Mike returned to his own station and sat down. His bots were not only ready for reconnaissance, but they had been doing reconnaissance in the area of the destroyed Deep Shield camp since he’d deployed them. He’d used the opportunity to experiment with his own talents and realized something interesting—each robot, though they were supposed to be identical—felt different. He couldn’t have explained that to anyone—maybe it was the personal touch of a single screw tightened more than another, or a wire soldered from a different angle, or a combination of thousands of those little things. But he knew it to be true regardless. There were four of them now, stationed at intervals down the mountain, and Mike had named each one. They were Anatoly, Boris, Zhenya, and Sacha. Sacha was his favorite, and was the one deployed farthest from the mountain peak to keep watch on the Deep Shield cleanup. So Sacha was the one he inhabited now—without even needing a line of sight. Now he just knew how the bot felt.
Sara went to stand before the massive bank of screens at the head of the big room and set most of them to show a huge visual of Matt Streegman and the room in which he stood. All except one. One, Mike noticed, showed Sara what Matt was seeing—her, standing at the front of the cavernous operations center in a pool of white light, her dark hair glossy, her face in dramatic shadow, wearing a black, formfitting jumpsuit.
She was impressive, Mike had to admit, and he more than suspected she even impressed herself. At the very least, she wanted to be sure she projected an intimidating image. Having lived with her these past few days, he wanted to assure her that she was definitely intimidating.
Mike kept ears on Sara’s dialogue with Matt and eyes on the environment around the Sacha-bot. Sensors built into the robot’s thorax and head told him that the ex–Deep Shield camp was sparsely populated by cleanup crews. His earlier observations had convinced him that their mandate was to return the area to something as close to its pre–Deep Shield appearance as possible, to make it appear as if the fire had spread out from a lightning strike or a simple campfire.
He moved Sacha closer and observed that the entire cleanup crew was composed of half a dozen guys with metal detectors going over the area where the bodies had lain. He wondered what had become of those bodies. Had they been buried anonymously? Returned to their families? Cremated?
He heard Sara laugh and realized he’d gotten distracted from her conversation with Matt.
“. . . good to see me?” Sara was saying. “Why do I doubt that?”
“You shouldn’t doubt it,” Matt assured her. “I’ve been worried about you three. Howard had a stranglehold on Forward Kinetics. I can’t even imagine what he must have done to you.”
He looked older, Mike thought. Frazzled. Not surprising, considering that he’d been in the clutches of Deep Shield longer than they had. Why was Sara being so snarky with him?
“Not nearly as drastic as what we did to him, apparently,” Sara said dryly. “The damn coward shot himself.”
Matt snorted. “That surprises you? He put himself in a no-win situation.” His face sobered. “He put you in a no-win situation, too, damn him. I hate how he treated you—like you were ordnance instead of human beings.”
Mike couldn’t see Sara’s face—she had her back to him—but he caught her expression in the monitor she’d filled with her image. He saw the ripple of naked pain and anger that crossed her face—saw the softening in her eyes.
“Thank you for that, Doc,” she said. “You’re a good guy. So, where do we stand? I assume you’ve gotten the authorities—the real ones this time—involved in this?”
“Actually, the president came to me. Her administration had no idea what Howard was up to.” His mouth twitched and one corner turned up in a wry smile. “Heck of a way you chose to shout ‘We are here!’ Sara. But it worked. You were heard. So, where we stand is, President Ellis wants to know your . . .” He glanced to one side as if conferring silently with someone before looking back at the camera. “She’d like to know your intent and your goals.”
Sara cocked a look back over her shoulder, taking in Tim and Mike. “Our goals are simple: world peace, incorruptible governments and agencies thereof, safety, long life—”
“Not being thrown into prison,” murmured Mike.
Sara and Matt both heard him and said, in perfect unison, “No one’s going to throw you in prison, Mike.”
The look on Sara’s face, now turned toward him, told Mike she meant the words in an entirely different way than Matt did. She turned back to the screens.
“I’d say we need to talk at length,” she said.
