The Justar Journal: An AOI Thriller

by Brandt Legg

  Row after row of shelves were coated with black and red film, so much red it was as if the air itself were tinted with blood. The blood of books, the bleeding brilliance of all of humanity’s collected knowledge and history. Books were no longer physical artifacts to be studied, but rather digital facsimiles that could be manipulated, controlled, and . . . erased.

  “We can see what’s happening out there from the windows on the upper floor,” Nelson said, but that was just an excuse. He wanted to see, had to see, like a grieving parent going to the scene of the accident where his child died.

  “Tragic,” Munna said quietly, as they reached the top of the steps. A layer of dust, ash, or chemical residue coated everything. The color red had never looked so evil.

  “Runit used to brag that there were thirty-three kilometers of shelves filled with books in this library. And there were thousands more they didn’t have room to display.” Nelson took a deep breath of the toxic air and coughed. He wanted a bac but, was afraid if he lit one in the building the whole place might go up like the explosion they’d seen ten minutes earlier that wiped out the AOI agents. He stood silently, staring, his face wrinkled up as if watching the execution of a loved one, his eyes haunted with a look of devastation.

  “We can’t stay here,” Munna said. “If they’ve tracked us anywhere nearby, they’ll surely check here.” She could almost see the past consuming him. “Can we get out the other side?”

  “Yeah, I know, yeah,” Nelson whispered, barely coherent.

  “Come,” she said forcefully, her deep, gravelly voice not allowing for argument or delay.

  He managed to uproot his legs and moved towards the stairs. Just as they reached the front entrance, his INU lit again.

  “Where are you?” Chelle asked as he opened the connection. Before he could answer, she saw the familiar twin staircases, once so magnificent, behind him. “Whoa, talk about full circle! But it’s the first damned place they’ll look. Listen, Deuce has half of Portland in chaos trying to give you a diversion.”

  Nelson looked at Munna as if to say it had been Deuce, not Cope, helping them after all.

  She just smiled.

  “Okay, you’re about ten blocks from the Willamette River,” Chelle continued. “We can’t get a Flo-wing in to you. They’ve shut down air traffic, but I can have a boat at the river. Once we get you far enough out of the city, a Flo-wing can grab you, or we can go all the way to the ocean if we have to.”

  “Can you give us some help with the best route?” Nelson asked.

  She used a hacked access to KEL to reverse-track AOI movements and sent the details to his INU. “I’ll update it as much as I can,” she said working an array of VMs. She gave him the boat’s description and wished him luck.

  She wanted to say, “Don’t get yourself killed, big brother. Grandyn is dead, and you’re our only hope to find the books and decode the prophecies,” but she knew he’d fall apart. It already seemed as if the war had started in Portland and the Amazon at least a week before they were ready . . . the timing couldn’t be worse, and if they lost Munna and Nelson, it would be the shortest war in history.

  As they walked out the front door, Munna turned to him and said, “You may not believe it, but Cope is helping us for the same reason we helped Twain. The future depends on it.”

  Chapter 47 - Book 2

  Zaverly, hidden in the upper branches of a tree, surveyed the surrounding Amazon jungle. A relay report broke the silence. The message brought confusion and despair. “Grandyn Happerman killed by AOI in Olympic Earth Park, Washington State Area, Pacyfik Region.” She looked four meters below and clearly saw Grandyn’s head among the leaves, definitely alive.

  “Grandyn, the AOI just killed you up in the Olympic forest!” she shouted.

  He looked up. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “It’s not funny! Who was that who died in your name?”

  “I’m sorry, sometimes humor is the only way through pain . . . I have no idea who it was.”

  “Don’t you want to know?” she asked, watching the smoke gather in the distance.

  “Yes. I would. The way things look down here, I may be meeting him soon.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Sorry,” he said again.

  She didn’t answer. Her relayer, used to communicate in the dense jungle, relied on old-fashioned radio waves. It beeped, distracting her as another update came in. The fire was spreading. Communications had been spotty. The whole area was in turmoil.

  For the past few hours, reports had been pouring in about battles breaking out all over the Amazon. It wasn’t just PAWN and AOI, in fact PAWN was so far the least involved. Two private armies, believed to be controlled by the super-wealthy pharmaceutical titan Lance Miner, and his trillionaire rival Deuce Lipton, were engaging each other and AOI forces. But they had bigger problems.

  Someone, Zaverly suspected the AOI, had ignited huge areas of the forest. Fires were spreading all over, and every fifteen minutes they’d been getting word of new outbreaks. She had a bad feeling about the day.

  It’s a bad omen that the AOI is claiming to have killed Grandyn in Washington, she thought. She was about to call in backup to see if someone could help them get to the other side of the fires when communications went out completely.

  The flames tore through a stand of palm trees deep in the Amazon. Zaverly watched through digital binoculars that automatically estimated the distance at just over seventy-one-hundred meters. With wind speed, humidity, and numerous other variables factored in, the device calculated they had two hours until the flames reached them.

  “Grandyn, the flames are traveling faster than we can,” she said. “If we don’t start moving now we’ll be trapped.”

  “But there’re reports of fighting that way,” he said. “All we can do is head north for the river.”

