The network map of the nervenet that they recovered from Willy’s proxxi indicated that a senior member of the Alliance military command in Arunchal Pradesh was another nodal point, just like Jimmy. So Sid and Zoraster snuck into Arunchal to infect this nodal point with their own virus. Vince came to Washington to unload the information that Terra Nova discovered this ancient machine. If they were right, then Sid would see the network of crystals light up as the information passed from Colonel Kramer to his senior staff, and from there into the nervenet. He hoped it worked.
And if it didn’t, then he’d just alerted the Alliance of a dangerous new doomsday cult. Either way, there wasn’t much more he could do.
Closing his eyes, Vince drifted off. His mind went back to the voodoo ceremony, to the night on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. In his mind he saw the hulking figure that had risen out of the fires with a star pattern burning in its forehead. Half asleep, Vince opened his eyes. The presence from the fires on Ponchartrain was standing in his cell next to him. Vince wasn’t surprised. He smiled. “Bob,” he whispered. “Is that you?”
The figure moved toward the door, and, silently, it slid open. Swinging his legs off the cot to stand, Vince followed his rescuer out and down the hallway. Other detainees were in their cells, but they all looked away. Vince followed in a dream. At each checkpoint, the guards opened the doors and looked away at just the right moments—chatting to a colleague, dropping a coffee, everyone looking at anything but Vince. Like a ghost he slipped out of the building until he was standing outside next to a dumpster.
Vince woke to find himself standing alone in the alleyway.
He’d thought it was a dream.
Hotstuff stood in front of him, her glowing virtual presence in sharp contrast to the dingy alley. Blond hair fell in waves over her black sweater. “How the hell did you get out here?”
Vince blinked and looked up. The sky was clear and blue, but the air was freezing cold. He shivered. “I don’t know.” No alarms were raised. It was quiet.
“Let’s just get out of here.” Forwarding a set of phutures into Vince’s networks, Hotstuff constructed a set of escape routes. They might not own Phuture News anymore, but they had enough backdoors to last a lifetime.
Wiping the diagrams from his workspaces, Vince shook his head. “No.” He plotted paths to the Federal detention center.
“Seriously?” Hotstuff shook her head in disbelief, but she was already following him out of the alleyway onto a tree-lined street, turning left toward the center of Washington. She frowned at his orange jumpsuit. “At least let’s get you into something a little more fashionable.”
“COME ON, LET’S go.”
Connors looked up. “Vince?”
He smiled. “Time to get going.”
But she didn’t budge from the cot she was sitting on. The cell looked a lot like the one Vince had been in; rough concrete walls, folding metal cot, gray steel bars. Detention wasn’t the most imaginative of businesses.
Connors frowned. “What do you mean, time to get going? Why are you here?”
“They’ve released us,” Vince replied. “Come on.” He smiled and held out his hand. “Before they change their minds.”
Connors hesitated but then rocked forward onto her feet. She didn’t take his offered hand.
Vince dropped his hand and began leading the way. “Don’t talk to anyone,” he instructed. “Just follow me, strict orders.”
They walked out of the cell block hallway, out past the guard at the desk who just happened to be holding the door open and talking to his wife in a virtual space as they passed. Outside the cellblock section, the rooms were filled with desks, federal agents busy filing reports, standing chatting at coffee machines, all of them looking away from Connors and Vince as they walked past.
“I heard you cooperated,” Connors said, following quickly on Vince’s heels. “I’m glad you did. I told them everything, every detail, about how you asked to come here and give yourself up.”
Vince jogged down the stairs, glancing up at Connors as he turned to the next flight. “Good.”
“I was worried you sided with the terrorists,” continued Connors. The newsworlds were flooded with stories about the attack in Arunchal and the capture of the Grilla linking this all back to Sid and Bob and Terra Nova. “I’m so relieved you kept your head and weren’t so wrapped up in it that you couldn’t see the truth.”
