The Justar Journal: An AOI Thriller

by Brandt Legg

  He flipped his coin and was so outraged when he got another tails that he turned it over to make sure there was, in fact, a heads side.

  Chelle got word shortly after Miner, but she didn’t have the luxury of sending anyone to help. PAWN had nobody within a thousand kilometers. All she could do was hope there were enough TreeRunners there. Unable to reach Parker, that group’s leader, she zoomed Nelson, who had gone to the redwoods to help Munna find Twain. She knew it was almost impossible to get a zoom, but she tried anyway.

  “We found Twain!” Nelson shouted, as her image came through. “He’s barely alive.”

  “What?”

  His voice was trembling. “The beach was our closest extraction point.”

  “Where are you?”

  “We hiked out of the redwoods. We’re on the coast somewhere.” He panted. “Munna got a zoom out and her people are on the way.”

  “What about Deuce?”

  “No sign of him.”

  “What happened to Twain?”

  “I don’t know. Shallow breathing, very thin. He may have been starving. I don’t know,” Nelson repeated. “I carried him out.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Chelle didn’t like any of it; Grandyn on the verge of being killed or captured, Deuce’s son near death. Twain was a person Munna deemed important enough for her to go personally into the wilderness to find him, and now Deuce might be missing. She watched Nelson light a bac and figured he could handle more news. His reaction was not what she expected.

  “It’s not him.”

  “What?”

  “Grandyn has been sighted in the Amazon, India, Germany, and California Areas, not to mention all over the Pacific Northwest, and now Russia. How is he getting to all those places?”

  “Jet, Flo-wing? I have no idea, but it’s more than possible. Why wouldn’t he keep moving? Maybe Deuce is funding him, or who knows?”

  “I don’t think it’s him.”

  “What if it is?”

  “Then we can’t do anything about it anyway.”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “Of course I care. I love him like a son‒‒”

  “And he can find the books, unlock the prophecies.”

  “That too.” Nelson found his flask and held it up to Munna. She shook her head and continued to watch over Twain, lying motionless and unresponsive in the sand. Nelson checked the sky for any signs of a Flo-wing as he took a swig. “Grandyn is not a kid. He’s become a sophisticated strategist and has as much, or more, reason as any of us to want the Aylantik ousted. He’s too smart to get trapped in the Russian wilderness.”

  “You’re awfully sure.”

  “That’s because I know we’re going to win, and we need Grandyn to do it.”

  “The AOI is convinced it’s him.”

  “They’ve been convinced before.”

  “Polis is alive,” she said, unable to suppress a smile. “At least I think he is.”

  “Wow, you’re full of surprises today.”

  “He’s in Hilton Prison. He sent me a message and I sent him a test.”

  “Amazing. See? Good news. We found Twain and Polis is alive. It can’t be Grandyn.”

  “That is not logical reasoning, but I hope you’re right.”

  “Here comes the Flo-wing. I’ll be in touch. Try to reach Deuce, or his wife, or someone in his organization. I hope Twain will live long enough to see his father again.”

  Chapter 42 - Book 2

  Team leader eight-eight followed the tunnel. The images he beamed up became more sporadic, the smoothed concrete walls and tiled ceiling seemed to snake on forever. Each of the team of nine agents held a lasershod, an infrared night vision, and various virtual shields – sonic, atom, and light-based – but they were nervous. Anything could be in this tunnel. It didn’t belong here and it spoke of an advanced, organized foe, not some starving TreeRunner.

  The on-site commander’s voice came through the team leader’s earpiece. “We’re sending in a mini-Collins-HG3.”

  “Down,” he ordered. The team dropped to the concrete floor ten seconds before the mini- Collins-HG3 flew above their heads, navigating the tunnel like a bat in a cave. The flying weapon relayed back images only as far as the team leader, as its signal could not penetrate the ground. The unit was flying autonomously and had been programmed to detain or injure the target. The team was back on their feet and jogging now in an effort to catch up to the HG3. They were feeling much safer and more confident with the mechanized back-up.

