Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  “I don’t think so,” says Cal—and then the lobby’s outer wall explodes into a shower of flying glass, the Earthtrust soldiers ducking instinctively as a swarm of thousands of John’s hacked bees zooms inside, their bodies striking the soldiers in a confusion of tinny rotors, minuscule shells shattering against armor plating, embedding into exposed skin.

  The bees are more distraction than weapon, but a distraction is all Cal needs. She aims her rifle, fires. Her ears ring as Julie fires beside her, as Noor squeezes three-shot bursts into the screaming surprised soldiers, their bodies falling to the granite or slumping against the timber columns. Shards of supertree take wing amid the kamikaze nanobees, the cordite-choked air filling with broken bots, the deadly detritus of John’s best invention.

  Once the fighting begins, it’s impossible to contain, but not every angry Volunteer clashes with Earthtrust security. Others attack the Farm’s infrastructure, charging into the fields and orchards they’ve been made to work, tearing down the pebble readers and security cameras that watched them; there are few military weapons available to the Volunteers but there are the tools, the shovel and the axe and the hoe, all the other instruments of this reinvented agrarian pastoral. Already the superorchards west of the Tower burn. The fire takes slowly, the trees designed to be wildfire resistant, but resistant does not mean impervious. The fire spreads tree to tree, the wood roasting, apples baking, the smell frustratingly entrancing. The grass burns fast too, the chemically treated ground beneath blackening and blowing away, exposing the Farm’s buried infrastructure: subterranean sprinkler systems, irrigation pipes, electric cabling, heat and moisture sensors, microprocessors, listening devices, all the apparatus of an agricultural surveillance state. Somewhere a server fills with the sound of crackling flames, of supertrees crumpling in the heat as the fire spreads to a service road, where for a while it stalls against the gravel. But the winds are high today—the winds are always high—and soon a flaming trunk lifts off its shallow roots, the freed root ball burning, the blazing crown floating into the next square of unburned orchard. And then another tree flies upward. And then another, another, another.

  The elevator doors open on the Tower’s fiftieth floor, the administrative level reserved for Earthtrust executives and the commanders of Earthtrust’s security, decorated with the same opulence as Eury’s penthouse: the gleaming stone floors, the hardwood arc of the reception desk.

  “Director Mirov,” says the receptionist, rising as John and E-5 approach. “We thought you were—” She looks again at E-5, then turns to John. “Dr. Worth,” she says. “I’d been told you were back, but I didn’t realize you were escorting the rung today. My apologies, it’s been a confusing hour. The leadership team is in the west conference room, speaking to the director from Beijing. You’ll join them?”

  What do you mean by the rung? John wants to ask, but there’s no time. Here on the fiftieth floor, everyone has always spoken so knowingly, because at the top of every organization secrets become power, knowing becomes rank; everyone here, even this receptionist, might be complicit enough in what Earthtrust has done. John looks past her: if the bluff of E-5’s presence fails, he’s made no alternative plan for crossing to the next elevator at the center of this floor.

  “There must be a mistake,” he says. “As you can see, the director’s right here.”

  “Yes, of course, but—” The receptionist half rises out of her seat, turning to check the frosted-glass walls of the occupied conference room behind her.

  While her back’s turned, E-5’s eyes flick to the receptionist’s nameplate: John had coached her on what to say here, assuming she’d know everyone on the floor, but this receptionist must be new enough that this version of Eury doesn’t know her name. Someone hired in the past two years then. “Ms. Khan,” E-5 says, snapping her fingers to get the woman’s attention, delivering the lines John had given her. “The Farm is on fire, and we’re two hours from launch. Should we stand here discussing the particulars with you, or can I go up to my office and get to work?”

  Faced with Eury’s voice, warned by the snarl threatening at the corners of E-5’s lips, the receptionist flinches. “Yes, Director,” she says, chastened. “I’m sorry. I’ll notify the rest of the team that you’re here, if you’d like them to join you?”

  “No need,” says John, already leading E-5 past reception, cringing at the way her force of personality collapsed the moment she’d finished playing her part. “Anything the director needs, they can provide from here.”