“And what’s that?” Vince asked as he banged open the doors to the ground floor. They walked outside.
“How dangerous these religious extremists are.”
Vince walked without saying anything.
“Hey, slow down.” Connors grabbed his arms and swung him around. “What’s the hurry? Where are we going?”
“I just want to get out of here,” replied Vince. “You can understand that, can’t you?” He tried to reach for her, but she backed away.
“They didn’t release us, did they?”
Pedestrians slid by, sidestepping them as if they weren’t there, and a wind kicked up, driving wet leaves past their feet.
“We need to go.” Vince turned and kept walking.
Connors paused but then ran after him. “You don’t really believe all that stuff, do you?”
Vince said nothing.
“Thoughts can be viruses,” she continued. “You know that, don’t you? Virulent memes can rip through thought-space, half-truths and deceptions can destroy just as violently as kinetics. It almost destroyed Atopia, and now you’re stuck in it again. Why can’t you see it?”
Alarms began sounding. “We need to go.”
“I can’t come with you.”
“You can’t stay here. They’ll think you were a part of this.”
The wind whipped up again, sending leaves spinning into the air. They were hiding between the lines of perception in this reality, but the lines were blurring. The base finally noticed Vince had disappeared from his cell, and it wouldn’t be long till they saw Connors was gone as well. The authorities had all the information they needed. This time the directives going out to the enforcement branches wouldn’t be to capture, but that dangerous terrorists had escaped, shoot to kill.
Connors weighed her options. “And where on Earth were you thinking of trying to take me?”
Grabbing her hand, Vince angled them into a fresh slice of the future. “Someplace safe.”
15
“JIMMY, HEY JIMMY!” Bob called out.
There was no response.
Hesitating, Bob looked at the lollipop trees and chocolate chip moon of the Little Great Little, and then walked into the thunderfall, a wall of sensory white noise. It enveloped him, crushing his senses, and he edged forward, afraid, but also determined. He knew this was where Jimmy hid.
The thunderfall fell away and his senses returned. Behind was a cave, and Jimmy sat in a corner, his eyes cast down, surrounded by his play creatures and guarded by his proxxi Samson, who stared at Bob.
“Jimmy, hey, I didn’t know,” Bob pleaded. He was replaying sections of his inVerse, going over every interaction—every word—he had with Jimmy when they were growing up. This scene had been just after Nancy’s thirteenth birthday party. “I’m sorry.”
“Leave us alone,” Samson growled.
Bob allowed a respectful pause. Jimmy was crying.
“I was just trying to help.” Bob moved a little closer, and Samson grew a little larger. “Listen, stuff like this happens all the time, they’ll forget in a week.”
Jimmy’s face twisted. “It doesn’t happen to you! And no they won’t!” He wiped his tears away and didn’t look Bob in the eye.
Back then, Bob had just tried setting Jimmy up with Cynthia, a girl Jimmy had a crush on. The results were disastrous. Bob had suggested that Jimmy should take Cynthia into Jimmy’s private worlds, where he was doing research
for Solomon House, but somehow Cynthia discovered a very private world—one where Jimmy tortured little creatures. It also contained some private memories where Jimmy’s mother was ridiculing him.
Cynthia copied it all and broadcast it to the other pssi-kids. It was cruel fun, and now all the pssi-kids were making fun of Jimmy—whole worlds constructed for the sole purpose of mocking him. Jimmy was awkward, never quite understanding how to interact with the other kids. With Bob’s encouragement, this party had marked the first time Jimmy opened up a little, and now all this had happened.
It was a disaster.
“Hey, I’m not perfect either,” said Bob. Even as he said it he realized how it must sound. Bob was popular, everyone wanted to be his friend. He sighed. “But I’ll tell you something, just between you and me.”
Jimmy sniffled, still staring at the floor, but Samson retreated a pace.
Bob took a step closer. “I lose my temper. I yell at my brother all the time. I feel bad, but I can’t help it sometimes.”