  It had only been weeks since the rainy season ended, and the way to the river would be a mucky, near impossible, trek. The recent moisture was helping to slow the fire’s progress, but it was still moving faster than anything she’d ever seen in the rainforest.

  “We can go west,” she suggested.

  “It’s too dense. We’d have to move too slowly, and if the winds pick up we’d be trapped there, too.”

  She checked her binoculars again. In only a few minutes the flames had grown larger and closer. The device recalculated and showed the fire catching them in one hour and thirty-six minutes. Sixteen thousand different tree species made up the more than five hundred billion trees that populated the earth’s largest jungle. The AOI, or whoever was starting the fires, was risking a far greater calamity than just allowing some rebels to remain hidden.

  After the Banoff, scientists had discovered just how important the forests were to keeping the balance, and ultimately life, on the planet. It wasn’t just oxygen, although that was a critical role they’d long understood. It seemed that trees helped to maintain healthy oceans and to regulate the earth’s climate. Aylantik had created a university with campuses near the three largest forests in the world to do nothing but study trees.

  One of the main reasons the rebels hid in the forests was that the AOI was forbidden to destroy them. They could not risk mass deforestation even to prevent a revolution. The other benefit was that the forests were the only place on the planet where the Field, and all the systems of communications, monitoring, and weapons which relied on it, were completely blacked out. Even satellites could not penetrate the thick canopies. Scientists had been struggling unsuccessfully for years to discover the reason. The more the trees were studied, the more mysteries were uncovered.

  Grandyn yelled up to Zaverly, “There’s another fire out to the west!”

  “We’re running out of choices!”

  “There’s only one choice . . . I’m going to the river!”

  The river, aside from being more difficult to reach, also meant more encounters with the AOI because they clung to the areas around the river for access,
mobility, and supplies. More importantly, the river was wide enough in parts to allow for the Field and its vital communications and weapons management. Zaverly believed it was a death trap, but the other routes were closing in on them, and they couldn’t stay where they were.

  “I’m coming!” she shouted.

  If fortunate, they might connect with other TreeRunners and PAWN teams. With the evacuations, the jungle should be teeming with allies, including Creatives and Rejectionists.

  Zaverly swung and flipped her way out of the treetops and caught up to him on the ground. “I thought they’d tell us when the revolution started,” she said.

  “I guess this is their way of doing it,” he said as a missile ripped through the trees six hundred meters ahead of them.

  “That’s too close,” Zaverly said. “What are they after? That’s not going to start another fire and there isn’t a PAWN base there.”

  “A little Creative camp is near that strike, but if they’re going after stuff that small then we aren’t going to make it to the river.”

  Zaverly grabbed him from behind. “I’m sorry,” she said as he turned around.

  “For what?”

  “For being so mad all the time. It’s not at you . . . well, maybe some of it was, but I’ve just lost so much. My family, our way of life. I mean, I know we all have, but I feel it personally.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just never wanted to let you down.”

  “Really?” Her eyes filled, and she looked at him for a long time until he finally smiled self-consciously.

  “What?” he asked, almost laughing at her seriousness.

  “That’s not really what I was sorry for.” She put a hand behind his neck and another on the small of his back and pulled him into an embrace, a kiss that felt as lush and vibrant as the tropical forest surrounding them. She pulled back a few inches so that he could still feel her hot breath on his lips as she spoke. “I’m sorry I never told you I love you.” Her eyes fell into his, like a drug he couldn’t escape. “Because I do . . . I love you, Grandyn.”

  Chapter 48 - Book 2

  Drast, sitting in the sterile visitors’ room of Hilton Prison, smiled when he saw Terik. “I didn’t think you were coming. Thought you might still be angry.”

  “Angry?”

  “That I haven’t given you the location of the books yet. Didn’t think you could trust me, did you?”

  “There are checkpoints and surveillance everywhere. It’s crazy out there right now. That’s why I’m late,” Terik said ignoring the “Mr. Nice-guy” routine, which actually worried him more than Drast’s typically clipped demeanor.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” Terik asked sarcastically. “I was beginning to think you knew when the World Premier took a leak and that you controlled the weather.”

  “No, that’s ACE’s department,” he said, referring to the Aylantik Commission on the Environment. “Please, tell me the news.”

  “Someone is making a lot of noise in Portland. Security is being tightened across the region. Officially it’s a crime spree of unknown origin, but it’s mostly Deuce Lipton trying to save his son and keep Nelson Wright and Munna from being arrested by the AOI.”

  “Damn. What on earth are they doing in Portland?”

  Terik, picking at the edges of his AOI lapel pin, told Drast what he knew. Drast paced the small room and then asked if he could get a quick message to Chelle. Terik agreed and recorded Drast speaking for two minutes in a form of code that sounded like a cross between one of the dead languages, maybe German, and a gibberish of numbers and letters. Once it was done, he pleaded with Terik to get it to Chelle as quickly as possible.

  “Please apologize to her for my appearance. She remembers me quite differently,” he said. It was a vain request and confirmed what Terik had come to believe. Drast had feelings for Chelle.

  “I’ll get it to her as soon as I leave. But don’t you have other means of contacting her?”

