Pivotal (Visceral Book 3)

by Adam Thielen

  * * *

  Roland ground the nicostick around between his teeth as he admired the blaze in front of him. Even from ten meters away, it was almost hot enough to singe his hair when the wind picked up. His wide, bloodshot eyes stared at the flames. Even they followed the same path. That such forces could be made so predictable made him feel like a god.

  His com augment chimed, and the name and portrait of the director of Chantech intelligence appeared on his heads-up display. “Yes, Mr. Yang.”

  “Mr. Somer, I see you are enjoying yourself.”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It seems your sister has some fans,” said Yang. “Two hours after you dropped her off at the Kang Hills facility, a small group of outsiders took her back out.”

  The stick went loose in Roland’s mouth. “Yang, what kind of clowns are running that place?”

  “Let’s be careful, Mr. Somer,” cautioned Yang. “We believe you were followed there.”

  “You will forgive me if I’m a little skeptical,” said Somer. “In any case, give me a lead, and I’ll get her again.”

  “No, Mr. Somer. The Chairman wants a word. I’m sending your lieutenants this time.”

  “You think some people followed me, stole one of your prized possessions, and that instead of finding her, I should go to a meeting?” Roland scoffed.

  “He has concerns,” said Yang. “But I’m sure you can put him at ease.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Roland jovially. “I’m going to ease the shit out of him.”

  “Mr. Somer...”

  “On my way now.”

  * * *

  With Cho still radio silent, Drew and Kate decided to get some distance between themselves and Desre’s captors, while still staying fairly close to Tsenka’s GPS marker. They headed to the port city of Tianjin, just one hundred and thirty kilometers from Beijing. Once one of the largest cities in the mainland, Tianjin was still a formidable trading hub, and its economy gave it a certain amount of clout while the international business interests of multiple corporations made it much more friendly to Westerners than the rest of Chantech territory.

  Kate rented an expensive suite at the Tangla Hotel in the center of town. She wanted space for all three of them, even though technically Drew wouldn’t need a bed. Part of her wanted to splurge, as she rarely traveled. She did manage to bid it down and stack a few promotional codes, but it still was expensive for her budget.

  Once they settled in, Kate called Taq to check on him. The face that appeared in front of her looked markedly different than the one she left. It was Taq, but he looked less weary and spoke with clarity and energy.

  “Wow,” he said. “You are going all-out. I didn’t know this was a vacation.”

  “Hey, why not?” she said. “You l-look good. Like super good.”

  “You just miss me,” replied Taq. “How’s the mission?”

  “I shouldn’t talk about it,” Kate said, her voice lowering. “Made some progress, I think.”

  “I hope it won’t take you too long.”

  “I don’t think it will,” she replied with a smile. “Hon, I just wanted to check in. I have to do a couple things, but I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” he sighed. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.” Kate disconnected, then stared at the carpeted floor for a moment before remembering why she needed to go. She looked up at Desre, who stared out of one of the windows, admiring the view of the city.

  Kate pinged Tsenka’s com but received no reply. She checked their online message drop. Tsenka had left nothing. Her GPS had gone silent just after entering a Ping detention facility. Kate became worried, then agitated.

  “Drew,” she said, turning to the robot. “Is there a way we can get in contact with Ping and ask—no, request Tsenka’s status?”

  “I will begin making calls,” said Drew. He sat on a loveseat in front of a coffee table, looking straight ahead at nothing. “However, they will have little incentive to provide us with information unless we identify her.”

  “Hm. That would only complicate things.” Kate sat on a small upholstered chair next to Drew. “Can you start probing their network? Maybe we can do a little light extraction.”

  “Certainly, Ms. Jones.”

  Desre sat next to Drew on the loveseat. Kate still didn’t know exactly what to think about her, and what to say to her. She seemed almost blithe about the situation. The psion was young and pretty and curvaceous, and Kate found herself a little irritated at her existence. It wasn’t just about her looks, though. It was also the way she moved, as if constantly at ease. She talked as if she had no doubts or fears, and Kate had never been charismatic.

  She watched Desre play with a com Kate had bought for her, eventually figuring out how to get it to project an image on the wall, and then switching modes to project it into her retinas. She put it away and experimented with a panel on the wall, eventually displaying a two-dimensional news feed. She switched from one channel to another, looking for something to watch, eventually settling on a movie.

  Desre sat back down and put a hand on Drew’s knee joint. “What’s a girl gotta do to get some food around here?”

  “I do not believe you require my assistance,” said Drew. “This hotel has many culinary options that they can deliver to our room.”

  “Thank you, robot,” said Desre.

  Drew had been motionless since he sat down but at that, he turned his head toward Desre. Kate smiled at the thought that Drew had been irritated. Desre ignored him and took remote control of the smart wall with a wave, then swiped over to the room service menu and began to peruse the hotel’s offerings.

  “Order me a steak,” said Kate.

  “Excellent choice, madam,” said Desre. She put in both their orders but allowed Kate to answer their door and bring the food inside.

