The PhilanthropistsThe Agent lifted the gleaming hemisphere of plutonium from its Styrofoam packing and squinted at it, the soundless voice of the Discarnate throbbing in his brain. Hurry, the voice said, the radiation is unpleasant for me.
"Yes, yes, I know."
The suitcase bomb lay partially assembled in the glare of the rented room's single bare bulb, a tightly knotted mass of explosives and multicolored wire. Simple chemical explosives would force the two subcritical masses together. The plutonium had been more difficult to obtain, but not much.
Who would have guessed that they'd start dismantling them so soon?
The Agent grunted as he checked a contact with a voltage meter. "You certainly didn't."
You've been embodied too long, the Discarnate chided. You're answering rhetorical questions.
"This is the last one," the agent said, snapping the suitcase shut and locking it with a small metal key. "Will it work?" He wasn't referring to the bomb.
The Discarnate made a sound that the Agent now thought of as laughter. There are no certainties! History, even with such simple creatures, is sensitive to initial conditions. The laughter that wasn't laughter grated again. Not to worry. The possibility of failure at this point is, you might say, astronomically small.
Wincing at the pun, the Agent set the brown Samsonite suitcase beside its three identical siblings. His mind, atrophied by its long residence in human flesh, could no longer perform even the simple calculations necessary to foresee a near future.
"Let's get it over with." He stared at the luggage morosely. "They were in love with these things just five years ago."
* * *
The Agent stopped by his office in downtown Bethesda to say goodbye to his employees.
His investment banking firm was small, discreet, and appallingly profitable. All told, a half dozen people, lawyers and support staff shuffled tens of millions of dollars worth of currency a year among a plethora of startup companies. Until recently, the Agent had split his take evenly between various insurgencies around the planet, as he had since the development of currency in ancient Mesopotamia.
He stopped at his executive assistant's desk. "Phyllis. How's your father doing?"
She smiled. "Oh, you know. As well as can be expected." She tucked a long strand of dirty blonde hair behind one ear. She was really very pretty. "He is sixty after all, with a broken hip."
"Still, I hate for you to miss this trip. We've been planning it for so long." The company had booked a flight for all of them to a Colorado hotsprings for next week.
She laughed, causing the Agent to shrivel inside. "Oh, there'll be other trips!"
We continue to kill them, in fantastic numbers, and you worry so about these few. They'll all be dead in a twinkling anyway.
"Shut up." The Agent subvocalized. "We no longer think in the same timescales."
He sat in his office immersed in the sixty cycle hum of the overhead florescents, tasting the processed staleness of the air. He'd miss it. For the next hour he tinkered with the screenplay currently in progress. He'd told stories, danced, sang, written plays and teleplays and movie scripts. He'd chanted and canted and prayed and channeled. Many of his efforts had been quite successful. He wasn't Shakespeare, although they had once been close friends. Neither was he Christ, but he may have been Mohammed.
He couldn't be sure. The memories from his previous bodies were murky, like a pile of faded, water damaged photographs.
Relax. It's almost over.
The Agent nodded. In a burst of irritation he told his computer to erase the contents of his creative directories.
Are you sure? The machine wanted to know.
"Yes." The machine asked him the same question two more times, only erasing his work when he'd given the final code, "what I tell you three times is true."
* * *
Really quite a gesture. Building the bombs yourself, I mean. The Discarnate's voice suffused the Agent's hypnogogic state. It was an infuriating habit, speaking when he wasn't fully awake. The Agent grunted, still half asleep, and padded into the condo's kitchenette.
"Coffee," he murmured.
"Yessir," said the coffemaker as it ground the fresh beans with a tinny whir. The Agent drank the bitter Kenyan brew, watching the sun rise over the Potomac. When he felt a little better, he said, "You predicted a higher probability of success if I constructed them. A greater chance of simultaneous detonation. A greater wave of fear."
Yes, but that's not why you did it.
The Agent scowled, sipping his coffee.
You didn't want to sully another's hand! You didn't want anyone else to bear the guilt. Poor Harry. Poor Albert. Poor Oppy.
The Agent sat in the room's single comfortable chair, a massive leather recliner. "Wirenews. Keyword search. Comet. Impact. Earth. Within a hundred words proximity."
A flatscreen monitor slid from its slot in the ceiling, blinking to life as the search began. The Agent scanned through the three articles meeting the criterion. Plans to convert SDI hardware into a space defense network. The timetable outlined was hopeless.
"We could build the interceptors ourselves. We could have marshalled the resources to buy the warheads. Construct the delivery system."
Of course we could, the Discarnate sneered, and when the Developing Worlds Council runs a probability model on the event, we show up like a supernova. They'd cleanse this sphere of primate life five within an hour of the destruction of Vulcan...
The Agent nodded and picked up a telephone. "Phyllis, home. Priority, urgent."
A groggy female voice murmured, "Hello?"
"Phyllis. I'm afraid I'll be needing you in Colorado after all."
Long pause. "I'm sorry. I thought I told you I was taking my vacation time to look after my father."
"Yes, I've called a nursing service for him. The company will take care of it. Colorado isn't exactly a vacation anymore. It's more of business trip. I'll need you to prepare some correspondence, make some calls. It's about the Genome project. It won't wait."
"I'm very sorry, sir. But I can't."
Threaten to fire her. She'll hate you, but she'll come. Ninety eight percent probability rising.
"Its very important Phyllis." The Agent sighed. "In fact, your job depends on it." He paused, wincing at the long silence, "Shall I expect you in Colorado?"
Phyllis swore under her breath. "Yes." The receiver clicked and went dead.
