Terminal White

by James Axler

  They were blowing air at people, Brigid realized. Not circulating it in the room—well, not just that anyway—but blowing it at people’s heads.

  “Brigid Baptiste,” she mouthed to herself, subvocalizing the words.

  The act of subvocalizing triggered something else in her mind, another piece of the puzzle. The Commtact, she remembered. She had a Commtact, a remarkable piece of hardware wired up inside her skull that could send and receive radio communications in real time. And one trick to using the Commtact in awkward situations was to subvocalize, because the way its microphone was built into her skull meant that it would pick up and augment the words when it broadcast them to a colleague. A colleague like Kane.

  Brigid thought hard about the Commtact, remembering how to make it function. “Kane, this is Baptiste,” she subvocalized. “Where are you?”

  Subliminal Instruction to Ioville Citizen 618M:

  Attend Delta Level from 1532.

  Location: Tower 3, room D11.

  Nutrition intake. All food must be consumed.

  Any food not eaten in situ may be packaged up and removed to be imbibed in your sleeping quarters. Only use designated packaging and log the removal with one of the wall-mounted analyzers, including the weight of the package.

  Duration: .75 hours.

  Chapter 23

  The elevator doors parted and Supreme Magistrate Webb emerged on Cappa Level, in the headquarters and training facility of the Magistrates. It was here that everyone in his ville was schooled in physical fitness. Even now as he passed the training gymnasium, Webb could see a small group of citizens being put through their paces as he peered through the reinforced glass panel set in the gray double doors.

  Webb’s face was set in a grim expression. He had been thinking about what that ex-Magistrate Kane had told him when he had arrived at Ioville, before he had been sent through Processing and Orientation and had lost his mind to Terminal White.

  He marched on, striding familiar corridors, passing through another set of doors and into one of four incident rooms where the Magistrates toiled to retain the fixed order of Ioville. Gray-clad Mags worked at their desks, following through on a grand project to create laws that could govern all of the continent. To govern one needed rules. Webb had thought this an idle dream of noble intent but a dream all the same; now, however, he was beginning to realize the necessity of such an endeavor.

  Webb had been waiting three weeks for a message to come through from the barons, setting his request message on a loop so that it would play over and over, twice a day at random intervals. No response had been received.

  Webb stepped into the Magistrate communications suite, a large room, twenty feet square, its walls hidden behind equipment—all processors and flashing diodes and the whir of cooling fans. Two Mags manned the control desk, which looked like the instrument panel of an aircraft, sending instructions to the Magistrates on duty out in the ville.

  “Mag 390M, please report to sector 3-G for clean-up,” one of the controllers was saying into his microphone headset.

  The two Mags turned as Webb entered, offering a clenched-fist salute. Webb nodded soberly, then instructed them to wait outside. For what he had to do next, he wished to be alone. The two men filed out of the room, marching in step.

  Still standing, Webb went over to the comms array and tapped in his private code. The unit switched to monitoring the dedicated frequencies for baronial communication. Webb glared at the transmitter display, holding little hope now that the barons would contact him. The display was blank, confirming what Webb had suspected—that no response had been received.

  He grimaced as he took a place at the comms desk, seating himself in the swivel chair. Could what Kane said be true then? Could the barons be dead? It seemed incredible, preposterous even, that such beautiful creatures could have died.

  But without them, as he had told Kane, the world would surely descend into chaos, as man turned on man, exposing his violent nature. This could not happen—not when the Program of Unification had drawn everything together and imposed order on the world.

  Webb made a decision then. He took it upon himself, in that quiet moment alone in the Mag comms center in a perfectly ordered ville named in binary code, to take charge of the reins, to correct the dangerous path that the world outside the snowstorm must surely be on, to bring Terminal White to the masses.

  He had his army, trained and ready, every citizen schooled in the techniques they would need to conquer the madness snapping at the world’s heels.

  When Webb was done, the whole of North America would be in his control, eradicating all the petty rivalries and wars and dissatisfactions that had driven mankind to the brink of extinction once before.

  The discipline, the fitness, the manufacturing—everything was in place for this moment. Everything was ready. It had to be—the world was depending on him. It was time for humanity to experience the day after it lost free will.

  He turned away from the radio receiver, stood up and strode out of the room with renewed purpose. It was time to begin again.

  “Call my personal guard,” he told the waiting comms officers outside.

  What he had to do next, he would conduct from Alpha Level—a new baron for a new age.

  * * *

  “KANE?” BRIGID TRIED AGAIN, subvocalizing the request through the pickup mic of her Commtact. “I’m in Ioville with you. Do you hear me?

  “Grant? Are you there?”

  Just as the first time, there was no response to her request.

  Brigid stood self-consciously, eyeing the citizens working at their designated tasks in the factory. She had to get out of here, find Kane, figure out a way to stop this madness that was slowing her mind. Her eidetic memory had shaken it off, but even now she could feel her thoughts misting over again.

  Brigid tried the Commtact again. “Grant? It’s Brigid. Do you read me?”

