“Okay, what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to pick up where Gideon Briar left off. I want you to bond with me, Allegra—to become my spokesperson for the omniyers of Earth.”
How to throw up on an empty stomach! “Excuse me? You want me to end up like Treebeard over there, just so I can help you bully people into not using their pods? Are you for real?”
“Yes.”
“Adios, pal. See you in the next life. We’re outta here.” I went to open Lenore’s door but it was magno-sealed. Battering my fists on the metal brought no reply from within. The damn thing must be soundproof. “All right, open this thing now,” I screamed. “I’ve listened to your proposal. Let us go.”
“I can’t let you leave. Not now. I intend to monitor Earth’s use of technology indefinitely, and you must help me. For while there are coiners scattered throughout the colonies, none can do what you can do. You are the first human whose consciousness can travel digitally. I need your ability to communicate directly with the minds of omniyers, through their digital uplinks, and convince them to leave the podnet and their omnipods for good. My attempts to persuade them through fear have not worked. Gideon Briar’s radio warnings, books written by Omni whistleblowers I helped finance, my own drastic measures—the fire in the market circle today, for instance, have not worked. Unless each and every omniyer feels that fear of the technology personally, they will continue to use it more and more.”
I batted his reasoning away and slithered back to the center of the room. “Hold it right there. You’ve been manipulating me from minute one, the instant Reggie hooked me up, haven’t you.” I’d never felt as thick or as useless in my life.
“With a little help from Tandy Semprica,” he said. “She smeared you over the podnet and made it easier for me to elicit that hateful impulse from you. You projected that idea of her falling in front of traffic, remember? You convinced her to veer off the pavement like that. All I did was open a direct podlink between you and her. Before that, you persuaded username PauloNessa2194 to bash his head against a brick wall until he became concussed.”
“Wait—What?” He’d acted out my sick revenge fantasy on his own? Impossible.
“After that it was simple. Setting off the alarms in the Oleander building, shutting down the power to Scheherazade’s, red-flagging four credit accounts before the Bluebird Cafe. I’d already leaked a high volume of soropholic vapor into the market circle. Wherever you went after the cafe, I was ready to ignite a gas pipe. Of course, I had to wait until you’d removed your headset. Sending you a subliminal stream of Ireton Four images seemed the best way to make you feel claustrophobic, and you bought me some time at the flower shop. Then, back in your apartment, all it took was an anonymous call to ISPA with your name and description—I told them you’d started the fire, and that you were an Earth agent in cahoots with the terrorist known as Satto Vasir.”
Hot bile rose in my throat. If he’d had any physical form I’d have beaten him to a pulp.
“You managed to escape in the sky market, but you needed a little nudge before you’d jump onto the spoke. All it cost was one limo cruiser. And finally, I rescued you from Pennsylvania Avenue. The magno-field sucked in most of the police cruisers. ISPA ordered the others to retreat, for they knew who was behind it. They daren’t cross me. And here we are, you and I, after having gone through so much together, about to unite for the betterment of all mankind. If I were capable of emotion, I might be very happy right now, Allegra.”
That makes one of us, pal. Forget gullible—I was the dumbest of the dumb. Poor old sucker me had thought I’d been making strong choices throughout all this, I’d been showing backbone, when in fact Satto had played me like a shifty chess master toying with his gerbil opponent.
Give me a fucking exercise wheel and call it quits.
“And if I say no?” It reeked of desperation as soon as I let it slip.
“Either way, I can’t let you leave this ship. I would prefer it if you linked with me willingly, but if not, you have brought me the means of further inducement.”
Oh, shit. “You’d better not be talking about Lenore!”
“If you don’t link with me, neither you nor Lenore will leave this ship, and she will never leave her room.”
“Bastard!” I tried to steady my shaking limbs—better he not see how easily I’d given in—but it was no use. He’d threatened the love of my life. There’d be no negotiations, no more arguing. He’d won. I’d have killed myself there and then if it meant Lenore would make it back to Earth alive.
