by James Knapp
We’re working on it.
The snow began to pick up as the helicopter took us back toward the Stillwell Corps base. Visibility was down and the ride was choppy. The windshield turned black, and a computerized view appeared in its place as the pilot passed between two buildings.
What about you? she asked. If this really is true, wouldn’t you be affected?
I’m okay.
But have you been affected?
A notification appeared in front of me as my internal diagnostic finished. My JZI called out my new arm on the system tree with a low-level warning. The necrotic bleed-through had been identified. It was true—the altered nanoblood was leaking into my bloodstream.
No, I lied.
The chopper hit a patch of turbulence and bucked underneath me. My stomach dropped. The vectors tilted in the windshield display, and through the side window I watched the buildings below as we banked left and veered over one of the main strips. From our position, I could see the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance, and beyond that, nearly lost in the snow, the UAC TransTech Center.
Keep me informed, she said. Let me know as soon as you have something we can use against Fawkes. She broke the connection.
I pulled my collar down to check my shoulder and saw what looked like bruising there. The bleed-through was getting worse. I wondered if the filter was no longer able to screen the altered nanotech at all. I could be running out of time.
I opened a new link over the channel MacReady had provided.
MacReady, this is happening fast. Do you have a revivor I can use?
It’s on its way. I will have it shortly.
Let me know the second you do.
Understood, Agent.
In the meantime, I have a question. Something revivor related.
I’ll help if I can.
You said you continued the Zhang’s Syndrome study?
Yes.
Was the condition ever recorded in a living person?
It’s a condition that occurs during reanimation. No, it does not affect living people.
What about a person experiencing necrotic bleed-through?
It doesn’t work that way, Agent. Even with the M10 series, the synthetic blood is something wholly separate from the revivor nodes that interface with the brain. Synthetic blood leaking into an organic system does not, and cannot, cause reanimation. If the traces of synthetic blood were to make their way into the brain, they would most likely kill the affected person.
Understood.
Do you know someone who is suffering from this condition? he fished.
What if the nanoblood were altered somehow? I asked. Could it be changed to that much of a degree?
You’re referring to Fawkes’s use of the transmitter earlier.
Is it possible?
I don’t know, he said. In theory …at the molecular level, many of the components are generic. They could be recoded to perform different functions, but not easily.
So it is possible?
I would say yes. Particularly if you had high-ranking scientists like the ones you named on your team. That kind of research would, of course, be highly illegal, but I would say possible, in theory.
Understood.
Are you saying that you’re—
Just get the revivors I asked for. And hurry. There isn’t much time.
I understand. I think you should know this before the time comes, though: you have a relationship to this revivor.
What—
It’s the revivor of Faye Dasalia, he said.
Even as the storm outside caused the chopper to buck, I felt a pang in my chest. For a minute, I forgot about the rest—Fawkes, the arm, everything.
Faye is part of this, I said. She’s with Fawkes now. She’s close to him; you can’t use her.
Trust with revivors doesn’t hold the same connotation as it does for humans. I believe she was the one who compromised Heinlein’s security and allowed Fawkes access, he said. But something has happened since then and she’s no longer part of his network.
If she’s not on his network, then—
Trust me, Agent. Fawkes is trying very hard to reconnect her, and I’ll see to it that he succeeds, but only once we’re ready.
She’ll tell him—
She can’t tell him what she doesn’t know, and anyway, at the end of the day, she is a revivor. It doesn’t matter what she did before or why she did it. When I’m finished with her, you’ll have the access you need.
It was still hard for me to swallow. Everything that had happened, all those people dead and dying in the streets, all of it had happened with Faye standing at Fawkes’s side.
Agent?
I’m here, I said. Set it up.
Stand by, he said. I should have access shortly—
His message clipped off as the helicopter started to descend toward the building tops. On several of them, I could see groups of people bundled in coats and scarves that whipped in the wind. They were looking down at the city, at the streets below.
MacReady?
Down on the street, pedestrians looked up as we approached. Police blues flashed against the white of snowbanks where a group of officers waited, keeping a crowd of people from entering a strip mall whose windows had been smashed in.
The pilot chattered over the radio and was pointing down toward the street, but I didn’t hear him. In the corner of my eye, an FBI alert popped up:
IMMINENT ORBITAL STRIKE
The pilot and copilot looked at each other, and the pilot shouted into the radio. Before I could pull up the details, Alice cut back in.
Wachalowski, get out of the area now.
I just got an alert about an orbital strike. Is it an ICBM?
No. The DoD just detected a massive energy buildup in Heinlein’s orbital-defense satellite, The Eye. It’s going to fire in the next minute.
Fire at what? What kind of buildup?
They’re not sure what the target is, but this charge is off the charts. A spy satellite observing it saw it go into targeting mode two minutes ago. It looks like it’s focusing every lens it’s got on a common target that is outside of Heinlein’s security perimeter.
I brought up the specs for the satellite. It had more than one hundred lenses for striking multiple targets such as missiles, aircraft, or ground forces. Any one of them could generate a beam capable of incinerating a large vehicle or even a tank at only half capacity.