  Nothing.

  Her crew supervisor was pacing across the room toward where Brigid was standing in the break area, a stern look on his wrinkled features. Her break was over, she realized, and Ioville always ran to schedule. There was no leeway to deviate.

  “Hello, Cerberus? This is Brigid Baptiste. Please respond,” Brigid subvocalized again as she watched the supervisor get nearer.

  The supervisor stopped before Brigid, standing on the other side of the low barricade that delineated the “room.”

  “You are dangerously late, Citizen 619F,” he said.

  Dangerously? It was five seconds since she should have been back at her post. Just five seconds.

  Brigid nodded as if chastised and hurried back across the room to her position on the production line. But she was thinking things through now, putting together all the tiny slivers of evidence that told her something was very much amiss.

  One, she had trouble recalling her memories. She knew they were there, but pulling them to mind took effort. Which meant that something was blocking her normal thought processes.

  That something was likely coming through the vents, which she realized were in every walkway, every room, every apartment. A narcotic, a beat, a subliminal suggestion of some kind—it was hard to tell, but it was almost certainly there.

  How that suggestion worked she did not know yet, but it was making people obey. Brigid herself had been made compliant by whatever it was, working in this grim factory for the betterment of a ville she owed no loyalty to.

  Two, she had a means to contact her allies and the outside world. That means was the Commtact, but for some reason no one was picking up her signal.

  From what she could recall, the Commtact was surgically inserted beneath her skin, which meant it was next to impossible for a stranger to happen upon it. So she felt safe to assume it was still there. Furthermore, its hiding place meant it should have su
stained no damage, so maybe there was another factor in play here.

  She settled into her groove at the rear of the semiconstructed Sandcat, considering all these points as she set about affixing another rear panel to another vehicle. And as she did so, Brigid wondered: Just how many Sandcats does one ville need?

  * * *

  IN ZETA LEVEL, Citizen 618M was working on the final armament checks for a Sandcat, his sixteenth today. Each Sandcat and Deathbird was checked after being produced by the factories on Epsilon Level, and each was checked regularly after that to ensure it was in optimum working order.

  Citizen 618M went through the checklist of tests required for each vehicle, never hurrying and never slowing. Each was granted precisely the same amount of energy and time, each a regimented test of its capabilities and efficiency.

  He climbed into the turret of the snow-white Sandcat he was working on, ran a series of tests on the control board before activating the twin USMG-73 turret guns located there. The guns cycled to life, the control panel switching to a faint red color to indicate that the weapons were live. Citizen 618M commanded the turret to swing around, watching on the targeting controls while the crosshairs tracked across the vast garage and repair shop, past his fellow workers.

  Citizen 618M brought the twin heavy machine guns around counterclockwise until their target fell on a bull’s-eye located on a distant wall. The bull’s-eye was two hundred and fifteen feet away from the Sandcat and was marked in rings of gray, white and black with an outer ring in silver. Citizen 618M depressed the twin triggers, sending a short burst of fire—just two bullets—from the turret guns. The twin bullets streaked away and struck the target an instant later.

  Citizen 618M checked a portable display he carried with him, linked to a camera that had been positioned facing the target but out of the line of fire. The image on the display unit confirmed that the bullets had struck, dead center. The guns were perfectly balanced and in working order.

  Citizen 618M commanded the turret chair to swivel back to the starting position, following the counterclockwise circuit. Once this was done, he climbed out of the turret blister and back into the main body of the Sandcat before exiting via the side door. Around him, the other mechanics continued their own checks.

  If Citizen 618M had any inkling that he had ever operated one of these turret guns before, either in his previous life as the Cerberus warrior called Grant or even in the preceding three weeks in his current role as an Ioville mechanic, he gave no hint. In fact, he seemed to be exactly what he was—a blank slate, ready to be shaped to the will of his superiors.

  * * *

  CITIZEN 619F’S SHIFT was over. Citizen 619F—Brigid Baptiste as she knew herself to be now—was expected next in the food distribution room in the adjacent tower at Epsilon Level. As she left the factory, she took a moment to let her thoughts settle. Her thoughts had raced while she was working, so many questions and problems that needed to be addressed before she could get herself—and her allies—out of this mess.

  She was standing before a large bank of windows that looked out over the snow-covered ville. It looked beautiful, like a frosted cake in an art deco style. Snow continued to fall, generated by the artificial engines and the seeded clouds.

  Brigid stopped in surprise, eyeing the falling snow through the windows of the walkway as if for the first time.

  Extreme weather could affect the Commtact’s signal strength, she realized, and it was snowing up a blizzard outside the ville, had been ever since she could remember.

  That man’s broadcast had reached her, the man she had heard in her head—no, through the Commtact, she corrected herself—weeks ago. He must have had some system to penetrate through the blizzard, some way to boost his signal.

  Brigid’s mind raced, drawing on all the radio broadcast knowledge that she could recall. Antennae and signal boosters and receiver stations—that was the basic triangle of radio broadcast.

