by Ramez Naam
“You won’t win,” Barnes told the man. “It’s too late for that. There’s too much hate. You made sure of that yourself. Humanity’s going to hunt down every last one of your kind, and exterminate you.”
The shadow laughed. “It’s our kind, Max. I saw those muscles.” A cloaked hand reached out and squeezed Barnes’ upper arm. “You should’ve learned to use them in a fight, though.”
The blurry figure opened the door and stepped out. The door closed behind him.
A force took control of Barnes’s muscles, used them to take manual control of the car, and drove onto the bridge. At the halfway point, against his will, he stopped, stepped out of the car, fighting it every step of the way, stepped up on onto the railing in the wind, and raised his phone, the camera pointed at himself.
In the wind and rain, Barnes was sure he’d slip into the fast rushing waters below. He hoped he’d slip. He strained at his muscles, tried to push his legs out from underneath him, to jerk his arms, to kill himself without giving his enemies this victory
But the intelligence that held him kept his body steady.
Barnes struggled, vainly, as some malevolent force used his thumb to activate the camera, and started speaking, loudly and clearly, with his voice.
No. No. No!
“My name is Maximilian Barnes,” his own voice yelled into the camera. A status indicator showed that it was streaming successfully to the net.
“For the last few months I have served as Acting Director of the Emerging Risks Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security,” Barnes’s voice went on.
He pushed at the thing controlling him, fought to unclench his hand, to drop the phone, tried to bite his tongue, to topple himself backwards, even just to wink one eye! To let people know it wasn’t real!
Nothing.
“For the past eight years I have served as Special Policy Advisor, first under President Miles Jameson, and then under President John Stockton. Eight years ago, at the orders of President Jameson, and with very deep personal reservations, I created the Post-human Liberation Front, the international terrorist group known as the PLF, as a front group to frighten America and the world into accepting laws and international agreements that restrict the use of and research into neurotechnology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. To my shame, I’ve run this terrorist organization every day since then, with the full knowledge of President Jameson…”
Fight! Barnes roared at himself. Fight! He pushed with everything he had, one massive surge at his right foot, just to move it an inch, just enough to slip, to fall, to die before he said the words!
“…and with the full knowledge of President Stockton, and the full knowledge of key members of his administration.”
NOOOOO!
“At the President’s direct orders, despite the misgivings of my conscience, I staged the assassination attempt in July, knowing the President himself would be unharmed, and that it would secure his re-election.”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
“I’ve killed men to keep my secrets. To keep the President’s secrets.”
On the screen, his face was mournful, contrite, a man who regretted his deeds.
I REGRET NOTHING! NOTHING!
“I can no longer live with what I’ve done. To my country, all I can tell you is this: you deserve better.”
LIES! LIES! Barnes tried to force the words out of his mouth. ALL LIES!
And then his body toppled backwards, the phone still held in his hand, the camera capturing his humble, remorseful, utterly resigned face as he fell towards the fast-rushing waters of the river below.
LIES! He raged, struggling to spit that one word out, to force one piece of true emotion across, as he fell, and fell, and fell, endlessly backwards towards the water below, the wind of his fall rustling his hair, whistling past his ears, the heavy clouds of Zoe looming above, the bridge receding, out beyond the horror of the red TRANSMIT light on the screen of the phone held in his paralyzed hand.
LIES! He strained as he fell.
Then he crashed into the river and the waves swallowed him, his sincere, repentant face the last image the camera captured before darkness.
8
Back to Jesus
Saturday 2040.11.03
Rangan Shankari groaned as Earl and Emma Miller manhandled him into the truck and loaded him with blankets and food and water. The movement sent waves of agony through the throbbing bullet wound in his side, temporarily pushing aside his terror with even more visceral pain.
Earl Miller leaned over him to check Rangan’s safety belt. “Sorry, son,” he said. “Gotta get to town fore they close the noose.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He’d been going to hide at the Miller farm. Wait, for weeks if needed, until things cooled off. Then neighbors had sent word. Police were going door to door, searching homes, fields, barns, cellars. They had to get Rangan out. And St Mark’s, at least, had a hidden cellar, that might avoid detection in a search.
Rangan nodded feebly, his eyes closed, trying to express his thanks, his gratitude that they’d taken this risk for him. But he couldn’t breathe. The pain or the fear or the exertion of coming up the stairs and into the garage and then the truck were too much. There was sweat all over. He put a hand to his side, where a bandage covered the bullet wound. It was wet.
He opened his eyes. Miller wasn’t even in the truck with him. Earl and Emma were out in front of the truck, framed between the pickup and the wall of the garage, the older couple holding each other, the pudgy woman’s hands wrapped around her grey haired husband’s neck, their eyes closed. Were those tears on Emma’s face?
He closed his eyes to give them privacy.
More people sticking their necks out for me, he thought.
He opened his eyes again, and for a moment, it wasn’t Earl and Emma Miller out there. It was his own mom and dad. There was a knot in his stomach.
