by Stan Lee
The bumper catches him behind the knees and his body pitches back, slamming against the hood of the car that brought him here—sleek and black and driverless, its interior lit up like a spaceship. He has just enough time to make the connection, to realize what a very stupid mistake they’ve made by bringing their best technology within a hundred yards of Cameron Ackerson, before the car squeals to a stop, throwing him roughly to the pavement. Six throws his hands over his face as he slams against the asphalt, feeling his earpiece rip free and then crunch underneath him as he rolls over it. He comes to an abrupt stop against a parking post, knocking his head hard enough to see stars, trying to catch his breath as Juaquo and the old man struggle to lift Cameron’s body, easing the boy through the car door that has swung open of its own accord. From where Six is lying, the headlights seem to be glaring at him like angry eyes—and perhaps that’s not so far from the truth, he thinks. Cameron Ackerson may be doing his best impression of Sleeping Beauty, but some part of him is wide awake and angry.
The car revs its engine as the two men scramble in, Juaquo clambering into the driver’s seat and then staring with confusion at the sleek, brightly lit dashboard. “Where’s the steering wheel?” he says.
The door slams shut, and there’s a thud as the locks engage.
“Please fasten your seat belts,” says a pleasant female voice.
“Oh God,” says Juaquo.
On the dashboard, a GPS comes alive. The voice chirps, “Let’s go!” as the screen illuminates with a map of the surrounding area.
The engine revs again, as if in eager agreement.
Juaquo has just enough time to click his seat belt into place before the car peels away with a squeal of tires and the sharp stench of burning rubber.
Both passengers scream as they veer wildly around corners and down deserted streets, taking them deep into the industrial wasteland south of Oldtown. The illuminated map shows their progress, the confused GPS continually shrieking commands that go ignored. The car is outfitted with cutting-edge technology, but it’s no match for the focused rage of its unconscious, cyberkinetic passenger.
“Turn right!” the voice chirps, as the car makes a screeching left turn. “Recalculating! Make a U-turn on—RECALCULATING!”
Juaquo casts a frantic glance backwards at Cameron’s sleeping form and shouts furiously.
“Damn it, Cameron, if we crash, I swear to Christ I’ll—AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”
The sleek black car swings a full one-eighty as just ahead of them, another sedan accelerates out from the shadowed alley between two buildings. The world outside blurs as the car spins wildly; when Juaquo looks in the rearview mirror, he sees the sedan pursuing them. The car turns left, then right, bouncing violently up over the curb and through a deserted lot lined with piled rows of PVC pipe, then out the other side. There’s a crash behind them as one sedan loses control, plowing into the pipes and stopping half buried against the chain-link fence—but as they speed away, Juaquo’s heart sinks. Behind them, two more cars have appeared to take its place.
“Recalculating!” the GPS chirps.
From the passenger seat, the Inventor lets out a low groan. “I think I may be sick.”
“Don’t you dare,” Juaquo fires back. A long straightaway lies ahead; beyond it, he can see the glittering lights of the distant city. The car begins to accelerate, the headlights of their pursuers dropping back twenty yards, fifty, a hundred. For a moment, Juaquo dares to imagine that they’ve done it, that they’ve escaped. The car takes a hard left, headed for the freeway on-ramp.
“Detour ahead!” the GPS shrieks, as a mess of orange traffic cones and flashing CAUTION signs rises up just ahead.
“Turn around!” Juaquo yells, but there’s no time; the car screeches to a halt as the engine coughs and dies. Behind them, half a dozen black sedans pull up, forming an impenetrable semicircle. Inside, there’s a long moment of silence; outside, the doors of the sedans open in unison as the black-clad agents step out, weapons drawn, and train their sights on the rogue vehicle. Cautiously, Juaquo raises his hands overhead and prays not to be shot; in the passenger seat, the old man does the same.
That’s when Cameron speaks from the back seat, in a low growl so full of rage that it makes all the hairs on Juaquo’s neck stand on end.
“Why. Can’t. Everyone. Just. Leave. Me. ALONE.”
Slowly, Juaquo turns to look at his friend. Cameron is sitting up, shrouded in shadow, his hands curled like claws against the leather seat, his mouth twisted in a furious snarl. The expression on his face is so unsettling that Juaquo forgets for a moment about the driverless car, the guns, the agents who are slowly taking formation and preparing to make their next move.
“Cameron? You don’t look so great.”
“Really?” Cameron says, and the snarl becomes a sneer. “Because I feel terrific. In fact, I’m ready to party. And I know just where we’re going, as soon as we’re done here. I just had a nice little online chat with the satellite that’s tracking us from way up there in the atmosphere. OPTIC has an eye in the sky and boots on the ground.”
Juaquo gulps. “Maybe you should take it easy. You passed out back there, you know. Or maybe we should just surrender? I know it seems like these guys want to capture us and interrogate us and pull out all our toenails and stuff, but maybe it’s all, I don’t know, some kind of . . . mis . . . uhhh . . .” He trails off, falling silent as Cameron lifts his gaze and stares him dead in the eye.
“Those men back there. The ones chasing us. You know what they’re carrying?”
Juaquo shakes his head.