Can they stop it? I asked.
Not in time. A communication from Fawkes warned that if The Eye is destroyed, he’ll launch another—
The connection skipped, then cut out. A second later, the radio chatter on the helicopter cut out as well.
Something flashed and lit up the sky. A hole appeared in the clouds and a light shone there like a second sun. The hole blew out, until the clouds were gone and a huge, blinding beam of energy arced down toward the ground below.
The helicopter banked hard as I threw my hand in front of my eyes. Everything went white, and a loud thunder crack pounded in my ears. Spots danced in front of me as the white-hot light burned over the skyline and struck the Central Media Communications Tower in the distance.
The pilot screamed to the copilot, but I couldn’t hear anything over the racket outside. I stared in shock as a ball of fire engulfed the base of the tower and began to expand.
Clouds of glass blew out and rained down toward the street as the flames began to boil from the windows. The air rippled, and in seconds the base of the tower turned an angry, molten red.
The pilot was screaming to hold on. A blast of hot air rushed in as the beam writhed and arced through the night sky, setting the surrounding building tops ablaze. The helicopter began to shake violently, then fell into a slow spin.
Concrete and glass split under the waves of heat and tumbled down toward the streets below. Over everything else, I heard a low, earsplitting moan echo through the sky as the huge structure started to twist on its failing foundation.
The city reeled through the window as the helicopter’s spin got worse. As the remains of the CMC Tower whipped past the windshield, the arc of light flashed and went out, leaving a dark line to float in front of my eyes. The tower was lit up like white phosphorus, while a cloud of black smoke and fire blew out from around it in every direction.
The peak dropped down toward the other buildings it towered above, and then the mighty structure began to implode. As we spun around again, I saw it crumble, and begin a slow collapse down into the debris.
“We’re going down! I’m going to try to land her!” the pilot yelled. My stomach rolled as the deck jumped again, but he managed to stop the spin and stabilize us. The street below tilted at a steep angle as we whipped, dangerously close, past a mirrored building face.
“Hang on!”
The buildings tapered off up ahead where a large, flat area was carved out. It was the Stillwell Corps base. Security alerts began flashing as we passed into their airspace. The pilot was barking into the radio, requesting an emergency landing even as we began to drop.
“Negative! Negative!” a voice came back.
“We don’t have a choice! We’re coming in!”
A helipad was lit up on one of the buildings up ahead. At street level, I caught several bright flashes of gunfire as we banked around and began our descent.
“The security perimeter has been breached!” the voice on the radio said. “Repeat, our security perimeter has been breached!”
As we came back around toward the helipad, I saw more muzzle flashes from below, and when the helicopter’s floodlight washed over the street, I saw why: hundreds of bodies surged toward a chain-link fence whose gate had been forced open. Blood sprayed through the air as soldiers on the other side opened fire on them, but there were too many. Already they were breaking their way into the buildings on either side of the street.
The pilot veered off at the last second, struggling to keep control of the helicopter as we passed over the heads of the clawing mob. The copilot pointed out the windshield at another rooftop, farther into the base, past the fence.
The pilot switched off the radio, cutting off the screaming voice on the other end as he began to take us down.
7
OUROBUROS
Zoe Ott—Alto Do Mundo Penthouse
The silence that came after the lights went out was worse than all the chaos that went on before it. I stood in the dark with the others for what felt like a long time before the overheads flickered back on, but even once they did, the screens on the wall stayed dark. The feeds were all dead.
“What happened?” I asked. Ai was staring into space, not moving or saying anything. At first she looked like she had a seizure or something, but when I focused on her, I saw her mind was still working; she was just in some kind of trance. None of the others at the table moved either.
The armed guards were all alert but weren’t sure what to do. One of them called on his radio to see about the power, while the noise outside rumbled off into the distance. No one approached the table or Ai.
“What happened?” I asked again.
“It was the CMC Tower,” Penny said. Her face was lit by the glow from her computer tablet. “Fawkes just destroyed it.”
“What?”
She turned the tablet toward me, and on it I could see a video feed from somewhere in the city across town. Someone was filming from the window of a building that would have looked out at the spot where the Central Media Communications Tower would have been, if it had been there.
“Oh …” It was all that came out. I stared at the image as thick black smoke billowed up from flames that had spread through the surrounding blocks. The CMC Tower was gone. It just …wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t get my brain around it.
“That’s why we lost all the feeds,” Penny said, her voice flat. “It was all going through a hub at the CMC Tower.”
“Mr. Raphael—”
“He’s dead, Zoe.”
I just stared. I liked Mr. Raphael. He was always nice to me, and whenever we’d met face-to-face, he’d always brought me a little gift of some kind. The last thing he’d gotten me had been my little diamond solitaire. I put my hand to my throat without thinking, but I wasn’t wearing it.
