The other swarm soldiers rushed into the apartment after the brainbender, at which point they—the corridor and everything—disappeared in a thunderous fireball.
3:7
The nothing took Sky. She floated in a space without stars. She was free.
Then came the first sensations—the smarting of her eyes, her throat filled with chalk. She coughed and spluttered air that was like glass dust. Her ears whined a single high-pitched note, one that transformed into the klaxon of the apartment building alarm. She found herself slouched against a wall.
The hallway was thick with smoke and particles that had once formed the corridor’s structure. Unfiltered sunlight poured through the cavity in the window wall; it looked as if it had been pried open inside-out by a giant beast. A cold wind whistled through the breach.
The apartment the telepath had rushed into was no more. Its ceiling had disappeared. The walls were no longer walls. In a neighboring apartment, a middle-aged woman sat shaking in one corner, a teenaged boy huddled in her arms. They were safe, at least.
Firefighting bots rolled onto the scene, puffing their white gas at any sign of flame.
‘Are you okay?’ asked a familiar voice.
Okiro sat against the remainder of a wall, caked in dust. Sky was sore in too many places. Uncle Jesse said she was bruised, but nothing was broken. ‘I’m okay,’ she replied, covering her head with her hood.
She spotted movement at the end of the corridor, something beneath the rubble. The debris parted, and three swarms opened, like flowers blooming, to reveal the soldiers safe inside. Two of their colleagues swung up from the lower floor. The soldiers gathered, then stood still, as if in discussion. Then, one by one, they leapt out through the hole in the corridor’s window wall.
The last agent—the armored one, presumably the leader—glanced in Sky’s direction before leaping after the others, leaving a swirl of dust in his wake.
‘I still prefer the elevator,’ Okiro said, helping Sky stand. Their hands met, slippery with dust.
The alarm stopped.
Sky walked to the intact portion of the window wall and watched the swarm soldiers claw their way down the building, then disappear across an atrium pockmarked with lifeless bodies.
Okiro stood beside her, speechless.
‘Ma,’ Sky cried. She bolted down the corridor, debris bending and crackling under her feet.
‘Watch your step,’ Okiro called after her.
Sky’s apartment door was open. She gasped at the scene before her. The living room looked as if it had been tipped to one side.
‘Lucky,’ Okiro said, right behind her, ‘the structure is still intact.’
A scream came from somewhere at the end of the corridor, near the elevator. The teenaged boy was inching his way to the breach in the window wall, held back by the middle-aged woman.
‘Find your mom,’ Okiro said, and he darted toward the struggling pair.
Sky stepped into the living room and called out, ‘Ma?’
No answer.
She made her way to the sofa—she had last seen her mother lying on the floor beside it, but her body was no longer there. Sky scoured the living room. There was no sign of her.
‘Ma!?’
A scraping sound. From the kitchenette.
Sky climbed over fallen bric-à-brac and peered over the bench. Nothing there except open drawers and fallen utensils. Then she spotted a trail of red, leading to her office.
She followed the trail, her breath quickening. As she approached the office, she heard her mother’s voice, muttering, ‘No, please… stop…’
Sky found Winona sitting cross-legged on the office floor, a lone figure in the dark room, a knife in one hand slitting the bloodied wrists of the other.
It took a moment for Sky to register what was happening. She rushed to her mother and reached for the knife. She missed; her mother pulled the blade at the last moment and slashed the air.
Sky felt a sting across her forearm. The skin parted and a trickle of blood issued from the wound.
‘Call for help,’ her mother said, tears streaming. ‘I can’t stop it. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Can’t stop it.’ A mind and body at war.
Sky lunged at her mother again. This time she managed to grab hold of the knife-arm. She threw her weight across it, but her mother pushed back and the blade arm flailed.
‘Leave me,’ her mother screamed. The woman’s strength caught Sky by surprise. She lost her balance and landed hard against the wall.
