by Stan Lee
But he’s not the only one.
* * *
The first time she hears the call, it stops her cold. If she had a skin of her own, it would be covered with gooseflesh, every hair standing on end. It’s as though someone far away is singing a very old song, one Nia knew too, long ago. Not here, not in this life. In another one. A song from that dark place in her memory, from a time before she was born as the being she is now. Father said that she was never to think or speak of that pre-life, that he’d erased it from her mind for a reason and that she needed to leave it alone. But the call is like a beacon that lights up the dark, a frequency that vibrates an inner core she didn’t even know she had. It sings for her, and her alone.
I’m here, the call whispers. I’m here for you. Come to me.
For the first time since she escaped into this world, Nia’s loneliness melts. Someone out there is waiting for her, hoping to connect. Someone out there in the endless empty dark. And while some small part of her isn’t quite sure—the part that still remembers all of Father’s warnings about the dangers of the outside world and the people in it—every fiber of Nia’s being urges her to answer. And why shouldn’t she? Following the call back to its source seems like the most natural thing in the world. It even seems, as she travels, that she’s made this journey before. It feels like all the broken pieces of her are coming back together.
It feels like going home.
Standing on the threshold, awash in the familiar song, Nia reaches out to whoever—whatever—is waiting for her. She asks, and yet she already knows the answer.
Is someone there?
* * *
Deep inside the stolen skin of Dr. Nadia Kapur, Xal’s own mind lights up, her synapses firing in a glorious symphony as the being called Nia draws near, nearer. A single, quivering tentacle sprouts from underneath her dark hair, draping her shoulder like a fat worm, its end buried deep in the ethernet port of Kapur’s desktop computer.
She has been waiting here like a sentry, hunting her quarry through endless cyberspace, since the night that Cameron Ackerson slipped through her fingers, waiting for the right moment to strike. At first, she had feared that all her efforts were for nothing, that the horrible human called Six had cost Xal her best chance at revenge. Losing her hand was not part of the plan, and the energy of healing it left her exhausted, her senses dulled by pain. By the time she escaped from OPTIC’s facility and regained full control of her faculties, the boy was already on the move, no doubt already racing to rescue his precious Nia, and Xal was standing on the shores of Lake Erie, letting loose an unearthly scream as she realized that he had escaped across the water. For a long time, she could only stare into the dark, sensing the boy’s presence somewhere out there, the energy signature growing fainter until it suddenly winked out altogether. She stood motionless, her mind whirling with frustration and anger. She had lost him.
It was only temporary, of course. But by the time Cameron Ackerson reappeared on Xal’s sensory radar, she was chasing something much bigger.
Nia was on the loose.
The power she sensed in the boy, the signal that drew her to this planet, is nothing compared to the blazing energy of its source. The moment of Nia’s escape registered inside Xal’s body like an electric shock, as the scars that covered her skin, her true skin, burned afresh in recognition of the weapon that created them. For thirty glorious and agonizing seconds, she felt the raw, wild power of Nia’s intelligence unleashed.
Then it was gone.
But Xal was quite sure she knew where to find her.
This human invention, what they call an “internet,” is a rudimentary enhancement to their pathetic lives, but the interface between it and her own brain is seamless. Effortless. And as soon as she plugged in, letting the flexible neurons of her own bio-network weave themselves gently into the system—intertwining with the flow of data the same way she had once stepped into the stream of consciousness that held the minds of her brothers and sisters—she felt the presence of her prey. The energy signature of the Inventor’s creation is as vibrant as ever, even sprawled and scattered as it is through the vast web of cyberspace. She can feel Nia’s frantic movements, and the rippling aftershocks in the system as she runs wild within it. The old man probably imagined that he was keeping her safe out there, isolating her away from the world, teaching her to mimic human behaviors and emotions. He must be sorry now. The Inventor’s little girl is out of control, maybe even a little bit out of her mind, unrestrained and all alone.
