Before We Die Alone
Page 36
Of course, that’s a lie. It’s a lie because of Vanessa. While I’ve been in college, she has carved out a part of my brain. She’s a part of my mental inventory. She’s as natural as my arm or my leg, not to diminish her. A percentage of me is always thinking about her. I’ve given up valuable real estate in my brain to Vanessa.
I didn’t tell her anything about this mission.
She knew I was cooking up something with Adam. She knew and she didn’t quite approve, but she trusts me too much to push too hard. If it were just me, making my way through this world alone, I might resolve to accept my fate. We tried to penetrate the security of ProNavitas and we failed. But what will Vanessa think when I never return?
It’s impossible, but I have to find a way to reach the fold before the spark fries me in the air.
---- * ----
I make a quick estimate.
While my mind wandered, I covered about half the distance to the fold. The red arc is more than halfway to me and it appears to be gaining speed. The motion of my body is governed by physical laws. I have no sway over those. The fold is static and the arc of interdimensional electricity is certainly beyond my control.
I have nothing to do but wait and hope for a miracle. Maybe the arc will hit the bear first and that will slow it down before it electrocutes me. The idea is ridiculously unlikely.
The motion of my body is governed by physical laws.
Wait… Is it?
Long ago, there was a bear in a bathroom. He didn’t want to incur the expense of a three-dimensional shift, so he did a little trick. Back then, everything was like magic to me, so it didn’t stick out as particularly unusual. Now that I think back, there was something very strange about that move.
The bear simply shifted his hips to the side and it felt like the whole world moved. What was that?
Not that it would matter—I can’t shift my hips any more than I could shift any part of my body. If I could, I wouldn’t be caught in this mess.
The red arc is now flowing towards me like water creeping across a flat floor.
How did the bear back in the bathroom do that? He bumped the wall and I tumbled into a fold. It wasn’t like the whole world shifted, it felt more like the space between me and the fold was greased. The bump was just the nudge I needed to slip. Maybe the bear had some innate ability. Maybe he could do a trick that his space-folding machine couldn’t do.
Maybe it was a trick I could repeat.
As I’m thinking about it, I slip forward. Maybe it is just a hallucination—I can’t have slipped forward more than an inch, but it feels like I did. I try to envision the air between me and the fold to be frictionless, like new leather-soled shoes on ice. In a blink, I slip forward. Just as quickly, my forward momentum is halted.
This isn’t working quickly enough.
The red arc is closing the distance.
I see the bear’s hair begin to stand on end. It straightens and he’s as fluffy as a plush toy. I feel my own hair standing up. It makes my scalp ache for scratching. There’s nothing I can do about it. I try to focus on greasing the path. I’m working at it the same way that I make a fold—it’s muscle memory. But it’s different. I want to slide in there, but it’s not a relaxation. I need to push like I’m forcing all the blood into my head.
I slip forward.
The red arc juts to the side and then slithers forward. It’s negotiating invisible air currents, like a bolt of lightning would. I can feel its charge on my skin. Electrons are jumping from my body. It shoots forward again. The glowing shaft of electricity is now as close as the fold. I can see the way it’s threading through the golden glow suspended in the air. It’s a beautiful sunrise of color that I could stare at for hours if given the chance. They would be the last hours of my life. The electricity is dividing and dividing. It’s making a fractal path through the fold in its effort to reach me.
A side-bolt splits off and rushes towards the bear. I can’t look away as his hair curls back and blackens. Smoke erupts from the contact as the water in his flesh is vaporized. Another bolt comes right for me.
My brain tenses and I slip forward again, right towards the red electricity. I pick up speed as it does. Before I reach the thing, I see a sympathetic arc jumping out from my hand. The charge of the bolt has created an opposite charge on my skin and it’s leaping forward to make the connection. The red arc finishes the jump and hits me. My body is already frozen. Now, it stiffens as the muscles work against each other and pull at my bones. The skin on my hand is on fire where the electricity meets it. I don’t mean it feels like fire, or it’s metaphorically on fire. My skin is literally burning where the lightning is contacting it.
And I’m sliding forward even faster. The lightning consumes me.
---- * ----
I tumble through the fold, engulfed in red electricity. I fall to the shiny floor of the lobby, right in the midst of the battle. Around me, bears are swatting at jabbing spears. Men are back to back, warding off the attacks. I roll and hit the floor with my shoulder. With my impact, an enormous CRACK cleaves the air. My body is charged and it has just hit ground.
This electricity is interdimensional, and doesn’t seem impressed by the normal behavior of power going to ground. It seems repulsed by the floor. Instead of dumping my charge into the building, it shoots out from every surface of my body. Purple lightning reaches out to the others. I’m connected with dozens of tiny bolts to everyone in a twenty-foot radius. Bears, apes, and naked humans are all hit simultaneously. As my body slumps, I see theirs straighten.
