Nick Thacker

by The Dawn (Relics Singularity 1)

  “You think they’re coming back?” Myers asked.

  “Maybe, but their ride was trashed. Unless they’ve got a lot of extra Current lying around and somewhere to spend it, it’s probably not them we’re going to need to worry about.” Merrick stopped, and turned to face Myers. “Look, we’re getting close to the city. Here’s the plan.” He flicked his eyes left and right, as if they weren’t the only two people in a ten-mile radius. “You can’t stay out here, since there will probably be Unders on us within the hour. You can’t normally get into the city since you don’t have a pID, but I think I can get you past.” Merrick looked up and checked the sun’s position above them. “We have to move quickly, though. My contact is in Zone 2, which is about a block away from the gate.”

  “Won’t there be guards?”

  Merrick shook his head. “No, this isn’t a high-risk city, just a tech quadrant support area. Security is minimal, and it’s all System-based. Nothing we can’t get past without too much difficulty.”

  “Okay. Do we get to negotiate this whole part about you selling me to some highest bidder, though?”

  Merrick’s face was resolute. Myers couldn’t read it, so he stopped trying.

  “Myers, I shot at you two days ago, thinking you’d stay still, but you got away. I should have just snuck up on you or something, but I didn’t want to risk the chance that you’d hear me.”

  “You weren’t trying to kill me?”

  “I needed you alive. Still do.”

  “To trade me for some bandwidth to buy a car.”

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong. You don’t understand it yet, but there’s a much bigger game being played here. All of the pieces are stacking up and people are taking sides. This little cat-and-mouse game we’ve been playing is just a small part of it.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you. So you’re not going to sell me?”

  Merrick nodded. “No, I still am, but it’s an arbitrage play. We’ve got a station set up that can register transactions and send them in. But there’s no ‘buyer’ on the other side of it. You’re still getting ‘sold,’ since that’s the only way to clear you from the Board and get you off everyone’s ‘most wanted’ list, but I’ll be the buyer and seller.”

  “Wait — you’re selling me to yourself? Won’t the System know?”

  “No, it won’t. It’s two different pIDs. Mine, and another one the station is running as a virtual server. We’ve been docking transactions through it for a few months, running it up slowly, and it’s been working. The System sees a moderately-active pID in the business sector of Umutsuz, who can now afford to purchase your bounty. I’m going to make it a deal, and you’ll be home free.”

  Myers felt a wave of relief, or something he assumed was relief, pass through him. He didn’t care about the details, or the System, or anything else. He was going to live.

  “Thanks, Merrick.”

  “Look, I wish I could say I was doing it just out of the kindness of my heart. I would, too, if I could. But there’s another reason.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “We need you. You were the president once, and you did some good things. But before that you were running the finances at what is now the largest corporation on the planet.”

  “EHM?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And I suppose you think I know something about this ‘System,’ since I was there when it was being built? And since I was the guy advocating for it when I was the president?”

  “That kid tell you all that?”

  Ravi. Myers felt the weight of the kid’s death heavy on his heart. It was my fault he died. Whether it was true or not was irrelevant.

  “He helped me piece it together.”

  “I see.” Merrick thought for a moment. “Yeah, that’s it. You might be able to help us out.”

  Myers heard a slight popping sound, like a rattling in the distance, and a line of tiny explosions in the dirt drove toward the two men from behind them. Merrick must have seen it out of the corner of his eye, and he pushed Myers to the side.

  “Get down!” He yelled. Myers felt his body once again crushed under a perfect tackle by the man next to him, and he hit the ground hard. How much more of this torture can I take? He wondered. He’d surprised himself so far, so he went with it and reacted to the new information.

  He rolled to the side and popped up on his feet. He was a second behind Merrick who already had his gun raised and was pointing it out to the desert.

  “Get behind something!”

  Myers looked around. There was literally nothing else to hide behind, so he stood behind Merrick.

  “Not me, idiot,” Merrick screamed as he fired a few shots from the rifle.

  “There’s nothing else out here!”

  “Then run — I’ll cover. Get to the gate and wait for it to open. There’s a maintenance auto that’s on a daily schedule, and it should be coming out soon.”

  Myers didn’t wait for the rest of the instructions, if there were any. More popping from in front of Merrick triggered something in Myers’ brain he assumed was massive adrenaline, and he started running. Merrick would be able to catch up anyway, so a head start wasn’t a bad idea.

  He was close to the gate now, and he started to see some detail. A simple chain-link fence rose upward from the ground, higher than the one in Istanbul, but this one had an open gated section directly in front of him. Behind that a ten-foot-high concrete barrier stretched across the road. Myers saw two sets of huge wheels mounted below the barrier, likely used to slide the concrete section open to allow entrance to and exit from the city. He aimed toward the barrier, hoping Merrick would reach it before Myers was forced to explain himself to a robot guard or some other automated terror.

