by James Knapp
Node formation successful. Reinitializing communications network.
In the back of my skull, the white noise streamed in like TV snow. The inhibitor usually stopped it, but not today.
All units clear zone H1B, a message said. As it faded, a shit-ton of them connected all at once and started blasting me with info. The node count kept climbing: a hundred, a thousand, two thousand …
Shit …
The count passed six thousand. I’d linked with revivors before, but never more than nine. Back in the field, I’d get a feed for each one on my JZI so I could keep an eye on them, but this time there were so many there was no way to show them all. Each feed came up as a point of light on a grid at the bottom of my periphery. They looked like stars.
We are fucked.
I focused on one of those points of light and my receiver called it out. I couldn’t control the revivor on the other end, but when I homed in, I could see what it saw. It was looking down at a concrete wall that was covered in graffiti. It was female; I could make out a pair of tits. Strapped between them was some kind of metal casing. A display was fixed there, with an LCD that flashed blue.
It didn’t move. It just stared. The display jumped, and the feed fell back on the pile with the rest.
This is what the static was. All this time, I had a link to all of them. At first they must have been dormant, then the inhibitor kept them back, but now I was in it. I was in there with them, up to my neck.
Mesh established. Synchronizing …
“The virus is embedded in the synchronization package,” Singh said. His voice was muddy, like I was underwater. “It’s going out …now.”
The last link lit up, and my node puked data over every one of them. Shit flew back and forth as we all synced up. In seconds, they knew who and where I was. A map of the network formed on the grid in front of me and formed a kind of shape.
“Did it work?” Ramirez asked.
“It’s converging,” a voice said. That was Singh. He was close by. “Hold on.”
The Huma node took all the data that came in and used it to make a picture; a map of the city blinked on and an electric inkblot spread over it. Blotches of light spread and bled together.
Synchronization complete. The pattern covered everything; they were all through the city. The light was brightest in shitholes like Pyt-Yahk, and they were clustered around the three towers, but they’d spread all over. They were moving through the whole city, heading out.
All units clear zone H1B. The message popped up again. With the connection to the rest, I saw an area outlined on the city map; the zone surrounded the CMC Tower.
“What’s that there?” a voice asked. Ramirez.
“Looks like he’s moving them away from Central Media Communications.” On the map, the cluster around the tower was thinning out.
“Why?”
I heard fingers tap at a keypad.
“I don’t like it. Contact them and let them know.”
All units clear zone H—
One signal whined from out of the static, coming through loud and strong.
Initializing command spoke …
The link lit up under the rest of them. I knew what that was. Usually I was on the other side of it, but I knew what it was. Whoever was on the other end started to pull data from me. I watched the data stream by; my heart rate and body temp had bottomed, but no revivor signature had formed. Not yet.
“The command spoke is active,” a voice said. I barely heard it.
“He’s going to cut her off. Did the virus go out?”
“Yes, sir.”
Node 5948. Report in. The message came over the command spoke. It was him; it was Fawkes.
“There.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’ve got activity from a remote source. It’s trying to assert control. He’s seen her.”
“Did the virus work?”
“No change in activity yet.”
“What about her?”
Commands dropped in. Fawkes had kicked off some kind of diag from the other end. It triggered my systems and code flicked by as my JZI came back online. He connected to it and started to dump its memory.
“He’s got her. If she drops off now, it will tip him. Let him have her.”
He was pulling data from me. Along with the rest of the shit he was pulling, I packaged up a little something else for him.
A handy ’bot we’d passed around the grinder got pulled back over the link with the rest of it and stuck itself in Fawkes’s memory. He might be a smart jack, but he was still a jack, and an old one too.
Respond, Fawkes said. I decided to try to bluff him.
Node 5948. Reporting in.
There was some corruption detected during the synchronization. Stand by.
Understood.
He went idle for a few seconds, then: You’re on the private military base.
Before I could think of a response, Fawkes tried to pull my signature and didn’t find one.
You’re not a revivor, he said. He’d started some kind of scan. Who are you?
The game was up.
The one who’s going to fuck your dead ass.
The goddamned spoke let him pry through into my JZI and before I could stop him, he’d tapped into my systems. In seconds he’d found my communication node and broke in, branching out over every connection he could find.
“He’s in our system!” I heard a voice shout. “Shit! He’s in our system!”
“How is that possible?”
“Cut the link!”
Whatever you’re attempting, Calliope T. Flax, it won’t work.
Don’t be so sure.
As you can see, my army is still online, so whatever you’re trying to do, it hasn’t worked. The people behind this are going to pay for that, and so will you. My next strike won’t be a warning.
Yeah, well none of my strikes are ever warnings. If Nico doesn’t get to you first, then you’re mine.
That shut him up for a second.
Who are you? he asked. The son of a bitch didn’t even remember me.
I set off the remote ’bot, and it started to dump everything in his memory buffers back to my JZI.
