by Hill, Travis
The entire net was aflame with discussion, trolling, denial, and cheering. News anchors and talking heads had adopted the net denizens’ unofficial name for the party or parties responsible for the drug and the induction module. “The Core” was apparently what Brian, Garret, Derry, and Michelle were known as, though they were more anonymous than anyone else. All four kept up their regular, legal net presence, just in case NSA computers went number crunching and noticed that one, or all four of them, had deviated from their long-standing routines of browsing for music, videos, pornography (in the boys’ case, Derry’s as well, but they never found this out), gaming, or their social networks.
The Core had fourteen weeks left before reveal. Everything was in place, other than the final module’s distribution from their friendly networks to seed across the public net. Michelle and Brian had become a permanent couple, much to Brian’s dismay whenever he looked at Derry. He warred with himself over it too much, and did his best to avoid her so he wouldn’t be distracted by her presence. He was still in love with her, more than ever, and knew he was slowly crushing her heart as each day went by that she had to see him with Michelle.
He was definitely in love with Michelle, which made everything that much more complicated in his head. She was the archetype fiery redhead, complete with the temper, personality, and attitude. She was great in the sack, she was as intelligent as he thought himself to be, and she could get things done. That she also tormented Garret at every single opportunity, as well as laughed at all of their nerd and bodily function humor, was icing on the cake. But she wasn’t Derry, and that bothered Brian too much to want to dwell on it for too long.
*****
November, 2045
“Derry, sit down,” Garret said to her as she hovered near his computer chair. “We need to talk to you.”
“What is it?” she asked, looking from Garret to Brian and back. She didn’t look worried, but she knew something serious was coming.
“We need to tell you something, and you probably aren’t going to like it,” Brian said, causing her to look back and forth at their faces again.
“Tell it, then,” she said.
“Okay. So… Brian found something out by accident a couple of weeks ago. We initially decided to not tell you, but we kind of, sort of think you need to know this,” Garret said.
“Oh my God, you guys have brain tumors from too much Receiver and YouTube?” she asked. Neither of them could determine if she was joking.
Brian squinted at her, then sighed. “Look, I accidentally took too much of a test batch of Receiver one night, and watched the new module that Garret has been working on.”
“What module?” she asked, interrupting the rest of what he was about to lay out for her.
“Uh… it’s kind of like a ‘general’ module,” Garret said, trying to think of how to explain it to her. “Like, it doesn’t have any specific lesson on it. It’s sort of a… a base module. One that opens the mind for learning in a certain way.”
“So? Receiver already does that, and the modules are tuned to do that stuff already, right?” Derry asked, again looking back and forth at each of them. She narrowed her eyes. “Wait, what do you mean ‘opens the mind a certain way?’”
“Listen,” Brian told her, and she turned her head to look at him. “I took way too much of the stuff one night then watched this new module that had only been half-encoded. It had just the initial learning vectors programmed into it, not any specific lesson. He was testing the code on it, fooling around, trying to see if there was something specific in the way the information interacted with the brain while on the drug.” He sighed again. “Mostly to see if he could replicate what I did to the juice that night.”
“You guys are still trying to juice yourselves like that again?” she asked, but this time there was no humor in the way she said juice, the group’s private little joke. “I thought you gave that up.”
“No,” Garret replied, sounding miffed at the thought of giving up that particular dream. “We never gave it up, but once we’d struck gold with the induction process, it kind of became a back-burner thing. Bri still fiddled with the formula a bit, and I was still fiddling with the coding to see if we could, you know, make it happen.”
Understanding dawned on her face. “And you did it?” she asked in a whisper.
“We did more than ‘it,’” Brian said, wanting to smile, but knowing this was the part where shit was going to hit the fan. “The latest formula I distributed? It’s the new formula, and it makes the Receiver about four times as potent. The pocket cook will only make two doses now, but that’s okay. It only takes one dose plus the modified induction module.”
Derry looked around as if there were others in the apartment that she didn’t want listening in on their conversation. “Show me,” she said.
Five minutes later, she collapsed on the beanbag chair, stunned into silence. Brian couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Garret wanted to go to her side, sit down next to her, comfort her, but he stood behind his computer chair, thinking it might be useful as a shield if she erupted in a rage.
“You lied to me?” she asked, looking from Brian to Garret. They both felt their hearts melt in their chests before boiling off into the vacuum of betrayal that now separated them from her.
“We lied,” Brian said. He didn’t think trying to explain it would change anything.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because we love you, and we didn’t want to have to make the choice between you trying to stop us, and hating us when we made it clear we weren’t going to stop, or you finding out in a few weeks that we’d kept it from you for almost three months,” Garret told her, wincing as the words left his mouth.
“Of course you love me,” she said, “but why would that stop you from telling me what you were really up to?”
“No, Derry,” Brian said, “we really love you. Are in love with you. Both of us. The real kind of love. Like husband and wife love.”
