Super World

by Lawrence Ambrose

Jamie's opinion held sway in the end. When she informed Horner and Culler of their selection, she told them: "I had to push to get you both into the unit. Please don't make me regret it."

  "Don't do us any favors," Jake growled.

  "Why did you choose us anyway?" Hulk Horner asked, sounding more curious than belligerent. "Never understood why I was on your guard team that night, either. I know you think I'm an asshole."

  "You're right. I think you are a misogynistic, homophobic asshole. But you're the kind of asshole I'd want at my side in a battle." Horner was beaming like a dog that had just been served a juicy T-bone steak. She turned to Culler. "And you're the guy who has the best chance of keeping him in line."

  "Gee, thanks. I assume I'll be getting hazard pay for babysitting this big galoot."

  "We all have to put up with some inconveniences to save humanity." Jamie gave him a thin smile, and then decided she'd gone this far, why not lay it all out there? "Something else. I am in command. That means in the field my orders stand, and you will obey without argument. If you have an issue with that, you're free to walk away from this unit now."

  The two large men stared at her in wondering disbelief.

  "Jesus," Jake Culler muttered. "You almost sound like a goddamn Marine."

  "What if I do?"

  "I like it." Jake cracked a smile. "Creates the illusion you might actually know what you're doing."

  "Ever heard the expression 'fake it till you make it'?"

  "We both know you ain't fakin' it no more, Commander."

  Jamie was startled by the words and the beefy hand Hulk Horner thrust at her. After a brief hesitation she grasped it. Not gently. She noted with small satisfaction the flash of pain cross Horner's face before he scowled in determination and strengthened his own grip. The two swayed as if battling for balance on a narrow beam.

  "Heh," Jake chuckled. "One of my favorite scenes from Predator."

  He stepped up and slapped his hand down on top of theirs. The tension in the three arms relaxed.

  "It's a deal, Commander Shepherd," said Jake. "We'll follow you into battle. And if you fuck up, we might even save your ass."

  "Fair enough. I might even do the same for you."

  They broke their grips and took a step back.

  "Any word on our first assignment?" asked Jake.

  "We're headed to San Francisco. No indication of nuclear weapons, but our clairvoyant suggested it, and logically the Federal Building could be an AAF prime target. We'll be working with three Team Two units."

  "A clairvoyant." Jake wrinkled his nose. But then he and Greg Horner exchanged a smile. "Screw the AAF wimps. I sure hope Hibat Allah shows up. I'm really looking forward to sending some of their sorry jihadist asses to paradise."

  A COOL ocean mist rolled in over the tarmac as the new team deplaned at the Coast Guard's Air Station in South San Francisco and were greeted by Team Two leader Sergeant Wilcox. From there, it was a short ride north to their lodging in the Marines' Memorial Club and Hotel a few short blocks from the Federal Building. Short, but in this case anything but quick as they battled bumper-to-bumper traffic every centimeter of the way.

  "Brian Loving's in town," Sergeant Wilcox said with a disgusted shake of his head. "Holding what his organization's calling 'prayer meetings' at the Oakland Coliseum and ATT Park. The local news estimates over two hundred thousand people have flooded into town."

  The stately Memorial Club Hotel was a far cry from their rooms back at DARE Headquarters, and quite an improvement, Jamie thought with a small pang of guilt, over the Alameda Coast Guard base where the Team Two agents were holed up. They wandered through ogling the military memorabilia and the portraits of famous Marines adorning the walls grateful for their respite from honking horns and revving engines.

  They met with Team Two leader Sergeant Wilcox, FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC, SF division) Andrew Wheeler, and Homeland Security Investigations head Bonnie Dale in the stateroom, discussing their recent intelligence and the mission over coffee, tea, and doughnuts.

  "These Last Days people have thrown a giant wrench in our security operations around the Federal Building," said the local HSI head, Bonnie Dale. "They're supposed to be confined to the AT&T Park and Oakland Coliseum areas, but they seem to be everywhere, holding prayer vigils in the parks and on the beaches and especially around the Federal Building. SFPD tried to clear them out from Federal Building area, but that prompted a spontaneous sit-down 'prayer protest' against our registration policies, which they claim are violating their spiritual rights to be divine beings."

