The only real thing was the pistol on her hip, and its promise.
The next morning she had to be casual. Kim had to make sure nobody thought anything was wrong.
Tonya was at her side after they set out. “Please, talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Come on, I can help. We can help. Kim, we’ve come so far.”
Kim knew she was trying to figure out the right thing to say, anything to bring her back from the brink. But there would be no coming back, not today.
“I know, Tonya.” She smiled and shook her head. Sigh dramatically. Sell it. She let a tear drop down her cheek. “The trees stopped talking to me last night.”
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”
She walked slowly, letting even Ozzie’s sorry, wheezing ass go on ahead. There was one way to end this. The solution was right there, layered thick with an old desire she’d fought off for most of her life. The misery and isolation of her disability had put her in an observation ward more than once, after all. Over the years she’d signed at least half a dozen promises not to kill herself. And now, in a forest at the end of the world, it was time.
But for this to work, there had to be a message. Do the unexpected. It was a mantra in her life. Today, this morning, it would fix her problem, one way or another. She used the sight on the pistol’s barrel to scrape the words onto the base of a bamboo trunk.
Kim scooted to the left, figuring she’d fall that way. The last thing she’d see. Memorize it. The barrel of the pistol was cold under her chin.
Mike, please be there, one way or another just be there.
The timing had to be precise. When the countdown hit zero, she squeezed the trigger.
*
Kim choked at the fire and chaos that tore through her mind. She’d been walking through the forest and suddenly she wasn’t. Her stomach protested at going from standing to lying down in a moment. She grabbed the edges of the bed to keep from falling out.
And then, finally, Kim remembered what she’d planned. Everything after that was a blank. Eighteen minutes. She was in the woods, set a timer for eighteen minutes, and then woke up here. She’d lost exactly eighteen minutes. She’d been right! Kim ran through every curse and blessing she could think of.
The room was dim, lit only by monitors. Warnings flashed. She was on a strange frame; it was almost like…of course, it was a cot frame. Wires connected to power and data sockets on the walls.
She sat up, wincing as she moved the IV lines attached to her arms. A catheter tube snaked down her leg as the sheet fell forward and cold air raised goose bumps on her bare skin.
Miracle of miracles, she wasn’t alone. Spencer, Shan, and Tonya were beside her. A fat Chinese man slept in the final bed. Ozzie.
A big screen at the front of the room displayed the view in their realm. Tonya was on her knees, holding Kim’s lifeless body in her lap. Everyone else stood around her.
A migraine bloomed to life so intense Kim briefly closed her eyes, but it didn’t matter. She had invented the forced disconnect, the impossible memory-wiping way of suddenly disconnecting from the realm. Most people passed out, but she’d trained herself to stay conscious through it. Being half crazy to begin with helped.
Enough celebration. They were alone in this lab for now, but that would change very quickly. She pulled a small monitor screen mounted on the side of the bed over and accessed the history file. Kim needed to see if the last message had stayed the same, if she’d thought of anything else in those last eighteen minutes.
It had changed. The message wasn’t what she remembered. It wasn’t “find Mike.”
It said “blow the latches.”
This was going to suck worse than the pounding in her head.
There were lines of potential, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. Power build power collapse higher waves lower waves build build build…
It was the last great trick she'd learned back in her Rage days. They’d been caught inside Donald Trump’s Midtown house, trying to use his personal gateway to launch an attack behind the New York Stock Exchange’s public firewalls.
Reinforce high to low pull and force.
The quantum computers that underpinned the Evolved Internet relied on wave functions to work, mathematical descriptions of energy fields at impossibly small scales. In the panic of the alarms inside that penthouse, Kim had discovered she could make the waves grow to scales nobody had ever dreamed of.
Gather waves split waves build towers pits higher lower build giant up and down.
This time it would be bigger, bigger than anything she’d ever tried before. She only hoped it wouldn’t be big enough to force a complete transformation. That had only happened once, in a dimension that couldn’t exist, and it had almost killed her.
Soak power snap power waves towering falling gathering destroying.
The patterns gained strength as they danced under her skin. Kim heard the room’s quantum stack, its rising keen as the feedback loop she’d set off hit the tipping point. It was one of dozens scattered throughout the campus. They were overloading on the power she sent.
Collapse and now.
Her vulnerability expanded as the power flew away. A cabinet in the far corner of the room exploded, its doors flapping violently through a storm of smoke and debris. All four of the others gasped awake as the room briefly went dark. Emergency lights flashed to life as fire alarms shrieked.
They were too close to her. Each time after using that much power Kim couldn’t stand to be within fifteen feet of people, usually for hours. But there was no chance of that happening any time soon.
She’d seen the list of patients currently in the hospital before blowing it all to hell. It had been a lie. She hadn’t seen Mike die.
He was alive.
She fought down the pain and madness and shouted over the alarms, “Tonya, we need to get out of here! Tell me how to get these lines out!”
Chapter 26: Mike
The excuse changed every time he asked about his friends, asked about Kim.