  The team leader watched the images on a tiny VM floating in front of his eyes. It responded to his retina, and would darken or become translucent as needed. “HG3 now nine hundred meters ahead of us,” he reported, but most of his signal was lost to those above. “Nothing but empty tunnel.” He didn’t understand how Grandyn could have disappeared or gotten so far ahead. After another five hundred meters he stopped his team. A sick feeling filled his stomach.

  “How torgon long is this damned tunnel?” one of his men asked.

  The team leader shook his head, but gave no verbal response. They kept running. Then, suddenly, the VM showed something in the tunnel ahead – a small object, maybe a brick. He stopped his team again, concerned it might be a bomb. Four meters beyond the object, the tunnel just ended in what appeared to be a solid wall. “What the hell?”

  “Trouble receiving,” the Commander’s voice crackled in his ear.

  “HG3 has found an object.”

  The Commander and the Chief only heard “object.”

  “Target, do you have a visual on target?” the commander asked.

  “Negative, HG3 is at the end.”

  “End?” the Chief asked, astonished.

  “There is only an object.”

  Again they only heard “object.”

  “What is the object?” the Commander asked, exasperated.

  The HG3, now one-point-six kilometers from the tunnel entrance, hovered over the object. The team leader waited. It took a couple of seconds for the HG3 to zoom in on the object.

  The sick feeling in his stomach worsened. “It’s a book . . . It’s a printed copy of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.”

  The Chief heard that part of the transmission, but stared at the images of the trees above the tunnel in disbelief. “Grandyn is just screwing with us now,” she said to herself. “Where is he?” she asked the commander.

  Before he could answer, an explosion ripped through the tunnel, sending a surge of flame and debris into the team like a shotgun blast. There were no survivors, and no sign of Grandyn. It would take weeks to excavate the site. The Commander believed there was no way Grandyn could have escaped the tunnel. “Grandyn’s body is down there. We’ll find it,” he told his superior.

  The Chief laughed derisively. “He’s probably up in a tree watching your people make fools of themselves.”

  She didn’t care about the team of dead agents down in the hole, and that infuriated the Commander. “I’ll take the people we have left and scour the area. If he’s alive, he can’t be far. We’ll find him.”

  “You do that Commander!”

  Miner, surrounded by Imps, could not believe the events in Russia. “They let him get away again!” Part of him was pleased that P-Force might be able to get in there and find the fugitive, but mostly he was just outraged that one twenty-one-year-old “kid” could embarrass the AOI like that. He checked a VM. His crew was still seventy minutes out.

  “You won’t find Grandyn in Russia,” Sidis said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Same way Munna found you . . . all the information is out there. Why don’t you understand this concept?”

  Miner looked to Sarlo, hoping she would calm him with a glance. She did. “Explain it to me,” Miner said.

  “I don’t have the practice, nor the discipline that Munna does, but everything we want or need is already connected to us.”

  “We’r
e all one, ‘Krishna-Sidis?’” Miner asked with a sarcastic sneer.

  “Do you imagine we are accidental? That life arose on this planet in the middle of the vastness of space? Have you been out there and looked back at this little blue sphere floating in an infinite sea of blackness?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I guess my point is that you probably won’t grasp this until you die.”

  “Are you threatening me?” Miner rose, and as if they’d been monitoring the room, two P-Force brutes burst in and walked quickly to Sidis.

  Sarlo shook her head.

  “You are too nervous Miner,” Sidis said. “If you could see what I see, you would know that you’ve already lost,” the Imp continued in a tone Miner didn’t understand and certainly didn’t like.

  “Get him out of here!” Miner yelled.

  The P-Force guys stepped toward Sidis.

