It wasn't until they had reached the border between the Citizen's Metropolitan Union and the Southern Confederation that the reality of the trip sank in for James. Prior to that he'd been rather unwillingly dazzled by Dr. O'Brien-Blackbird's car, a new road-sensing Ganesh, and occupied with answering Bugsy's questions. The colony had never been out of the house before, but overall it seemed to be handling the trip well. Its container took up the whole trunk, so he and Dr. O'Brien-Blackbird had had to pile their luggage in the car's rear seat.
         To his disgust, James felt himself perspiring as they slowed for Customs a few miles below Alexandria. He did his best not to show any uncertainty in front of Dr. O'Brien-Blackbird.
         Nevertheless, she noticed. "Nervous?" Marian O'Brien-Blackbird's round face reflected her Native American ancestry. "Understandable. But you might want to turn off Bugsy's speakers so he doesn't alarm the guards."
         "Look, Doctor-"
         "Marian," she said, smiling. "Or 'Doc,' if you like, James." There was, however, a glint of something in her eyes that was not a smile: a glitter of irritation and even an infuriating condescension. He had seen it in others' eyes.
         So you don't like me, he thought. Deal, squaw. I don't like you, either. I've got a career ahead of me, while you'll be chairing committees back on the rez, if you're lucky. He pasted a smile on his face.
         "Okay, Doc," he said. "It's my first time out of New Jersey. I don't actually know anyone who's been outside the MU. It's too expensive." He glanced around the Ganesh's cockpit. Few people could afford single-owner cars, and she certainly wasn't one of them. This was a government vehicle, smaller than an old-fashioned SUV but still impressive.
         Apparently the Customs officials, two from the CMU and another pair from the SC, thought so, too, because they made James and Marian exit the car while they searched it.
         Most of the validation procedure was automatic, handled electronically by the Ganesh's com, but the officers didn't know what to make of Bugsy. The dark-loving insects within weren't visible through the hull, but with the attached gas, water, and nutrient modules the thing looked decidedly strange.
         "Hey whatzis?" one of them, a blue-eyed man with untidy hair and genmod cat whiskers, asked. He tapped on the container.
         "It's a termite colony, and don't do that!" James said, almost adding you dumb goober.
         "Watch your yap, kid," said another official, scowling. "And take off that damn data ribbon so I can see your eyes."
         Catface drew back. "Termites?"
         "Absolutely," said Dr. O'Brien-Blackbird. "Cryptotermes brevis. The common West Indian drywood termite. A mutant strain, I should say."
         "Mutant?"
         "Not in a bad way," she said, speaking much more rapidly than usual. "James, here, has won the Continental Association of Student Science competition and we're going to Houston to make a presentation. As our papers indicate. Colonies like this could provide fuel and food for space travelers or urban reclaimers. Did you know this car is partly powered by gas the colony produces?"
         But Catface had had enough. "Save it for your vlog, lady." He spat to one side. The other guards laughed. "You and Brainiac get outta here."
         "Yes, sir."
         As they drove away James switched the car's entertainment system back on.
         The AI monitoring the colony spoke in a well-modulated tenor. "I would have been happy to explain myself to those men."
         "It would only have confused them," said Marian. "But thank you, Bugsy." She yawned. "Shall we get some sleep, James?"
         She put the car on wirepilot and vanished behind a privacy shroud. James watched part of a BBC story detailing Muslim-led anti-genomic riots in Europe on his data-ribbon. A small status window drifted off to his left like a peripheral floater, reassuring him that Bugsy's ten thousand-odd constituent termites were all online, their vital signs nominal.
         The colony units were "infected" with nanos originally developed to control prosthetic limbs by connecting wirelessly to implants in a patient's brain. Another branch of neural engineering, for Alzheimer's victims, had had some success restoring cognitive function by creating bridges over or through damaged brain tissue. Augmentation and control. The result: networked termites, linked by their own semiochemical signature, genetically tweaked to increase reaction time and facilitate communication with the nanos in their blood. Many thousand termites birthed an emergent AI: Bugsy.
