The Northern Star Trilogy: Omnibus Edition

by Mike Gullickson

  He approached the back, indistinct from the shadows. He glanced across the kitchen window and saw the top of the wife’s head. She was washing dishes. He moved against the house to the porch.

  The door was unlocked. Out here, no one locked them. He quietly slid the door open, just enough to squeeze through. Glass was low, knees bent, hunched over with the slide of the gun near his head like he used it for prayer.

  He moved through the dining room. He saw the top of the woman’s head over the countertop he crouched behind. She was perpendicular to him. She stopped washing a pan and put it down. She looked out the window, thinking about something. Glass shot her in the head and swept around the countertop into the kitchen and broke her fall. He put her into the cupboard and listened for footsteps. Muted conversations. Nothing. He continued through the living room into the main hall. He paused to listen. He heard . . . water. Water pipes. Someone was in the shower. He moved up the creaky stairs and they made no noise.

  To the right was the master bedroom. Glass could see the entrance to the bathroom and he heard the shower. To his left was the boy’s room. There were posters tacked all over the door.

  Glass drifted into the master bedroom. The man—Frank—was in the shower, washing away a tough day’s labor. Glass leaned in and saw his outline through the shower curtain. Glass raised his pistol and shot the silhouette in the head. The shadow of a man washing his armpit collapsed into a heap beneath the bathtub.

  No need to clean up now. All adults accounted for. He moved toward the boy.

  He entered the room. The boy was on his Mindlink, seemingly unaware of his surroundings. Glass pulled a syringe filled with Sodium Pentothal out of his jacket. The boy turned, done with his session. Before the boy could react, Glass grabbed him by his shirt and threw him on the bed.

  “Dad!” Justin cried. Glass didn’t bother to cover his screams, there was no one for miles.

  Glass popped the syringe into the boy’s shoulder and pressed the plunger. The boy’s struggle stopped. He stared glassy-eyed at the ceiling, unconscious.

  Glass took two long zip ties and bound the boy’s hands and feet. He carried Justin like a bride through the doorway. He hopped down the steps and exited the house.

  He put the boy down in the front yard and went to the barn. He found large alcohol-based fuel canisters near the ATVs. He coated the base of the barn with one canister and lit it up. The fire bit into the fuel and the dry barn erupted into flames.

  Glass trotted over to the farmhouse. He went inside and doused the lower level with the fuel and dropped a match. He came out through the front door and picked up Justin. The inside of the house was already engulfed—and through the windows—deep flickering orange danced on the lawn.

  Outside the dogs howled and hissed at Glass. But they kept their distance. He was the predator, not they.

  Ten minutes later, while he dreamt of a vacation he took fifteen years earlier with a stripper he had known (and adored), Tommy Spade’s dreams ended forever when Glass cut his throat.

  The Grotto went up into flames too.

  = = =

  It was night when Glass got to the Derik Building. Glass brought the boy to Evan’s office and Evan directed him to a pair of Mindlink chairs next to each other. Glass put Justin down in one. Evan checked the boy’s vitals.

  “Was it difficult?” Lindo asked. Glass shrugged. Lindo checked the boy’s pulse. He opened his eyes and shined a light into them.

  “I sedated him with Sodium Pentothal. It should wear off soon,” Glass said. Lindo nodded.

  “You did well Mike,” Lindo said. Glass showed no reaction.

  Evan put a rubber tube around Justin’s right arm as if he were drawing blood. He rolled a stand next to the chair that held a bag of IV fluid. With precision, he inserted an IV needle into Justin’s vein and attached it to the bag. He taped the needle down on the arm.

  “What’s that for?” Glass asked.

  “I don’t want him to wake,” Evan replied. He tapped the IV and watched the fluid drip from the bag. “You can go.”

  Without another word, Mike left.

  He makes no noise when he moves, Evan noticed. Not even his boots.

  Evan walked over to a server as tall as the room. It was new, backwards engineered from the self-contained Mindlink blueprint that Cynthia had given him for the Tank Major program. Two Mindlinks were attached to it with fiber. He turned it on and a hum filled the air.

