And still the global negotiations towards a Copenhagen agreement to restrict humanity-threatening research had ground on at a glacial pace, taking years, unclear if they’d ever actually get an agreement, every country trying to squeeze out financial incentives or trade benefits as bribes to sign on, risking gigadeaths so they could profit a bit from the Accords. And meanwhile, researchers in those countries sprinted faster and faster, to make as much progress as possible in horrifically dangerous areas before restrictions came down.

So… kill a handful, and maybe save millions?

No, she hadn’t given the order to kill these men and women.

But she had a hard time blaming those who had.

Pryce shook it off.

ERD_SECRETS. That’s where this had come from.

The account had an address, hosted offshore, no doubt, connected to through anonymizing layer after anonymizing layer.

She stared at it.

Dealing with the fallout of this particular leak was the State Department’s problem.

But could this account have more? Might this be Lisa Brandt, Holtzman’s former student and lover, whom he’d called and visited days before his death? If Holtzman had sent her this, might the woman have something else that Pryce could use? Something to help get to the bottom of the PLF’s creation?

FBI was still watching Brandt in Boston, had kept Pryce at arm’s length with good arguments about the intel the woman might reveal under passive surveillance…

Carolyn Pryce grabbed her jacket.

An hour later, across town, via a fresh phone she’d paid cash for, she connected to an anonymizing service herself and created a fresh account on a messaging site.

And then she sent a message to the account behind ERD_SECRETS.

“Hello. I’m a friend, inside the US Government. I’m highly placed. And I’m looking for evidence of how the PLF was created. Can you help me?”

She waited, and waited, and waited.

She waited so long that she put an alert on the account, flagged it for the highest possible importance notification to her, any time, any place.

Then she waited some more.

There was no response.

33
Better World

Su-Yong Shu walks the street of her simulated Shanghai, her future projection of the city she loves. She’s barefoot, her hair wild, her white dress stained with soot and blood.

Shanghai is in chaos.

Two dozen mirror-faced, battle-armored soldiers move down a rubble-filled urban canyon of a street, firing at something ahead. Smoke rises from all around. An explosion blows out glass windows tens of meters above.

Then with a sudden whirring, a pair of armed, quadcopter drones round the corner, their chain guns firing, jerking from angle to angle with eerie insectile precision, proboscis ejecting death, even as micromissiles streak out on jets of white-hot flame. The soldiers dive for cover behind chunks of fallen building, behind overturned cars.

There are explosions and screams. In seconds the humans are dead, the machines unharmed.