Pivotal (Visceral Book 3)

by Adam Thielen

  “Whatever Ping was working on was destroyed,” said Tsenka. “But it involved nocturnals, and I would be willing to bet Chantech was well ahead of them.”

  “A reasonable wager,” asserted Drew.

  Tsenka shrugged. “Does this get us anywhere?”

  “There are formulas and research notes that might curry favor with the NRI,” noted Drew. “But nothing that gives us a strategic advantage in our current situation.”

  Tsenka sighed and picked up her suit, slipped her feet into the bottom leg openings, and slowly right-side-outed it onto her calves, then thighs, then pulled it up to her torso and fed her arms through the sleeveless arm holes. The suit interfaced with Cho’s implanted com and knew to seal itself up using a micro-zipper on the front and back. The vampire lifted her knees and swiveled her hips, stretching and allowing the suit to slide into alignment with her body.

  “Hey, Drew,” she said. “Of the Chantech sites you know of, can you try to discern which one would be most likely to contain their vampire research projects?”

  Drew’s eyes moved about while he considered this. “Using process of elimination and some guesswork, I will present a candidate to you within the hour. Do you have a plan?”

  “We need help,” said Cho. “We need Desre, and we need Kate. But we don’t have them. Set a course for Baoding,” she ordered.

  “Kate would not approve,” resisted Drew.

  “Do you want to get her back or not?”

  “She will get over it,” the AI decided.

  * * *

  Kate stared at the com her husband had managed to pocket after dispatching the mage Lane Marquez. For hours she ran her codebreaker on the universal and ubiquitous pocket computer. For hours she had fought off sleep, going so far as to program her implant to buzz her awake whenever she nodded off. And while her knowledge of information hardware was extensive, there were too many different devices with different builds and firmwares for her to know by heart all their vulnerabilities.

  Without a network connection, Jones was left with her generic toolset which, given that most systems were protected with character-based passcodes, was ninety percent brute-forcing passwords. Sure, most coms relied on fingerprints and retinal scans and sometimes facial recognition, but if a retailer or investigator wants to get into a device, sometimes those biometrics are not available and so as long as one knew the private key for a specific manufacturer, they could enable the fallback security, which was always a passcode. If there was one thing Kate kept up to date, it was her list of manufacturer keys.

  Linked to her neural interface through near-field signal, Kate was able to keep the com hidden while she worked, and as Roland Somer became transfixed on the video of Tsenka, the com beeped approvingly in Kate’s ear.

  The pendant Taq had given her was charred, but when Roland had gone to sleep, she put it back around her neck, hiding it underneath her plaid button-down shirt. In the event that Roland became suspicious of her, he would not read her deception.

  After watching the footage for several minutes, Somer turned off the wall screen. He sat down on a leather wingback chair. He retreated into himself, and so Kate decided to bother him.

  “So,” she said loudly. “Your sister seemed nice.”

  The psion looked at her, confused at first, then scoffed. “Then she has you fooled.”

  Kate shrugged. “She was kept pr-prisoner and wants to be free. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure she wants to be free,” he replied with a grin. “Free to sow chaos and rob people blindly. Before she ran out on you, did you check your pockets?”

  “You really must hate her.”

  “Not at all,” said Roland, lifting his seat and turning it toward the cage. “She is weak, too afraid to confront others but a master manipulator. Did you enjoy your time with her, really? No one jumped off a roof, overdosed, or fought with each other?”

  “No,” lied Kate. “Do you blame her f-for everything that goes wrong?”

  “Desi simply cannot help herself,” said Somer. “She lives to toy with others’ emotions, to expose their human weakness.”

  Jones felt her face become warm, but she would not allow the psychopath to take her guilt and use it to fuel anger at someone else, though some doubt crept into her mind.

  “She says you are good at seeing the immediate future,” said Kate, changing the subject.

  “And you want to suss out a vulnerability,” he presumed.

  “Oh, I have thought of several,” she bluffed.

  “Sure you have,” said Somer. “But if I follow the path, it will lead me to my destiny, no matter what you do.”

  “Or to your demise.”

  “I have led an incredible life,” he said. “Because I trust what my previous selves have done, the path they have forged. My faith will keep me moving long after you have stopped.”

  “Don’t let me t-talk you out of it,” said Kate.

  “I won’t.”

  “Don’t you get bored though?” she asked. “Doing the same things, n-never making choices for yourself, always knowing what will happen and what won’t?”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “That is the challenge. There are times when I am weak and give in to the desire to create something new, but most of the time that has landed me in trouble. I’m sure Des has told you about that.”

  “You sometimes do s-something new?” asked Kate. “Why?”

  “You said it yourself. The boredom can become very tiring.”

  Kate put her elbows on her knees, posturing as if enthralled. “You do this recently?”

  “Not very.” He shook his head, then smiled. “But earlier this year I had an interesting… moment.”

  “How so?” inquired Kate.

  “You really think you will learn something useful. I like you, Kate.”

  “Well then go on, d-do tell,” she prodded.

