Alara looked torn, but she nodded, and he turned back to the Peacekeeper. “I’m ready.”
Rovik gave him a grim look and shook his head. “No, you’re not.”
Chapter 23
Rovik lowered his arm, and Ethan walked cautiously toward the broad, red-glowing door. It cast a bloody light on him as he drew near. The drone standing beside the door turned its matching red eye on him, watching his every step as he approached. Upon reaching the door, it hissed slowly open, revealing a corridor as dark as death. Ethan waited, trying to pierce the gloom and see what lay beyond the door. His ARCs responded by amplifying the available light in the room, but that only made the red glow coming from the frame of the door brighter. Whatever lay beyond the threshold remained cloaked in shadows, as if Omnius wanted to scare them away. Ethan started toward the unknown.
“Ethan, wait!” It was Alara.
He turned to her with a lopsided grin that was meant to be reassuring. It did nothing to diminish the panic in her eyes. He blew her a kiss. “I’ll see you soon.”
“I love you,” she replied.
“Me, too.”
Ethan walked into the darkness. No sooner had his foot crossed the threshold than something grabbed him and pulled him off his feet. He cried out, taken off guard. He felt himself being carried—no, floating—down an impossibly dark corridor.
A deep, resonant voice spoke out of the darkness. “Hello, Ethan.”
“Omnius,” he replied. “You can put me down, you know. I can walk.”
“Can you? You’re in utter darkness. You can’t see where you’re going.”
“I’m sure I’ll find my way.”
“As you wish.”
Ethan felt a brief falling sensation—
Smack.
He hit the cold hard floor; his teeth clacked together, and he bit his tongue. Then came the ferrous tang of blood. Ethan cursed and pushed off the floor. “You could have let me down gently.”
This time there was no reply.
He scowled and started forward, his hands outstretched and groping in the dark. At first it was disorienting, but each time his hands found walls, he turned the other way, and soon he stopped running into them.
“Where’s this go?” he asked.
Again, no answer.
He went on, picking up the pace, impatient to get out of the dark.
Suddenly Ethan’s feet touched air and he tipped forward. He put out his hands reflexively but they touched air, too, and he began to tumble as he fell. His stomach lurched and wind rushed past him in the dark. He screamed despite himself. “Hey! You sick frek!”
Suddenly his momentum began to slow, and he saw a dim red light begin growing all around him. With the light he could see that he was falling down what looked like an open lift shaft. Ethan’s eyes narrowed as he floated to a stop at the bottom. Intellectually he knew that he was caught up in some kind of grav field, but it was still disconcerting to see himself floating above the ground, suspended by an invisible force field.
A pair of transparent doors opened in front of him and he floated out into a vast chamber with a domed ceiling and a single, glossy black chair in the center of the room.
“You’d better not try that with my wife,” Ethan growled.
“I thought you said you could find your way?” Omnius replied, his deep voice echoing through the chamber.
“Very funny.”
“It’s not funny, Ethan. If I hadn’t caught you, you would have died.”
“Yes, but you’re also the one who left me in the dark, and you’re the one who opened that lift tube so I could plummet to my death.”
“The darkness and the fall are an analogy. You and I both know that you have a habit of getting yourself into trouble, and you are fond of blundering around in darkness. I won’t be there to catch you in the Null Zone.”
“I got by just fine in Dark Space. Doesn’t get much darker than that. I think I can look after myself.”
“But can Alara?”
Ethan looked accusingly up at the domed ceiling. It was glowing—pulsing—a faint red, providing the only illumination for the chamber.
“Cut it out and get this over with. I’ve made my choice, so stop trying to change my mind. You value our free will enough to make us choose in the first place, so respect my choice now and go find someone more gullible to listen to you.”
“Very well, but know this, Ethan, without my help you will lose everything you hold dear.”
“Like my son? Too late, you already took him, didn’t you? I’m beginning to think you predict the future by making your predictions come true.”
“No, Ethan, I’m talking about your daughter. And your wife. They’re both going to leave you. They’re going to go to Etheria.”
Ethan’s heart began thudding in his chest. “What are you planning to do to convince Alara? I suppose you’re going to tell her the same thing—that I’m going to leave her and go to Etheria.”
“I don’t lie, Ethan.”
“No? Well, you’re blackmailing me with my family. That’s worse.”
“I’m telling you what’s going to happen so that you can do something about it before it’s too late. That’s not blackmail. It’s compassion.”
Ethan didn’t buy it. Alara wouldn’t leave him. Especially not after she’d promised to follow him last night. And if Omnius was talking about something that was going to happen in the far future, well, not even he could predict that with any certainty. The Peacekeepers had said more than once that Omnius didn’t add the Nulls to Sync and his simulations of the future. That meant that he and Alara were about to be thrown into a sea of unknown variables, and any one of those could change the future that Omnius was predicting now.
Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “If you already know what I’m going to choose, why do you keep trying to convince me to change my mind?”
