Sun

by J. C. Andrijeski

  She paused her rush of words midstream.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” she said. ‘About the Loki map? And those cities?”

  Still fighting to catch up with the satellite composite she’d sent him and its five or six layers, Vikram nodded after a few more seconds of scanning the readouts, his mouth firm.

  “Is this correlation true of all the hot spots?” he said. “They are all close to one of the Shadow cities? Or only some of them?”

  Sighing, Dante pushed a few longer strands of her dark hair out of her face.

  “It’s not all of them,” she admitted, motioning vaguely at the virtual display. “That one.” She pointed at a glowing light in northern Russia. “That’s like some shit-rusted factory that makes centrifuges or something. Some dead tech to do with weapons. The satellite images made it look like it was half-falling down, but there’re workers there, so it might be guarded.”

  She pointed at another glowing spot on the map, that one in England.

  “There’s nothing at all at that one,” she said with a shrug. “Nothing I could pick up on satellite. A field. Some cows. A few trees. I’ve got sensors doing a deeper scan now. I’ve already picked up more life forms than I should have, so it’s possible there’s another one of those bunkers there, like what they found in Denver.”

  She tapped the map on his screen at the same place in the United States, under the Denver Airport.

  “We already know about that one. It’s not a Shadow city, but the Bridge said there’s a bunker there, right? And they had Dragon down there.”

  She aimed her finger at another location, a hundred or so miles outside Salt Lake City.

  “The actual hotspot for Salt Lake is pretty desolate,” she added. “For the site itself, there’s nothing there. Nothing man-made, at least. Images show a cliff or something… a stretch of desert. I’m running scans on that area, too, but we might need sonar if it’s something underground. Which means we’d need Declan or someone to do it from the ground––”

  “So this could be a natural phenomenon?” Vikram broke in.

  Dante frowned, focusing back on Vikram. “Near all those Shadow cities?”

  Vikram shook his head, pursing his lips.

  “No,” he clarified. “I mean, the hotspots are natural. I mean Shadow and his people staked out claims on cities that were close to one of these energetic anomalies. Is that what this looks like to you, cousin?”

  Dante’s eyebrows scrunched as she thought.

  “Makes sense,” she admitted, shrugging. “For the locations, anyway, but not for whatever’s triggering them now.”

  “What does that mean?” Vikram said, frowning.

  “I’m saying it’s not a natural phenomenon. Something’s setting them off.” Not seeming to notice Vikram’s frown, she pointed at Manhattan, tapping his screen again.

  “Look. There’s even one in New York, near the Cloisters.” She grimaced. “I mean, yeah, it’s all underwater now, since the fields are down. I don’t know if there’s a bunker down there or not… or if it’s accessible even if there is one. But that hotspot went off just like all the rest.”

  Gina walked over to the two of them, listening now.

  Vikram found himself overly aware of her as she leaned on the back of his chair, on the opposite side from Dante. When he glanced behind both of them, he saw Jaden watching with interest, as well.

  From the way he wore his headset, he was obviously listening to them talk.

  Vikram looked back at Dante, frowning. “You say whatever is triggering this is not a natural phenomenon. You say that with a lot of certainty, cousin. Why are you so sure?”

  Exhaling in another sigh, Dante leaned over his screen, bringing up another set of readings and laying them over the maps.

  At his silence, and her mother’s silence, Dante sighed again.

  “You see it, right?”

  “No.” Vikram shook his head, bewildered. “No, cousin. What am I to be seeing?”

  Rolling her eyes in human, teenager-ly fashion, Dante highlighted the exact set of readings and moved them with a thought so each set lay over its corresponding glowing spot on the map.

  “What am I looking at, cousin?” Vikram’s voice still sounded bewildered to his ears.

  “That’s the Barrier map. Standard Barrier scan of the area, using ‘Dori’s people,” she said, obviously fighting patience into her voice as she outlined the parameters of the map in question.