         Some time later James started awake. The moon had risen half full, a smear of light in the gelid mist cloaking the trees crowding the roadway: subtropical cycads marching further north each year. The dashboard clock read 2:23 AM. The squaw was unshrouded, frowning at her datapad.
         "I think...we have a small problem," she said, not looking up. He blinked at her, not quite wakeful enough to take in the implications of her words. His e-ribbon map showed that they were on a remote stretch of highway in the middle of what had once been South Carolina, near the border of the Southern Confederation and Hispaniola.
         "What's the deal?"
         "Customs up ahead is reporting a discrepancy in our paperwork." She wrinkled her nose. "Our friends back at the first stop were a lot more polite than we're likely to see here. They're already texting me to pull over, but we're so close to the checkpoint that I'm going to head straight in."
         "Maybe you should just do what they want?"
         "Hold it, they're calling me." She touched her right ear, indicating the bud therein. Listening, she bared her teeth and squinted in concentration. "What? Oh, ba-all right." To James, she said, "I can't make head or tail of the regs they're quoting. Plus their accents are so thick I can barely understand them. This may take a while."
         "You're a government representative, aren't you? You must have all sorts of passcodes and variances and whatever, right?"
         She stared at him for a moment. "You know," she said, "I may get some respect in the CMU being a member of an official commission, but out here no one cares that you won the CASS, or that I'm taking you and Bugsy to Houston to dun a bunch of suits for funding. We're nothing more than a series of numbers that have to match theirs or else we not only won't get into Hispaniola, we'll find ourselves sitting in some detention area until the screw-up gets unborked."
         James, stung, lapsed into sullen silence. He blinked up the presentation he was going to make in Houston. Vids showed Bugsy's development, from the custom-made hull to the selection of insects. Energy output, nutritional content; it was all there. A van like the Ganesh could supply reclaimers in even the most desolate, disease-ridden coastal regions for weeks at a stretch while they rifled through waterlogged, snake-riddled ruins. Storms generated by global warming had killed or displaced millions of people over the past decades, but exotic molds and spores bloomed in the wreckage of the old cities, drawing the powerful pharma companies desperate for cures to genmod sicknesses threatening the swarm of elderly caucs living like parasites off the corpse of the fragmented USA.
         At the border station Marian climbed gracefully out of the car and, flanked by two lank-haired guards, vanished into a dusty brick building. Time passed, half an hour...the outpost's methane gas lamps hissed and flickered in the heat. James sat fuming in the car, tweaking his presentation, disdaining the twangy, whiny regional music in favor of rock from a satellite station. He turned it up as loud as it would go, taking a sour satisfaction in the occasional hooded glances cast his way by the swarthy, squat Hispaniolan border guards as they passed by the Ganesh on various errands. He hated the very look of them, and slumped down in his seat as far as he could. His father, Louis, used to rail about the Mexicans taking over all the low-paying jobs. "You keep it in mind, Jimmy," he'd say. "We're less than fifty percent of the population now. Half the street names around here are in Spanish. Thank the damn liberals for that! Makes me sick, cooties and grease-balls everywhere." But James didn't pay much attention until Louis was killed in a type of accident that should have been impossible in mid twenty-first century Flemington, New Jersey, CMU.
         A Hispanic day laborer named Rodrieguez had somehow managed to lose control of his truck, which was not monitored by the town's traffic grid. At his trial Rodrieguez admitted that he had illegally tampered with the vehicle's computer to avoid having to register his driver's license, which had been suspended for drunk driving.
         Unfortunately his computer skills, augmented by some questionable bioroutines added to his DNA by an unregulated genehacker, were rudimentary at best. His hamfisted coding damaged the truck's programming. Rodrieguez, who was drunk again, shouldn't have been able to drive his vehicle across the median and into Louis Leblanc's oncoming car. The truck's computers should have stalled its engine or directed it to hit something else, like a tree or a signpost. In fact, given the amount of alcohol in the man's blood, the truck's sensors shouldn't even have allowed the engine to start.