  Could she find something to boost her signal here in the ville? She racked her brains, thinking about everything she had seen but nothing came to mind.

  But that was looking at the situation of herself alone. Kane was here, performing duties as a Magistrate, and a Magistrate would know more about the inner workings of the ville than any normal citizen. Which brought her to her next question— How do I find Kane?

  Chapter 24

  Brigid stood to the side of the broad walkway, watching the milling crowds switching shift at the Sandcat factory. Like them, she was due somewhere now, too, at one of the designated tasks, this one involving serving food.

  Brigid felt the pull to her next task, felt the compunction to follow that edict, to go to the vast food banks elsewhere on Epsilon Level, where she should be serving her fellow citizens in ten minutes’ time.

  “You are Brigid Baptiste,” she whispered to herself, holding her head, rubbing at her face. “Don’t let them make you forget that.”

  She had more important things to do now. She needed to find Kane and locate Grant. Grant would be harder—she had not seen him since she had been indoctrinated into ville life, could not even be certain that he was really here. But Kane—Kane should be easier to locate. She just had to apply logic, because in a world as ordered as Ioville, logic was the most effective weapon of all. Use the logic, flip the process—simple.

  She strode toward the nearest elevator bank, tapped the call button and waited for the elevator car to arrive. A few seconds later the elevator let out a dull chime and a set of elevator doors opened. Two Magistrates came marching out, and Brigid stepped back automatically, pushing herself against the wall, trying not to draw attention to herself. The Mags strode past, ignoring her—they clearly had business elsewhere on this level.

  Once they had passed, Brigid stepped into the elevator—gray-walled, of course—and pressed the button for Cappa Level.

  “You are Brigid Baptiste,” Brigid muttered to herself as the elevator ascended. “Do not let them make you forget that.”

  The elevator ground to a halt, issuing just the faintest of wheezes as the hydraulic brakes functioned. Then the doors opened, revealing a corridor on Cappa Level. The corridor was gray with horizontal white lines running along it at waist and ankle level.

  Brigid stepped warily from the elevator, searching right and left for anyone who might be observing her. Two Magistrates in full uniform—gray with the white Io insignia over the breast—were marching toward her from the far left, but as she watched they peeled away, turning into a doorway located farther along the corridor.

  Self-consciously, Brigid pushed her hair back, pulled down the peak of her cap and began to stride purposefully along the featureless corridor.

  She made her way past several open doorways, glancing inside to see various workings of the Magistrate Division. There was an armory, heavily secured and guarded, a computer room and a lab where samples might be taken for analysis. Another room looked like a morgue, lines of open drawers waiting between its cool walls, each drawer empty. I guess no one has died lately in Ioville, Brigid thought with a sense of curiosity. She wondered if maybe no one ever did, if that would be against the Designated Task system that was applied so cruelly to every resident of the ville.

  She hurried on, uncertain of where she was going. There were no signs here, and no wall maps as there were in other areas of the ville.

  She walked straight into an evidence room without realizing it, found herself facing a wall of identical lockers, each one identified only by bar code. A network of robot arms descended from the ceiling like an upturned octopus, motionless now but ready to spring into action if anything was required from this room.

  Another doorway opened into a long corridor that served as a communal shower, stretching forty feet, open like a carwash. Brigid stepped out, almost walking into a Magistrate who was about to get washed. The man was stripped
down and held a gray towel in his hands.

  Brigid said nothing and neither did the Mag, and she wondered if by saying nothing the man presumed that she was following orders and thus had no need to challenge her. If that was the case then it made things easier—so long as she did nothing to specifically draw attention to herself she should theoretically be able to move about this area freely.

  Brigid hurried on, trotting away from the showers until she reached a junction where four corridors met. She halted there, eyeing each direction. Ahead, a doorway, wide enough for a Sandcat to pass through, opened into an operations room. A dozen Magistrates worked at their desks there, and Brigid searched their faces—or what she could see of them from under their helmets—looking for the familiar strong lines of Kane’s jaw. He wasn’t there.

  The other two directions showed more featureless corridors. Brigid wondered how to choose a direction, stood for thirty seconds seemingly unable to make a decision.

  You are now late for Designated Task #008, her mind pleaded. Please report to Epsilon Level immediately, Citizen 619F.

  Brigid turned and began to stride back to the elevators, something like a sense of dread clawing at the pit of her stomach. She was late for her duty, and in not performing that duty to the utmost of her ability she was letting down the ville.

  “No,” Brigid muttered, halting midstride, the elevator bank still twenty feet ahead of her. She screwed her eyes shut tight and shook her head. You are Brigid Baptiste, she told herself. Do not let them make you forget this. “Brigid Baptiste,” she whispered.

  Regathering her thoughts, Brigid turned herself around and strode back down the corridor, repeating the mantra of her own name in her head. If she kept focused, it seemed that she could retain her own thoughts and personality—but any momentary lapse and she risked losing sight of herself and reverting back to her prescribed role as Citizen 619F.