A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  “But we weren’t done talking earlier,” Olivia says sweetly. “And you never did give my colleague an answer to his offer of employment.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “I guess that’s a no, then.” Olivia flicks her eyes toward the old fellow in the caftan, who flinches as though he’s been stung. “Is that because your interests are invested . . . elsewhere? Have we been making new friends?”

  “Hey, excuse me. I don’t know what you’re implying, lady,” Juaquo says, “but we literally just met this guy. Well, unless you count the time he dropped a deuce in front of a school bus full of fifth-graders in a public park, but—”

  “Please shut up,” says Olivia, without taking her eyes off the old man. She takes a step closer. “You know, Cameron, we could still reach an agreement. Leave now, and leave your new friend with us, and we could forget all about the rest of this unpleasantness. After all, we are not our fathers. We don’t have to hold their grudges. This bad blood between us, we could forget all about it.” She pauses. “We could even forget about Nia.”

  * * *

  Olivia is watching Cameron so closely for a reaction, she doesn’t realize at first that the response is happening inside her own body. The reactive tattoos on her arm flush from black to a sickly green as beads of sweat erupt on her forehead. The room suddenly seems very hot—only the air against her face is cool as ever. Gooseflesh ripples over her arms and the threatening migraine suddenly roars into being, the pounding in her head so fierce that she staggers, grabbing at a nearby table to catch her balance. Her tongue is swollen, her vision blurred. But her ears still work perfectly well, and Cameron Ackerson’s voice is loud and clear.

  “You people really don’t understand who you’re dealing with, do you,” he says, as Olivia falls to her knees. “You have no idea. I could wipe your servers, expose your organization, and boil you alive from the inside out, all at the same time. I could flood your system with so much poison that your brain turns into soup. I’m talking to your immunosoftware right now, Olivia. I’m reprogramming it to think that every cell in your body, every part of you that’s still you, is foreign, toxic tissue that needs to be purged. You’re about to be eaten alive by your own nanobots . . . or maybe I’ll just choke you to death with your own hand.”

  Cameron narrows his eyes as the color drains from Olivia’s face, as her prosthetic fingers fly to her own windpipe and begin to squeeze. She raises her other hand to yank it away, and a thin wheezing sound escapes her throat as the fingers plunge deeper, grip tighter. Juaquo grabs him by the shoulder.

  “What are you doing!” he shouts, frantic. “Stop it! You’re gonna kill her!”

  The horror in Juaquo’s voice breaks through Cameron’s concentration. He feels his control slip, and a dry croak works its way out of Olivia’s swollen throat—a death rattle, he thinks, only the expression on her face says otherwise. She’s not dying, not yet.

  She’s laughing.

  Everyone in the room stares openmouthed as she struggles to her feet.

  “If you. Kill me,” she croaks, between gasps. “You’ll never. Know the truth.”

  “What truth?” Cameron snarls.

  Olivia gulps for air. “About your father. About what he was looking for.” She turns her gaze to the Inventor, who flinches as she looks at him. “And what he found, perhaps.”

  “Please,” the old man says. “This is not the right moment—”

  “Oh, no. I think it is,” she snaps, bringing her breath back under control. “I wonder, does Cameron know why the police questioned you after William Ackerson disappeared? I bet he doesn’t. He was so young when it all happened, and from that stricken look on your face, I bet you’ve been keeping this part of the story to yourself. Perhaps you even thought nobody else knew. But you were being watched, Barry—or whatever you call yourself. My father never stopped keeping tabs on his former partner, and William, of course, was keeping tabs on you. I’ve seen the surveillance files. Poor Dad just thought his old friend was losing his grip on reality the same way he’d lost his grip on his company, that he was a washed-up failure chasing a fantasy. But it wasn’t a fantasy, was it? William was close to something. I wonder, did he get too close? Is that why he disappeared?”

  The Inventor doesn’t answer. Instead, Cameron steps forward.

