by Brandt Legg
“You know what they want,” she said, more than a little impatiently.
“No, I don’t. I’m at a complete loss.”
“They want the truth!”
“Truth? Why would they want the truth when they have entertainment and sports beamed to their INUs twenty-four hours a day?”
“It’s hard to believe,” she said sarcastically.
“They don’t really want the truth. The truth would just confuse them, the truth would make them start to think that there might be something better. They don’t even know how good they have it. They’re bored. It’s time for a change, something new . . . well, screw them! We’re not letting PAWN, or a bunch of Creatives, or a damn TreeRunner, or anyone else take us back to the dark pre-Banoff world.”
“No, sir.”
“The Council is getting worried. We’re wondering if you can contain this thing.”
“It’s got lots of moving parts, but I believe we’re still out front.”
“You crush this thing, and you make sure no one is left to start again. The Doneharvest has to be as close as we ever get to war.”
“I understand the objectives, sir.”
“Make damn sure you do.”
“Sir, my attentions are required elsewhere. I address the full Council in forty-eight hours. We can certainly go more into this at that time,” she said curtly. “Peace prevails, always.”
“See that it does!”
Chapter 60 - Book 2
Everyone looked at Grandyn.
“My dad gave me the clue, but only the part that related to Hamlet,” Grandyn explained. “Now it makes perfect sense. To unlock the eternal mind of existence, the Justar Journal, one must go one, two, that’s Act One, Scene Two of Hamlet. Possess it, next, not only confirms that Hamlet is the correct play, but it also gives the starting point for the code.”
“And the check digit?” Fye asked.
“Four,” Nelson said before Grandyn could respond. “Four digits in Cope.”
“Right,” Grandyn said.
“But why Cope?” Fye asked.
“I can answer that one,” Deuce said. “Clastier saw three people as instrumental in preserving the message of the Justar Journal. Spencer Copeland was a mystic who lived a hundred years ago. Nathan Cope Ryder, also a mystic, was named for Copeland, and finally Cope Lipton, named for both men, who became a mystic and passed on much about the prophecies . . . one must cope.” Deuce smiled.
“Well, let’s see if it works,” Fye said, scrawling out scores of lines of text in a pad as if her hand belonged to a secretary doing shorthand.
Munna walked into the large room. “Am I in time?” she asked, smiling.
“Always,” Grandyn answered.
They set up a giant VM for each book. The text filled the nearly-three-meter-high screens. Like the paper pages it emulated, the background was an opaque white while the text was a vibrant black.
“The INU will overlay the pattern from the Hamlet code and apply it to the text of this book, picking the letters and giving us a new book, so to speak,” Fye said. “It will automatically fade back the old text.”
They started with the passage from Hamlet on the first VM:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . .”
Once the check digit was plugged into the program at the starting point in Hamlet, all the books, linked through INUs, miraculously began shuffling the letters. They looked like tens of thousands of ants racing across the sand.
“Look at that, it’s picking the patterns, it’s changing!” Grandyn whispered in awe. “It’s really working!”
“Can you imagine if someone had to do this by hand?” Nelson mused. “It would take months, maybe years, to decode the scramble.”
Surprisingly, the text of all eight books moved. They had not expected anything from Hamlet, and it didn’t move for long, but it revealed a very important piece of information. The other seven books were each a chapter of the Justar Journal. It presented the following list:
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
Health and Birth
Spirituality and Death
Reflections of the Revolution in France, by Edmund Burke
War and Peace
Wealth and Power
Paradise Lost, by John Milton
Earth and Nature
Planets and Stars
The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Science and Technology
Art and Creativity
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Time and Thoughts
Dreams and Wishes
The Iliad, by Homer
Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine
“It would seem that each one of your book deals with one aspect of the prophecies,” Munna said.
“But the Iliad and the Rights of Man have not come through yet,” Grandyn noted. “And look,” he pointed, “those two screens are still scrambling while the others have settled on readable text.”
“What good is a book with two missing chapters?’ Nelson asked.
“The two final chapters at that,” Deuce added.
They didn’t have time to ponder the meaning of two lost chapters, and collectively hoped they might still come through. Each had independently begun reading the screens and no one, at that moment, could imagine needing more information.
Each book had fascinating insights and predictions for the near future. Paradise Lost described a meeting between intelligent life forms and humans, and based on the descriptions, it would happen in eleven years, in 2112. That seemed to be about as far out as the prophecies went, but the monumental meeting, dreamt about since humans started looking to the stars, would come at a time of complete devastation for Earth. Hardly anyone would be left. Deuce and Grandyn had coincidently been reading that one, and both of them stood stunned. At the same time, Fye was reading a similar fate in Meditations. Nelson found himself absorbed in The Federalist, and he too discovered that the end of the world was near. Munna finished reading a page from Don Quixote and smiled.