  "Divine beings," Jake Culler snorted. "Is that what they're calling themselves now?"

  "I don't understand," said Tildie. "What exactly do these people worship anyway?"

  The FBI and HSI heads traded awkward looks.

  "We're not really sure," said the FBI SAC, Andrew Wheeler. "I have one of their brochures."

  "Can I see it?" asked Jamie.

  He handed it to her. The headline read: "It's Not The End: It's A New Beginning."

  My brothers and sisters, I bring to you God's Final Testament. The official story that an infection of an alien nanovirus caused our new powers is not true. I know this because I have spoken indirectly with the being who sent the Object. That being is none other than Gabreille, servant to God our father! This was not a mere piece of alien technology. This was a gift from our Father Himself to prepare mankind for the final days and coming ascension into His Kingdom.

  The choice to ascend is one that must be freely made. Every person on this planet, regardless of faith or personal circumstances, may choose to enter Heaven and enjoy eternal life. Even if you have committed terrible sins, all you need do is ask for God's mercy, and your sins will be washed away forever.

  Some of you have asked me what Heaven is like. Will you sit all day admiring an endless sunrise? Will you socialize with all your lost family and friends? To your questions I will give this reply, as the Father Himself has told me: your life in His Kingdom will be of your own making. You may choose to create a world of your own dreams, or you may live in the dreams of others. You may choose among infinite courses of action, between infinite numbers of goals. You may choose difficult paths or you may choose those paths of little resistance. Whatever you choose, God's love and grace will shine upon you always.

  Jamie skimmed a bit more before handing it to Tildie, who after a brief reading handed it on to Jay.

  "I wonder if they have that brochure back at DARE," said Jamie. "That's something they maybe should take a look at."

  "DARE should be interested in them," Bonnie Dale stated. "This organization is actively involved in sabotaging our registration process – and far more effectively than the Augmented Americans for Freedom movement from what I can tell."

  "I suppose it was inevitable," said Jay, thumbing through the brochure along with Tildie. "Someone would see something supernatural in this. Advanced technology, it seems, doesn't just look like magic, as Arthur Clarke said. It can also look like religion."

  "All these new powers are awfully hard to process," said Tildie. "If I weren't a card-carrying agnostic, I might get religious about it myself."

  "But his claim about being in direct communication with the Object's maker..." Jamie frowned, not quite sure where to take the idea half-forming in her head. "What if he's not delusional about that? He really might be receiving messages from the Object's makers – or someone or something else."

  "That's a bit outside my purview," said Andrew Wheeler, drawing an uncomfortable nod from his Homeland Security counterpart. "We're here to deal with more local threats."

  Jamie noted a look of warning from Tildie, reminding her that the encounter with the huge ship near Mars was not common knowledge. In fact, it was Top Secret knowledge according to the non-disclosure forms she and the other DARE members in the know had signed. She gave her friend a slight nod: message received.

  "Of course," said Jamie. "Do you have any new information on the AAF
or Hibat Allah?"

  "We're monitoring some AAF members in the area. No sign of Thomas Mayes or anyone who's been identified as top-tier leaders. We have some Al Qaeda suspects under surveillance in Oakland, but nothing to indicate an Hibat Allah presence here. DHS has vans equipped with Stand-Off Radiation Detection Systems patrolling the city along with Roadside Radiation Trackers on the major highways. So far, nothing."

  More coffee and tea and pastry consumption followed. Communing with federal agents as a federal agent still struck Jamie as surreal. From the uncertain expressions on her teams she was pretty sure she wasn't the only one who felt that way. Even stranger, she was a high-ranking leader in one of the most powerful institutions in the country. One more note to add to the mind-boggling symphony that had become her life.

  "Are you getting anything, Kim-Ly?" Jamie asked the quiet young woman sitting just beyond the circle of agents. From what Jamie had seen so far, Kim-Ly always found a place at the periphery of any gathering. Jamie wondered if she was attempting to avoid a psychic link with any of them.

