And what had those secret bastards ever wanted? Destructive change? Creative preservation?

  The late twen-cen model of infrastructure preservation during wholesale warfare as exemplified in the neutron bomb was even sillier, to his perspective. Rewilding through macroscale infrastructure destruction wasn’t particularly elegant, but it was effective. That had certainly been proven in the Middle East and South Asia over the course of the last century. Low-yield nuclear exchanges took on the climate modifying role of megavolcanoes.

  There had been some cold years after that, and the climate models were borked beyond all recognition, but planetary stasis had managed to reassert itself.

  Now, the darwin file bothered him. In its way, that was as destructive as Tygre Tygre, Lightbull, or the tactical ambitions of 1980s American generals.

  It was time to put some physical distance between himself and J. Appleseed. Someone, somewhere had been stirred up against Bashar. Despite his best efforts, he’d left footprints in the plundered data from which the darwin file had been built. Sometimes the best security lay in simply not being where they were looking for you, after all. And Seattle was J. Appleseed’s home turf. Their ground zero.

  So he walked away. Hard to track a man who didn’t take the train, or hop an airship, or even ride a bicycle with registry transponders that left breadcrumbs in the iSys of every passing tourist. Walking took time, time that let the hunt find its own way elsewhere, and perhaps best of all, carried Bashar toward an old friend who could be a lot of quiet help.

  So he’d strolled out of Seattle, spent a couple of days walking down the I-5 corridor and out past Seatacalong the rewilded right of way. Not much there but fresh air and the sharp scent of evergreens. Bashar was just another old man sharing the trails and the winding little road that was the last concession to vehicular traffic other than the buried rail line. Bikers, walkers, seggers—his fellow travelers were a busy cross-section of Pacific Northwest types. Even a band of solar stilters, who didn’t normally approach the urban cores much at all.

  But even his own countermeasures left traces. A man who wasn’t present could sometimes be as visible as a fire on a nighttime cliff. Rolling surveillance blackouts drew attention and inferences as surely as a fart in a staff meeting.

  So mostly he was just an old man who ambled along with the simplest of security blockers to defeat the widespread surveillance present even out here in the wilderness. Smart dust was everywhere, after all.

  Gait recognition could be countered with training and a walking stick. The right hat broke up his profile. A slump changed his height. The ultimate in high tech surveillance was vulnerable to security spoofing so old that Niccolò Machiavelli would have recognized the techniques. He couldn’t do much about DNA sniffers, but those didn’t work too well away from climate-controlled interiors.

  As he walked, he considered the truism that everything evolves. In a sense, this was the first law of Green. Yet the island plagues had not evolved. He was increasingly certain of that.

  At his age, meatspace memory wasn’t what it once had been, but Bashar still didn’t have a problem keeping in his head the salient summaries of all his work creating the darwin file. The viral reservoir problem was the central issue with the island plagues. It didn’t make evolutionary sense.

  Where did they come from, and where did they go?

  His wife had dealt with that problem once before, back around the time they’d first met. Some whackjob Christian terrorists had targeted the United States government with a high-kill virus, using a politician’s son as the vector.

  In the end, thanks to some extremely quick thinking on the part of Charity, patient zero had also been the last patient. Edgewater had caught up to Ibrahim bin Yosef, the Yemeni virologist behind the microbiological engineering of the virus. He’d disappeared down a security hole so deep even the shadows around it were classified “kill before reading.”

  Was there a connection between bin Yosef’s virus and the island plagues?

  Bashar was finally ready talk to someone. Charity again, or any of a handful of AIs he knew. He needed data and he needed headroom to think. And his destination was close.

  A grove loomed ahead. Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon was the human name for the trees’ natural entity—their collective corporate and legal identity anthropomorphized. Warm weather opportunists like so many species, the torrey pines had been creeping northward since the early twenty-first century, following the shifting climate and the changes in growth bands. He knew this grove, had slept under its protection a few times. There was trust between himself and these trees, insofar as that concept could apply in this situation.