“With that list of goals, I’d say so, too. ” Matt spread his hands. “Open up and let me in?” He grinned. “I come in peace.”
Mike’s view of the forest through the bot’s optics was supplanted by a tiny minotaur waving its hoofed arms. “Got signal!” it said in Tim’s voice, and indicated a direction by pointing with a miniature mace. Mike realized he was receiving intel about the location Matt’s signal was coming from. It felt like a soft pulse of static electricity beating against his right arm—the robot’s right arm. He turned Sacha into the signal and put him in motion.
“When can you talk?” Sara asked, adding, “You’ll have to come alone.”
“Obviously. As soon as I’ve been briefed.” He glanced aside again. “Tonight? Nineteen hundred hours?”
“Agreed. We’ll send you an escort. Mike . . . ?”
Mike nodded. “I’ve got a ninja bot coming your way, Doc. Don’t let them shoot him, okay?”
“I promise they won’t shoot him,” Matt said. “It would be an exercise in futility anyway.”
“Yes,” said Sara, “it would be. I’m serious, Matt. When I said we wanted peace and security and an incorruptible government, I was being perfectly serious. If I learned one thing from General Leighton Howard and his pack of mad bastards it was that this world needs saving and it finally has people capable of saving it.”
She cut the link, but not before Mike saw the stricken look on Matt’s face. The screens fell dark.
“Wow,” said Tim. “It just hit me—we’re superheroes. We’re the Avengers and the X-Men all rolled into one. Aw, man! I guess that makes me the Hulk, right? I mean, I’d be Scarlet Witch except—y’know, girl. I guess Sara can be the Scarlet Witch. Black Widow is cooler, but no superpowers. And Mike, who will you be? I mean, you look a lot like Bruce Banner, but—”
“Iron Man,” said Mike, wondering if he could think Tim to silence, and if he could do it without killing him. “I’ll be Iron Man.”
Sara cut across their conversation. “If you boys are finished playing make-believe, I’d like to sit down and come up with a coherent list of demands. We have an opportunity, here, to do some real good in the world. We should be ready to take it.”
“You think they won’t try to take us down?” Tim asked. “Win our trust by sending Matt in and then—boom!—try to blow us up or something?”
“They might. If you’re afraid of them making Matt a suicide bomber, though, I think you can kiss that idea good-bye. Matt Streegman isn’t the sacrificial-lamb type. But he might be a piece of a bigger plan.” Sara slid into a chair and swiveled it to face the two men. “We killed American soldiers.”
“Soldiers who were engaged in treason,” Mike reminded her.
Tim snapped his fingers and pointed at Mike. “Yeah. We did the country a service and they know it. We took care of a problem they didn’t even know they had.”
Sara speared them, one after the other, with her pale, gray gaze. “Someone knew they had it. Howard wasn’t bankrolling Deep Shield all by his lonesome. He was working with or for someone else. Someone with much more clout—possibly even political clout.”
“Someone in the White House, you mean?” asked Tim, as if the sentence tasted like chocolate.
Sara nodded. “Or Congress. Or the Joint Chiefs. We don’t know. Which means—”
“Trust no one!” Tim crowed.
“Trust no one,” Sara agr
eed without even a hint of sarcasm.
The chill that swept Mike’s body went all the way to the bone. He shrugged it off by focusing all of his consciousness on Sacha’s tracking of the Wi-Fi signal from Matt’s location. It was a strange sensation, feeling the signal as indescribable textures in the air, tasting it, smelling it, simply knowing what it was and where it was coming from. He immersed himself in the tingling awareness and tried not to think about trust.
When Kristian Lorstad arrived for his second attempt at learning to zeta, he had two of his fellow Learned in tow: the mysterious and aloof Alexis and a young Englishman he introduced as Giles Camden. Giles was one of the newest of the Learned and had only just crawled out of the tank after his first immersion. Eugene thought he seemed a bit bewildered.
