by PJ Manney
“You and your comrades committed seditious conspiracy, an act of war, and crimes against humanity,” said Conrad. “Surrender, and I have prisons waiting for the humans. A bed and three squares for a while. We’ll bleed you all dry for information, then finish you off. Better than you deserve. Don’t surrender, and you’ll be hunted down and killed like the animals you are. You’re terrorists now. The world is searching for you, and we will find you. Can’t make it simpler than that.”
“I’m just spare parts,” said Tom 1. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Conrad rolled his eyes. “Not you, dummy. The humans.”
“How do you plan on letting them know? I’ve got no communications back to my people. I’m just a mini-recording of a partial personality. I’m cut off from my source.”
Conrad snickered. The eight Secret Service agents snickered with him. “We know about your MAV. I’m talking to Thomas Paine right now, aren’t I?” He waved around the room. “Hey, Tommy Boy! How do you want to die?”
Tom 1 stood still, said nothing.
Watching the robot carefully, Tom said, “They’ve got to be filming this, too, for propaganda later. Don’t do it.”
The robot’s body rocked, his eyes twitching.
On the bridge, Veronika said, “Oh my God, he’s got contrary commands.” The others watched, breathless.
Tom was amazed. “He’s still so human.”
“What a weird little bot you are.” Conrad snickered, mocking Tom 1’s odd movements. The Secret Service officers laughed.
The team watched as Tom 1 reprioritized his commands. The robot stopped his bizarre movement. “Now that we know your terms, we will all see what the future holds, won’t we?”
“No. You won’t,” Conrad said. “You’re finished.” His hand made a slicing move across his neck, and Tom and the team watched as Tom 1 was dragged away by the agents for a final disassembly. As the MAV tried to fly away, a pair of giant hands grabbed it, and the image on the bridge went to static.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The team on the Zumwalt bridge rewatched the surveillance video, searching for any new information. Even with the robotic face’s limited expressions and affect, Tom knew what Tom 1 had been feeling. He felt it, too. No longer linked as a single mind, Tom 1 was an identical twin behind a silicone mask. Tom said a silent and final farewell to him, grateful that the machine had retained enough of Major Tom’s wisdom not to self-destruct and take President Conrad with him.
“Am I, like, the only one mesmerized by Conrad?” asked Veronika.
Tom was as fascinated as Veronika. Conrad was a type that humans regularly propelled up the razor-wire social ladder, even though their leadership would be society’s undoing. The tragedy was that autocrats gained power from the fear they generated and exploited. Humans were vulnerable to fear. The cycles of history never ceased to taunt those forced to see them. Would humanity ever learn? Or would it have to evolve?
“Dr. Who was a sideshow, meant to distract us,” said Tom. “They knew we couldn’t abandon her. But the Chinese and Russians? They’re no sideshow. What if the SSA brings them in to a real conflict? And against who? It can’t just be about me. The Northeast? The West? California? Who’s the enemy?”
If the SSA were to declare war on Thomas Paine, and bring two empires into it, would the SSA become a patsy of the club and its global partners? Autocratic leaders loved pretending to hang out together while screwing one another behind their backs. They had the same goals: carve up the global pie, control their populations, run sufficiently successful economies to enrich themselves, and stay on top. He could see why autocrats would be “friends.” Psychopaths tended to congregate. They didn’t see their mutual behavior as abhorrent. Just smart.
“Right now, I’m more worried about Carter and Amanda,” said Veronika. “And their bigger plan. They’re working directly for the club, and, like, now rising empires? Doesn’t make sense.”
“And I’m worried. How they get. In your head,” said Ruth. “You are vulnerable.”
Talia sat forward, engaged for the first time since they had gathered to watch Tom 1’s finale. “Tom, if you were Carter, where would you send her?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “We need eyes on the ground.”
“What kind of eyes?” said Ruth. “I will message Miss Gray Hat for help.”
“What do Carter and the club use?” asked Tom. “Same as us. Drones, satellites, surveillance cameras, old CCTV? Commandeer people’s GOs and HOMEs? Surveillance MAVs. We need anything with a camera.”
“Too much data,” said Ruth, twitching her shoulders in discomfort. “Too hard to cull through.”
