A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  “From the looks of this, she has at least a couple dozen people networked already,” Cameron says, studying the video clip. “I know she got Juaquo when he was using the augmented-reality system I gave him, but see this?” He pauses, tapping the screen to enlarge the picture. “This guy’s earpiece, that’s a cochlear implant. And this guy next to him is wearing a Myo band with EMG sensors. I’ll bet you anything that all these people were using some kind of tech, either wearable or implanted, something with a sensory interface that she could pass through to gain control.”

  The Inventor rubs his temples with one hand, clutching the black-wrapped pouch to his chest with the other.

  “Your friend Juaquo and these others were the beta test. Nia would have located the best candidates and tapped them individually so that Xal could monitor the process. Xal is careful; she would have insisted on that. But to create a true hive, Nia will connect their minds in a single surge, a massive pulse that brings them all together at once.”

  The Inventor turns to gaze out the window at the convention center, at the people below.

  “Xal has chosen this as her stronghold,” he says. “Most of those present will be drawn into the network, and it will be easy to surround herself with an army of loyal drones immediately. But Nia’s reach is far greater than this building, or even this city. You must remember, Cameron, she once sustained the collective consciousness of an entire race, an entire planet. If she channels her energy into one or more high-traffic sites, there’s no telling how many minds she might capture. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Eventually billions.”

  “Unless I can convince her not to,” Cameron says.

  “Yes,” the old man replies. “Unless. And I am warning you, our time will run out quickly. Xal will not tolerate any attempts to derail her plan, and she will not hesitate to kill those who get in her way. I believe she has only delayed this long because Nia needed time to amass her energy inside the I-X Center’s network, and gather her strength. If she discovers us—”

  “If things go according to plan, she won’t even know we’re there until we’re at the ‘gloating victory’ stage,” Cameron says. “And Nia will be safe in her new home, with her personality and her memory still intact.”

  The Inventor nods, but clutches the black bundle more tightly in his arms—the device Cameron has begun to think of as the Lobotomizer.

  “I wish you’d leave that behind,” says Cameron. He peers out at the crowded parking lot, his expression wary. It’s not just that the device makes him worried for Nia’s safety; it’s the kind of tech that OPTIC would love to get their hands on, and Cameron knows better than to hope that Olivia Park won’t show up here tonight with her own agenda. Traffic and security cameras would have picked up the car, and their faces, as they made their way west—and Cameron’s senses keep buzzing with the faint, familiar echo of the woman’s bionic software. She’s getting closer.

  “We cannot afford to go in there without a backup plan,” the old man says. “I will wire the reset device into the system as a cautionary measure. If we are caught—”

  “We won’t be,” Cameron interrupts, gesturing at the back seat. “That’s what the bot army is for.”

  The Inventor throws a sidelong glance. “I’m not sure how these . . . items . . . are going to be a match for Xal’s hive.”

  Cameron grimaces. “Yeah, well, I’ve gotta work with what I’ve got. I’m not like Nia. I can’t hack people, only machines. Best-case scenario, they’ll be our early-warning system if trouble comes. Worst case . . . well, I can definitely trip at least one person with that Roomba.”

  What Cameron won’t say, and doesn’t want to think about, is that the old man has a point. Most overwhelming is the sense that he’s walking into a scenario where he will be outmatched, where his powers can only take him so far—and where, at the most pivotal moment, he can’t rely on them at all. There is no hack here, no inventive bit of programming or innovative piece of tech that’s going to save the day. If he’s going to convince Nia to stop, to turn against Xal, he has to speak to whatever is human inside of her, to touch her heart in a place where Xal’s manipulation can’t reach. To help her see that connecting so many people might mean the end of a certain kind of loneliness, but also everything that makes humanity unique and beautiful and free. To help convince her that what he’s asking her to sacrifice is worth it. At the end of the day, Cameron won’t be a cyberkinetic superhero ready to save the world. He’ll be a boy, standing in front of a girl, offering her the meager gift of his heart and hoping that it’s enough.