As I hit the floor, the others lose their charge. All around me, apes, humans, and bears collapse.
Adam appears.
I’m unable to move.
I watch him do a slow spin as he tries to understand what he’s seeing. Some are injured, but most of the fighters look like perfect marionettes whose strings have been cut. Adam finally looks to me and locks eyes with me.
He kneels next to me.
“Careful,” I say. It’s the only word I can get out before he touches me.
He jolts back at the shock he receives from my skin. He immediately reaches forward again. This time he’s able to touch me without being zapped.
“What happened here?”
“Get us downstairs,” I say.
He nods.
I don’t know if the next fold he does is easy or hard. He does it fast, and it’s one he studied for, so he’s accurate. Adam drags me forward and we’re in one of the apartments below.
“Can you stand?” he asks.
“Give me a second,” I say. Trying to use my limbs is like re-learning to play a video game that I’ve set down for a few years. I have a sense of the commands, but my effort yields jerky, uncoordinated movements. When he leans over to help me up, I nearly smack him in the face with a numb forearm.
Adam wrestles me up to the bed and then gets me upright.
“Thanks,” I say. I’m able to wipe drool away from my mouth with the back of a forearm.
“What happened?”
“Electricity,” I say. “Hold on.” I can’t remember the next jump, but I know what’s below us. I summon an image of a conference room and relax into it. The process feels normal. With a floppy hand, I point towards the glow of my new fold. I wonder what happened to the bear and man who were tumbling with me. I wonder if they were consumed by the red arc.
Adam gets an arm around me and shuffles me towards the new fold.
We crash down on the center of the conference table. Adam loses his balance and rolls off the side, banging his head into a wall.
There’s a light near the door. It looks like a fire alarm or something, but it’s not labeled. It’s flashing. I can hear the distant sound of a buzzer going in time with the light. The workers on this floor have been alerted to our intrusion. Adam must see it too. He scrambles to the door and locks it. He pulls the blinds on the window that look out over the cubicles.
“Your turn,” he says.
“They’re coming,” he says. “They’ve already figured out where we are.”
“Cameras everywhere,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “I can jump us somewhere else if you can’t.” He starts to move towards me.
I shake my head.
“We have to make the fold now or never. They know we’re here and they’ll be clamping down the security to match our methodology,” he says.
I’m spent. My nerves still jangle and chime from the energy that was stored in me briefly. I can’t even imagine how I survived. I take a breath and try to exhale the nails that rattle in my head. It’s no use. I’m nothing now but a glass jar of pennies. Too much shaking will only shatter me.
“Damn it,” Adam says. He’s peeking between the blinds. He lets them slip shut again as the pounding starts on the door. The handle rattles.
I see Adam close his eyes, cycle his breath, and then come at me. He plows into me and we fall backwards.
---- * ----
We skid to a stop on a warm metal floor. I’m looking up at a ceiling made of metal panels. Adam stands and helps me up. My knee is still wonky. My hand is beginning to burn, throb, and itch with equal intensity. We’re in a rounded room with tall windows. On every side the view is of pink and orange clouds. We must be high up because level with our position are towers of orange thunderheads.
I cough and shake my head. The pennies rattle around in there. My eyes bug out.
“How?” I manage to ask. I gesture to the world around us. The ribbon was preventing us from making major folds but Adam has somehow swept us far away to a place I don’t even recognize.
“This is the bear’s fold. Didn’t you sense it? He keeps it open for easy escape.”
It’s an interesting concept, but I can’t even begin to imagine how one would execute such an idea. Then again, the bear has technology I still haven’t witnessed.
“Where?” I ask.
“You wouldn’t like the answer,” Adam says. “He probably has a surveillance system set up here. We better get out of here fast.”
He gestures for the wall and then starts that direction. All I can do is limp after. When he sees how slow I am on my bad knee, Adam comes back to help. Of course he grabs my hand right near the wound. The extra adrenaline actually makes my knee hurt less. We shuffle towards the wall and a hatch opens in the center. It leads to a short hall and then an open area with a staircase winding up the near wall.
“Where?” I ask again. I’m certain that I’m able to construct longer questions, but the words leaving my mouth make the pennies jangle in my head. I would like to keep that to a minimum. There’s a metallic taste in my mouth. I think that when the bolt of electricity left me, my fillings exploded out of my teeth.
Adam misconstrues my question, probably on purpose. “We’re looking for his control room. He must have a portal set up to get back to ProNavitas.”
Once we’re on the stairs, I don’t need Adam’s help anymore. I can take the weight off my bad knee by using the railing and keep up with Adam as he climbs.
“Here,” he says, getting off the stairs on the next floor. He points to a hatch as it opens. Inside, the lights come on to reveal a control panel topped with several monitors. I finally understand from the perspective of the outside cameras. We’re in a floating ship—a blimp of some sort—moving through a sea of giant clouds. Vertigo sweeps through me and I have to steady myself with a hand on the wall. I can’t imagine how many miles we are above the surface. I can’t imagine what’s down below us.
