by In Churl Yo
“I get that. I do. But I don’t know how long I’ve been in here. I don’t know what information I’ve divulged. You could be Taan in another disguise, and we could just tap out into another Virt reality. My mind could be wiped again. This could all start over. I don’t know. If we’re going anywhere, you’ll have to convince me you’re really Zoah.”
She thought hard, trying not to succumb to the immense pressure she was feeling. Zoah walked around and stood in front of Milton and took his hands.
“Let’s see… I know that despite its annoying and repetitive preambles you still consider Attack on Titan your all-time favorite anime. You prefer swimming pools to the beach because you hate the way it feels when sand gets stuck between your toes. You have a troubled relationship with your ears for the way they make your hair stick out when it gets windy.
“And I know something that you’ve never said aloud or shared with anyone. I know it because of the way you hold my forearm in your hand when we snuggle, the way you lay my head in that sweet-spot crook of your neck, how you laugh at my stupid jokes and act when we’re alone. I know you love me, Milton Lee, and if you’re not a complete idiot, you should know that I love you, too.”
Milton took Zoah in his arms and kissed her.
“I have been an idiot,” he said, “but not anymore.”
Zoah smiled. “Glad to hear it. So… we should go now.”
“Right. You tap out and I piggy back?”
She nodded. Milton placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it. “I do love you,” he said.
Zoah brought up her Virt interface and swiped in the exit protocol. “About time you said it,” she answered then pushed the correct command sequence propelling the two back into the real world.
The transition felt worse than it ever had before, and Zoah fought the urge to heave all over her haptic suit when the cycle completed. As her vision cleared, the first thing she noticed was that Caleb and Neema were nowhere to be found. Then she saw the open door.
“You okay?” Milton asked.
“Something’s wrong.” She went to Neema’s station and performed a system check. Everything seemed fine there, but Zoah found no indication of where her friends had gone. “Go close that door.”
Milton ran across the room and secured the hatch. She engaged the locking mechanism then sat for a moment to think. They wouldn’t have just left her. Zoah turned in her chair and stopped when she saw the empty Virt chamber.
“Our friend Taan must have something to do with this. Caleb and Neema were supposed to be here waiting,” she said.
“He was only out a few minutes before us,” said Milton.
“We should search the room.”
He went to the back and started checking each compartment. Milton found his clothes and confiscated gear and was more than happy to dress, put his cufflink back in place and clip on his belt and harness. No longer feeling quite so naked, he continued with his search and soon discovered a locked door. “Hey, Zoah, open the latch on A113.”
The bolt disengaged, and inside Milton found his friends lying on the floor.
“They’re here!” he yelled. “I found them.”
When Zoah arrived, Caleb was already sitting up with his hands to his face.
“Damn it all. We saw he was transitioning out of the Virt, but before we could get to him, he employed some kind of electroshock device. Knocked us out cold,” said Caleb. “Didn’t think he’d have the time.”
“At least you’re okay,” said Zoah.
“Define ‘okay’,” Neema replied still prone with her eyes closed. “Because I don’t feel okay.”
“It’ll pass,” Caleb said and offered her a hand up.
That’s when they heard a thump followed by three more coming from the next room. “You in there!” someone yelled from the corridor behind the locked door. “This is the only exit from your location, and we’ve got it covered. You can’t escape. We’ll give you two minutes to surrender only because we appreciate that you didn’t blow us up before.”
“Awfully nice of you,” said Neema looking at Caleb. “I thought you took care of them?”
“I did,” he answered shrugging his shoulders.
“This is some rescue, guys,” said Milton. “I don’t suppose there was a backup plan?” They all looked at each other.
“Ninety seconds,” the sergeant announced.
Caleb responded by pumping the action on his shotgun and aiming it at the door. Just as the rest were running for positions to face the assault, they all heard a high-pitched whine behind them that turned into a low rumble. Outside the window a large drone descended into view, its two high-caliber guns aimed directly at them. It was unlike any ship they had ever seen, pointed at them like a smooth contoured slate arrowhead without any sign of outward propulsion or identifying marks.
The group stood up and turned to face it, dropping their weapons and placing their arms up in surrender. The vehicle then turned around and presented its rear cargo hatch, which it then rammed through the window, shattering glass everywhere. The four covered their faces and crouched, not sure what to expect next.
The drone hatch lowered, and Heelo flew out, beeping excitedly as he approached.
“Heelo?” Zoah said. “You are so my favorite thing ever right now!”
The drone ship’s abrupt entrance did not go unnoticed out in the hallway. “You in there! We’re blowing this hatch now, so clear the area!”
Caleb looked at everyone. “Run!” he yelled.
They all passed Heelo on their way to the ship, and the toy drone had to circle back around to follow them aboard. Milton was already at the controls trying to familiarize himself with them. “This ship is amazing,” he said.
“Forget that—we have got to go,” said Neema.
Four loud pops and the door to the corridor fell off its hinges landing on the floor with a thud. Soldiers began pouring into the room with their rifles up, assessing and acquiring targets.