  A road appeared out of the sand and headed inward through the gate, seeming to rise from below the earth and continue into the heart of the city. Myers reached it and ran toward a small concrete bunker next to the road, just inside the chain-link gate. It was nothing more than a concrete box lying on the ground, and he assumed it housed some electronic components or protected something crucial to the city’s infrastructure.

  Whatever it was, it provided Myers a good vantage point to see the firefight behind him. He ducked behind the bunker and watched Merrick.

  The man fired three shots at targets Myers couldn’t see, turned and ran about ten steps, then started the process again. Myers thought he could hear the faint pops of at least two shooters, but he still couldn’t see anything to shoot at.

  Merrick repeated his shoot-run-shoot pattern three more times until he reached the gate and Myers’ lookout bunker.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Where?” Myers shouted back. “The gate’s closed.”

  “The auto will leave soon, and you need to get inside it after it drops the trash.”

  It was probably one of the strangest sentences Myers had ever heard, but in the midst of what was currently happening to him it made perfect sense.

  “It’s an auto, so it doesn’t have any way for us to control it. It’s also a civilian-grade vehicle, so it won’t have any security mechanisms. Hauls trash out and supplies in, that’s it.”

  “And it won’t know I’m in it?”

  “It shouldn’t.”

  It shouldn’t. Myers hoped he was right.

  He followed Merrick to the concrete barrier and stood next to him as Merrick aimed down the scope of his rifle. “There are still two out there, but I think I dropped one.”

  “Hunters?”

  “Unders, yeah. Not the same friends we ran into before, but these three won’t be the only ones we have to deal with. Okay, I hear the gate switch cycling on.”

  Myers strained his ears and thought he could hear a high-pitched whine.

  “It’ll take a minute, so keep your eyes toward the desert. Make sure we don’t get ambushed. I’ll try to keep them far enough out. They know I’ve got the range on them, now, so their potshots aren’t going to do
anything but mark where they are.”

  Thirty seconds passed and the soft whine suddenly turned into a frustrated, squelching yell as the rusted wheels were forced to move. The concrete barrier behind them slid slowly to one side.

  “Get over there where the opening is,” Merrick said. “The auto is mounted on a rail up on that building, so it won’t start rolling through until it’s completely open. But at least you can make a run for it into the city if anyone gets close.”

  Myers followed the order and ran toward the widening crack between the concrete barriers. He waited for the crack to widen to about six inches, then he peered through.

  “Uh, Merrick.”

  Merrick fired a shot from his rifle and moved to Myers’ position. “What is it?”

  “Are there supposed to be people on the other side?”

  “It’s a city.”

  “Look.”

  Merrick dropped the gun and turned around. The crack between the barriers was a foot wide now, and Merrick stared through it. His jaw dropped. “Shit.”

  Myers and Merrick were staring at a street completely full of people, all walking toward the gate. Entire families, carrying backpacks and pillows, dragging luggage behind them, headed directly toward them. The mass exodus extended back as far as they could see, and street intersections along the way only dumped more people out onto the main road.

  “What’s going on?” Myers asked. “Why are they all walking toward us?”

  “They’re leaving,” Merrick said. “Look.” He pointed toward a rotating light on top of a building just inside the gate. Myers followed his finger upward and he saw a flashing sign — some sort of LED display — on a pole.

  “Umutsuz Deactivated. Deactivation Protocol Initiated. Please Proceed Carefully.”

  “They deactivated Umutsuz?”

  “Not they. The System,” Merrick responded. “I’ve never seen it done to an entire city at once. Usually it’s over the course of years,” Merrick said.

  “Hey, Merrick. We’ve got another problem,” Myers said. In the chaos of the mass of people tumbling toward them, it took Myers a moment to recognize the sound from behind him.

  Merrick turned around and looked behind them.

  Two helis — Tracers, as Merrick had called them — floated just outside the chain-link fence, and about a dozen armed men had their rifles raised and pointed toward them.

  RAND

  THE CITY WAS PROGRAMMED TO deactivate in eight separate stages, one per hour. In each stage, the standard three-phase deactivation protocol would be initiated, beginning with the electric, water, and Current grid going down. Shuttles would be scheduled to bunch together at the stations, allowing the most people possible to board a train leading to their next assignment. Anyone with a car or other vehicle would be crammed onto the freeways, racing to beat the onslaught of foot traffic and deactivation drones that would follow in the second phase.

  During that second phase, the drones would move household to household, scanning for thermal discrepancies and charting their location. They’d fly through the zone, making sure any stragglers, had a pID that listed them as a Deactivated, not a Reassigned. If their listing had them marked for a scrape, the drones would either apply the scrape at that time or log it to the database for a later visit.

  Finally, phase three marked the shutdown of the Grid, meaning any hand terminals or battery-powered stations would be rendered all but useless. Anyone left in the city would be the Deactivated, waiting for their scrape or their recall — a period of “holding” within a secure facility followed by a scrape and deployment. Few of the blue collar workers in Umutsuz would need a long-term scrape and redeployment, but there were always a handful of people the System deemed too much a threat to leave active.