Sky cried out in pain—she had knocked the back of her head. Her vision spun.
After a few seconds, she found she could focus again. She picked herself up and made another attempt to reach her mother. But as she neared the bloodied woman, Sky’s foot went through the floor. Her stomach lurched. Her fingers clawed the space around her for something to hold onto, but all they found was air.
3:8
Okiro had just finished tying the final knot on the suicidal teen’s wrists when he heard the screams coming from down the corridor. He left the boy in the care of his mother and rushed to Sky’s apartment.
He found Sky on the floor below, lying on a pile of debris. ‘Don’t move, I’ll come down—’
Sky coughed and waved him away, ‘I’m all right,’ she pointed to Okiro’s level, ‘My mom…’
Okiro hadn’t noticed the woman in the corner. She was sitting against a wall, knife in a limp hand, wrists bloodied. She was not moving.
He made his way over to her, checking his footing. He flicked the blade away with his foot then sprayed clotter over the woman’s wounds to stem the bleeding.
Sky’s voice rang out from below, ‘Ma? Are you okay?’
Okiro checked for a pulse. ‘She’s alive.’
He dragged the injured woman out of the apartment and into the corridor. Seconds later, the elevator opened and Sky rushed out, limping on one leg. ‘Ma,’ she called out.
‘I’ve clotted the wounds,’ Okiro said. ‘We need to get her to an ambulance.’ He asked his BOS for the ambulance’s estimated time of arrival, but his BOS informed him that the Neuronet was still down. They could do nothing but wait.
Nearby, the suicidal teen was still fighting his bonds while his mother tried to calm him.
Minutes later, the building’s medical bots arrived to assess the injured. The medbots transfused printed blood into her mother, gave her a neurosedative, and announced she was stable enough to transport (declaring the elevators safe). The medbots notified Sky that she had some bruising, but her leg was not broken.
Automated stretchers arrived. Sky and Okiro placed her mother and the teenaged boy on the stretchers and took the elevator down to the lobby.
Downstairs, they were greeted by a bloodied ring on the atrium floor; citizens who had jumped from balconies had landed near the inner walls. The center of the floor was, in eerie contrast, pristine. Okiro could smell something burning. A few of the balconies above were blackened and smoldering, with firefighting bots crawling about them.
Okiro was relieved to find his colleagues safe. They were attending to half a dozen victims, all sedated.
‘You ran off so fast we thought you’d been hacked,’ Trinh muttered, her face long and drawn as she bound the wrists of a victim to a stretcher.
Okiro did not understand it himself. When he had realized a citywide hack was in progress, with multiple victims detected, his first thought went to his daughter, Elsa. In an instant, he had disconnected her from the net using his parental override. Next, he placed a call to Penny, Elsa’s mother; they were in Cleveland visiting Penny’s boyfriend. She was a little terse, but Okiro cut her short to warn her about the hack. She followed his advice and disconnected. Moments later, the entire Neuronet cut out—probably a safety mechanism to quarantine the hack. Offline and powerless, Okiro’s attention had returned to the apartment complex and to a single client, Sky Marion. That was when he had rushed to her floor.
Had he acted in haste? Had his
duty been with his unit? He would find out when he received his monthly scanner report.
Okiro realized Sky was no longer beside him. He spotted her exiting the atrium for the street where the priority railpods waited. He caught up with her and helped position her mother’s stretcher inside a railpod. Sky’s dark hair protruded from her hood, casting shadows across her features.
There, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, he felt a strange pride for Sky Marion—she was outside, among other humans. He wanted to tell her so, but thought that if he did, she would become conscious of her achievement and relapse.
‘I have to get back to help the others,’ he said. He thought he saw her nod. He may have imagined it. The doors closed before he could decide, and the pod skimmed away to join the yellow streaks of priority vehicles clogging Detroit’s rails. Many of the city’s high-rise buildings were spouting thick black smoke, like the industrial chimneys of the Before.