  He looked at the boy and marveled at what was in front of him. Lindo’s eyes teared up. He rubbed them away. No reason to celebrate. Not yet.

  Cynthia had thought they would find some kind of supercomputer designed to disrupt cyberspace by flooding a targeted section with data. A classic hack on a massive scale. “That would explain the chaos,” she had said when she had briefed him just a few days ago on what they had learned so far. “During the anomaly, no program or portal functioned differently, like they were being manipulated—that would indicate intent—they just weren’t functioning, as if they had been short circuited. All signs point to a software program designed to overload our systems.”

  Evan had listened intently and didn’t object to her hypothesis. But he knew she was wrong. She was too close, too shaken by what had happened to see her grade school error.

  A mindscape is a human attribute. They would find a man. Evan didn’t think it would be in DeKalb, he thought they would end up in China, or somewhere else after they unwound some kind of routing algorithm. He didn’t expect a boy. But Evan knew at the end of the rainbow, they would find a human because that’s the only thing it could be.

  What seemed so complicated because of the preposterous nature of its scale, was actually simple. The boy didn’t mean to cause the chaos. He just did it. He willed his reality into existence. The portals and programs that went dark were just caught in the wash of his jet stream.

  The implications were enormous. The boy could manipulate and control cyberspace—at least theoretically—on a level that a thousand Sleepers could not. And it should have taken at least sixty terabytes per second to cause that kind of disruption, and the boy had done it on a three hundred megabyte line.

  It had been theorized for decades that the human memory compressed data. It had to be true, because humans only used ten percent or so of their brain, yet they never ran out of space. An eighty-year-old woman could vividly remember her first kiss like it was yesterday. Using all the senses, the brain took memories and broke them down like Legos, only to rebuild again. That was why a perfume could trigger the memory of an old flame, or the morning sun on a calm lake would transport a person to a vacation they took when they were three. The raw data was parceled and shared to build different things. But that compression and decompression was all in our head, in one space.

  As preposterous (once again, Evan thought) as it sounded, the boy’s brain was compressing data and decompressing it in cyberspace. He was capable of transferring this ability outside of himself. No person or system has ever done this without a codec on the other side to decompress the data stream.

  So . . . how?

  Lindo put a Mindlink connected to the giant server onto the boy. Lindo took the other and put it on himself. He lay down in a reclined chair and felt his consciousness get pulled outside his body.

  Lindo hovered. Not above the boy, but inside the Mindlink the boy wore. He was analyzing the boy’s brain by using the micro frequencies that made a Mindlink function as sonar. The boy’s brain worked differently with a device that worked in the same predictable manner for ninety-nine percent of the population. Lindo thought he knew why.

  After Albert Einstein’s death, his brain was removed and preserved for research. Great minds of the twentieth century wanted to find out how the greatest mind of the twentieth century worked. Would they find that Einstein’s brain was no different than their own?

  No. They found it was quite different. Einstein was missing the parietal operculum (used for speech and language) on both hemis
pheres of his brain, but the inferior parietal lobe—which was responsible for mathematical thought, visual cognition, and imagery—was fifteen percent larger than a normal brain.

  He thought differently and saw things differently not because of education, but because of evolution.

  Evan gasped.

  Justin’s inferior parietal lobe was thirty percent larger than normal. And like Einstein, parts of his brain were completely different than anything Evan could have imagined.

  Had Lindo seen this boy’s brain without knowing its capabilities, he would have said either the person was dead at birth or a genius.

  = = =

  Justin woke up floating in a white space. There were no visual cues to call it a room. It could have been the size of a closet or as vast as the universe. There were no shadows or bends, no hint of distance. He sensed someone in the room with him.

  “You’re up,” the man said.

  Justin rotated to his right and sat up on the bed of air. The man wore all white. Justin did too. Suddenly Justin remembered.

  “My parents!” Justin yelled.

