by In Churl Yo
Neema checked the profile data. “We can’t communicate with him, and Milton can’t tap out on his own. He has to be brought out, which means--”
“Which means someone’s going to have to go in and get him,” finished Zoah. “But what about that guy?” She looked over at the other man suspended in an adjacent Virt chamber. He was tall, wiry, and had a head full of white hair.
“If Milton’s in pain that man could be the reason for it,” Neema said. “Or he could be the only reason he’s still alive. No way to know for sure. His profile settings are… unique.”
“Wait. I think I have an idea,” Zoah replied. “But first I’ll need to go find a haptic suit.” She ran for a nearby storage locker knowing they needed to hurry—time was running out.
# # #
“Congratulations, Jack,” Taan said, “or whatever your name is. You figured it out. But what if I told you I could wipe your short-term memory, so you didn’t remember any of this? What if I told you I already had, and that we’ve gone through all of this before?”
“I don’t…” Milton grunted. He was still being held off the ground in a chokehold. “The Virt…”
Taan put his prisoner down, then smoothed Milton’s pajama shirt and patted his shoulders when he was done. “That’s better. Sorry, you were saying?”
Milton leaned against the wall, rubbing his throat. “The Virt’s regulated and monitored. The physics can’t be hacked. Many have tried. Half the things you’ve done to me in here are supposed to be impossible. There are numerous failsafe’s and safety protocols in place. So, tell me, Taan or whatever your name is, how’d you do it?”
“You’d like to know, wouldn’t you? I suppose I could tell you, seeing as you won’t remember anyway, but I’d rather you earned it.” Taan moved to the center of the room. “Still, I like you, Jack, so I’m granting you the privilege of knowing the real face of the man who’s going to break you.” He tapped into his Virt interface and made a swiping motion with his hand. In an instant Taan was replaced by a much taller, not even remotely Taiwanese, man with white hair.
“You’re… still ugly,” said Milton, laughing, beat but not yet beaten. “Do I keep calling you Taan?”
“Tell me your name, I’ll tell you mine. This would probably go better for you if you did.” Milton remained silent, and the man who was no longer Taan shrugged. “It’s your funeral, at least until we do this all over again.” He picked Milton up off the wall and sighed, then punched him in the face. And then he punched him again. Several strikes later and Milton slumped onto the floor semiconscious.
“Don’t pass out now, Jack.” He stood straddling Milton’s body and was just about to reach down and pick his prisoner up when someone tapped him on the shoulder. As the white-haired man turned to look, a powerful blow leveled him, sending him tumbling through a concrete wall into the next room.
Zoah kneeled over Milton. “Are you okay, sweetie?” she asked. He responded with a faint moan. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Oh, not so quickly, I hope.” Her opponent climbed back through the sizable hole he had just made and started patting his sleeves and pants to remove the dust that had collected all over him. “This has just taken an interesting turn.”
“Let us go,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You may have cloned my profile, giving you equal strength and speed, but I have years of martial arts and combat training. Quite frankly, I don’t expect you to last very long. You should have subdued me when you had the element of surprise. Now you’ve lost the only tactical advantage you had!”
# # #
Caleb admired his work. He had spent the past several minutes stacking desks and tables in the hallway on either side of the door to the Virt chamber room where Neema and Zoah were currently attempting to rescue Milton. It would have to do, he thought and began loading shells into his shotgun.
He put their odds at exactly zero they’d pull this off, and in his opinion that was pretty good all things considered. He opened the nearby door and poked his head inside. “Neema, you’ll need to lock yourself in here. If they get past me, it’ll buy a few more minutes to get Milton back.”
She shook her head. “No, I won’t. If it starts to look bad, you come in here and then we’ll lock it.”
“There won’t be time. The only way you’ll know I’m down is if soldiers come running in. Lock the door. It’s the right play.”
“You’ll be cut off,” she said. “It’s suicide.”
“Oh, ye of little faith. You should know better,” Caleb said while flashing a grin. He closed the door, and Neema engaged the lock behind him. As he took a knee behind a desk and leaned his shotgun against it, Caleb pulled out his handgun, inspected its magazine and chambered a round. Just as he leveled the weapon at the far stairwell door, the distinctive sound of boots on concrete grew increasingly louder before stopping into an uncomfortable silence.
A massive explosion blew the door to the stairs open. The heat from the blast travelled down the hall, enveloping Caleb as he ducked to protect himself from the shrapnel propelled toward him by the sudden expansion of gas.
And then just as quickly, the silence returned.
By choosing not to take advantage of the blast and run in guns blazing, the ranking officer was either being conservative or unconventional. Neither tactic made Caleb very happy.
Still, he knew they’d have to venture out of their hole like bear cubs hesitant to leave their den yet motivated by hunger to go out in search of food. This of course meant that Caleb was the food, but he had no intention of being anyone’s lunch today. If anyone was going to be served, it wasn’t him. On cue two men in containment suits moved out into the hall, rifles raised scanning for targets.