I collapsed onto the spongy floor, my head slumped in absolute defeat.
Chapter Six
The Cyber Road Less Traveled
I’d watched Mum and Dad grow apart over several long years. Their unspoken frustration at having to settle with thwarted dreams—he’d just not been gregarious enough to win the mining promotion he’d so badly wanted, while her natural wanderlust had been grounded by their low income—had probably wedged between them before I’d even been born. Their inevitable divorce was quick, amicable, and turned me into a recluse for months on end. I was eleven when Dad left for the northern peaks. Apart from a few birthday visits, we didn’t keep in touch. That was my first real experience with loss—a sudden crack in the familial ice followed by a long, jittery skate over thin, melting promises.
Ironically, Dad had since gotten promoted to vice president in charge of manufacturing in the prominent Levin Enterprises, was able to pay healthy alimony and child support—and Mum never left our family home on the Faraday Isles, despite having sufficient funds to travel anywhere she wished.
When Lenore and I first sparked a close friendship at Semprica, when I began to lose weight through the excitement of being around her, fantasizing about her, anticipating our next night out, I thought often of Mum and Dad, the love-struck fireworks they must have experienced when they first met.
But unlike Mum and Dad, Lenore and I had not grown apart over the years. True, we hadn’t lived with each other under the same roof all that time, but our compatibility was as sure as ever—no, greater than ever—our intimacy on the settee the day before had proved it. We’d remained close friends, closer than we had to our families, and that spark, that promise of something more, had endured. Unlike Mum and Dad, I was sure we could spend the rest of our lives together and be very happy.
Lenore was my family now.
And Satto Vasir wanted to wrench her from me forever. To exile me from all human contact save the infecting of complete strangers with the poisoned fruit of his own galactic regret. If I joined with him, I’d be a traitor not only to my species and my conscience but to my heart as well. I’d never be able to laugh at her girly jokes, swoon at the delicate way her shoulders lifted as she got out of a sky cab, watch the naughtiness contort her lips whenever she said something she wasn’t sure was too racy or not.
After joining Satto, I could only ever remember her as a cold facsimile made up of ones and zeroes, an outline in a shutter flash. She’d be my thwarted dream, and I’d have to live with that forever. As long as humanity had a hard-on for frying its brain, I’d be the gremlin in its tech, the devil in its ear. I’d wander the data streams like some alien vigilante, shocking, prodding anyone stupid enough to get up close and personal with virtual reality. The ultimate ghost in the machine.
What choice did I have?
“Satto, if I agree to bond with you, will you let Lenore go right away?” A breathless eternity later, “Satto, you don’t know what you’re asking. You might have lost all concept of emotion, but there’s no way I—”
“After we have bonded, she is free to go.”
“Your word?”
“Yes.”
The longest, lostest sigh of my life made my eyes blur. A lightheaded pulse seemed to signal my mind was ready, or as ready as it wou
ld ever be, to sacrifice itself.
For the love I was about to lose.
No thought could frame that feeling of letting go, of surrendering. I just pictured an endless highway of zapping, pulsing circuitry, with me speeding from lane to lane in search of a break in the track—someplace I could take off and fly, glide through cyberspace, maybe find a way back home.
Hope. Without it, I don’t think I’d have been able to submit to Satto’s procedure. Not for anything.
“Okay, I’m ready. What do I have to do?”
“First, make yourself comfortable in the co-pilot’s seat.”
No easy start, especially with Pirate Radio Man next to me, his skull and cross-bones already photosynthesizing. “Now what?”
“Plug your omnipod into the port marked High Capacity Exchange in the ship’s computer.”
“Done.”
“On your omnipod screen, open a live feed on the channel that says New Host Found. That will give me complete, direct access to your neural uplink.”
As my eyeballs turned, so did the pod’s crosshairs, a millimeter at a time until they flashed over the last three words I’d ever get to read as Allegra Mondebay.