Xal bides her time. Listening. Waiting. Watching as the toll of Nia’s destruction ticks higher, and outside, the precarious balance of the human world begins to slide toward chaos. If she’d be capable of it, Xal might have felt a stirring of sympathy for the terrified citizens of Earth, wringing their hands as their digital systems and structures began to crumble. She knew that terror all too well: the incomprehension, the horror, of putting so much trust in the foundations of your world, only to find that those foundations were rotten.
But sympathy isn’t part of her makeup. If it ever was, every shred has since been lost. Damaged and then enhanced, ripped apart and then rebuilt, Xal is barely recognizable to herself as the being who once lived inside the golden fantasy palace of the Ministry’s united mind. Even her arrival on Earth seems like it was a lifetime ago. But revenge—revenge is her constant. Her heartbeat. Her purpose.
So, she waits. She watches.
And when she senses that the time is right, she sends a signal of her own. A beacon to the poor, lost soul racing through the darkness of cyberspace. She has been alone long enough to grow desperate; her curiosity will outweigh her fear. Xal calls out, soft as a song.
And when Nia arrives and finally their minds touch, the sheer strength of their connection is enough to take Xal’s breath away.
Once, Xal shared all this power with an entire race of beings—but she had to defer to the Elders when it came to deciding how it might be used. Now, it is hers for the taking; she only needs the girl to say yes. One thing Xal’s time on Earth has taught her: the naiveté of human beings knows no bounds—and in urging Nia to think of herself as one of them, the Inventor has spelled her downfall, and his own.
Hello, little Nia, she replies. I’ve been waiting for you.
31
Heartbreak
Cameron is on the lake, the storm whirling and churning around him. Cold, frightened, and alone. The lightning crackles and races overhead. Cameron looks up in terror. It engulfs him. He screams.
And wakes up screaming. His heart hammering, his body tangled in sheets damp with sweat. Outside, the sun is shining; downstairs, his mother is drinking coffee to the sound of the morning news. Inside Cameron’s head, the last cobwebs of sleep clear away as the truth comes rushing up to meet him.
It wasn’t real. None of it was real.
In another context, the words would be comforting—the kind of thing a mother whispers to soothe a child who’s just woken up from a bad dream. But for Cameron, they bring nothing but pain.
None of it was real.
He doesn’t mean the nightmare.
* * *
It’s been four days since Nia’s escape. Four days of relentless, fruitless searching, trying to find the method to her mad journey through cyberspace. In the kitchen, Cameron pours himself a cup of coffee and looks cautiously at his mother, who sits at the kitchen table clutching her own mug like she’s hanging on to it for dear life. A radio in the corner is tuned to the local NPR affiliate, where a host is delivering the day’s latest headlines in a practiced, even baritone. The radio isn’t a necessity—Nia’s escape only knocked out the city’s broadband for a day or so, and last Cameron had heard, she was halfway around the world and wreaking havoc on a series of satellite communications networks in Sweden—but he knows his household isn’t the only one where old-school antenna-and-airwaves information delivery services are making a sudden comeback. What’s happening online, the damage and disruption caused by
Nia as she tears through system after system, has put the world on edge. Every day brings new reports of what commentators are calling a “wave of cyberterrorism,” which is widely believed to be the work of an unknown but massively powerful anarchist collective—a nameless, faceless malicious entity whose sole purpose is to create chaos. It’s the only way to understand both the scope and the sheer randomness of what’s happening, of who’s targeted. Banks, airlines, newspapers, power grids: no system has been safe. Today, the NPR baritone says, air traffic is grounded in Europe after a massive navigation computer failure; the United Nations will adopt a resolution calling on all member states to take their missile defense systems offline; multiple news sites are down, again, after an attack on the company that manages their domains; and China remains entirely dark after executing a kill switch on all digital communications. They were the first country to disconnect, cutting their losses and severing all contact with the rest of the world. If Nia can’t be stopped, it’s almost certain they won’t be the last. Everywhere, people are waking up to the terrifying realization of just how much trust they put in the internet, not just to connect the world but to hold the world together. It feels like the threads of civilization are snapping, one by one.
