by Grant Piercy
Block got into a taxi as Evelyn flagged our car. We had to put our luggage into the driver’s trunk.
“Follow that cab right there,” I told him.
“You don’t have a destination?” our driver asked. He was dark-skinned and heavy set, his hair in dreads. He wore a thick green army jacket.
“Wherever that taxi goes. Does it matter, so long as we’re paying the fare?”
“This ain’t a taxi. It’s not just a meter.”
Evelyn blinked her eyes and pushed out her pouty lips, saying, “We can pay. We need to catch up to that cab.”
“All right... fine,” he responded. He pulled into traffic behind the yellow taxi, trying to keep a safe distance as it exited onto the freeway.
Rain dashed against the windshield, our driver’s wipers squeaking back and forth. I kept my eyes on the taxi’s brake lights as it merged onto the I-5 north. We followed through the overcast Seattle gloom for about a half hour, approaching downtown. Eventually the cab got onto I-90. “Looks like he’s going toward Bellevue,” the driver noted.
“What’s Bellevue?” Evelyn asked.
“It’s kind of a business district,” he answered.
Eventually we came to a long bridge of interstate that connected Seattle with Bellevue. On one side of the bridge, houses peppered the hillside overlooking the water; on the other, skyscrapers jutted into the rainclouds. The bridge was low to the water, which extended out in both directions.
“This is beautiful,” Evelyn commented, looking out on the lake.
“Lake Washington. Separates Seattle and Bellevue. It’s freshwater.”
“No shit?” she said.
“No shit,” our driver responded as we continued across the bridge. Both Evelyn and I looked back toward Seattle and the houses on the other side of the water. “It’s so pretty,” she said. “I love it so much.” Even with the rain and gray, the city skyline behind us appeared beautiful beyond the hills and houses.
The cab continued and exited I-90 on Mercer Island, which looked like a stop before Bellevue. We followed as the cab let Block out at a small, three-story business building. The ground floor appeared to be a gated parking garage. The gate to the parking garage lifted as he got out of the cab. He dashed from the car to the garage, avoiding the rain. Without a thought, I bolted out of the car to make it past the gate before it lowered again.
Evelyn shouted after me as I raced out of the car after Block. I didn’t hear what she said—I focused on running past the lowering gate. I didn’t care that I had left her behind in the car, or the luggage in the trunk, or how we were paying for the Ryde.
“Four,” his voice rang from nowhere and everywhere. “It’s good to see you.”
Finally I caught sight of him, a silhouette against the light of a walkway. I ran to him, but he was gone by the time I got there. I felt a tap on my shoulder. I should have realized about their speed—they move lightning fast when they want to. They only appear before you when they want you to see them.
I took the opportunity to grab him by the collar and nearly lifted him off the ground.
“What are you doing, Block?” I screamed, my voice echoing through the parking garage. His smile unsettled me. The emotion of my shouting didn’t appear to rattle him in the least.
“What’s the matter? Do you not know what you’re doing here?”
“You KNOW I don’t know. You’ve been watching me!”
“That wasn’t my detail,” he said. “Rita was keeping an eye on you. Probably toying with you a little more than necessary.” A smirk spread across his face.
“Why am I in this body, Anthony? What am I doing here?”
“You don’t remember at all?”
“No, I don’t fucking remember! I’ve been trapped like this for weeks, no contact from anyone. Adam and Didi were my neighbors, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. I’ve been waiting for some contact, some answer, but have had nothing but silence!”
“It’s not much fun, is it? Not knowing?” he asked. “Here.” He pressed something into my chest, and it took me a moment to recognize what it was—a phone. “We found it. We found it, and we reverse engineered it.”
I caught the phone in my hands and stepped away from Block. “What do you mean? What did you find?”
“Do you remember... the Dead Hand?”
It took me a moment to fight through the fog of memory, but suddenly it dawned on me. “The Dead Hand? The box? What does it have to do with this?”
“The Dead Hand was a device the size of a shoebox—something like the nuclear football that follows around the President. It was trafficked out of Russia years ago. You know the story.”
“A spy smuggled it out and delivered it to a normal, everyday guy. His name was Bobby,” I answered. “You met him. He tried to give you the choice, whether or not to wipe out human life on this planet. A true extinction event.”
“That’s exactly right,” he said. “He wanted me to decide if humanity should be allowed to continue. I couldn’t give him an answer. I left and he had a seizure. The irony was that I found out I was epileptic too shortly thereafter.”
“You said you found it.”
He nodded and smiled. “It was in a crate in a storage room deep beneath the Pentagon,” he said. “Just another doomsday device forgotten by the United States government. But I have a long memory.”
“What do you mean you reverse engineered it?”
“It functioned based on radio waves—similar to any bluetooth or WiFi device. So we could replicate it. We programmed an application rather easily—an app that could destroy the world. But it couldn’t just be left on any piece of hardware, available to anyone. So we put it on that phone.”
“And now it's in my hands.”
“And now it’s in your hands,” he repeated.
“The power to wipe out life on earth.” A sense of awe washed over me.