  He hurries E-5 past offices housing executives he’d once worked alongside; she dogs his heels, something the real Eury would never do. It’s only a short walk from the desk to the next elevator, its doors guarded by two security officers already stepping aside for John and E-5, whose pebbles transmit all the right access codes, whose performative confidence is convincing only as long as they move quickly enough to not get stopped.

  They hurry, but when John looks back he sees the receptionist’s confusion resolve into action, the woman reaching below her desk for the alarm installed underneath, her voice rising in a shout as the elevator doors close. Inside are only two buttons: the fiftieth floor, the seventy-fifth. At John’s touch, the elevator takes off smoothly, its ascent fast but not fast enough: a moment later it slams to a jerking stop, throwing John and E-5 against the mirrored walls. The elevator lights turn red, a siren blares. E waits, docile and unconcerned, while John paces the square box of the stalled car. If they’d never entered the elevator, they could have tried the stairs, but with the alarm raised, returning to the fiftieth floor is no longer an option.

  “What now?” E says, her voice placid, patient.

  John points at the ceiling, where a square trapdoor leads up and out. He shakes his head. Twenty floors to go. “Now we climb.”

  The Farm’s automated trams are quickly locked down, but other equipment is easier to commandeer. A Volunteer drives a solar-powered bulldozer down the length of every fence line she meets, mowing posts and rails out of the ground. She does more than is necessary to release the animals, the over-fattened calves, the sows so swollen they can barely walk; she frees the land, unboxing it, unparceling it. The land must not be contained. It’s the last thought she has before an Earthtrust sniper fires the bullet that flings her instantly limp body across the bulldozer’s cockpit.

  At the Tower’s base, the original superorchard burns until it ignites the parkland around it, the heat crumpling the recently erected viewing platform; beneath it, the printed bison run terrified along the edge of their flaming prairie, unable to cross the buried sensor barrier sending electric shocks to their implanted pebbles, a fence sparing humans its unsightliness but just as ruinous to the animals it pens in. Now the American bison is made extinct for the second time, this time on a stretch of burning grass Eury Mirov might’ve been able to see from her penthouse’s floor-to-ceiling windows, if only she was at the Farm.

  Cal and Julie and Noor reach the twentieth floor with the adrenaline from the lobby gunfight palpable in their stink of sweat and blood, the three firing now at every moving shape: a mail drone gets riddled with one burst, a uniformed officer spins to the tile beneath another. Julie and Cal lead, moving from cover to cover, clearing the way for Noor to follow. The nexus is easy to find, housed in a glass trapezoid protruding from the otherwise flat structure of the Tower’s southern wall; a short hallway leads from the warren of glass-walled offices to its sealed doors, a red light swirling its warning over the doorframe.

  “Just down there,” Julie says, emptying a side hallway with gunfire, barely waiting for the hit bodies to reach the floor before turning away. “How do we open the doors?”

  A sound from behind: someone running too fast and slipping, skidding across the smooth tiles. The three spin, their rifles ready—but here comes Mai, her marathoner’s physique sleek in formfitting athletic gear, each hand hauling a backpack containing the printed explosives and detonators she’d promised, her black ponyt
ail whipping side to side with every quick step. The other three women whoop to see her. “The furies,” Julie says, pumping a fist. “We ride again.”

  Mai laughs, opens a backpack. She reaches in and takes out a clump of claylike plastic explosive, its lumpy surface still warm from the fabricator. “Let’s get this door open already.”

  After the smoke clears and the gunfire stops, Noor charges into the nexus, moving console to console, looking for an undamaged workstation left carelessly unlocked. She can hack a password but it takes time. She can reboot a computer with root access but that takes time too. Ditto for pebble spoofing, especially if she can’t simply copy the information she needs from another. She steps around the unarmed officers slumped in their chairs, blood pooling beneath their consoles. Noor isn’t a soldier but she’s willing to do what needs doing. She’s never forgotten the civil wars and regional conflicts of the first twenty years of her life, followed by her violent exodus out of Iran to unreceptive Europe, then a second escape from the predatory governments in the Balkans to the States, her family arriving mere months before the borders were closed forever. She’s fought for what she wanted, has been hurt and has suffered, has hurt others. The world they have isn’t the world anyone wants, because the world they have is a human world. For years, all she’s wanted is to take as much of the world from human hands as possible.

