Uprising

by David Ryker

  Quinn blinked. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “On my honor as a Marine.”

  “Toldja,” said Ulysses. “It’s all this sufferin’ ah been goin’ through with you clowns. Somebody upstairs reckanized it and made me a real saint.”

  “So what did you find?” asked Quinn.

  “There’s a small maintenance room that borders the kitchen, off this hallway here.” Bishop pointed to the right, where the t-intersection led in the opposite direction. “I found a ladder set in the wall that leads up into an access hatch that takes you into the apartment’s guts. Judging by the direction it leads, it goes right overtop of the missing room that Alina described to Han.”

  As much as he wanted to keep looking the gift horse in the mouth, Quinn knew they didn’t have time—they had to just accept their good fortune and pounce on it while they had the chance. He nodded and followed Bishop down the hall toward the maintenance room. Inside, it looked like any other custodial space, with storage shelves, cleaning equipment and a few spare fuel cells locked behind the clear polycarbonate doors of a wall unit. Bishop motioned them to a darkened corner, where rungs set into the wall climbed about four meters up into the entrance of a tube that curved out from the same wall.

  Quinn took the lead, his eyes adjusting to the dark as the light from the room below faded into the encroaching dark of the tunnel. He reached a set of vertical railings that allowed him to climb the final rungs and step into the low-ceilinged utility corridor. It reminded him somewhat of the back channel the Jarheads had used to navigate through Oberon One, only more spacious.

  “Let there be light,” Bishop said from behind him, and suddenly a line of dim orange light appeared low on the wall, showing the way forward.

  “Keep your eyes on the floor,” said Quinn. “Try to find anything that looks like it might open.”

  They shuffled along slowly, eyes straining to catch a seam or a handle. After a dozen or so meters, Quinn’s foot hooked something and he almost tripped onto the floor.

  “Looks like a handle t’me,” said Ulysses, kneeling next it. He pulled a deadbolt back and lifted. The tunnel was immediately bathed in light from below.

  “What’s down there?” asked Quinn.

  “Big piece o’ machinery. Sounds n’ smells like a freezing unit. Ladder leads down into a tight space.”

  Quinn and Bishop exchanged an unbelieving glance.

  “Fortune favors the foolish,” Bishop said with a shrug.

  Ulysses dropped to his butt and swung his feet to the top rungs of the ladder. Once he was low enough, he grabbed the railings and pressed his feet against them, sliding down to the floor below. Quinn did the same, followed by Bishop. The three of them stood in a space about two meters square, facing a large control panel. Behind them, the unit took up almost the entire wall, but there was a shaft of light coming in through the far side of the machinery.

  “Looks like whoever does maintenance on this thing only gets to see it from this side,” said Bishop. He shuffled over to the space where the light was coming in. “It’ll be a tight fit for you two, but I should be good.” With that, he sidled his way into the space and disappeared.

  “Is it what we’re looking for?” asked Quinn.

  “You better come and see for yourself.”

  Quinn didn’t like the tone of Bishop’s voice. He slid his arm into the crack first, then turned his head to the left and squeezed his legs and torso in as well. A fleeting flash of claustrophobia ran through him as his sternum lodged against the cold steel of the machine, but he managed to shrink just enough by expelling the air from his lungs to get through.

  All that time in the back channel paid off, he thought as he emerged into the room itself and took a deep breath. Ulysses struggled his way through after him until the three of them were all standing in a room about ten meters square, with a set of metal-framed stairs on the far wall running up to a door about four meters up the wall. A single cryo-chamber sat in the middle of the floor like a sleek, white coffin, attached by a thick cable to the freezing unit they had just squeezed past.

  The cryo-unit’s hatch stood open on its hinges, and the bed inside was empty.

  “So much for our lucky streak,” Bishop sighed. “Should have known it couldn’t last.”

  “Hang on,” said Ulysses. “There’s still frost on the inside o’ this hatch. Ah only been in cryo once, on the way to Oberon, but don’t frost mean it hasn’t been open fer long?”

  “It does,” said Quinn. “I was pretty dozy the first time they woke us up on our trip, but I did notice that it took about an hour for the frost on the door to dissipate. Conditions could be a little different here on terra firma, but this was definitely opened recently.”

  “But why?” asked Bishop. “What are the odds that someone would take the occupant out at almost the exact time we got here?”

  Before Quinn could give the question any thought, someone spoke his name. A female someone.

  “Quinn,” said a shaky voice from above them.

  They spun to see Han standing at the top of the stairs. Quinn couldn’t tell by her expression if she was furious or terrified. Then she took a few steps down the stairs, and Oleg Johnson’s rough-hewn face appeared behind her, sporting a wide grin. He was followed by the two women who had been with him earlier, and when they finally reached the floor of the room, Quinn could see the Makarov PP-250 machine pistol in his hand, pointed at the small of Han’s back,

  Their luck had definitely run out.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” Oleg said amiably. “Mr. Quinn is it? That’s what the lady just called you.”

