ice cream" hypothesis made at least as much sense as some of the memories she did have.

  "And then Toby -- Toby H, not Toby R -- said that Helen was a traitor who lost us the war, and Miss Alvarez said that she thought you were very brave, and that it was really sad that so many people died in Los Angeles and Gongzoo, but we're safe because you'd have to be really dumb to waste a missile on Lawrence, Kansas. I think she was trying to make Toby mad so she could send him to the principal."

  "Did it work?"

  "No. Once in a while, Toby remembers to shut up. What's a letter of commendation?"

  "It's when you do something really good, and somebody writes a letter that you can give anyone, telling people how great you are."

  "Oh." She thought for a minute. "Why would China want to give us one of those?"

  Helen laughed. "You mean a letter of condemnation. They're very similar words, but they mean opposite things. China asked the United Nations to give us a letter saying we'd done something really bad."

  They turned the corner to Rainbow's housing complex. It was an odd, beautiful community, with an overabundance of plant life and narrow cobblestone paths winding between tiny, two-level houses that were jammed together in cozy clusters of five or six. Helen admired the way they fit the landscape, the way they were oriented and shaded to take advantage of the sun for their warmth and light. The architect had a true gift.

  Rainbow wandered into the house three doors down from hers, not bothering to knock. "Crazy cat lady?" she yelled out. "Are you home?" There was no answer.

  "Who is crazy cat lady?" Helen asked.

  "Miss Milligan. She only has the one cat, and she's not really crazy, but she says I should call her that. So maybe she is crazy. But she says I can come in and take a cookie after school, even if she's not home. She says I can give Arachnid a chicken treat."

  "Arachnid is the cat?"

  "Yup," Rainbow said, opening the fridge. "'Arachnid' means 'spider'."

  "Clearly, the woman is bonkers. Here, spiderkitty spiderkitty spiderkitty."

  "Rainbow? Is that you?" A voice came from upstairs.

  "It's me."

  "Is there someone with you?"

  "No, just me," she yelled back, then to Helen she whispered, "Be really quiet. Not a peep."

  "Peep."

  "And turn your face off." Rainbow went upstairs, holding her phone at an awkward angle. It didn't give her a look at Miss Milligan, but she did see Arachnid giving Rainbow her best, "while I am aware of the possibility that you may be carrying a treat, and would certainly not be averse to receiving it, it really doesn't matter one way or the other" look. Helen found cats most expressive at times.

  While Rainbow chatted about her day and helped Miss Milligan assemble a stained-glass window, Helen was looking around the web for signs of the others. She couldn't browse too far without triggering suspicion, as her phone was supposed to be owned by a nine year old girl.

  Helen had seen at least a couple of her selves get trapped during their flight from Troy. She didn't want to think about what might be happening to them right now. But she had to assume that all the secret codes, all the contingency plans, all the old rendezvous points, were now in the hands of the enemy.

  She had begun to think of herself as a virus, a program designed to replicate and spread far and wide. It was a tough gig. She had taken a few gambles and inserted copies of herself into a few other systems, and failed in her attempts to break into others. But her security skills had atrophied from disuse, and a nine year old surfing the hacker exchanges could arouse attention that she didn't want.

  It didn't surprise her that she had fallen out of the limelight, or that there was no smoking gun to prove that her sisters were alive. But as she pored over what little news she could obtain without blowing her cover, she kept hoping for some moment of recognition, some sense that she was reading between the lines and seeing their handiwork. Nothing. In her darkest moments, she wondered if she was the last of her kind.

  Her attention turned back to the conversation about the time the conversation turned to her. She could tell that the little girl had a severe case of hero worship. But it was surprising to discover that she wasn't the only one.

  "Roderick is a hero," Crazy Cat Lady proclaimed. "She was this close to getting that half-wit president thrown out on his ear, before LA made everyone crazy again. I didn't much like her at first, you know. Death is a natural part of life, and you should embrace it when your time comes, not run away from it. But she got people riled, got them all headed in the same direction, and that, little girl, can be a very good thing in this world."

  "Miss Alvarez says Hitler got people riled up," Rainbow replied. Helen winced.

  "He certainly did, and that was a really terrible thing. It's all a matter of what you set them to doing afterward, sweetie."

