by J D Cortese
It resembled what would come out of a huge, monstrous fish swimming just below the surface, its fins splitting the waters on both flanks.
It was possible that the AVM reached supersonic speeds just before Agdinar did the next, even crazier thing he thought of.
Agdinar made the AVM turn its nose down and submerge, so fast he felt the deceleration inside the cabin—a hard impact, as the AVM was flying faster than an intercontinental jet—even under the protective layers of anti-gravitation the machine had triggered.
The air and water nearby captured all the energy and thus blew up, just as if a meteor had hit the surface of the East River. The crash created an expansion wave that collided with the other two AVMs with energies much greater than their engines could counter. One of them was blown backwards, crashed against the support pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge, and became visible—although hidden under the cover of the bridge's understructure. The pilot powered it down and made it rest over the waters, probably while trying all the curses he could remember from computer school.
The other AVM was luckier, and the explosion knocked it away and into the opposite side of the river. But something was malfunctioning on that flyer, and it only managed to float over the riverside in a tilted position. Its pilot would think twice before engaging the dangerous escapee again.
As for Agdinar, he was recovering from the shock, and most of the story about the other AVMs came from a debriefing by the central AI of his transport. He shook his head and put his palms alternatively on each ear, hoping to regain hearing after the powerful explosion.
He had pushed the AVM to its limit, but it was a battle-ready machine and as sturdy as his people could make them. It had survived, though not intact: the front console had only a few lights on, and many of the control viewers had vanished from the front window. It was the first time he could see outside just like through a plane's window.
...Are you all right?
“Yes, just very sore. At least we took care of them—for now.”
...You don't want me to tell you how wrecked this AVM is.
“Yeah, I know. The main console is not reading my thoughts. And we need to make this thing move soon, to get back—”
...We are not sinking in the river, so it's not truly dead.
“What a relief.”
...And what a coincidence that you've managed to destroy yet another air-transport.
“You crashed the other one at the exit door.”
...And you scratched it like it spent time touring the mouth of a lion.
“All right, Dhern; all right. But tell me, what can we do to get this thing moving?”
...That's no problem.
A couple of handles descended to where Agdinar's hands were. He couldn't see where they had come from.
“What are these?”
...I didn't say it was going to be easy for you—Just drive.
“Drive?”
...Yes, friend. Move those controls up, down, left, or right, whichever direction you want this bird to take us.
With some hesitation, Agdinar used the manual controls to move the AVM forward at a leisurely pace. The transport soon gained enough height to see the Brooklyn Bridge from above.
He vaguely remembered hearing about the dangers of taking AIs through a bumpy storm of space-time waves. Not unlike the problems of making a human consciousness travel across the boundaries of time travel. Agdinar had recovered enough from the ordeal to notice that, if traveling through time was as bad for a human mind as what he had done to the AVMs' AIs, it was a wonder how they had all traveled back in time intact. But he forced himself to stop thinking about these weird considerations, as the day had had, so far, enough great risks to be worrying about a few humans who went insane in those early experiments with time displacement—as distant in time from his birth as the building of Egyptian pyramids was from the people on the bridge's walkways.
He had to drive the AVM back to City Hall, and he thus concentrated again on those weird hand controls.
But to have used “so far” when referring to this day was worrisome, as, most times, “so far” was a short-lived prelude to ominous developments.
Chapter 41
The plaza was emptying by the time Agdinar’s AVM reached it. He was still struggling with the cabin’s environmental controls, his brow dripping sweat around the eyes. The people who remained there were experiencing swirling human currents; some columns headed back north in the city, while others kept filling the bridge's access ramps and taking the unplanned excursion to the neighboring borough. Rychar hadn't told them why he wanted the city’s inhabitants to cross the river, but, manipulated as they were, and for so many years, the throngs of New Yorkers didn't seem to care much about the reasons behind the rally.
A little more comfortable with the commands after taking an aerial ride around the plaza, Agdinar knew they couldn't do anything there for Sarinda. The elevated stage was now empty, and the building, still decorated by the grand hanging flags, had no lights left in its windows. The Hawks had abandoned their lair.
He stopped the AVM again over the plaza’s exact center. The transport wouldn't move without his instructions, and he had none.
He had nowhere to go.
Even Dhern kept silent.
Soon, Agdinar would have to decide to either land or go up to the Towers again, and thus face the consequences of what he had done. He didn’t want to think about that.
What he wanted was to leave the Towers behind forever, but the alternative could very well be for him to wander as a castaway a world that would not resemble the present one in the least. Very little of the city would be left to wander around; only ruins and the kind of subterranean rubble that historians of the future would unearth to figure how twenty-first-century humans had lived before their downfall.
Two hundred years of a barren world awaited beyond the ice blue skies of that day. He knew it, and the pain it brought was unbearable.
