The Conspiracy Chronicles Boxset 2

by Michael Evans

  They can’t pull anything over me.

  I will never let them win.

  “Yes, Senator Winslow,” the man says, his voice monotone and his arms moving robotically as he speaks. “He sent us here to deliver you a message. A message that will change your life.”

  “That’s fucking bullshit.” I place my hand on the top of the cube, the exterior flashing blue at my touch. Screw my plan of blowing us all up. I want to kill them first. I want to see these people’s blood one final time just to show them that they will never stop me.

  I lunge forward, readying to choke the man.

  If the people on the aircraft decide to shoot at me, I’ll just command the cube to heal me.

  Right before my hand grips around his neck, I freeze. The same deep, monotone nature to his voice causes chills to cascade down my spine. He doesn’t even flinch as I lunge forward to attack him, his body maintaining its rigid stance the entire time.

  “Please, just listen.” The man smacks his arm into my chest. The other men on the aircraft all have their weapons at their sides, the dark, spaceship-like exterior to the vehicle having a way of blending into the air.

  Even for an aircraft that is over twenty feet in length and well over thirty feet wide when its wings are taken into account, it looks inconspicuous amid its surroundings. The black coating on the exterior effectively absorbs almost every wave of light that hits it, leaving a sort of vacuum of light just above the peak of the mountain.

  “Okay.” I step back, my arms shivering as I meet his eyes. Part of me wants to kill him, in fact all of me does, but there is a lonely, desperate side to me that is willing to listen to anyone that promises me a way out.

  I have no good options in front of me.

  I will take everything I can get.

  “Justin Winslow is the leader of a resistance within the Syndicate of Truth.” He pauses, as if his mind is buffering before it can let out his next sentence. “Your father was a part of it too.”

  “Where are you going with this?” I cut in, growing annoyed that this man would even mention my father. He has no right to ever think about that man, never mind talk about him.

  “Justin has made it his life’s work to derail the Syndicate’s operations through covert action in the government and sometimes overt action like during your induction ceremony. He was the one who fired those shots at the council.”

  “Are you serious?” I question, the emptiness in his eyes making me grow even more suspicious of him. “And the Syndicate didn’t catch him?”

  “No, he covered his tracks and lied his way out of it. He did the exact same thing when they overheard his conversation with you telling you how your father killed Jake’s dad. He even lied about his entire reason for going out to California. He signed up to be one of the people tasked with assassinating you, but in the end his plan was never to hurt you. He has always wanted to welcome you as one of the members of the resistance. And that day is today.”

  “You better offer me some real good proof if you don’t want me to kill you.” I grit my teeth. My hand hovers above the cube, readying to deliver a command that will kill us all at a moment’s notice.

  I will never let the Syndicate win.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” the man says, his voice firm. “You can kill all of us right now, I won’t stop you. But the Syndicate released your location to the entire world. If you keep going at this alone, you will be trapped with endless numbers of people wanting to kill you.”

  “I know that, you dipshit.” Spit flies off my lips and hits his face. He doesn’t even move to wipe off the saliva.

  “But if you help the resistance, you have a chance to take down the Syndicate and end all of this for good. They want you to take out the crown jewel of all the Syndicate’s underground operations. The place where they send their biggest enemies and punish them for life.”

  “Okay, I know the Syndicate kind of makes their own rules and everything, but how do you expect me to believe that they have their own prison camp without any international agency getting involved?”

  “Well, technically it’s not run by the Syndicate. On paper it’s a United States military research facility run by DARPA scientists. In reality, it is a place where the Syndicate has commissioned the United States Government to perform brutal experiments on innocent humans in an attempt to design a brain computer interface that can hack one’s minds and bodies to turn regular humans into super soldiers.”

  “That sounds like something they’d do.” I shake my head, not even surprised that the Syndicate has their own research facility for manipulating innocent humans. Just another operation run by the world’s most powerful secret organization.

  “The second they get the cube, it will allow them to complete that project overnight.” The man’s voice is still monotone, but the impact of his words is not lost on me. “The power of the Chimera Cube will usher in all the necessary breakthroughs that they need and set up the Syndicate to initiate the final stage of their master plan. The Last Migration is almost complete. Their hand-picked successor to lead the United States government is polling ahead of all the other candidates to win the presidency, and once they have all their political tools in control of Congress and the White House, they will rewrite the rules of the constitution to keep themselves in power forever. The Last Migration of power in this world is months away from being cemented permanently, and you are the only one that can stop it.”

  “I know that. I-I mean I know about The Last Migration,” I say, still annoyed. I’m not angry at the man; he seems like a nice enough guy and probably one of the few Syndicate operatives who is concerned with doing the right thing over a big payday. I’m furious that this shitty position happens to be the one I’m stuck in.

  One where I have no choice but to embark on a hopeless mission to take down the Syndicate or I can surrender this cube to them along with the rest of the world and save myself from endless amounts of pain and suffering.