  Suddenly, all the lights went out. Alarms sounded. Flashes of bright pulsating light colored the room in a frantic strobe effect. Loud music blared distorted Bach and Wagner. All the INUs in the room, including the ones on the P-Forcers’ necks, projected hundreds of VMs. No one could see anything. Lance felt as if he’d been dropped into a horror movie funhouse as images of dying soldiers and diseased civilians blinked on and off.

  For several nightmarish minutes it went on, and then it suddenly ended, as if it had never happened. The Imps were gone, all but Charlemagne, the original Imp from Denver. He stared at Miner disapprovingly.

  “We were your last chance,” he said, standing to leave.

  “Please, Charlemagne, don’t go. Sidis is the only one I had a problem with, he’s just so . . . you know . . .”

  “Honest,” Charlemagne finished.

  Chapter 43 - Book 2

  Chelle smile, having received the update that Grandyn had escaped yet again. “How does he do it?” she asked herself out loud. Her INU lit up at the same moment and she eyed it suspiciously. When she saw it was Terik, she opened the feed and read his message.

  “Polis really is alive!” she sang. She had asked him a question that he could answer emotionally but which would confuse the memory probes of a Said-scan. The night Bull had died, the information was that she loved him. She had told him every single day. Drast would have known that, and also would have known that she would have liked to tell Runit she loved him before he died. And, finally, she wanted Drast to know that after all these years, she loved him too.

  “Drast’s response,” Terik had said, “is simply three words, ‘I love you.’” Chelle had already prepared her message back to him, hopeful he’d pass the test. She quickly sent it to Terik. It told of vague plans and asked, in an old code they used to use when he was Regional AOI Head, to establish a new code based on that one so that Terik and others could not read their correspondence.

  Terik, still in the prison parking lot when he received Chelle’s response, contacted Osc. Although, they would not be able to get Drast to the visitor’s room again without raising suspicions, Osc agreed to take it to Drast’s cell while Terik waited.

  Drast was delighted to hear back so quickly, and spent the next fifteen minutes drafting his response. He told her he would send a new code by another method. When Osc brought the message back out, Terik was furious that it did not include the location of the books. “You tell Drast not another message goes out unless he gives me what we agreed upon!”

  “Ander, look at his message. He says he’ll get her the code in another way. That means he has another method to get to her.”

  “Then why did he use me in the first place?”

  “Maybe you were the only one who could make the first contact for some reason. How did you do it anyway?”

  “Long story.”

  “Okay. It’s probably best I don’t know.” Osc winked. “Listen, Drast did say that he has to give you the information you want in person.”

  Terik nodded. “I guess that makes sense. Can you get me in to see him tomorrow?”

  “I think so.”

  Drast walked out onto the three-by-three-meter dirt pad and stared at the guard tower in the distance. Soon, he thought, soon. He swatted a fly, or a mosquito, always wondering if they were micro-drones. This one he slapped on his arm and saw the organic smear. He liked killing bugs, but he’d prefer to smash a drone.

  A human guard opened a gate in the old-fashioned, three-meter-high, chain-link fence that surrounded his patch of open air. Drast slipped him a “thread” as he passed, on his way to his mandated one–hour of socialization. Mite, the short, stocky Asian man who had become one of Drast’s closest lieutenants, marched up, smiling. He held out his two fingers in a “peace” sign, inserting them into Drast’s.

  The android guards were patrolling close by, and keeping a constant watch on Drast/Evren. The two inmates were using micro-whistler-FAs, so their monitored conversation would be picked up as one about food, weather, and sports. But Mite had real news, and Drast was anxious to hear it.

  “One of my old clients spotted Tiger at Vegas.”

  Drast smiled. It had worked. Tiger, the huge, black, convicted murderer with the wild, icy blue eyes, had faked a fight with a guard several days earlier.

  “Then we’re on the way. Once the revolution begins, the prisons will be ready.”