  Noor considers her options. With the security officers dead, their pebbles are unpowered and inert. She could copy them, but only with even more time, plus equipment she doesn’t have with her. Meanwhile the elevators are frozen, halted as soon as the Tower went into lockdown. She can at least start undoing some of the security measures, making it easier for others on the ground to follow them into the Tower: most of the chaos remains in the neighborhoods and the wider Farm, but sooner or later it will come here. As firewalls and passwords fall before her, Noor unlocks the sliding elevator doors on every floor, then opens every other door she can, beginning at the top of the needle and working her way back down to the nexus.

  Far above Noor, the elevator door to the antechamber of Eury Mirov’s empty penthouse slides open over a yawning shaft, its drop plummeting vertiginously to a stuck car far below, above which two figures climb slowly up the narrow emergency ladder, a long way from the top but already far ahead of anyone else making the ascent.

  Cal and Julie work landing to landing, climbing the Tower’s southwest stairwell, rifles shouldered, tactical lights lit and leading the way. They move with ease, all their old habits returning, the ways they fought beside each other in Sarajevo and Rio, then in Seattle and Portland during the Secession. The worst was clearing building after building in post-Sacrifice Phoenix and Albuquerque, dragging families out of tinderbox suburban homes left without power or water, their rooftop solar panels obscured by blowing dust. Wherever Cal and Julie were, whomever they were working for, they stayed together, watched each other’s backs, kept each other alive. Together they left the military, resigning their commissions after their last European campaign; then together they joined Earthtrust, hoping to rebuild the country; and together they’d quit, after it became obvious Earthtrust wasn’t interested in their kind of rebuilding, at least not west of the Mississippi.

  They didn’t always agree, but always their disagreements stayed within a tolerable range. The only topic they’d ever truly fought about was John Worth. Cal had loved John but never fully trusted him. Julie hadn’t liked John but she loved Cal. When Cal said John could be useful—he was angry the same way they were angry, he was disillusioned with Earthtrust, even though he’d helped found the company, even though he was a childhood friend of Eury Mirov’s and her former partner—then Julie had trusted Cal, had trusted Cal to not trust John the right amount, no matter what her romantic feelings became. And so when Cal told Julie about the job within the job, Julie knew Cal had done the right thing.

  John could do it, Cal had said. He could get access to Eury Mirov. He wouldn’t even have to really try. In fact he’d probably waste time trying not to go to Eury, becoming all the more convincing because he’d think he was doing the right thing by resisting. When he finally gave in, he’d be doing exactly what Cal wanted him to do. But he wouldn’t know there was one more choice to make until the last possible moment, and even then only if someone showed it to him.

  One more reason Cal and Julie need to make it to Eury’s office before John does anything stupid.

  Gunfire rattles down the stairwell, fired from a floor above—Earthtrust security pushing back at their advance. The women flatten themselves against the wall, return fire blindly. Through the reinforced concrete walls, they hear an explosion outside the Tower, close enough the metal stairs vibrate beneath their boots. The gunfire from above pauses at the sound; Julie waits two beats, then steps out of cover, finds her target, and aims. Two quick bursts, bullets clanging into metal, striking concrete, digging into armor and flesh, then a soldier in matte black armor topples over a railing to fall through the stairwell’s open center, a bullet having spiked through his bare neck.

  Cal yells to Julie—“Clear!”—her voice echoing, the echo interrupted by the sound of a door opening somewhere above, fresh boots on the stairs, another spray of bullets aimed at her voice, its mistaken declaration. She throws herself to one side, her shoulder striking the wall, jostling her weapon out of position. She swivels behind a railing, but she can’t see well, can’t move without exposing herself. Pinned down, she waits for Julie to dislodge the Earthtrust soldiers blocking their ascent, holding on to the perpetual high ground.