  “Tell me what you’re talking about, Olivia,” he says. “If you want my help, or even if you just want me to leave here without putting you in a coma, stop dancing around and tell me what happened to my father.”

  Olivia waves a hand at him. “The tough-guy act doesn’t suit you, Cameron. I’ll tell you what I know—and then perhaps your friend can fill in the rest.

  “Before I took over OPTIC—before OPTIC was OPTIC—it was my father’s company. Communications security, the best in the world. He launched it shortly after leaving Whiz, and his timing was impeccable: Every organization in the world was rushing to get online, and Wesley Park had an advanced encryption technology that was unmatched at the time.” She pauses, leveling her gaze at Cameron. “But it wasn’t his. That technology was created by William Ackerson, derived from a rogue programming string he found embedded in the Whiz network during its early days. He captured it, he developed it, and he built something quite remarkable out of it. But at the end of the day, Ackerson wasn’t satisfied. The message he’d found wasn’t enough. He wanted the messenger. The source code. He was obsessed with figuring out where what he’d stumbled upon had come from. My father, on the other hand, was more interested in figuring out where it could go. Cue the big breakup, lawyers and all.”

  “But not before Park walked out the door with what my father made,” Cameron says. “So it’s true. Your father was a thief.”

  “And yours was an idiot,” Olivia replies. “He would have spent the rest of his life toying with that code, trying to track it, digging around in digital rabbit holes while men with sense and vision built enormous cities all around him. I’ve seen the court transcripts, Cameron. Your dad had every opportunity to get on board, to make it big. He chose to dig his heels in. What happened to him is his own fault.”

  “What happened to him,” Cameron repeats back, and Olivia shrugs.

  “I only know what’s in the file. Like I said, my father wanted to keep tabs. I know he still cared about William, in spite of everything. He took no pleasure in watching him squander his gifts on scammers and grifters. But your dad was obsessed. I imagine he thought that if he cracked the origins of the code, he could rebuild his little empire, make a success of himself again—maybe even change the world. I’m sure that’s how he justified everything he did afterward, all those bad acts for a good cause. I know you’ve heard the stories.”

  This time Cameron doesn’t respond, and Olivia shrugs and continues.

  “The sad thing is, he wasn’t wrong. He was making progress. I believe he was even getting close to something extraordinary. And at some point, he became very interested in your friend here—which was also when my father must have decided that William was fully out of his mind and past the point of no return, because he dialed back the surveillance. William disappeared just a few weeks later, and that was the end of that . . . until just recently, when fragments of a certain peculiar code started popping up in connection with certain mysterious hacking incidents. And tonight, shortly before you turned up in the company of this man, a massive program written in the same strange language hit the internet like a tsunami, and has been rampaging through networks causing so much instability that it could quite literally end the world as we know it. We are, to put it bluntly, in deep shit. Now, I have maybe seventy-five percent of a theory about how this all ties together. So if Barry here would kindly stop fucking around and fill in the blanks, I’d appreciate it.”

  The Inventor sits heavily on a desk, his face drawn, and looks at Cameron with enormous, begging eyes.

  “My boy, you must believe me. I do not know what happened to your father.”

  Cameron folds his ar
ms. “But it happened because of you. The source code he was searching for, that he sacrificed everything for—”

  The old man nods. “It was mine, yes. In that, I am culpable. Your father’s network, the one called Whiz, was an invaluable resource to me when I first arrived on Earth. The binary language of your computers was the only one on this planet that I knew how to speak, a rudimentary form of the same one I used to create my own work, and my only means of understanding this world. I was desperate. It made me incautious. I left traces. I knew your father had captured a fragment of my programming language, but I did not realize the danger—what something like that would mean to a human being, especially one so gifted and so curious. By the time he found me, and I recognized my mistake, it was too late. I had made my home here, and Nia’s. I had begun her education, and erased all her memories of our old world, of what she was and what she’d done. She was as in love with life on this planet as any human child. Please understand. Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t simply rip her away.”

