by Julia Keller
The machine also didn’t know that its time could now be measured in minutes, not millennia. Kendall had built it to last forever—or for as long as there were humans in residence in the universe, flawed beings who were ruled by their emotions.
And now the Intercept had to die.
The drastic move had been debated for days, with opinions expressed eloquently and forcefully on both sides. The Intercept already was effectively shut down. The drones no longer downloaded their daily surveillance records into its main circuits. Yet the Intercept continued to run, just as farm animals, even after being decapitated, would prance around the barnyard. Ogden Crowley had provided the analogy. He’d been raised on Old Earth. He had seen a real farm.
So why not just let the Intercept run on harmlessly? Why destroy it?
Because as long as it exists, Ogden had said, it’s a potential threat. The technology might be revived one day by an unscrupulous person.
His argument won the day: The Intercept would be destroyed.
Violet checked the time on her console. She nodded at Kendall. He opened the briefcase. He dumped out the contents. Loose sheets of scribbled-on paper, ripped out of the red notebook, swished to the marble floor in a series of scalloped arcs, the way falling leaves did. These were his original notes for the Intercept, the key technical specifications—the pattern of the connections, the ingredients for the biochemical parts, the code. The precious code. He had never stored this information in a computer. They were his handwritten notes. As long as he kept them out of a computer, he could control them. No danger of their ever being disseminated without his approval.
That also meant, however, that once they were gone—they were gone. There would be no way to retrieve them. With a computer, even a deleted file could sometimes be recovered. Without a computer, it was a different story. Once sheets of paper were destroyed, they were destroyed forever. There was no hope.
But that was a good thing, right? When it came to the Intercept? Because it had wrought such havoc. And yet …
Kendall snapped the briefcase shut. He flung it aside. It hit the floor with a smack and then skidded a few feet.
He and Violet exchanged a brief, fraught glance. And then they walked away. The matter was settled. They would leave the papers here, in the middle of the floor, which meant that when Kendall initiated the detonation and then stood on the plaza in front of Protocol Hall—at a safe distance, one they had calculated and recalculated—and as, two minutes later, this entire structure collapsed in a heap of smashed glass and pureed steel beams and computer components flash-welded into hot gray blobs, the specifications would go, too.
The Intercept would disappear forever.
And Kendall wouldn’t have any notes from which to rebuild it. Not that he wanted to rebuild it. No. Never. It had all been decided.
Violet waited for the glass doors to open so that they could leave. Excitement stirred in her. She looked down at the inside crook of her left elbow: Nothing. No tiny blue flash. The system was shut down. No signals would ever again pass from her to the Intercept, or from the Intercept back to her.
A small part of her missed that flash. A bigger part of her didn’t.
Kendall was right beside her. As he crossed the threshold, he felt in his pocket for the detonator. He pressed the small red button in the center of it, setting the trigger.
Now he and Violet began to walk faster. Then they began to jog. The countdown had begun. They had ninety seconds to get to that safe distance before the blast happened.
Running now, her legs rising and falling in rhythm, Violet had a vision of the lab, the one back on Old Earth. She had an image of Kendall working feverishly in that lab: intense, disheveled, in love with code but basically scared of emotions because emotions were things you couldn’t control. His parents were dead. His world was dying. He had no idea what to do—except to get out in front of those emotions, to wrangle them, gather them, be in charge of them. Somehow.
And so he had built the Intercept. He had made it out of science and magic and fear and love and awe. It was … himself.
Without being totally aware of what she was doing, operating on pure passionate instinct, Violet stopped abruptly. Kendall, too, stopped. They knew their thoughts had synced up. They looked at each other. They asked the question silently:
Who’s faster?
“I am,” Violet said. Kendall didn’t argue. He knew it was true.
She ran back toward Protocol Hall, tearing across the flagstone plaza, taking the steps three at a time. Her body felt light and strong. She had less than a minute now. She ran to the spot from which she and Kendall, just seconds ago, had leaned back their heads and marveled at the bright rise of this building.
A building now doomed.
Violet snatched up two handfuls of loose pages on the floor. This was the code. The blueprint. If she saved this, it meant that in the future—if the human race ever found itself able to handle the Intercept—she could give the gift a second time. Just as Kendall had given it the first time.
What will I tell my father?
Violet had no idea. Maybe she could make him understand. He knew about putting your heart and soul into something, and building it, and wanting to protect it at all costs.