Earl Miller climbed into the cab, loading his shotgun and boxes of shells behind the seats. Then the garage door was opening, and the howling wind was coming for them.
Zoe was older and weaker, but she was still a monster.
She struck them from the side as Earl backed them out of the garage, rocking the truck. Rangan groaned as something in his midsection compressed, sending a new burst of pain up through the fuzz. Wind rushed into the garage. Debris flew loose inside. A garbage can went careening into a far wall, knocking down a rack of tools. Then they were clear of the garage entirely, still backing up, the wind howling at them, the rain pelting the windshield, the trees they could see bent nearly in two. The garage door started dropping in front of them.
“Dangerous weather detected,” the truck told them, in a low feminine drawl.
The garage door reversed its fall, started rising again.
“Taking shelter,” the truck continued.
The truck abruptly stopped backing up. The drive indicator light switched from MANUAL to AUTOMATIC as it drove forward, towards the open garage door again, the bouncing garbage can inside it.
Earl Miller slammed his palm down on the steering wheel. “Override!” he yelled at it.
The truck stopped moving. The indicator light switched back to MANUAL, and Earl Miller started backing them down the long country driveway again, Zoe pounding them with gravel and rain and debris as they went.
“Warning,” the truck went on. “Dangerous weather detected. You should stop driving and take shelter immed…”
“Shut up!” Earl Miller told the car, cutting it off in mid-sentence.
Then the old farmer shook his head. “Never shoulda got this new truck,” he yelled over the sound of the storm. “Automobiles shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.”
Through the pain, Rangan tried to laugh.
He failed.
Earl drove them into the gloom, on manual, the truck on battery only, the lights turned off. Zoe battered them, tried to push them off the road, threw branches and dirt and burst after burst
after burst of hard horizontal rain at them.
Rangan was cold all over, even with the blankets pulled over him.
“They’ve closed off Seminole,” the old man yelled. “Spotswood Trail, Highway 33, Orange Road, James Madison Highway.” Miller shook his head. “They want you bad.”
Rangan groaned as they rammed through a pothole
The windshield had night vision turned on, transforming the outside world to a surreal greenish landscape, highlighting outlines of the mud and water-drenched road, of downed trees, of intersections.
But the scene kept changing, warping in crazy ways. The processors were having trouble parsing the world ahead through the biting rain and howling wind. They were driving nearly blind. And being hunted.
He forced himself to talk, to distract himself from the pain and fear. “Won’t they see us moving?”
Another piece of debris flashed out of the night at them. Rangan ducked reflexively. Earl Miller spun the wheel to avoid it.
“Can’t fly their drones in this weather!” Miller yelled. “Can’t see us on satellite!”
Fragments of cop shows flashed through Rangan’s head. “Infrared?” he asked.
“You ever hunt, son?” Earl Miller asked Rangan.
“Only girls,” Rangan replied.
Earl Miller chuckled at that. “Well, I hunt deer,” he said.
Something flew at them abruptly. Rangan cried out and twisted to avoid the blow. Miller turned the wheel hard. A massive tree limb slammed into them on Miller’s side. The truck shook. Pain jolted through Rangan’s side and up through his guts. Something else struck the window above Miller’s door window, leaving a spider web of cracks. Zoe took the chance to pummel them from a new angle, turning the windshield into a massive sheet of water, with augmented outlines of the road superimposed on it, and pushing the left side of the truck so hard that Rangan feared the wheels would come up off the ground. Then somehow Earl Miller brought them back onto the flooded country road, headed straight into the wind again.
Miller took a deep breath, and then another. A while later he spoke again. “At night, you hunt deer with infrared, son. You can see em clear as day, a thousand yards out. Unless you got thick fog.” He glanced at Rangan and nodded. “Or a heavy rainstorm.” He turned his eyes back to the road. “And a truck runnin’ on battery, with the heaters turned off.”
Rangan shivered, and huddled even deeper in the blankets.
Rangan lost track of the twists and turns Earl took. He was so cold. So tired. Everything hurt so much. His shirt was definitely wet above the bandage where the bullet wound was.
Earl forded a flooded low point in a road, deep enough that water started to come in through his door, through some leak from where the tree limb had struck them. Then they were out the other side. They drove over tiny roads that were just mud now, mud raked up by wind to splash into their windshields. They drove across a field that had been flattened by Zoe, the tires just barely getting enough traction to pull them back onto the road at the other side. Earl pulled them up onto an overpass, then slowed and took them down an embankment instead of continuing on the road they’d been on.
Lights appeared ahead, moving lights, and Earl pulled them off the side of the road again, and behind a row of trees, until a different pickup passed their hiding spot, heading away from town, out towards where they’d come from.
Finally, more than an hour after they’d left the farm, they crawled slowly, carefully, into Madison, taking the smallest roads possible, until finally Earl pulled them into an alley a block from St Mark’s.
The wind was still fierce in town, but weaker. It had grown weaker even out in the countryside in the hour it had taken them to drive this circuitous loop around the town. Zoe was dying, bit by bit.