  “What do you mean?” the man asked calmly. He walked over to Justin.

  “A man took me. He may have hurt them!” Justin said. He shook from the thought.

  “Shh. They know you’re here. Everything’s alright,” the man said. He was short and stubby and wore glasses. “My name is Dr. Evan Lindo. They asked that I help you.”

  “Help me? No. The man. He threw me down. He had long hair. He—” Justin started. He was confused. He didn’t trust this, it felt wrong.

  “This man?” Lindo asked. In the nothingness a picture appeared of Mike Glass.

  “Yes! That man!” Justin said.

  “He’s not real, Justin. We’ve seen the dream you had of this man coming to your home. He came at dinner and asked questions and then left. Then he came back and took you. You’ve had a serious accident, Justin. You’re in a coma. We’re at a hospital right now.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Justin said. The room vibrated. Evan felt it, but Justin seemed unaware.

  “You fell off your four wheeler while following Margarito and Fernando back from the utility barn. You hit your head and broke your neck.”

  “How am I here?” Justin asked.

  “This is how we test coma patient’s true brain activity. Your father Frank said you had just been on a Mindlink, which was a blessing. If you hadn’t, it would have been much harder to connect to you, to even get here.” Lindo looked around at the white space they were standing in.

  “Can I see Dad?” Justin asked.

  “Yes, very soon. Your father is going to help you recover,” Lindo said. “Because you’re here, we can now develop a proper rehab program to pull you out.”

  “What about my neck?” Justin asked. He was scared.

  “Your hands and feet are reacting to us poking and prodding. Not perfectly, but that’s fine. You’ll recover once we beat this,” Lindo said. “I need to go now, but have faith and know that your parents are right next to you. In fact, your mother is holding your hand.”

  “I feel nothing,” Justin said.

  “You will. In time. We’ll begin the rehab very soon. In this space, it will feel like a couple of hours. Your father will tell you what to do and I’ll be connected too, but only in voice. I know this is strange, and difficult to comprehend, but you’re doing great. What would you like this room to be?”

  “What can it be?” Justin replied. He was so confused.

  “Anything. A beach with an ocean and jet skis. A house. A toy store. Whatever makes you the most comfortable.”

  “I want my Dad,” Justin cried. He curled up into a ball.

  “I know, son. And they want to be with you too. Soon,” Lindo replied.

  Justin didn’t respond. He was curled in like an armadillo. The room shook again.

  “I’m trapped here,” Justin said. The voice came from all around. Evan could feel Justin’s pain as if it were his own. The boy vanished from view.

  “Why am I trapped here?”

  “It’s for your safety, Justin.” Evan had to stay calm. However powerful, Justin was still a boy. “Don’t disappear. Come back. We can’t get you well if you aren’t here.”

  Evan could feel Justin poking and prodding at his avatar. Suddenly he could feel Justin’s mind encroach on his own.

  “Justin! This isn’t a game!” Evan yelled.

  The boy re-appeared in front of him. “I want to go home!”

  Evan got down on one knee. He saw that Justin’s eyes were onyx black and the interior of his mouth glowed neon purple. “Then listen to me, Justin. If you follow my instructions and work really hard, you will see your home. You will see your mom and dad, okay?”

  The black eyes and glowing mouth disappeared. Now a small, scared boy stood in front of him.

  “I’ll make this a beach,” Evan offered.

  “I like books.”

  “With books,” Evan said. “Be brave.”

  Evan disappeared and a cabana on a Caribbean shore appeared around Justin.

  Evan pulled off the Mindlink. Sweat drenched his body. The kid didn’t realize it but for a moment he had hijacked the program, he had even crept into the interior of Evan’s mind. If Evan had had any doubts about his actions to this point, he didn’t now. The boy was extremely dangerous.

  The false construct was necessary. You couldn’t reason with a child. You couldn’t kill their parents and then expect them to give you their mind. The boy wouldn’t wake the entire time he was being used. Instead he would think he was doing exercises to improve his mind at the encouragement of his father. But the whole time, he would be dismantling infrastructure, hacking into secret files, influencing, and yes—even killing—foreign leaders.