  Few places served real meat, and fewer served it unadulterated, and fewer still without grinding it up and treating it for long-term storage. The meal cost almost as much as the price of the room, but it was only the second time Kate had eaten a natural cut of beef, and it was as good as she remembered. Desre ate potato soup, a club sandwich, and non-dairy chocolate ice cream.

  Drew watched them and noted the change in the women’s demeanor, deciding that when they returned home he would have to develop hardware for tasting foods and figure out how to simulate eating. A call interrupted his thoughts. It was Tsenka.

  “Ms. Cho,” said Drew, grabbing Kate’s attention with a wave. “Hold on, I am putting you on our screen here.” A simulated image of Tsenka appeared on the wall. Her com was built into her brain implant, and so her hardware read her facial expressions and simulated them for the benefit of the others. On Tsenka’s end, she could see both her cohorts and their new friend through the camera built into the smart wall.

  “What’s going on, Tsenka?” asked Kate.

  “I followed Roland in Baoding,” said Tsenka. “He blew up some building there, then left. I got there and Ping Group showed up and arrested me.”

  “Why are you still there?” asked Kate.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m tired of chasing, and I didn’t want to kill all these people. Anyway, I see you have his sister.”

  “Desre, meet Tsenka Cho, the muscle,” said Kate.

  “Pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure,” said Desre.

  “I see where you are at,” said Cho. “Is it safe there?”

  “There’s no place safe for me,” said Desre.

  “We’re fine,” said Kate. “But we should meet up tomorrow and find a good place to trap him.”

  “Trap?” questioned Somer. “You’re talking about my brother, aren’t you? That’s why you rescued me?”

  “I tried to get to him tonight, but he got away, and the tracker won’t work for much longer,” explained Cho. “We don’t want to use you, but your brother has to die.”

  Desre sighed. “And who is it that wants him dead? From your accents, I must
assume the New Republic has it out for him.”

  “The NR has no interest in him,” said Cho. “But I do.”

  “Now that’s interesting,” said Desre. “Who’d he kill to deserve your wrath?”

  Tsenka’s mouth opened, and she realized she had only told one other person what had happened. Others had understood her injuries and the circumstances of the incident, but not from Cho’s mouth.

  “Your brother waited for me and my team in Taiwan. He killed three of my colleagues. He beat me until I couldn’t fight back, and then he held my face in the dirt while he raped me. One of his men shot my fourth colleague when he screamed for him to stop. His bros cheered him on, and when he was finished, he shot me in the back of the head and lit nearby brush on fire that eventually engulfed our car and burned half of my body. The bullet created a narrow path through my brain, barely missing the stem and cleanly exiting without breaking up. My suit slowed some of the bleeding and kept my heart beating.”

  Tsenka inhaled. “Most of what made me me was shot, burned, bled, or humiliated out of existence. But thanks to Kate and others, those parts were replaced with things less fragile, and my only motivation is to see Roland dead.”

  “I’m... sorry,” said Desre after a few moments of consideration. “I wish I could say that I’m shocked. But Roland feels no remorse. He has no regard for right and wrong. He’s been killing, torturing, and raping for years... and you can’t kill him.”

  Episode 10: The Kiss and the Crunch

  “I know he’s your brother,” started Tsenka. “But you have—”

  “He may be my brother, but I’ve seen his work. He’s a monster, and I harbor no love for him. No, what I mean is, he can’t be killed,” Desre tried to clarify. “And even if he were, I’m not sure it really matters.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” challenged Kate.

  “Any human can be killed,” stated Drew.

  “Well, robot—”

  “Drew,” he interrupted. “My name is Drew.”

  “Drew-bot,” she addressed. “Roland is a special case.”

  “How so?” asked Kate.

  “We call ourselves seers,” began Desre. “Though you call us psions. We have many gifts. One of which is a sense of the near future. Roland has a very focused future-sense. Mine is blurry, so to speak, but covers a larger area of time and space.”

  “You can see the future?” asked Cho.

  “If I actively focus, I can sense it,” she replied. “But it’s not my strong suit. For Roland, his focus is razor sharp. I can only do it for short bursts. My brother can keep his sense active for much longer, maybe all the time.”

  “Because of that ring on his head?” asked Cho.

  “A safe assumption,” said Desre.

  “He has some s-sort of probability matrix, doesn’t he?” speculated Kate, referring to somewhat new technology that assessed known facts and sensory data to present likely outcomes to the user.

  “He does,” confirmed Desre. “But that implant is tertiary to his power. A backup at best.”

  “How does his power work then?” asked Cho. “What’s it like for him?”

  “I have rarely had a fraction of the clarity he does,” replied the seer. “But even so, I know what it is capable of. He knows exactly what is going to happen in the immediate future. So anything you do to kill him, he will see and avoid.”

  “How immediate?” asked Cho.

  “One second, five seconds, ten,” said Desre. “It depends on his level of concentration and how many times it’s happened.”

  “Wait, wh-what do you mean, how many times?” asked Kate. “How many times what has happened?”

  “The event,” replied Desre. “The future. The present. The past. He sees all the other times something has happened.”

