by Brian Trent
Gethin sucked in a breath. “As in negative mass matter?”
“But,” Judith said sternly, “the cathode was empty. Exotic matter experiments are not done anywhere near the brightworlds by IPC regulation. Actual, physical experiments are conducted in the asteroid frontier. We only work in virtual.”
“So there was no exotic matter on Luna?”
“Absolutely none.”
Gethin said, “But there is in the Belt?”
Her answer was predictable. “I don’t know how far they’ve come in their research out there. I have never been to the Belt.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Gethin said dismissively, the possibilities wheeling in his mind. “But this cathode rail was completed? Your virtual test results were embedded for the conference. As soon as you received Earthside approval, you were going to ship out the data-stream to Ceres for production and testing, right? For the TNO Project?”
“Yes.”
Gethin raised an eyebrow and looked to Jack.
“I’ll look into it,” Jack said, startled by this revelation.
It was 2100 when they left the couple.
“I’ll page you when Cavor is ready,” Jack said.
“Thanks.”
“Do you have accommodations?”
“Yeah,” Gethin lied. He knew PI would be shadowing his every move. As soon as they verified his room number, they’d put the hotel on full surveillance. Every meal he ate would be noted (“Mr. Bryce has chewed his toast four times before swallowing”) every place he visited, every window he passed (“He seems absorbed by the book display at Melville’s”) and certainly any unencrypted message he sent.
Maybe the encrypted ones too.
“We have nice guest accommodations,” Jack persisted.
“I’m sure you do, but I already have a hotel.”
Jack smiled slightly, reading the lie off Gethin’s forehead. “I hope it wasn’t too expensive.”
Gethin laughed. It was actually the first real moment of warmth he had showcased, and Jack chanced to join it.
“Nice meeting you, Jack Saylor. Let me know when all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have put Cavor back together again.”
Chapter Eleven
The Oversoul
Again, the soothsayers had been wrong.
A world of digital surveillance and thousands of tracking methods hadn’t made society more transparent for the crafty few, but provided more bramble and brush to vanish into.
Gethin left Saylor and contacted the Hanging Gardens Suites to register a room. The charge was made over comlink. Knowing he was still being tailed, Gethin then ducked into a neon, gaudy falafel diner and found the back door before any employee realized what was happening. While passing vats of hot oil and cooking rice, Gethin touched his clothes’ reversible option and they turned to drab black.
“Implement Gemini,” he muttered to Id.
*Then stop moving for half a minute, will you?* the Familiar snapped.
There was a burst of signals from Gethin’s head, and they lashed outward like invisible hydra heads biting down on the local surveillance sphere. Fourteen security cameras were fed a false trail of Gethin’s face in the crowd, moving south-east towards a local arcadium. At the same time, the cameras just outside the falafel diner were told to see Gethin as mere ‘noise’ amid the shopping herd, of no more tracking importance than the seams in cobblestone, the patterns in Babylonian tunics, or the angular geometries of kiosks.
*Okay,* Id said at last. *Follow the yellow brick road.*
He went out the back, found himself in a narrow alley, and scaled a short wall of potted plants. Keeping his head low, Gethin snuck into the district’s clustered shops and garden strips while following a jagged yellow overlay of Id’s safe spots. It was no easy task hacking Babylon security. Gethin moved as a poltergeist through the arcology and knew that right behind him, the safety zone was zipping up like the ocean closing over a ship’s wake.
Babylon’s Faustian Temple was on Level 100, across the street from a popular franchise club, the Decadents. Gethin made a cautious approach. The temple’s front was fashioned like the rest of the arcology, in carved stonework made to imitate the ancient styles of Persia, Babylonia, and Sumer. Two bearded sphinxes guarded the entrance.
Gethin took a deep breath, steeling himself. When he heard his name called, he wasn’t remotely surprised.
“Mr. Bryce!”