  “Well, there’s something you probably don’t know about it.” The man pauses awkwardly after he finishes the sentence, his eyeballs still locked on me and unmoving. Something about this man doesn’t even feel real; it’s almost like he is nothing more than a holograph in front of me. “Your mom, Ai, Riva, everyone that the Syndicate wanted you to think that they killed is being held there. The dead bodies that you saw were nothing more than hyperrealistic realistic humanoids. The police, hospitals, and fire departments were bribed to say that it was real, when in reality their bodies were shipped off to Moosehorn in Maine. The research compound is only a couple dozen miles away from where White’s Island is, and inside it they are working out the glitches in a secret military program called Maga X. For years the thousands of people that the Syndicate has captured as retribution on their foes have been tortured in that facility. And you are the only one who is capable of breaking them out.”

  “They did a really good job.” I clench my fists, readying to lunge forward and choke the life out of this man. “They must think I’m freaking stupid if they want me to fall for that. I saw her body!” My mind flashes back to the moment that I woke up to find Riva’s body dead in the bathtub, her torso stabbed dozens of times by Charles. There was an odd firmness to her body and a lifeless color to her skin that still haunts me.

  But I know she is dead.

  She has to be.

  This is nothing more than a fancy trick by the Syndicate to try and get me to enter that aircraft without any problems.

  “It was a humanoid. Even more realistic than the ones than the artificial intelligence of Li Wang resided in.” The man holds his hands in the air to try and calm me down, but I am already enraged. “They were specially made using samples of DNA from their bodies designed to do nothing more than trick you, your father, and everyone else that they were dead. That way, no one would ever question where the bodies ended up and ever uncover the truth of the facility in Moosehorn.”

  “Pistol.” I tap the Chimera Cub
e, a fully loaded firearm appearing above the cube for me to grab. With one hand I hold the barrel of the pistol up to his head while I have my other arm wrapped around the cube.

  “Tell Justin and everyone else in the Syndicate to go fuck themselves.” My entire body trembles as I hold the gun up only inches from his forehead. The man seems unfazed by my actions, his calm, collected demeanor only angering me more.

  Every time I blink, I can see the images of my mother’s dead body, Riva’s bloody flesh, and Ai’s slumped-over head as the flashbacks overcome me. The Syndicate has taken away every single person I love.

  Now they want to rip this cube and my life from the world forever.

  I won’t let them.

  I’ll set everything ablaze. I’ll turn this entire world into a circus straight from hell.

  I will win.

  “Don’t say another word, or I’ll fucking shoot you,” I snap before the man can speak up again. I expect to see all of the soldiers behind him with their guns raised, but instead they stand with their firearms at their sides in silence.

  I take a deep breath, trying to slow down my racing heart, but the only effect that it has is making my mind move even faster. Part of me wants to believe this man. Part of me knows that this story, one where the Syndicate harvests bodies from around the world to experiment on, sounds too real to not be true.

  But that’s the point.

  The Syndicate knows exactly how they can bait me. They know just what they need to say to get me to fall for their trap.

  “You have five seconds to go back on that aircraft and fly as far away from here as possible, or you and all your friends on that ship will be dead.”

  “You’re making a mistake.” The man backs up, his motions just as rigid as before. “Come with us. We will take you back to America. We will make sure you are safe so that you can destroy the facility at Moosehorn and save everyone inside it.”

  “Did you hear what I said?” My hand vibrates as my finger hovers above the trigger. My instinct says I should shoot the man now, but deep down inside I know that he means well. He has a story just like everyone else, and somehow all the dark shit that the world has thrown at him has ended up with him becoming an operative for the Syndicate.

  That’s about as shitty as it gets.

  “Turn around and fly that plane as far away as it goes,” I say, stepping forward so that the barrel of the gun is once again only inches from digging into his forehead. “And don’t stop, don’t look back, and don’t even think about sending anyone else after me. If they think I would fall for something as cheap as this, then they must have no idea who I am. No idea what I’m capable of.”

  Instead of moving back, he puts both hands behind his back and searches for something in his pocket. I wait to see what it is, knowing that I will have enough time to shoot him if the object happens to be a lethal weapon.

  “Take this,” he says holding an old, plastic flip phone. “I promise I won’t say another word. I’ll leave right now. But take this. And if you ever change your mind, you know who to call.”

  I place the Chimera Cube down at my feet and grab the flip phone. The entire time I keep the gun focused on him. There is no telling what is inside that phone. Whether it is covered in poison, infected with a transmitter that will detail everything I say back to the council, or whether it is actually a secure way to contact the resistance.

  All I know is that the dark, sickened thoughts inside me are refusing to calm down. And they are all saying the same thing. I need to kill him.

  Right as I grab the phone from him and slide it into the back pocket of my baggy gray sweatpants (I wanted to be comfortable in my last few moments), I do the thing my body has been aching for since the moment the aircraft landed. I press down on the trigger, the bullet connecting with the forehead of the man and sending his body falling to the rocky ground.

  I’m a monster.

  I try to tell myself that I had to do it. That if I didn’t pull down on that trigger that I would have been the one to end up in the same position. But all of that is just me trying to hide from the fact that seeing his bloody body on the ground gives me a euphoric rush of adrenaline. To have the power to end any and all life at the snap of a finger is one so intoxicating that it has permanently changed my brain chemistry.