The door closes behind us and I realize that the control room is a little cave of buttons, levers, and lights. Adam sits in the big chair and I look around at the bear’s decorations. Every unused surface is covered with a photo taped up. His dirty bear paws somehow held each photo in place and smeared a piece of ragged tape at each corner to hold it up. They’re pinups, I suppose. Some are women, provocatively posed in bikinis. Others are bears, stretched out or looking back over their shoulders. I assume they’re female bears. I suppose another bear would know instantly. The bear who uses this control room is a pervert.
Adam begins flipping levers and knobs. The panel looks like something out of a ’60s sci-fi movie. The flat monitors are the only thing that seem to be from this century. Not that I know for sure what century I’m in, of course.
“I think this is it,” Adam says. He points at a one-line display that reads “PN CC.”
“What?”
“ProNavitas Control Center maybe? Worth a shot,” Adam says. When he punches the green button, a thin buzzing sounds accompanies a thin line of light that appears on the wall. It’s located in the gap between a centerfold of a woman and a lady-bear nursing two cubs. Kinky.
“Have you ever used a portal like this?”
I shake my head.
“They’re jarring,” Adam says. He stands and walks straight for the wall. His confidence turns out to be warranted. Instead of smacking his forehead directly into the metal, he passes through like the wall was simply a projection. I’m just standing there. His hand comes back through the wall and he waves me forward.
I shrug and follow him through.
---- * ----
No need for any more folds. I recognize the room immediately. The racks of servers are each as tall as the ceiling. All the mess of wires is around back. We’re seeing the pretty side. I know what I’ll find when I limp forward and slide out the middle drawer. A monitor swings up and a keyboard folds down. This is a convenience terminal meant for routine maintenance tasks. I crouch in front of it. I have an administrator’s credentials and they’re still enabled. This is sloppy work. Too often, in the panic of a release, the IT department will postpone their regular tasks, like changing administrator accounts when someone quits or is fired. In my case, the accounts should have been changed right when I disappeared from the final test run.
I know which module I’m going to attack. I’ve planned this for a while.
I was in charge of securing this system, and I left no holes. I drove my team hard until the system could withstand any eventuality. Any conceivable failure would immediately be covered by redundant algorithms. Any inconceivable failure would be handled just as easily. There is no way to introduce any new code without an exhaustive review period and dual-factor authentication up the chain of command.
I’m not going to introduce a failure or any new code. In fact, I’m going to do the opposite.
“How are you going to break it?” Adam asks. I’m surprised that this is the first time he has bothered to ask. He’s risking his neck on this mission and he didn’t even know my plan.
“I’m not going to break it,” I say. I bring up the appropriate log and get everything ready. “I’m going to un-fix it.”
I hit the button.
The world explodes into a shower of sparks.
I tumble to the floor and roll. I expect to see the bear towering over me. Something massive just clubbed the side of my head from behind, and I have to assume it was the bear. It’s not the bear. It’s my brother.
“God dammit, Dennis. What the fuck are you doing to my God damned machines?” Arthur asks.
I blink several times to try to make the stars go away. My head is buzzing from the blow. He must have hit me with all his strength.
Adam slips around him and comes to my side. It doesn’t stop Arthur from kicking me. His toe digs into my hip.
“Adam,” I say, “this is my brother.”
Amazingly, I think I actually feel better. The near-electrocution I suffered was finally shaken loose by the blow. I can’t stop blinking though. Adam helps me u
p until I’m resting back against the rack.
Arthur turns away from us and moves to the terminal.
“What did you do?” he asks as he pages up through the code.
“Nothing,” I say. I work my jaw around. My ear pops and I can hear better. I blink again even though most of the stars are gone now.
“Fuck off,” Arthur says. “I know you did something. Tell me what it was and I’ll make sure that he doesn’t eat you.”
My lips purse to ask who, but then I see the bear. He lumbers around the corner. He’s doing his swagger-walk. I believe that he thinks it looks imposing.
“I’ve seen the outcome of your plans, Arthur. Don’t you realize what’s going to happen? I’m sure the bear can tell you. This machine is going to destroy most of the world. You’re not going to have your perfect little community without making most of the planet uninhabitable,” I say.
“Yeah, no shit,” Robert says. “That’s the plan. I thought you knew that by now.”
I did know that—at least I should have. Adam told me that was his plan. I remember clearly that it sounded like a comic book plan. It was the plan of some evil genius who only exists in Saturday afternoon movies.
“I did,” I say. “I do, I mean. But you can’t kill billions of people. What possible Utopia is worth killing billions?”
“They’re going to die anyway,” Arthur says. “My plan is the only way to save enough people to move forward.”