  I could really use Dr. Kapur’s advice right now, he thinks, bitterly. She was always trying to get him to work on his people skills, to talk about his feelings, and he always tuned out—like an idiot. Now Kapur was dead, with a vengeful alien wearing what was left of her skin, and Cameron was realizing much too late how valuable her insight would have been.

  He was on his own.

  “Cameron, are you listening?” The Inventor is peering at him. “This is important. If I am captured, Xal will kill me. But if you are captured, she will drain you. She will take your attributes for herself. You cannot allow this to happen. If she takes you, you must sacrifice Nia to the reset, before Xal can infiltrate your mind. Are you prepared?”

  Cameron swallows hard, imagining himself looking into Nia’s face as he sends her to her doom, watching as the life and light go out of her terrified, pleading eyes. The thought is horrifying, somehow even worse than the idea of being dismantled by Xal himself. And if his plan works, it will never come to pass. But if not . . .

  “I’m prepared.” He pauses, frowning. “I’ve just thought of something. What happens to the minds on the network if Nia is reset while they’re all still connected? What happens to Juaquo, and everyone else?”

  The Inventor looks grim.

  “I cannot say. Among the Ministry, such an event would cause temporary disorientation but no permanent damage. Their minds were built to withstand such things. But in humans—I simply do not know. The mere existence of a shared consciousness among you is already pushing the boundaries of what your minds can bear. It is one more reason why I share your hope that you might convince Nia to undo what she’s done, to close the doors she opened. But it is also one more reason—”

  “Why I should prepare for the worst,” Cameron says. “I know. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, the two hurry across the parking lot, weaving through the crowd and then scurrying around the far corner toward the I-X Center’s loading docks. Following closely at their heels and overhead is Cameron’s makeshift “army,” everything he could summon from the display floor of the city’s big box electronics store: three drones, a robot vacuum cleaner, and—best of all—a BB-8, all hastily reprogrammed to perform reconnaissance and report back if they see Xal. A security door with a keypad entry system swings open at the touch of Cameron’s eyes; a moment later, the two are moving quickly through a service corridor. The drones and bots vanish around a corner, heading for the main floor. Cameron monitors their progress until he senses them dispersing, the bots rolling through the crowd as the drones swoop high to capture a bird’s-eye view of the space. None of them sees anything unusual, and Cameron wonders for a moment if it might really be this easy—if he can save the girl, save the world, and cap it all off by knocking out Xal with a drone to the head, all from the safety of the upstairs control room.

  The Inventor begins to wheeze as they climb the stairs, clutching the black bundle under one arm as he grips the railing with the other. By the time they emerge on the corridor that holds the convention hall’s central offices, the old man can barely stand upright.

  “In here,” Cameron says, dragging him toward a door with a placard beside it reading AV CONTROL. The door opens onto a room outfitted with a long, multicolored control desk running along one wall, with video screens stacked in neat four-by-four grids above it. At the far end, a massive window looks down on the f
loor several stories below, where the roar and chatter of the crowd is almost as loud in Cameron’s ears as the babbling of all the equipment inside his head. He concentrates on the data feeds from his hastily assembled army, forming a mental picture of the hall as he gazes down at it through the glass. At the far end of the massive space are row after row of booths with hundreds of people milling among them, gazing at elegant arrays of tech that promise everything from performance-enhancing smart drugs to sensory-immersive VR sex. In one section, the crowd surrounds a man and a woman who are strapped into elaborate exo-suits and executing a complicated series of dance moves; above them, a hanging array of glass screens shows video of people wearing the same tech, running at incredible speeds and vaulting over walls. A line for amorphous smart tattoos made from nano-ink stretches the full length of the hall under a banner that reads YOUR BODY IS A CANVAS; another, shorter line for touch-sensitive electronic tattoos made from gold leaf microprocessors winds behind it (WHY TOUCH A SCREEN WHEN YOU CAN TOUCH YOURSELF). Another booth holds dozens of prototypes for concept prosthetics—hands and feet and legs but also eyes, ears, even swaths of artificial skin mounted vertically like the world’s freakiest display of carpet squares—and Cameron thinks briefly of Olivia, remembering the creepy sense that she and OPTIC were just a step behind them. That sense has evaporated; the efficient hum of Olivia’s internal systems would be barely a whisper in the midst of so much chattering tech—but he wonders if there’s another reason. What if Wesley Park’s daughter is here, but no longer herself? The software inside her body was just the sort of portal through which Nia could enter and Xal could claim control.

