by J D Cortese
And a few of them did, colliding with the incoming Hawks who were making their way with new loads of weapons.
“I think it's time to leave,” Agdinar said. He felt safe enough to stand.
“There's no space to sit inside this thing,” said Tysa. “It's—”
He didn't have to turn back. “Look again.”
When Tysa did look, there were two seats behind the pilot’s chair.
“It's magic; I knew it,” Sarinda said, touching his shoulder.
“In a way, it is.” Agdinar couldn’t face her to talk, as he was pointing with his arms to a worried group of armed thugs—there was a ridiculous undertone in the scene. It was true that many things his world could do were even beyond magic.
“Get inside; this is getting out of hand.” His inner viewer showed Rychar, hiding behind the kitchen's island and using his wrist-phone to call even more Hawks to the building. They would need to get the nuke before Rychar got its codes.
Sarinda and Tysa had started to sit in the back row of the cabin. They kept away from the ethereal panels and screens that floated around the front seat.
Then, Sarinda screamed, “Agdinar, there!”
Even before he turned left to check the windowpane's corner, Agdinar knew they were in trouble once more. Two Hawks had placed a tripod there and propped up a missile-like weapon. It wouldn't damage the AVM but could easily carbonize them.
“Can you—?” Agdinar got to say.
The Hawks released the rocket, and in that instant, a yellow wall rose in the middle of its path to him. The explosion that followed was brutal, but Agdinar only felt a warm breeze and radiating heat on his face.
The bedroom where he’d hid with Tysa was gone, and a huge gap opened to show a glistening view of the Hudson River. As for the Hawks, only some dark stains on the ceiling remained of them.
Agdinar knelt and touched the transport's shining outside. “Thank you,” he said.
...MY DUTY.
“Wow, you are faithful,” said Tysa.
...I LIKE THAT NAME, BUT YOU CAN ALL CALL ME JUST FAITH.
Agdinar nodded, and said, “Faith, get us out of here.”
There was a blast of light, vaguely human-shaped, and he was flipped to the pilot's seat. The yellow wall now extended across the wreckage that was once a luxurious living room.
Agdinar felt the wave of nausea pass and spoke to his friends crowding on the back seats. “Sorry, but this will be a fast ride. Close your eyes, if you need to. And you, Faith, let's go. As fast as you can.”
Faith receded, like a killer whale with brilliant skin, and her black shadow rose. The yellow wall of light disappeared, giving the Hawks still in the room only a second to see how the suspended ship disappeared in the edge of an invisible pocket.
Chapter 45
They flew east without a clear direction. The AVM—the one they were now calling Faith—continued to revise the local records, which flashed at incredible speed on the cabin’s screens, probably trying to avoid any indirect connection with the Towers. They were outside the law, both above and below.
Agdinar wanted to contact the Eye at will, but he was only getting an incipient headache.
Tysa startled him. “This is amazing,” she said. “So, they don't see us?”
“No, nobody can,” he answered, peeking to the skies, sustained by mountainous clouds. Agdinar was worried for what might lie ahead for them, but Faith provided a jarring distraction. She had taken a high flight path, heading straight east. A passenger plane was coming from over the ocean and passing near New York in a lateral approach to Kennedy Airport. La Guardia had been closed for more than five years, and likely forever.
Faith accelerated head on to the plane, much faster than the speed of sound. It looked as if they saw a model airplane, and the next second, they were inside one. They went thought the plane’s wings and body perpendicularly to the fuselage.
And then, the plane was behind them, receding back as they crossed Queens. Agdinar could hear the two passengers retching in the back seat. He also felt a little sick to his stomach and had double vision, but knew it was the normal reaction to a strong transient contact. “A little like a rollercoaster, isn't it?” he said.
“It felt...sort of hurt,” Tysa said, “deep inside my chest.”
“Well, atoms don't like to be stretched apart.” He looked back toward Sarinda's seat; she was fine, only a little pale. But she smiled back at him. He had taken her on that ride before.
“How...how's this possible?” Tysa was staring hard into his eyes.
“Nothing is truly solid,” he said, the echo of his own bewilderment and the Overseer's voice explaining it to him in the distant past. “We sort the atoms of each object, juggle them around, and finally put them together like they were before.” For once, he felt knowledgeable.
Tysa spoke, and she wasn't looking as composed as Sarinda. “Sorry, but do you mean atoms are moved one by one?”
“Yes, pretty much.”
“It is really amazing,” Sarinda said, “like magic.”
Agdinar was going to restate that yes, it did seem magical, as all super-advanced technologies might appear, but he couldn't find words that didn't sound condescending about current humans’ technology. And then, they all flinched.
...I FOUND HIM.
“I heard that,” said Sarinda. “Is that the computer?”
...YES.
“Why don't you talk more softly?” Tysa was intently watching the console, unaware that the voice was coming from inside her mind.
...I'M KIND OF LOUD.
“I can tell,” said Sarinda.
Agdinar intervened, worried about too many people—and AIs—inside Faith’s cabin. “You said that you found Rychar’s people?”
...YES, BUT NOT THE EXPLOSIVE.