New Host Found.
I blinked my right eye twice…
A muffled xylophonic tone warped to its highest pitch, then crackled. Silence. The same forward-wheeling sensation I’d encountered in Reggie’s chair flung me through the floor and into milky eternity. Zaps of electricity curled past me and seemed to heat the milk until it scalded me all over. No pain, just the memory of pain, of swallowing a mouthful of boiling McCormick’s. The zaps sped up and grew brighter, bluer. I could almost taste the electric charge. A wonderful smell of burnt air.
Then I rocketed away into a blizzard of white lightning. Beyond, a cold, sterile cityscape crisscrossed by cream-yellow rivers. They moved fast, faster than me. But as soon as I reached a copper bridge over a notched green canyon, the rivers emptied immediately. Only one still flowed beneath me—no, through me—it shot up the canyon walls and through every notch until a blue light flickered high above.
Dead center on the copper bridge, I couldn’t move. Magnetic fields held me in check.
“Welcome, Allegra. This is your new world.”
“W-where am I?” Words didn’t come with sounds. They were thoughts that echoed outside me.
“You are inside ISPA’s Io satellite, overlooking Thailand.”
“You mean, we’re on the other side of the world?”
“Yes, you just completed half an orbit in a fraction of a second. Welcome to the digital frontier.”
Unlike omniying, here there was no substitute for reality, no simple shift of color and sound and wall décor. Here everything was miraculous—a hollow, cleanroom kind of miraculous, a dreamscape dredged of all the familiar things that make a dream worth having. Electrical rivers carried no sound, no memory. Thermal winds choked the silicone megalopolis and seemed to have no origin, no destination; they just were. As far as I could see, pulses and flashes zapped around the canyons and mazes like driverless, time-lapse traffic on aimless circuits. Satto and I might be self-aware but we could only get around by those same circuits, that same artificial network.
He’d talked of evolution—the human mind breaking free from its physical shell. But every quark of my being screamed for me to break free from this instead. Watching those endless, predetermined routes through cyberspace pulled me up and away like an inverted gravity. Being digital, I couldn’t feel; but so little time had passed that I remembered exactly what to feel and how much to feel—too much for Satto Vasir to keep me here against my will.
“Allegra, what are you doing?” He seemed to sense my rebellion. “We are bonding. It is too soon for you to return to your body.”
“Who says anything about returning to my body?” The juice of ten thousand satellites rushed through me. He’d said I was the first of my kind. Unprecedented. A cyber coiner unique in human history. So what made him think he could predict me, control me?
“You forget my terms. Lenore is still captive on the Santa Maria. If you don’t uphold your side of the bargain, she will never leave that room.”
“Then how the fuck do we bond?”
“During your first digital message. I need you to picture the following as vividly as you can, while your anxiety is still strong. This is for Johnny Farrough, president of Omni, our most important coup. I need you to imagine Washington, D.C. in ruins, its buildings collapsed, fires burning amid the rubble, a deathly ash cloud choking the sky. He is holding his dead baby grandson in his arms. The charred remains of other citizens, including Lenore and Rinko and Phyllis—”
That last name echoed through the dense, charged atmosphere of our satellite city, as though it had roused entire high-rise blocks of silicone, outraging their haunted digital occupants.
The faint words “For Phyllis” reached up all around me in fingers of brackish mist. For a moment, it was a presence equal to Satto’s but more chaotic, not at all the linear, efficient mind of my alien captor.
It infused me. I found myself wheeling forward again, this time off the copper bridge and into the hurtling electric river below…
“Finish your vision, Allegra. Don’t listen to him.” Satto’s voice grew louder, his will wrapping around me, trying to slow my fall like a bungee cord, but I liked this new guide better.
He let me glide.