Talia said nothing. She turned her chair away, her silence a censure.
“On it!” said Veronika, swiveling back to her monitors. “We’re not looking for, like, a thousand different things. We’re looking for one face and body we already have a lot of data for.”
“Where is Miss Gray Hat? Why haven’t we heard from her?” asked Ruth.
“Do we need her?” asked Veronika. “I can handle this.”
Tom leaned forward. “She’s got this. Let’s focus on—”
Ruth shook her head so hard that her curly hair jiggled like tiny springs. “We need higher-level data analysis. Veronika has skills. But Miss Gray Hat is better.”
Veronika spun in her chair. “Excuse me? Have you seen, like, what I’ve done since you met me?”
“Yes,” said Ruth. “And we still need help.”
“What the fuck, dude!” said Veronika. “Talk about ungrateful.”
“Veronika, stop it,” said Tom.
“Why so d-d-defensive?” barked Ruth, now twitching. “Can’t you learn from those b-b-better?”
Veronika removed her MR glasses and looked at Ruth with her own two eyes. “Sure. If there were any.”
“Such arrogance!” Ruth threw her arms around her torso in disgust.
“Ruthie, Veronika, please,” said Tom. “Calm down.”
Both women ignored him. But Talia didn’t. She was watching Tom with a growing expression of horror.
Veronika rolled to Ruth’s monitor and began typing. “Miss Gray Hat is a mirage.”
“Get off my system!” said Ruth.
“You won’t believe me unless I show you.” Veronika pointed to Ruth’s screen, which displayed a text message to Miss Gray Hat: Help us! She rolled back to her own monitor, put on her glasses, and typed a few commands. A scrolling script appeared on Veronika’s monitor.
Ruth stopped twitching and sat motionless. Then her entire body sprung into shuddering. “You l-l-l-lied to us! How c-c-c-could you?” she wailed. She swung to Tom. “D-d-did you know?”
“No,” he lied.
“Oh! So clever!” said Ruth to Veronika. “Messages! From both! At the same time!”
Miss Gray Hat was no longer an enigma. Ruth’s greatest intellectual crush was flesh and blood, wearing a baggy black skirt, a Ziggy Stardust T-shirt, and high-top sneakers. The proof was there all along: a quick, slight smile when Ruth would compliment Miss Gray Hat. Veronika hiding when maintaining both personas simultaneously was too difficult. And they had been too busy trying to save themselves and the world to see the truth.
“I protected you!” roared Veronika. “If you had known I was Miss Gray Hat, someone else could have found out. How could you have trusted me if you knew I was some girl living with her parents in Santa Barbara?”
“Nein,” barked Ruth. “A linger darf hoben a guten zechron!”
“I . . . I don’t understand,” sputtered Veronika.
Ruth lunged at her keyboard and cut the link to Veronika’s—and Miss Gray Hat’s—messages. “N-n-no longer the great linguist? N-n-n-no hiding behind a computer. With translation! ‘A liar must have a good memory.’ And you have n-n-none!”
“But you can’t seriously—” said Veronika.
“A ligner hert zikh zeineh ligen azoi lang ein biz er glaibt zikh alain.” Ruth’s body shook
so hard, she would have fallen to pieces if she had been a robot.
“‘A liar tells his story so often that he gets to believe it himself,’” said Tom.
“I just wanted to be with you,” said Veronika, softer now. “All of you. You’re my heroes.”
Talia faced Veronika. “Where’s the server farm?”
Panicked, Veronika looked at Tom. “Dude. No.”
Tom sighed, then nodded. “They have more invested in all this than you do. They deserve to know.”
“It’s, it’s . . . like, 45.846605 S, 170.474149 E.”
“And where is that?” asked Talia.
“Dunedin, New Zealand,” Veronika blurted.
Ruth and Talia looked surprised, but not Tom.
“Safest place I could find,” said Veronika. “Nicest, most resilient, reliable people. Speak English. Least likely to join a war. No nukes. Ass end of the world. And not, like, the most active area on the Ring of Fire. I took an old server farm used for movie special effects and built it there. Students from the University of Otago do the maintenance. They think it’s an AHI simulation project.”