“One problem at a time,” he said. “We'll get to that in time.”
It was strange for Agdinar to see the calming effect his words had on the passengers. But they didn’t help him in the least. He had no idea about how to find the nukes and was experiencing painful pressure in his jaw. The unease, and that explosion of emotions he couldn’t handle, were coming from searing anger. Rychar had gone too far, and he shouldn’t escape punishment. Agdinar couldn’t stop these violent thoughts from surfacing—they upset him, but deep down, also carried excitement.
* * *
In the few minutes Faith spent correcting their course to reach Rychar before he left the city, Agdinar tried to answer Tysa’s questions about the artificial minds that intermingled with them.
“But, are they people?” Tysa insisted, while looking around as if waiting for Faith to intervene.
“No, they are Others,” he said.
“Others?”
Even a single word by Sarinda had a delicious accent, the hard-to-place contributions of many countries and many Spanish tongues.
“The Others are of many kinds,” he said. “Some, you deal with them as dogs, point and ask...other Others are wiser than any human.” Agdinar was trying to explain in figures of speech something he barely understood. He'd meant to say that the Others were tellers, something like sages, but he didn’t know if that was a word that carried any meaning in Sarinda’s world. “And some Others,” he added, unsure, “are ineffable masters, beyond all of us.”
He looked again to the skies, tainted with pink swirls as the night approached.
He thought about the Eye and shuddered.
* * *
Faith was a powerful AVM, and she moved faster than any transport Agdinar had ever taken for a joyride. But she also knew that they were under siege and wouldn't want to enter battle with her AVM friends. Faith was thus flying in the trough between buildings, close enough to street level to make everybody jump from time to time. It wasn't as much going from A to B as spelling words in the alphabet of a Ouija board.
Agdinar turned back to talk to his partners, trying to distract them from the spinning world around the cabin. They wouldn't fe
el the effects of gravity or rotation, but if they paid attention, the shifting sights could be sickening.
“Don't worry,” he said, “we're going to get Rychar.”
“And then what?”
Tysa's question hung in the air, lacking any easy follow-up.
“We'll get the nuke,” Sarinda said. “That's what we will do.”
“How?”
Agdinar had to stop the six-year-old questioning persona of Tysa from scaring them. “Rychar surely knows where they are going to place it,” he said, “and we will make him tell us.”
...IF WE CAN PASS THROUGH THE CITY AS IT IS.
Agdinar turned to the front— “I thought you were going to—”
The entire cabin became transparent, and they all froze.
Moving at such speed, ten floors above the ground and vertically angled between the tall buildings, the 360-degree view wasn’t going to calm anyone.
They all gasped and tightly held their invisible seats. The view around them turned deep blue, and movement slowed down. Agdinar knew that was a trick of projection; they were still swerving around and in a random path between skyscrapers.
“Oh, my God,” said Tysa. “Look.”
They could now see the world as it really was: hundreds of connecting paths between earth and heaven, crowded by thousands of floating robots of the most varied forms. And, above them, a cloud of shuttles traveling around the Towers.
An invisible world, with endless maddening motions.
They could see now the immense city above, an indescribable forest of buildings and branching routes, which resembled a thick canopy in a leafless winter. It was a spellbinding sight for Agdinar's passengers, and Faith kept showing them the Towers in detail as it moved slowly in a circle while facing upwards.
But only Agdinar could understand the deeper meaning of what he was seeing. There was a reason for the frantic movement in the Towers.
The Watchers were dismantling their connections with the world below.
They were going to sever them completely before the city went up in flames.
And that, as bad as it was, wasn't the worst thing about the vision Faith was sharing with them. Agdinar's civilization was thousands of years ahead of this present, and Management had to have known—but wouldn't tell lowly Watchers like him—how the past was going to turn up.
They were going to fail, and the city would fall much harder than he'd thought possible.
The Second Descent would happen after the end of New York.
* * *
Faith had located Rychar's convoy as it tried to cross the west side of town, barely moving within the thousands of auto-cars that were fleeing the city. Alarms from crashes could be heard, and many auto-cars were stuck in the Riverside Autocarway, the traffic backed up for forty blocks inland.
Locating Rychar was fortunate for them, but other events were not. The air was as congested as the ground; the fact that only they could see it wasn't making Agdinar any happier.
Faith was now crossing a jungle of floating machinery, which formed a wobbling column of invisible tools. She had slowed down, as there was a limit to how many transient contacts she could endure before losing substantial power.
“Can we go any faster?” Tysa tapped the headrest of Agdinar's seat.
“We are stuck. These machines are too simple—sensors, cameras, storage bins—and they can't avoid colliding with us. It's just logistics materials, but if we keep bumping into them, their command center can triangulate our position.”
“Oh, I see.”
Tysa's silence worried Agdinar more than her ceaseless questioning. But he wasn't going to tell her that. With such density of Tower machinery being recalled, it was only a matter of time, brief time really, before they got entangled with enough heavy equipment to be taken for a ride to Tower City.
A flying camera moved distractedly right and left—it was playing a chess game with itself to pass time—and it crashed on Faith's wing before the AVM could slide away.
