Influx

by Daniel Suarez

  She couldn’t hear a thing above the wailing of the fire alarms. She wondered what the Twins would have to say about this. Bad career move. She certainly knew Tracy wouldn’t approve.

  Good-bye, Denver.

  Through the door, Davis ducked right and started running down a long utility corridor, its floor painted red. Up ahead she couldn’t miss her objective: a truly massive metal door with a “No Unauthorized Access” sign. The thing looked positively Victorian, with massive hinges and rivets.

  She sprinted toward it and yanked on the thick metal handle. The door swung open with a groan, and in her rush to enter she almost flung herself down a flight of crude stone steps leading into yet another subbasement. In the nick of time she grabbed onto an iron railing and caught herself.

  “Careful.”

  She looked up to see Jon Grady standing off to the side, a small rucksack on his back.

  “Yeah, thanks for the warning.”

  He pulled the door closed, then rammed a dead bolt home with a loud click-clack. “Follow me. We need to keep moving.”

  Davis stayed on his heels down steps worn from the passage of many feet and years. At the bottom was a winding corridor lined with more steam and water pipes and electrical conduits, and also cluttered with moving dollies, sawhorses, cardboard boxes for computer equipment and fiberglass insulation, piles of lumber, tarpaulins, electrical cabling—there was stuff everywhere. Twin grooves in the center of the stone floor led off down the corridor, which was lit by bare fluorescent fixtures at intervals.

  “What is this place?”

  “Steam tunnels. Old. Really old. Those slots in the floor were for coal carts.”

  Davis stayed close to Grady. He seemed to know where he was going, and as they rounded a corner, she couldn’t believe how far the next corridor stretched into the distance. “These connect the buildings.”

  “Most of them, yeah.”

  “How did you know about this?”

  “To be honest, I can’t remember. My memory’s blank in spots. But I do seem to know.”

  “Alcot. He’s why you came here. You spent time here—but you weren’t a student?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not good with structure. I prefer to do things unofficially. But he helped me. Now I want to help him.”

  “You’re saying Doctor Alcot is alive, too?”

  “I’m hoping so.”

  • • •

  Two Morrison clones in hockey jerseys and jeans raced through the basement corridors, delta-wave guns at the ready, as the fire alarms wailed. They rounded a corner to see a dozen other Morrisons like themselves, but in various outfits and hairstyles—beards, crew cuts, and ponytails—converging on the same place, in front of the huge steel door.

  The fire alarms finally stopped.

  They all lowered their weapons as one of them, wearing ratty army surplus pants and a T-shirt, kicked the massive steel door in their path. “Fuck!”

  “The rest of the building’s clear.”

  The angry Morrison was still kicking the door. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “Eta, we shouldn’t be bunching up like this. The old man would have our asses if he knew how many of us were gathered in public.”

  “Fuck off, Rho. They went through this goddamned door.”

  Rho stowed his weapon and brought up a hologram. “It’s not even on the tactical plan.”

  “Goddamned right it’s not. TOC fucked up again.”

  Rho spoke over his q-link. “TOC, we’ve got a steel door blocking pursuit of the target subjects. This door is not on the tactical plan.”

  “Copy that, Rho-Sigma. Will advise, please stand by.”

  “Advise, my ass. I’m gonna delete the AI asshole that did this to us, I swear to God.”

  “We’ve gotta bring this door down.”

  Eta turned on him. “Yeah? Tech level four, nonlethal, and you’re gonna bring down a steel gate?” He kicked the door again for good measure. It was like kicking the side of a locomotive.

  A voice came over their radios. “TOC to Team Charlie, Team Echo. Redeploy to indicated coordinates.”

  Eta ignored the call as the others started to move. Instead, he was rummaging through his cargo pockets.

  Rho called back to him. “Eta!”

  “I’ll be damned if I’m going back to Dad empty-handed.” He produced a small black cube wrapped in a translucent material.

  The others had stopped and were looking on, intrigued.

  Rho approached. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Better to beg for forgiveness than ask permission . . .”

  “Where the hell did you get that?”

  “Never mind where I got it.”

  TOC’s voice came over the radio again. “TOC to Team Charlie—”

  Eta silenced his q-link..

  “You are way off reservation, kemosabe.”

  “Stop being such a pussy.” He rubbed the surface of the steel door clean of debris and then pressed the small black cube onto it. The device stuck in place. “We are getting through this door, and we are getting Grady.”

  “That’s illicit nanotech. We’re not authorized to—”

  “Terminal kinematic mechanosynthesis. I promise it won’t destroy the world.” He shoved Rho back and stared him down. “This mission is not failing. Do you read me?”

  The others remained silent.

  Eta raised a mass spectrometer wand, scanning the walls with a broad green laser beam.

  “Eta—”

  “Shut it!”

  A hologram appeared above his wrist, listing possible manufacturing options given nearby materials. He looked up from the display and smiled. “Chain golem it is . . .”