         Rodrieguez, or most of him, went to the organ banks after his DNA was repaired. His family wept and wailed at the verdict, but James and his mother could only feel Lou's loss. Now there would be no salary, small as Lou's had been as a siding salesman; there would be no companionship, no handy-work around the house. James Leblanc grew up in poor circumstances, spending all his spare time with supremacists on the web, his mother forced to hire out as a vorg-farm: a surrogate body for artificial organs.
         He was leaning back, eyes closed, when the door on his side was yanked open. A blunt-faced guard stood there, smiling. "We need to talk to you, maricon," he said.
         What the hell's 'maricon' mean? "Yeah, yeah," James said, sighing. He got out of the car. "What's the problem?"
         "No big deal," the officer said, his smile growing wider and more insolent. "Heartland's timechop was out of date. We just need to reconcile your-"
         A shout from the guard shack interrupted him. Female voice.
         Wrong; that's wrong. "Doc?" Another cry, louder, cut off.
         The guard whipped out a pistol and aimed it at James. "Don't be stupid, maricon."
         We're all alone, no one to help-wait! "Bugsy!"
         A voice from inside the car replied, "Yes, James?"
         The guard's eyes went wide and flicked to the empty cockpit. "Who's-?"
         To his own astonishment James kicked him in the balls. The man puked and crumpled. James dashed around to the driver's side, slid in, switched on, floored it, blessing the new car's powerful engine.
         Holy crap! I just-holy crap! His hands shook on the steering wheel and he began hyperventilating.
         The rear vid showed the unsteady pool of light flooding the area around the guardhouse. Figures ran out, paused. Something smacked into the back of the Ganesh. Gunshot. James felt his bowels weaken.
         Behind, lights flicked on to one side and pulled on to the road. Chasing him. "Bugsy?" He angled the GPS screen. Nothing, no towns or settlements for miles, just the highway and the bastards behind him.
         "Yes, James."
         "We're going off-road. It could get bumpy. Make sure you're secure." It wasn't like he had a backup of the colony. The data, yes, and even the colony container could be replicated easily enough, but the bugs were family by this time.
         "Thank you, we are secure. You should fasten your seatbelt."
         Headlights behind. Damn! "Yeah, sure, soon's I can. Can you interface with the GPS?"
         "Yes."
         James chewed his upper lip. The Ganesh was in plain sight of his pursuers down a long straightaway. He twisted the lights off and dimmed the cockpit illumination. Half-moonlight would have to do. The e-ribbon could correct for darkness to some extent, too. "I need to pay attention to my driving. Find me a fire road, trail; anything."
         "I will."
         Bugsy wasn't long on personality, only having been cohesive a month or so, but his processing capabilities were as good as any off-the-shelf AI.
         Better, in fact. James was sure of this. All AIs shared some common traits, because it took a lot of code to build one and there was no point in reinventing the wheel each time. As James's computer-savvy friends liked to say, all AIs had brown hair. But Bugsy tagged, monitored and tracked thousands of units, including newly hatched ones, each with its own genetic make-up. He understood his own code and deployed numerous updates, sometimes several times a day. His build numbers were already up in the triple digits.
         He should, therefore, be able to handle a little map without any trouble.
         If nothing else, this is a damn good field test. James allowed himself a wry grin.
         The e-ribbon snowed out for a moment, terrifying him before it cleared. All external feeds were down except the colony's own stream.
         "James? The cars behind us have cracked software."
         James shook his head at the road unspooling in front of him. E-ribbon crash, cracked software; too much input. "Not following you."
         "Their systems have been illegally altered to mask ID. Those men are trolls."