  She highlighted the next layer of her overlay.

  “…that’s a heat map. As in temperature.” She highlighted a third layer. “And this is where the hotspots are. From the map Loks brought back from D.C.”

  She highlighted the fourth layer.

  “…Plus the sensor readings from the satellites, where I first got the power spikes.”

  She pulled up a fifth layer.

  “…And the location of each of the Shadow cities.”

  Vikram stared at the overlays. Clicking back into the Barrier slightly, he used both versions of his sight to assess the work she’d done in aligning the different layers.

  He could see it now.

  “Gaos, cousin!” His mouth firmed as he continued to scan the readouts in front of him. “Are you sure these are correct? There could be no mistake?”

  “Pretty sure.” The teenager’s voice warred somewhere between pride and defensiveness. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, right? The spots are alive.”

  “Alive?” Gina turned away from the screens, staring at her daughter, her dark eyes wide. “Something alive is generating enough electricity that it got picked up in space?”

  Thinking about her mother’s words, Dante shrugged, making a seer’s “more or less” gesture.

  “Pretty much,” she said. “I figure it’s got to be a machine though, to be emitting that much juice. Unless that whole thing about people spontaneously combusting sometimes is true.”

  “A living machine? Putting off a Barrier signature of this kind?” Vikram frowned, still staring at the virtual readouts.

  Pulling her overlays into a separate screen in his headset, he compared them to other aleimic signatures they had on file, without putting them up on display. He frowned when he couldn’t find a match with any of them.

  He had to admit, Dante’s logic made sense.

  It could be some kind of organic machine. But it would have to be something they’d never encountered before, at least not in a way they could map. It was a sobering theory––particularly in light of what Dehgoies shared with them from his experiences in China.

  “Are you sure, my friend?” he pressed. “All this data is correct?”

  “You questioning my mad skills, Vik?” Dante said, frowning. “The data’s right, old man. I know you’re double-checking it all right now anyway, so why bother asking me?”

  Grimacing a little, since he’d more or less been doing exactly that, he said, “Have you explored other theories? Besides the organic machine one?”

  “Like what?” She folded her arms, straightening to look down at the screen. “What else could it be? Is there a seer that sets off pulses like that? ‘Cause I checked with things we had on file. None of them were as big.”

  Still frowning, and now sounding more insulted, she added,

  “I checked it against when the Sword and the Bridge spiked off the charts in Dubai… during their little telekinesis blowout. This is about twenty times that.”

  “So not a telekinetic seer,” Gina muttered, looking back at the map.

  Dante shook her head. “I really doubt it. It would have to be one hell of a telekinetic seer. I couldn’t get Barrier readouts of that Dragon guy, though. If it’s something like him, I’d have nothing to compare it to.”

  “Whatever happened to Dragon?” Gina spoke up, still gripping the back of Vikram’s chair. “Does anyone know?”

  Vikram shrugged, looking up at her. “The Sword said he vanished. He was inside that living machine he stumbled upon
under the Forbidden City, and then he wasn’t. The Sword made it sound like he turned to pure energy. Perhaps he became a part of the machine?”

  Vikram was still thinking about this, turning it over in his mind, wondering if Dragon could be the source of the power surges somehow, when a new voice interrupted his thought.

  “What’s it doing?”

  Vikram turned his head, meeting the blue eyes of Jaden. He’d walked over too, and now stood directly behind Dante, staring into the same monitor they were all bent over. Scrubbing his fingers through his recently shorn black hair, which was now only about a half-inch long all over his head, Jaden frowned down at the same set of readouts.

  “All those signals going off,” Jaden said. “What’s it doing? Anything?”

  Dante turned, looking at him. “What do you mean, what’s it doing?”

  He aimed his frown at her. “Well, if they’re machines, then it’s some kind of network, right? The map shows all those spots are connected. Now they’re all are going off at once. There’s also some relationship to the Earth’s magnetic field… and the Shadow cities, right?”