  He tapped several menus, and the black cube suddenly cast a blinding light as it sank into the steel door—eating through it like fire through paper with a deafening sizzling sound. As it did so, white-hot light wavered menacingly. Ribbons of black material started streaming down from the edges of the expanding burn site. These ribbons then curled back up and started knitting themselves into a series of chain links. Unlike in a regular chain, these seemed not to be looped together. Instead, they regrouped and re-formed magnetically or by some other method not clearly understood by anyone present. The links kept piling up, then coming together to form still larger groups of links that began to move collectively with purpose.

  Already most of the steel door was consumed, and the process began to eat into the hinges and frame. Flakes of rust and dirt had fallen free from the reaction, gathering on the floor in a pile.

  But by then the kinematic automaton stood, its metal feet clattering on the concrete floor, like a barrel full of chain mail.

  Eta pointed through the opening and looked at the chain golem’s face of seething chain links. “Double time. Human target. Hunt acoustically . . .”

  • • •

  Looking at the extent of the tunnel ahead and behind, Davis thought out loud. “New York division would have known to watch these tunnels.”

  He cast a look back at her. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just . . . I’m surprised they don’t have these tunnels guarded.”

  “It’s not the FBI. It’s the BTC. They might have better technology, but they don’t always seem to know how to use it.”

  “Where are we heading?”

  “Subbasement of Pupin Hall—the physics building. That much I do remember.”

  “Did you travel down here a lot?”

  “It got me into buildings. I think I lived in Pupin Hall’s basement. There was a way into the tunnel system from there.”

  They were now coming out into a much more modern utility corridor lined with color-coded foot-wide steam pipes with labels like “Low Press Steam” and “Chilled Water Sup” and arrows showing the direction of
flow. Above and below these were orderly bundles of power and data conduits curving around a bend a hundred or more feet ahead.

  “Mr. Grady, you need to tell me what’s really going on.”

  “I know I sound crazy, but everything I told you in Chicago was true. The BTC exists, and they’re very dangerous.”

  “But why would they choose you? No offense, but you don’t exactly have a record of scientific achievement.”

  He looked back at her. “They made sure of that. But they knew what I was working on. They have AIs that try to find people who fit a pattern—disruptive innovators. People like me.”

  Davis pondered Cotton’s list of undistinguished victims at unknown companies.

  “The BTC was created back in the ’60s, and they’ve been hoarding major technological advances for decades. If you knew just how advanced human technology really is, Agent Davis . . . well, you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”

  He turned right down a branch in the passage. They had to duck under a convergence of pipes. “Watch out for these. They’re hot.”

  On the far side she asked, “But why would the BTC cover up new technologies? Money?”

  “They don’t need money. Their quantum computers eat the stock market for lunch. No, they think they’re protecting society from disruptions caused by sudden innovations. If somebody somewhere comes up with a technology they think will disrupt the existing order, they grab them. Neutralize them.”

  “They actually kidnap them?”

  He glanced back at her as they ran. “They made hundreds of clones of this one guy named Morrison—some top Special Forces soldier back in the ’80s.”

  “Oh, come on . . .”

  “I’m not joking. Keep an eye out for him. I met the original Morrison—he’s sixty or so, but his clones are much younger. Tall blond guys with thick necks. Like ugly Fabios.”

  Davis felt a wave of shock pass over her. “Blond guys?”

  “Striking specimens. That’s why Cotton’s followers were always masked. There is no antitechnology movement blowing up research labs. The bombings are just the BTC covering their tracks.”

  “But we have body parts of victims.”

  “You had body parts for me, right?”

  She didn’t have a ready explanation.

  “They can grow body parts. Replacement organs, teeth—hell, they can clone whole people if time isn’t a factor. They grab people they want, fake their deaths, then offer them a chance to join the BTC.”

  “And if someone refuses?”

  “They send him or her where they sent me: a prison called Hibernity. It’s somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. I don’t know where. Very remote. But it’s the reason I contacted you. There are others like me there.”

  Grady stopped in the middle of the tunnel and produced a small white plastic device from a chain around his neck. He aimed it at a blank spot in the wall, and suddenly a hyperrealistic holographic image appeared in midair. It showed a balding Indian man in very simple clothes sitting in what looked like a gray circular chamber. Davis was stunned at the image’s clarity—it was as though a three-dimensional sculpture had just materialized from nowhere. She could barely hear the audio amid the steam and exhaust motors in the corridor.

  “My name is Archibald Chattopadhyay, nuclear physicist and amateur poet. I have a lovely wife, Amala, who has given me five wonderful children. I led the team that first perfected a sustained fusion reaction, and for this I was imprisoned by the Bureau of Technology Control in April 1985. I am not dead. I live still . . .”

  Grady paused the hologram and pointed. “What you’re looking at is a prison cell in Hibernity, and that man, Archie Chattopadhyay, saved my life. And the lives of many other prisoners. He leads a prison group called the Resistors. There are dozens like me—maybe hundreds, and we need to save them.”

  Davis pointed at the device. “Can I hold onto that?”

