Mat gave her a surprised look.
“What?” Alyssa challenged him. “Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but you know as well as I do that it’s not all white hats around the government. Or do you believe my official title of Augment Combat Trainer encompasses my whole job? Because I’ve got your signature on taskers saying otherwise.”
“Sure, but creating new Augs?”
“You know they’d love to control that. Assign what they want to who they want to have it. So if you think they’re not experimenting—anyway, you’re the one who doesn’t trust technology all of a sudden. How am I the tinfoil hat?”
“I think it happened when you started ranting about ‘Them’ just there,” Mat said, grinning.
“Paranoia is a survival trait in my line of work,” said Alyssa loftily.
“Which is why I called you here. Okay, so look.”
Mat showed her the diagram he’d drawn on the pad. Alyssa looked it over and let out a low whistle. “That’s not containment, boss. That’s exploitation.”
Mat grimaced. “It doesn’t have to be. Look, if we just build this part, leaving off the connections here, then it’s just a life-support unit.”
“For a coma it induces, sure. Quick question: how is that any different than killing him?”
“It’s—well, it isn’t. We’d hold him like this until we terminated him.”
“Then quit pretending you’re maybe not going to build the part where you make use of him, too. If you’re spending the money to build this, then you’re building the part where you get a return on that money. And if you’re not building that part, then just put a bullet in his head while he sleeps.”
“I don’t think that would work,” said Mat.
“Well, yeah, not if he can pick the perfect future. But if he can do that, then nothing’ll work. Clearly, you think you’ve got an in. So spill.”
“Gammalock believed that Foresight can’t see the future, exactly. What he can do is step back along his own timeline. So he can reset paths he didn’t like.”
“How far back can he go?”
“He’s on record as saying he can see a day ahead, but I discovered—Gammalock discovered—that he’s been lying about his Aug level, at least. And the function of the augment, of course. So he may well be lying about the reach of his ability, you see. A week, perhaps? More?” Mat shrugged. “We cannot say.”
“And you think he can reset fast enough to prevent death by bullet?”
“I think yes.”
Alyssa cocked her head to the side. “You say Gammalock believed this. How did he communicate this belief to you?”
“A wave, post-mortem. Why?”
“Your speech pattern just then. That was his, not yours. How sure are you that you believe this idea?”
Mat paused, then spoke slowly. “That’s...a tough one to answer, I suppose. I was in agreement with him on this topic in general before I received that wave. And he was world-shatteringly smart. So I think I’d be inclined to follow his conclusion in any case. Certainly it squares with my reactions to and interactions with Foresight.”
Alyssa nodded. “Good enough for me. I just wanted to check in. So, how do we beat someone who’s got infinite retries?”
“We keep his hand off the button,” Mat said. “You weren’t entirely wrong about the bullet. I think the first step in this is getting him while he’s asleep. I’m working on the theory that this is a—not a conscious response, it’s too reflexive for that, but that he’s got to be aware of the problem. Something as traumatic as a bullet would set it off, even if he wasn’t aware of it until it hit him. We have to assume that it’s that fast, because we’re only getting one shot at this. We need to avoid triggering that danger awareness at all. And sleep seems like the best time to do this.”
Alyssa looked skeptical. “Sketchy. There are a lot of assumptions being made here, and I don’t like that. That’s how people get killed.”
Mat nodded. “I agree. I’m trying to follow my aug on this one. I think that’s why Gammalock entrusted me with this. If we’re pursuing a bad idea, I’ve at least got a chance to know about it.”
“Is that working?”
“I think so, yeah. Even when it works, it’s basically the equivalent of a dowsing rod, but I’m following the nudges and it’s been sounding off fairly regularly as I work the details into this plan. I’m really at the point where I need your expertise, though.”
“Me? I’m just an Augment Combat Trainer,” Alyssa teased.