  There’s no way to know how many more Earthtrust soldiers are above.

  It’s impossible to prevent others from following from below.

  And as long as the elevators stay deactivated, every path leads to these stairs.

  All Cal and Julie can do is climb, climb and kill, climb and hope.

  It’s not only in the Ohio VAC that the people rise up. In St. Louis, two hundred would-be Volunteers attack the Earthtrust train depot, all of them refusing to be sent east, refusing to let anyone else be sent east against their will ever again. The processing center burns, but the security guards are invited to surrender, the other employees are allowed to exit peacefully. Only the maglev conductor refuses the Volunteers’ mercy, making a lonely escape in his train, fleeing across the Mississippi to find the track already bombed on the other side, a problem that doesn’t come to the conductor’s attention until it’s too late to prevent a violent derailment, his empty passenger train flipping off its tracks to shatter its tube, sending buckling wreckage to churn up rolling clouds of dead Illinois dirt.

  John exits the elevator shaft first, climbing into the anteroom outside Eury’s penthouse. He reaches back: then it’s her hand in his, Eury’s hand gripping his; Eury’s hand but not. E-5 climbs free as the penthouse doors open, just as Noor promised they would—but then the previously hidden blast doors inset before them start to slide shut, the heavy steel moving haltingly, a never-before-used mechanism jerking on its rails.

  “Hurry,” John says, dragging E-5 as fast as he can, disoriented E yelping as Eury never would, stumbling through the blast doors seconds before they close. Eury’s ornate office is as sunlit as before, the polished desk waiting, the curving wood chairs inviting, everything expensive, bathed in bright light. Through the glass walls, John watches black smoke plume into these heights where Eury lives and works and rules.

  “This way,” John says, pointing E-5 toward the security console embedded in the far wall, the entrance to the Pinatubo control room. He squeezes his fist, checks the row of lights: orange, purple, green, blue; Cal, Julie, Mai, Noor.

  All still alive. He sighs with relief—and then the green and blue lights blink out.

  At the half-built Earthtrust spaceport outside Des Moines, two saboteurs in bomb vests are gunned down before they can trigger their explosives. Their rigged bodies fall, slumped at the base of rails meant to guide the not-yet-built starship into launch positi
on. Over the next hour, two more sets of saboteurs attack, each pair repelled by gunfire, riddled with bullets before they can explode their suicide vests. Soon armed drones patrol the airspace above the construction yards, blockades are permanently erected across every remaining freeway. And still the saboteurs keep coming, not just today but in the years to come, crying, No escape, crying, No escape for anyone unless there’s an escape for everyone.

  For a time, Mai holds the entrance to the Nexus alone, but her luck can’t last forever. The next bullet burst strikes Mai in the shoulder, spins her to the ground behind the metal weapon crates stacked across the doorway to the nexus, an improvised barricade hastily erected after Cal and the others blew their way inside. She moans at the pain but doesn’t scream, doesn’t want to give away that she’s been hit. Before infiltrating Earthtrust, she’d served as a field doctor during the Secession, first on the American side, then for the disorganized western resistance. She’s removed bullets from thrashing bodies, she’s amputated limbs, performed emergency surgeries whose complexity boggles her, when and if she makes herself remember.

  All that, but before this, she’s never been shot.

  Her breathing slows; she meditates on the pain’s pulse, counting surges of blood like breaths. She tries to lift her body atop her knees, then into her shooter’s stance. Without her suppressing fire to stop them, the Earthtrust soldiers will charge in seconds. But she’s rising too slowly, her injured arm unable to lift her weapon. “Noor,” she cries. “Noor, they’re coming.”

  Noor turns from her console, her eyes taking in Mai only partially, her focus emerging out of the world inside the computer, the virtual battle she fights while Mai handles the real.

  Mai tries to right herself behind the crates, her dead arm dragging, her rifle discarded. It’s too late. She looks at Noor again, desperate for the right thing to say, one last right thing. The two have known each other a long time. They’ve been friends, they’ve laughed and fought, separated and reunited; whatever else they became, they were survivors first.