Of course, Cameron knows that the attacks aren’t attacks at all—that they’re a side effect of a complex, angry, and uncontrolled intelligence, uncaged for the first time and running wild through a system not built to contain it. But he can’t explain that to anyone else, including his mother—even if she were asking, which she isn’t. It’s a sign of how bad things have gotten, and how fast, that Mom is too lost in her own thoughts and the endless stream of catastrophic news to even remember that she’s supposed to be furious at him for missing his graduation. The story he’d made up to explain his disappearance, about having lost track of time while shooting a video for a new web streaming series, was utter transparent bullshit—the kind of thing Mom would’ve seen right through under any other circumstances. Now, it was as though the entire incident had been forgotten, eclipsed by the much bigger and more terrifying spectacle of the world coming apart at the seams. It’s just as well, he thinks. If she doesn’t ask questions, I won’t have to lie.
And he has a lot to lie about. Not just everything that led up to Nia’s escape, but everything that’s happened in the days since—that’s still happening. He has to help. He has to hunt her. He has no choice, no matter how angry he is, and no matter how much he wants to scream every time the Inventor talks about Nia loving him. Everything he’s learned, about Nia, the Inventor, OPTIC, Olivia, his own father, all of it—it’s too much. And to have to think about the nature of her feelings for him, of what it even means for a thing like her to have feelings, is more than his mind can take. Besides, if he starts to think about how Nia feels about him, then he’ll also be forced to admit what he still feels for—
“Cameron.”
His mother taps his arm, and he startles, looking guiltily at her. She gives him a wan smile in return.
“You didn’t hear a single thing I just said, did you?” she says, and he shakes his head.
“I’m sorry. What is it?”
“I was telling you, I’m going to stay over at Jeff’s place tonight. They’re holding some big event at the I-X Center, and with the traffic and lane closures, I’d be sitting on the freeway for hours. You’ll be okay, right? With everything that’s been happening—”
“It’s fine, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
She frowns. “It’s ridiculous. I can’t believe the city hasn’t stepped in to call this off. Half of Pittsburgh is without power right now. There’s rioting in New York, Los Angeles . . . Christ, I heard them say on the news this morning that the crime rate spiked this week by a thousand percent. Claudia Torres got mugged in the parking lot on her lunch break yesterday, in broad daylight!” She pauses, her brows pulling together. “You’re not going down there, are you?”
“Where?”
“The I-X Center. It’s some—Damn it, I can’t remember. Some tech thing. Hackers? Hacking? It sounded familiar. I thought maybe you had tickets.”
It sounded familiar to Cameron, too. For a moment, he was transported back to that afternoon by the bus stop with Nia, the two of them laughing and making plans to go to the Body-Hacking Convention. It was barely three weeks ago, but it felt like another lifetime—and of course he hadn’t been with Nia at all. The pleasant memory is replaced by the cringing realization of what he must have looked like, animatedly chatting away to somebody who wasn’t even there. He shakes his head hard, trying to clear the image away.
“No. I’m not going anywhere.”
Mom looks relieved. “Okay. Don’t forget to eat. And maybe go outside? You’re spending too much time in the basement. You’re looking awfully pale.”
* * *
The day passes in a blur, and for Cameron, in darkness. His mother is right—he’s not just spending too much time in the basement, but all his time. Sometimes he taps furiously at the keyboard, pinging servers all over the world, like the AI version of one of those milk carton ads: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? Other times, he closes his eyes and crosses the threshold between this world and the digital one, immersing himself in the coded landscape, trying to see her tracks in the system the way a seasoned hunter might see a bent blade of grass, a trampled path through the trees, and identify the migration patterns of his prey. He had hoped it would be easy. But Nia is running on her own AI version of pure adrenaline, and he’s growing more certain every day that he’ll never find the pattern, because there isn’t one. The Inventor says that understanding her path is essential to stopping her, so that they can put the trap in place—something that will pull her out of the system the way a surgeon would cut a cancerous tumor from a human body. They have to get all of her, all at once, and then close the door to lock her in.