Mat gave her a dirty look. “I need your advice as the covert Aug-ops leader for the US government. And if getting that requires me to agree that the government is probably experimenting on living brains to create new augments, then fine. But Foresight strong-armed his way into leading LUAU this evening, and I’m positive that that’s the worst thing that could have happened. So this needs to get done, and it needs to get done now.”
“Okay,” said Alyssa, abruptly all business. “Show me your plan and let’s make it shine.”
Mat sat impatiently in the car, watching the street around him through the vehicle’s ring of embedded cameras. Foresight and his team should be gone for at least another half an hour, even if they came immediately back, but there was always the possibility of something changing. And, of course, he was only mostly sure that Mimic had gone with them. With the team’s rise in the public awareness, Mimic almost never left their headquarters while visible anymore. A few rumors existed of the hidden fifth member, but the general population still believed that Foresight worked in a four-person team.
Progress report, he waved.
Canisters in place. Nozzles in place. Holes drilled as far as they can go without poking through. Yurei is placing the rods, to be removed and replaced by the hoses, Alyssa replied.
How long?
As long as it takes, boss. You try moving without a corporeal body. She’s going as fast as she can.
Up in the apartment building, Alyssa shook her head. She drummed her fingers on her leg for a moment, staring at the ceiling, before speaking aloud.
“Report, Yurei.”
The wave she received blurred her vision, as if a filmy veil had fallen across her eyes. The voice echoed strangely, the words flowing back on themselves.
“Hurts when you contact like this. Hurts. Hurts.”
“I’m sorry. How long?”
“Knives. Decay. Fourteen steps. An age. Minutes. Four. Electric. Fours.”
Alyssa sifted through the stream of ideas, picking out the reply to her question. “Minutes, four” was clear enough. “Fours” was probably sixteen, so another quarter-minute on top of that. Yurei had a hard time organizing thoughts in her noncorporeal form, and the wave seemed to exacerbate that. She’d explained to Alyssa that the incoming wave was like a thrown pebble, and she was a pond. Over time, Alyssa had grown adept at picking out the key information from Yurei’s erratic responses.
Four minutes, boss. All clear below?
Clear here.
A quiet impact sounded from the ceiling, and Alyssa climbed the stepladder and peered up into the hole she’d drilled minutes ago. She could see faint light at the top, a glimmering white outline in the shape of a limp hand. It protruded through the floor above, gesturing weakly with one finger.
Alyssa threaded a metal hose up through the hole, feeding it upwards until she felt it catch and tug slightly in her hands. She let go and watched the hose gently rise as Yurei pulled it up through the hole she had made in the floor above, against the wall below Foresight’s bed.
As the hose rose on its own, Alyssa moved the ladder slightly to the side and readied the next hose beneath the next drilled hole, then waited for the ghostly hand to reappear. Once all six were in place, the trap would be set, ready and waiting for the next phase of the plan.
“You’re not sleeping enough, Mat.”
“And good morning to you too, Raul,” Mat responded to his second-in-command as he entered the newly-established
control center, showing his badge to the guard at the door.
“You were here when I left last night at eight.”
“And you’re here now when I’m getting into the office at seven,” Mat pointed out. “So which one of us really isn’t getting enough sleep?”
“I know how much sleep I’m getting, and it’s not enough. And I’m positive that you’re getting even less than that. Have you been managing even five hours a night lately?”
“More like four,” Mat admitted, pouring a cup of coffee. “There’s been a lot to do. You know that. Gammalock left huge shoes to fill.”
“Yeah, don’t I know it,” agreed Raul. “We’re making progress, though. With those most recent hires and the new directorship you created, we’re just about getting our feet under us again.”
“Only took thirty-eight people to do what he was doing,” Mat said, gesturing at the array of screens and workstations filling the large room. Functionaries bustled to and fro, chatting to each other and exchanging paperwork and data drives. It was a poor imitation of Gammalock’s personal information center, made larger and slower for use by lesser mortals.
“If you don’t include the duties we distributed to people already in the department, yeah. And the stuff that we just abandoned, like the entire R&D lab.”
