dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Palgrave!” she said to Joe, who followed her gaze, nodded, and then started climbing down the scaffolding toward the escaping man.

  Ani wasn’t just going to stand by and wait, so she followed Joe, and they both hit the ground at about the same time and took off in the direction that Palgrave was heading. He had a two-hundred-yard head start, maybe more, but he wasn’t running. He was just steadily walking and didn’t look worried at all.

  Joe and Ani broke into sprints, leaping over unconscious teens and running as fast as their legs would take them. Ani took small pleasure in the fact that she was matching Joe stride for stride.

  They caught up with Palgrave on the outer edge of the concert area, and Joe screamed his name.

  Victor Palgrave turned around, a smile on his face. His minders stood behind him, hands inside their jackets. Their gun hands, Ani was certain.

  “Give it up!” Joe yelled. “There’s no escape.”

  Palgrave’s smile widened.

  “Joe,” he said with a fake warmth that had presumably been spliced into his personality when he decided to take the political route through life. It was the warmth that allowed him to shake hands with people when he despised everything about them except their ability to vote, and helped him kiss babies that he longed to deprive of state benefits. “How lovely to see you again.”

  “It’s over.”

  Palgrave feigned surprise, which was the only thing less sincere than his smile. “Oh, I’m sorry, you seem to have misunderstood my actions. You truly believe that I was making a getaway, right? Running away from the scene, hoping to jump on a plane to Ecuador? Or Argentina? But I wasn’t trying to escape. I was just getting far enough away so that I could do this.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small silver device, about the size of an iPhone. He held it up theatrically and made a big show of pressing some buttons and then he laughed, a sound that was cold and hateful and terrifying.

  “I’d think about running, if I were you. You and your little friend there. Is that the American in you showing through, Joe? Does it make you feel enlightened, politically correct, to run around with someone so obviously your inferior? Run, and take her with you. You won’t get far, to be perfectly honest, but it’ll make your ends so much more … dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “What are you talking about? We stopped you. Shut off your signal from space. We won.”

  “You put them in standby mode. Impressive work, though. Completely unexpected. What was that, by the way? Antinoise? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Here’s the thing: I just woke them all up. But wait, there’s more. You see, I put the programming parameters for this new form of the space sound in place.”

  “To turn them into your slaves!” Ani spat.

  “Oh, my dear, how tiny your imagination is. What a view there must be from your head, so boring and bland and unable to see true greatness. But people like me have vision. Vision enough to see how an army of privileged kids at my disposal—”

  “Soldiers?” Joe said dismissively. “All this for a bunch of remote-controlled soldiers?”

  Again, Palgrave seemed amused. “The first phase was supposed to be quiet, with the slow, steady, covert infiltration of all the levels of society that matter. Young scientists, and lawyers and politicians and … well, you get the picture: the elite.

  “You and Abernathy lucked your way into that one, making me … evolve my plans. The second phase was to be consolidation, with my secret helpers chipping away at all structures of power, authority, and control. The third phase would have been glorious: the takeover of all political power in this country. The moment when I would finally assume the power that I was born to inherit.

  “Not just with an army, Joe. That’s just so last year. No, I made it so that my puppets could become my greatest weapon. I have to confess that I have simply been dying to try it. I had hoped for more time to make this a bit more … global. Still, it would be a shame to waste the opportunity to go out—as they say—with a bang.”

  He pressed another couple of buttons on the handset and nodded over Ani’s shoulder. “Now why don’t you take a look at what you’ve won. I think it will redefine, for all time, the whole concept of a prize.”

  It started with random sparks, leaping between the unconscious individuals spread out across the park, rekindling those strange electrical shells that seemed the only outward sign of their true nature.

  Joe had really thought that Ani’s plan had worked. That it had been ingenious, immediate, and that no one had gotten hurt. Canceling out the sound had, he thought, canceled out the menace.

  No such luck.

  The sparks were already turning into bolts of white light that arced through the air, leaping from person to person, lacing the fallen crowd together in a complex network of unearthly power: forming a crisscrossing pattern that missed no one in its hunger to spread, to connect, to grow.

  Static electricity filled the air, making it taste metallic. Burnt ozone filled Joe’s nose and lungs.

  “What have you done?” he shouted.

  “I have created,” Palgrave replied, his voice full of pride. “It looks like I won’t have my new British Empire, but at least I have this.”

  He gestured over Hyde Park.

  The lines of power continued to glow, throwing out more and more strands, pulling the fallen people closer together, binding them with the alien fire.

  On the stage, the members of Precision Image were being drawn into the mass that was forming in Hyde Park. Joe saw Harry Brewster—Null-A, one of the high priests of this new religion of electricity and power—being flipped and bumped across the stage, pulled with tentacles of incandescent brightness.

  The electric lattice was not just connecting people: it was pulling them together, squashing them against each other, and wrapping electric bindings around them to hold them there.

  Joe had no idea what he was seeing. His shocked senses could see no pattern, no logic to it at all. The electrical lightning was just gathering the crowd together into different-sized piles in front of the stage, then working at the piles with its bands of force until they were bound together in formless masses.