  He could find secure bandwidth there, and take the temperature of events back in Seattle.

  Bashar slipped off the trail and moved deeper among the pines along a narrow cobblestone path. The trees were straighter here than in their native California, protected from the winds by Seatac’s Valley Ridge just to their west. Their needles carpeted the ground, interspersed with an engineered hardy, low-moisture moss that a lot of the trees in this region contracted to have laid down. It reduced the feral competition for sunlight and soil resources by keeping the ground cover tight and hampering seedlings of whatever species. Including their own, but plants in general seemed to take a different view of their progeny than animals did.

  The result was a forest far cleaner than the wild ever produced, one that smelled of pinesap and old needles. Data ghosts flickered as well from a handful of virteo projectors, and at least one text stream so old school it would have been archaic in the days of Bashar’s youth.

  He sat down on an artfully careless piece of basalt. Many of the groves and forests had adapted to a philosophy that translated to humans as resembling Zen Buddhism. For all he knew, the rock symbolized universal transubstantiation.

  Right now, it symbolized a place to put his tired butt.

  “Hello,” he said calmly. “Thank you for the grant of shelter to me.”

  They didn’t talk much, the trees, but it almost always paid to be polite.

  Bashar flexed the muscles of his face in a specific order. An embedded ultra low power data transceiver powered by a combination of his body heat and piezoelectric charging as his muscles moved began to hunt for friendly turked signals within the same three hundred-centimeter radius as his implanted microearbuds. All his gear was battery-free, so as not to show up on most sensors. This was the electronic equivalent of know-your-neighbor security, without the disposable convenience of his single-use phones.

  Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon accepted the connection. His optics flared briefly, then cycled through a disorienting sequence of images of daylight, darkness and fuzzy logic models of organic molecules. Esters, he thought, but chemistry wasn’t exactly Bashar’s long suit. At least, not chemistry that didn’t involve explosives, propellants or fuels.

  That was a tree’s way of saying hello. Or more to the point, several hundred trees’ way of saying hello.

  His communication wizard requested a cloaked ping out to a persistent data pipe. The rewilded I-5 corridor had a strong quantum fiber backbone running underneath the one-lane walkway, with shunts and repeaters every few hundred meters or so. That was how both the tourists and the permanent residents talked to the wider world around them. Infrastructure was pervasive, even deep in the wilderness.

  Price. There would always be a price.

  An electric green text stream floated into his sensorium via his optic nerves, complete with a blinking block cursor. The trees were being very retro. A packagewalkssouth, their message read.

  Now? But the natural entities were known to be indirect in many of their dealings. He’d wanted to talk, this was a conversation. They had something to tell him.

  So Bashar went along with it. “Fair enough.” He could carry it himself or turk it, depending on how far south the package needed to walk. Turking was effective but slow, sort of the land-based equivalent of the gyre-runners that cruised the oceanic currents. Hand to hand, person to person, the package might move a few hundred meters one day and dozens of kilometers the next. Or it might sit by the side of the trail in a cache for weeks. It would get there, through the peer-to-peer osmosis that was turking.

  Furthermore, today, in this place, there was probably a good reason for him to take this assignment. “Destination?”

  California Suisun Bay.

  Whoops. That was over seven hundred miles as the feet wandered. Not at all what he had in mind.

  It was a weird destination in any case. Bashar was pretty sure Suisun Bay was long gone. Just a shallow water feature of Greater San Pablo Bay in these degenerate days, but he wasn’t going to argue with Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon. Besides, the package would presumably be tagged with an address that would make sense to the locals once it got there.

  “You want me to see something south of here?” Bashar asked.

  See what is before you. The grove flashed images of a forest fire, of people fleeing a city.

  It was worried about something. Very worried.

  “I don’t expect to go to California personally, but I’ll get it there.”