You never should have brought me on that boat, fucker.
I found his Leichenesser seed and popped it, but the link stayed up, so he must have had it taken out at some point. I tapped his visual feed, and a window popped up in the dark. Through it, I saw what he saw.
He was at a desk. He looked down at a console that showed a bunch of security feeds, while a figure off to his right reached in front of him and touched one window. It came to the front, and I saw a woman walk through the frame.
I’ve seen her…. It was that creepy revivor bitch, the one Nico locked lips with on the tanker that night.
The image went blank.
“Damn it!” Right behind the visuals, the command spoke went dark.
“He just killed the spoke.”
“The virus went out; he’s too late.”
“She’s still tied to the mesh. He still can’t trigger the kill switch with the inhibitor in place, but—”
Fawkes was inside Heinlein. I pulled up the stuff I’d grabbed from his buffers. I didn’t get it all, but I got enough. I couldn’t tell the assholes in the room with me what I had because I couldn’t fucking talk, but if Singh came through and got my JZI back online, I might be able to get it to Nico.
“Shit,” someone said.
Ramirez answered, “What?”
“We just got a surge of activity out there. A lot of it. Look.”
On the map, the large blotch changed shape while I watched. It was close to where we were. Slowly, part of the shape began to branch out and move.
It began to creep in our direction.
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo
By the time Penny and I got back to the war room, it was the closest thing to chaos I’d ever seen in front of Ai. She sat there, calm, while voices on the video scr
eens and in the room all tried to talk at the same time.
“ …confirmed, it was one of the ICBMs from the defense satellite,” a voice said.
“You get that?” Osterhagen asked.
Ai nodded. “Mr. Vaggot,” she asked, “how long until we regain control of those missiles?”
A window with the man’s face appeared in one corner of Osterhagen’s screen. He looked a little less collected than the last time he’d appeared, but his voice was still strong and confident.
“Not long,” he said. “It’s taking time for the ’bots to chisel through the defenses he set up, but once they do, control will be transferred here through the Stillwell Corps satellite-communications array. I think we can shunt him out in thirty or forty minutes, maybe less.”
“That was a warning shot,” Osterhagen said. “He’s telling us to stand down.”
“A warning shot?” a woman asked, her voice breaking.
“Initial data confirmed all twelve ICBMs were aimed across an even spread of twelve sectors through the city,” he said. “In order for him to drop one out in the bay like that, he’d have to have programmed it with a new target. He intentionally fired it outside the city, where it wouldn’t cause any structural damage, but where we’d see it. It was a warning shot.”
“What about the radiation?” someone asked.
“The explosion created a radioactive cloud of steam and smoke that right now is moving along the shoreline at a distance of ten miles,” Mr. Raphael said. “That could change.”
“The next launch won’t be a warning,” Osterhagen said. “What is the situation at Alto Do Mundo?”
“The detonation of a Leichenesser charge cleared a hole,” someone said. “But he’s streamed in more of them. I’d say we put a weak link in the chain, but it’s reforming.”
Osterhagen looked offscreen for a second, then nodded and cut back in.
“We just got a report that the revivors in the street are being ordered away from the CMC Tower,” he said.
“Why?” Raphael asked. “Moved to where?”
“Outside a five block perimeter around the tower,” Osterhagen said. “We have to assume it’s to protect them, and that it’s a precursor to some kind of strike. Start getting your people out of there.”
“How? We’re surrounded from the ground and the air—”
“Any way you can, Robin!”
“What about the virus?” Ai asked. “Has it been deployed?”
“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “That’s how this information was obtained. Ott was right about Flax. We seeded her revivor matrix and transitioned her onto their network. Fawkes cut her off, but not in time. She received the alert along with the rest to clear the CMC Tower.”
“How long before the virus will take effect?” she asked.
“It should have worked by now,” he said. “It might be taking longer than expected to propagate, but we have to consider the possibility that it failed.”
For the first time that day, I saw something like confusion appear on Ai’s face before it went back to its drugged-out expression.
“Failed how?” she asked. “The tests were successful.”
“Yes,” Osterhagen said. “Assuming the Huma version of Fawkes’s revivors matches the ones we had in custody, then it should have worked. But as of this morning, that version changed. It could have invalidated the virus partially, or even completely.”
“But the virus affects them,” she said. “It reaches them, I’ve seen it.”
I closed my eyes and tried to cut through the anxiousness and pressure that emanated from every consciousness in the room, even those piped through remotely. I took a deep breath and focused on Ai.
She was the elephant in the room; her consciousness hung over her tiny body like a small, broken planet whose pieces were carefully held together by gravity. Tentacles of light stretched out from the fragments and connected to the men and women at the table. More tentacles wove through the room to touch Penny and even me. They floated through the walls, ceiling, and floor, across the city, I figured, to reach Raphael, Osterhagen, and the rest. She was amazingly calm in the face of what was going on, her thoughts ticking away beneath the colors of her mind like the tiny pieces of an incredibly complicated clockwork machine. She was tied into the future model that was displayed on the wall, tuned to the smallest change, and looking for some clue, any clue that might tell her what to do as time ran out.
