by Tad Williams
"All of which wouldn't have meant all that much, except that HARDCASE had a much different approach, especially to recruiting. Their process was much closer to what I had imagined would be used on PEREGRINE, focusing on reflexes and even more esoteric things, synaptic variations, certain types of chemical and immune system receptivities, and so on. And even psychologically they were looking for a different kind of subject. We were pilots, had been chosen primarily as such—some of the PEREGRINE subjects had never flown a combat mission, but they were all fliers, much like the original astronaut corps. HARDCASE needed soldiers. You might even say that, ultimately, they needed killers. They tried to be more discriminating than that, but that infinitesimal slant shadowed it from the beginning, I think.
"Even so, if Barrett Keener's problems had been physical—a tumor, say, or a serotonin imbalance, it would have been caught immediately. Both PEREGRINE and HARDCASE subjects were routinely tested for such things, and we spent most of our time hooked up to analytical devices as a matter of course. But in those days pure schizophrenia was still largely a mystery, and Keener was the sort of paranoid who made hiding his growing illness part of the focus of his madness. Although very few people who worked with the man could honestly say they liked him, not a single one of the psychologists or doctors at Sand Creek or any of his HARDCASE co-subjects guessed that he was slowly going insane. Not until it was too late.
"I see the look on your face, Mr. Ramsey. No, you haven't ever heard of Keener. You'll find out why in a moment.
"I can be brief about this, and I would prefer to be. I lost many friends on the day of Keener's rampage. There were plenty of safeguards built into the system, but although the military and its contractors had considered the possibility of sabotage, and had even considered the frightening possibility that one of the HARDCASE subjects might have a breakdown, no one had considered that both might happen. Keener, caught in the grip of a strengthening psychotic delusion, had been preparing for weeks. The HARDCASE complex at Sand Creek was an arsenal—the cybernetic battle-suits themselves each carried the firepower of a Powell tank, and there was a stockpile of other ordnance for combat-testing purposes. But as deadly as the battle-suits were, for someone like Barrett Keener with a background in munitions there was even more damage that could be done. He spent weeks preparing in secret, determined to avenge some incomprehensible insult, or strike some unimaginable blow for delusional freedom, descending deeper and deeper into a black spiral of hatred.
"I have pieced together much of what happened from secret reports. It was night when it began, and most of the personnel on the base were asleep. I happened to be up—I've never needed a lot of sleep—working with the night-shift technicians in the construction bay. We heard the explosions first. We barely had time to wonder what was going on when Keener himself, his battle-suit already in full thermodispersal flare, blew through the walls of the construction hangar. He wasn't singling us out—we were simply on his destructive path from one end of the base to the other. Despite the surprise and the firestorm from the bombs he had already triggered, there had been at least a little resistance before he got to us. Keener had already survived a direct hit from a grenade launcher with only scorch marks and a slow freon leak at one of the suit joints to show for it. With the glow of his heat dispersal units and the cloud of leaking vapor, he looked like an angry god. We didn't have a chance. As he stepped through the wall he opened up with a mini-railgun and the place literally fell apart around us.
"It was horrible. I cannot bear to think about it much. In the early days I tried to imagine things I could have done differently, ways I could have saved my comrades—tortured myself with a thousand different scenarios. Now I know that it was only blind luck that I even survived. I was close enough to one of the ships under construction that I was able to scramble inside the shell when the first of Keener's incendiary ordnance went off. I had time only to see Keener marching out across the rubble of the construction bay, armor blazing like the sun as it struggled to process the additional heat, then the rest of the thermal grenades he was spraying began exploding and everything went away."
Sellars brought a knuckle slowly up to the corner of his dry eye. Ramsey wondered if it were only an old gesture helplessly repeated, or if the man felt tears he could not shed. He wondered which would be worse.