  “Look, Mr. Johnson, I know how this looks—”

  Oleg rolled his eyes and his smile vanished. “Please. Did you honestly think I wouldn’t recognize the goddamn Jarheads of Oberon the second I laid eyes on you? You dickheads aren’t just famous in the UFT, and I make it my business to keep up with what’s going on in the world. Moscow may be isolated, but we still have network access. I’ve seen the video a dozen times, and I watched live when they arrested you after you blew up Oscar Bloom’s space prison.” He paused a moment and tilted his head. “Nice work, by the way.”

  Quinn felt a flutter of hope at that—they had made a colossal mistake, but he might be able to salvage the situation. It hinged on the belief that Han hadn’t said anything about their mission, but it was all they had.

  “Then you know how valuable we could be to your organization,” he said. “We came to offer our services—”

  Oleg shook his head. “Give it up, asshole. You show up out of the blue talking about the coming war, and you think I’m not going to realize that Zero sent you?” His eyes narrowed and his expression went cold. “And if Zero sent you, that means you’re here for the former occupant of that box on the floor. And under other circumstances, I might have just handed him over to you. Zero paid me to keep him, after all, and a deal’s a deal.”

  Quinn was finding it impossible to keep track of their situation. Was Oleg saying he was going to let them go?

  “So honor the deal and give us the package,” he said. “We’ll be on our way, and you’ll never see us again.”

  Oleg nodded as if considering the offer. “There’s only a couple of things wrong with that,” he said. “First is, I don’t fucking trust Zero, as far as I can spit.”

  You and me both, Quinn thought.

  “Second is, I rent this room out to people who want someone to disappear without actually killing them, see, and I don’t ask who’s inside the chamber. It’s part of the service. But then you people showed up, and I realized that you were working for Zero, and I got curious. I had my people break the seal, and when they flashed me an image of the guy inside, well, I realized I had old Zero over a barrel.”

  “Who is it?” Quinn asked, but part of him already suspected the answer, and his guts started to clench.

  Oleg grinned and raised his wristband. “See for yourself.”

  A holog
raphic sphere appeared in mid-air in the space over the empty cryo-chamber. It was a male, approximately Quinn’s age, with chestnut hair that was askew from a couple years worth of cryonic sleep. Even though he was unconscious, and it had been two years since Quinn had seen him in the flesh, there was no mistaking the chiseled, handsome face of Frank King.

  17

  “I’m sorry it had to come to that, Dev. Then again, you really didn’t give me much choice.”

  Schuster watched as Sloane looked down at Gloom’s body. Everything except her had faded to gray around Schuster, until the world consisted of him, his shotgun passenger and the beautiful corpse on a floor that seemed to stretch forever in all directions.

  “To be honest, I wasn’t sure how that was going to work,” Sloane said mildly.

  “You killed her, you bastard!”

  Schuster launched himself toward Sloane, his entire being exploding with rage and despair, but there was nothing to grab hold of. He simply flew through Sloane and landed on the other side of him.

  “Stop that,” said Sloane. “It’s not helping.”

  Schuster scanned the horizon again, searching for anything his mind could grab onto, but there was nothing except vast emptiness.

  “Where are we?” Part of him felt exhausted, as if his chest was heaving, but another part of him felt no physical sensations at all. He couldn’t even determine if he was actually seeing anything with his eyes or if it was all just images in his mind.

  “Good question. It’s not the astral realm, that much I know. I came aware while you were in that room with those people. Except they weren’t people.”

  Schuster blinked and shook his head, hoping it would help. It didn’t.

  “What do you mean, they weren’t people?” he croaked.

  “They were projections from your own mind,” said Sloane. “I couldn’t manifest as myself in that reality, so I kept trying to talk to you through one of them, but you apparently couldn’t hear me.”

  Schuster remembered the old man glaring at him, the silently screaming waitress, the terror they had elicited in him.

  “Something else was guiding your thoughts,” Sloane continued. “Not the way the Gestalt attenuates its drones, by essentially taking over their minds and using their memories as data banks. Your mind was being directed to think certain things, to feel a certain way. To create the reality of that room and those people. I deduced that the only way I could reach you was to somehow overcome that direction, and killing Gloom was the most expedient way to do that.”

  Instantly, the corpse on the floor dissolved into nothingness.

  “So—so she wasn’t really here?” Schuster asked, feeling desperate hope rising inside him.

  Sloane frowned. “Of course not. I wouldn’t kill the real Gloom, Dev. You know me better than that.”

  “Of course,” Schuster sighed. “I do know that. I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t know what was happening when you—you know, shot her. I didn’t even know who I was back in that room. As far I knew, I was a member of the upper class, about to help Chelsea Bloom with her senate campaign. Then little pieces of the real me started to show through the cracks, until everything finally shattered when—when Gloom…”

  “This is not attenuation,” Sloane said curiously. “This is thought manipulation, most likely through electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex, though it’s possible that pharmaceuticals—”

  “Cortex!” Schuster cried, feeling a flash of insight on hearing the word. “This is cortical reality! It has to be!”

  “Your knowledge of cortical reality is limited,” said Sloane. “A system in which sensual patterns are fed directly into the brain in order to allow the user to experience a programmed reality.”