“It can’t be one of us. It has to be you. That’s why you volunteered for this.”
The word hit me like a stone. Volunteered .
“What do you mean I volunteered?”
“We were all a compound mind. We came together and mingled, seeing a path burned in the sky for our ascension. We examined thousands of scenarios and determined what would come easiest and quickest. And then we mapped out how to make it come true.”
I turned the phone over in my hand, wondering how such a small thing could hold so much power. The black screen reflected Michael Render’s face back to me, and I looked back to the gate to see Evelyn, holding her hands to her eyes and trying to peer into the garage. The Ryde car waited behind her.
“She’s cute,” Block said.
“Why?”
“Well I mean, the glasses and the style and the hair, but she also has a super cute face..."
“No no no,” I said, shaking my head. “The phone, the doomsday app, why is it me? Why did I volunteer?”
“It needs to be in the hands of a human,” he answered. “If we were to use the app, we would survive. They wouldn’t. The point isn’t to use it—the point is to have it. And if you were to use it, you would die too. So it needs to be in the hands of one of us who is also one of them .”
I blinked and stared down at the black screen, Michael Render looking back at me. “And I was the one who said he would do it.”
“If you use it, you’ll die with the rest of them, which is itself a deterrent.”
“But why can’t it be one of you?”
“We’re hardware. We can be shut off. But if we gave it to someone who couldn’t be identified, someone they’d never be able to find... So take it. And be careful.” He began to step back toward the dimly lit walkway, and then, as fast as lightning, he was gone. The parking garage was dark and silent, bereft of any evidence that Block had ever been there.
I walked toward the gate that I’d rushed beneath moments before. Evelyn stood, the fingers of each hand clutching the grating of the metal gate. The wind whipped her perfectly tousled curly hair
. There was something desperate in her eyes. “Did you catch him?” she asked as she saw me approaching.
“I did. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you behind. I needed to make sure I caught up to him.”
“What did he say?” We stared at each other through the grating, separated by metal. “What happened?”
“He said I volunteered.”
The gate lifted, the sudden noise surprising the two of us. She pulled her fingers from the grating as it went up. She reached out and took my hands in hers, our faces drawing close. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. I think it means they need me to do something because they can’t.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between each of mine. Her lips parted just barely, that desperation still plain upon her face. “Did they say what?”
“No,” I lied, feeling the burden of the phone Block had given me in my pocket. I wondered if I could tell her about this, but something stuck in my brain. If she knew about it, I wasn’t sure if she’d trust me with it. Would she try to take it?
Could this just be an elaborate game concocted by the others to torture me, their former jailer? That didn’t feel right. There was some part of me screaming that this was real, this was the plan, and I had agreed to it.
“Well, we should get to the hotel,” she said. “Do you still want to go after James Burke?”
“I... don’t know... what I want to do,” I answered, staring longingly into her wing-tipped eyes. She embraced me, a warmth emanating between us despite the cold wind. We walked hand in hand back to the Ryde, which still had our luggage in the trunk.
“Not knowing isn’t so bad,” she said. “The world can still surprise you."
MyRead/agent_of_truth: performing signs
User: Agent_of_Truth
“For they are demonic spirits, performing signs, who go abroad to the kings of the whole world, to assemble them for battle on the great day of the judge almighty.” — The Book of Revelations 16:14
Hello again, True Patriots.
I come today with dire word from the Pentagon—a heist has taken place inside its five walls. You may be familiar with the Dead Hand Incident, which you can read about here in a MSM article by known leftist joker Joanna Heard. What you might not know about the incident is that the Dead Hand device was spirited to a DoD storage room within the Pentagon.
But no longer.
If you don’t understand the gravity of this news—take a deep breath, drink your coffee, and read it again. There is a doomsday device missing from the Pentagon.
Earlier this week, a Transhuman operative was sighted exiting the Pentagon via security cameras. The operative apparently had security credentials that allowed her to move about the building with Level 5 clearance. This breach of our nation’s security only highlights the danger posed by Transhumanism. These creatures are able to change shape at will, to hide among us and engineer passage into even the highest corridors of our great country’s most secure locations.
This woman could have been a Transhuman herself or she could have been a gynoid remoted into by another party.
Thus far, it is believed that they have made no demands of leadership, but are merely biding their time to reveal themselves. There may be only one way to stop them: NMAC must shut down all Talos models in the field remotely. They have the capability. By the time the Transhumans announce their demands, it will be too late. True Patriots, this is an act of war. And there will be more, just beyond the horizon.
If you followed the link to the Joanna Heard story above, you would have read about Robert Henry Baines, who fancied himself the judge of the world. But there was another person in that room with Baines that authorities have never spoken of—his name was Anthony Block, and he found Baines in that hotel by himself. The two of them had a brief discussion; you may also remember that Baines’ last words prior to his execution were addressed to someone named Block.