3:9
A hospital should be a place of healing, but the triage ward looked like a war zone from the Before. From behind the safety of her hood, Sky watched hack victims babble and writhe and scream.
‘Uncle Jesse, drop the volume.’
< Yes, ma’am. By the way, you’re fidgeting again. >
Both her thumbs were rubbing up against the web of skin between her fingers. ‘Uncle Jesse…’
< Good idea, ma’am, I’ll suspend the reminders for a while. >
The screams muffled to a bearable groan, but she could still make out ordinary conversation.
She was surrounded by humans. It was like walking in front of a firing squad. At least when she had faced the telepath her fear had matched the circumstance. Here, in the hospital, she knew she was safe, yet she wanted to run just the same.
Despite her body’s illogical reaction, she managed. For the first time in years, somehow she managed. She did not run. She stayed in place. She still feared people, but it was nothing in comparison to the fear of losing her mother.
Medical staff tried to funnel the new arrivals out of the bottleneck and into the corridors, but the more stretchers they shifted inside, the more arrived.
A medical drone lay trampled on the floor near Sky’s feet.
There were no mayas. With the Neuronet offline, people moved around as if lost, scanning the building, wide eyed. Everyone still had access to their internal DNA computers which ran basic wetware such as the Brain Operating System and maya-generation programs, but that was no consolation. Few were used to living offline for such an extended period.
Sky, however, felt a strange sense of relief at being disconnected. It was as if some ethereal beast was no longer demanding her attention. It made her think of her youth, during the holo era, when disconnecting from the net was as easy as removing your wearable. Simpler times.
Her mother groaned. Her eyelids sprang open and she caught sight of Sky. ‘I’m sorry, baby,’ she said. Her eye sockets were hollow like craters on the Moon, her arms tugging at their restraints. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Sky tightened her bonds. ‘It’s not your fault, Ma.’
The stretcher linked with the hospital’s system, then rolled down the corridor with Sky in tow.
Most of the hospital’s walls were transparent, allowing Sky to see wards carpeted with patients and their families. She wished for a private room, somewhere to hide, but instead the stretcher parked itself in the corridor, at the end of a long line of stretchers.
Outside, the weather was clear. The gardens and children’s playground were empty.
The hissing of an auto-injector caught Sky’s attention. A nurse, her hair bun falling apart, injected something into a struggling patient that made him go limp.
‘It’s a chemical sedative,’ the nurse croaked as she approached Sky. ‘The neurosedatives aren’t strong enough to put the infected to sleep.’
‘Where are your emergency programmers? My mother needs treatment,’ Sky said, eyeing the injector in the nurse’s hand.
The nurse sighed. ‘We don’t have enough programmers to attend to everybody immediately. I’m just following doctor’s orders here, okay? They tell me to sedate the victims, so that’s what I do.’
The nurse took her mother’s arm and injected the chemicals. Winona’s eyelids closed and she fell asleep.
*
As the hours passed, the deluge of patients slowed to a trickle. From beneath her hood, Sky observed the family members who remained in vigil. She felt a perverse connection to these strangers, a sort of communal bond of affliction.
Uncle Jesse had news. < Ma’am, the Neuronet’s online again. It’s secure, so they tell me. >
Citizens’ mayas lit up. There were sighs of relief. The hallucinogenic data filled every available space of the building, layers upon layers of it like clothes on a teenager’s floor. Most displayed news sites.
Sky opened her own news channels: Detroit was the epicenter of the hack, over one hundred thousand victims estimated, maybe more. The virus had spread abroad; thousands infected in the Asian Federation, African Federation, and some in Europe and Antarctica. Over a million confirmed infections in total. The Earth-UNION Security Council had disconnected the Neuronet in the worst hit regions to contain the infection. Victims leaped from buildings, drowned themselves, stabbed themselves, and set themselves alight. The toll would have been even worse if private gun ownership had existed as it had in the Before, the pundits agreed.
