Sunfail

by Steven Savile

  “There’s a problem,” the assassin began again.

  “Then find a solution, or die trying.”

  “Yes, Mr. Alom.”

  “Better. I take it your man encountered resistance at Wall Street?”

  “Very little. None of our friends made themselves known, but our man picked up an audience.”

  “And judging by your 'problem' I assume he failed to deal with it at the time?”

  “The priority was getting out of there.”

  “No, the priority was doing the job your team was paid to do, Mr. Cabrakan. You disappoint me. There can be no witnesses. Do you understand?”

  “I do.” The words were delivered like a marriage vow.

  “Good. Do not disappoint me twice in one day or we shall have to consider liquidating our assets.” There was no misunderstanding the threat. “I take it the operation itself was a success?”

  For a moment there were only the sounds of the city on the line, and even those were muted by the absence of traffic with just the one engine revving quietly beneath him, then the assassin took a deep breath and finished his report: “The adjustment was successful.”

  He explained that the programmers infiltrated the system and inlaid a real-time delay, allowing their systems precious milliseconds to react upon the trades before they actually happened on the stock exchange servers. It was barely perceptible, not visible to the human eye, but given the hundredths and millionths of a second it took these machines to react, it was almost a lifetime in terms of cold hard calculating time—as good as being clairvoyant, allowing them to make all the right trades, grab stocks a moment before their share prices hiked, and dump them before the bottom fell out of the market. Fractions of a second were all it took for the machine to make a killing, and once the worm was embedded, no simple reboot was going to cleanse the system, no matter how clever the SYSOPs believed their system was. Pulling the plug wouldn’t change a thing.

  They were in.

  It was only the start. He wasn’t party to the myriad strands of the plan. He was only a pawn in this game, with Alom and his kind the kings and queens. He knew that. He knew that he was disposable. He’d be a fool to think otherwise. But if he played his part and didn’t let Alom down, he could walk away from this richer than any god. The prospect was almost worth dying for.

  “Send word, we need more foot soldiers. Let the youth rise up and feel useful.” It was a simple enough plan to keep the Watchers busy so that they wouldn’t know where the true threat lay. With the city already on edge, masked kids with spray cans were every bit as frightening as an armed jihadist. Anarchy on the streets had always been the best alternative when it came to distracting law enforcement. And it was so much better to use disenfranchised youth than it was to risk any of their own men. “There is still so much to do before we emerge from the shadows, Mr. Cabrakan. You know what you must do. Very simply put, give them hell.”

  Or, in the case of the gate-crasher who’d stumbled into the party back on Wall Street, open the gates and push him through with a bullet in the face, the assassin thought grimly.

  He had no intention of failing Mr. Alom.

  He knew better than that.

  Chapter Twelve

  “HOLY FUCK . . . I MEAN . . . JUST . . . LOOK AT IT . . . look at it.” Finn Walsh couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. It was astounding. Breathtaking. She was quite literally lost for words. She shook her head. She knew she was grinning like a kid, but she didn’t care. It was incredible. It was everything she’d dreamed it would be and so much more.

  An underwater image dominated the screen. It had been taken with some sort of night-vision lens, making it bright and clear, but heavily tinted to a pale blue-green. It was like looking down on an alien civilization in some distant world.

  There was a row of buildings, or more accurately foundations, clearly squared and far too precise to be artificial. Beside that row was a second row. This one was far more than just rectangular bases and broken foundations, with three complete structures. Each of the three submerged buildings’ four walls sloped inward to form a rough pyramidal point. The first and last of the three structures had smooth sides, but the middle one was broken into squared rings, each one narrower than the one below it. Stair steps. She was looking at a stepped pyramid through the green filter of the sea. The two ruins flanking it were regular smooth-sided pyramids.

  These three buildings made this underwater ruin an incredible discovery. A life-changing one.

  It was the very first image of the ruin the divers had found. They’d included it and all of their early seismographic readings on the server so she could get up to speed on the project. A husband-and-wife team who’d first stumbled upon the area, and then returned to survey the ruins on behalf of the Cuban government, had taken the shots. The area in question, in the Pinar del Río province, was right on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle and was rife with shipwrecks, so the motivation behind the first dives, she assumed, had almost certainly been salvage related.

  Instead, they’d stumbled on something so much more important than lost treasure.

  The pair, Pauline Zalitzki and Paul Weinzweig, had shown the images around, drawing a great deal of interest very quickly, including from National Geographic. But the economic truth was these ruins were over two thousand feet beneath the surface, both difficult and costly to examine. The fact that standard oceanography suggested the area would have taken almost fifty thousand years to sink to that depth, significantly predating any recorded civilization, didn’t help, though it really should have been the thing that had the moneymen the most excited. They were dealing with so many anomalies. The first Egyptian pyramids had been built roughly five thousand years ago. The numbers just didn’t add up, financially or historically. There was no way the couple’s discovery could be ten times the age of the pyramids of Giza. It wasn’t possible. Unless the area had somehow sunk suddenly, due to fractures around it, perhaps? A break in the plates?