“Think we can stop it?” she asked the group.
They all turned to Reflections of the Revolution in France and saw the war described in detail. It hadn’t begun in Portland or the Amazon as they feared, but it led to the near complete destruction of the human race.
“We can’t let this happen,” Deuce said, bringing up two of his own VMs and madly motioning a series of commands.
“I have to talk to Drast,” Grandyn said.
“What can he do?” Deuce asked.
“Don’t you see? It’s telling us that the war starts in nine days . . . from the prisons!”
“And you think Drast is behind it.”
“I know he is!”
“It doesn’t matter how it begins,” Nelson said. “It is going to begin, but now we have the tool needed to make sure it doesn’t go this way. The outcome will be different if we win.”
“The Justar Journal cannot be used for war,” Munna said firmly.
“How can it not?” Deuce asked.
“You gave me your word,” Munna said.
“That was before I saw what happens. Look at this! Ten years of war and destruction and we’re wiped out,” Deuce said, motioning to the VMs.
“Look!” Nelson interrupted. “It’s changing.”
Suddenly the scenario was
different, some events erased and new ones appeared. The end result was still almost total annihilation of the species, but now it happened two years sooner.
“What just happened?” Deuce asked. He pulled up another VM, this one showing up-to-the-moment satellite-monitored news collected from unauthorized internal AOI feeds, including KEL, zooms and Field data. It only took a second to spot a major event. Two PAWN POPs had been raided in France and Pennsylvania Areas. “As soon as these events happened, the prophecies changed.”
“They’re still changing,” Grandyn said, pointing to all the screens.
“Incredible,” Nelson said, staring as the lines continued to rewrite themselves. “Then it’s true. The prophecies do change.”
“But how? How can they change?” Grandyn asked. “I’ve got to get to Drast.”
Suddenly, BLAXERs appeared from concealed panels behind the still half-empty shelves. The doors locked and the connection to Fye was terminated. Grandyn watched helplessly as her hologram dispersed into the ethers.
“No one is leaving here,” Deuce said.
Chapter 61 - Book 2
Munna turned to Deuce and appeared almost to glide toward him. Only centimeters from his face, although much shorter, at that moment she seemed equal in stature. “You let Grandyn go!”
“I can’t do that,” Deuce said, unable to shake her stare.
Munna waved a hand above her head and the five VMs displaying the decoded chapters went blank. Only Hamlet and the two scrambling screens remained active.
“What did you do?” Deuce snapped.
“You will not use the Justar Journal for war!” Her gravely whisper had the effect of a shout. The rest of the room reverberated silence.
“Munna, please. I’m on your side,” Deuce said. “I’m trying to save us all from what we just saw up on those screens. We need to win this war. You saw what happens if we let them beat us.”
“You can not save us through war,” Munna said, looking at Deuce, her hand still in the air. She turned to Nelson. “Winning a war is not possible.”
“Munna, I don’t know how you’ve hijacked the INUs,” Deuce said, “but I manufacture them, my family invented them, I will get back control.”
“Booker did not invent them, he merely borrowed the technology,” she replied. “I’ll enjoy watching you try to get back in.” She turned to Grandyn. “Go, TreeRunner, go!”
Grandyn looked at the BLAXERs.
“They will not impede you.”
Grandyn jogged to the door and as Munna stared at them, two BLAXERs stood back, and the door unlocked. He turned back and looked from Munna to Deuce. The trillionaire seemed resigned to having to operate under the whims of an old lady. Grandyn spun and headed out the door.
“Grandyn!” Nelson yelled.
He stopped and looked at his uncle.
“Be brave and true.”
Grandyn nodded and left. A few minutes later, he was on a boat heading toward Ryder Island. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get back to the mainland from there but, to his surprise, a man met him at the dock and said Deuce had given instructions to fly him wherever he wanted to go.
Munna just might be powerful enough to defeat Aylantik without a war, he thought, shaking his head in wonder. He told the pilot where to take him. The man was surprised, and told him to prepare for a long flight.
Once the Flo-wing lifted off, he reconnected with Fye. “Munna somehow stopped the INUs from processing the chapters,” Grandyn told her. “But if Deuce gets back on, doesn’t he need your program to re-start them?”
“He’s already got it. While we were connected, he would have easily copied it.”
“Maybe Munna can keep him from getting back in. At least until I can have a conversation with Drast.”
“Do you have a plan?” Fye asked. “The AOI is on the highest alert level. There are still checkpoints everywhere. What might have been simple a few days ago is now likely to get you killed.”