Cameron grins, his eyes narrowing, his mouth stretching grotesquely. It’s not a nice smile.
“Smart guns.”
* * *
Outside the car, OPTIC’s agents train their weapons on the driverless vehicle. The team leader has issued two commands, one to the men in formation, and one to the guns in their hands. With an electronic chirp, the weapons acknowledge receipt of their new software protocol and reconfigure accordingly. They’re keyed to the target, Cameron Ackerson; if he steps into their sights, he’ll be hit with nonlethal sticky bullets that adhere to the skin and send paralytic impulses to the central nervous system, rendering him immobile and easy to capture. He’s the only one getting the capture-alive treatment, though. The other two have no value at all. If one of Ackerson’s friends gets in the way, the ammo will adhere and explode on contact. One hit can easily sever a hand or tear a jawbone free from its moorings; more than one, and the local cops will be scraping all that’s left of the kid’s pals off the sidewalk.
“Cameron Ackerson!” the team leader shouts. “Show yourself! Exit the vehicle alone with your hands over your head, and you will not be harmed!”
None of the assembled men notices that the display on their weapons is discreetly shifting, the guns emitting a series of low chirps as they recalibrate. In front of them, the door of the car swings open with agonizing slowness. The agents hold formation. They raise their guns. They wait.
For a moment, silence falls.
And then comes the synchronized click of the weapons ejecting their magazines—the ammunition inside reprogrammed not to stun, but to detonate on impact.
The night is filled with screams and smoke and shrapnel as the magazines tumble to the ground and explode, the force of the blasts tossing the agents aside in a flying tangle of arms and legs. They are the lucky ones; the ones who had already begun to move forward, so that their heavy boots were directly beneath the stock of their weapons, collapse where they stand, clutching the shredded, dripping remains of their feet and legs. Juaquo and the Inventor cower in the car as a cloud of dust rises around them, obscuring the horrific scene as the howls of the wounded become moans. Somewhere in the street, a man begins to sob and then choke, an inhuman sound that bounces off the curves of the concrete overpass so that it seems to be coming from everywhere at once.
“Fall back!” screams the team leader, and those who can still m
ove begin to lurch confusedly away. One, his arm pulled fully from its socket and dangling unnaturally by his side, looks back and screams at what he sees.
Cameron, his eyes blazing, emerges from the cloud of dust with fists clenched. His fury is all-consuming—and all-empowering. In this moment, all he wants is to crush everything he sees . . . and everything he doesn’t. OPTIC: This is their doing. These are their people. Behind him, Juaquo and the Inventor scramble from the car and call his name, but he pays no attention.
OPTIC wants him? Well, now they’ve got him. His mind is fully interfaced with their system, a connection so seamless that he could—and did—do it in his sleep. This time, there was no hesitation, and no pushback; he’s been inside OPTIC’s protocols, and he’s seen everything. He knows what they’re here for. They came with men, with machines, with guns. They came to take him, and they don’t care who they hurt.
They don’t get to run.
The team leader is the first to try, stripping off his communication devices and limping away into the swirling dust. Cameron narrows his eyes, and the car they came in revs its engine and rolls away in pursuit. There’s a pause, then a scream, abruptly cut off, and the long, slow crunch of something being crushed between tires and pavement. When the car reappears, silently rolling up like a dog returning to its master, its front fender is marred with a thick smear of blood. Then, a new sound: the soaring shriek of sirens. Cameron smiles again. That didn’t take long. The local police are headed for the scene now, having received word that there’s an act of terrorism in progress—and when they check their database, they’ll find that every single one of the men they apprehend here has a warrant out for his arrest. Cameron has good old Omnibus to thank for that; he’d encountered the security bot while ripping through OPTIC’s system, and found Omnibus delighted to see him again and only too happy to retrieve the personnel files for the team that was supposed to take him down.
Hello, Batman. I have the data packet. Do you have further instructions?
Cameron closes his eyes.
Tag them all, buddy. Grand theft auto, grand larceny, assault with a deadly weapon, and throw some indecent exposure and public urination in there for good measure. Get creative. Have some fun with it.
Affirmative, says Omnibus. The files have been altered. Deliver?
Bombs away, Cameron thinks, and watches as the files disappear through a digital back door into the hands of the law. Bad guys on file.
Cameron will be gone before the cops get here. OPTIC’s foot soldiers deserve every ounce of pain he’s inflicted on them, but they’re just pawns. It’s the queen he wants—the one whose digital fingerprints are all over this whole operation, whose encoded instructions are still stored on the devices of the men lying groaning in the street. Before the end of the night, Olivia Park is going to pay for messing with him—after she gives him answers.
“Hey.”
Cameron turns at the sound of Juaquo’s voice. His friend is standing beside the driverless car, studiously ignoring the gore on the fender. The Inventor huddles beside him, eyes wide.
“I hear sirens. We should get out of here,” Juaquo says. “Let’s get you home, yeah?”
Cameron shakes his head. “No. We have one more stop to make.”
29
Revelations
ENCRYPTED MESSAGE INCOMING
—Six, report in. Do you have him?
—Negative. Target not acquired.