"Two technicians inside the ship and I were the only ones in the bay that survived the attack, and neither of them lasted out the month—they were too badly burned. We all were burned, roasted like meat in an oven, but I had shielded organs and modified skin—the engineers didn't. I was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to survive. Just barely.
"After leaving a path of destruction all the way across the base, Keener actually escaped Sand Creek. Through a lucky accident his built-in flight jets were incapacitated by machine gun fire from one of the sentry posts, so he set out on foot. He was headed toward the closest town, a place called Buffalo, I think, and God knows what he would have done when he got there, but they scrambled jets from the nearest air base and caught him within a mile or so of Sand Creek, in open prairie. They lost a plane, but Barrett Keener was finally killed by air-to-ground misiles. To be more precise, even though there were no direct hits on him, the explosions finally pushed his suit past its dispersal limit and it went up like a small-bore thermonuclear device. It took years, I hear, before anything grew on the spot. The soil was virtually turned to glass.
"So . . . a madman committed a very, very expensive suicide, and the rest of us were left behind to deal with it. I was the only surviving test subject of PEREGRINE. Keener had been even more thorough with his HARDCASE comrades, placing shaped charges in the barracks, and every one of them died in their beds when the building went up. The entire Sand Creek base was in ruins—one hundred and eighty-six killed, three times that many wounded. The ships were ruined, billions of dollars worth of work and research gone, so the military-corporate fellows cut their losses and ended the program. HARDCASE was buried too—or at least that was the official story. Of course, Keener had managed to do a very impressive amount of damage with only a single suit, and the less ambitious combat suits that soldiers wear today look very similar to the HARDCASE regalia, so perhaps they simply changed the name of the program and started again somewhere else."
"How . . . how horrible," breathed Kaylene Sorensen.
"I've never seen anything about this," Ramsey said, trying to keep from sounding too doubtful, if nothing else out of respect for the obvious pain on Sellars' ruined face. "Not a whisper."
"It was buried very, very deep. People knew about the base at Sand Creek of course, but not what was being done there or what ultimately went wrong. The official story was that it was closed because of a bad fire, with some residual radiation contamination forcing them to seal the site. Some of the dead, like the PEREGRINE volunteers, whose postings had been secret in the first place, were siphoned off to other operations and their deaths reported there. It was a failure of colossal proportions, not to mention that it would have brought down countless billions in lawsuits if the truth came out. They buried it. They couldn't just make it disappear completely, of course, which is why there are rumors about what happened there to this very day."
"And they buried you, too?"
"As best they could. I had no relatives. In fact, they thought I was dead the first twelve hours or so, because . . . because the scene in the construction bay was so bad. When I survived, it became easier just to lose me."
"They made you a prisoner!" Ramsey couldn't help feeling angry.
"Not at first. No, with all that time and effort put into me, quite literally, they wanted to find some other use for me. But my project was gone, I myself was burned, crippled, my circuitry badly damaged. I was functionally useless—and, unlike the other survivors, I was also incontrovertible living testimony to what had happened there. If an ordinary soldier violated his confidentiality agreement, you might be able to discredit him as a crackpot, but what about a
man with millions of dollars of state-of-the-art cybernetic implants in his body? Yes, eventually they imprisoned me, but I am actually grateful, Mr. Ramsey. In another country or another time they might simply have cut their losses and silenced me in a more definitive manner."
Ramsey did not know what to say. In the silence, Major Sorensen huffed and sat up, glancing around. Not knowing he had been asleep for almost ten minutes, he did his best to look as though he had just closed his eyes to concentrate better. Sellars looked at him for a moment with what almost seemed like fondness before continuing.
"It's been a long time. What happened then isn't so important, except to me. But what does matter is what happened afterward. After the first few years' rounds of hospitals and research facilities, they decided there was nothing useful left to do with me, so they moved me to the base—the one where you babysat me, Major Sorensen, although I arrived there a long time before you even joined the service. In fact, one of the small ironies of the whole terrible mess was that even though I was Navy, my imprisonment somehow came out of the accounting for HARDCASE, so I wound up on an army base.