The voice came from the Decadents café. Gethin saw a man wearing a maroon tunic, waving at him.
Gethin entered the café dubiously. His eye-lens informed him the man in the tunic was Faustian monk Water Basilisk.
Water. Basilisk. What a bunch of lunatics.
“You’ve got sharp eyes,” Gethin said. “I didn’t realize monks kicked back with a drink at the end of the day.”
The monk nodded gravely. “We hoped you would come.”
“You were waiting for me?”
“We knew you were in Babylon. But we also know you still place a high premium on privacy.” The monk spat the word with distaste. “We hoped you would seek us out.”
Gethin expected this to be followed by the usual ‘you showed such incredible potential’ bullshit, but the monk didn’t dare. Wary of cameras, Gethin said, “Let’s get inside. And you’re buying.”
Decadents was smoky and hallucinogenic within. Heavy bass music shook the corridors. It was like crawling through the veins of a giant monster with the thudding of its heartbeat resonating in the walls.
The main dance floor was made up like a masquerade with an antique clock standing thirty feet tall. Revelers whirled and spun, seething with color and life. Gethin steered clear of it – there was no telling who might recognize him from the Lunar broadcast – and he went to the club’s catacombs. Here, tables were arranged behind damp mounds of lichen, murky pools, and fake tombs of the dead.
Gethin grabbed a remote table. Basilisk sat down with him.
“Amontillado?” a jester asked them.
“Two,” Gethin said.
“We won’t betray you,” the monk told him amicably. “We know the corporate world is monitoring your every step while you conduct your investigation.”
Gethin said nothing, but inwardly felt a chill. How can Basilisk know about all this? Of course…they saw me leaving the regen center on Luna. They could have tracked me to the train station, and seen which train I got on.
Gethin liked to think he would have lost them after that, but really, there was no way to be sure. The IPC shuttle had discreetly picked him up at Tycho Hospital, and the Faustian’s collective hound might have been sniffing fruitlessly for him for a while. So where had they noticed him again? Was it those two Helen of Troy greeters up top? A random Faustian adept in the market?
Saylor himself?
Gethin waited until the jester brought their wine. The table’s menu glowed in soft phosphorescence. He was hungry. But he wasn’t about to drag this meeting out any longer than he needed.
The monk looked very grave. “You received our message?”
“I received a stupid hook. Normally I stay the fuck away from you guys, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Do you have something to tell me or not?”
“We have information,” the monk whispered. He dropped his eyes, indicating with his entire manner that Gethin should switch to subvocal. Gethin nodded and amped up his hearing.
“The natural state of mankind is to fragment,” the monk said, his lips barely twitching as he spoke. “Do you agree?”
“No,” Gethin said. “That’s like saying the natural state of locusts is to swarm, but that’s not true. Locusts are ordinarily sedate until their population hits a critical mass. Then enzymes kick in. They transform. They metamorphose and go on a feeding frenzy. Humans are the same way. We start off in fragmented tribes, then gr
adually coalesce into a unified civilization, things get static for a while, and then we fragment. Then it starts all over. It’s like the first line of Romance of the Three Kingdoms: ‘The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.’”
The monk’s eyes widened. Clearly he hadn’t been anticipating this kind of argument. Clearly, too, he read into Gethin’s deeper meaning.
The Faustians eagerly anticipated the merging of all sentient life. They believed it was the inevitable fate of the universe.
“You don’t think that worldview is a touch bleak?” the monk asked neutrally.
“Not at all. The very seasons come and go. Ebb and flow.”
“But you’ve already broken the ebb and flow. You died, Mr. Bryce. Now you live again, sharing this drink with us. Was it good or bad that death was abolished?”
“Protecting human life from the ravages of the universe is not breaking ebb and flow.”
“Ah, but it is precisely that,” Basilisk insisted, leaning towards Gethin. “Humans live forever now. It is the penultimate state. What follows is either total chaos as our species splinters into warring factions on ten thousand future worlds, or a merging into one being…where all consciousness comes together with the total sum of our experiences. It strengthens the species.”