         That explained a few things. Trolls, gypsies masquerading as officials and broadcasting fake ID signals from bollixed chips, weren't entirely unheard of in the CMU but they were very rare. Out here...not so much, apparently. They'd probably overpowered the legitimate border personnel, and were phishing whatever ID data they could from unsuspecting travelers. By dawn they'd fade into the forest, leaving the official computers zombified, infecting every passing vehicle before they could be deborked.
         "I didn't realize it until their automobiles came on line."
         These trolls obviously were after more than IDs, though. Ransom, maybe; a nice shiny new car, weird machine in the back, well-spoken female and a kid...hostages. The squaw must've tumbled to the scam, at which point - squaw or not, hopefully all they'd done was slug her. It was a good thing he had an AI; most people coming through here wouldn't.
         "Bugsy, call the cops."
         "All frequencies are jammed."
         E-ribbon crash. James sighed. "Okay, any luck with the road thing yet?"
         "I have lost GPS transmission, but saved enough to model the next thirteen point six square kilometers. Three point two-one miles ahead on the right is a fire road."
         "Cool. Give me ten seconds' warning. Can you access the car's diagnostics? Or schematics? Any possibility of you preventing its brake lights from flashing?"
         "Affirmative on the diagnostics and schematics. And yes about the brakes, but only physically."
         "Mm?"
         "If the colony is opened I can dispatch constituent units into the car to short out the appropriate circuits. The brake lights will not be visible."
         "But the units will die." James glanced at the colony status feed. Nominal.
         Bugsy said nothing.
         James nodded again. "Do it."
         In the peripheral status window James saw Bugsy open one of the colony's access ports, little airlocks that provided egress for the insects while maintaining the high internal humidity they loved. James took the car into a curve as fast as he dared, and the headlights trailing him were cut off from his view. Termites were now pouring out into the Ganesh's luggage compartment, searching for access to the vehicle's electronics.
         "Ten seconds," said Bugsy.
         Headlights behind.
         James braked, swinging the car to the right. Yes, there was an opening in the trees, a dirt road leading into the forest. Red numbers appeared in the status feed as termites died, crisped while shorting out the taillights. "Hold on." He floored it again and the car surged forward, thundering over the unimproved road.
         With any luck, whoever was following him would roar right on by, buying him some time to get further into the woods.
         Light behind, brighter - headlights turning, aimed straight at him. "Damn! How'd they see me make that turn?"
         "They homed in on the Ganesh's ID chip," said Bugsy.
         "Can you do anything about that?"
         "Tampering with the chip will activate an anti-theft SOS and kill the engine."
         "SOS, fine; I'd love for every cop in the world to show up. The engine, well, we need that!" He blew out his breath, fogging the windshield a little. "Where's this road go?"
         "My model doesn't extend far enough to answer, but there is a footpath one hundred and eighty-two meters further on, and at least one additional intersection half a kilometer beyond that."
         "Bugsy, disable that chip. Can you keep the engine going?"
         "Yes, I can feed it a false ID signal for about approximately ninety seconds before the units burn out."
         "Understood." The ID chip's output to the engine's sensors was higher than Bugsy's normal operating frequencies. More termites would fry delivering the stronger signal. Lots more. The AI's population could fall below the level of cohesion.
         But without any way to call for help, he - and Dr. O'Brien-Blackbird - would be in serious trouble.
         A delicious, nutty cooking scent filled the compartment. James gritted his teeth. Peripheral red lines flashed, Bugsy losing units.
         "Turn left," said the AI. James spun the wheel. Tall weeds whipped by, leaving insufficient room for him to see anything other than the path ahead. The Ganesh banged into a declivity and James cursed.
         "Now right."
         James slowed the car. "There's no path there!"
         "Forty-five meters to the right, down a hill."
         James scrabbled for his seatbelt, locked it, and turned the car into the weeds. Perspiration bloomed on his forehead, gathering in his eyebrows. "How steep is-"
         The car's nose dipped sharply, pitched forward. James shouted, the vehicle crunched into something unyielding and the airweb ballooned into him with a bang.