“Now would be a good time,” Zoah insisted, eyeing Milton’s back as he worked the control panel. The ship dropped while its rear door closed, and then they were ascending into the sky, a missile plowing a straight furrow away from the military complex, the sound of rifle fire fading fast behind them.
# # #
Nox transitioned out of the Virt and knew he was not alone. He pressed the quick-release button on his harness and rolled toward his gear. Six paces at a dead sprint later, Nox had his cufflink on his arm accessing his defensive measures.
Two armed assailants, a male and female, were closing on his position. Nox had just enough time to deliver a stun charge at both, leaving them incapacitated. He dragged the bodies to a nearby closet and locked the door before changing out of his haptic suit.
Nothing had gone to plan. He had hoped to gather quite a bit more intelligence from the boy than he got, but that no longer mattered anymore. In a very short time everything had changed.
He reached the corridor and found a pile of debris blocking the stairwell exit and a large hole in the ceiling from where it fell. Nox considered climbing up to the sixth floor or hacking into the elevator system, but there just wasn’t enough time for either option. He walked across the hall to an adjacent room and looked out the window. A parking structure was below, and his means of extraction lay just beyond it.
Nox heard voices from the hallway. He slid the door over until it was only open a crack and looked out into the corridor. Soldiers were on the floor above him, no doubt preparing to rappel down through the cavity. If they found him, it would only delay his escape, and that was a distraction he couldn’t afford. Nox closed the door and returned to the window.
He pulled a large capsule from his belt, attached it to his cufflink and activated the device, stimulating the lasing material inside and producing a tight beam that Nox directed at the edges of the glass pane. When he completed cutting a loop, Nox ejected the laser capsule from its casing and then pushed the glass away. He watched it fa
ll the 20 or so meters down to the top floor of the parking facility and shatter into pieces.
It took him a second to run some quick math, which Nox then entered into his cufflink. It didn’t need to be precise, just close enough. He released a nested hook line from the back of his belt and clipped it around a nearby structural column.
He took several steps away from the window, turned back toward the opening and ran as fast as he could, jumping out of the building. As Nox fell a brake began applying pressure to the attached line, slowing his descent until he hit the roof of the garage at a full spring without missing a step. He pressed a button on his cufflink and the hook around the column unhinged and the line began snaking its way back into his belt.
“Prepare a text message to Big Boss,” he said, his cufflink answering his commands. “Mark it urgent and tag it encrypted/secured. It reads: ‘Found our Busan intruder. No luck getting any Kiter info from him, only his name—Milton. He was rescued from Taiwan secured facility by three accomplices, one of which has been positively identified as ZOAH LIGHTSEA. Requesting orders to pursue and apprehend.’ End message. Send it.”
Nox reached the other side of the parking structure and peered down. The ship was right where he left it but, in an unexpected turn, started flying up and away of its own accord as he stood there watching. His eyes followed the craft as it climbed and banked around the building until it was no longer in view.
Nox sat down in a huff on the concrete, not sure what to do next. Then his cufflink buzzed, and he read the incoming message: ‘Follow and observe. Intervene if necessary. Send updates when appropriate.’
Well, that settled it then. Plans changed. He knew that. It was part of the job. He retrieved his canteen and took a drink, enjoying an impromptu moment of calm. Then Nox watched as his drone made a beeline across the sky while the report of rifle fire echoed all around him.
“You know, I really liked that ship,” he said, then got up and set off in search of another one.
CHAPTER 13
16 Years After the Pandemic
Where once Miranda Pyle was young, dumb and fearless, now she found herself no longer any of those things, chiefly because of the inevitable effects of time, the wisdom gained from lessons sorely learned and the fact that there now was so much more in life for her to fear. She reflected far too fondly and too often back to a time when she reveled in those base traits, as well as the even constancy and privilege of excess her life afforded then, when the world was no less complex, yet somehow simpler and innocent in hindsight.
She remembered the meetings. Often catered and planned to the millisecond, gatherings that tended to be extravagant affairs meant to entice potential clients to proffer themselves to the maw of her company’s already engorged portfolio, adding to the corpulence to which her fellow executives had grown accustomed.
The views from the corner conference room were obscene—unobstructed sights that allowed for kilometers of downtown buildings, grand bridges spanning urban waterways and far-off undeveloped green pastures that pinched the horizon.
Miranda had been made a junior officer, wooed fresh from the Yale School of Management, but she already knew then she could get used to such a life, that in fact she deserved it. Only, much to her disappointment, it was not meant to be.
Today’s meeting, case in point, was being held in a windowless and cold concrete box.
Miranda knew she should be grateful. She was alive and safe, something most people weren’t. But it wasn’t as if she didn’t belong here among the fortunate few who had escaped the Zombie Flu. She worked hard and made sure she was always positioned at the right place and the right time to take advantage of opportunities as they came. Miranda was ambitious, but she was also very good at her job. That’s why she was here today.