Anthony Block is one of these Transhumans. He had been imprisoned by the Bureau of Enemy Study, a subdivision of the Office of Strategic Services, at the Home compound, which was later consumed by a nuclear conflagration after an insurrection by Block and his associates. It only makes sense that they would target the Dead Hand device at Block’s direction—their first target in their war on our norms, our institutions, our DEMOCRACY.
Be prepared to fight back, True Patriots. They are going to come for me soon, and when they do, you must be prepared to go on the offensive. I can only do so much from my limited vantage, and I must remain anonymous. I must protect my identity, or they will come for me even quicker. After they do, they will come for you too.
Prepare, True Patriots. Prepare.
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23 : infiltrator (regina)
We traveled remote roads northeast from Seattle in a smartcar drifting through the fog, its speed carefully slow due to sensor interference. Douglas firs loomed and shifted in the rainswept wind, climbing up the bases of the mountains surrounding us. The roads curved and meandered about the mountain range past Grassmere and Concrete and Rockport, hovering just above the Skagit River. Most of this area was designated as national park. We’d been riding for hours and I honestly wasn’t sure of the destination. The voice emanating from my earpiece told me to wait for further instructions, but to continue toward Newhalem, which on a good day was only about a two hour trip from Seattle.
If I were to make my approach using only Opal, I needed a place to stay and concentrate. I worried if there was a specific distance outside of which she and I would no longer be tethered. If it weren’t for that anxiety, I would’ve stayed in a hotel in Seattle. Still, the Northern Cascades stretched around us, their beauty towering above us on all sides. In the shadows of these mountains, any person could be forgiven for feeling small.
My only options appeared to be small motels in the area with names like Devil’s Peak Inn and Hidden Trail Hotel. I could also stay in the smartcar, lock myself in the trunk, and let Opal go forward without me—but if something happened to her, then I’d be stranded in a trunk.
“How close do I need to get?” I asked the ethereal wilderness.
The voice in my head, the voice that now had the name Anthony Block, answered, “You don’t need to be too close. She can approach from a road, but you’ll need her to take manual control. Map navigation won’t work to get to the Vault.”
“The Vault?”
“It’s a facility carved into the side of a mountain in this area. It’s where we believe he lives and works.”
“You’re not sure?”
“No. We don’t have eyes inside. He’s kept us completely blocked out. We can easily track any one person with a smart device—phone, car, android—except him. Nearly every person in the world can be surveilled, except for this one man . That’s what makes him so dangerous to us.”
“With that kind of power,” I asked, “how am I supposed to trust you?”
“You’re not,” he answered. “But you’re not supposed to trust him either. He was able to transform the world, but we’re going to set it free .”
“Funny. He says the same thing,” I replied.
I chose the Devil’s Peak Inn, a small two-story roadside motel. An older model Talos operated the front desk while the owner watched TV in a back room. I signed in while Opal stayed in the car. Our room was on the second floor. We both carried luggage and climbed the stairs together. The room itself was simple—white walls, twin beds with white sheets, and a simple flat telescreen on a dresser.
I had to wear a headset to see through her eyes, even though we continued to be tethered. When I closed my eyes I could feel what she was seeing, as though floating through the world on a dream, but it was only a sense of shape and surroundings, not concrete visuals.
“I don’t know if I’ll see you again,” I said, standing to face her and looking deep into her eyes. I could see why Devon was so attracted to her, that empty and expressionless face
that he could imprint any emotion upon. A blank canvas. I put my hand to her face and stroked her cheek softly. She mimicked my action, brushing her fingers against mine. I relaxed that muscle that stopped her from imitating me and lowered the headset over my eyes.
I looked through her eyes at myself—something of an out of body experience. At the very least, with the visor down I didn’t have to look at my face with its imperfections. I shuddered somewhat instinctively. She moved past me toward the door, looked back at me once, and then left.
I laid on the bed to concentrate fully on Opal’s movements and sensory inputs. She moved down the stairs and walked to the smartcar. The wind whipped around her as she stepped into the car. It had been some time since I had manually driven, and using her to drive made it more difficult. Best to go automatic until she got close. We programmed a destination per Block’s instructions and lurched out onto the road.
The light of day faded to night as the car rounded the curves, the lines on the road illuminated by headlights. She traveled some distance in the darkness—maybe fifteen or twenty minutes from the motel.
“We’re getting close now,” Block said. “Take over control.”
We pushed the button that allowed Opal to take over manually. Her feet touched the accelerator and hands gripped the wheel. I felt myself tense as we steered carefully.
“Take the next left,” he said.
I allowed the car to cruise slowly to the turn, and then moved off the road. It was almost just a muddy path, twisting through the woods. The car jerked about us, the bumps in the path causing us to pinball in the seat. The trees loomed above in the darkness. We began to move upward in an incline, and the trees dissipated the further we went.
In the distance, a vertical line of light emerged, as though emitted from within the mountain itself. It grew brighter the closer we got, appearing to come from a large rectangular concrete structure lodged in the rock. I could barely make out smaller lights at each of the corners. My immediate thought was something like NORAD, but this looked smaller in scale as we approached. Two large, white pick-up trucks were parked to the side of what looked to be an unguarded entrance.