  Rand was in Zone 6, but he was watching from his station at home as Zone 3 finished its deactivation protocol. The station he was using was a custom-built machine using water-cooled casing surrounding a hodgepodge of components he’d thrown together from leftover Vericorp prototypes and Current-funded additions. He’d used the standard request form in the laboratory, but put his employees’ names down instead of his own. It wasn’t a rock-solid plan when he came up with it, but he thought might at least slow down anyone snooping around. He hadn’t planned on Davies tracing his actions as closely as she did.

  He quickly relived the “conversation” he’d had with Davies earlier that day and laughed. She was much smarter than she let on, and he wondered if it was on purpose or if she was just a ditz.

  For a Grid connection he’d wired one of the internal boards to his home coaxial port, opting to use the land-based connection over the general wireless Grid that blanketed any of the larger cities and metropolitan areas. Finally, he’d used a WADD, or wireless automatic data drive, to take care of his memory requirements. The WADD synced with his internal memory implant and provided him a way to download any memories and important data he’d filed away that day without needing to initiate a specific data transfer.

  The result was a machine that was faster than the machine he’d been given at work, and he spent most of his available Current and any free time using it for online gaming. It was capable of speeds that rivaled the terminals and stations used at most government entities, and he was damn proud of it.

  It was also a twin.

  The second station was hidden away in the city, ready for his contact to activate it and use it for the next phase of the plan they’d been working on for almost two years. With Davies’ uncovering of his plan to build a “scraping” device, the scare he’d received when he’d tried to use it, and now the deactivation of the city, the timing of the larger plan he’d put into motion two years ago was either serendipitous or extremely unlucky. He wouldn’t be able to tell which until the dust settled, so there was nothing to do but keep pushing forward.

  The station sat on a desk along the front wall of his small apartment, just below a wide window overlooking the city. His neighborhood was conveniently located on a small hill and in the far corner of the city, allowing him a near-complete view of the entire area. Zone 4, just to the south of his current location, began the deactivation process, and Rand watched as scores of families abandoned the apartments they’d called home for the past years and filled the streets with gas-powered vehicles, and thousands of pounds of luggage. He tried to imagine what it was like to leave with children, a wife on his arm, as he prepared for a completely new life, but couldn’t. It was easier to be single — relatively so, anyway — to have nothing but the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet to carry him to the next chapter.

  He’d always shied away from commitment, even while dating and “getting serious” with other women. They thought his attachment was love, while he considered it simply mutual convenience. He and Diane were the type of people who were never supposed to meet and grow close, and he was terrified at the prospect of becoming another checkbox on her long list of to-do items.

  He shook his head, forcing himself back into the present. He heard a few screams coming from Zone 4. The mass exodus had probably ignited some less-than-reputable behavior from certain less-than-reputable citizens, thinking it was a good time to take advantage of the chaos of a city-wide deactivation. It didn’t escalate to rioting as the screams died down quickly, so he went back to planning his escape.

  Rand needed to get out of the city, but he couldn’t make his move until he knew for sure what the System had planned for him. He was almost positive he was in for a total deactivation and scrape, but the System hadn’t thought it necessary to alert him of that fact. So far, the orders hadn’t come through on either his terminal or his station. He checked both once more, expecting a “connection error” code that would signify the reason behind his not receiving the order.

  Nothing.

  He was connected, and everything appeared to be in working order. If another hour passed without an update, he wouldn’t have time to get out before the drone flew by. The System is messing wi
th me, he thought. He needed a plan. Something, at least, to focus on.

  But before he could plan anything useful, he heard a knock. A small in-screen image of the person awaiting answer outside his home flashed at the bottom-right of the station’s monitor.

  Well, I’ll be scraped.

  He walked to the front door of the small apartment and opened it.

  “Rand,” the woman said before it was even fully open.

  “Yeah, me. What’s up, Davies?” he asked, the statement a single breathless thread. He motioned with a quick snap of his neck for his boss to enter.

  She did. “You doing okay?”

  He frowned. “A house call just to see if I’m okay?” he said. He’d always felt a little weirded out — not to mention annoyed — with his boss, but she’d never come to his house. She stood like a Mack truck in front of the door, her eyes darting toward his station. He shifted subtly to intercept her wandering interest in his private life. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Davies?” he asked, trying to get her to the point, and quickly.

  She flicked her eyes back toward him. “Yes, sorry, well —“ the three words were abrasive and loud, as if she were trying to address any number of people she seemed to imagine must be hidden throughout his house. He suddenly felt the closeness of the walls, pressing in on him. “I just… I just came by to see how you were holding up.”

  He rolled his eyes. I’m busy. “I’m doing fine, thanks. Just waiting for my Zone —“

  “You’re being deactivated. It came through my terminal after the city orders were sent.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “Scraped, too.”

  He felt a pang of regret in his chest. The feeling surprised him.

  “How much?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “All of it, from what I can tell. It needs all of it.”

  It.

  “Yeah, that makes sense too.” Rand looked over at the station. He needed to start planning, start figuring this out. He put his mind at work trying to figure out a convenient way to rid himself of the woman standing in his living room.