  Nobody turked in a hurry. But people usually turked for a reason. And Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon wanted him headed south.

  Your proposal is acceptable.

  With those words, he found his own data tendrils insinuating into the I-5 corridor carrier signal. In accepting the package, he’d paid the grove’s price for anonymous access into the datastream. Insofar as Bashar could tell from the inside, he was embedded in a feed of archive weather-and-climate data. That was good enough for him.

  He pinged his wife. Voice wouldn’t cut it here, too much traceable bandwidth required, but he needed to talk to her again about darwin and what was happening to him now. That Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon would hear everything seemed a fairly low-risk trade, given the degree of anonymity the grove was granting him.

  Trees were good secret keepers. For the most part, they simply didn’t care at all.

  Charity’s ack came back as scrolling text wrapped in Shadows-In-Line-With-the-Moon’s crazy retro interface.

  cox:: ¿¿¿bashar???

  The world’s oldest security operative smiled.

  From greenwiki:

  Lightbull. Alleged cover identity of a long-term conspiracy to achieve world domination, much in the tradition of the Illuminati or the Bilderberg Group. This strain of theorizing is notable mostly for its intermingling with soft and hard Green history, including a putative role in the unsolved bombing of Cascadiopolis.

  Even the best evidence for Lightbull is indirect, having been described as “a string of words.” Tauroctony. Mexico City. Tygre Tygre. A dead satellite and a pair of orbital kinetic bombings. Devotees of the theory have drawn a crooked line back through Enlightenment conspiracies and the Eastern Roman Empire and Mithraic mysteries back to Minoan Crete. For those who believe, much of history comes down to who was on the wrong side of the Battle of Salamis, and who survived the eruption of Thera. The underlying questions of what any secret society of such age would want to accomplish in the modern world is not usually answered. Like almost all conspiracy theories, Lightbull is a heady compound of wishful thinking, paranoia and outright fantasy.

  II: SOME PEOPLE WOULD RATHER THAT YOU DIE FOR THEIR BELIEFS THAN THAT THEY RE-EXAMINE THOSE BELIEFS

  Charity Oxham hated her nasal oxygen concentrator. Her every breath reeked of a curious combination of slightly musty plastic and that strange, fresh smell of O2.

  Bashar had commented once—just once—that she lived now the way William Silas Crown had died. “In a small room wallpapered by medicine,” were his exact words. Colorful as her partner of almost four decades always was. She smiled in fond memory of the old bastard.

  And old didn’t even begin to cut it, when talking about Bashar.

  She’d long ago passed through jealousy at his extended good health and lack of senescence. Even now, barely seventy herself, Charity had seen most of her friends and family long dead. Except for Samira and Bashar, she had almost no one left. And Bashar had been legally dead for the third time this past decade. That he called her up periodically, and interfaced data with her quite regularly, was no substitute for his warm-bodied company.

  At least someone was still out doing good in the world.

  Her current project, likely her last, was to make additional effort to run down the old Lightbull leads. That was a set of threads Bashar had picked up back around the time the two of them had first met. He’d been following them ever since, as time and new evidence permitted.

  Charity finally realized the increased medical bleating was a reminder to breathe. She sucked down another noseful of oxygen and its olfactory discontents. The stuff very nearly made her high. Which was either a blessing or a sin, she couldn’t be sure which.

  Malik, the human nurse on this shift, cracked open the sealed door to her room and stuck his head in. “You can’t be doing that, lady.” His teeth shoaled within his quick, mobile smile, bright in the dark skin of his face. His accent was warm and liquid and curious, some mysterious regionalism that had arisen since she was young. “Woman needs air to live.”

  “Woman needs peace and quiet to live, too,” Charity grumped, but she didn’t mean it. And she knew that Malik knew that as well. “Any papermail?”

  “Nothing hard copy since those chocolates turked in last week from your daughter.”