“He blew up the CMC?” I asked. My voice seemed to be acting independently from my brain, which was still trying to take in the size of the wreckage I was seeing on the screen. The fire blazed as waves of smoke and dust several stories high boiled down the surrounding streets, swallowing up the cars and streetlamps as they went. Pieces of debris were still falling down through the air, raining down into the expanding cloud below. The CMC Tower had been almost as big as Alto Do Mundo, and now it was just gone.
“Zoe, snap out of it,” I heard Penny say.
I felt her hands grab my elbows as I looked around. No one else in the room was moving.
“What’s wrong with them?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Penny said. The guards had left the room to secure the floor and try to get back communications with the others. Except for the distant rumble, it was completely quiet. It was almost like Penny and I were alone together.
Penny started to get up, but I stopped her by grabbing her sleeve. She looked back at me, confused.
“Wait,” I said.
“I need to check on Ai—”
“Wait. I …”
“What?”
“Something happened,” I told her. “I saw something. Something important.”
“What did you see?”
“The Green Room,” I said. “I saw inside the void again. I think …Noelle tried to contact me there.”
Penny’s face changed when I said her name. I felt a distant spike of emotion that she stifled just as quickly, a red flare that arced up out of the aura surrounding her.
“Did she say anything to you?” she asked. I nodded.
“I think we’ve been wrong this whole time.”
“Wrong about what?”
I glanced past her at Ai. Her consciousness had taken the form of a dense, white sphere. The connections had all been withdrawn. She was experiencing an intense vision, and wasn’t watching either of us. Still, I leaned close to Penny and whispered in her ear.
“Penny, I think I’m Element Zero,” I whispered. She tried to pull away, but I held on to her sleeve.
“Fawkes is Element Zero,” she whispered back. “Fawkes drops the nukes. You stop him.”
“She’s been trying to tell me something…. I think we’re wrong.”
“We’re not.”
“What if we are? She said the blast doesn’t cause the event; it stops it. I think Noelle knew that. I think she knew Ai was wrong and that she’d have to be the one to kill all these people, to stop something worse from happening. She knew—”
“It was one vision,” Penny said, raising her voice. “That’s not enough to—”
“But it’s the only one that matters,” I said. “It came from the void after the event …isn’t that why Ai tracked us down? Maybe she is some ‘next step in evolution’ but even if it’s true she can’t see past that point—she doesn’t survive whatever happens, she knows that. We ran out of time, and even with everything she did, she wasn’t able to figure it out.”
“Zoe—”
“I’m telling you I saw something, something important. Noelle tried to reach me there…. I think she’s alive.”
“She’s not alive.”
“The database says she’s dead, but how can we really—”
“Because I killed her, Zoe.”
I felt the vibe again, like a spike. Her face didn’t change, but I felt it, and I remembered something she’d said to me a long time ago:
“This can be a good gig,” she’d said, and her voice had been serious. “It can also be a bad one …”
“I thought they had her killed,” I said.
“They did.”
“Ai made you do it?”
She shook her head. “Os
terhagen,” she said. “Things were different then. Noelle was …”
“Was what?”
“She was amazing,” she said. “She was better than I ever was. Ai sent her to go get me and bring me in. She took me under her wing. She took care of me and protected me.”
One of the screens flickered, but didn’t make it back on. Ai’s consciousness pulsed, but she stayed withdrawn.
“Like you did with me,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“She had a bad vision one day,” she said, looking down. “Like the ones you’ve been having …the deformities and all that. She started talking dangerous talk.”
“Like what?”
“You’re right about one thing,” she said. “Noelle was afraid. She did think we had it all wrong. One day, she saw something she wouldn’t talk about, and she changed after that …she lost her appetite, stopped smiling. Something was really wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me what she’d seen.”
“She knew. She knew what she’d have to do.”
“Maybe,” Penny said. “She decided at the time that the only way out of this was for us, everyone like us, to be destroyed. Maybe that was the alternative …maybe it was one or the other. Either way, she believed it. She got this idea that we were wrong about everything. She sounded a lot like you, but she just …wouldn’t let it go.”
“How did Ai react?”
“How do you think she reacted? We’re the greatest human breakthrough the world’s ever known. Even if it was as simple as flipping a switch and getting rid of us, no one’s going to listen to that.”
“So what did she do?”
“Even back then, the model was crystal clear,” she said. “Whatever other factors might or might not be in play, Fawkes triggers the event. When she realized no one would listen to her, she pushed to take out Fawkes early, to kill him. He was just an engineer at Heinlein back then. He had no idea any of this was going to happen, but she didn’t want to wait. She wanted to cut the line there.”
“But why not? Why not do that?”
“Ai can see how all the pieces fit together in a way no one else can. She knew killing Fawkes was a mistake even if Noelle couldn’t see it. She knew he’d be more dangerous dead than alive, and she was right, but Noelle was off on her own by then, and she tried to kill him anyway. She jumped him on the street and stabbed him. He lived, but they all knew she’d done it. By that point they’d begun to think she was some kind of ‘rogue element’, and that she had the potential to cause the very outcome she’d seen …the one where the people with our abilities are wiped out. Osterhagen wanted her dead…. ”