“I just need to show him something.”
“He is in a maximum security prison.”
“I know that, but I have no intention of talking to him directly.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“But it won’t be easy. It’s about so much more than just getting Drast to stop his rebellion. I’ll need Chelle to cooperate.”
“You want Chelle to help you stop the war she so badly wants?”
“It was a war I wanted too until I read the prophecies.”
“But she hasn’t read them. And even if she did, she’d be like Nelson and Deuce. She’d just want to use the Justar Journal to win.”
Together they devised a risky plan. Fye went to take care of her part, while Grandyn, still in the air, zoomed Chelle. She sat next to him holographically as the Flo-wing continued its flight. He told her about the scene on Runit Island.
“So Deuce is going to keep them to himself?”
“I don’t know if he just wants time to figure it out, or if he intends to hold the power exclusively for his agenda.”
“So it just showed us losing. There’s nothing on how we could win?”
“I don’t think there is any question it can show us what needs to be done to avoid that horrible fate we’re heading toward now,” Grandyn said, “but we’ve just started.”
“You said you needed me to do something.”
“My father thought I was asleep the night before he was killed. I heard him whispering these words from Hamlet: ‘Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.’ It was a message.”
“To me?” she asked.
“No. I mean, I’m sure he loved you, but repeating lines from Hamlet was him trying to decode the prophecies.”
“Do you think it could lead to the last two chapters? The ones you said were still scrambled?”
“I don’t know, but before we can discover the rest, or figure out how best to use the Justar Journal, I need your help with something in the Amazon.”
Chapter 62 - Book 2
Miner watched as the rain began. Within two hours, the deluge would be heavy enough to put out most of the fires. It would take days more to stop the downpours. Sending that much water into the Amazon during the dry season shouldn’t cause any major problems, at least for the trees, but things could go wrong and the rains could last weeks. Weather-making was still an inexact science.
Chelle Andreas, of all people, had made the request, and he still couldn’t decide if he’d done the right thing.
“Putting out the fires is a good move no matter what,” Sarlo said.
“That’s what I think. It’s just that she wants a war and I don’t, so doing what she requests is counter to my interests and against my better judgment.”
“But she said they had the prophecies.”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe her?”
“I think I do. And if she is telling the truth, then the Amazon burning leads to a war which results in Armageddon.”
“Your greatest fear.”
He thought of the years of nightmares about war that had plagued him, both in his sleep and during waking hours. Some might accuse him of using his power and wealth to accumulate more power and wealth and, to a great extent, that was true. But mostly he had spent his life desperately trying to avoid war. Others could question his motives, but not his resolve.
He simply nodded, consumed by his mental wanderings.
“The irony is that the prophecies may unite us all.”
“I hope so,” he said, surprised at his response. “Munna was right, she might be my best hope. But if Deuce and Nelson Wright have seen the potential result of their revolution, they may think differently.” He was quiet for a moment. “Getting them to live quietly under Aylantik rule . . . even with what they know about the future . . . I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. They can’t change that much.”
“Maybe we have to change some too.”
Before he could reply, their conversation was interrupted by another zoom, this one not as unlikely as Chelle’s had been, but the consequences were far more dire. As it would turn out, it was a zoom he’d been hoping to receive for years.
“Look at your INU, pull up the file named ‘gold’,” Blaise said, smiling as the image view opened.
“I don’t have a file called gold.” But as Miner said the words, the gold file appeared in his secure section. “How the‒‒”
“You’re going to like this very, very, very much,” Blaise teased.
“This is an AOI personnel file,” Miner said, annoyed and bewildered. “Who the hell is Ander Terik? And how did you get into my torgon INU?”
“It will cost you one billion digis to find out who Ander Terik is. To find out how I put the file into your INU would cost more money than you have! Only Deuce could afford information like that.” Blaise loved pushing Miner’s buttons.
“Are you out of your mind? Why do I give a damn who this guy is?”
“Two billion.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Three billion.”
“Stop talking! You’re crazy!”
“Four.”
“Blaise, I’ll pay! Damn it, I’ll pay!”
“Five billion.”
“I said I’ll pay!”
“Say you’re sorry or it’ll be six.”
“Blaise, you’re asking me for five billion digis to find out something, but I don’t even know what I’m buying!”
“If I told you first, you wouldn’t have to pay for it would you? Six billion digis, normal procedure. Zoom me once it’s done.”
“Six?”
“You didn’t apologize. Should we make it seven?”
“No. I’ll be back to you in less than ten minutes.”
“Make it less than nine minutes or I’ll make you throw in that silver dollar of yours too,” Blaise said without even the hint of a smile as he vanished, ending the zoom.