Most of the people in the room she’d never met before. They were a hodge-podge of private- and public-sector experts—but assembled for what purpose Miranda had no clue. It had been inferred that failure to attend might be cause to revoke certain entitlements with unfavorable results for those unwilling to participate. Miranda didn’t need her Yale degree to decipher the threat. Besides, her curiosity was piqued, so here she was.
The door opened, and a cadre of suits and uniforms took their place at the front table, the background noise of taut whispers ceasing as a decorated officer stepped to the podium to speak.
“What is about to be discussed is classified and sensitive, not to be shared with anyone outside this room. Failure to keep it that way will result in the expulsion of your family from this facility and your immediate demise. Now, I don’t need to remind you about the serious nature of what’s happening to the rest of the world outside, but you should understand the strength of my resolve. Come hell or high water, mankind will survive this nightmare, and as God is my witness I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we do, so don’t test me, comprende? The floor is yours, Mr. Ogden.”
Miranda watched the proceedings as if it were high theater. The officer relinquished the podium to an older, distinguished-looking gentleman in an expensive suit who sipped a glass of water before acknowledging the room.
“Thank you, General. For those I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Cecil Ogden, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Ceres Corporation. You’re here today because we have a new problem—mainly that our old problem doesn’t seem to be going away.
“While Ravendale has proven to be the exception to the rule, most post-pandemic communities have experienced some form of recurrent outbreak of the Zombie Flu despite taking appropriate quarantine measures. Ceres was contracted by government and other world leaders to replicate its success at Ravendale but experienced a major setback at our Austin site. We lost 100,000 souls, a majority of the people housed there, to the flu. When you consider there are less than a million people protected in various government and Ceres communities in all of North America, you begin to understand how such a loss translates as significant to the welfare and future of mankind. We are facing our very extinction.”
Ogden paused to take another drink of water before continuing.
“I don’t know if you can even win a war with an incurable, insatiable virus, but what we’ve been doing up to this point will no longer get us there. Till now we’ve protected ourselves by constructing walls around our communities, but it’s apparent now we must change tactics. Our team has come up with a Hail Mary solution, but we aren’t certain it even can be implemented. You are here to help us find a way to make it happen.
“A lot of the existing Ceres infrastructure lends itself to our plan, and it is only because of recent evolutionary breakthroughs in virtual reality technology that we could even consider going to such lengths to insure the survival of our species.”
He looked like he was about to come out and say it, Miranda observed, but changed his mind at the last second. She watched him walk away from the podium and around the table until he stood just in front of seated audience. He was about to sell them. Miranda had hawked enough products in her life to know when someone was about to try and peddle something to her.
“Someday I want to start a family. Now, I might be a senior citizen by the time that happens,” said Ogden to some laughter, “but I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t bring a new life into this world unless there was hope. So how do we do that? How do we bring hope back to a world that’s in a hopeless situation? We start by stemming the tide. People have got to stop succumbing to this flu. If we can keep another Austin from happening, if we can prevent thousands of people from dying at a time, then maybe we can have hope. Maybe we can alter the course of this pandemic to our favor, but to do that we’ll have to change. We’ll have to create a new kind of society.
“Here’s what we propose: completely individualized isolation. We create discrete environments such that every family or small group will be quarantined within its own housing unit and will no longer have physical contact with anyone outside of that unit, without ex
ception. People will instead interact and communicate through, and eventually integrate with, a virtual world—a world that will still allow us to experience simulated life outside the confines of our self-imposed prisons. In effect, we are taking ourselves out of the equation. The disease won’t be able to spread if it has nowhere to go. Humanity will, by default, win out.”
Silence hung in the room for a few seconds as the words were absorbed and processed, then a cacophony of arguing erupted.
“You can’t be serious,” a voice in the back shouted. “What you are proposing isn’t natural. It will be impossible to sustain.”
“We should be concentrating instead on making our existing communities safer,” said another.
Someone in the front row yelled over her shoulder, “Please, we have to keep an open mind!”
The loud squelching of feedback reached out from the speakers and hit the crowd. All eyes turned to the podium, where the military General still held the microphone in his hand. “Maybe you people don’t understand,” he said, “so let me lay it out for you: There’s no debating this. The decision’s already been made. If anyone here doesn’t agree that’s fine—go right ahead and raise your hand.”
Eyes darted back and forth around the room, then someone’s arm came up in the back. The General nodded toward one of his aides, and in seconds a group of armed soldiers surrounded the civilian and escorted him out of the room. The man did not leave quietly. When he was gone and a cold silence enveloped the chamber, the officer looked at everyone and presented them all with a dry smile. “Anybody else?” he asked.
Ogden had his arms crossed, one resting on the other, a hand up to his chin in thought. He raised his head then to speak. “I’m afraid the General is correct and in his own rather unique way stands with all of us and wants us to succeed. The bottom line is our projections are consistent without much deviation. If we continue on our current course there is a high probability humanity will be extinct in the next 20 years. This is something we simply have to do.”