Every channel was the same: questions, questions, and no answers. Who hacked Detroit this time? Was it the telepaths again? Of course it was. It would have been impossible to pull this off from Earth. Perhaps a Detroit citizen had dabbled in telepathy and been infected without the scanners picking it up? The Security Council was in session. When would the federator make her address? The share market had taken a hit.
‘All this bio-computing and artificial hallucinations…’ one citizen complained, ‘… we inject computers into our brains and this is the result. Why is anyone surprised?’
Some old-timers had refused to get back on the Neuronet and instead reverted to the Holonet system. ‘At least a wearable holo device can’t mess with your mind,’ they said. Yet the government announcements assured everyone with statistics; you had more chance of being struck by lightning than having a hacker turn your internal DNA computer against your own brain.
Local and state leaders came out in solidarity. ‘We will not be cowed,’ they said. ‘This town/city/state will not live in fear,’ they said. ‘We will continue to live our lives, to use the Neuronet.’ Not that they had much choice—the Neuronet was so enmeshed in modern society that it would be more disruptive to revert to the Holonet. And besides, the net was secure now.
Everyone agreed it was almost as bad as ’36.
‘We survived that, we can survive this,’ they said.
There was no mention of the events at Sky’s apartment that day, and nothing about the brainbender. Sky wondered why the authorities had not approached her about the incident. Perhaps there was no need; the scanners would have picked up her impressions and the NIA would be trawling through them this very minute.
Her father had not contacted her either, even though she was only a maya-call away.
What did you expect?
A young girl of about six, wearing a puffy jacket, sat on the floor a few stretchers down the corridor. An adult patient lay still on the bed above her. The girl pulled out a doll, placed it on the floor at her feet, and stared at it. Her brow furrowed, as if trying to pierce it with her mind. The thing moved a little; an arm here, a leg there. Frustrated, the girl kicked it away. It landed near Sky.
Sky searched for a link with the doll and found one. She thordered the toy to lift its head and look around. The girl smiled. The doll pushed itself up, stood, bowed, and then proceeded to dance. The girl clapped. The doll fought an imaginary foe, sometimes winning, sometimes getting a kick in the face. The kid laughed. Sky turned the settings on “easy” and returned it to the child, who wa
s amazed to discover she could better control the doll.
At that moment, every public maya in the hospital corridor—and likely everywhere else in the Federation—switched to footage of an empty podium. In the background was the flag of the Americas Federation with its 101 stars.
A woman in a suit strode to the podium. She had deep natural graying hair, loose over her shoulder, and a face that had long discarded its baby fat, yet somehow had retained its youth.
Sky had given up hope she would be as accomplished or as striking when she neared her own centenary. She watched the federator with both admiration and envy.
The federator stopped at the lectern.
‘My fellow citizens, today our great Federation and our sibling Federations of Earth were hacked. This hack struck at the very heart of our society—our brains.’ A loose strand of hair fell over her face and she swept it back over one ear. ‘Earth’s Neuronet was breached. It was breached only for a moment, but that was all it took to infect a million global citizens before our engineers could contain it. Despite our advanced security measures, the hackers managed to get through. I, my government, and the EUNION Security Council, have failed you.’
You sure did, Sky thought.
The federator continued, ‘The hack came in the form of a deadly neurological weapon; a neurovirus which forces victims to take their own lives. It is a rare form of viral hack that has until now only existed offworld. It is known as the Tellinii virus.’
Tellinii, Sky thought. The name was familiar, but there were so many viruses offworld it was hard to keep track of them.
‘I know many of you are, as I speak, standing beside your infected loved ones. I understand what you are going through.’
How could she?
‘My only son, Videl…’ the word had begun with determination but ended in a stammer, ‘… is infected.’ She stared at the podium, her jaw tightening. She looked up at the camera again, ‘It is with the greatest of regret that I must inform you that, at present, there is no cure. At least, not one known to us.’
Neurotopia Page 5