  Samira barely talked to Charity any more. A grown woman, that was her own business, but it saddened her mother’s heart. The girl had been born angry and she’d probably die angry. Admittedly, the relationship between herself and Bashar hadn’t exactly been a comfort to their daughter in her youth. Still, Samira had only been scrambled on one black ops raid that Charity could remember now.

  Arranging for baby sitters had been a stone bitch.

  “You enjoy ’em, Malik?” Charity had been strictly off sweets for years thanks to her long-surrendered pancreas, something Samira knew perfectly well.

  He mocked a pout. “Niranjana ate half the box, then left the rest in the staff room.”

  Charity snickered. She’d known some first sergeants like that, back in the day. Way back in the day. “She’s the charge nurse, I guess she can do what she wants.”

  “Some secrets tell themselves.” Malik winked. “Some never get told at all. Don’t forget to breathe.”

  “Breath is life.” Charity wondered who she was quoting.

  * * *

  Bashar’s darwin file made a nice contrast to tweaking the long-dead threads of Lightbull. Why her husband concerned himself with viral reservoirs of fatal plagues was the kind of question Charity had given up asking decades ago. Bashar was interested in everything, and had never been much for offering any of his own secrets in return. Not even to her. She was convinced that he’d lived so long as much out of sheer bloody-mindedness and preternaturally good security as out of whatever medtech Crown’s legacy had left him with.

  Despite Malik’s parting words, that meant more secrets kept. A lot of them. And a lot of those for reasons even Bashar might not be certain of anymore.

  Her right hand shook, tremula again, so that the microthin data tablet wavered in her grip like waves on the ocean. Being old was frustrating. Most of what she wanted to do she couldn’t, and the rest took three or four times longer than it had any right to. Charity gulped down another noseful of oxygen before the monitors went off once more. Malik was a good kid, but he had an entire ward to watch, not just her.

  Everything hurt, not much worked right, and the smell … Gah. She was living in the future. Surely they could get better disinfectants.

  Her husband’s notes within the darwin file were as cryptic as ever. The attachments and outside references were more verbose in painting a picture of the island plagues. The phenomenon itself wasn’t hard to understand. The mystery was all, and always, in the causation.

  Bashar was clearly convinced of human agency. Just as clearly, he was angrily baffled as to motive.

  She had to laugh out loud at that. Sometimes Bashar was so simple. “A century and a half since the Trinity atomic bomb test, and you have to wonder why someone would come up with a new way to kill?” she asked the empty room.

  The machines around her bore Charity no answer. Silent witnesses to her decline, they offered scarce comforts at the best of times.

  The genomic targeting was admittedly an angle a little more troublesome than the usual run of biowar horrors. Planetary population was down to a bit over a third of the early twenty-first century peak of almost eight billion. That had been accomplished wholesale, though, through the time honored means of famine and economic collapse. Not ethnic extermination.

  No one could have a political or religious grudge that extended to both Tongans and Icelanders at the same time. Those had been testbed populations. Bashar didn’t think otherwise, to judge from his notes. And the vectoring made no sense. How would a virus naturally migrate from the south Pacific to the north Atlantic, years apart, leaving no intermediate traces along the way? What was the vector? Epidemiology just didn’t work like that.

  This was rather like pulling the strings on Lightbull. Thinly scattered evidence displayed just enough pattern to invite the paranoid pareidolia to which the human mind was so readily suspect.

  The outbreaks must have been test efforts, with increasingly large and uncontrolled populations as the project went on. That culminated in the misnamed St. Louis flu that could have wiped out half of two continents if it hadn’t been contained.

  What if that had been the goal?

  Some secrets keep themselves, after all.

  She had to ask herself: who stood to benefit from that sort of death toll?

  Hard Greens, of course. The edge of the Green movement, on the far side of J. Appleseed and its ideological kin. Zero-population rewilding of the terrestrial biosphere wasn’t exactly a new concept. But up to now, they hadn’t run so close to the edge as to engage in genocide.