  Grady shook his head. “Not yet. Not until we get access to a serious electronics facility. This device has holographic data from many more disappeared prisoners on it—people abducted from all around the world. It runs on DNA-encoded software, so it contains huge amounts of data—including the complete genomic sequence of each of these prisoners to prove they were the ones who made the recording.” But he held it up. “It also has a nanoscale inertial gyroscope that’s been recording my movements since I left the prison. There are instructions in it for parsing that data. And that will make it possible to lead help back to Hibernity. So I’m not letting this thing out of my sight until we get it to a lab.”

  Davis gazed at the first physical evidence she’d seen so far. It was a nearly miraculous device—but then, she was never very technological. Was it miraculous? “Why did the BTC take you, Mr. Grady?”

  He turned off the device and slipped it back beneath his shirt. “I invented a gravity mirror.”

  “That’s a mirror that reflects—”

  “Look, it’s not important. What’s important is that I get this data to people who can help rescue those I left behind. These are people whose innovations will literally transform the world, Agent Davis. Fusion energy, a cure for cancer, quantum computers, immortality, and a lot more. You need to help me find them and free them.”

  A booming sound echoed in the steam tunnels.

  Davis looked behind them.

  “I spent three years in solitary confinement at Hibernity with an AI doing experiments on my mind. It was a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from.”

  She turned back to him. “But why would they mess with the minds of geniuses?”

  “Because if you don’t join the BTC, they consider what’s in your head to be a threat. Hibernity is their research center for creation of a biological supercomputer—some sort of organic quantum machine. They’re trying to create consciousness without free will.”

  Davis again was speechless.

  “I’m just one person who discovered one thing. The men and women in Hibernity have done so much more than me. You need to help me save them. Their prison needs to be revealed to the world.

  Davis was still having difficulty wrapping her head around it all. Or even believing it.

  Then another loud boom behind them caused them both to turn around.

  A hundred feet back the way they came, Davis could see a nightmare—a seething swarm of metal links pouring itself like black nails over hot pipes and then re-forming again into a ball that rolled with the sound of chains tumbling down a staircase.

  She froze for a moment, but Grady grabbed her arm, pulling her along.

  “Damnit! We shouldn’t have been standing here!”

  “What the hell is that thing?”

  “Run!”

  “What is it?”

  “Chain golem. Nanotech machine. Don’t let it catch you.”

  She glanced back at the horror that was gaining on them. A black spiked ball three feet in diameter. “Oh, no kidding!”

  Davis drew her Glock 17 and aimed behind her.

  “Don’t waste your bullets! They won’t do anything.”

  She lowered her gun and kept running. “Why not?”

  “It’s thousands of interacting metal links. And the shots will help the Morrisons find us.”

  “Goddamnit!” Davis holstered her pistol.

  “There’s a fire door up ahead. Move!”

  She followed Grady as they raced through what looked like a magnetically controlled fire door. As they passed through the doorway, Grady pulled, drawing it off its magnetic plates. The door slammed shut just as the chain golem smashed into it—deforming it visibly.

  As Davis watched, she heard metallic rattling sounds like a ghost in chains—and then a massive booming sound as the door started to buckle further and bend in its frame. She turned to run but saw Grady rummaging through his backpack.

 
“What the hell are you doing?”

  He withdrew a plastic tube into which he poured white powder—like a muzzle-loading musket. “We can’t outrun it down here.”

  A glance back showed Davis that the monstrous black machine had smashed open the top half of the door and was busy swarming around it—re-assembling on their side.

  She started running but slowed when Grady didn’t follow. “Mr. Grady!”

  To Davis’s surprise, Grady tossed the backpack aside and raised the tube to his mouth like a blowgun. The chain golem rose to vaguely humanoid form and stomped heavily toward him.

  “Mr. Grady!”

  As the chain golem rose to engulf Grady, he blew through the tube and a plume of white powder billowed into it. Almost immediately the machine contracted—and in doing so, the grit jammed even further between its links. It collapsed to the floor and started writhing as if in a seizure. The abrasion made a horrible screeching sound—like a million nails across a million blackboards.

  Davis covered her ears as Grady grabbed his rucksack and motioned for her to follow. The deafening screeching continued as she glanced back to see the monster apparently in its death throes.

  “What the hell did you do?”

  “Diamond powder. Common industrial abrasive.”

  “How the hell did you know to do that?”

  Grady raised the video device on its chain. “I read the FAQ. Lots of good advice in here. They warned me they might send a golem. Nonlethal weapon for incapacitating high-value targets.”

  As they ran down the corridor, the horrific screeching died away.

  “That didn’t look nonlethal to me.”

  “Do you believe me now?”

  She still felt her heart trying to outrun her. Adrenaline had her hands shaking.

  “Keep moving.”

  Davis had long since lost any sense of direction as they moved through a series of tunnels—some narrow, some clean and modern, others obviously more than a century old and forgotten.

  They also came across locked doors several times, but Grady seemed to have a single key that opened them all. When Davis nodded toward it, he shrugged. “Stashed a master key beneath a flagstone years ago. Stole it from a facilities workshop.”