  But it’s not Olivia he’s here to find; it’s Nia, and his attention is drawn most immediately to the area nearest the control room, where a makeshift arena has been set up under a banner that reads IMMERSIVE E-SPORTS CLASSIC: ALL-DAY TOURNAMENT. A sea of spectators sits rapt on three sides, their heads covered by VR headsets that make them look a little like ants, faceless and uniform under the opaque black headgear. An enormous screen rises a hundred feet up from the center of the tiered bleachers, showing to passersby what the seated crowd sees inside their virtual world. The highlights reel from a recently finished game—Cameron vaguely recognizes it as a next-generation version of Mortal Kombat that he’d once been excited to play—is running in slow motion to an ongoing series of cheers. The winning team stands to the side of the stage, dwarfed by the images of their triumphant avatars on screen; in real life, they’re wearing matching yellow tracksuits along with their VR headsets and gesture-capture bands, jumping up and down in celebration alongside a trio of gyrating golden holograms that look like big-breasted cat-human hybrids. Overhead, autopilot camera drones swoop and dive over the crowd, capturing the scene. Instinctively, he reaches out and adds them to his network, though he leaves them to continue running their current program trajectory. A few more bots in his army can’t hurt.

  All of this, the lay of the landscape below with all its technology chattering away, registers in Cameron’s brain before he notices that the control room is staffed by three men and one woman in matching polo shirts, all of whom are staring at both him and the Inventor with something between alarm and annoyance.

  “You can’t be in here!” one of them says, and Cameron freezes in place, realizing that he has no idea what to do next. Politely ask the staff to leave? Set off a fire alarm to force an evacuation?

  “Listen,” says Cameron, but he only gets out the one word; beside him the Inventor falls to his knees, twisting away with a groan.

  “Oh my God, is your grandpa all right?” says the woman in the polo shirt, moving toward the old man—and then recoiling with a shriek as he looks up at her. The Inventor’s massive eyes have popped fully out of their sockets, and as everyone gapes, his striated neck pouch inflates to the size of a basketball.

  “Get out!” the old man croaks. “It’s contagious! Get out, before you’re all exposed!”

  The tech crew screams in unison, all scrambling to their feet and vaulting over their chairs as they flee the room. Cameron looks out the door in time to see them disappearing at a sprint around the corner, then turns back to the Inventor, grinning in spite of himself.

  “Not the first thing I would’ve thought of, but nicely done.”

  “Thank you,” the Inventor replies, shaking his head as his eyes return to their sockets and the turquoise pouch disappears. “Let’s not rest on our laurels. I’ll have to hardwire the reset device into the mainframe. You are sure, I assume, that we’re in the right place?”

  Cameron concentrates, plunging his mind into the surrounding systems—and finding them in a shambles. Every networked system in the center, from lights to security to the dancing holograms below, has been dismantled and derailed, running on a single server while the rest of its high-capacity network sits quietly, wide open, like a narrow hallway cleared and widened to accommodate the passage of an enormous object. He’s seen this kind of destruction before, as he tracked Nia’s movements through cyberspace, but this is different: more controlled, almost painstaking. Nia has cleared a path for herself. And yet the workaround is so seamless that the audiovisual crew never noticed anything wrong. Cameron lets out a low whistle, impressed by the elegance of it all.