* * *
The airport was crowded. Men and women. Children. Walking corpses, all of them. The Agent lugged the suitcase across the vast expanse of marble towards the lockers at the far end of the terminal.
You were the one who wanted to stop interfering. To end the cold war before the fat lady sang.
The Agent bit his lip, subvocalizing. "You said we could get away with it."
I didn't count on the Greens in France. They shut down the breeder reactors three years ahead of schedule! History is sensitive to initial conditions.
"Don't forget the disarmament treaties," the Agent hissed, "You were wrong about them, too. And the disposal methods."
He felt the Discarnate writhe in discomfort. They dispersed the fissionables into the Marianas Trench!
"We share the blame." The Agent sighed. He slid the suitcase into a locker, inserted fifty cents, and removed the orange plastic key. He threw it into a trashcan on his way to the parking lot.
He wouldn't be coming back.
* * *
Ten miles from the airport, the agent pulled to the side of the road and shut off the ignition. He eyed the hillside rising up the right. "I want to see it."
The Developing Worlds Council is scanning this solar system for interference. I'm going dormant.
The Agent relaxed as the Discarnate retreated into itself, leaving behind, as always, a vacuum that was both exciting and painful. He thought of their situation in human terms now, and though he knew the analogies were false, they comforted him.
They were criminals.
The Agent started to climb, pausing to remove his jacket. The sweltering heat of DC in August gripped him like a blubbery fist, and he removed his shirt and tie as well, as he moved inexorably up the weed covered hillside.
He checked his watch. Twenty more minutes. He'd worried about getting stuck in traffic when he set the timer on the bomb.
His eyes roved over the horizon. Saving nascent intelligences had been forbidden since the Seyferts, the exploding galaxies. There had been those of his people that had insisted, illogically, that the species responsible for those unfortunate incidents had been meant to die. So the DWC had stopped intervening in astronomical events.
But they hadn't.
The trick was to distort the native culture enough to protect itself. Difficult, when that meant deflecting a comet a quarter the size of Earth's moon. As he waited his attention drifted. He was glad his people were in Colorado. It would be largely unaffected by the coming chaos.
The Discarnate uncoiled itself. They're gone.
"Almost time," the Agent murmured.
The glasses!
The Agent fumbled in his suitpockets for the polarized lenses, slipping them on hurriedly. Seconds later a brilliant light bloomed on the horizon. The shock wave hit a dozen heartbeats later, almost knocking the Agent to the ground, although he'd braced for it. The cloud formed as the light died, a mushroom stretching into the sky, looking ludicrously out of scale, like something from a bad Japanese monster movie.
He watched it for awhile, before picking his way down the other side of the hill to where his helicopter was waiting. Ground traffic in the DC area would be difficult for quite some time.
* * *
Success approaching certainty, the Discarnate crowed. By the time Vulcan strikes, they'll have enough megatons reassembled for a healthy delta-V. I see Vulcan deflected, minor perturbations in the Earth Moon system, moderate damage from calving. They make it with no interruption of their civilization. Such as it is.
They'll have quite a few warheads left over! hmm. It paused, running its simulation farther into the future. Perhaps too many. But that's none of our concern. What they do next is up to them.
It's time to go.
"No."
Other worlds wait.
"I would like to help return to the way they were. Return them to their Garden. They miss it terribly, you know." The agent said quietly. He sensed shock, outrage, from the thing in his brain, as he felt his mind being rippled like a stack of cards, as it ran a complete diagnostic on his faculties. It took several minutes.
You've gone native, it said simply. The agent interpreted its emotion as sadness, although he knew this to be a gross simplification.
"Spawn another sister."
I will. And you?
The Agent shook his head. "I've grown tired of having another in my mind."
Native, the Discarnate lamented. There's no real sentiment I can express at this moment that you would possibly understand. I'll miss you, is all. Until we meet again, in the Omega...
Good bye.
There was a brief stab of pain between his eyes, a sudden blurring of his vision, an internal ripping that left him trembling. He shook his head, and for the first time in his long life, he felt himself utterly and irrevocably alone.
* * *
Six hours later he sat in a hotel room, holding the phone in a sweaty hand. The system had nearly collapsed under the surge of traffic, as millions of Americans tried to contact relatives now surely dead or dying. He had to dial three times to reach Colorado, using a priority override code he'd bought from a young man gifted in telecommunications.
"Hello, Phyllis? Is everything all right?"
Silence. "You're alive?" her voice was congested, as if she'd been crying.
"I was out of the city."
More silence. "Why aren't you here?"
"They canceled my flight."
"Oh."
"Everything's going to be all right, Phyllis."
She laughed. "Right."
"There's work to be done now. Opportunity. We need to get our client's capital out of defense conversion, and fast. The world is indeed a dangerous place. We know this now."
The Agent suppressed an inappropriate giggle. He'd made it dangerous after all, to save it. And he'd make it safe again, soon, so very soon, in the grand scale. He stopped, his thoughts racing.
He no longer could think on that scale! He lacked the software to maintain this body eternally. He was mortal now. Still, he might pull it off, given another twenty or 30 years...
"We need to pull together to get through this. I need you, Phyllis."
"I keep thinking somehow that you knew it was going to happen. I'm sort of angry at you about it. Silly, isn't it?"
The Agent felt a twinge of panic, subvocalizing a request to the Discarnate as to a possible response before remembering he was on his own. For good. He swallowed.
"Very silly," he agreed. "No one on Earth can predict the future."
And he smiled, because for the first time in millennia, the statement was the simple truth.