She ran back toward the glass double doors. The countdown ticked away in her head. It was going to be close. No time to dawdle. Down the steps she fled, stuffing the paper into her pocket. In the distance, she saw Kendall’s mouth forming the word Hurry. She ran toward him.
Violet had just reached the far edge of the plaza, at the outer margin of the safe zone, when Protocol Hall exploded in a monumental geyser of dust and smoke and millions and millions of micro-bits of steel and glass.
She was spun around by the concussive force of the blast. But she was fine; she had caught herself and landed on her hands and knees, her body balanced like a cat’s, facing the crater. Kendall wound up a few feet away from her, sprawled on his belly. He grinned at her. His grin was easy to translate: What a team.
Violet’s ears were ringing. She felt flakes in her hair. She watched the slow twist and turn of ash as it fell to the ground, like thousands of tiny gray dancers performing their delicate pirouettes.
She was dazed and slightly disoriented. Her thinking was temporarily slowed, so at first she wondered what she was looking at, out beyond the drifting gray curtain of debris. The large object was directly in front of her. It was round. It seemed to have some kind of fire embedded inside it. Then she realized that, with the tower now gone, she was seeing what was behind it:
The rising sun.
Acknowledgments
This is a book about the power of emotion. As I was finishing it, I felt that power quite profoundly; one of my best friends, Elaine Phillips, passed away suddenly. In the last conversation I ever had with her, I told her how much her belief in my writing means to me, each time I sit down to make a new world with my stories. And so it does, and will continue to.
I also must thank my wonderful editor, Ali Fisher, whose glorious enthusiasm and luminous imagination helped me see this book in a new light. And I am grateful as well to Dave Seeley, the brilliant artist who designed the cover; copy editor Bethany Reis; and Lisa Gallagher, agent extraordinaire.
I grew up reading and savoring stories about bold quests into the future. As a young girl, my heroes were Ray Bradbury, Eleanor Cameron, Robert Silverberg, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Madeleine L’Engle. I still revel in such stories, and my hero list has expanded to include Dan Simmons, Alastair Reynolds, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, Isaac Asimov, and Octavia E. Butler.
Some of them, like Elaine, have returned to the sky as pure light. But we can still see them. We only have to look.
About the Author
JULIA KELLER, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune, is the author of many books for adults and young readers, including A Killing in the Hills, the first book in the Bell Elk
ins series and winner of the Barry Award for Best First Novel; Back Home; and The Dark Intercept. Keller has a Ph.D. in English literature from the Ohio State University and was awarded Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship. She was born in West Virginia and lives in Ohio where she’s hard at work on book two of the Dark Intercept trilogy. You can sign up for email updates here.
JuliaKeller.net
Facebook.com/julia.keller.writer
Twitter: @DarkIntercept
Goodreads: Julia Keller
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1: Moment No. 327
Chapter 2: Danny’s Secret
Chapter 3: The Very Bad Detective
Chapter 4: The Darkening Day
Chapter 5: Over the Edge
Chapter 6: Rebels of Light
Chapter 7: The Very Bad Detective Strikes Again
Chapter 8: The Intercept Strikes
Chapter 9: Holdup
Chapter 10: A Memory of Christmas Morning
Chapter 11: Division 12
Chapter 12: The Color of Love
Chapter 13: Chip-jack
Chapter 14: Prisoner No. 49878104-12-XHVB
Chapter 15: Glitch
Chapter 16: Lucretia Crowley, M.D.
Chapter 17: Death in the Rain
Chapter 18: Cats and Rats
Chapter 19: The Fall
Part Two
Chapter 20: Welcome to Old Earth
Chapter 21: The Woman in the Red Bandana
Chapter 22: Teatime
Chapter 23: The Notebook
Chapter 24: First Attack
Chapter 25: Second Attack
Chapter 26: Into the Darkness
Chapter 27: The Sensenbrenner-Cooley Code Derivative v. the Pforzheimer Equivalent
Chapter 28: Little Girl Lost
Chapter 29: Last Rebel Standing
Chapter 30: After and Before
Chapter 31: The Kiss
Chapter 32: The Revelation
Part Three
Chapter 33: Flicker
Chapter 34: Confrontation
Chapter 35: On the Run
Chapter 36: The Story
Chapter 37: The Last Stand
Chapter 38: The Search
Chapter 39: Sunrise over New Earth
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE DARK INTERCEPT
Copyright © 2017 by Julia Keller
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Dave Seeley
A Tor Teen Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8762-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7653-8764-6 (ebook)
eISBN 9780765387646
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First Edition: October 2017