  “Exactly. You don’t really have any control over it, though I’ve read that some researchers have been working on advances to allow for that. In its current form, people just plug in and basically go along for the ride. Sex, adventure, sports, historical re-enactment—anything to get away from their real lives. It’s incredibly expensive, but there are millions of Tower people who are pretty much addicted to it.”

  Sloane raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like an incredibly unproductive way to spend one’s time.”

  “I’m not one to judge,” said Schuster, “considering how much time I’ve spent in our head lately. Anyway, in normal CR, there are limits. It can’t create thoughts for you, or even sensations. That’s why I couldn’t taste the champagne in my glass—I’ve never actually had champagne in real life, so I have no idea how it tastes. But like I said, I wasn’t just along for the ride in that reality, I was an entirely different person. I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”

  “There’s another question as well: how did we arrive here? Do you recall?”

  Schuster took a deep virtual breath and tried to concentrate. His memory of the cortical reality was clear, but before that was a blur.

  “We were at Government House,” he said. “And Chelsea’s mother showed up out of nowhere…”

  “Yes.” Sloane sounded encouraged. “Then you and the others went to the Bloom residence. Someone let you in through a service door…”

  Out of nowhere, the image of the service foyer appeared in front of them in full three dimensions. Schuster felt a sense of vertigo as his perspective shifted to a different position: he was looking up at the ceiling.

  “Bitch!” It was Gloom’s voice! He turned to see her and Ben dropping to the floor.

  “Stop,” said Sloane. Instantly, the scene froze in place. “Interesting.”

  Schuster stared, bemused, at a woman with dark hair and stunning violet eyes. She had a hypo-spray in her right hand and it was frozen in mid-air about a foot away from his neck.

  “How are we doing this?” he asked. “It’s like the astral plane, only… well, not.”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see anything except your perspective. The rest of the room is a mystery to me. It’s possible that there are similarities between this form of cortical reality and attenuation.”

  “Maybe. And maybe it’s got something to do with the God Element. I mean, Melinda Bloom said that she followed a blue light to find us. Do you think it might be possible?”

  Sloane shrugged. “Unfortunately, unlike the astral plane, I believe time is flowing at its regular rate here, which means we don’t have the luxury of trying to decipher what’s happening.” He pointed to the woman. “We have to act on the assumption that she means us harm, and that she has something to do with Chelsea’s fate.”

  “Ben said that there was online gossip about Oscar hiring a psychologist to deprogram Chelsea,” said Schuster. “What if she was trying to do more than that? If we’re on the right track about this different form of CR, it’s possible that Oscar is trying to change her actual memories. Or even…”

  A moment later an image of a blond man with a wide face and blue eyes appeared in front of them, replacing the memory of the incident in the foyer. The man was talking to an older man, with sagging jowls and the kind of spectacles people used to wear around the turn of the 21st century.

  “What is this?” asked Sloane.

  “There was an old movie on the public archives when I was young,” said Schuster. “It was about a group of people who could enter other people’s dreams and plant ideas in their heads. When the victim woke up, they believed they had come up with the idea themselves. They referred to it as ‘inception.’”

  “Hm. It’s possible that Oscar Bloom is trying to convince Chelsea that she wants to run for the senate.”

  “Of course!” The realization hit Schuster like a thunderclap. “Knowing him, he’s probably sick of dealing with Drake! If Chelsea is in the senate, it wouldn’t be much of a leap for her to become tribune. Once she is, Oscar has control over the government.”

  “But Drake told you the government was headed for another war that would supposedly leave him as the de facto leader of the entire world.”

  S
chuster gave him a sidelong glance. “Nobody ever accused Oscar Bloom of being the sharpest knife in the drawer. He probably has no clue.”

  “Whatever the case, we need to disengage from this reality and get back to the physical world as soon as possible.”

  “But how? If we’re plugged into CR, it’s logical to assume that Gloom and Ben are, too. We can’t leave without them, assuming we can find a way out of here ourselves.”

  Sloane frowned. “We may not have a choice.”

  “I refuse to believe that.” Schuster shook his head. “If we’re all being fed the same reality, it’s possible that our brains are linked to some sort of central hub. Maybe we can use that hub and your special abilities to move our consciousness from this one to the others.”

  A holographic map of some sort of cubic circuit suddenly appeared in front of them.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Schuster.

  “I searched your memory for any technical information on CR,” said Sloane. “You said you read about new research, and this is it. It would appear you saw technical schematics as well, even if you didn’t consciously remember or understand them.” He stared at them for a moment. “Fascinating. You were right, there is a hub for multiple interfaces, assuming this is similar to the design of the one we’re currently trapped within.”

  “Can you figure out how to get us into the other’s realities?”

  “One moment.”

  Sloane winked out of existence, leaving Schuster to wonder if he was losing his mind for several seconds before reappearing exactly where he had left.

  “There is a central hub, and a pathway that will take us there. From that point, we can ride a wave of impulses into the other outlets. I believe you call it piggybacking. You’re quite intuitive, Dev.”

  “Don’t praise me too soon,” said Schuster. “I don’t get what you said.”