  Trailing, he glanced down at Vikram.

  “So?” Jaden said, shrugging. “What’s it doing?” He paused, looking around at all of them when no one spoke. “Machines do things, right? A network’s just a way to boost the power of multiple machines, and to synchronize them.”

  He paused again.

  “So? What’s this one doing?”

  Vikram stared back at him, frowning.

  Then Gina, Vikram and Dante all frowned at one another.

  Clicking under his breath, Vikram shook his head.

  “I think it is time to bring brother Balidor into this discussion,” he muttered.

  Even as he said it, he was already hitting in the Adhipan leader’s signal code.

  “IT’S DEFINITELY AN organic of some kind,” Balidor said as he folded his arms.

  “…If you can even call it that, given how advanced the mental processes are,” he added grimly. “It’s not like any organic anyone on my team has ever seen before. Still it is the most likely supposition. I find it much more unlikely this could be a group of living individuals, Elaerian or otherwise. Their mere uniformity makes that highly suspect, even apart from the level of aleimic energy we’re seeing come off this network as a whole.”

  He sighed, his avatar showing him to be combing his fingers through his hair, right before he went on in a gruff voice.

  “We really need the Sword to look at it,” he admitted. “Based on what he told us of that living machine he found beneath the Forbidden City, it’s likely he’s the only one of us who’s ever encountered such a thing before.”

  “Can we bring him in?” Vikram said. “I know it is late, but he usually wishes to be looped into such things. Even in the middle of the night––”

  “No.” Wreg spoke that time, standing behind Balidor. “No, brother. The Sword is indisposed. We will discuss this with him tomorrow.”

  Vikram glanced at Balidor, frowning.

  From the look in the Adhipan seer’s eyes, he agreed with Wreg.

  “Continue to map it,” Balidor said. “Monitor any changes. My infiltration team will do the same. We are still learning about this thing, and how its mind works. We’ve gotten a few insights about meta-structures of thought, with some emphasis on physics, on time, but all of that is hypothesis at this point.”

  “Physics?” Vikram said, frowning. “Time? What does that mean?”

  Balidor met his gaze through the virtual screen. “You’d best ask brother Varlan about that, if you want preliminary findings from the infiltration arm. He can give you real detail as to what’s been observed so far. He’s the lead on mind-mapping this thing, although brother Wreg and I will be joining him shortly.”

  When Vikram nodded, Balidor added,

  “From what he’s told me, it’s like an alien consciousness almost. Something more than simply sentient. Something we’ve never seen before. That being said, it’s also apparently been programmed to function along very specific tracks.”

  “What kinds of tracks, brother?” Vikram said.

  Balidor exhaled, making a gesture that meant, only the gods know for certain, brother.

  “Again, you should probably speak to Varlan,” he said. “I can only tell you what he told me, which is that it appears to operate almost like a group consciousness, and that it is singularly focused on a very specific set of highly complex tasks, and that those tasks appear to have something to do with concepts inherent in the study of physics. It is like there are many beings thinking independently and at high, abstract levels, even as they operate under a single, unified consciousness, with one centralized, directive force.”

  “That centralized force. Does it have an origination point?” Vikram paused, looking between Balidor and Wreg. “Like a leader?”

  Balidor’s gaze sharpened. “You are thinking of something in particular?”

  Vikram hesitated, then shrugged with one hand. “Could that leader be Dragon?” He grimaced, still thinking. “Or Menlim? Or others among the Dreng?”

  “You are thinking of what the Sword told us about Beijing? About Dragon disappearing inside that living machine?”

  “It crossed my mind,” Vikram said. “And it might track. Could he be controlling all this? Like a hive mind?” He hesitated. “…Or a seer network? One more similar to what we saw in the Pyramid? With a Head on top, and many moving parts below?”

  Slowly, Balidor nodded, his eyes and mouth showing him to be thinking.