"The only thing the top brass really wanted from me was silence, so I lived for years in an environment that might have been something from an earlier century—no telephone, no television, no electronic connection to the outside world. But after I had been ten years on the base, my cultivated show of patience had lulled them. I was allowed a wallscreen, since a one-way, extremely low speed media connection could hardly cause much trouble when the recipient was allowed no input devices.
"I had been waiting years for this, of course. I was so bored, and in those days so angry at what had been done to me, that I had freedom on my mind the way a slave chained to a galley oar does. My only exercise was mental—you can see my legs, my withered arms, what Keener's incendiaries did to me—but I was a pilot, damn it! In a few minutes I had lost everything—my ship, my health, my freedom—but I had in me still that drive, that need. If I was denied the skies, I could fly through information space, the way my PEREGRINE fellows and I had discovered. It might not be the same as walking the streets like other citizens, but it would still be escape of a very real sort.
"It was true that I had no devices to access the net. No visible ones, in any case. But even then my caretakers understood very little about my capabilities . . . and, more importantly, my obsession for escape. It was easy enough to steal a length of fiberlink from the men who installed the wallscreen. When they were gone, it was almost as easy for me to perform a brief if messy operation with a magnifying glass, a butter knife I had ground down to razor-sharpness, and various other implements, including old-fashioned solder. It would have looked horrible to anyone but me, the wires going directly into a long and bloody incision in my arm, but I connected up to the old input control point from the PEREGRINE days and began using some of my implanted systems to force a machine-language connection, reversing through the wallscreen downlink.
"I won't bore you with all the details. My keepers on the base eventually noticed what I was doing—I was so enraptured with my newfound freedom that I was not as cautious as I should have been. They brought four MPs to subdue me—me, all one hundred and ten shriveled, pre-metric pounds!—and ripped out the wallscreen. Doctors sewed me back up. See, here is the scar. They put a big flashing marker on my file ordering that nothing which might allow me that kind of connection was ever to be given me again, and I was subjected to periodic random searches for decades.
"But what they didn't know was that it was already too late. In the early hours of my newfound freedom, I located and downloaded a raft of specialized gear to my internal systems, including a very clever little black market number that permitted me to make remote connection to nearby networks, using my own metallicized bones as an antenna. Long before the telematic jack became a chic accessory for the busy new-rich, I had one of my own, invisibly hidden inside me.
"Since then, I have continually upgraded myself, all without the knowledge of my captors. Not everything could be done by software alone, but to a man who can go anywhere and converse with anyone, not much is out of reach. In a fit of reflexive honesty, the military had kept my pension for any survivors that might turn up. I made it disappear with a small numbers trick, then moved it into some other areas and began growing it—legitimately, always legitimately. I don't know why that matters, but it does. I have never stolen from anyone. Well, except information. I'm not the world's richest man by any stretch, but I have a tidy sum now, and for a long time I bent it all toward self-improvement. Upgrades?" Sellars suddenly laughed, a genuine bark of amusement. "I am the Upgraded Man! Do you remember my chess-by-mail game, Major Sorensen?"
The man narrowed his eyes. "We examined the hell out of that. No codes. No trick writing. Nothing."
"Oh, it was a perfectly legitimate game—we made sure of that. But you can put quite a bit of expensive black-market nanomachinery in the period after the word 'check,' which is how one of my contacts was able to send me the last things I needed to be able to upgrade my system and survive without constant hydration. I tore out and ate a tiny little piece of paper and the little machines went to work. I would not have lasted a day in that tunnel under the base without that improvement."
"You bastard," Sorensen said admiringly. "We were wondering what you were going to do after you broke out. We had every medical supply place in three states on the watch."
"But why?" Ramsey asked. "Why did you wait so long to escape? I mean, you've been there thirty years or so, haven't you?"