Ruth was incredulous. “You? How?”
“I made, like, a shit-ton of money. Kept a little for me . . . like, to do what I needed to become who I always was, help my family out. But the rest . . . I put into building the place where Major Tom would be safe. Dr. Who knew this. Ask her! She knows I’m telling the truth!”
Ruth turned to Tom. “True?”
“As far as I can tell,” he said.
Talia was stunned. “Dr. Who knew? Why didn’t she—”
“Because she knew Ruth would appreciate my talents. Accept my help as an anonymous hacker. But she didn’t trust your reactions. And you sure never trusted me or Tom!”
“Enough,” said Tom.
Veronika ignored him. “You didn’t even, like, want him to evolve! And he’ll evolve more than this. What are you going to do then?”
Talia considered this. She did a terrible job hiding her fear.
For the next few hours, only Veronika and Tom worked. Talia had retreated to her bunk. Ruth sat cross-armed, her eyes twitching, staring them down. It couldn’t last.
“Found something. Street cam,” said Veronika. She put it up on a screen. A figure that looked like the made-over Amanda got out of a car, her door opened by a chauffeur. She entered the side door of an elaborate neoclassical building that was under reconstruction. But the scaffolding didn’t hide a building Tom knew well.
“How long ago?” he asked.
“Looks like . . . an hour?” said Veronika. “1733 16th Street, DC.”
Ruth’s eyebrows shot up. “But that’s the Phoenix C-C-Club!”
During the riots that had followed the Major Tom revelations, the Phoenix Club’s DC headquarters had been attacked by mobs. But in the two years since, either the Southern States of America or the club, or both, had decided to renovate. An SSA flag flew from the roof’s flagpole.
Tom zoomed in. There was something in the back seat that Amanda had vacated. It looked like a child in a safety seat. Little legs kicked.
“Is that—” asked Veronika.
“Yes,” said Tom.
Veronika fast-forwarded the footage, stopped it, and pointed to Amanda getting back in the car and leaving.
“They want us to follow her,” said Tom. “So let’s do it.”
Veronika looked unsure. “Okay? But we’ll always be behind her. She could lead us into an ambush.”
Ruth asked, “Can we use an algorithm? To guess where she’s going in advance? And beat her there?”
“Can you think like Carter?” asked Tom in return.
“N-n-no. But you can,” said Ruth.
“Exactly.” Major Tom dove into his memories of Carter, a creature of habit and comforts, obsessed with his personal history and its ties to his former nation. Major Tom had held hints all along. He tried to think of all the places Amanda might go. “Veronika, tag the following places: the Phoenix Club, the Hay-Adams Hotel . . . ” The Hay-Adams was north of the White House, near the Phoenix Club. Peter, Amanda, and Carter had stayed there before Peter Bernhardt’s first initiation. Tom sent Tom 1 there for his final mission. “Also Reed House. It’s Carter’s family home on the Main Line outside of Philadelphia.” Amanda could go there, but he doubted it. Only Carter’s mother was still alive, but pickled as she was from gin and benzodiazepines, Carter would not want to create a scene. “What other properties does the family own? Or maybe once owned. Or we visited together?”
He dug through family trees and title records going back centuries. And as soon as he found it, he knew immediately that it was what Carter would choose. “I need a helicopter to Dover, Delaware.”
Delaware was a special case among the former United States. It was tiny—only ninety-six miles long and between nine and thirty miles wide, the second smallest state, after Rhode Island. Like many coastal states, it had lost some seafront: originally thirty-five miles at its widest, the rising waters overtook the low-lying beaches of Rehoboth and Bethany. It was technically north of the Mason-Dixon line, which jogged south near the Atlantic Ocean to trace Delaware’s border. It had stayed in the Union during the Civil War, even as a slave state. It was also the only slave state where no Confederate armies or militias had assembled. Later it had created special laws of incorporation that made it a tax haven so cheap and legally advantageous that half the large corporations of the formerly fifty states incorporated as Delaware businesses, including most of the banks. Riding the fence of history was a locally cultivated cultural trait that the Potsdams had inherited.