“So that the Ethan of the future won’t ask me why I didn’t try to stop him from going to the Null Zone.”
“All right, then give me a hint. When is she going to leave me?”
“If I tell you that, you will know what she is going to choose now.”
“So?”
“That would defeat the purpose of your choice.”
“You’re using her to blackmail me anyway! What’s the difference?”
“Without certainty of the facts, you have to trust that I know what’s best for you, even without understanding why.”
“You’re talking about faith.”
“I am.”
“You are one twisted frek, Omnius. You’re a bot, not a god. Why should I need faith to deal with you?”
“Because I am smarter than you are, and neither of us have the time for me to walk you through the reasons for every little thing I say or do. It is much easier for you to simply believe that I am looking out for your best interests and obey my commands.”
“Sounds like a convenient way of telling me not to ask questions. That’s also a convenient way of hiding a lot of krak.”
“Please sit in the chair.”
Ethan turned from gazing up at the ceiling to stare at the glossy black chair in the center of the room. Suddenly, that chair looked sinister to him. He hesitated there, wondering about Alara and second-guessing himself. What if Omnius did convince her to leave him? Would she really break last night’s promise?
“Wait,” Ethan said.
“Yes?” Omnius replied.
* * *
Alara waited for what felt like an eternity before Master Rovik nodded to her. She was gratified to see that his eye had turned a nice shade of purple.
“You can go now, Mrs Ortane,” he said, his voice surprisingly neutral considering that she was the reason his eye was busy swelling shut. She’d heard Ethan screaming on the other side of the door, and she’d run right up to it, pounding on it with her fists. Master Rovik had pulled her away from the door, and she’d punched him in the face. Then he’d explained that he’d been trying to prevent one of the
two drones guarding the doors from identifying her as a hostile target. She’d felt bad after that, but only a little. Master Rovik had gone on to explain that Ethan would not be harmed in any way, and that his screams were from surprise, not pain.
Now free to follow him, Alara ran toward the door. It opened before she reached it, sliding aside with a loud hiss. The corridor beyond was so dark that she almost tripped over her own feet, but then she felt herself lifted off the floor and carried forward.
“Hello, Alara,” a deep voice said.
“Hello? Omnius?”
“Yes, my child. It’s me.”
“I’m going to become a Null. I’m not your child.”
“Are you certain of that?”
Alara frowned in the dark. “Yes. I won’t leave my husband.”
“How do you know he didn’t choose to go to Etheria?”
Alara felt her momentum shift, and she began descending in the dark. Her eyebrows drew together. “What did you tell him?”
“Nothing but the truth.”
“As you see it. You’re saying you changed his mind?”
“I’m saying you need to make your own choice, for your own reasons, not simply follow your husband wherever he goes.”
Alara felt herself slow to a stop and she saw a pair of transparent doors slide aside. She floated out into a large, circular room. The ceiling was pulsing with a faint red light and in the center of the room sat a glossy black chair. Alara eyed it curiously.
“What will you do, Alara?”
“I made Ethan a promise. I can’t go back on my word. He’ll never trust me again, and he’ll hold it against me, so I’m going to the Null Zone. But you already know that . . . don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you trying to convince me to change my mind?”
“To save you the heartache that’s coming. Your daughter will go to Etheria when it comes time for her to make her own choice.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“You will follow her, but Ethan will stay. Before he changes his mind, he will cheat on you with the first woman he can find.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“Just like he thinks you wouldn’t leave him?”
Alara frowned. “If our daughter left, we would talk about it and come to a decision together about whether or not to follow her.”
“And if he didn’t agree with your decision? You saw the way he treated his son. Atton is dead to him, and yet he is more alive than Ethan right now.”
Alara’s mind reeled. She felt like someone had gone into her head and turned everything upside down, taking away everything she believed in and making her doubt everything she trusted the most. She shook her head to clear away the creeping poison of doubt and despair. “You already know what I’ll choose, so why are you trying to convince me otherwise?”
“If I didn’t try, one day you might wonder why a supposedly loving god wouldn’t warn you about what was coming.”
Alara felt her resolve begin to flicker. Was it possible that Trinity really would choose to go to Etheria? Would she follow their daughter with or without Ethan? Would Ethan respond by cheating on her? Alara supposed the real question was whether or not Omnius could predict all of that before Trinity was even born.
“Please sit in the chair, Alara.”
“What else have you seen? I thought you can only see a day into the future?”
“To know everything with absolute certainty, yes, but there are some things that I can see many years in advance, and some people are more predicable than others.”
“But you can’t be one hundred percent certain, can you? Especially not for Nulls. You don’t even try to predict their behavior, so the entire Null Zone is filled with millions of unknown variables that constantly change and defy your expectations.”
Omnius remained silent for a long moment.
“Admit it, you don’t know. You’re just guessing.”