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” Mat asked. “No matter what we do here, we can’t overcome this loss.”
“I don’t agree. I think we already are overcoming it. Things are different, but not necessarily worse. We needed this structure years ago. In the end, this makes us stronger.”
“I suppose,” said Mat, rubbing his temples wearily.
“But it does no one any good if you burn yourself out in the middle of the process. Take a rest. Stop replacing sleep with coffee. Cut back to ten-hour days.”
“Trust me, I’d love to. Soon.”
“Gotta finish up your secret project first, on top of everything else?”
“What?” asked Mat, surprised.
Raul laughed. “You can’t expect me not to notice when you’ve got meetings that I’m not invited to and never hear anything about. I understand the concept of need-to-know, and if I’m not in on this one, that’s fine. I’ll pick up the slack elsewhere, and I’ll be here as a resource if you need me.”
“God, what I wouldn’t give for some slack elsewhere,” said Mat.
“Hear, hear.”
Coffee mug in hand, Mat left the control center and traveled down the hallway to an unmarked door. The door opened at a swipe from his badge to reveal an unfurnished room, no bigger than a closet. Mat stepped inside, turned on the lights and closed the door behind himself.
He took a sip of his coffee, closed his eyes and took several deep, slow breaths. The new control center he and Raul had designed to help keep everything running was good for many things, but it offered no privacy at all. And for this, he needed to be alone.
After centering himself, Mat began the small ritual which had started every day for the last several weeks.
“We launch today. We launch tonight. We delay until later.”
He paused, uncertain, and repeated, “We launch tonight.”
Each time, he felt the same small sense of relief, a release of a muscle he hadn’t realized had been tensed. Subtle, small, but detectable—unless it was just wishful thinking. Mat wished, as he had many times before, that he had something more useful than an Aug-0.
He composed a wave to Alyssa, and sighed as he sent it. This would be the fourth time they had launched the mission to capture Foresight, and would probably be the fourth time he scrubbed it before completion. Although he had believed each morning that his augment was indicating that night as an auspicious time for retrieval, it had sounded off again each evening, cautioning him against moving forward. Either things had changed in some unpredictable way, or he had simply been wrong about what he thought he’d felt those mornings.
Or, of course, he was wrong to believe that his augment was warning him off at night. With as weak as it was, it could easily be confused for nerves, and nervousness could masquerade as a warning from his augment. But he was haunted by the knowledge that he would only ever get one chance at this, that a single failure would put Foresight on guard against him forever.
Worse, it was entirely possible that he would never even know he had failed. If Foresight stepped back to before Mat had even made the attempt—Mat quashed that train of thought. It was hopelessly circular, and unhelpful. If he was doomed to failure, then so be it, but he had to assume that success was still in his grasp.
Time? a message from Alyssa queried.
“Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.” Mat counted slowly through the times, feeling the tension relax as he reached eleven. He continued on, feeling carefully for the differences. “Midnight. Eleven? Eleven-thirty. Eleven.”
He sent Alyssa a reply. Gather at nine. Expect to move around eleven. Let’s hope.
Fingers crossed, boss.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Mat grinned. He’d asked Alyssa once why she constantly called him “boss,” despite her clear unwillingness to consider herself subordinate to anyone.
“Just reminding you that if things ever go wrong, you’re the one taking the fall, boss,” she’d told him. She’d flashed her teeth in that feral grin she had, the one that said both that this was a joke and that she was completely serious. Mat always remembered that short exchange, because it encapsulated Alyssa completely.
The time in Mat’s display read 7:13 AM, and he sighed and scrubbed at his face again. Eleven o’clock at night was a long way away, and Raul was right: he really hadn’t been getting enough sleep. Fortunately, his involvement in the plan was fairly minimal at this point. He would be there only as a ripcord while Alyssa and her team did the work.