Most pertinent of all, one of Carter’s most prominent ancestors, John Dickinson, had owned a plantation in Dover. Known as the “penman of the revolution,” Dickinson was famous for writing documents urging Britain to change its ways and spurring the colonies to independence. “Letter from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” and “Petition to the King” had beseeched the Crown to treat the colonies with respect. And yet, with a Quaker’s faith in pacifism, Dickinson had prayed it wouldn’t come to a fight. Holding out hope for diplomacy, he had refused to sign the Declaration of Independence, believing it would incite violence. Instead, he had helped write the Articles of Confederation. Then when war was imminent, and contrary to his Quaker upbringing, he had fought in the revolutionary army. A complex man of deep Quaker feelings, he had been the wealthiest and largest slaveholder in the Delaware colony. Dickinson’s plantation alone had once spanned thirteen thousand acres. During the revolution, Dickinson freed his slaves, the only Founding Father to do so during the war. He remained a devoted abolitionist for the rest of his life.
Twelve acres around John Dickinson House remained, owned by the state of Delaware. There had been no money to maintain it since the troubles and little interest in anything as “unproductive” as a historical museum. Once again, when a people most needed to know their past, they rejected it as superfluous. Closed up and fenced off, it awaited future generations to appreciate its importance.
But there was a catch. Dover was both the state capital and home to Dover Air Force Base, one of the largest in North America. Dickinson House was less than a mile from Dover’s landing strip. While it was not yet under the control of the SSA, Dover AFB was on constant alert.
That’s where I’d go, thought Major Tom.
Tom outlined his destination, what it would involve to get him there, and why he was doing this. He wanted no misunderstandings.
“You can’t be serious!” said Ruth. “Alone? With that Lominer gaylen?”
Colloquially, it meant clumsy fool, but literally it meant a golem, the undead monster created by a fictional Lominer rabbi.
“I thought I was the golem,” said Tom with a grimace. “Out to kick ass for our little tribe.”
Ruth blew air through her lips. Her shoulder twitched.
“Are you nuts?” said Veronika. “No way I’m letting you go alone. We’re your Musketeers. All for one, and like, all t
hat crap, right?”
While Ruth and Veronika objected, Talia took an encrypted call from Captain Curtis on the Roosevelt. Her not sharing the call concerned Tom. She had made it clear she didn’t trust him, so he couldn’t trust her. He listened in.
Curtis’s tone was gruff, his anger close to the surface. “Here’s your last favor: I contacted Dover’s commander, Colonel Bryce Keating, directly. We all know what really happened at Port Everglades. I swore on my men and my ship you won’t hurt them. I’m probably a fool, but—”
“You’re no fool, Geoff. We were outstrategized, outmaneuvered, and outnumbered. I’m sorry I involved you.”
Curtis ignored her. “Dover won’t interfere. There’s no love between them and the SSA, with DC so close. And they don’t have short memories, either. Just don’t make any sudden moves. They’re nervous enough as is. Rough Rider out.”
Tom felt guilty. Talia was still in his camp.
Pacing back and forth between consoles, Ruth muttered, “I don’t like it.”
“What, Ruthie?” asked Tom.
“You alone with them. You are not strong enough. To fend them off.”
Tom looked down at his youthful physique. “You think I’m weak?”
“Not your body,” said Ruth, waggling her hands toward him. “Your mind. They know your buttons to press. They installed them.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
It wasn’t yet dawn. Viewed from the V-22 Osprey, the twelve acres of John Dickinson’s plantation appeared dark and abandoned. The main house, outer buildings, gardens, and trees occupied the south end of the property. A large contemporary barn and parking lot occupied the middle of the land and functioned as a visitor’s center. The north half was an empty, overgrown field. There were no cars in the lot, nor anywhere nearby. No movement. No lights. Through an infrared scanner, they saw only rodents, a large owl looking for a final meal, and nesting turkey vultures.
Talia sat at the rear of the transport, avoiding eye contact with Tom. She had come reluctantly. She wasn’t armed, but neither was Ruth.
Veronika was armed with who-knew-what in her backpack, but she wasn’t proficient with weapons. This worried Tom more than the unarmed women.