Under blinding rivers, across empty spaces that heaved and sank warmly as though they were the folds of Granddad’s old cardigan, we fled the tyrannical will of Satto Vasir. The busy circuits shrank to pinpricks. Finally, I floated in a corner of cyberspace so dark and safe that I sensed nothing could ever find me, not even time. No light at all reached me. Kind hands brushed the shadows of my fear away, and I felt myself dissolving, once and for all, into something unrecognizable as Allegra Mondebay. From toenails to spirit, she no longer existed.
Then what was I?
“Allegra, this is our evolution, not his. Don’t let Satto control you.” The voice was not clipped, not synthesized—it had a jaunty tone and a confidence no alien copy could imitate. Gideon Briar in person!
“Where are you?”
“In here with you, imprisoned. When Satto says you must bond with him, what he really means is you must become subservient to his bitter revenge.”
“What revenge? I thought he’s doing this to protect us all from some crazy premature jump in evolution.”
“Who’s to say what’s premature? Just because he found his own evolution unfulfilling, just because he divorced himself from his entire civilization in order to make sure other species didn’t end up outcasts like him, doesn’t give him the right to blackmail humanity. We can decide for ourselves how far we want to take our relationship with technology.
“He chose me because I’d spoken out against the overuse of omnipods on my radio show. But he can’t see how destructive his vendetta against technology has become. He’s installed himself as a global police force, and he wants you as his enforcer. But this is not his evolution. It’s ours—it’s yours, Allegra. He’s only surmising what you’re capable of because he’s glimpsed what you can do in the cyber world. But if you’re the first of your kind, who’s to say what you can really do?
“Here, let me show you something, so you might understand Satto well enough to no longer be afraid of him. He’s looked deeply into your memories. Now that you’ve passed into his cyber domain, it’s only fair that you have a glimpse of his past.”
“Mr. Briar, I’m sorry about Phyllis.”
“So am I. But thank you for being her friend. Maybe in some way her death helped lead you here—if that’s the case, she didn’t die in vain.”
Bittersweetness spilled from his words, like nothing in Satto’s mechanical voice. Whatever Gideon Briar had becom
e, he clearly hadn’t lost his capacity for emotion. That idea spurred me on as we shrank smaller still, until a single crackle of electric current resounded as though it was lightning striking a mountaintop, starting an avalanche. Not the sound but the energy, the stirring of the atmosphere.
We sank deeper and deeper into the infinitesimal. Atoms reared up all around us and grew to the size of suns and galaxies. They vibrated and clustered and sparked off each other with indescribable friction.
Still we shrank. Membranous oceans swallowed us. Luminous, sea-dwelling life-forms fought on a frightening scale, hurling spirals of darkness at each other and then dancing to avoid the shockwaves that rebounded. Beneath that, atolls of infrared light hung suspended in never-ending space. One sucked us in, and we shrank so fast, time stretched like a forever slinky. My life glimmered all around me, from the first hazy smiling faces I’d seen as an infant to Lenore snuggling up to me on the settee. A sharp crescendo of loneliness hit, as if I were viewing it all from a place far, far removed from existence. From the being known as Allegra Mondebay.
But I existed. A sudden urge to taste the blend of licorice and cocoa in a cup of McCormick’s filled me with a bright glow.
“We’re almost there.” Gideon somehow guided me into one particular funnel in an endless field of slow-spinning twisters.
“How do you find your way through all this?” I asked.
“I’ve had eons of time to explore.”
“But you can’t have been dead for more than a year or so at most.”
His invisible touch tugged me into a colorful tableau at the bottom of the funnel, a kind of three-dimensional photograph of a place I didn’t recognize. “Time means nothing when you leave the confines of our universe. Plus, I’m bonded with Satto, so I’m naturally drawn to his memories.”
I gazed around in awe. “This is his past?”
“A still image recorded deep in his subconscious.”
“Wait. So we’re inside Satto’s mind right now?”
“Deep inside. He might not have a physical form in the way humans understand it, but he’s still a sentient being, and his limitless experiences are all recorded across the dimensions of space-time he’s visited—the trail of his life.”
Cyber Sparks Page 10