“That’s not a species,” Gethin snapped, no longer speaking subvocally. “What you want is one super-organism, an omega creature. And that’s suicide.”
“It’s immortality and godhood. It’s true omniscience.”
Gethin shook his head, feeling strangely hunted. Wondering how many Faustians were down here with them, he glanced to the bar. All three bartenders were staring at him while they worked.
The monk’s eyes glinted lustfully. “Life is only sentience. Not these evolutionary husks of meat! And of all the people in the universe, you experienced that moment…a prescient taste of what the future holds.”
Gethin started to get up. “I didn’t come here for sermons. Your monks on Luna said you had information to share…”
The monk nodded readily. “We do. War is coming. It threatens to fracture humanity into disparate shards. We see much and share all. The Prometheans are waiting for any excuse to spread their seeds into the galaxy and leave this petty solar system behind. The Asteroid Federation swells with evil ambition. The devil-eyed Ashoka breed in their rockships. MarsAlone stockpiles weapons for revolution…maybe violent enough to harm someone you care for?”
Gethin turned away.
“Lori Ambermoon?” the monk called after him. “Or was it Natalia Argos?”
Gethin halted and turned back. His glare was volcanic.
Basilisk held up his hands in parley. “You have the unique ability to be the godhead, Mr. Bryce. In six hundred million simulations, you are the only one who consistently showed such promise. You could unite humanity through worlds both digital and physical. You could play every faction against the middle in conjunction with our forces. Together we can achieve peace, do you understand, before humanity spreads and shatters beyond all hope of repair!”
“Yeah? Will I change water into wine too?”
“Why do you think the IPC nabbed you?” the monk taunted. “Why send you to Mars? Why dispatch you on dozens of fruitless missions around the solar system? It’s to keep someone of your strategic talents busy, distracted!”
Gethin bristled at this.
Basilisk’s face was flushed. “What do you think will happen when the colonization ban is overturned? And it will be, within a century. Your abilities with the Oversoul can prevent this hopeless fracturing. Every monk has reviewed your career. You entered the Oversoul’s consciousness and it frightened you, it drove you to recoil into your shell. But that’s natural. When humanity moves forward into space, it can either diverge into ten thousand subspecies triggering new wars, or it can benefit from your input and leadership and guidance!”
“My leadership?” Gethin laughed. “I was an Arcadian addict, and I won’t return to those days. You call us chaotic, warlike, messy? I say that it’s exactly the life I want. Merging into one super-being is oblivion.”
“It is sharing with your species!” Basilisk roared, lunging at him.
Gethin vanished.
To Basilisk’s gaze, the awesome prodigy he was having drinks with suddenly blurred and disappeared, as if drawn into a higher dimension, the lofty crystalline shell to which all consciousness was moving as surely as a caterpillar crawled up the tree to spin its silken womb and emerge, winged and beautiful, for flight.
But for Gethin, he had simply accessed a tab on his HUD.
It was the tab that said SPECIAL. And when a drop-down menu unraveled, he selected the BLURMOD option.
Faster than the human eye could register, Gethin sprang up from his seat, fled the table, and escaped the club.
But not before breaking Basilisk’s jaw with the astounding power of an accelerated punch.
Chapter Twelve
Celeste Awakens to Civilization
The girl hides behind dusty towers of egg crates in the moldy basement. She hates the basement. Dirty water always seeps in, and centipedes crawl on the walls. They’re fast and ugly and have too many legs. She tries not to think about them, especially now, with the basement lights extinguished and the hum of the refrigerator and the hollow drip of water. If a centipede crawls across her feet she might scream.
But Mommy is in the dark too. The large wooden buttons of Mommy’s apron are comforting. Mommy’s hands are strong and warm. They smell like lemon.
