Farah’s lip twitched and her eyes narrowed. “Maybe you should be.”
Bretton felt the skin around his eyes crinkle with amusement, and he imagined for a moment that he looked as old as he felt. In reality he was a very young-looking fifty-something, whose face bore none of the marks of age that it should have. Even Farah looked like she was still twenty-one. Her real age had to be more than thirty-five by now.
“Why fear death?” he asked. “It’s an end. You know where it goes. Life’s the scary part, because you don’t know where it will end up.”
“Some would say death isn’t the end.”
“It is for us. We already died once at Roka. If some part of us went from there to some other after life, we won’t ever get to see it. This is all we’ve got.”
“All the more reason to cherish it, Uncle Bret. Be careful out there.”
“I will.” He unbuckled his seat restraints. Just as he was about to open the passenger’s side door and jump down, his niece stopped him with a hand on his. “Hold on,” she said.
“What?”
She nodded to the grid. “Someone just walked in on the Psychos.”
“Is it one of our missing partyers?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
A visual feed from the air car’s surveillance suite sprang to life above the pilot’s control console.
The newcomer stood at the end of the alley behind them. He was tall with black hair receding at the temples. One eye glowed red, while the other was dark and inscrutable. He wore an unusual jumpsuit—white with blue stripes—and a strange symbol was sewn into his upper sleeve. Upon seeing it, a vague sense of deja vu trickled through Bretton from some other lifetime. Suddenly he knew which lifetime it was coming from, and his eyes flew wide. “It can’t be . . .”
“Can’t be what?” Farah asked, slower to make the connection than he. It had been over ten years, after all.
“Magnify that feed.”
“Okay . . .” Now the symbol on the man’s sleeve was easy to recognize. Six stars surrounding a clenched fist. “Holy frek!” Farah said, swearing in a language that neither of them had used since waking up on Avilon.
“Frek is right,” Bretton said.
“He’s an Imperial!”
“Yes, question is, how did he get here?”
“Well, we won’t know until we ask him.”
They watched him walk into the Psychos’ camp and sit down, oblivious to the danger he was in.
“What’s he doing?” Farah demanded. “Is he stupid, or what?”
“I’d better get down there.”
“After he stirs them all up? You’re as good as dead.”
Bretton frowned. When he’d been about to jump down and go question the Psychos, he’d been meaning to do so quietly, with stealth on his side. For that, he was wearing a suit of cloaking armor. None of the Psychos would have something as sophisticated as a cloak detector. Of course, if he’d found Tera Halls, he had orders to rescue her, so Bretton had also come prepared for a fight.
“I’ll be fine, Fay,” he said, his hand back on the door handle. He flashed her a quick grin before triggering his helmet visor and turning on his cloaking shield. He was using a cut-rate power core, so he’d only have a few minutes of invisibility to play with.
Farah’s expression clouded and she looked like she was about to blurt out something. “Good luck,” was all she said. He had the impression that hadn’t been what she’d meant to say, but there was no time to ask.
Bretton opened the door and jumped the few dozen feet to the ground. On the way down he triggered the grav field in his boots to cushion his fall, but he landed with a loud crunch anyway. A few heads turned, and the newcomer looked up, but no one saw anything to associate with the sound. Just as well he’d made a noise, though. Now that the Imperial had looked up, he’d noticed his peril. There were already four Psychos sizing him up. Bretton sighed inwardly and crept toward the group.
Sometimes he wished he’d never left Etheria, or that he’d never found Omnius’s dirty laundry, but if he was going to wish for something, he’d wish that the Sythians had never invaded the galaxy, and that neither he nor his wife had died and come to Avilon in the first place. Then he’d wish Omnius away for good measure, just in case the AI god of Avilon decided to resurrect him from a natural death, too.
As the Psychos advanced on the Imperial, Bretton bet that man had a few wishes of his own.