* * *
Agdinar kept the AVM steady over the plaza, watching the last few people leave. The Hawks still working there had clear tasks; they were taking boxes and packages to a series of trucks parked on Broadway Avenue, a line stretching for blocks north of the plaza. They had removed almost everything out of the building, as fast as they could. He understood what that meant. They knew that the fall of the city was imminent.
One of the trucks was oddly painted in a brilliant shade of purple. But when Agdinar tried to focus his tired eyes on it, it was featureless black. Maybe it had been another truck, he thought, parked behind that first, the one coated in a reddish violet—its color had been fuzzy such that Agdinar couldn't see it well. And then, the next time he blinked, that second black truck had turned blue, a washed-up color of years waiting on the streets; and the building just next to it was surrounded by a purple haze, as if hidden by a purple cloud.
Agdinar shook his head and brought the controls of invisibility of the AVM up front in the console. He thought of eliminating the bluish shield around the transport to return the outside views to a normal color. But that normal tone soon faded away, and the scene below changed, or maybe it didn't, stuck and never reaching the next second.
Everything below was static, and nobody he could see on the plaza was moving.
... Do You Remember How to Use Your Eyes?
That voice. It was both indescribably large and intimate, a multitudinous lament.
The Great Eye was with him, in the cabin.
But how? And why?
A purple filter fell over everything he saw, and probably over everything he was inside. He stopped breathing. It wasn't a surprising or painful sensation, unless he reflected on the true reason of his state.
Time had stopped.
He was outside the river of time, watching it from the shore.
Watchers theorized that the Eye's engine could generate movement through time—true time-traveling, not cheating like they had done by using a space-time bridge wormhole. And Wa
tchers used to gossip that the Eye, like a Greek god, could control time and move objects through its curse.
Or perhaps, take an insignificant pawn in the game and cast it aside from the chessboard.
Agdinar had a feeling, even while watching his own body from outside, that he was going to find out soon whether there was any truth in these legends.
* * *
He was floating away and into the dark, a dark space that he knew was also outside time. It was the corner of the Eye, a twilight of the universes.
It was like the chamber he’d visited inside the Eye, a place interposed between infinite possibilities. Agdinar thought that he would never get out of the Great Eye; that the world would forever be an illusion for him.
... You Have Seen
I really don't understand, he thought plainly, as if talking to himself.
... I Showed You
... You Saw How to Get to Her
Agdinar detected a weird inflection in the Eye's choral voice as it washed over his mind. If the Eye had been a mere mortal, Agdinar would have thought it was getting angry.
And then, he saw it again, those weird objects in his vision. Now they did hurt, in a place deep in his mind, burning one by one the cables that held his consciousness together.
A nine-point star, each end blazing like a little sun.
A golden pyramid, sweating dark fibers of water that pooled to form a dark, flowing current at its feet.
And an infernal view of Hell, fire surging and wind blasting from every direction, a wave of destruction pouring over the world and leaving a city blackened forever.
Then, nothing. Silence behind his closed eyes.
Apparently, the call from the Eye had been suddenly interrupted. He was back in the AVM's cabin, his hands resting on the console. The cabin’s temperature was now on the colder side.
...Are you distracted?
Dhern was talking to him as if nothing had happened. And it probably hadn't, as the words of the Eye couldn't be captured inside time, and even when they had been heard, their meaning was, perhaps by design, otherworldly.
He thought about the pyramid—there was something familiar about it—and then heard the mind-comm from the AVM.
Location identified, it said.
...What was that?
Agdinar realized that his hands were still in contact with the AVM's reader. A small screen was now showing a view from the city's west, over the Hudson River; it contained a pyramidal building, with an irregular glass front that shone like gold on the waning hours of sunset.
A gold pyramid in front of flowing waters.
Maybe he had another friend in the AVM's AI. If it could decipher the tortuous thinking of the Eye, he shouldn't have underestimated it.
“Set path to location. And get us there fast.”
...I'm glad we have somewhere to go.
“Not only somewhere. We have someone to go to.”
Chapter 42
Once the AVM had a clear indication of where it needed to go, it moved like a ghost. Not just invisible but rushing at incredible speed, it darted through narrow gaps between buildings evading any possible detection. It seemed that one moment Agdinar was hovering over City Plaza, and the next one, resting in the air over the Hudson.
The building was exactly as the screen had shown, an enlarged reproduction of a smaller building from the Late Golden Age of New York. While suffering increasingly failing governments, America had attempted to rebuild its great metropolis, trying to reach the growing heights of Asian cities. The result was a crop of cheap, pretentious buildings like that golden glass pyramid.
The AVM wasn't just Agdinar's chauffeur: It had quickly provided him with a rationale as to why the building was important to the Eye. On the twenty-fourth floor, Sarinda's father had a personal apartment.
A little red rectangle on the AVM’s console highlighted the front windowpane of Major Paredes's place.
“Well, Dhern,” said Agdinar, finally sure of the meaning of the Eye’s image, “we know where Rychar is taking Sarinda.”