Lorstad insisted that Alexis have the first try, so Eugene and Dice set her up with the rig just as they had their own Zetas in the earliest days of kinetic technology. The positron cap was on her head, cabled to the kinetic converter and thence to the Brewster-Brenton Brain Pattern Monitor and Roboticus Mark II.
Chuck described the principles on which the machinery operated—reading the subject’s brain waves and converting them into discrete impulses.
“Those waves can easily move a stylus on a chart,” Chuck told her. “So there’s no reason they can’t move Roboticus there. So, for the first trial, just concentrate on the joystick on top of the robot. It has a full three hundred sixty degrees of movement, but I want you to just concern yourself with back and forth right now.”
“So simple?” asked Alexis. “I could take that device and throw it across the room.”
“Yes, using your immersion-enhanced abilities. I want you to just use naked thought to move the joystick. Try to push it forward, please.” Chuck’s voice was gentle and his facial expression patiently neutral.
Eugene admired the hell out of the way he could do that. Chuck handled disbelief, arrogance, and outright mockery as if they were pleasantries. Euge wanted to snark back, despite the fact that he knew he wasn’t good at it.
Alexis shrugged, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and focused her gaze on Roboticus. After a moment, her brow knit and her lips tightened. She gripped the arms of her chair.
“Don’t try so hard,” Chuck said softly.
Alexis glared at him, then back at the bot. It tumbled forward about five feet and ended up against a lab table with its little wheels in the air.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “You’re asking me to ignore powers I have already developed. Let me use my learning.”
“But that would defeat the purpose of what we’re trying to do.”
Before she could protest, Eugene interjected.
“You know,” he said, looking at Chuck, “that might actually not be a bad idea, if only to establish a control among the—the Learned. I mean, maybe the abilities can be built up even with the power assist just through practice.”
“Do you predict that it will?” asked Lorstad hopefully.
Chuck frowned. “No. I’d actually predict that as the Learned’s enhanced abilities waned, she’d find it more difficult to do what would be easy at first attempt. But I’m willing to be proved wrong,” he added at Alexis’s sharp glance. “It’s also possible that the abilities would strengthen with repeated use, though it might take longer than for a—uh—a nonimmersive talent.”
“That’s absurd,” said Alexis. “There’s no such thing as—” She cut off, her gaze flitting to Lorstad. “I . . . apologize. That was out of line. Kristian insists that your talents—if not innate—do not make use of immersion technology. I suppose I must accept that as fact.”
But she didn’t accept it as fact, Eugene was pretty sure. Her world was under threat. The typical first response to such a threat was denial. These upstarts had walked in and revealed that her years of submersion were essentially for naught. Not only that but the tanks may have produced inferior abilities across the board. Considering this she seemed to handle things with a fair amount of poise. She made repeated tries to not make use of her extended sense set but merely to operate the machinery via the homely activity of her imagination. Each time, though, the same thing: failure.
Not close.
No cigar.
No biscuit.
During a break, Chuck put Joey into the rig and got him to send Roboticus on a hesitant ramble up and down the center of the lab. Giles was next and managed to move the little bot in a timid, but straight, line. Chuck had probably intended these demonstrations to show Alexis what she could accomplish or to at least spark a sense of competition, à la “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.” But she just failed more her second time in the chair. Toward the end, Alexis simply began using her power assist to move Roboticus around the lab, almost certainly out of frustration.
It was a most entertaining display—especially the levitating and rolling across the ceiling and down the wall part—but it was next to useless in terms of what Lorstad wanted his people to learn. Well, at least where Alexis was concerned.
Euge gave Chuck a sidewise glance. He knew what he was thinking: Her EEG is not very interesting. Sure it hits some gamma, but above that it really isn’t that impressive. What exactly is the source of the Learned’s power?