  “You’ve actually made me a little paranoid, so I will be vague,” the psion qualified before beginning. “I was on a mission. Had to take care of… something. And that I did, but also had the opportunity to take care of a few others at the same time…” Somer’s voice trailed off and his eyes closed as if trying to watch the scene in his head. “It’s not often my work brings me into contact with someone… important, let’s say. This time it did, and as the assignment was, uh, coming to a close, I saw every path I had taken. I could see the most recent paths and the oldest. I could see both the most common and the thinnest or rarest.”

  “B-but not the one you wanted,” concluded Kate.

  Somer laughed. “Actually, all I wanted to do was get it over with and leave. But a small part of me wanted something else and after seeing all the previous cycles, it struck me as so very strange, astonishing even, that I had never given in to such an impulse. That I had never made the time for it.”

  “For what?” asked Kate. She hid her disgust and the physical sickness his words incited.

  To this, Somer only grinned. “So, I gave in, and after I was done, it took a while to find my path again. That consequence of creation always makes me regret it.”

  “Desyncing,” she recalled. “But if you see what y-you did in past lives, can’t you just jump back in? Is it s-spatially limited?”

  “Jumping back in is not always so simple. That is why I must continue doing what I do… what I have done,” he said, nodding sagely. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my life. If I ever see death coming, and the only way out is to break the cycle, then I will, and the others that come after me will follow my lead, even if I don’t make it all the way.”

  “All the way to what?”

  “To everything,” he said. “Whatever this world offers, I will take. Chantech will increase my power to see far into the future, anywhere in the world, and minds will break before my might. I will rule this corporation and someday the world as well.”

  “If you get Desre back,” speculated Kate. “That’s why I’m still alive. What if I
kill myself now?”

  “You might,” said Roland. “We’ve never had this conversation before, at least not all of it. To be able to tell you about my earlier sin required a second.”

  A chime rang through the flat. Someone was at the door. Somer rose from his seat, moved to the door, then turned to Kate. “Make no mistake. Even without my sister, I will succeed. If not this time, then the next. It is inevitable.”

  Somer opened the door to his loft and his remaining lieutenant, Danliti Nurat, took his place to keep watch over her. He had a new, upgraded eye, but walked with a limp and had some light bruising on his chin.

  “I have to go take care of your mysterious friend,” said Roland. “Danny here will take good care of you, though.”

  The cyborg sneered at Kate. Roland stopped at the doorway, turned, and looked to his man. Dan pulled his eyes away from the hacker and met Somer’s gaze. He knew immediately what it meant without any words spoken: hands off the girl.

  Dan frowned and sat on the leather chair, pointing it toward the smart wall. After an hour of watching TV, his head slumped and he began to snore. Kate took the hacked com and moved her hand between the bars of her cage, and held it outside as far as she could. She pressed her ribcage against the metal rods while projecting an image onto the floor that she could read but no matter how far she stretched, she could not get the device outside the interference of the prison.

  Nurat snorted himself awake and looked around disoriented, then turned to Kate, who sat on her stool looking sullen. Dan shook his head, stood, and went to the bathroom. Kate programmed the com to attempt sending a message after a delay, and to re-attempt on failure. Afterward, it would delete the message and the address of the recipient.

  She could send one message, and she debated what it should contain. She considered sending Drew her coordinates but deleted the message, sighed, and started over. Jones knew that if she really needed to contact Drew, if she thought it would make any difference, she could engage her entanglement drives despite the danger inherent in their use. But she hadn’t because it wouldn’t.

  Her eyes began to tear up. She thought about their fight, and finished the message with, “I love you, too.” Kate stared at the message as she heard the sound of Roland’s toilet incinerating. She shook her head and deleted the closing, hit send, and then slid the com out of her cage and across the room. It came to rest under Somer’s dining table. She had no idea whether it would successfully transmit, but it was the best she could do.

  She looked at Dan as he re-entered the room. “Nice eye.”

  Episode 16: The Plan

  Though cross-country travel by car was a strange and rare thing, it proved to be much more scenic than using a tube pill. The highway was packed with unmanned transport trucks. The vehicles that all other drivers had waged war with for decades before the Collapse had won in the end. Automated driving and superconductor plates embedded in the road had made them cheap and effective cargo transportation, moreso than trains, tubes, or flight.

  At the same time, vacuum tubes were much faster than cars and even faster than flight in distances under five hundred kilometers due to boarding times, and so they became the default option for daily commutes and travel. And tubes were guarded, while roadways were only occasionally patrolled.

  Much of the distance from Beijing to Baoding was filled with poor housing and stratified farmland. Residences ranged from cardboard boxes to fairly elaborate shanty towns. The corporations used food drops to keep a large and neglected segment of the population far from the view of the rest of the citizens.

  The informal society that was forming outside city limits was lawless and uneducated in a time when information was not only readily available but structurally built to be digested quickly. But as long as their crimes did not affect travelers, farmers, or the corporate transports, then justice against criminals was left to those willing to take it.