Chapter 3
Ethan noticed that the blinding tunnel in the clouds became noticeably dimmer after they’d crossed the threshold. It led to a circular chamber with a familiar, shiny golden dome at the end. A Peacekeeper stood waiting there for them. As they approached, that man placed his hands against the dome and it rose up on four shining pillars of light. Then they were herded underneath the dome by more Peacekeepers. From the inside, the dome and floor were both black and glossy. Two glowing circles marked the floor. The inner one green, and the outer one red. Ethan led Alara into the inner circle.
Then one of the Avilonians raised his hands and the inside of the dome began to glow with ever-increasing brightness. Suddenly, the Peacekeeper dropped his hands and the dome fell with a boom. A loud whirring filled the air, and it became so bright inside the dome that Ethan had to shut his eyes. Wind whipped at their hair and clothes, and Ethan’s ears popped with a sudden change in air pressure. Then the brightness faded and the wind died down. Ethan opened his eyes to see the dome rising on four pillars of light once more.
“Is it going to be like that every time?” Atton asked.
Ethan shook his head. They’d just been teleported from their reunion in the sky back down to the surface of Avilon. He supposed some drama was to be expected for such a feat of technological wizardry.
As they were herded out from under the dome, Ethan saw that they were now in the middle of a rooftop garden. Faintly illuminated synthstone walkways slithered out into the night, flanked by colorful beds of flowers. Majestic trees stood sentinel on dark, rolling fields of grass, tracing the sky with jagged, tree-shaped shadows. Their leaves rasped in a warm breeze. Overhead, a full Avilonian moon shone bright and blue in a sky that glittered with countless stars. Something was wrong, but he couldn’t decide what.
Atton was the first to recognize what was missing. “Where’s the city?” he asked.
Ethan looked around, noticing now that the horizon was dark. Absent from it were the bright, shining towers he remembered from the world-spanning city. He looked up once more to the bright sea of stars overhead. It shouldn’t have been possible to see stars on Avilon, not with all the city lights, yet here they were, surrounded not by soaring skyscrapers, but by dark, cultivated greenery, as if the nearest city were in some far off land.
“Please follow me,” a blue-caped Peacekeeper said as he began walking down one of the snaking pathways.
The group followed without complaint, marveling at the quiet beauty of the park. They passed a bubbling brook, walking over a short bridge with ornate railings. Fronds of soft, gold-glowing flowers hung like a curtain over the other side of the bridge. The pathway sparkled darkly underfoot, a mirror to the stars.
As they passed through the curtain of flowers, something tickled Ethan’s hand. He scratched at it absently-mindedly. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain, and he smacked his hand, assuming an insect had stung him. Something small and delicate rolled away between his fingers, confirming his suspicions.
“Frek!” he hissed, his hand beginning to throb in earnest.
“What is it?” Alara asked.
He shook his head. “It’s nothing, don’t worry.” Probably a bee, he decided, remembering the hanging fronds of flowers they’d passed through. Whatever it was, he assumed it wasn’t venomous. Paradise wouldn’t be paradise if it were infested with venomous bees.
Ethan looked up and now he saw a modern-day palace shining on the horizon. It was four levels high with parapets, archways, and columns rising into the night. Prevalent win
dows glowed with a soft light, but the windows were blurry from the outside, obscuring whatever lay within.
“I wonder who lives there,” Alara whispered.
“This is where you’ll be staying for the duration of your tour of Celesta,” the Peacekeeper answered from the head of the group.
“I guess it’s a resort,” Ethan said.
“No, martalis, this is a home. There are many homes like it in Celesta.”
Rumblings of shock and surprise rippled through the group.
“What?” Atton said. “So who lives in the city we saw when we were fighting around the Zenith Tower?”
“The same Celestials who live in neighborhoods like this one,” the Peacekeeper replied. “Most Celestials own several homes and apartments. Some homes are found by the beach, others in the mountains, still more are floating in the clouds. And yes, there are city apartments for those who prefer a metropolitan lifestyle.”