Chuck diplomatically assigned her the role of Control 2. Alexis’s performance yielded no useful observable data. Her machinations were fun to watch but not very helpful to the cause as a whole. Joey Blossom would serve as control for completely untrained nonimmersive talents and Alexis would be control for immersive talents. Lorstad was not particularly pleased with this; he clearly wanted evidence or a harbinger that the full-fledged Learned could overcome their immersion training—or at least hold it in abeyance while flexing other muscles. That zeta abilities had eluded him and his co-psychokineticists so completely was beginning to grate and continued to confuse. This was more difficult than he imagined. Eugene had quipped that in order for the Learned to learn to induce zeta they would have to unlearn what they had learned. Lorstad agreed with his mildly humorous assessment, if not the jokey tone behind it. Regardless, he did not believe that instant mastery should be the standard, but surely a stronger beginning.
The whole session seemed like a fail for everyone but Joey and Giles, but by the end of it, Eugene had gotten further insight (he thought) into the Benefactors’ issues with kinetic technology. He tried to articulate it during his debriefing session with Chuck.
“Remember what you said about confidence? That maybe I lacked confidence in my ability to develop zeta waves?” Eugene stood in the door of Chuck’s office, realizing he also lacked confidence to advance theories about his ability (or inability) to develop zeta waves.
Chuck looked up at him. “I’m not likely to forget it. Why do you ask?”
After a moment of indecision, Eugene entered the office, closed the door, and came to sit in his habitual spot across the desk from Chuck. He leaned both elbows on the desktop. “I think we nailed it—the Learned are suffering from the same . . . mental habit.”
“Go on . . .”
“Now that I have seen more of the Benefactors’ attempts . . . look, I was watching Alexis—her facial expressions, her color, her brain waves. She was frustrated, annoyed, dismissive. You heard her: she even doubts, deep down inside, that non-Learned can do what Lanfen and Mini do. Or that they should even bother trying. When Joey took a turn at the controls and got Robbie to take a walkabout, she was angry. And that was when she decided not to try ‘our way’ anymore.”
Chuck nodded. “Yes, and?”
“I think she was angry because she felt suddenly inferior to a mere mortal—”
“Euge . . .”
“No, this is something we have to factor in. Alexis and her fellow Benefactors clearly feel a bit superior to the rest of us. No—that’s wrong. Not a ‘bit.’ They feel vastly superior. Joey, to Alexis, is a—an ox. A lesser mammal. I doubt Alexis imagines that any naturally developed faculties she has in com
mon with him—or with me—could allow her to do what immersion therapy allows her to do.”
Chuck laughed. “Hard to imagine that the Learned suffer from a lack of confidence. Or a lack of faith. They seem pretty sure of themselves.”
Euge gave him a wry look. “You know better than that.”
Chuck’s smile vanished. “Yes, I do. And I suspect your instincts are good, in this case.”
“So, where does that put us?”
Chuck stared ruminatively out through the glass walls of his office at where Joey continued to work with Roboticus. “Focus on Giles Camden. If your thinking is correct, then what the Learned need to see is that one of their number who hasn’t had his circuitry redirected by immersion therapy can make strides with kinetic training.” He paused, then shook his head.
“What?” Eugene asked.
“We were right—we’re no closer to being able to give Lorstad some foolproof formula for churning out zeta talents. It’s not as simple as surreptitiously switching off the interface this time. You can’t make someone have faith in their ability to do something. There’s no pill or shot or vitamin we can give them to inspire certainty that they can affect the physical universe with their raw brain waves.”
Eugene chewed on that for a moment, then asked, “How did you get that certainty?”
“I saw it work.”
“You theorized that it would work first, then you saw it work. So you suspected it would work before you saw it work.”
“Yes, okay.”
“So,” said Eugene, “maybe the question is: how did Lanfen or any of the other Zetas get that certainty? We basically took Mini’s training wheels off without her knowing, but the others?”
“They had no idea what we ultimately wanted them to accomplish. In fact, I’d say we had no idea what we ultimately wanted them to accomplish until Mike showed he could manipulate machinery directly. They had no preconceived notions about . . .”
Chuck’s voice ran down and stopped.
“So, maybe there’s nothing we can do,” Eugene said, reading his face. “We can’t mind-wipe them and make them forget they know what we’re trying to get them to learn. But that’s nuts—they’ve seen it work, just like you and I did.”
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