  The young Vietnamese girl - twenty but often mistaken for a teenager – shrugged her thin shoulders, averting her eyes downward as the group turned to her. She replied in a voice that had most of them leaning forward to hear.

  "The people here are happy," she said. "Many are filled with joy they had not known."

  A few seconds of silence followed. Kim-Ly kept her gaze firmly on the floor.

  "Religious bliss?" Jeremy ventured.

  "Their belief is strong."

  "Do you sense anything that isn't blissful?" Jamie asked. "People who are dangerous?"

  "Yes." She rubbed her forearms. "There are always those people, but they are not the ones we are looking for."

  This was Jamie's first clairvoyant, and so far she couldn't say she was impressed. Like the psychics skeptics traditionally lambasted, pointing out their vagueness and lack of reliability, Kim-Ly had been fuzzy and sometimes oracular in her predictions and perceptions. DARE scientists, including Zachary, had measured her abilities and found them impressive in technical tasks such as "What number's behind the screen?", but as Zach admitted to her, it was damn difficult to measure her performance in the field. People and circumstances were complex, and so, apparently, was her ability, which appeared to vacillate unpredictably between future and present – and occasionally, even past – events.

  On top of that, some of the things she saw were symbolic. Kim-Ly herself admitted she didn't always know the difference between real and figurative, present and the future. Kim-Ly believed it was a skill she had to develop before she could reliably make those distinctions. Yet both she and her DARE handlers believed she had an excellent chance of predicting a major event, based in part on her prediction that Jamie would encounter a "giant ship" near Mars and "destroy one of its lesser craft." The first part not being that unpredictable, but second had earned her a place on Team One.

  "Well, we'll keep you posted," said Andrew Wheeler, both he and Bonnie Dale rising together.

  Afterward, the team strolled down to the Federal Building, using their IED badges to get past SFPD lines that been set up two blocks all around the building. They'd finally gotten the area cleared out of protestors and intended to keep it clear.

  Allen Lassiter drilled the nearby buildings with his object-penetrating vision, while Kim-Ly walked in rapt concentration, attuned to any psychic image. They were dressed in normal street clothes and stayed earthbound to avoid drawing any notice from curious eyes.

  They met up with the Team Two units – plus Terry Mayes and his father - staying over at the Alameda Coast Guard base. To avoid hours in traffic, they were ferried over in a Coast Guard cutter. Three units of twenty-members each crowded the small barracks, which they were sharing with Coast Guard sailors. They hung out there for a couple of hours, trading intel tidbits and some field stories, but mostly just getting to know each other.

  After this mission, Terry told her, he and his dad were going home for a couple of weeks. They'd built up a serious appetite for Granny Mayes home cooking. Or so they joked. But she could see the homesickness in their eyes. It would probably be in her eyes, too, if not for Zach, and if not for...well, the fact that she only had her Dad waiting for her.

  The Team Two members were middling to upper-level Class Twos. Three or four of them might've qualified as marginal "Ones," and if Team One lost members or was ever expanded, they could move up in rank. The "entry exam" into Team Two was rigorous, and DARE scientists guesstimated that Team Two personnel were superior in power to ninety percent of augments (which now effectively meant "the general populace"). But tests and field experience had shown that those with elite powers could outmatch even a large number of lower-class augments. In theory, a group of lesser-powered individuals could align their powers against an elite to negate that advantage, but in training and in the field that had proven easier said than done. Still, Jamie was glad to have them there. If nothing else, more eyes on the ground might spot something her team missed.

  Their final stop for the evening was the Oakland Coliseum and an estimated one hundred and twenty thousand people swarming outside and within the stadium. Even with the DHS and Oakland P.D. out in force, the crowd was barely controllable. The DHS funneled them in through their checkpoints past agents with M4s and full military regalia, bomb-sniffing police dogs, and big white vans bristling with satellite dishes, sound amplification, and radiation detection equipment.