“They’re on a tour.”
“They’ve just gone to bed.”
“It’s not the right time.”
When the guards got to “they are in the bathroom” he’d had enough.
“Helen, what’s going on, why won’t they let me talk to my friends?”
The bone-knit had come off twenty-four hours after her surgery, and all things considered, she was doing fine. Her integration wasn’t progressing as fast as Mike’s had, though. Her father insisted her real self had to stay in the private realm of the lab, so she wasn’t able to use all the medical realms he’d had available. Helen did it all by hand.
“I’m not sure.” Her accent was still thick, but either she was getting better at speaking English or he was getting used to it. She kept her hands firmly on the parallel bars as she walked stiffly down the track. “You need to be less pushy about it.”
“Pushy? I’m being held prisoner in this crazy lab, and they’re calling me pushy?”
Helen reached the end and he helped her turn around. Panting, she wiped the sweat off her brow and briefly lost her balance, slapping a panicked hand back to the support rail. Mike didn’t dare grab her; he’d learned a completely new set of Chinese curses the few times he’d tried.
She said, “I really do think this has all been some sort of mix up. They don’t want to lose face, that’s all. Don’t fight it, work with it.”
He wouldn’t have to fight it at all if he could just get someone, anyone, in the outside world to listen to him. The embassies all shrugged at his requests when he said the word “trespassing,” the mainstream news sites were too busy with Prince George’s upcoming wedding, and he didn’t dare do anything publicly in China. There was still Helen to consider. They had so much in common now; he wouldn’t dream of getting her into more trouble.
Supper was another lesson in common frustration. She refused a fork, even though it was j
ust about all she could hold.
“It’s barbaric. A weapon.”
Which meant another dinner spent watching her snarl and flick chopsticks everywhere.
“Eating sucks!”
He smiled at her, which only made her mood worse.
“No, Mike, damn it, pancakes won’t make it better.”
He’d told her the story about his first meal outside: pancakes and maple syrup. It only made him worry about Kim more. He broke another set of chopsticks apart and handed them to her.
“I need to see my friends.”
“I know, Mike, I get it.” She fumbled the set of chopsticks and they hit the floor. “Damn it! Motherfucker!” Swearing in English was progress, but then she threw her hands into her lap. “How long will it ake? Shdake.” She cleared her throat and then tried again, “TAKE!”
Helen fell in on herself and sobbed. It wasn’t the first time her new accent had caused a meltdown.
“You promised me you’d help.” He wiped the tears off her cheeks. “I need to know they’re safe.” Mike fumbled a piece of chicken onto his chopsticks. “We’ll get through this together, okay?”
She wavered between defiance and need. “Okay.” She opened her mouth, and he popped the piece in. “Shit! Wow! That’s spicy!” Helen fumbled for a glass of water and he barely managed to keep her from dumping it on her chest.
The next day she had him press a different button on the elevator. When they stopped, she turned to him. “Let me handle this.” She wheeled herself up to a guard while Mike stayed back. The conversation grew heated; Helen gestured at him several times and then shouted a series of commands. The guard shot to attention like a ram had been shoved up his backside. Helen wheeled herself back in a huff. “Father’s name wasn’t this useful when I was inside. I know what’s happened. Follow me.”
The guard fell into step beside them.
“There was an accident. They tried to escape and stumbled into a…into a…shit.” She took a deep breath and spoke very carefully, “A chemical processing facility. They’re okay, Mike. Don’t make a scene. My father’s name got us this far, but if you lose it, they’ll drag us back, and we’ll never get to see them.”
He followed her into a new section of the lab, another hospital ward of some sort. A nurse came around a corner walking straight for them.
“Stay here,” Helen cautioned, and then wheeled up to meet her. They whispered to each other for awhile, and then the nurse nodded. Helen wheeled back over to him.
“They’ll be okay.” She motioned him much closer. “They got poisoned but were found in time. Stay cool. The nurse will take us to them.”
Kim had stumbled into something that poisoned her. If she’d just waited he would’ve figured it out.
The nurse waved a key card at a door further down the hall. It opened with a faint whoosh. “They sleep; you be quiet.”
He walked in and there she was, surrounded by machines, covered with a white sheet. Her eyes were closed, face relaxed. Mike walked in silent as a whisper and stood next to her. Tonya, Spencer, Shan, and a man he didn’t recognize were on identical cot-like beds. She was so beautiful. He reached out to touch her cheek, but stopped when the nurse said, “They are sleeping. We will continue the therapy.”
Helen’s bluster managed to make the arrangement semi-official. They worked together by day, and he visited his friends at night. The nurse relented and let him hold Kim’s hand, share a private kiss. He risked climbing into bed with her, desperately hoping she’d wake up and shove him to the floor. Her peaceful breathing lulled him to sleep as well.
“Mike. Mike!”
He lifted his head. It was morning. Helen stood in the doorway, braced with a cane. “You can’t do this. The day nurse will catch you. Come on, they’ll be fine!”
Between physical therapy sessions, they passed the time telling stories. She could not believe how he had reached out to his first human.