  But that didn’t stop Finn from being stunned that it had taken so long—over a decade from the first sighting of the ruin—to fund a proper exploration.

  Government approval? Jurisdiction on the find was probably a nightmare with it falling between Cuba’s and the United States’ governance. The two countries had had plenty of issues. And, of course, the initial discovery had been right before 9/11. Everything had stopped after that, with the obsession over Homeland Insecurity taking precedence. Who cared about looking at old underwater ruins, especially near Cuba, when there were civil rights to infringe upon in the name of national security?

  Their loss was her gain.

  Technology had marched on significantly during the last decade, so the timing was good in that regard too. They were capable of closer scrutiny, with significantly more clarity, at much less cost. And back in 2001 there was no way she’d have been involved without being on-site—innovations in global communication and file-sharing had changed the world in ways it was still hard to comprehend. To quote Walt Disney, it really was a small world after all.

  It was also one in which the university employed ancient backup generators, otherwise it would have been as dead in here as it was out there. Sometimes it was good to linger in the technological dark ages, she thought wryly. The hard-science division eggheads were always playing around with miniature cyclotrons and god only knows what else, everything they touched capable of generating massive power surges capable of bringing down the network—so all of the computers on campus were shielded, and isolated from the city’s electrical grid. The grid had been out for six hours now. It was probably their fault. Her network connection kept dropping, but other than that mild annoyance, her system seemed okay even if it had taken about five times longer than necessary to download the initial batch of files to her local hard drive to access whenever she needed.

  But there was no getting around the fact that things were weird outside Columbia’s walls. An ounce of imagination was a very bad thing.

&n
bsp; At first it had been a cacophony of honking and blaring horns following the unmistakable screech of tires and squeal of brakes and the sharp, tearing sound of metal upon metal. Quickly it had transformed into the chaos of crunching impacts and so much else, but those had been overtaken by the proper sounds of chaos. Voices first. People screaming, initially in fear, then at each other. Eerie silence had slowly taken over, and that was worse than all of the noise put together.

  Finn hadn’t dared leave the university’s protection to see what was left out there. In her mind the world beyond the campus limits had taken on a complete Escape From New York vibe. The problem was, she was no Snake Plissken. She didn’t want to venture out in case it turned out there was nothing but a wasteland beyond the campus gates. She couldn’t help it. Once her mind had gone down that track all she could imagine was a barren Mad Maxesque ruin that had once been one of the busiest cities in the world.

  Give it enough time and there’ll be primitive tribes out there, people hunkering down behind makeshift forts and attacking each other with whatever weapons they can bring to hand, she thought. All that was needed for wide-scale panic to kick in was someone realizing the lights weren’t coming back on—then they’d lead a revolution straight to the nearest grocery store, slaughtering anyone who tried to take the food from their hungry mouths.

  It was basic psychology.

  It had been drummed into the American psyche ever since the Y2K hype. The whole notion that the computers would just suddenly stop and everything they knew and trusted and built their lives around would come to a juddering halt was ingrained now. The first hint of trouble, of a tornado or even a storm warning, and the lines at the groceries stores were a mile long with people lining up for toilet rolls and stockpiling batteries and canned foods, anything with a long life, anything that wouldn’t go off and stink the place up. Then they’d go back and turn their homes into bunkers and batten down the hatches. That was the reality of America today, and it wasn’t just the rednecks.

  Given all of the portents over the last few months—the dogs, the birds—Christ, last week there was talk of the animals fleeing Yellowstone and other woodland parks, heading for the high ground—all of it just made everyone even edgier. They were living day-to-day, expecting the worst, some of them even wanting it to happen, she was sure. She’d seen the doom patrol out there preaching their end-of-the-world gospel, bless their hearts.

  Six hours.

  A lot could happen in six hours.

  She didn’t want to find out exactly what. Not yet.

  For now she just wanted to immerse herself in the wonder that was scientific discovery. She had lost worlds to explore, digitally at least. It was a gift that put her on the autism spectrum, she knew, but like a lot of obsessives she could forget the world even existed when she wanted to, especially when confronted by the unknown.

  It was more than mere intellectual curiosity, it was compulsive, like she needed to turn the lights out five times before leaving a room or knock on any closed door three times to announce her presence. She liked to think of it as a quirk, the kind of thing that made the Sheldons of this world adorable, but that need was what made her good at what she did.

  She studied the latest geological tests.

  The geophysics suggested that the entire area was made up of granite: close to twelve square miles of granite bedrock. That was several times the size of Central Park. It was difficult to adjust her thinking to account for something on that scale. If she was right, it meant they were talking about something on par with a city, not a couple of ruined buildings, which really was beyond her wildest dreams. And ever since that first image had come in she’d been dreaming big.

  She was banking on that making her job easier as opposed to looking for the proverbial linguistic needle in this very wet haystack. She was more likely to encounter writings on a larger site, and the more samples she had, no matter how eroded or unclear, the easier it would be to run comparisons on them.