  Drast’s plan relied on getting word to specific inmates at other AOI facilities like the prison in Vegas. He had other methods to get strategies to them, but first contact had to be personal. If all went well, Tiger, the crazy aborigine with dragon tattoos, would be transferred two more times before the end of the month. Drast had others on the move too.

  “My project is progressing,” Mite added. “Another few days and we should be able to roll it out.”

  “What about testing?”

  “An incident in the kitchen should do it.” Mite’s genius for explosives and logistics was an integral part of Drast’s grand scheme. Mite had a method of creating nano devices that could use the electrical systems in the prison to detonate charges, strategically placed, to cause havoc and allow all gates to be forced open. The system, if it worked correctly, would liberate all AOI prisons around the world at precisely the same time. The AOI was efficient: everything was linked. If Drast’s inmate operatives could reach enough facilities before the deadline, they would get them all.

  Drast was pleased. He had access to enough AOI files that he’d been able to hand-pick the inmates most likely to cooperate with his plan. One thing he knew for sure was that all the convicts held by the AOI would do just about anything not only to escape, but also to work at bringing down the evil empire. He had long counted on that miscalculation by the AOI. They were so centered around information and intelligence gathering that they had inadvertently created a dissident army that should have been executed upon arrest. Instead, they kept the brightest opposition minds alive in case they could glean more data from them or use them to catch others. It was a major mistake, one on which Drast planned to continue to capitalize.

  The AOI might have been expecting to fight the PAWN army, but they would be surprised to discover another powerful force to reckon with: the dissident army freshly liberated from dozens of AOI prisons, led by a fierce general. Drast.

  Chapter 44 - Book 2

  Two days after the Russian tunnel debacle, the AOI got another chance. This time they had plenty of resources available. In the dense forests of Washington Area, Grandyn had been spotted by a patrol of specially-equipped forest drones. They weren’t able to send data from the deepest parts of the rainforest, but returned twice a day for a data dump. Thirty-nine minutes earlier, one of the units showed up with four images that were immediately confirmed through AOI INUs to be Grandyn Happerman.

  The geography fit better than the Amazon or Russia. It had always bothered the Chief that the Grandyn sightings in distant locations were so far from where he’d been raised in Oregon Area. AOI profilers had all shown that on a personal level it would be unlikely the twenty-one year-old
would venture away from his home territory. However, on the strategic side, there were two indications. First, that he would stay within the forests, terrain and climate for which he was best trained and most accustomed. Second, as predicted by other models, his best strategy would be to seek the most remote regions with a greater concentration of anti-government populace, such as the Amazon.

  Her instinct told her he was, and always had been, in the old Pacific Northwest. She had sometimes fallen into the excitement and drama of a close encounter or a false alarm, but she had always believed he’d be found close to the Oregon Area.

  The Chief also thought the same of the books. It would make sense to move them far away to some obscure, out of the way place, but they were difficult to move, and were probably still within a few hundred miles of where they were when the librarian was killed three years earlier. So, when word came of the latest Grandyn sighting in the rainforest of Olympic Earth Park in what used to be Washington State Area, she became more excited than usual. Although, almost afraid to believe it, she had a good feeling that this time they would get Grandyn.

  It wasn’t as if the AOI had been unsuccessful. Much focus went to the thus far unsuccessful Grandyn hunt, but in the three years of the Doneharvest, thousands of TreeRunners had been killed or imprisoned, and more than one hundred thousand Creatives, Rejectionists, and PAWN members had been executed.

  What the Chief was most worried about though were the sixteen hundred and twenty-two corrupt AOI agents that had been discovered. There must be more, and she was determined to find them all. She had to find them. Another thirty-nine thousand “ordinary” citizens had also been arrested for having thoughts or conversations counter to the Aylantik. But, most important of all, a once imminent war had so far been averted.

  The Chief waited for the latest update. She’d ordered three thousand troops into the forest to assist the six hundred already there. Another two thousand were preparing to go, if necessary.