Tiona followed him, heart pounding in her chest. Where can we possibly go? she wondered, but then saw the eight meter saucer settling into the yard and tipping to lower its back deck for them.
Vaz ran toward it in his clumsy looking gait and she followed on his heels. Before she could throw a knee up at the edge of the deck, he grabbed her by the upper arm and easily lifted her onto the deck. She turned to give him a hand, but he placed both hands on the deck and vaulted effortlessly up onto it. “Inside! Now!”
She turned, opened the door and pulled herself in. Vaz was right behind her.
She threw herself into what she thought of as the pilot’s seat, because that’s where she’d always sat. She’d expected Vaz to get into the seat beside her, instead he dropped into the middle seat behind her. He said, “Take it up!”
Tiona did, wondering as she directed the AI why he hadn’t just told it to go up himself…
***
At Yodok penal labor colony number fifteen, guard Jok Wan-li stepped into the hut that held the new girl. Not yet starved, she was by far the most attractive of the women in the camp at present. He went to the mat she slept on and found an old hag lying in her place. Angrily, he looked around the hut. He saw someone lying behind another prisoner. He stalked over and found it was the girl. He leaned down and jerked her to her feet.
As he dragged her through the hut, he saw that she’d already been sobbing and crying. Not uncommon, after being gang raped every night for a week, but she’d get used to it. He took her outside and started to drag her toward the guard house.
Jok stopped, surprised, when he heard the roaring of a big diesel motor. He looked towards the sound. In the dim light, he saw a truck rolling rapidly down the road toward the gate.
Jok stopped in some confusion. In the first place, trucks never arrived at night. In the second place, this truck didn’t even have its lights on. Lastly, it was going so fast he thought it was going to have a hard time stopping at the gate.
Then it swerved a little to the right and crashed right through the guard house. Jok dropped the woman’s arm and started to run toward the accident. The small building had been destroyed! Surely Jok’s friends, who’d been waiting in the guard shack for him to bring the girl, had been injured if not killed. As he ran to the door of the truck he pulled out his weapon, thinking he should kill the driver.
He jerked the door open.
No one was in the vehicle!
The radio was blaring a spoken message. He expected to hear the usual propaganda, but instead, a loud but poorly worded statement said, “The dictatorship of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been overthrown. Declare your freedom! Work for justice! Achieve real democracy!” The message began to repeat.
Jok turned to look. Prisoners were beginning to come out of their huts at the noise. He called out to his fellow guards, but no one responded. One of the prisoners bent over and picked up a rock. Jok began to lift his weapon, but a rock coming from his other side laid him out.
More big trucks crested the hill and began rolling down toward the camp. One after another they turned off to crash into the other guard houses. Then a long series plowed into the guards’ barracks. Those trucks that still ran backed up and then drove over to the main gate to join other trucks that waited in front of it.
First as a trickle, then as a flood, the prisoners began to head for the trucks. When the crowd found that several of the trucks carried full loads of food, ecstatic joy swept over the starving prisoners.
After the prisoners had shared the food, a few of them eating too much and throwing up, they began climbing in the trucks and directing them to leave. Some prisoners headed back to their home cities, others—unable to believe that Kims’ reign of terror was finished—turned their trucks toward China, a final group started for Pyongyang, anxious to contribute to the establishment of their new government.
***
Across North Korea, the internet shut down. All computers that were turned on at the time were left with a single message on their screen which could not be taken down. “The dictatorship of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been overthrown. Declare your freedom! Work for justice! Achieve real democracy!”
Those loyal members of Kim Sung-Jong’s totalitarian regime who remained found themselves unable to communicate with one another. Everywhere, phones, radios, TVs, computers, and the few AIs that existed in North Korea, simply carried the message that the government had been overthrown. Some kind of virus had overcome every digital processor connected to the net.
As people came to understand that the reviled leadership of their despised government had truly been decimated, they began to show up in droves to do away with anyone who even thought of resurrecting the tyranny.
***
A garage door rolled open on the north side of Raleigh. A man stared as a flying saucer dropped down out of the sky and slid into the opening. He blinked a couple of times, but by then he had driven past the opening and the door was closing.
***
Lisanne sat in the breakfast nook of the Gettnors’ kitchen, staring sightlessly out the window and wondering what to do with herself that day. Her life had seemed so vibrant and full back before those men had killed Tiona’s guards and carried away her husband and daughter.
A thumping sound came from the basement. Lisanne startled to her feet, spilling her coffee. Could someone be down there trying to steal Vaz’s computers?! Or perhaps some of the equipment or one of the incomplete projects Vaz had been working on?
The sound became a heavy tread ascending the stairs and Lisanne moved to the door to the backyard. As she started to pull the door open, she barked, “AI, connect me to 911!”
The door to the basement opened and Vaz stepped out.
A tinny voice said, “911, please state your emergency.”