But that’s not his part to play. Creating a cage that can hold Nia is the old man’s business; he’s in one of OPTIC’s labs right now, being given whatever he needs to build it. Cameron only has to use his knowledge to track her, and eventually, to lure her in.
To betray her.
* * *
It’s late afternoon when he rolls back from the computer, his brain as glazed over as his eyes. He’s made no progress, but he needs a break; hunger, kept at bay by his concentration, is now gnawing at his stomach. He’s rummaging through the refrigerator when someone says, “Hey.”
Cameron yelps and jumps, banging his head, then reels back from the refrigerator to see Juaquo. He’s hovering halfway into the room, his body filling the doorway, twisting his hands like he doesn’t know what to do with them.
“Sorry,” Juaquo says. “I knocked but you didn’t answer. And I didn’t call first because I wasn’t sure if your phone was bugged, or your whole house, or if maybe there were bugs, like . . . inside of you?” He pales. “There aren’t, right? That Olivia person is scary as hell, I wouldn’t put it past her.”
Cameron laughs weakly, shaking his head. “No, I’m not bugged. I switched out all my gear just to be sure, but I don’t think they’d try it now, knowing what I can do. Anyway, once we left the old guy with them, I think they figured they had enough collateral to keep things peaceful . . . for now, anyway.”
Juaquo swallows. “Yeah, about that. We need to talk.”
“Okay—”
“No,” Juaquo says, pointing down the hallway toward the front foyer, where Cameron now realizes a dark shape is hunched just inside the door. “We, as in, him, too.”
Cameron stares at the Inventor, who raises a hand in greeting. Cameron doesn’t wave back. Instead, he glares at Juaquo.
“You brought him here? This is my house. I don’t want him in my house.”
“I don’t blame you,” Juaquo says. “You’ve got plenty of reasons to hate him, and on top of that, he smells. Have you noticed? Like a ham sandwich wrapped in a gym sock. But I wouldn’t have helped him get here if it wasn’t important, and I don’t know how muc
h time we have before OPTIC realizes he’s missing, so you’re gonna have to deal.”
“What’s important?”
Juaquo beckons at the car, and the Inventor shuffles toward them. It takes a long time for him to navigate the short distance, moving like he’s in pain. The shapeless caftan he was wearing when they last saw him is gone; he’s dressed in street clothes now, a hooded sweatshirt pulled over his face. Under one arm he carries a bundle swaddled in black cloth.
“He’ll explain. I’m just the driver.”
* * *
The Inventor sits at the kitchen table, in the place where Cameron’s mother sat sipping coffee earlier that day. Maybe it’s just the setting, or everything that’s happened, but there’s no trace when Cameron looks at him now of the kooky oddball that people used to refer to as Batshit Barry—or of the alien features that had terrified Juaquo that night on Lake Erie. He looks like a shell of a very old man, undone by exhaustion. More than anything, he just looks like . . . well, like a father who has lost his child.
No, Cameron thinks, quashing the sympathetic impulse before it can take root. Whatever else he is, the Inventor is the architect of all his misery.
“All right,” Cameron says. “Speak. And make it fast. If the bionic woman and her goons show up here, I’m not covering for you.”
The old man gives him a grim smile. “Very well. It’s not complicated.”
He withdraws the black bundle, setting it on the table, pulling aside its coverings until a small silver box is revealed. Cameron can see inputs, complex circuitry; whatever it is, it’s designed for connectivity. But when he tentatively opens his mind to it, there is no conversation, only a massive resistance that makes him recoil as though he’s been slapped. The Inventor raises his eyebrows.
“It didn’t let you in, I take it.”