Worldwired Read Online Free

‘We cannot weep for the whole world.' I guess we hold up our end of the table and trust in Fred to hold up his. We'll have a summit meeting tomorrow, us two and Gabe and Charlie and Paul and the new kids. And Dick, onscreen so everybody can talk to him.” She swallowed the other half of the canapé, cracker corners scratching her throat. “What're you doing for your birthday?”
    “Birthday?”
    “Sunday? The day you turn fifty-one?”
    “Don't remind me—”
    Elspeth grinned. “Okay, I won't. Gabe and I will plan something. It'll be just us and Genie.” Her voice wanted to hitch on Genie's name; it wasn't supposed to be just Genie. It was supposed to be Genie-and-Leah, but the second name hung between them, chronically unsaid. Elspeth brushed it aside with the back of her hand. “You just promise to show up and be a good sport.”
    Jen's expression warred between resignation, delight, and trepidation. Finally, she nodded and studied the carpeted floor, scrubbing her gloved iron hand against her flesh one as if dusting away a fistful of crumbs. “Patty,” she said. “Patty Valens. Invite her, too? She's all alone up here—”
    “More than fair.” Elspeth's hesitation was strong enough that Jen looked up and frowned, meeting her gaze directly.
    “What?”
    “This meeting tomorrow—”
    “Yes?”
    “Is it too much to ask for you to brainstorm and come up with something we can
do
to get the Benefactors' interest, other than balancing our checkbooks back and forth at each other?”
    Jen laughed dryly. “I've got an idea you're going to love, if Wainwright doesn't shoot me for suggesting it.”
    “Well, don't leave me hanging.”
    Genevieve Casey arched her long neck back, stared at the ceiling, laced her hands together in front of her, and said with studied casualness, “I want to find out what happens if we EVA over to the birdcage and wander around inside.”
     
    Thursday 27 September 2063
HMCSS Montreal processor core

HMCSS Calgary processor core

Whole-Earth Benefactor nanonetwork (worldwire)

21:28:28:35–21:43:28:39
     
    When Dick took over the planet, he'd been prepared for surprises. But the ache of the Toronto Evac Zone like a runner's stitch in his side had not been one of them.
    He'd comprehended the scale of the damage, of course; of all the sentiences in his sphere of experience, he was uniquely qualified to do so. He'd understood that the global nanotech infection that Leah Castaign and Trevor Koske had given their lives to engender would be a mitigating factor at best, and not even the temporary magic bullet of a penicillin cure. He'd thought he understood what spreading his consciousness through a planet-sized, quantum-connected worldwire would entail. If he could call it
his
consciousness anymore, as he evolved from a discrete intelligence into a multithreaded entity that might be compared to a human with disassociative identity disorder—
    —
if
such a disorder were a native state of affairs, and if the various personalities carried on a constant, raucous, and very rarified debate regarding every serious action they undertook.
If
portions of that entity brushed feather-light fingertips across the waking and sleeping minds of certain augmented humans, and other portions moved through the ruined waters of Lake Ontario, and hovered in the well-shielded brain of Her Majesty's Canadian starship
Calgary
in its position of rest at the bottom of the ocean; if other portions infected fish and birds and bushes and topsoil and atmosphere, and extended like a meat intelligence's subconscious through eleven-dimensional space and into the alien nanotools of the far-flung Benefactor empire, or confederacy, or kinship system—
or whatever the hell it might be,
Richard mused, with the fragment of himself that never stopped musing on such things. If.
    I never began to imagine what I was in for,
he thought, shifting focus as Constance Riel touched her earpiece and accepted his call. She wasn't in