  It has transformed me into a radically different person.

  The echo of the gunshot in my ear is somewhat satisfying. An ominous silence prevails after the shot is fired as all the birds halt their chirping. The body of the dead man, a person who will be forever nameless in my eyes, lies at my feet, blood gushing out of their limbs and swathing the Chimera Cube.

  This is the moment when tears would normally coat my eyes as the reality hits me that I just ended the life of another human being. But the rage blocks out every desire besides my undying need to destroy the Syndicate and kill everyone in it.

  Those men on the aircraft need to die.

  “Rocket launcher.” I tap the Chimera Cube on the ground and drop the pistol on top of the dead body. All the people on the aircraft still have their guns at their sides, the same hollowed-out expression in their eyes that the dead man had when speaking to me.

  When I grab the rocket launcher from the air and direct it at the aircraft, I question whether this is all just one terrible nightmare. This could all be nothing more than a hallucination, the deepest fears and desires within me clashing into a horrifically realistic scene.

  But when I press down on the trigger of the rocket launcher, I know that none of this is a hallucination. The salvo, which is over two feet long and easily over fifty pounds, collides with the dark black exterior of the aircraft. On impact, it erupts into a ball of fire, spewing shrapnel and smoke in all directions.

  A number of shards from the blast connect with my body, one even tearing apart my right cheek. The adrenaline that gave me the strength to pick up the hundred-pound rocket launcher flees as my body collapses to the ground. To add insult to injury, the rocket launcher falls on top of the dead man as the aircraft smashes into the rocky surface of the mountain.

  The explosion that follows brings a suffocating wave of energy over me as the heat from the flames swallow my outer layers of skin. The eruption of light from the fuel tank bursting turns the scene of chaos around me into one of complete destruction as the surrounding forest is set ablaze. If anyone was wondering where I was, the resounding boom that echoes across the valley and the large cloud of smoke billowing out of the wreckage of the aircraft is certainly a dead giveaway.

  Without the Chimera Cube, this would yet again be another one of those moments where I am on my deathbed with no idea how to save myself. But two simple commands to the Chimera Cube allow it to sequester the flames in the surrounding forest and heal the wounds lining my body.

  The searing pain that accompanies shards of metal and flames tearing apart your skin is one that is impossible to get used to. But after experiencing the same terrible sensation so many times, my mind can instantly shut down the sensation of pain the second it knows the agony is coming.

  When the nanobots perform the magical intracellular operations on my body, producing more skin cells and repairing my blood vessels as needed, I feel as good as new. But my mind is fucked. The ringing from the explosion still leaves a haze coating my brain, and the shock and confusion pull me in different directions.

  Then I lock eyes with the man lying next to me. Both our bodies are covered in blood, the cube sitting on my stomach as I breathe in and out deeply. This man is dead, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.

  But once I stare into his eyes, the light burning at the core of the dark pits sends chills down my spine. When I look at what lies beneath his torn-apart flesh and the blood coating his body, everything makes sense.

  None of these operatives were humans.

  They are all hyper-realistic humanoids, programmed to fly the ship to my location and bring me into captivity. Thousands of tiny wires poke out of the
guts of the humanoid, tiny charges of electricity flying off the ends as the blood continues to seep out of the wound in its head. Its rubbery skin has been torn apart by the shards of metal, revealing the nest of computer chips and motors inside.

  This man was nothing more than a machine.

  A machine programmed to kill me.

  But killing him, killing all of the people who stood on that plane, doesn’t make me feel any better. I know they are still coming for me; thousands more identical humanoids are likely en route to my location right now.

  There is no way out of this.

  Even as I sit here, coated in humanoid blood with the wreckage of the Syndicate aircraft releasing toxins into the air, I know that I’m not even close to my rock bottom.

  This is just the beginning of the madness.

  I have no other option.

  Time to do the one thing that will either save my life or end the world forever.

  Chapter 17

  I never thought I’d be doing this.

  I often feel that way about the things I am forced to do in my life, but this time, even I could not have imagined this in my wildest dreams just a few minutes ago.

  I am contacting a member of the Syndicate.

  More accurately, I am contacting Justin Winslow, whose contact information was preloaded onto the flip phone when I turned it on. I have no way of knowing whether I have dived straight into a trap, or whether everything that humanoid said was truthful, but I know what I have to do.

  If there is even a fraction of a percent of a chance that I can save my mom, Riva, and Ai from the Maga X experiments, then I have to try. Even if this is a lie, even if me doing this will lead to the cube ending up right in their hands, I have no other option.

  That humanoid was right when it said that I am trapped with endless numbers of people trying to kill me. If the result is going to end up the same no matter what, I might as well try and save some of the people I care about in the process.

  So I hit send.

  My fingers twitch nervously when I press the button. I feel like I’m back in middle school, when messaging my crush was a feat of heroic courage. Hopefully this time it doesn’t end up like all the other times I texted my crush, which usually resulted in no answer back. And the Syndicate’s equivalent of leaving me on-read is something I want no part of.