Wiping back more tears, Jimmy took a deep breath. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” Bob took another step toward Jimmy and sat down, cross-legged. “We all have stuff about us we can’t control.”
“Everybody hates me,” sniffled Jimmy, his face snotty, eyes bloodshot. More tears streamed down his face.
“Jimmy,” said Bob softly. “Hey, Jimmy . . .”
The scared little boy looked back at Bob. “What?”
“Not everybody.”
SPITTING OUT A mouthful of water, Bob stopped to swim in place, regaining control of his body from autopilot. The glittering farm towers of Atopia hung in the sky before him. It wasn’t much farther now. Already he was at the outermost edges of the kelp forest, their air-filled hold-fast bladders sitting like fat green goblins in the rolling swells. He reached out and grabbed one to rest.
His body had been fit as an Olympian’s when he left Atopia, but the trek across the desert drained and damaged him. Even so, swimming these few miles wasn’t much of a challenge. The cold water was draining his reserves, but the hydrophobic shell covering his skin was doing its job. Leaving his body in low-power autopilot swim mode, eking every fraction of fluid-dynamic efficiency it could, he plotted paths through the waves and current and stayed away from drone patrols.
The sensor networks of Atopia were keyed to cyber and mechanical-kinetic intrusions on the wide-angle side, and pathogenic and microbiologicals from a small-angle view. Macrobiologicals were lower on the threat scales. He maintained a small alternate reality clipped around himself as he swam, a cloaking filter that would be enough to keep any alerts below the thresholds for escalation. As powerful as Jimmy was, Sid and Bob had been his equals, even surpassing him in some areas.
This was Bob’s house, too.
Moving up and down in the swells, holding onto the gas bladder, Bob took a deep breath and closed his eyes, opening them to take in the blue cathedral of the sky overhead. Cirrus clouds streaked the heavens above. He felt the familiar surge of the surf pounding on the beaches like an old heartbeat—not far away now—and he was reconnecting with his friends in the water, the smarticle-infused phytoplankton, the fish, the sharks.
He was thinking about what Tyrel had said in the Terra Novan Council meeting.
This thing they were facing, if it was all-powerful, it would have just risen up and destroyed them. Whatever it was, it wasn’t supernatural, it was of this world. It needed their technology to do whatever it was trying to do. Otherwise, it would have just done whatever it wanted. It was a virus that was infiltrating their social and technical networks, but it still needed them.
And if it was something that needed, then it was also something that had weaknesses.
But what were they?
But the more essential question, and one the Terra Novans weren’t able to answer, was why was it doing whatever it was doing? Did it want to subjugate humans, make them suffer, hold them in thrall? Or did it just want to destroy? Bob shook his head. He was anthropomorphizing, trying to apply human desires and traits onto this thing. They really had no idea what this thing was. Did it even really want something? If it was just an echo, then it was just repeating a pattern. There might be no conscious intent. The apocalypse legends all talked about a day of judgment, but why would this thing want to judge us?
He looked up at the looming towers of Atopia. He had to figure it out.
Soon.
Releasing the gas bladder, Bob set his body into swim-mode again and left it to pick its way through the thickening kelp. He was close enough to start projecting some private network tunnels. He had all of Terra Nova’s resources, funneled through the darknets, at his disposal when the time came. Once opened, though, he wouldn’t have long to make his attack before those connections were found and choked off.
He could use some inside help. He was close enough now.
SEAGULLS YELPED UNDER wet skies framed by white chalk cliffs. The portal of Durdle Door stood above the beach. Bob leaned down to pick up his red plastic bucket, then ran toward the girl with blond hair who was turning over rocks in a tidal pool.
“Nancy!” he squeaked in a tiny voice. He was only four in this secret world.
She looked up, her eyes growing wide as her primary subjective filled the placeholder they each always left for each other here. “Bob? Is that you?”
“It’s me.” He closed the last few feet, splashing through the shallow water. He offered his bucket for the squirming crab she held daintily between two fingers.