  “Yes. Once you made the initial contact, I was able to establish another way. You understand that I had to do this in case you became unavailable.”

  “You mean if my superiors find out what I’m doing and throw me in here with you?”

  “Something like that . . . it’s a dangerous world.” He stared at Terik with the concerned look of a father. “Anyway, my other method is much, much slower and less reliable. And this is urgent.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Thank you,” he said, looking relieved. “Now, here’s something you’ve been waiting for.” He handed Terik a thread. “I went to a lot of trouble to save those books, probably part of the reason I’m in here, but also part of the reason I’m still alive. I do hope they prove to be worth all the effort.”

  “So do I,” Terik said, smiling for the first time in many days. He thought of one of his father’s favorite quotes: “Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory,” Franklin Roosevelt. Then he recalled another line from the same speech: “In this war, we know books are weapons.”

  Miner watched the VMs come back to life. The Imps were gone. “You’ll need to go back to Denver and collect another gaggle of Imps,” he said to Sarlo.

  “There may be thousands of them, but it’s a small community,” Sarlo said, frowning as if he’d told her to go find Santa Claus. “I doubt I could round up one Imp, let alone a ‘gaggle.’” She made a face at his word choice. “You’re done with Imps unless you can somehow make up with Sidis.”

  “Screw Sidis!” Miner scooped up some cherries from a bowl. They were specially grown without pits, which he hated. “I’ll give Charlemagne a day to cool off. He’ll get us back in.” He popped a cherry into his mouth, holding out the dish to Sarlo, even though he knew she wouldn’t take it.

  “Without the Imps, you’re going to have to pay Blaise a lot of digis for information.”

  “Hell, I don’t give a damn about the money. I just don’t trust the bastard.” He ate another cherry. “But we might not need him if we can get to Munna and Nelson Wright before the AOI.”

  “Before Deuce you mean,” Sarlo said. “He has to be the one behind the Portland flare-up. The rebels aren’t going to start the war in a city with no strategic advantage.”

  “There is a large Creative population there, and PAWN may have no choice but to start the fight in order to save Munna and the writer.”

  “It’s Deuce. PAWN isn’t ready.”

  “You might be right, but in either case, it must be stopped or this may go down in history as the day the end of humanity began . . . a history no one will be left to read.”

  Chelle watched a series of VMs as the situation steadily worsened. She had open zooms with Parker, the head of the TreeRunners, as well as the elected representative of the diverse Creative community, and the three-member council of the Rejectionists. The twelve highest-ranking PAWN officials were also present across infinite encrypted connections. These important leaders were never physically in the same place, and even a joint conference like this one had occurred only once before, at the start of the Doneharvest.

  “This crisis is forcing us into action,” Chelle began.

  “We’re not ready!” one of the PAWN generals barked. “Years of planning, and mere weeks from our ready date, your brother and Munna go off half-cocked.”

  “They had no choice but to save Twain Lipton,” Chelle said.

  “One life,” the general retorted. “Is the entire revolution worth one life? Maybe, if it is the life of a trillionaire’s son‒‒”

  “One of the class of individuals we’re fighting,” the Creatives’ representative interjected.

  “Need I remind you that a major portion of our funding and a large percentage of our weapons have been provided by that trillionaire?” Chelle said. “And Munna made the choice. Are you going to question Munna?”

  “Munna does not want war,” the general said. “I thi
nk she would happily sacrifice our plans to save a stray kitten.”

  Images of roadblocks, checkpoints, and river patrols filled VMs as the group of holograms mingled in disagreement and the discussions raged on. PAWN didn’t have enough resources, and the generals were reluctantly following Chelle’s orders to save Munna and Nelson. For hours they had continued expanding the chaos by all available methods in order to distract the AOI and spread their agents thin enough that Munna and Nelson could slip away.

  “Look at this,” one of the Rejectionists councilors said, pointing to the VMs. Primitive weapons such as bricks smashing through windows and Molotov cocktails tossed at LEVs and AOI stations looked like pre-Banoff riot footage. “We’ve had to deploy some of our pre-planted explosives. That will cost us when the real fighting begins.”

  “This sure looks like real fighting to me,” the general said, pointing to images of the Amazon. “And just as when the Portland Library theft prematurely brought us into the open three years ago and the AOI responded with the brutal Doneharvest, they will respond and crush us again, only this time we may not be able to recover.”

  “We’re so close to being ready. Surely we can scramble and use this as a springboard for the Exchange,” Chelle said.

  “We’ve lost the element of surprise,” the general said.

  “Maybe not,” another general argued. “They would not suspect a full counter from us in every city.”

  “We’re not ready for that,” the first general repeated.

  Chelle noticed a message from Terik come through her INU. She adjusted a VM to private mode and flicked her fingers so that it would display text rather than audio. After a written warning from Terik about Drast’s appearance, his face, or rather the face of inmate Evren, came on the screen.

  It took her a moment to get used to him, but she recognized his eyes, and as she watched his lips move, she knew it was Drast. His words filled the screen, and there were translation issues that made it difficult for her to interpret the already complicated code, but once she got past that, his message was simple and clear.