In the meantime, the day’s meetings would be starting soon, and bureaucracy had no care for the petty problems of the people who powered it. Mat took a large swig from his coffee cup, opened his office door and prepared to face the day.
Mat stared down at the shiny glass-and-metal machine, Gammalock’s vision of the containment chamber come to life. He had built most of it himself, hands wiring connections and soldering circuits in ways he could never have told them to do. Despite this, it still felt like his idea and his accomplishment, and he was as proud of it as if it had been his idea. It would work. It would contain Foresight. As long as they could get him into it.
Yurei had brought the machine into the apartment below the penthouse a piece at a time, ferrying each section slowly and undetectably up through the walls of the building in her insubstantial form. It had taken days, but had carried no risk of failure, and so Mat had opted for that approach. Once all of the pieces were inside the apartment, he had assembled it, completed the finishing touches and plugged it in. It hummed quietly to itself, an anticipatory sort of noise.
Alyssa lounged against the far wall, seemingly at ease. Her hand loitered by a switch, ready to begin dispensing the gas at his signal. Yurei sat quietly in a chair, apparently also content to wait. And Twonky, an Aug in his early twenties who Mat had only met when Alyssa recommended him for this team, knelt by the containment chamber, running his hands across it. The machine opened its lid and gently coiled a cable around one of his forearms in return.
Twonky was an Aug-2 Kinetic, subclass Technology, which was a surprisingly common and yet varied area. His particular augment allowed him to establish a mental connection with machines and imbue them with a temporary semblance of life. His usual speciality was undetectable entrances, since any sort of electronic security device would simply allow him access just for asking. But Alyssa had requested his presence here for the speed and ease with which he would allow the containment chamber to function. Even Mat, who knew it intimately, would have to take time to connect every needle, cable, electrode and hose. Under Twonky’s touch, the chamber would attach every one of these pieces itself, simultaneously and without error. The machine knew how i
t should run, and Twonky would let it operate itself.
Although everyone else appeared relaxed, Mat was almost vibrating with tension. He had spent the last dozen minutes quietly whispering to himself, “Now. Now. Now,” and feeling for any response from his augment. The word had long since lost any meaning and had simply faded into a rhythmic beat in his head, but still he continued, waiting for the right moment to make itself known.
At 11:08, Mat felt his tension shift. He hesitated, uncertain if this was the sign he had waited for. Alyssa, attuned to his body language, looked up at him, her hand hovering near the button. Mat waffled, unsure. Was this it? Was he deluding himself? Was he about to ruin everything? Would he instead ruin everything by waiting?
He agonized over this for long seconds before taking the plunge. He nodded to Alyssa, who pressed the button to slowly release the airborne sedative into the room above. The die had been cast. Soon they would see if they had succeeded or failed.
Mat resumed his near-silent chant. “Now. Now. Now.” Several more long minutes passed before he felt a response, and he gestured to Yurei. She straightened up from her seat, stretched briefly and slowly faded into translucency. She drifted upward like a sheet of plastic caught by a gentle water current, disappearing into the ceiling.
Twonky stood, brushing the chamber with his hands. It opened its lid and spread its accessories wide, a cocoon ready to receive its inhabitant. And then, with nothing else to do, all three people in the room simply stared at the ceiling, waiting.
More than a minute passed before a diaphanous shape appeared, nothing but a slight bulge in the ceiling at first. It pressed through and resolved itself into a leg, sliding smoothly through the ceiling until a man’s naked back was entirely revealed. Yurei descended slowly into the room, wrapped around Foresight’s limp and transparent form like a consuming snake. She guided him slowly to the machine and settled him carefully onto its padded bed, letting him phase gently back into full physical form as she withdrew.
Foresight’s breathing was slow and regular as the containment chamber set to work. It moved like a parasitic infestation, wires and cables guiding themselves to temples, neck and veins. In seconds, the job was done and the chamber was hissing closed, sealing its occupant within. Diagnostics lit up on the screens outside, revealing that all was nominal.
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