Free Hyperthought by M. M. Buckner Page A

by that? Did he want me to come? I tried all day to reestablish the connection.
    A month after that, Jonas retrieved a second vidmail from Jin that had hung up in a Net traffic jam and would never have gotten through to me. The date header was gone. Who knows when he sent it. The first part of the message was distorted, and Jonas had to clean it up. What emerged from the shadows was Jin, sitting in half-light, wearing a blindfold.
    Again a text box opened. Jonas enlarged it for me, but instead of typed text, what appeared were quivery scrawled letters. Jin was writing by hand, using a slate and stylus. His first word took shape with glacial slowness. It was, “Fear.”
    Mes dieux, but I clenched my fists till the fingernails cut. Jin in a blindfold sending a message of fear? My imagination ran rampant. Adrienne walked in about then and leaned over the screen to see what we were staring at, but Jonas must have signaled her to be quiet. More words were forming in the text box. I watched the holograph of Jin’s emaciated face, shadowed by the black cloth. His hollow cheeks had grown as pale as my own. He pursed his lips in concentration as he wrote. “Fear the light,” his sentence read.
    “Fear the light? What the hell?” said Adrienne.
    Now Jin was scribbling another word. His stylus vacillated, then skipped. “Blind,” he wrote. With desperate illogic, I prayed to the Laws of Physics for his safety. Jin’s stylus wandered on, skittering like a seismograph. The final sentence was almost illegible. “Blind yourself.”
    That was the end. “Fear the light. Blind yourself.” The message terminated in a rough cut. From the silence that followed, I could tell that even Jonas and Adrienne felt shaken.
    Adrienne squeezed my shoulder. “Jollers?”
    “It’s all right,” I answered.
    We said little about the message, that day or any other.
    Two weeks later, a curtain fell on Euro. Jonas’s network started failing. Luc couldn’t reach any of his contacts. Adrienne stomped around our midtown cube slapping the Net monitors as if that would make them work better. Apparently, Greenland.Com had detected our covert communications, and they simply shut down the power grids. Only much later did we discover what that meant in terms of prote lives.
    From the commercial news channels, we learned that the largest three Coms—Greenland, Nome, and Pacific—had used the rebellion as an excuse to annex and devour their smaller rivals. Now there were no longer fourteen northern Coms, just three. Greenland was claiming all of Euro as its protectorate. Nome had taken over the entire continent of Norm America. Pacific had annexed the Arctic Sea and a big chunk of mainland Asia.
    The “Triad,” they styled themselves. When they issued a joint statement, every bar in Palmertown fell silent. We watched Caspar Van Hyeck, Allistaire Wagstaff, and Suradon Sura announce that the conflict was over. Then our links to the north went dead. We heard no more news. Even the commercial channels were stymied. It was as if half our planet had dropped out of existence.
    For several weeks afterward, Jonas kept sending messages through the old grids, hoping they’d flicker back to life, but they didn’t. The refugees we’d placed in the floating Mediterranean camps were safe enough. Those jellyfish were stealth-clad and self-sustaining. Trinni gave the protes training classes over the Net in how to operate the equipment. At first, we offered to place them in jobs down south, but the protes voted to stay close to home. They elected themselves a central management committee and set up an internal barter system. They could sail their little fleet wherever they wanted, so we decided to let them be.
    For a while, we kept flying missions. But no one met us at our rendezvous spots. Then four of our aircraft were shot down in one week, so we called a halt. After that, we just waited. Adrienne’s fundraisers started losing money. One by one, our volunteers