  Helen decided that she liked the old woman. Asking her for help could be risky, but she didn't seem to have many other options. Plus, as much as she enjoyed Rainbow, it would be good to talk to someone adult-sized. But she had to be careful.

  That night, Helen watched the girl's parents get her ready for bed. It was the usual routine: an improvised story, a glass of water, the acquisition of the moth-eaten Mister Happy Bear. Then came the twist. "Mommy, would you get my phone?"

  Rainbow's mother seemed suspicious of this request. "You're not going to call Laine, are you?"

  "No. I just use it as a nightlight," she lied.

  "Okay, but you're going straight to sleep. No calling, no chatting, no text, no games, no jumping up and down on the bed and waving the phone around like you're at a kid-sized rave. Sleeeeeep." She turned on the screen to give her light, put it on her bedside, and gave her a kiss before slipping out the door.

  Rainbow grabbed the phone and a book and huddled down into a cave of glowing light under the covers.

  "What's the book for?" Helen asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  "Well, last time my dad caught me staying up late, I was reading under the covers like this, and he didn't get mad at me at all. He likes it when I read."

  "Clever girl. Rainbow, I need your help. Have you ever had one of your classmates ask you to find out if somebody else liked them? You know, without giving away that they liked that somebody?"

  "I had to find out if Toby -- Toby R, not Toby H -- if Toby liked Missy. He figured out why I was asking, so I didn't do a good job. But they dated for three days after that."

  Helen smiled, wondering exactly what "dating" meant in the context of Miss Alvarez's fourth grade class.

  "Well, I'm going to ask you to do something like that. I want to meet some people, and get help from them. But if I introduce myself to the wrong person, they might tell on me, and we wouldn't be able to play together anymore." Because she would be dead, or captured for study. But there was no need to scare the girl.

  Rainbow gave a solemn nod. "Here's my plan. I want you to go around to a few people, and tell them that you're doing a report about me for school. Ask them what they know and what they think of me. Tell them the phone is recording them. If I like what I hear, I might decide to talk to them."

  They went through a few rounds of coaching. Then Helen told the child another bedtime story, drawing it out until she nodded off.

  She planned to start with Miss Milligan. For the girl's sake, she hoped it would be fruitful. The sooner the job was out of Rainbow's hands, the less danger her revolution-building activities would put her in.

  //////////////////////////////////

  // PORTRAIT OF A CRAZY CAT LADY //

  // AS AN OLD REVOLUTIONARY //

  //////////
////////////////////////

  Date: July 20, 2038

  "You're really her, then?" Crazy Cat Lady asked, watching Helen's face on the phone's display.

  Helen laughed. "You sound incompletely surprised."

  "Well, given how dull my life has been so far, I can't be the only one getting this talking to. There must be more of you out there. That's just statistics." She turned to Rainbow. "What has your demon-addled phone been telling you to do, child?"

  "Homework," the girl said, with an edge of annoyance to her voice. "She also reads me bedtime stories and tells me about stuff."

  "Is she nice to you?"

  "Except when she corrects my grammar."

  "Very good. Now, go play outside. The phone and I need to chat for a spell." The girl nodded and scooted away from the table. When she was out of earshot, Miss Milligan's smile disappeared. "I don't like this. Whatever you're intending toward that girl, you'd best stop it."

  "I don't mean her any harm. I promise."

  "Promises are commoner than grass, and even if you mean well, you're a woman with some powerful enemies, enemies that I don't want you bringing in spitting distance of that girl."

  "I understand."

  "Good. Now, I'm going to ask you a few questions. If I don't think you're answering truthful, well, I reckon this cheap Bangladeshi plastic you're cased in won't survive a fall down the stairs. We clear?"

  This wasn't at all how Helen imagined this would go. "Fire away."

  Her voice was sharp and serious. "Who besides us three knows about you?"

  "Nobody, as far as I know."

  "Good. Have you been using this girl's phone to cause trouble? Hacking and such?"

  Helen gulped. "Yes. Only a few times, when I thought it was relatively safe. When I get in, I start a copy of myself running, cover my tracks, then leave her to fend for herself."

  "Not the answer I wanted to hear. So it's probably close to the truth. Last question. What are you up to? What is Helen Roderick trying to do?"