She didn’t know, though, and that scared me. Underneath it all, she was confused. Things weren’t happening like she expected anymore. With all of her knowledge, she wasn’t sure what to do.
Penny was calm, but was ready to physically act. She spent a lot of time like that, and she almost never relaxed, even when she was drunk, but I’d never felt her so alert before. Part of her mind was turned toward me and I sensed a bond there, a protectiveness I’d never quite noticed before. I’d always known she would kill for me, but somehow I’d never seen the devotion that drove it until that moment.
I reached out, following the connections Ai kept with the others at their remote locations, and found Osterhagen and Raphael. Raphael was worried. He was worried for himself and us, but mostly he was worried for the people on the ground; he was afraid for them, and not just our people but the innocent bystanders about to be caught in Fawkes’s attack. Osterhagen was angry and frustrated. He was confident he could defeat Fawkes—in fact, he was certain of it—but the nukes had tied his hands, and, yes …there …buried away deep inside, he was scared too.
The people in the room continued to talk in restrained, clipped tones, and as I took the pulse of their thoughts as a whole, I realized that fear had begun to creep into the entire network. It was fear of the unknown. It was the fear that despite all the manipulation and information tracking and careful planning, they were delving into an unknown where they couldn’t see clearly. That scared the hell out of them, all of them.
Even Ai.
They don’t know what to do, I thought, and even though I felt like that should make me scared too, it didn’t. I thought maybe I knew what they didn’t.
There was someone I needed to communicate with. The person who had stood next to me in my vision and the only one in the room I knew would survive along with me if we failed.
“ …the lines that die out aren’t the ones that can’t stop the launch; they’re the ones that do stop it …”
Hans Vaggot was isolated, and I could tell that although Ai was watching him, she wouldn’t touch him. He was being left alone to retake the satellite, and as soon as I entered his mind, I knew he was getting close. There was a relief there, like a cool undercurrent beneath the hot colors of his mind. He’d recently made some kind of breakthrough and was closing in. I couldn’t tell how long it would be, but although he was still focused like a laser, I could sense his hope—he knew he would succeed; he was only worried about the timing. If he knew it and I knew it, then at least Ai and Osterhagen knew it too. Despite their misgivings, they had begun to think that in spite of everything, they still might stop the event from happening.
Except they were wrong.
Mr. Vaggot, I whispered into the back of his mind. I felt the flow of his thoughts hiccup, and I knew he’d sensed me. In a second, Ai would sense me too, and when she did she’d shut me out again. I only had a short time to communicate with him, to plant, maybe, an idea in his mind. It was an idea that I didn’t totally understand myself yet, but somehow I knew it was the answer. When I thought back to what I’d learned about Noelle, who came before me and before Penny, it suddenly seemed clear. She’d known. She’d known all along; she just couldn’t handle it.
I took a long swallow off the bottle in my hand and wormed my way further into his mind.
When you retake the satellite, don’t shut down the launch, I told him. I felt anxiousness in him from somewhere deep inside as the command took root. Don’t shut it down. Wait for my signal….
I felt Ai then, and my eyes snapped open as t
he connection was broken. When I looked over at her, her large eyes had narrowed and there was a hard glint in them.
“I told you to leave him,” she said in a low voice. “I—”
She stopped short and perked up, as if she’d heard something. The anger went out of her eyes and I felt a spike of alarm from her, licking out of her consciousness like a solar flare.
“Robin, wait,” she said.
“Hold on,” Mr. Raphael said. He checked something offscreen.
In all the activity, no one else saw Ai sit up straight suddenly. Her eyes looked startled as they opened wide and stared into space. The others around the table jerked in their trances, sitting up straight along with her.
“Mr. Raphael,” Ai said, and the voices quieted.
“Yes, Motoko?”
“Abandon the CMC Tower immediately.”
“We’re organizing the evacuation now—”
“Forget the rest,” she snapped. “Use the helipad.”
“Motoko, there are sixteen thousand people in this building,” he said. “Tell me what you saw…. ”
On Mr. Raphael’s screen, he turned toward a window behind him where something outside had started to glow in the sky above the electric city lights.
“What is that?” he muttered.
The screen flickered and went out. A second later, all of the screens went out and the room went dark.
Nico Wachalowski—Stillwell Corps Base
From the helicopter, I could see fire in the streets below. A car burned in an intersection, flames spraying cinders as the wind howled through the street. Two blocks down, smoke was pouring from the broken window of a residential building.
Alice, we need to start tracking the bites that occurred since the activation code was sent.
We’ll coordinate with local hospitals. If this is true, though, Wachalowski, our best bet is going to be stemming it at its source, not chasing thousands of leads.
We need to contain the city. No one in or out.