  Evan marveled at his own genius.

  Chapter 5

  –One Month Later–

  WarDon hadn’t been feeling well. His wife had thought it was the flu, but it had never quite reached the boiling point of either fever, puking, or pooing—or the hat trick of all three—that guaranteed a solid ten pounds off the waistline.

  It had been going on for two weeks. His days always started off fine. He’d wake up at 4:30 a.m. for his five mile jog, then he’d hit the weights. He’d shower up and get dressed, his wife would have breakfast waiting for him, and he’d eat up and head to the Pentagon.

  His life had become a series of meetings, and most of these were now virtual. Every morning he’d debrief the President and the Cabinet on local and global military matters and then meet virtually with every military branch for an update for the next morning’s meeting.

  He enjoyed his job; it was important. But he missed the front lines. He missed waking up on the other side of the world. The smell of diesel. The chop of helicopters. The echo of live fire. All of it. He felt like a woman whose best years were in high school: fond of the memories but tinged with bitterness. He didn’t like getting old. He was sixty-two and still strong. His knees were good. He could bench three-fifteen. But dammit, he was starting to look like his old man. When he got a good night’s sleep, the bags under his eyes still stuck around. He was pretty sure every morning his spine was fused solid for the first few hours. And the wrinkles . . . he had wrinkles on areas of his face he was certain didn’t bend.

  And for a few weeks now, sudden waves of nausea would overtake him randomly throughout the day. It wasn’t the flu, that bug would have hit. He was worried. He looked like his old man, maybe he’d die like his old man. The Big C.

  “We’re confirmed for MindCorp tomorrow at ten a.m.,” Evan said.

  WarDon didn’t reply. He stared off into space.

  “Are you alright?” Evan asked. They were in a virtual room waiting on the General of U.S. Forces for Iran.

  “I’m fine. Been under the weather lately,” WarDon replied. Even in cyberspace, he took the handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his forehead. Man, I feel like shit.

  “Flu? It’s goin
g around,” Evan said.

  “No. I’ve had this for a few weeks. Pink Flamingo,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to see a doctor. My wife’s insisting.”

  “Pink,” Evan said.

  “Flamingo,” WarDon replied absently.

  “You have nothing if you don’t have your health,” Evan said.

  The General for USFOR-IRAN appeared in front of them and they got to their meeting.

  = = =

  “THEY HAVE OIL?” WarDon’s face looked like a blood blister. He was having a bad week.

  Cynthia wore a Mindlink. A computer screen the size of a movie theatre made up a wall. “Yes. As you can see,”—on the screen a satellite image of a mountain range deep in China appeared and zoomed in—“the well is located deep in this mountain range. To get to it, they had to drill over fourteen miles. They are finding more pockets of oil in this region weekly,” Cynthia continued. “The EU is a mess. Britain and France trust each other less than you trust all of them. The rest of them are bit players. China, on the other hand, has been busy. We found allusions to this information in a Presidential Advisor’s personal folder, but other than that, nothing.”

  “If it’s such a big deal—” WarDon started.

  “They are keeping it out of the digital space,” Evan interrupted. He turned to WarDon. “They are concerned with exactly what we’re doing. Cyber-hacking.”

  Cynthia smiled. She loved information. “Exactly. This discovery is so big they were smart enough to keep it off servers, out of e-mails, conferences, all those things. They know the holes in the levee.” Pictures of an Asian man in his 50’s wearing a hardhat and sunglasses filled the screen. “This information came from the CEO of the drilling company working on the project.”

  “You found files?” WarDon asked. Cynthia shook her head. “Cut with the mysterious shit, what?”

  “We went in,” she responded. “No one else has been online. Not the President, his advisors, not oil workers. We used the void as our guide. It was the abnormality. So we waited until someone popped on. The CEO went online to discuss a completely separate project.”