Less than a dozen steps in, a crosscurrent of more than 7 million volts discharged from electroshock discs Caleb had left for his visitors to discover, incapacitating both soldiers. Then Caleb slid a rubberized puck across the floor expelling large billows of thick smoke into the air, filling the entire hallway and making it impossible to see. He reached for his mask and put it on. While he’d hoped the smoke would take some of the soldiers out, their CBRN defense suits would no doubt protect them. Still, they couldn’t shoot what they couldn’t see.
Something landed close by. Caleb heard the object rattle off the ground and bounce against the desk in front of him. It took a few seconds for him to recognize it, and he leapt over the rear barrier just as the grenade blasted behind Caleb, destroying everything in its wake.
Neema heard it, felt it in her bones, and she stood up from her chair and watched the door wondering whether it might open any second now. She said a quick prayer for Caleb just as the alarms went off and the lights dimmed. Systems throughout the room were kicking into low-power mode. Neema searched for a cause and found it—the main power line was being disrupted by the explosion. She was going to have to find a way to reroute it soon, or the Virt was going to shut down with Zoah and Milton still inside.
# # #
Zoah braced herself for the coming onslaught. She stood between Milton and her attacker, seeming small and overmatched by the larger man who was now running fast toward her. The young woman crouched down in a protective pose. Not-Taan leapt into the air, his fist raised in a striking blow. At the last moment, an iconic red-and-white metal shield with a star at its center materialized on Zoah’s arm and she held it fast as it absorbed the energy of the attack, throwing the man backwards.
Quickly then, Zoah spun around and, as she turned, produced a green laser sword that she swung against him, cutting just into the skin across his chest, a crimson line forming there on his shirt. In a second rotation, she used her momentum and brought about a large hammer that she let fly, hitting her opponent dead center and sending him crashing back again through the wall. The assault was sudden and well-calculated. Zoah landed on one knee and watched the opening, hoping she had done enough to keep him down.
Instead she heard laughter.
�
��I have to hand it to you, girl. No one has entertained me like this in years. Maybe ever,” the white-haired man said, returning to the room bloodied and disheveled. “How did you learn to fight like that?”
Zoah didn’t answer but reminded herself never to complain about family night or her brother’s movie choices ever again.
“That was a neat trick,” he continued. “Now let me show you one.” His fingers tapped air and the Virt interface engaged. It was as if the room rebooted—walls no longer destroyed, furniture back in its place and floors pristine. Milton laid on a hospital gurney between them, no longer bloody but still unconscious, with Zoah and her opponent standing on either side. Like Milton, the man across from her was now perfectly kept and unhurt. He offered her what he thought was a pleasant smile. “Maybe it’s time we try a different tack.”
Looking down at her boyfriend, Zoah couldn’t help but worry. Milton seemed different to her now, almost innocent, asleep and unaware—so vulnerable and unable to defend himself. Could she save them both? “What is it you want?” she asked.
“A simple matter, one your friend failed to provide to me—a name.”
“Whose name?”
“Why, yours of course.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “If I give you my name, what, you just let us go? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You’re right. How about if you give me your name, I won’t kill him.” A small red stain appeared on Milton’s pajama top. It soaked the fabric, a burgundy-hued blot that grew and grew—reminding Zoah of the time when her brother’s nose bled so badly she couldn’t believe his little body could hold that much blood.
“What? No, no, no, no...” cried Zoah her eyes suddenly wet with tears. “You have to stop this. You have to.”
“Then give me your name.”
“Please, please don’t do this.”
“You want this to stop? You want him to live? THEN GIVE ME YOUR NAME!”
Zoah fought to regain herself and brushed a sleeve across her cheek. Steeled against her fear and worry, looking directly at the man, she leaned forward in defiance. “My name is Zoah Lightsea, and if you don’t stop this and save him right now you’ll wish you’d never heard of me!”
He smirked at his victory for the briefest of moments before a sudden realization washed over his face. The man turned away from the table and accessed the Virt controls, restoring Milton’s health. He remained with his back to Zoah deep in thought, not yet ready to turn around. In fact, the figure once known as Taan wasn’t sure what to do next at all.
# # #
Neema found the panel she was looking for and swung it open. Inside, micro-relays blinked in apparent random fashion. She had traced the insulated pipe that held the power cables to this junction. Now all she could do was hope the disruption occurred farther down the line.
There was no elegance to the way the level five energy utilization system functioned. If a power fluctuation was detected anywhere along the line, the entire grid shunted to a smaller but more stable independent supply until the problem was sorted. It also transferred every bit of hardware into a gray, low-energy mode—including the Virt system. This all-or-nothing approach was lazy engineering plain and simple, something Neema couldn’t abide. But the flaw also presented her with an opportunity.
She cut across the insulated pipe, careful not to damage the wires housed inside, and pulled back the protective housing. Neema then released a stylus from her cufflink and placed the tip onto the exposed wire. The display revealed there was still power coming through the line here, which meant there was still a chance to avoid the Virt shutdown.
Neema ran back to the monitoring desk and began the process of hacking into the restricted command tree, drilling down through the various coded directories until she cracked the level-five utilities network. She directed the system to re-engage the breakers to the Virt chamber room and revert power back from the main line to her location. When she finished, Neema sat back in her chair, eyes cast high around the room waiting.