  “She’s here,” he says aloud.

  Behind him, two male voices speak in unison: “Yes, she is.”

  Cameron whirls, and the Inventor gasps. Standing in the doorway are two security guards wearing ill-fitting uniforms and identical grins, their euphoric smiles eerily mismatched by the empty glassiness of their eyes. They look stoned—until they see the old man and the smiles become twisted sneers of rage.

  “Get him,” they whisper in unison, reaching for the tasers on their belts.

  “No!” Cameron shouts, as his fear of confrontation evaporates in a surge of pure adrenaline. With a savage scream he puts his head down and charges, landing a solid blow to the solar plexus of the man in front. Gasping, the guard staggers back through the open door and into his companion, who caroms off the wall with an explosive grunt. Both of them tumble to the floor outside as Cameron leaps out after them, dragging the door closed behind him. He turns back just before it shuts.

  “Do what you’ve gotta do to catch her,” he says, “and I’ll do what I can do to save her.”

  He slams the door shut, listening in his head as the security lock engages and then scrambles at his command. The old man will be safe inside from Xal and her army; the door won’t open again unless Cameron asks it to.

  The guards are on their feet. They advance on him, still moving in perfect sync, still grinning with empty, glassy eyes. Cameron shudders, frantically scanning the guards, the room, the building in search of a solution. Something he can use.

  “He’s the one,” says one.

  “Take him,” says the other.

  “Hey,” says Cameron. “You know what I just realized? You guys are wearing earpieces . . . and they’ve got Bluetooth.”

  For a split second, the guards look confused.

  Then they drop to their knees, shrieking, as a blast of high-frequency static squeals out of the devices looped over each of their ears.

  Cameron lurches away down the hall and back into the stairwell, dashing down the stairs in circles until he reaches the first floor. He vaults the last two steps, and above him he hears a door open. Someone’s heavy feet begin a slow, deliberate descent, and a deep voice growls, “There’s no use running, Cameron. We see you. She sees you. We all see you.”

  Shit, Cameron whispers, and plunges through the door in front of him—then flings himself away against the wall as a woman in a skirted suit appears from around a corner at a run, her hands outstretched to claw at him.

  “We all see you!” she calls, grinning, and Cameron ducks and flees, his feet pounding unevenly as he bursts through a doorway and onto the floor of the con. People jump aside as he plunges into the crowd, trying to lose his pursuers, tapping in once again to the dron
e eyes in the sky overhead. He sees the woman in the skirt suit first, and then groans aloud as he realizes she’s not alone. There are a dozen of them cutting furrows through the crowd, converging on him in precise formation. They spiral in toward him, with a focus that’s all the creepier for how unhurried it is. He dives behind an enormous digital billboard advertising an upcoming panel discussion called “An Afterlife in the Cloud,” then skids to a stop as he stares down a long straightaway, between the booths, his confidence evaporating at the awful sight in front of him. It’s packed with people, a sea of still bodies in the center of the oblivious, jostling crowd. All of them holding perfectly still, all of them with the same glassy eyes and creepy smiles.

  Xal’s hive.

  Standing at the front of the pack is a familiar figure.

  Cameron’s guts give a vicious twist.

  “Juaquo?” he says, tentatively, and shudders as his friend takes a step forward in unison with the people around him. Someone in the group titters, setting off a chorus of high-pitched synchronized laughter that rises above the ambient noise in the massive room. Several bystanders turn to look for the source of the eerie sound, but the hive is laser-focused on Cameron.

  “We’re so glad you’re here,” Juaquo says, in the pleasant tone of Disney­land greeter. “She wants to meet you.”

  Cameron turns and turns again, scrambling under a table and then bursting through into a clearing between the bodies. He feels eyes on him—not Xal’s drones, but curious spectators. He’s broken in to the exo-suit dance party. The waltzing woman gallops up to him.