  “You’re killing them,” Ani screamed. “Stop it! Stop it now!”

  “Oh, is that what I’m doing?” Palgrave said. “Then stop it yourself, little girl.”

  Palgrave had made a comment about her “inferiority,” and now he was calling her out on her size and sex. Oh yes, he was quite the charmer.

  She wondered what a country under this man’s rule would have been like, and shuddered. It would have become a country for people who Palgrave thought deserved it: white and full of xenophobia, no doubt; straight and full of homophobia. The UK would have become strong, probably, but it would have been a country that drew its strength from being scared and insular and full of hate.

  Power was wasted in the hands of those who desired it.

  There were piles of people stacking up on the grass, piles of kids, all fizzing and crackling with energy. An energy that seemed sentient, that appeared to have a purpose, although she could think of no purpose for piles of kids.

  Whatever it was, she decided, it was very bad.

  Worse than her worst-ever nightmares, and she’d had some doozies.

  “ARISE!” Palgrave screamed, for theatrical embellishment again, because it was surely that infernal device in his hand that was doing this, rather than his sub-Frankenstein demand.

  Ani wished that Joe had thought to take the stupid thing out of his hands before all this could come this far. She guessed that he had been as surprised as she had to find that not only hadn’t they stopped the sound from taking over thousands of kids, but that Palgrave had some kind of fallback plan.

  Suddenly that backup plan started to make some sense.

  Insane sense, sure, but it was finally possible to see what was happening out there on the grass in front of the stage.

  “I guess we’re in real trouble now.�
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  The piles of humans that the electricity had gathered together—one big mass in the center, two smaller ones below it, one still smaller to the left and another to the right, and the smallest of all at the top—were being pulled together with remarkable speed and precision.

  Once the final drawing together began, it became clear that the shape was both intended and familiar.

  First the two small masses—each containing over a thousand people, Joe figured—started building upward, with the electrical force nudging them carefully into place and maintaining their positions. Two large, flattish bases with columns stretching out of them ever higher, until their shape became so obviously recognizable that Joe could only look at them in terror.

  A huge part of him wanted to take the device out of Palgrave’s hands and smash it into a million pieces. With his reflexes, it would be easy. But would he be solving the problem, or just taking away the last chance they had of stopping this madness from happening?

  “Abernathy,” he said. “Are you seeing this?”

  “That giant pair of legs standing in Hyde Park? Yeah, they’re kind of hard to miss.”

  “I hope you’ve got a plan.”

  “Half a plan. And a couple of prayers to alien gods. We’ll be with you as soon as we can.”

  The legs complete, the force moved onto the central mass, reeling in skeins of people and weaving them into a body. If it hadn’t been so utterly horrible, Joe was sure that he would have been impressed. Unfortunately, the human aesthetic sense seemed to wither and die when confronted by the truly unthinkable.

  The feet and legs themselves—composed of two thousand or more people packed in tight rows and held in some kind of electrical suspension that shored them up and made sure that the lower bodies weren’t immediately crushed by the tremendous weight bearing down on them—had to be fifty feet high at least, and the ribbons of force were adding a body that was that high again.

  A vast colossus constructed out of people and electricity.

  The arms were being assembled and pulled into place, and the final mass of people became a vast sphere that rolled up the right leg, and then the body, before taking up position at the top of the human structure as its head.

  Blinding white electrical light blasted outward from the human outline, and Joe couldn’t begin to guess where all of that power was coming from. Enough to hold thousands of people in place … enough to power …

  Thum-thump

  The creature took its first, tentative step forward, and the ground beneath Joe trembled with the vibrations.

  Behind him, Palgrave laughed again.

  “How do you stop a war machine made out of children? Because when you attack it, only innocents die.”

  “You’re insane, you know that?” Joe said. “Completely and utterly insane.”

  “Oh, like a crazy person could build that,” Palgrave said, pointing at the creature as it took another unsteady step forward.

  Thum-thump

  “Only a crazy person could build that,” Ani said. “It makes no sense. It makes no sense at all. Why?”

  “The alien sound,” Palgrave said. “Our first-ever contact with an alien race. When Imogen Bell recorded it, she had no idea what it was that she had brought down to Earth. Her and that stargazing buffoon, Klein, just put the carefully laid first contact protocols into operation and, guess what? Bell’s first call? Came to me. Me. If that’s not destiny calling, then I don’t know what is.”

  Thum-thump

  “But, here’s the thing: the sound may have only been a pathetically poor copy of a larger organism from out there in the dark depths of space, but it was still alive. It was still life. Not quite life as we tend to think of it, but a whole new category of being.

  “Of course at the start, it was so weak, so primitive, it didn’t have the strength to do anything but sit in a file on Pabody/Reich’s computer.”

  Thum-thump

  “I instructed Imogen Bell to substitute the sound file for another one; some instinct told me that if we had made contact with an alien race, then I wanted it to be me who defined the terms of that contact. She sent me the file and I just forwarded it to some … acquaintances I keep on my payroll. Weapons developers of the hush-hush kind—always looking to build the next bomb, the next gun, the next nerve gas agent, the next biological weapon. They analyzed the file, and discovered something odd. This … sound … it was alive. It thought, it fed, and eventually it grew. It did what all life does: it reached out and tried to make more copies of itself.