Earl Miller pulled out his phone, dialed, said a few words into it, listened, and hung up.
“They’re gonna open up the side door for us.”
“Won’t the cops trace your call?” Rangan asked.
“If they want you bad enough,” Earl said, nodding. “They’ll pull all the calls from all the houses.”
“What then?”
Miller shrugged. “My grandson, Jamie,” he said. “That stuff you made. The Nexus. It changed him. He and his daddy took it. He got so much better… Lookin’ you in the eye, listenin’, talkin’, huggin’.”
Rangan looked over at the farmer.
“Sons of bitches took him away. Got him locked up somewhere.”
Miller turned his head, returned Rangan’s gaze.
“Levi told me that you had a chance to get outa lockup. But you wouldn’t leave without the kids. That true?”
Rangan choked. He nodded. “Mr Miller… You’re grandson, Jamie…”
“I know he’s not one of the boys you got out, son,” Miller said. “But he coulda been.”
Miller’s phone buzzed. He looked down. Tapped it. Then took control of the car.
“Seems to me,” the farmer went on. “You took a bigger risk than I am.”
Rangan leaned back, not at all sure what to say. Earl drove them out of the alley, back into the wind, made the corner, and there was the back of the church. Then they were pulling up to a side door, and it was opening.
“Stay safe, son. Stay free. There’s more the Lord wants you to do.”
Rangan leaned over, despite the pain, and hugged Earl Miller. “You stay free too, Mr Miller. There’s more left for you to do too.”
And then the truck door opened, and Levi was there, and another man he didn’t recognize. The belt came off, and they helped him down from the truck. The first motion hurt. The second hurt worst. Then agony shoved itself through him as his body contorted in new ways. He collapsed onto the two men as they dragged him in through the door of the church.
Rangan was suddenly so deeply cold. His vision was growing so very dim.
Then the world receded into nothing at all.
9
Transit and Debriefing
Saturday 2040.11.03
Kade verified his last upload, then streamed the last of the files down from Shiva’s satellite constellation, through the plane’s directional link, and into the NexusOS in his mind. That was it. There was no more time. Either this was going to work or it wasn’t.
It has to work, he told himself. It will work.
Sam’s voice came through the plane’s cabin, amplified over the plane’s speakers, in Thai, for the kids. He could only parse some of what she said, but he understood enough. They were landing.
The plan they’d agreed on was going to be put to the test.
He felt the children react, twenty-five of them crammed into this private jet meant to transport a dozen adults in luxury. They tightened seat belts and huddled together and curled up in the crash position taken from Feng’s mind. The nerves were back. Fear. Uncertainty. They were amazing beyond anything Kade had ever known, but they were still children.
Kade reached out with his thoughts and open arms and the one called Kit – seven years old? – came to him. He wrapped his arms around the boy, braced them both as well as he could on the floor of the plane, and then, with little more than a bump, Sam brought them down.
Sam shut down the engines again, killed the fuel pumps, and then unclipped from her harness. Her chest was pounding. Her face was hot. She turned and Sarai was there, standing in the cockpit doorway.
Sam held her arms open and the girl ran into them, into the hug.
“I knew you’d come for us,” Sarai told her in Thai.
Sam kissed the girl’s brow, mussed her hair. She could hear Feng behind her, tapping on controls, going through the rest of the post-flight shutdown.
“Aroon misses you,” Sarai said. “He can’t feel you. I miss you, Sam. When you have Nexus again…”
Sam’s chest pounded louder. Kevin Nakamura’s face swam in her mind. Her finger pulling the trigger. Kevin’s form, just a green outline in her goggles, toppling back into empty space as her bullets punched into hi
s face, his chest… Kade and Shiva tearing at each other in her mind, wrestling for control as she dropped to her knees in agony…
“Sarai, I…”
“Sam.” It was Kade, standing behind Sarai, by the door of the plane. A door that was opening. “Time to go.”
Kade in her mind, clawing at Shiva, the two of them ripping her to pieces as they fought one another, Kevin already dead at her hands.
Sam’s stomach churned. Something like rage was threatening to rip itself loose from within.
She pushed it down. She needed Kade. Needed him to do his part. Needed him to do play a role she couldn’t.
She took a deep breath, swallowed hard, squeezed Sarai with all the love she had in her, and then went out to meet their Indian hosts.
An officer in uniform met them on the tarmac, a Colonel Sanghita Atwal: tall, muscular, short haired, dark eyed, utterly professional and rather deadly looking. With her were uniformed medics. Beyond them Sam could see soldiers, armed, their rifles at the ready but not quite pointed at the plane. With them were emergency vehicles, the sort that responded to aircraft crashes, their amber lights slowly flashing in the pre-dawn gloom, ready, but this time unneeded.
Medics saw to their wounds with cold professionalism. Soldiers watched carefully. Any time Sam looked around, there were at least a dozen ringing her, another dozen around Feng, far enough back to take several strides to reach, their rifles in both hands, safeties off.
Further out, she saw sets of powered combat armor, occupied or being piloted remotely, in a loose perimeter around them.