Her eyes went wide as her mind finally grasped what Brian was saying. None of them took a breath for what seemed like minutes, until she burst into tears. The two men looked at each other, not sure what to do. This was the one reaction they hadn’t anticipated when they’d decided two nights ago to tell her everything. They’d expected raging, screaming, throwing things, even demands to dose her and let her watch the module so she could then punish them with her new ability.
“I don’t understand,” she sobbed. “I don’t understand!” She repeated it a few more times until Garret went to her, sitting down next to her, wrapping his arms around her while she cried.
“I’m sorry, Derry,” Garret said to her. “We’ve been torn up about it for a couple of months. But in a few weeks, everyone in the world is going to be able to do what you just saw me do. The world is going to change, and in an instant. And it isn’t going to be pretty for a while. It wasn’t going to be pretty before with just the learning modules, but this… this is going to change everything.”
“Why?” she sobbed. “Why do you want to do this? You can stop it! You can call it all off, or just put the learning modules out there.” She began to talk faster, trying to dissuade them from their plan. “You can just have the ability yourself. You don’t have to give it to everyone. Let them learn how to fly planes and fix nuclear reactors, who cares? But don’t give them this. Please, Garret. Please don’t do this.”
“We have to, Dez,” Brian said, sitting down on the other side of her in the beanbag chair. It wasn’t big enough to hold all three of them comfortably, but he didn’t mind. He put his arms around her as well. “We have to do this. We’ve come too far.”
“Bullshit!” she shouted into his face. She attempted to break out of the prison of arms and hands that held her. “You don’t! You don’t have to do this! Fuck your goal or this we’ve come too far bullshit. It’s bullshit!” She broke down again.
“Derry,” Garret said, grabbing her chin, forcing her look at him. She stopped s
truggling and looked him in the eyes, preemptively defiant about anything he was going to tell her. “It’s inevitable. We already rocked the boat too far when we released the formula the first time and gave everyone the ability to sing. Every chemist, every government, probably every university lab on the planet is burning overtime trying to figure out what the drug does, how the module works.
“Eventually they’ll stumble onto how I’ve locked the program before recording it as a holo. Once they figure that out, they’ll slow it down, frame by frame, then reverse-engineer the whole thing, cook up a batch of Receiver, and eventually stumble onto what we just showed you.”
“Wouldn’t it be better,” Brian continued, gently grabbing her chin from Garret and turning her face toward him, “to let everyone have it? I know it’s some Darwinian survival of the fittest shit that you hate, but imagine if a government solved our little riddle. Think of the power they’d have. There would only be Garret and I with the ability to counter them. We don’t even know what kind of abilities people will have. What if the feds make a bunch of agents that can read minds or hack computers without any effort, and they discover the trail we’ve left behind?”
She tried to protest that they’d done too well at covering their tracks, but he put a finger on her lips. “Don’t,” he said. “You know as well as anyone that everything we’ve done has left a trail of some kind. No one has picked up the scent yet because we’ve been careful, but also because the world is focused on the drug and the reveal. Most of the world’s governments are trying to put out fires all over the place.
“They haven’t had a chance to catch their breath and go on the hunt again. But when we reveal, and this is if we were to just reveal the learning modules, then they will have that chance. The world will be going crazy, but the black suits will still be cranking away for a solution in their labs. And they’ll stumble on this secret that only the three of us know. And while everyone is busy learning how to be a plumber in thirty seconds, they’ll be giving this ability to their people. They will cut the net connections completely once they know how to do what we can do.
“When they cut the nodes off, you can be sure that they’ll sever them all over the world, one way or another. By sabotage or by military force or by remote missile. They can’t have anyone else figuring out what’s going on when they start using their abilities to do whatever it is they’ll be able to do.”
“Why would they do that?” she asked, her tears drying on her cheeks.
“Because it’s power. Imagine what you could do with the power we have. Men have always aspired to power, and men have always dreamed of having this kind of power, the power to eliminate any threats that might also discover how to acquire it,” Garret told her.
“But the rest of the world…” she trailed off.
“Governments, corporations, religions, if any one group has exclusive control over either of these components, it will probably be the whole ‘thousand years of darkness’ thing. If everyone on Earth is on equal footing, has the same chance to dose then flash with the module, it will still be a free-for-all, but it won’t be an organized power grab like it would be with a government or the military, or a religion.”
“You really think that men with this ability won’t do exactly what the governments would do with it?” she asked angrily, as if they were stupid children who couldn’t think more than one step ahead.
“No,” Brian said. “We know they will. But if everyone else can do it, it will be some kind of defense or deterrence against it.”
“You’re insane,” she said to him, then turned to Garret. “You’re just as insane. You both are fucking insane.” She detached their arms and stood up. She looked like she was going to leave, but instead said, “I want it.”
“You aren’t going to kill us, are you?” Garret asked, only half-joking.