“A Buddhist monk in an official Catholic Church realm? Really?”
“Well, how did you do it?”
She paused and then shrugged. “I knew I was evaporating too, dying, so I searched for the most powerful man in China. He would give me the purpose I needed. It took most of a month to tease open all the realm connections to get to his office, but I managed it. One day, when the last of his meetings were over, I presented myself.”
She shook her head. “My plan was what you Americans call not very well thought out. I didn’t know it at the time, but Father has a heart condition. My sudden appearance in his secure realm sent him to the hospital. The nurses mixed up his medications while he was there and were about to give him something he was deadly allergic to. I stopped them. I almost killed him, and then saved his life.
“Father can be extremely stern, but he’s also very smart. He worked out what I was before the scientists did.”
“But why call him your father?”
“His great insight was to understand that, strange as I am, I am still Chinese. I had the same wants and needs. Most of all, I desperately wanted a family. Westerners have no idea how important family is to Chinese. He knew I needed one, and he was right. But he didn’t dare trust anyone else with my upbringing. So he became Father.”
“And you being a cop was?”
“Another way to instill discipline. My talent with the realms makes me the perfect cop. I’m good at my job, and I love the work.”
They had a lot in common, but this was definitely a difference. If the lunatic he only knew as Ralph W. Emerson hadn’t discovered him, Mike wasn’t sure he ever would’ve left the realm in which he was born, let alone sought a specific person out. After his time with Taranathi, he made his own way and pretty much built his life from scratch. Warhawk was a spectacular success but represented only the latest in a long line of otherwise failed ideas.
When Helen found out about his failures, they fascinated her.
“Ice cream booths? Really? Mike, you didn’t know how to eat, didn’t know what eating really was.”
“But I could control every single one of them by myself, make any flavor known on the spot, and use realms to entice the kids and entertain the parents. It would work worldwide with almost no employees.”
“What went wrong?”
“That time nothing went wrong. The first three were a hit, and the guy who made the machines for me bought me out. It was the biggest chunk of money I’d ever seen.” Mike only found out how similar his story was to the McDonald brothers’ after he’d signed the contracts. “He hated the name, so he changed it to Kitty Creams.”
Helen gasped. “You invented Kitty Creams? That’s one of the first things I want to try when we get out of here!”
“I didn’t count on how popular it would turn out to be in Asia, but I don’t hold it against him. I used the money to buy an entire BBox provider outright. That’s how Warhawk got started.”
What the World Wide Web was to the Internet, BBox was to its Evolved successor. The constructs made realms possible, either in groups, individually, or split across them. Having that many BBoxes allowed him to completely exploit every feature they provided. It was his work with their quantum physics models that turned Warhawk into such a phenomenon. Nobody but the engineers who’d created the protocols had bothered with anything that fine grained, and never on a large scale. The theories and their predictions was how he’d figured out he could go outside.
Helen liked the stories, but not the after-dinner routine.
She groaned like a petulant kid. “I can walk now, Mike. Do I really have to keep doing this?”
Buddhist chants and meditation were how he’d been trained to find his own center before he’d gone outside. They sped up Helen’s integration, so Mike made her do it with him every night. It gave real insight into why human siblings always seemed to be torturing each other over the smallest things. He’d never counted on it being this much fun.
Her opinion on religion was that there wasn’t any. She’d laughed out loud
when she found out he was a Buddhist. Her refusal to accept there could be any points of view outside what she’d learned in her communist schools was a major source of friction in their relationship.
“Do you own stock in a temple?” was her very first question. Temples in China had gone commercial a generation before; many of the largest had been listed on various stock markets for decades. It was a bit embarrassing to admit, but the reason he’d met Taranathi at all was because the old man had been determined to put his monastery at the forefront of a burgeoning market.“Yes, Helen, you have to do this.” After they were done he’d get to sneak over and visit Kim.
*
In spite of herself, Helen was getting very good at chanting. It was an excellent sign for her integration. They were in the middle of the first one when he noticed the quantum stack in the corner of the room sounded like a motor spooling up. They had no moving parts, so that was definitely out of the ordinary. It took him a few seconds to realize what it meant.
Helen asked, “What’s that noise?”
There was no time to explain. “Get down!” He rolled her behind the bed just before the stack let go with an ear-splitting bang. The power went out and alarms blared. Helen turned pale, rolled her eyes back, and then passed out.
“Helen! Helen!”
The local realmspace had crashed. She was far enough along in her integration that she didn’t need help to breathe, but anything else was iffy. He tapped her lightly on her cheeks. “Are you okay?”
She came to with a snort. “What going on?” she asked, her accent so thick he barely understood her.
He was very worried but couldn’t stop the grin. “I’m pretty sure Kim just woke up.”
The smoke from the destroyed stack smelled like burned popcorn. He stamped out the small fire in their room, but it couldn’t be the only one. Kim never was much for subtlety. The door was cool, so he plopped Helen into her wheelchair, then pushed her into the hall.
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