“Hold on a minute,” a new voice said. Ethan recognized it as that of Captain Loba Caldin. “If Avilon is so crowded with trillions of people, how is it that you have space for homes at all, let alone ones that are built on beaches and mountains?”
“Some environments are simulated, others are real. While it is true that most of the planetary surface is covered by the cityscape, ample space has been made for Celestials to live however they please.”
“What about everyone else?”
“Everyone else is trying to become a Celestial.”
“Aha,” Caldin grunted, as if that had confirmed her suspicions.
“Where are we now?” someone else asked. Ethan didn’t recognize the voice very well, but it was soft and feminine—girlish even. He thought it might belong to the young Nova pilot he’d seen with Atton.
“This home is built on the rooftops of Etheria,” the Peacekeeper replied as they walked past a shimmering fountain in the driveway of the palace. “We are at the top level of Destiny Tower, where all Avilonian children go for The Choosing.”
That was news to Ethan. “We’re staying with kids? How old are they?” he frowned, thinking of little feet pounding down the hallways of the palace and little lungs screaming long after they should have gone to bed. He was too tired to deal with that.
“This house has been reserved specially for you. It would be inappropriate to leave refugees unsupervised around Avilonian children.”
“Hold on—” Ethan objected. “We’re the ones who need supervising?”
“Yes.”
They came to the doors of the palace—two large, frosted glass slabs flanked by a pair of intimidating statues. The statues looked almost human, but taller and broader than the average man, with limbs that looked thinner and more articulated. Where the head should have been was a dark, shiny ball. As they drew near, those ball heads sprang to life with a glowing red eye in the center of each that slowly swiveled and rolled to track their approach.
“What the frek are those?” Atton exclaimed.
“Bots,” Ethan suggested.
“Drones—also known as Omnies,” the Peacekeeper supplied, stopping at the doors to be scanned by a fan of blue light that quickly washed over him from head to toe. A pleasant tone issued as the doors slid aside, revealing a massive entryway with polished marble floors, a spiral staircase, and bright, recessed glow panels running along the tops and bottoms of the walls. A large, crystal chandelier hung from the center of a high, dome-shaped glass ceiling.
“Nice,” the girlish voice from before said. Ethan turned to see that it did in fact belong to the young Nova pilot he’d seen with Atton. She was holding his hand.
The Peacekeeper turned to address them from the center of the foyer. His subtly glowing blue-white armor gleamed in the gilded light of the chandelier.
“I’m sure you all have many questions, but it is almost time for us to . . . sleep, so I’ll try to be brief.”
Ethan frowned at that, noting the way the blue-caped Peacekeeper hesitated on the word sleep, as if he’d been about to say something else.
The Peacekeeper went on, “Night fall is somewhat different here than what you’ll be used to—at least it is in Etheria and Celesta. We don’t have the same requirement for sleep that you martales do. That, along with all the many other frailties of our species, has been engineered out of us.”
“So why is night any different from the day? Why not carry on doing whatever it is you’d normally do?” Captain Caldin asked.
“Because we all have to take a break from our daily routine in order to Sync. This is the closest thing we know to sleep. Sync is when we synchronize the data in our Lifelink implants with Omnius. Sync data serves as an emergency backup in case of a very sudden death, but it also gives Omnius the data he needs to make accurate predictions about the day to come.”
Ethan’s eyebrows floated up. “Predictions?”
“Perhaps I should start at the beginning. Over thirty thousand years ago, Neona Markonis, a renowned cyberneticist at the time, hypothesized that it would be impossible to create an intelligence any greater than the creator’s. Working on this assumption, she used Lifelink implants to network thousands of our greatest minds together. Using the collective power of their intellect, they created Omnius.
“His test function was to study the data in His creators’ Lifelinks and tell them things about themselves that they couldn’t discover on their own. He began to predict what they would do next. The team realized they could use an intellect like His to predict the future and prevent crime. A logical extension of that was for Omnius to predict everything else, too, and create a true utopia. During Sync Omnius runs an internal simulation of Avilon with all of the variables in place. Like that, He is able to predict our actions for the day to come with near perfect accuracy.”