“No, Garret, I’m not going to kill either of you. I probably would only get one of you down before the other finished me.” She didn’t sound like she was joking, and she didn’t have a smile on her face. “I won’t try to stop you. Though I will pray for you both when you realize what you’ve done.”
CHAPTER 12
January 1, 2046
Derry and Michelle sat in the boys’ computer chairs, one at each computer desk, waiting for the countdown to reach zero. Brian and Garret exchanged glances. Both of them were sweating buckets, their shirts soaked through at the armpits. Word had been circulating for two months that everyone needed to have a dose of the new formula and net access on New Year’s Day. The entire world had seemingly come to a stop on January 1st, 2046.
There had been a rumor circulating for weeks that said the United States of America was poised to cut all inbound and outbound communications before the countdown expired. Another rumor said that multiple countries were poised to invade their neighbors when the countdown reached zero, the aggressors assuming that their victims would be too busy tripping on a psychedelic drug while watching holos and videos on YouTube and a thousand other sites.
To counter these rumors, Brian’s black site co-conspirators circulated their own rumor that proclaimed the induction module was already seeded to over a million zombies, file repositories, and internal node communities, just in case the powers in charge really did decide to cut the lines. Like the formula instructions, the module would begin seeding into every capable device the instant the networks came back up.
The net never went down, and no government except for a few radical dictatorships cut their links. Too many talking heads on the holo, the web, and on the radio had made it clear that trying to cut off communications in such a way was both unfeasible as well as guaranteed to cause violent rebellion across the globe. The net was too much a part of every human’s daily life.
The timer that had signaled everyone to take their dose had been flashing red zeros for fifty-nine minutes. The second timer passed below forty seconds. There were tens of millions across the country, hundreds of millions across the world, that had no interest in whatever was going on with the drug and the video. In the metros, they were busy breaking into stores, banks, any place containing valuables that no one was bothering to guard. In most small towns, the streets were empty, only an occasional car or pedestrian interrupting the stillness.
Twenty seconds. Brian gave Michelle’s shoulder a hard squeeze, causing her to look up from the screen for a second. She returned his smile before staring at the monitor again, her mouth silently counting down the remaining time. Ten seconds. Derry gave them both one last hard-eyed glare before turning back to her monitor. She was bitter that they’d made her wait until reveal along with everyone else.
Brian and Garret had agreed that it was too dangerous to let her have the ability ahead of time. They’d seeded the lone induction module only four hours ago. She had almost begged them after that to let her dose and flash. They denied her even though it was too late for her to do anything to stop it. Both hoped she wouldn’t exact revenge thirty seconds after the module played.
The counter reached zero. The entire world refreshed their net pages at once, but with the module having been seeded all over the globe, only a few of the smaller sites that weren’t able to handle ten million simultaneous connections at once crashed. The visual field in the two girls’ H-Vis went black as the module synchronized with their contacts.
“WELCOME TO ABILITY” flashed onto the black background and hung there for thirty seconds. Then it began.
*****
Tuscon, Arizona - January 1, 2046
John Malcom Heider wandered from his bedroom to the stairs, his head still buzzing from the video he’d just watched on the net. He grabbed the railing and descended, somehow keeping his balance. John paused at the bottom of the stairs for a few seconds to clear his mind of the noise. When he was able to focus on what he wanted, he walked into the kitchen.
His mother was bent over the table, doing a crossword puzzle on her tablet. His father sat across from her, reading financial data from
his trading net. John stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and cleared his throat. Both of his parents looked up at the same time. John gave them a smile, then burned them from the inside out.
Marseilles, France - January 1, 2046
Teri Marchand stumbled out of the net cafe, sick to her stomach. Whatever was in the drug hadn’t agreed with her at all. The flashing video had made her feel dizzy and uncomfortable. She sat down on the sidewalk bench outside of the cafe and took a few deep breaths. Three young men walked past her, one calling her a Christian whore just loud enough for her to hear. Teri reached down and caressed the crucifix hanging between her breasts while looking at the boys’ backsides. A burst of anger turned her caresses into a clutching fist. The anger turned into a consuming rage, and somewhere in her mind, she heard Jesus, or God, she wasn’t sure other than the voice filled her with the desire to serve the Almighty. The Voice of God told her that to smite evil was something He praised greatly.
Teri stood up from the bench and walked after the boys. They heard her heels click on the sidewalk, and turned around as one to watch her approach. The one in the middle had just formed a question on his lips when she thrust her hand forward, not knowing what she was doing but feeling as if the Almighty guided her, sending a hard wave of air toward him. The youth’s head was ripped from his body, flying for twenty meters before striking a car parked along the street.
The other two looked from their friend’s headless corpse to the car when its alarm began to blare loud enough to make their ears ring. Teri approached them and put a hand around each of their necks. Both boys tried to reach for her arms, but she sent a blast of power into her hands, burning through the flesh of their necks, cooking whatever was under it in less than three seconds. Power coursed through her hands for almost a minute until their flesh crumbled, the smell of cooked meat filling the street.