  Her primary aim was to identify the language. Her secondary one, to build a lexicon.

  Anything that could add to the greater knowledge pool of ancient languages, offering some new understanding, some new glimpse at the way things might have been back then, was better than gold, even if it was something as mundane as Jesus’ shopping list. Not that any self-respecting messiah did his own shopping, she thought, grinning as her train of thought derailed.

  A lot of it was about joining the dots.

  The raw data was out there just waiting for someone to interpret it. Sure, it wasn’t all ones and zeroes of strings of hex or whatever it was the guys in the computer labs were using today, but it was there, every bit as concrete—or in this case granite—as the mathematical strings they used when it came to examining the building blocks of the world.

  There shouldn’t be any granite in the region, it was as simple as that. The sheet rock was anomalous. Cuba was mostly limestone, so the granite had to have been brought in by whoever built the city beneath the sea.

  The exploratory team had only taken a few preliminary photos and videos of the find so there wasn’t a whole lot for her to look at yet, but it was obvious that time and tide had worked their damage, with entire levels of the pyramidal structures missing and whole sides of what may have been temples collapsed.

  On the plus side, granite was a hard stone, capable of withstanding the battery of the elements, and even after all this time lost to the sea the granite had survived the worst of the erosion virtually unscathed. That meant the few symbols she could make out in the images were sharp. They’d been carved deep into the stone blocks, and even though the top layer of strata had worn—or broken—away, the remainder was still chisel-clean.

  She had no difficulty transcribing the symbols. Pulling up a graphics package, Finn began the painstaking process of tracing the first one, saving it as a clean layer so that she could study it independent of its surroundings.

  Peculiar, she thought, and not for the first time. The pyramids suggested an Egyptian influence, that much was obvious, but the thinking was highly suspect. The Olmecs and Mayans had constructed pyramids, and theirs were often stair-stepped like the central one in this image.

  But that presented its own set of time line problems: Olmecs hadn’t started erecting pyramids until circa 1200 BCE (Before Central Event, which was exactly the same as Before Christ for the non-Christians of the world); the Mayans were an even younger civilization, their pyramids built closer to 1000 BCE, only three thousand years ago—so neither of those fit her flood-basin time line. There were the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, they were old enough to correspond with the estimated age of their discovery, but that civilization was half a world away in the cradle of humanity, Iran and Iraq, and with no evidence of Mesopotamian society having ventured as far as Europe, never mind the Americas, and even if the Great Ziggurat of Ur dated back to the twenty-first century BCE, most of the ziggurats were actually from the same time period as the Olmecs and the Mayans.

  She removed the overlay to study the first symbol. It definitely wasn’t an Egyptian hieroglyph. There was no denying the similarity, certainly: it appeared to be a flower, definitely representational rather than phonetic, showing something instead of sounding something out. But Egyptian markings were more finely crafted than this. The hieroglyph for owl, for example, was a likeness of an owl, complete with beak, talons, and feathers. This icon was cruder. In a lot of ways it was closer to an Olmec representation, though it didn’t exactly match their more stylized symbols.

  The fact that she didn’t recognize the language right away was exciting. Had it simply been Egyptian or Olmec or some other known variant, her job would have been a simple case of translating a few symbols. If they’d just uncovered a lost language, possibly even the oldest extant example of a written language, her job was only just beginning. She’d be the first to study it, to document it, and to try her hand at translating it. That didn’t happen more than once in half a dozen lifetimes in her
world. It was beyond being career-defining. It was life-changing.

  She knew she was grinning like a lunatic. She didn’t care.

  She saved the first symbol, eager to see what else the underwater world had to show her. Turning back to the original photo, she selected the next symbol, created a new layer, and began tracing it. It was going to take awhile to get through all of the symbols, but she wasn’t in a hurry to go outside. She had heat, light, and quiet in here, what else did she need? Power bars and Coke? Check. There was an ample supply of both in the vending machine across the hall. There were spare clothes in her office closet, along with a few blankets.

  She had everything she needed in here to survive a mini-apocalypse.

  Chapter Thirteen

  FOR A MINUTE, AT LEAST, HE’D FORGOTTEN about Sophie’s enigmatic message.

  That was something. But in the grand scheme of things, not a whole fuck of a lot, really.

  Jake grabbed the messenger bike and hauled it up off the ground where he’d abandoned it. He didn’t get on it. Anger, frustration, impotence welled up inside him and he hurled it away, hard. The handlebars hit the asphalt, but the back wheel kept spinning after the bike slammed into the door of a nearby truck. People were staring at him. He didn’t care. He was so thoroughly pissed off he wanted to break more things. A pipe or bat would make a fine weapon, but even sans weapon he was happy to start bashing the fuck out of things with his bare fists and boots—windshields, headlights, and roofs, it didn’t matter. The only thing that would appease his anger right now was watching glass fly and hearing metal squeal like a pig.