Captain Caldin snorted. “If he already knows what’s going to happen, why not skip to the end? Tell us all what we’re going to do and save us the trouble of thinking about it. In fact, maybe he should just do it all for me, that way I can spend my time contemplating eternity.”
The Peacekeeper turned to the captain and stared at her for an uncomfortably long moment. “Omnius does not control our actions simply by knowing them. He uses his foresight to warn us against taking any action that will harm us or others.”
“What if I don’t heed his warnings?” Ethan challenged.
“If your intended action is a minor offense, it may be allowed, but if the intended offense is grievous, you will be arrested before you can commit your crime, and then you will be rehabilitated.”
“Rehabilitated . . .” Ethan nodded slowly. He’d spent enough time on Etaris to know a prison when he found one. Avilon looked orderly and pretty on the surface, but dig just a little deeper and something began to stink. No wonder his father had opted out. Preston Ortane would never let anyone tell him how to live his life.
Ethan adjusted his footing and crossed his arms over his chest. Alara must have sensed his annoyance, because she shot him a quick look, her violet eyes wide and intent. The message was clear. Don’t say a word.
“Hoi, cut the krak—you’re saying that Omnius doesn’t just see the outcome of the next day, he controls it, by telling us what not to do and then punishing us if we do it—sometimes even before we’ve done anything at all!”
Blue Cape’s inclined his head at that. “How else could paradise exist?”
“What good is paradise if it isn’t free?” Ethan countered.
“If what you call freedom is the ability to do wrong as well as right, then I would say that freedom and paradise cannot coexist. That kind of freedom is chaos, but don’t worry, Martalis. Even in Etheria, people are allowed to make mistakes. The lower levels have a certain degree of chaos, and it is there that Peacekeepers like myself find our purpose.”
“Arresting delinquents?”
“Guiding other Etherians.”
“From the sounds of it, you’re talking about more than just crime. You’re talking about bad choices.”
; “That’s correct.”
Ethan pursed his lips, nodding slowly as he considered the implications of everything that he’d heard. “Here’s a hypothetical scenario for you, Blue. Tomorrow night my wife is going to cheat on me. I’m going to find out and kill the kakard—but don’t worry! Omnius has already seen it all play out, so you show up on our doorstep while we’re drinking our morning caf. My wife won’t be allowed to cheat, and I won’t have to burn a hole in anyone’s head. You’re there to tell us what would have happened so that we’ll learn from our hypothetical mistakes.”
The Peacekeeper regarded him with a small, secretive smile. “Unraveling the chaos starts with much smaller things, Mr. Ortane. You kill the bee that stung you without asking why it stung you.”
Ethan froze. Ice trickled through his veins, making him shiver, and leaving him cold. His palms began to sweat, and his heart began to pound, but despite that, he spoke very calmly: “What did you say?”
“The same impulse for revenge that made you kill the bee when it stung you would have you kill your wife’s lover. But to put your mind at ease, your wife would never cheat on you. You, however, would cheat on her.”
Ethan’s mind spun. He was too flabbergasted to be outraged by the accusation.
Alara spoke up for him instead. “How dare you! Ethan isn’t like that. He wouldn’t cheat on his previous wife with me, even when he thought she was dead. He’s not like that.”
“No? I must be mistaken then.” The Peacekeeper’s gaze moved on, roving over the assembled group. “Rest assured, the ultimate freedom for wrongdoing is available to anyone who grows tired of ascending. That is, in fact, the very purpose of The Choosing—to give you a choice. The Null Zone is not subject either to Sync, or to Omnius’s foresight. There, criminals are punished after the fact, and people often suffer and die for the sake of someone else’s freedom.”
The small group of refugees grew silent.
“Sync is the same four hours for everyone all over Avilon, but whether it occurs during the physical night or during the day depends on the time of year, since our days are slightly shorter than 24 hours.
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