  Kate shook her head, still confused, while Drew and Cho remained quiet. “Wha-what? I still don’t—Are we talking quantum physics, many-worlds? He can see what happens in other worlds?”

  “Does it really matter?” asked Desre.

  “It matters,” said Cho. “I want to know what I’m facing.”

  Desre stood. “I need a drink first. Kate?”

  “Actually, yes, I think so,” she replied.

  “Preference?”

  “Just whatever,” said Kate.

  “My kind of girl,” said Desre, grabbing a couple bottles at random and some ice, and bringing them back to the coffee table. She poured Kate some wine and herself a shallow drink from a bottle with Mandarin symbols that she guessed by the smell was bourbon. She swirled her drink around, letting the ice cubes clank against the glass, then downed it in one gulp.

  She coughed the burning away and chuckled. “Early in their program, they wanted to test my abilities while drunk. Now that was a good time.”

  “I shouldn’t stay on the line for much longer,” said Tsenka. “I’m hearing a lot of shouting and movement in the building. Please, explain what you meant, Desre.”

  “Here’s the deal,” said Desre. “Most of this I gleaned from Chantech. The scientists love to talk, talk, talk. Every little insignificant find was a major breakthrough they just had to discuss back and forth, and even with me.”

  Desre scooted and swiveled her body sideways onto the loveseat, placing her legs across Drew’s lap. The AI glanced down, then at Kate, who gave him a look of pity. Drew had built sensors into every part of his frame, and could feel Desre’s skin glide along his legs, her pants rumpled up toward her knees. He enjoyed the sensation, and the knowledge it brought, as he was able to measure temperature and hydration, and make guesses as to her resting blood pressure and heart rate. But he wished it was someone else’s skin.

  “There are no other worlds,” continued Desre. “Because there’s no such thing as probability, outside of our brain’s attempt to understand varying outcomes from similar causes. You roll a die, there’s no probability that it comes up as a one or a six. The die rolls exactly how you make it roll. You may not have intended for it to come up snake eyes, but you still did it. Had you done it exactly the same way in the same period of time, do you think it would ever come up as anything else?”

  “Sure,” said Kate. “But we can make different choices. There’s the law of large numbers, and there’s also probability as something we ascribe to past events only. Weather prediction still uses some amount of probability.”

  “All rubbish,” declared Desre. “Put the exact circumstances in front of us, you get the exact same choices. Large numbers work simply because of how tiny the causes are and how ham-fisted humans are at directing them. Weather prediction is just another case of not knowing all the variables.”

  “So there’s no choice, it’s all determinism?” said Cho.

  Desre tried to reach for the bottle from her new position, managing to grab it after a couple sit-up attempts. “You follow the logic long enough, and you realize fighting determinism is not only futile, it is fruitless. Choices can only be made under a framework of determinism. Just because we’d make the same ones or that we are predictable doesn’t mean we didn’t make them.”

  “Sounds like doublespeak,” said Cho. “What does this have to do with Roland?”

  Desre poured herself another glass, then put the bottle precariously on the floor next to her. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit of a philosopher. I think you have to be, with what I see. So, as I was saying, one world. Well, one world at a time. Right now the universe, all that exists as far as that word has meaning, is expanding, but it’s also slowing its expansion rate. Eventually, billions of years in the future, it will stop. Then it will start to shrink, gaining momentum until all matter comes together to a single point.”

  “The big crunch,” said Drew.

  “I thought that w-was debunked ay-ages ago,” said Kate.

  “And in a few more ages, maybe it will be accepted again,” said Desre with a shrug. “But you haven’t heard the interesting part yet.”

  “By all means,” permitted Kate, finishin
g her own drink.

  “That single point, where all matter is stored, or energized, or whatever,” began Desre. “It’s uniform and perfect, exactly as it was before the big bang. The forces of nature have fused it into the only thing that can ever be created from such forces. Then, whatever sets it off sets it off, and the universe is created anew. Over and over this happens over a bazillion years. But remember,” she said, wagging a finger. “There’s no chance, no probabilities. That perfect mass explodes the same way every time. Galaxies form the same every time. Earth is created every time. And I get drunk in this hotel room every time.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Cho.

  “It’s not only possible,” said Desre. “It’s necessary. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Makes sense?” Kate questioned. “To live the same lives over and over? For everything to just repeat forever?”

  “You may think you drank here before,” said Drew. “But that was somebody else. You are just another iteration.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Desre, shrugging again. “But as soon as the eggheads told me this theory, I knew they were right. It made sense of the little differences I saw, the blurring of images in my mind. Despite my big speech about determinism, small differences happen and sometimes build up to big ones. These changes will almost always originate from another seer since they are the only ones who can choose a new outcome.”

  Desre paused for another sip, smacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Our sight is like finding footprints in the sand. If the same person walks the same path over and over, they will have deep, clear footprints. If they stray just a tiny amount, the footprints are larger and shallow. This way, we can actually tell how original our current experience is, and how well-worn. Breaking away from the beaten path only diminishes our abilities. It causes a desynchronization that leaves us blind until we find the path again.”