With a trembling hand, Lisanne slid shut the door to the backyard. Saying, “No emergency, sorry!” she ran across the room to her husband. She drove into him, throwing her arms around him and feeling his solid bulk stiffening as it always did when someone hugged him. “Vaz!” She drew back, “Are you okay?” Then she saw Tiona standing behind him and darted around her husband to fiercely hug her daughter as well. “Are you okay?!” she asked again, pushing back to look her daughter up and down, She looks so thin!
“Yeah, Mom, we’re okay,” Tiona said, pulling her mother back for another hug. “We’re free, we’re home, in fact—things are pretty damn good.”
Lisanne frowned, “Why didn’t you call? Why wait till you’d gotten here to let me know you’re okay?!”
Tiona gave her a trembling smile as her eyes brimmed with tears. She said, “It’s only a fifty minute flight Mom. We decided it would be nicer to tell you in person.”
Lisanne looked from her daughter to her husband and back to her husband, then pulled them both into a hug. Nurturing instinct in full bloom, she said, “Would you guys like some breakfast?”
“Oh God yes!” Tiona gasped. “You wouldn’t believe the crap we’ve been eating. But, even more than breakfast, I want a shower. Then a fast breakfast and I’ll be off to see Nolan. I’d be seeing him already, if it wasn’t for how I must smell!”
As Tiona showered, she thought about how her father had answered her questions while the saucer was making its suborbital trip back to North Carolina. The first thing she’d asked was what had happened to the guards in their building. As she had queasily suspected, Vaz had put the electronic devices Tiona had wired up for him into the bottom of the long rectangular plastic tubs where they’d acted as detonators. He’d partially filled the tubs with the mixture of PETN and nitrocellulose he’d made in the fume hood. The partial filling of the tubs left a cup shaped defect in the plastic on the side toward the wall. That cup was what made them “shaped charges.”
When he’d fired those shaped charges, they’d blown the slot-shaped hole she’d seen in the wall. As the material from that slot had blown out the other side of th
e wall into the guard room, the high velocity debris had presumably either killed or disabled the guards inside. Apparently, Vaz had waited until just after the guards had finished their rounds and returned to their room, so the blast would have a better chance of taking them all out.
Tiona had hated those guards for imprisoning her, but had an uneasy feeling that they were just doing their jobs. She wasn’t sure they deserved to die. She considered asking her father how he felt about it, but the placid look on his face told her he didn’t feel concerned.
Next she asked him what had happened to the guards out in the yard around their laboratory/prison. Without any reticence/ he explained that the high pitched humming she’d heard coming from the 1-meter discs had been the internal platters counter-rotating at 5000 rpm.
The platters that had been filled with ball bearings.
At his command, the platters had released ball bearings from their periphery at a point in the platter’s rotation that sent the bearings flying tangentially toward the center of the field of the disc’s camera. The bearings were traveling at about 250 m/s, which was a similar velocity to that of bullets fired from handguns. The weapon wasn’t very accurate, but flinging 600 bearings per second, it didn’t have to be.
Tiona had realized with some horror that the barrage of bearings was what had blown the guards into mist. Curious despite her revulsion she’d asked, “Why a rotating platter?”
“Didn’t look like a weapon,” he’d said with a shrug.
Having absorbed that, she then asked, “Weren’t you worried that their air defense system would see our saucer coming down and fire at it, either when it was descending or when it was going back up with us on board?”
He’d responded by telling her how the 15cm discs—discs she herself had built—had killed, not just Kim, but all of his close associates in the government. Men who’d been given the discs as gifts by their leader. “While the discs were decapitating the government, a program I’d hacked into their military computer network disabled all of their radar systems, missiles, military aircraft, and armored vehicles,” he’d said offhandedly, as if creating such a program was a simple task.
“Wait a minute, how were you sending programs out when you could only connect to the internet with Khang hanging over your shoulder?”
Vaz gave her a look like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Um, I connected to the internet quite a while ago. I only told Khang to hook me up every day so he wouldn’t suspect.”
“What?! How?!”
“You know how we had so many unused tops and bottoms for the one meter discs and some of them were dish shaped?”
Tiona frowned, “Yeah, why the dish shape? A flat inner surface should work better than concave.”
“A couple of them were reflecting a Wi-Fi signal from a building down the street.”
“And you broke into their router,” Tiona said, sounding mildly accusatory.
Vaz didn’t pick up on her tone, “Yeah, the security on it wasn’t any good.”
“So we’ve had internet availability for weeks, but you didn’t think to let me use it?”
“Um… I was afraid they’d catch you using it, or that you might send messages back home that would alert them to our connection.”
Tiona had gritted her teeth in frustration, but after a few moments had to admit to herself that the temptation to message Nolan would have been tremendous. She thought that surely Nolan could have kept that a secret, but she also remembered the old saying that the only real secret was something no one else knew. Rather than reproach her father, she said, “So you hacked and shut down their entire military computer system?”