She dropped it into the bucket and leaned in to hug him. “What are you doing here? Are you still on Terra Nova? I’m terrified, they’ve started a kinetic attack. I’m trying to get Kesselring to call it off.”
Bob hugged her back. “No, I’m not there.”
Releasing him, she leaned back to look in his eyes. “Good.”
“I’m here.”
“What?” She frowned. “Here?”
“Atopia.”
She backed up. “Bob, it’s too dangerous. I unpacked your data beacon. We’re trying to contain Jimmy. We have supporters inside.”
Lightning lit up the clouds in the distance. It was always storming in this world now.
“And that’s why I need your help.”
Nancy wiped her small hands against the frilly edge of her polka-dot one-piece, nodding. Their networks merged in the background, the familiar sensation of their phantoms and synthetic bodies feeling each other close.
“Isn’t this touching?”
Nancy and Bob spun toward the voice.
“YOU KNOW I never trusted you, Nancy.” Jimmy towered above them. “And Bob, did you really think you could just waltz in here?” He danced a half-step, mocking them.
Bob looked at Nancy. “Run.” He initiated the tunnel linking Atopia and Terra Nova, and unleashed the first barrage. The sky turned to fire, their childhood world exploding into flames.
Jimmy laughed.
But Bob didn’t run.
He watched.
16
NANCY TRIED TO hold her mind on the beach as long as she could, but the splinter snapped off. Bob closed the connection. The last thing she saw was young Bob’s face fade from her visual channels. He didn’t look scared.
And that scared her.
But she didn’t have long to dwell.
Already Jimmy’s networks were swarming hers, overriding her automated defenses. Her physical body was in the labs of Farm Tower Two, just below the Solomon House. She was going over some research notes with one of her staff. “We’re going to have to look at this again later,” she heard herself saying, just as psombie guards slammed open the doors.
Someone screamed, glass crashing to the floor, as the guards shoved people aside and advanced toward Nancy. She reached into synthetic space with her phantoms, worming her way into the psombie
s’ controls to click them off. One by one, each of the attacking guards dropped like a sack of potatoes to the floor. Horrified faces turned toward Nancy as she sprinted out.
Escaping wouldn’t ordinarily have been that easy, but Jimmy was distracted, busy protecting himself. A vortex opened in the shared mindspace of Atopia, a virtual black hole that was ripping the fabric of pssi-space apart. Bob was the Trojan who penetrated Atopia’s perimeter. He opened a tunnel straight to Terra Nova and unleashed their entire cyber-arsenal against Jimmy.
Running through the corridors, Nancy flooded the realities around her with security blankets while she keyed into Kesselring’s networks. His face floated into her displays.
“I’ve locked down Solomon House,” Kesselring said immediately. “Come up top to my level, we’ll coordinate from here.”
Nancy nodded and clicked off, watching a protective corridor open up and lead into the upper levels. Safe for the moment, she let her primary presence slide off into the hundreds of splinters her distributed consciousness was monitoring at key locations around the globe.
In a spasm, the world had erupted.
She watched the protective dome of the Commune in Montana blaze as Allied forces attacked. The battle platforms hammered the defenses of Terra Nova in a hundred-mile perimeter that stretched into the stratosphere above the southern Atlantic. Psombie armies flooded city centers around the world.
In counter-attack, the Ascetics launched offensives in Manila, Hong Kong, and Sao Paulo, but it wasn’t much.
In Boston, Nancy was ghosting through a bot stationed in Faneuil Hall market. She watched a man leaning over to inspect a basket of tomatoes. He picked up one of them, turning it over, while all around him rained small weapons fire in a battle between the Irish Ascetics and local police forces. The stall behind him burst into flames while he smiled and put the tomato in a bag. The person standing next to him exploded in a mist of red. The man reached down to select another tomato.
The Dystopia Chronicles (Atopia Series Book 2) Page 27