The girl thinks of the wrinkled knobby blind man who lives above the butcher shop, and she wonders if this is what it’s like to be blind: the universe as a swarming black nothingness, with only hard wooden buttons and lemon-scented hands and the sounds –
– drip –
– of leaky pipes and Mommy singing her favorite song in her softest, feather-light whisper:
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, starlight and dew drops are waiting for thee—”
An explosion makes the basement jump. The little girl screams, but Mommy clamps a lemony hand over her mouth. Quietly, almost pure whisper now, she continues: “Sounds of the rude world heard in the day…lulled by the moonlight, have all passed away—”
Upstairs, gunfire pops in staccato, perforating the foyer. Uncle Tony’s boys are yelling, knocking over furniture, shooting back at the bad men who have penetrated the barricade. The girl doesn’t understand why they came over the barricade. Why don’t they just stay on the other side?
A spatter of more gunfire and something very heavy hits the floor. It has to be Uncle Tony’s bulky, toadlike body, collapsing in terrible finality.
Mommy’s buttons. The girl feels Mommy’s buttons again. Flat, rough around the edges like coin grooves.
Is that why the bad men are killing Uncle Tony? For coins?
Mommy removes her hand from over the girl’s mouth. “Sing with me, Celeste. Quietly, my little angel. Sing with me.”
“Beautiful dreamer,” the girl whispers. “Wake unto me…”
“Starlight and dew drops are waiting for thee,” Mommy trembles.
An upstairs door bursts open. Horrible sounds, the sounds of men fighting hand-to-hand. A stampede of footsteps in the kitchen, last defense before the bolted cellar door, a table crashes over and there go all of Mommy’s pretty dishes. Men grunt and scream, making wet, choking sounds.
The girl can feel Mommy’s warm breath.
“Sounds of the rude world,” Mommy breathes.
The cellar door buckles. Angry voices and a hideous new noise…
“…heard in the day…”
…a terrible new noise…
“Lulled by the moonlight…”
…the BUZZING OF A CHAINSAW!
“Mommy!”
“Have all passe
d…”
* * *
Away.
Floating up to the gentle embrace of algae lamps above her hospital bed, Celeste Segarra opened her eyes. Then she immediately shut them. Used her private darkness to process what she had seen in that momentary glimpse.
Don’t let them – whoever they are – know you’re awake. Not yet.
She had seen a red room with a floor like pink quartz. There was a glassy orb-camera above her bed. A holographic jungle sprouted from the walls, deep green and resonating with chirps and trills. A medbot stood beside the bed like an old parking meter plucked from an overgrown ruin.
Celeste’s first thought was that she had been captured by Quinn. He would have heard about the raid and be none too pleased. His private security force was more than a match for her squad. Quinn stockpiled all the arky toys, and now she was a prisoner in his survivalist bunker.
A sick feeling exploded in her stomach. The memory of the airfield struck Celeste’s brain like a mass driver. No!
It had to have been a dream.
Had to be. The man with the searchlight eyes, his body shredding from weaponfire into a haze of bone chips, meat, and blood. The energy burst that had lanced her friends as they circled him.
Celeste felt hot vomit shoot up her throat, and she twisted in barely enough time to retch onto the floor.
All of her friends were dead. Jeff! Their bodies had been flung like dolls from that bastard’s suicide bomb. For a moment the delicate thread of hope wavered in her thoughts, because clearly she had survived the attack, so why not others? Then she remembered.
The leader had flung her clear of the area before detonating. Allie was already near death. Rajnar and Jamala and Jeff had been overtaken by the detonation.
Tomorrow is ours, babe.
Forever you’re mine.
Jeff. Sandy-haired, child-hearted optimist who somehow managed to stay hopeful in a kingdom of corpses.
Hey! There are glops the size of dinosaurs in Canada, Celeste!
She grunted in pain, dizziness, and rage. She wanted to kill something. Wanted to tear the room apart, bite out the throats of whoever was here.