  Jamie and her crew were surprised that once inside the Coliseum the bedlam gave way to a startling if not eerie calm. For the most part, they sat with their heads bowed, one eye on the stage, where a longhaired man in jeans and a white dress shirt stood with his head also bowed. Jamie split the unit in two, and they circled away from each other on the walkway between the seated people and the throngs in the playing field to meet somewhere on the far side.

  Jamie had the feeling of entering a church or mosque and being the only one not praying. Only a few people glanced at them as they moved between the crowds. She guessed they knew they were law enforcement.

  "That must be the famous Brian Loving," Tildie muttered. "He looks like some guy on the inside cover of GQ."

  "I think he actually was that guy."

  The man on center stage raised his head suddenly and grinned a big ex-model's grin. Weirdly, he appeared to be staring straight at them. Straight at me, Jamie thought with a start.

  "Blessed are the weak," he said into the microphones, his words swelling through the stadium, "for they shall soon become gods."

  "Amen," one hundred thousand people agreed as one.

  Jamie slowed her step, meeting the young man's apparent gaze.

  "I'm actually getting goosebumps," Tildie murmured. "God, is he staring at us?"

  "Looks that way." Jamie zoomed in until the gold flecks in his eyes glittered. They might've been standing two feet from each other. Oddly, Brian Loving's grin spread and he winked. Jamie shared some of her friend's goosebumps.

  "He's a handsome devil, I'll say that anyway." Tildie shot a nervous glance at Jay, who was suddenly fighting a frown. "Of course no one can hold a candle to my Telly Jay."

  Behind them, Hulk Horner made a gagging sound. Jamie smiled. Usually "inter-office" romances were a bad idea – even in her short tenure she'd seen their unpleasant consequences twice among the teaching staff at Grand Forks High – but it was an almost unavoidable option among Class One augments. "Freaks need to date freaks," as Tildie put it. "Or people are gonna get hurt."

  "What did he mean by the weak becoming gods?" Jay asked. "Didn't sound particularly Christian."

  "Just typical New Age bullshit," said Jack Culler.

  "New Age on Steroids," said Jay. "Deepak Chopra never shut down a city."

  "The city of fags," grumbled Hulk. "Fucking figures."

  Brian Loving resumed speaking, his voice soft, mellifluous, missing the usual preacher's melodramatic highs and lows and emphatic cadences but seeming s
tronger because of that. He spoke as if talking to friends in his living room after dinner and some drinks. Judging from the beatific smiles around them, his congregation was eating it up.

  Then Loving lifted his arms and declared: "Let us rise! Leave none of your brothers or sisters behind!"

  The Last Days' leader rose slowly off the stage, his arms remaining in the air. An ability shared by an estimated nine percent of augments, it wasn't exactly rare. But that didn't diminish the spectacle of what was happening now: people rising out of their seats or from the playing field, first in small groups, and then the small groups joined and a few stragglers on the ground were soon sucked up into the rising mass of people through, Jamie imagined, a concerted telekinetic/flying effort.

  "Nice show," said Tildie. "You have to give him that."

  "Let's hope none of them falls," said Belinda, craning her head along with the others as the crowd levitated about one hundred meters in the air, achieving a remarkably even bottom line, with Brian Loving hovering at their center, as if standing on an invisible ground.

  Jamie and her team met up with Jeremy and other half of the unit on the east end of the Coliseum. By then, Brian Loving had said another, apparently final, prayer, and the crowd was settling back down to earth. They lingered while the people milled around and gradually oozed out the exits. Brian Loving was nowhere to be seen.

  "They are coming to kill them."

  Jamie and the others looked around until they located the origin of the half-whispered words: Kim-Ly Klein, who was peering up at the darkening sky, now devoid of floating worshipers.

  "Hibat Allah?" Jamie stared at her. "The people in this stadium? Now?"

  Kim-Ly shook her head. "Soon. Tomorrow maybe. The people here, yes, but not only here. The whole city." She paused, breathing heavily, as if shed run up several flights of stadium stairs. "I do not know if it is Hibat Allah, but they come in fast, in the air, Class 1, I think. One bomb is placed in here...I see it in the stands. Others explode in air over the city..."