  “And we found ourselves in a rare and incredible position. We had a new form of life. That life had been digitally encoded into a file. Sound files can be edited. That meant that this life-form could be edited. It took a lot of time, and no small amount of trial and error, but in the end it was easier than you’d think. We had a sound that was capable of tremendous things. We just wrote some new instructions to be inserted into the file, and my team edited them in. Rewriting its code to change its purpose.

  “An alien creature loose on planet Earth, living in sound? That’s not good for anyone. But an alien creature, tamed, reprogrammed, loose on planet Earth to do my bidding?

  “That is just too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  Thum-thump

  The creature was still making awkward, slow progress forward, but it seemed to be getting better at moving with every step. Joe figured that they needed to stop this now before that thing really learned how to move.

  He moved toward Palgrave, thinking he was going to snatch the device from his hand, but the man knew what he was intending and shook his head.

  “Turn it off and they all die,” Palgrave said. “That thing falls apart and suddenly it’s raining men. They’re bound together using some kind of electric bands that even my scientists don’t fully understand. The way they see it, this creature that Pabody/Reich discovered was a space traveler, a creature of energy: some of it sound, some of it radiation, probably a whole bunch of stuff we’ll never truly understand.”

  Thum-thump

  “But perhaps a creature that is just waves of energy, moving through space, needs a physical form every now and then. You know, to interact with things, maybe to feel, or touch, or break, or eat, or destroy … It’s hard to know what space monsters really think about, isn’t it? But the electric field that’s holding our giant friend together over there is the way it makes things—tools, arms, a mouth—out of the junk it finds in space, or plunders from the planets it passes.”

  “So why did you think that making a monster out of living beings would a good idea?” Joe said.

  “It’s an engine of destruction,” Palgrave said. “And it’s made out of innocent kids. You’ve got to agree that is some human shield.”

  Thum-thum—

  Whap-whap-whap-whap-whap-whap

  The steady advance of the human colossus was drowned out by the sound above them, and Palgrave looked up. The barrels of three rifles were trained on him from the open door of a RAF helicopter. His minders went for their guns, but Palgrave shook his head and they stopped.

  “Stay still and don’t move,” Abernathy’s voice came through a loudspeaker. “Or move, and give me an excuse to put a bullet between your eyes.”

  Palgrave lifted his hands in the air, and the helicopter landed, throwing dirt and dust up in clouds around Joe and Ani.

  “Abernathy and the cavalry?” Ani yelled over the roar of the helicopter rotors.

  Joe shrugged. “I sure hope they have a plan,” he said, “because as of five minutes ago I’m all out of ideas.”

  Abernathy got the pilot to swoop down low next to the vast creature that was stalking across Hyde Park. If he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes, there was no way he’d ever have believed it. Put this up on YouTube and every comment would be the same: FAKE!

  But it wasn’t a fake.

  This was as real as things got.

  An animated creature made of rows of unconscious human bodie
s, neatly stacked in columns, held together with pulsing lines of electrical force. This close up, Abernathy could see the faces of the people on the outside of the creature, the ones that made up its skin and musculature, and he felt a terrible sadness.

  If you put the terror, horror, and wonderment aside, sorrow was the remaining feeling: these were human beings, robbed of their very individuality, now serving as the makeshift body of a poorly copied creature in service of a fascist megalomaniac.

  Abernathy knew that it wasn’t a CGI special effect, or a digitally manipulated image.

  He now knew precisely what this thing was, how it was formed and—although he hadn’t been expecting Palgrave’s madness to spill over into such an obscene construction—he had the ultimate ace up his sleeve to deal with it.

  An ace that he’d spent the afternoon organizing, that he’d had helicopters crossing the sky to secure, that he’d managed to put together with video conferencing and an impassioned plea to someone he’d never even met in the flesh.

  As they came in for a landing next to Joe, Ani, and Palgrave, he ordered the troops onboard to point their weapons at Palgrave. Palgrave looked smug, and Abernathy hoped that his ace wasn’t beaten by a better hand.

  000

  Ani saw Abernathy climb down from the helicopter, flanked by armed soldiers, and she saw something in his face that puzzled her.

  He looked calm. Confident. In control.

  She felt far from calm. If the striding monstrosity that Palgrave had built out of the audience made it out of Hyde Park, then who knew what damage it could cause? It was already creating a wake of destruction and panic, making slow but deliberate progress toward where they were standing, on the edge of the park nearest speaker’s corner. Past that it was city. Past that it was destruction on a mammoth scale.

  She’d grown up watching kaijū eiga, those weird and wacky Japanese movies where giant monsters tore up cities with their claws and a veritable arsenal of special powers, and she’d always felt them to be a bit of a guilty pleasure. Seeing Godzilla and his ilk—Ghidorah, Rodan, Destroyah, Baragon, Hedorah—laying waste to skyscrapers, stepping on people, fighting each other with no regard for collateral damage was fun, sure, but if you put that kind of destructive power into the real world, then the effects would be tragic.