* * *
Olivia’s response to the bizarre message from her colleague is a single word—EXPLAIN—but she never gets to send it. The device in her hand goes dark as she looks at it, and her own tech comes alive: on the pale skin of her inner forearm, a series of interlocking lines flushes red, then purple, then black. The smart tattoos are keyed to her body chemistry, and they’re all sending up alerts. Cortisol levels spiking, adrenaline pumping, blood sugar plummeting; she’s a damn mess inside, with the first pulsing sparks of a migraine beginning to beat just behind her eyes. She lifts her prosthetic thumb and forefinger to her temples, massaging them. A casual passerby would think she was just a woman with a headache, but the movement of her fingers is deliberate: she’s stimulating the replay function on her memory chip, watching her last conversation with Cameron Ackerson on the inside of her closed eyelids. Hoping there might be some hint, some clue, that might explain why everything is going so wrong.
What she knows for sure is that it is Ackerson. He’s the bug in the system, and she was an idiot to underestimate him. That stupid kid, whose interrogation was supposed to be a one-hour cakewalk that had everyone home in time for dinner, has ruined her entire day—and now her entire night. She’s stressed out and hungry, her whole schedule thrown off, the implants working overtime to regulate a body that’s running low on fuel. Nobody has been able to explain to her how William Ackerson’s son managed to compromise their security, and the tracking device she planted in his prosthetic has been frustratingly erratic. One minute, Cameron was inexplicably leaving his house in the middle of the night and charting a course for the center of Lake Erie. The next, he’d winked off the radar entirely. And when he finally reappeared, it coincided just a little too perfectly with a sudden series of massive network anomalies, as though the internet itself had been rocked by an earthquake. Fragments of destructive code were ripping through systems worldwide, OPTIC’s own network was going haywire, and none of it was happenstance. Cameron Ackerson was involved—maybe even picking up where his father left off. She knew he’d breached the old Whiz network, gaining the access that Wesley Park and then Olivia herself had been seeking for years. If her own father was right, if William Ackerson had hidden his darkest, dirtiest secrets deep inside the ruins of his ancient digital empire, it would only be a matter of time before the kid stumbled upon them and learned the truth about what his father had really been working on. That is, if he hadn’t found it already—but perhaps he’d been too busy making mischief, too preoccupied with that idiotic project they called Operation Cosmic Justice . . . or maybe just preoccupied with his partner in crime. Olivia had to assume that Nia was a real name, for a real girl—but her identity is one more thing about this disaster of an operation that still remains a mystery.
Olivia hates mysteries. A thing you cannot understand is a thing you cannot control, and control is her bread and butter. It’s why she loves this room so much, a satellite office to OPTIC’s compound and accessible only to her. A single, central command post from which she can oversee, monitor, and make real-time changes to every one of their operations—all while staying safe in the rare event that something goes badly awry.
And things are certainly going awry now.
Do you have him? she’d asked.
No, Six had answered. You do.
Somewhere outside the room, an alarm blares briefly and then cuts off mid-shriek. On the console beside her, a panel of screens begins flashing frantic error messages:
Security anomaly.
Program corruption.
Files not found.
System failure, system failure, system failure.
Then, darkness.
Olivia narrows her eyes. She’d been preparing to dispatch another team—assuming she could scrape one together from what remains of her assets. Between the Kapur woman and tonight’s disaster, OPTIC’s ranks have been greatly diminished. But now, apparently, that won’t be necessary. Another mystery: She thought Cameron Ackerson would run.
Instead, he’s coming to her.
* * *
She turns in her chair just as the door slides open—something that’s supposed to be impossible without multiple security clearances and biometric scans, but by now she knows better than to be surprised. Six was right: Cameron Ackerson has gifts, and not the kind nature gives you. But while his presence is anticipated, his appearance is shocking. He’s deathly pale, hunched over as if in pain, glaring at her with sunken, red-rimmed eyes from under his tangled hair. And he’s not alone: flanking him are two others, an
elderly gent in a caftan on the left, and on the right, a massive young man who’s built like a linebacker but looks as skittish as a chipmunk. The latter must be the friend, she thinks—one of the few they’d found when doing Ackerson’s background check, the childhood buddy who’d dropped out of engineering school the previous year. Something about a sick parent, she thought, but she hadn’t paid much attention. Juaquo Velasquez held no interest for her; he was a nobody. But the old man . . . now, that was interesting. A local kook, supposedly—the legendary so-called Batshit Barry—but he’s familiar to her for other reasons. It takes only a moment for her to remember: He’s all over the Ackerson file.
Not Cameron’s. William’s.
“Rough night?” Olivia says.
Cameron glares at her. “Not as rough as your men are having.”
Olivia’s voice is as mild as Cameron’s is furious. “Any idea of the death toll?”
“If anyone’s dead, that’s on you,” he snaps.
“On me,” Olivia says, coolly. “Of course. I could’ve sworn that one of the last dispatches I received before my communications cut out said something about our aircraft taking a dive into Lake Erie after all its systems inexplicably went haywire—but you wouldn’t know anything about that, I suppose.”
Cameron takes a step forward, his fists clenched at his sides. “You should have left me alone.”