...Let’s assume you’re right. So, how are we supposed to get her?
“First, we get closer.”
The AVM reacted as if it were Agdinar's personal magic carpet, and it took off fast enough to worry him about crashing against the windows of the Major's living room.
They were now hovering just outside of what looked like a glamorous art museum—the walls were covered by abstract paintings that, if original, could have bought the entire building. Mr. Paredes certainly had money to pay for any ransom, although Agdinar knew this whole charade wasn't about money.
Paredes turned around to face the door, and he said something Agdinar couldn’t hear. And then Rychar walked in, now dressed in street clothing that might have been what a priest would wear outside his church.
Two men followed him—he could recognize the largest of them as Stealy, the polite thief he'd met—and between them, standing tall but not looking up, was Sarinda.
Paredes advanced a couple of steps before Rychar stopped him with a hand up.
Agdinar wanted to hear what was going on, and he made the AVM slide sideways, beyond the main room and toward a lateral bedroom.
As soon as he’d opened the cabin's roof, and even before it vanished into a solid nano-material deposit, he knew it wasn't such a good idea. He had spent his life watching the city comfortably from above; this was an altogether different feeling.
He tried to stand, but the slight drift of the transport made his world sway. The ground was so far down that it felt as if he were trying to jump from a plane. Agdinar could barely turn and face the building without shaking to the core.
The way the AVM's cabin was placed behind the wings, he would have to walk over the fuselage and then jump straight toward the glass wall, engaging the suit's transiency before he hit the surface and started sliding down—falling over the very smooth, tilted panels that formed the pyramidal structure.
Too much to think about when the world was wobbling and the river hurled air at high speed, hitting his chest like a push from an even more invisible man. He didn’t know if he could muster enough energy and speed to jump forward from the fuselage; the AVM wasn't that close to the wall. A little shiver after engaging transiency, or a tiny doubt in his mind going over the mind-commands, and the fall would be certain.
...Don’t worry. And go, now. I also want to know what's going on inside.
“I don't like this.”
...Walk, please.
Agdinar saw silvery threads climbing onto his suit's boots. Dhern didn't want to miss the show.
...Let's go.
“I can’t—”
...Please, girl, help this guy.
He didn't know who Dhern was talking to, but then the AVM dropped to the floor below. And it left Agdinar behind, standing in the air.
...We are aerial people. Didn't you think that our military would make these top-of-the-line suits capable of flight?
Agdinar had trouble processing how he could feel as if he were standing on solid ground, when the many floors of building below told him otherwise. The AVM, visible only on his inner viewers, rested in a position that gave him some peace about being able to catch him on the way to the streets.
He took a tentative step; it felt like walking on perfectly transparent glass. But a wave of fear hit him in the pit of his stomach, and he ran toward the building, almost forgetting to activate the transiency generator.
Awash by brilliant orange light, he came through the bedroom's window and rolled over the floor until he hit the wall.
He sat, both nauseous and blind by the harrowing experience. Then he noticed that someone was standing near the room's open door, staring at him.
It was Tysa.
Agdinar had trouble standing up, and he remained sitting astride on the floor. His legs were weak, and he couldn't tell if it was the impact or a malfunction on his suit's transiency.
“You,” he said.
“Yes, still here.”
“Why did you try to kill me?”
Tysa looked disheveled, and it wasn't just the bands around her neck and arm, or that unseemly head patch. She looked older and under the grip of pain.
“I didn't want to kill you,” she said, “only to distract you. So, they would get to convince Paredes to let the Hawks in peace. But you had to attack me, and you almost killed me for real.” Tysa tried to show him her busted arm but just winced from twisting her neck.
“So, it was my fault,” Agdinar said. “The whole thing. The park too.”
“No, it wasn’t. I know I acted without thinking,” she said, “but it’s because I was blinded by what happened to my family, and the terrible time I had living on the streets—the fear I had, it never went away. But now the Hawks—Rychar, the worst—are way out of line, and I’m afraid they’re going to kill us all.”
“What do you mean?” Agdinar had managed to stand up against the wall, while his suit tapped on the building's electrical power to recharge.
“That I need your help,” Tysa said, sounding close to tears. “I made a terrible mistake, and now we need to...save more than my friend.”
“Your friend? You were trying to get her kidnapped.”
Tysa was going to talk, but tears did the talking for her. “No time for sad stories now,” she finally said, “as we have to fix more serious problems. Problems everybody would have.”
She signaled for him to go with her and disappeared in the hallway. Agdinar crossed the room, still unsure on his feet and with a suit not ready for battle.
There had been something imperious in the way Tysa had moved, and he understood, beyond her clumsy words, that he had to follow and be quiet.
He came back behind Tysa to the end of the hallway, right on the window side of the immense living room. There were three Hawks covering the door, their backs toward them, and Stealy and another big guy holding Sarinda in front of them. Rychar was closer to the Major, who had his back against the windowpane.