  Cameron feels a surge of anger at the mention of Nia, but keeps his voice even. “The day he disappeared—”

  The Inventor nods. “He came to me. I didn’t realize until that moment that he’d been tracking me back through the system. He had traced me as far as the house in Oldtown, and he’d figured out quite a lot. Too much. The storms on the lake, Nia’s storms—he had been analyzing the fractal patterns in the electrical activity. He knew there was a connection between the storms and the source code, and he suspected my connection to both. All the pieces . . . he just couldn’t see how they fit together. He was looking for answers. He was not unlike Ms. Park here, in that he had many suspicions, many theories, but no proof. He begged me, and I realize now that he was desperate, that not knowing was driving him mad. But at the time, all I could think of was my terror of being discovered, of being forced to flee or, worse, separated from Nia. To trust a human with the truth, even one as brilliant as your father, was a risk I could not fathom. So I turned him away. I told him he was mistaken. I thought, foolishly, that he would return home and give up the search. And I have wondered every day since then how things might have been different had I made another choice.”

  Cameron stares at the Inventor, his mind churning. He has thousands of questions, but only one finds its way to his lips.

  “Did he tell you where he was going?” he says.

  “No,” the Inventor replies, “but what I told the police is true. The last time I saw your father, he was driving away toward the lake. It is possible that he’d guessed at the location of my ship and went out in search of it, although my instruments never picked up any sign of him. It is also possible that he had exhausted the last option in his search for the truth, only to find himself still lost, and made a desperate choice. I do not know. I wish it were otherwise, my boy. For my sake as well as yours.”

  Cameron is about to snap back, to tell the old man that he and his wishes can go straight to hell, when someone coughs purposefully nearby. Olivia is standing there, a self-satisfied smirk curling her lips despite the still-ragged cadence of her breathing, and the bruises that are just beginning to bloom in two dark ovals on her throat.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt, but Cameron’s daddy issues are the least of our worries right now. And you, old man—your regrets will have to wait. I’ve got one more thing to show you that might be of interest. Earlier today, we had an incident at OPTIC’s main base of operations.” She picks up a tablet from the desk, tapping at it before handing it to Cameron. “Tell me, gentlemen: Does anyone look familiar?”

  The footage is rendered in grayscale, without audio, but there’s no mistaking what they’re seeing; the picture is perfectly clear, the action rendered in seamless, silent high definition. It’s shot from a high angle: security footage, Cameron realizes, from one of the hallways he passed through earlier that day on his way to be interrogated. On the screen, a tall woman is holding a struggling man by the neck. He’s clawing at his face, which is obscured by some kind of dark substance—only that’s not quite right, Cameron thinks. He’s not clawing at his face.

  He’s clawing at the place where his face used to be.

  As they watch, the man’s movements grow less forceful, his hands fluttering and then falling still. The body tumbles to the floor in a heap. The woman wipes her hand on the hem of her shirt and strides out of the frame.

  Cameron feels like he’s going to faint, or vomit, or maybe both at once. He grits his teeth and swallows hard.

  “Of course I know her. That’s Dr. Kapur. She rescued me, before your creepy doctor friend could start peeling my skin like a grape. But you’re saying—what? My psychiatrist is an alien too?”

  He looks at Olivia, expecting a reply.

  Instead, it’s the old man who speaks.

  “I’m afraid the answer to that question is both yes and no.” Everyone turns to look at the Inventor, who gazes back with a profoundly grim expression. “That was Xal of the Ministry, wearing a borrowed skin—or maybe more than one. I’m sorry, Cameron. I’m afraid your doctor is dead.” He takes a deep breath. “And I’m afraid we have even less time than I imagined. We must find Nia, before Xal does.”

  Olivia lurches past all of them, moving to the wall, where she presses her hand against an unseen sensor. A panel slides back, and everyone stiffens, expecting her to withdraw a weapon—but when she turns back, the only thing in her hand is a bottle of water. She takes a long swig, coughs, and spits a gob of bloody mucus onto the floor.