Sellars nodded. "Because after I'd gained full-time access to the net, and had read every file, explored every record, my anger began to fade. A terrible thing had happened to me, an injustice—but what did that really mean? Now that I had a sort of freedom, what more did I want? Look at me, Mr. Ramsey. It was clear that I was never going to be able to live a normal life. I still harbored deep resentments, but I also began to put my endless free time into other things. Exploration of the fast-growing worldwide data sphere—the net. Amusements of various sorts. Experiments.
"It was in the course of one such experiment that I found the first track of the Grail Brotherhood. . . ."
"Hang on a bit," said Ramsey. "What sort of experiments?"
For a moment Sellars hesitated, then his waxy face seemed to harden. "I do not wish to talk about that. Do you want me to go on, or have you heard enough for one day?"
"No, please continue. I didn't mean to offend you." But Catur Ramsey's radar was still flashing. It almost seemed like the old man wanted to be asked again, but Ramsey had no experience reading the odd features. But there's something there, he thought. Something important, at least to Sellars. Is it important to us, too? It was impossible to guess. He filed it away for later. "Please, go on."
"I have already explained much of what I discovered then. What the Brotherhood seemed to be doing, the weapons at its disposal, all were bad enough. But now, just in the last forty-eight hours, everything has gone completely off the rails. I am having a terrible time trying to make sense of anything and my whole Garden is in an uproar."
"Garden?" said Kaylene Sorensen before anyone else could. "What garden?"
"I apologize. It is the way I order my information—a metaphor, in a sense, but a very real thing to me as well. If you like, I will show it to you someday. It was . . . really quite beautiful once." He shook his head slowly. "Now it is blighted. Order is gone. Something drastic has happened to the Grail network, and also to the Brotherhood itself. The newsnets tell me that several people I believe to be part of their leadership have all died within the last few days, their empires suddenly in chaos. Is this part of some move toward immortality—of conveying themselves into the virtual universe forever, as I suspected that they planned? If so, it seems odd they would leave such disruption behind, since they must surely still need some kind of economic power to maintain that huge, expensive network."
"You're only guessing about that," said Michael So
rensen. "About a lot of things."
"I am only guessing about almost everything," said Sellars, amused and disgusted, and at that moment finally won much of Catur Ramsey's trust, "But the probability factors are too high to ignore, and have been since I first encountered this ghastly plot. I'm terrified, trying to grope at something behind a big thick black curtain and guess what it is. But I am certain that whatever it might be, it's bad and getting worse—unfortunately, that's the guess I'm most confident about. Do you think I would have involved a child like your daughter if I could believe for an instant I might be wrong? Me, who had his own life ruined by trusting those who should have known better and planned better? Major Sorensen, Mrs. Sorensen, I can never earn forgiveness for endangering your daughter, so I haven't asked. But I can promise you that I only did it because I felt that the stakes were so frighteningly high. . . ." He stopped and shook his hairless head. "No, that would not make it better. She is your child, after all."
"And we won't let anything happen to her," Christabel's mother said fiercely. "That's the one risk I won't allow." She stared at her husband; it was not a gentle look. "Not anymore."
"I think we understand the basic situation." A part of Ramsey was amazed that he was still sitting here, even more amazed to find he was about to take a central part in something that by any rational standard should be considered a mass delusion. "So the question is . . . what can we do?"
"Let me bring you up to date on the poor and probably hopeless measures I began," Sellars said. "My little group of explorers. I still have hopes for them, and until I know otherwise, I'll assume that they are all still alive, still active."
"Oh my God," said Ramsey suddenly. "Sam Fredericks. Orlando Gardiner. They're yours. . . . I mean, I'd almost forgotten, when we first spoke you said you knew something about them. Is that what you meant—you sent them into this network?"
Sellars shook his head. "In a way. But yes, they are part of the small group of people I brought together. I hope they still are."