  The trip gave Desre a lot of time to think. Through her new com or the car’s entertainment system, she could have easily immersed herself in the infinite content of creators struggling to monetize their talents. She also could have accessed a variety of corporate-sponsored programming. Instead, she chose to sit, and as she sat, she thought. For brief moments, she would remove her polonium necklace, allowing her to sense in her periphery the presence of other minds, be they the random transport that trafficked people or some of the shack-dwelling denizens established not far from the road. But the minds were all distant, blurry, unreadable. She was effectively alone.

  She decided to turn on some news. If nothing else, she tired of the silence. Maybe something boring, like stock markets, she thought. She had not configured her com to use a proxy to exit the mainland networks, nor did she know how to, so her news options were limited. She fingered the air, choosing what looked like a chart with bars that went up and down like a line graph. But instead of corporate analysis, she was treated to images of Tsenka Cho hopping around in front of a big robot.

  The psion giggled as the com translated the narration. The economists, who normally only covered earnings releases, were not prepared to have a cohesive narrative on the situation. They argued with each other about the corporatocracy, the possible involvement of the NRI, and whether or not any entity should be creating superweapons. They then started labeling Cho a superweapon. Desre continued giggling.

  “Oh, Tsenka Cho,” she sighed. “I may be crushing on you.”

  She turned off the com and looked at the windshield. It displayed her path and distance, both in kilometers and minutes, to her destination. She looked back at her com, then out of the passenger side window. She replayed her flight from the hotel in her mind, then her dream date with Drew the non-robot. He told her Kate could be saved. She could still be saved. The words echoed in her head. She also recalled her own admittedly exaggerated words to Kate, that she would never be safe, not as long as Roland lived. Desre Somer sighed and looked at her com again.

  * * *

  Drew waited in the monocopter as Tsenka stretched her legs in Baoding. While she would likely find some local cuisine, the AI had no use for food, and he opted to continue probing the external side of Chantech's servers for weaknesses. He also crunched numbers, calculated logistics, and analyzed data streams from news outlets and network activity.

  Amongst the data streams came an unencoded message from an unknown number using a text-based protocol. It read:

  D, I am sorry for the way I have treated you. Not just last night, but for many years. You and T’s safety is what matters now. Do not try to save me. If a trade would help T in her mission, then do it, but not for me. Thank you both for one last mission. -K

  Drew scanned the code for any location markers, but given its format, data could not be obfuscated. He analyzed the wording and characters for patterns that might suggest an encoded message but came up with nothing. After a few minutes of holding out hope, Drew discontinued his analysis. Kate’s words must be taken at face value.

  Despite the seemingly final communication, the AI composed and sent a response explaining that he too was sorry and requesting that she provide her location. His software still emulating human mannerisms, Drew found himself gripping the flight stick tightly enough to cause a warning message that he was over-stressing his servos. Kate was out there, and he was still incapable of doing anything about it.

  He had been sitting in the pilot’s seat stewing for over an hour when Tsenka returned. She closed the ramp and lowered her hood, sweat beads resting on her forehead from the sun high in the sky. Her eye shield retracted, and she pulled her mask under her chin.

  “I may be a day walker, but that sun is still killer,” she said to Drew.

  “A storm is coming,” he replied. “Clouds should move in soon.”

  “Good,” said Cho.

  “Kate has sent a message,” said Drew. “She wishes for us to abandon her.”

  Tsenka pulled a towel out of her locker and dried off her face, then moved to the clima
te controls and cranked it to pump out as much cold air as possible. “Fuck that, we are getting her out.”

  “I don’t think she would want this,” replied Drew.

  “She’s trying to protect us,” said Cho, sitting next to Drew in the co-pilot seat. “You don’t think she wants to live?”

  “Perhaps she believes that her remaining life may not be significant or fruitful.”

  “And what do you believe?”

  “I believe I should respect her wishes,” said Drew.

  “Really?”

  “No,” said Drew, re-evaluating. “I think what I meant was, I should want to respect her wishes, and I should not put my wants in front of hers.”

  Tsenka stood. “I think that in your heart, you know you have to try to save her. I know that I can’t quit this. Not now.”

  “Very well,” said the robotic man. “Did the meetings go well at least?”

  “They told me to chew glass,” she replied.

  “Are our interests not aligned?”

  “I think they felt insulted that an outsider would dictate their plans,” she explained. “Teo was courteous but wasn’t going to stick his neck out for me.”

  “That is unfortunate,” said Drew. “We are without leverage or allies then.”

  “I will do it myself if I have to.”

  “Then shall I take you back to Beijing?” the pilot asked.

  “Yeah. Somewhere on the edge,” Cho said, nodding. “As close as you can without pulling the heat.”

  Drew spun up the rotor, filling the cabin with a hum he almost missed. Before the AI lifted off, a series of short beeps echoed off the bulkhead, signifying an incoming call through the onboard com system. The AI directed it onto the windshield. The sender was unknown. Tsenka peered out the cabin windows for any suspicious activity and nodded at Drew.

  “Be prepared for an escape,” she said, answering the call. To their surprise, Desre’s bruised face appeared in front of them.