“It would take too long for me to explain how I know what I know, and you wouldn’t believe me even if I did.”
“That’s a convenient answer.”
“Right now the only answer you need to worry about is yours, Alara. What will you choose, and why?”
“I can always choose to go to Etheria later, can’t I?”
“If you are still alive, yes.”
“Will I live long enough to see my daughter go through her own choosing?”
“If you want to know with certainty how your life will turn out and that all of the outcomes along the way will be the ones you hope for, then you should choose to go to Etheria.”
Alara chewed her lower lip, thinking fast.
“Have you made your choice?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 24
30 Minutes ago . . .
“Wait.”
“Yes?”
Ethan eyed the chair in the center of the chamber.
“A Null can choose to ascend to Etheria whenever they want, right?”
“That is correct.”
“So if I choose to be a Null, at least I can undo that if it turns out to be a mistake.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m standing by my choice.”
“Very well. Please sit down, Ethan. There are others waiting for you.”
He started slowly toward the chair. “What’s it do?”
“Here you will get to select your professional training, which you will use to make a living for yourself in the Null Zone. The knowledge will be downloaded and then your Lifelink will be disabled. Choose wisely. Any change of careers after this point will require you to learn all of the necessary skills the old-fashioned way.”
Ethan reached the chair and eased into it. He heard a humming sound and looked up to see a glossy black dome descending overhead. Somehow he hadn’t noticed it hovering above the chair.
The dome touched the floor with a thud and Ethan’s ARCs brought up a glowing table of text and pictures. Each entry showed a picture representative of some type of training. Beside it was a text description, and in the third column was a list of possible jobs he might find with that training as well as the hours and monthly income for each job. Ethan quickly realized that he had no way of knowing what was a good job in the Null Zone, or even how much money he would need to survive. He began scanning the list for the highest salaries. There wasn’t a lot of variation—just a few hundred bytes and usually with a corresponding change in hours. He began wondering about the difficulty level of each job as well as possibilities for advancement. Among the jobs listed were building maintenance, law enforcer, custodian, night watchman, security guard, personal assistant, desk clerk, sales agent, receptionist, firefighter, bouncer, bartender . . .
Ethan frowned as his eyes skipped down a very long list of possibilities. They weren’t bad jobs, but none of them was particularly well-paid, and all of them had one thing in common—they were easy to train for. If he’d had to train for any of those positions in Dark Space the training program wouldn’t have been longer than six months. He didn’t really need to download new skills to do any of those things. “Ah . . . could you show me some better-paid jobs? Maybe with some more complex skills and training?”
“I cannot.”
“What do you mean you cannot? You could train me up to be a medic—some kind of cyberneticist that makes more money in a year than I’ve seen in my entire life.”
“I could, yes.”
“So what’s the trouble?”
“The Null government has placed restrictions on what types of training I can offer to people emigrating from Etheria. These are the best opportunities I can give you.”
“The best . . .” Ethan shook his head. “Let me get this straight. I came to Avilon with my own ship, and now I’m going to be stuck cleaning bathroom stalls for the rest of my life?”
“Yes, about your ship. There was a museum that wanted it. All of your personal effects have been removed and they will be forw
arded to your new address as soon as you choose a place to live.”
“Great. How much does that get me?”
“You managed to decrease your government debt by more than fifty thousand bytes. Now you only owe a hundred and fifty five thousand.”
“My what?”
“Your government debt, Ethan. Please try to hurry up. There are others waiting.”
“Yeah, yeah, just hold on. If it’s a government debt, why do I have to pay?”
“Because your wife is pregnant, and that’s how much it costs the government for you to have a child. Breeding licenses currently cost 205,000 bytes.”
Ethan’s cheeks bulged. “You can’t charge me for that! We got pregnant before we came here.”
“That doesn’t change the expenses that the Null Government will incur on your behalf. You can always terminate the pregnancy if you can’t afford to pay.”
“Terminate the pregnancy? You’re talking about my daughter, you dumb frek!”
“To you she is your daughter. To any other Null she is an expensive luxury that they can’t afford. It’s also illegal to breed without first buying a license, but since you couldn’t have known that, it would be unfair to put you in prison and terminate the pregnancy for you. Instead, you’ll be given a preferential interest rate on your breeding loan. You’ll only have to pay two percent per year. The usual rate is five and a half.”
Ethan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His throat was suddenly painfully dry. He shut his eyes and the room began spinning around him. He felt like he was about to be sick.
“Please try to calm down. It’s not as bad as it could be.”
“How could it be worse?”
“You could be having twins.”
Ethan scowled. “You’re enjoying this!”
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to help you. It’s not too late to go to Etheria, Ethan.”
“I’ll pass.”
“You are nothing if not stubborn. Would you like help selecting the best training program from the list in order to fit your personality and your particular financial situation?”
Ethan couldn’t summon the strength for a reply. A moment later the long list of jobs and training programs narrowed down to just two.
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