Lights flickered back to life, and a low hum rose around the room signaling a return to full power. But Neema’s smile did not last very long, as a series of nearby gunshots quickly brought her back to earth.
In the adjacent hallway, Caleb was blindly returning fire.
Ears still ringing, he sent several rounds downrange at random angles around the jumble of mangled desks and tables strewn in front of him. These guards weren’t messing around—no reason for him to either. Caleb wouldn’t choose to kill someone just because they were doing their duty, but when it came right down to it he also wouldn’t choose to die because of his own inaction.
The soldiers had no cover at the end of the corridor, so they retreated back into the stairwell. If they were good they would have pulled any wounded back with them as well. Caleb assumed the hall was clear. This might prove to be his only chance to end this without taking any lives.
Again, he fired his handgun into the air just to make sure, then from a Molle pouch on his belt pulled out a pair of what looked like Chinese Baoding balls—each coated in shiny reflective steel. Caleb took one, pressed a recessed button on its top and threw it down the hall. Once airborne the object released tiny propellers that began spinning, lofting the ball and sending it on a beeline for the ceiling. Upon impact, the ball clung to it—the steel material secreting a putty-like substance that made it stick to the surface. Caleb threw the other ball as well, hitting the ceiling two meters to the left of the first.
“Fire in the hole!” he yelled, giving the soldiers a fair warning they had not seen fit to provide him earlier. The balls exploded, sending the ceiling crashing down at the end of the corridor. The building shook, but the structure otherwise remained solid. The stairwell door, however, was gone—buried behind a pile of rubble, blocking the would-be invaders from their objective.
Caleb shuffled over to the hatch Neema had secured earlier and knocked.
“It’s Caleb. Open up,” he said.
The door cracked and he caught Neema’s eye cutting him down. “Surprised you didn’t bring the building down,” she said and let him inside.
“Well, it wasn’t for lack of trying. How’s the girl doing?”
Neema followed his concerned gaze to Zoah and offered one of her own. “She’s still in there.”
CHAPTER 12
Four pillars crafted of fine, ornate copper lifted the round orb of heaven from the square earth, Milton remembered from his mother’s Korean bedtime stories when he was young. Where once they were one, Mireuk divided them by placing elaborate columns at the four corners of the world. Then the divine being destroyed all the suns and moons, leaving one of each unharmed, using the stellar matter to create the stars up in the sky.
Milton should have been cold. The vacuum should have made it impossible for his body to even survive, much less breathe. But there he floated, high above the firmament, in orbit around the planet. Like Mireuk, he saw the division in the curvature at the horizon’s edge—a thin strip of blue sky surrendering to the eternal vastness of space filled with a million points of light. The deity was no doubt happy with his work, and Milton surveyed the continents and clouds as they spun below him, the spiral arm of the Milky Way filled with infinite splendor above, and was likewise awed by the majesty of all that he viewed.
He would stay here forever if he could. He would take Mireuk’s place and create a new world to replace the broken one he’d grown up in. Eradicate the Zombie Flu, restore the natural balance, save mankind. All Milton had to do was surrender to the void, just float away from the pain, the burden, and take his place amongst the stars.
Before he could ascend, Milton thought he heard a call—a tiny plea far below him that somehow lifted from the atmosphere out of the ether up to where no sound had any right to be carried. The second he acknowledged hearing it Milton began to fall, his peaceful silence replaced by a sudden deafening roar. The rumbling was a million voices bellowing his name on winds th
at whipped all around him. The speed of his reentry pressed against his brain, a throbbing bass that infiltrated every thought, every crook of his consciousness. Then a blinding whiteness consumed his vision until he could just discern the fast-approaching ground, the relief traces of trees and buildings barely visible, the bleached-out world coming up fast to meet him. Milton realized then that he could never have been a god. He was too flawed, a mortal creature limited by his own petty constraints. How could he have been so foolish? He braced himself for the inevitable end to his fall, comforted by the knowledge that mortals were made to die after all.
“Milton!”
He sat up on the gurney, disoriented and relieved. The surrounding room was empty, dark at its edges and populated by the person Milton most wanted to see at that moment and the person he least wanted to see.
“Milton, thank God,” said Zoah.
“I’m okay,” he replied then stepped off the metal table to stand next to her, facing the man who leered across at them both.
“Milton and Zoah,” the white-haired man said. “Now, why was that so hard? We could have avoided so much pain and heartache if you would have shared that information with me from the very beginning.”
The two held fast, offering no response. Their captor seemed to take this in stride. “I have an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you both take this opportunity to get reacquainted in private? And please, don’t hurry out on my account. I’m sure we’ll all see each other again soon.” Then the man produced a Cheshire cat smile and tapped out, disappearing from view.
Milton paced around the gurney, searching the room for any more surprises.
“We should go now,” said Zoah.
“Sure, but no offense, how do I know you’re you? My friend there who just left—he and I have gone through a few rounds of fun already. This could all be just another set up.”
“I know it’s been terrible for you,” she said. “Really. But we don’t have time. Caleb and Neema are in danger.”