  “It is worth investigating, brother,” he began thoughtfully. “I will have my people look at it with that lens in mind––”

  Dante blurted out words, interrupting both of them.

  “The sun,” she said. “Gravity.”

  On Vikram’s end of the virtual transmission, he, her mother, Jaden, Holo, Illeg and Poresh all turned to look at her. Her face colored a little, but she turned back to the transmission, and to the infiltration team on the other side, her mouth set.

  “Sorry,” she said, her voice subdued. “You said physics, right? Like they might be doing something that affects the physical world? I’ve been trying to answer a question we had on this side, about why the network is being activated now, if it tracks to anything else going on. I found something. I was still looking into it, but there are definitely anomalies.”

  She glanced around, taking in all the stares on her.

  “…With the sun,” she clarified.

  Balidor’s gaze sharpened. So did his voice, despite the overt respect of his words.

  “What kind of anomalies, respected cousin?” he said.

  She succumbed to her teenager’s slouch, like she did whenever all eyes were on her. Vikram had noticed that Balidor, in particular, seemed to make her nervous.

  Even so, her voice never wavered, or lost its sureness.

  “I’ll need more time to look at it,” she said. “But I tracked massive sun flares occurring shortly after each surge I plotted from Loki’s map. So far, none have been Earth-facing, so they haven’t done any damage to satellites that I’ve seen, much less the Earth itself. But it explains why all the satellites flipped out when this started. Whatever’s going on seems to be pointed at space.” Frowning in thought, she added,

  “Well. That, or it’s just affecting the sun as a kind of byproduct. It could be they’re screwing with something that’s having ripple effects. Gravity. The magnetic field. The Earth’s course around the sun. Dark matter. It could be a lot of things.”

  Seeming to notice the silence her words produced, she looked around at the rest of them, growing noticeably uncomfortable when they only stared at her.

  “How did you find this, cousin?” Vikram asked, incredulous.

  She blinked, surprised. “The solar flares? It’s in data banks for––”

  “No.” Vik shook his head, frowning. “Not where did you find the data. How did you make any connection with solar ph
enomenon at all?”

  She shrugged, her cheeks still pink. Shoving her hands in the pockets of her jeans, she shrugged again, glancing at her mother, then at Jaden before answering.

  “Jay had a good point,” she said. “It seemed like we should know the why of it all… what the network was actually doing. When I couldn’t find anything on Earth that correlated with the surge from the hotspots, I widened the net.”

  Vikram continued staring at her for a few more blinks, then looked at Balidor.

  Balidor was gazing somberly at Dante, as well.

  “Keep on this line of investigation, sister––err… cousin Dante,” Balidor said, seemingly forgetting she wasn’t seer, just as Vikram had been doing more and more often lately. “See if the surges repeat, and map any changes you find. And have your people look into the significance of solar phenomena from the human side. In the event this has anything to do with that Myther cult, I’d be interested to know if they have religious beliefs pertaining to such things. Many religious sects do.”

  He gave Dante a more pointed look.

  “If you could report those findings directly to me, I would be most appreciative.”

  She nodded, her hands still in her pockets. Then her eyes widened, right before she exclaimed.

  “Oh! And the bunkers. You know… the underground thing.” She looked at Vikram. “Did you tell him, Vik? About the bunkers thing?”

  Now they were all staring at Vikram.

  “It’s just a theory at this point,” Vikram said, turning his gaze back to Balidor. “Dante here postulates that every quarantine city has a bunker, similar to what the Bridge saw in Denver, and what the Sword found in Beijing. She believes they were built to house these organic machines, at least in part.”

  When Balidor looked back at Dante, she added,

  “I just wondered. That map Loks brought back from D.C., it depicted a hotspot in the Forbidden City. It didn’t show up on this spike because of the nuclear attack. The whole city of Beijing is a giant white spot on every heat map we have right now––”