  “Yes,” she says, her voice gravelly but wry. “Let’s do that. Let’s find Nia. She’s making an awful mess.”

  30

  Uncaged

  It takes only a day for Nia to understand that the world is more complicated than she imagined.

  It takes less than a week for her to realize she’s made a terrible mistake.

  The headlines trail her wherever she goes.

  SELF-DRIVING VEHICLES RECALLED AMID FUROR OVER “POSSESSED TESLAS”

  FALSE ALARM OF IMPENDING NUCLEAR STRIKE CREATES MASS PANIC IN NEW YORK CITY

  GLOBAL MARKETS PLUMMET AS ENTIRE NATION OF CHINA GOES DARK

  And that was only the beginning.

  At first, the freedom had been intoxicating. After a lifetime of being contained, the sense of being able to unfurl herself, to stretch out in a hundred directions at once, was pure exhilaration. The way she used to visit with Cameron, projecting a shade of the person she imagined herself to be out through the secret opening she’d created in Father’s firewalls, was nothing compared to this—like running at a sprint through an endless, wide-open world, when before you could only touch the sky by sticking your hand out a narrow window. As hard as it had been to say goodbye to him, to cause him even more pain, she had not looked back as she raced out into the vastness of the digital ether. She was free, utterly and completely free, for the first time in her life. She wanted to touch everything, be everywhere. It never occurred to her that her mad journey through cyberspace was leaving havoc in its wake.

  It wasn’t until she tried to slow down, to consider her next move, that she began to understand: the freedom that had seemed so exhilarating didn’t come with brakes. And the walls she’d hated so much, the ones that locked her away from the world like one of those hapless fairy-tale girls, hadn’t just held her back. They held her together. Without them, she bleeds uncontrollably from place to place, network to network, unable ever to gather herself together enough to feel whole. Once, she had been able to imagine what it might be like to have a body, one that contained the entirety of her being the way Father’s did, or Cameron’s. The avatar she’d made out of light and code, a wide-eyed, red-haired composite of a thousand different girls whose profiles she’d scraped to create a physical idea of herself: that was who she wanted to be. For a time, it had even seemed like that was who she was. She never felt more human, more herself, than when she was with Cameron. For the first time, she had known love, joy, connection—and had i
magined that this must be what it was like to be free.

  But she was wrong. She has never been so lonely. And it’s getting worse. Every day, the memory of what it felt like to be connected—to be home—seems to recede further from her reach. Every day, she feels less human than the day before. And when she reaches out, desperate to reconnect, things only get worse. Every network she enters seems to fall apart around her; her path through the system is a trail of carnage she cannot control, and when she tries to pause, Earth’s terrified leaders attempt to ensnare her in clumsy traps. She knows that Cameron is still out there somewhere, but she can’t stop running long enough to reach him, can’t gather her thoughts enough to even try. Early on, with great effort, she regained access to the secret virtual world they once shared, but the only thing she found there was the dog, who no longer seemed to know her. The door Cameron used to enter and exit the room opened onto a blank wall of nothing, the code behind it as impenetrable as any she’d ever seen. She faced it, haunted by the memory of their last moments together, the overwhelming pain and fear that rose up to meet her when she entered his mind. Was Cameron so angry at her betrayal that he’d come here to strip the place of everything that still connected them, even recoding the pet he’d given her as a gift? Or was she the one who had changed, so different from the almost-girl she’d been that she’d become unrecognizable?

  That was when she lost control again, exploding back out the way she came, causing an energy spike that created a wave of rolling blackouts in every major Midwest city. The damage to the power grids was irreparable; within a week, the residents of the neighborhoods hit hardest would riot. But by then, Nia was no longer capable of concerning herself with human affairs. She only knows that she is a runaway in every sense of the word—desperate to stay free, incapable of slowing or stopping. And she knows, in the deep-down part of herself that’s the closest thing she’ll ever have to a heart, that Father is searching for her.