Agdinar could see more threads of equipment coming together to form wide vertical roads as they moved to the skies.
It was an artificial Leviathan, its many members hanging from the clouds. And an invisible intelligence controlled each part of the monster.
They stopped, suddenly and completely, and Agdinar knew this was a sign of great danger. Faith was finally powerless against the colossal octopus and its myriad of flowing tentacles.
Faith was now slowly moving upward, caught in those tentacles, which started a swirling motion as they were funneled upward. Agdinar looked all around the cabin, and the flow of a million objects finally scared him as he got the message.
There was no possible escape for them.
Chapter 46
Even though they couldn't move forward anymore, Faith was slowly adjusting their height to escape contact with the bulkier containers passing near them. A constant, and at times deafening, shuffling sound penetrated the cabin. Agdinar thought of ghostly chains sliding around Faith and ensnaring her. Looking outside, he could only see a few layers of the massive migration of machines. In the distance, Faith’s invisibility scramblers wouldn't work as well, and the city pleasantly slipped into the night, the few burning auto-cars notwithstanding.
There were layers upon layers of invisibility in his world, and they were trapped in a most terrifying spectacle, while remaining unseen and unheard by the million New Yorkers who were escaping their town.
His world was, and had been always, a world of secrets.
Faith awoke him from the reverie, loud as usual.
...I CAN'T KEEP GOING.
“And what can we do to help?” he asked, not really meaning it. If Faith couldn't break the grip of the climbing rain of metal, they'd be just as powerless to do it.
...NOTHING FROM THE INSIDE.
“So, we can do something from the outside,” Tysa said, peeking over Agdinar's headrest.
...YES, YOU CAN.
They all saw it at the same time, and it jolted them from their seats.
“That's insane,” Sarinda said.
“I don't think we have a choice,” Agdinar said. “Let's suit up.”
Tysa and Sarinda gasped as tendrils of the ship's surface started to cover their bodies, fast as rising waters. In a few seconds, a squirming dark-blue mass was nursing their new military suits. Even Sarinda, who'd gone through the process in Chinatown, found it unnerving and reacted as if her body were covered by crawling insects.
“My arm,” said Tysa.
“Oh, I forgot; the suits have medical nano-surgeons.”
“It hurts,” she said, moving the arm in front of her. “Oh, now I can move it.”
“It will be all right soon. Give it a few minutes.”
Sarinda was watching the tornado of moving metal. “Do we still have time?”
“I'm not sure,” Agdinar said, and touched the control panel.
The cabin's roof vanished, and they contemplated the gigantic swirling trap around them. The movement of countless machine parts and Faith's drifting together created the illusion of them slowly falling upward into a sinkhole full of discarded junk.
“We don't have much time,” he said. “The gap above us is closing; and when it does, we're going to be totally enclosed and taken up with everything else.”
“Are you sure this's going to work?” Sarinda was seated on the cabin's edge, watching the crowded sky. She looked as despondent as he felt.
“No.”
Before Sarinda could ask him for more detail, she screamed.
As soon as she'd stepped onto Faith's wing, the sea of metal had disappeared, and she was standing on the air, more than fifty floors above the ground.
Agdinar extended his arm toward Sarinda, from the other side of the AVM. “Wait,” he said, “don't move, and close your eyes.”
Sarinda stayed standing, her body trembling and knees shaking.
A thin cord surged from Agdinar's wrist and attached itself to her
back.
“Now, you can open your eyes.”
Sarinda's inner sight had been restored, and the world went back to its abysmal reality. It was as if colored virtual glasses showed a monochromatic world outside, at the edge of catastrophe.
“I can’t believe I'm saying this,” she managed, still shaky, “but I'm glad to see this crap.”
“Just stay there,” he said, not quite steady himself. “Wait a minute.”
The gap above his head was getting to less than an arm's length; he wasn't sure they had even a minute left.
He lowered his body and knelt, close to Tysa. “You will have to drive,” he said, anticipating her resistance.
“Me? I don't know anything about this machine, and—”
“You can't help out here, not with your arm being repaired. Just touch the console with the other hand.”
“Just touch it?”
“Yes, it's a vestigial operation.”
“A what?” Even with the reigning chaos around them, Tysa's voice carried a load of annoyance.
Faith started to vibrate with worrisome intensity.
“A vestigial...a leftover from the past,” he said, struggling to keep calm. “Our machines can't engage in any thinking or process that can endanger a human without a physical authorization.”
“Am I in danger?”
“Look around. We all are.”
“All right,” Tysa said, but Agdinar had already left her and was walking toward the edge of Faith's wing, where the river of metal fell skyward with increasing speed. It was dizzying, and he felt, from the shaking of their ship, that the flow was getting more turbulent with each second. He couldn't reach the very edge, as a clotting mass of nanorobots had splashed into a slick puddle that would be dangerous to step in.
He knew theirs was a desperate attempt and couldn't believe Faith would allow it. But there were many different things weighing on that decision: if they didn't survive, get out, and stop the nuke, the city and millions of unaware humans would be destroyed.