“Well, that was the first thing, because I didn’t want them shooting at us. I left the civilian network open for a while so I could send out messages telling the people that their dictatorship had been shut down and urging them to reestablish a democratic government. I also used the civilian network to break open the penal labor colonies, the ones that they have filled with dissidents and political prisoners. Then I shut down the civilian internet too.”
Tiona had blinked, “Why shut down the civilian internet?”
“I didn’t want their military using it for communication that might let them crush an uprising. The soldiers still had their ordinary guns. If the military leaders had command and control I thought they might reestablish a military dictatorship.”
Tiona had shaken her head in wonderment, “And just how did you break open their prison camps?”
“You mean the ‘penal labor colonies’?”
Tiona nodded.
“I hacked into the AIs in their trucking system. That way I could send some big trucks to crash into the guards’ shacks and dormitories. I sent other trucks filled with food. Then I released the trucks’ AIs so that the prisoners could use them to go wherever they wanted.” He glanced into Tiona’s eyes, something that he didn’t do very often. “You said something about their prison camps, so I looked them up. When I found out how they treated the prisoners in those camps… that was one of the things that really made me think that we shouldn’t just escape. Kim Sung-Jong’s government needed to be destroyed.” He shook his head, “If you don’t already know how they treated the poor people in those camps, I’d… I’d… advise you not to try to learn about it. It’ll make you sick. Trust me… it’s awful.”
Even knowing her father, and knowing some of the astonishing things he’d done in the past, Tiona still found it difficult to believe what he’d told her. He almost seemed like a different man from the one she’d always known. In the past, he’d rarely worried about what might have happened to people outside his family. That he could have single-handedly destroyed the government of another nation seemed unlikely, but possible in view of his genius with computers. That he’d casually killed so many—admittedly bad—people, people who’d probably for the most part deserved to die, made her very uneasy. One part of her wanted to clap for joy, but another part drew away from a man who’d assassinated so many, so effortlessly.
She wondered whether she should tell her mother about this. She wondered whether she should tell anyone about this.
By the time she turned off the shower, she’d decided not only to keep it a secret herself, but to talk to her father and urge him to tell no one what he’d done.
Tiona encountered her dad when she came out of her room. “Dad, have you told Mom what happened in North Korea?”
He blinked a couple of times, “She told me to shower first. I’m supposed to tell her over breakfast.”
“I… I don’t think you should tell her… or anyone for that matter, that you overthrew the government… or that you killed anybody.”
His brow furrowed with curiosity, “Why not?”
“Because…” Tiona paused, thinking furiously, “even though the people who died had done terrible things and richly deserved it… there are a lot of people who think you should never kill, and others who’ll think we took the law into our own hands.” When Vaz, looking puzzled, didn’t say anything for a minute, she continued, “I think we should claim we just took advantage of their government’s collapse to escape.”
Vaz thought for a moment, then his expression relaxed, “That’s a good idea! I’ve been worrying that I’d have to explain the whole thing over and over to lots of different people.”
Tiona almost choked. Trust her father to worry more about having to talk to people than about whether he’d be condemned for assassinating hundreds and taking down a sovereign government. “We should agree on a story.” She thought for a moment, “How about this… We didn’t know that something had happened to the government there, but there was a lot of fighting amongst the guards in our compound. You finally were able to contact our saucer and you had it come for us. Fortunately, an explosion of some kind broke down the wall of the building we were in. During the confusion we managed to get from the building to the saucer without getting shot. Then the saucer brought us home.”
> Vaz gave her an uncomfortable look, “That’d be lying… Wouldn’t it?” Now his look was hopeful, as if somehow she’d tell him it wasn’t a lie. “Couldn’t I… just say nothing?”
Tiona suppressed a grin over the fact her father was worried about being accused of lying after the other things he’d done. “They’re going to be asking a lot of questions. If you just refuse to answer, they’ll hassle us mercilessly because they’re going to want to understand what happened somehow. If you tell them what really happened, some people are going to be very upset. I think telling them a lie that they’ll believe, in other words that the North Korean government came apart and we escaped during the confusion, will result in a lot fewer questions.” Tiona felt a little guilty that she’d steered the conversation so she could take advantage of her dad’s reticence to get him to agree with her.
Sure enough, Vaz frowned for a moment, then said, “Okay. There was fighting in our compound. I called the saucer. An explosion broke down the wall of our prison. We ran out to the saucer and rode it home.” He smiled, “All of that’s true.”
Tiona grinned back, “Yes it is.” They spoke a little longer about the details, but at least she didn’t have to worry that Vaz would elaborate his answers into long-winded lies that could be proven untrue.
They had breakfast with Lisanne, during which time Vaz responded to her questions with the answers he and Tiona had agreed upon. When she asked more questions and Vaz started to clam up, Tiona elaborated on the answers until Lisanne was satisfied. Once she’d finished breakfast, Tiona got up, “Time for me to go see my boyfriend.”
Disc Page 25