"A virus. A bad one. The doctor said if we'd left her with that fever until morning, she could have died."
"Worth it, then," Ethan decided, nodding.
"I called Valari as soon as Trinity was stable," Alara said. "She came and picked us up to get you. I don't know what she did to get you out, but it worked. We owe her a big thank you," Alara said, nodding to Valari over Ethan's shoulder.
Ethan's turned to see Admiral Vee standing behind him. "Thanks again, Vee," he said.
She just shook her head and smiled. "The commander of the precinct is an old friend of mine. It was no trouble." Vee walked up to them and went to see the baby. "You have a beautiful daughter. I can see why you risked so much to get her to the hospital. It would be terrible if something happened to her."
Ethan felt a sharp spike of dread with those words. Surely she wasn't threatening Trinity? He looked up to find Alara nodding gravely. Admiral Vee reached out to stroke Trinity's forehead, and Ethan cringed.
"Keep your daughter safe, Mr. Ortane." Looking up, Valari favored him with a grim smile. "And next time, I suggest you call an ambulance before you end up in one yourself. That stunt you pulled with the Enforcers could have gotten you all killed."
Ethan's eyes drifted out of focus as his mind flashed back to the dream he'd had. A horrible feeling of déjà vu came over him. He'd had that dream before... right after The Choosing, after he and Alara decided to become Nulls. Alara had the exact same dream, and the medic who'd de-linked them explained that it was a final warning from Omnius, a vision of the future.
"What's the matter?" Admiral Vee asked, looking puzzled. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Ethan?" Alara said.
He blinked and his gaze snapped into focus. He forced a thin smile onto his lips. "I'm fine. If you don't mind, Valari, we'd better get Trinity home now so that she can rest."
"Of course," Valari purred. "Climb in. I'll have my driver take you both home right away."
Chapter 13
Hoff watched his partner, Galan Rovik, scroll through the list of crimes to prevent. The holo display hovering above the patrol car's dash was filled with mundane misdemeanors, written up like headlines from a news site on the omninet. After each description was the time it would occur, followed by the address. Right now they were on patrol in the Daveroth District. Hoff scanned the list of crimes in the area.
Infidelity, wife plans to cheat on husband | 14:12 | D3-4-21.
Friends come to blows over mutual love interest | 14:13 | D1-17-12
Teenager bullies little girl | 14:13 | D9-2-2
Hoff shook his head and looked away. Here they were, two high-ranking Peacekeepers—strategians, no less—reduced to dealing with the neighborhood bully.
"What about this one—" Galan suggested, "Suicidal Peacekeeper plans to jump from rooftop?"
Hoff's frown deepened. He turned back to the crime board to read it for himself. The crime was set to occur at fourteen hundred hours and fourteen minutes on Street Three, block sixteen, and level one twenty of the Daveroth District.
Galan selected the case in question in order to get more details.
"Says here she's been having doubts since the battle in Dark Space. She feels helpless and trapped, and she secretly believes Omnius is evil." Galan looked up. "Sound familiar?"
Hoff shook his head. "I never said Omnius is evil."
"But you have doubts."
"Everyone has doubts. It's not the doubt that matters, but what we do with it."
"Wise words," Galan said, his glowing blue gaze unblinking as he stared at Hoff. Galan seemed to be staring straight through him, as if trying to peer into Hoff's soul. Not that he had a soul.
"Clock's ticking," Hoff said.
"Right." Galan selected the crime in question and accepted the job. The address went automatically into the patrol car's nav computer, and the autopilot took them up and out of the precinct's parking lot.
Hoff watched as the car raced up into a stream of automated air traffic, slipping into a narrow gap between two cars that no human pilot would have risked taking. Buildings soared to either side. On the other side of an imaginary divide, three lanes of oncoming traffic came at them in a dazzling blur of running lights. The HUD projected imaginary lines in the sky, showing them where the lanes were. None of the cars strayed from those lines, flying with a precision that only Omnius could achieve.
Hoff read over Galan's shoulder as he scrolled through the case files. A hologram of the jumper appeared, giving them a face and a name. Lena Faros. She had long red hair and striking green eyes. She looked young and beautiful, but then again, so did everyone else in Etheria. Hoff scanned her dossier and read that her real age was 73. The nature of her doubts wasn't listed, but Hoff could imagine what they might be.
He looked away, out the windows, watching as they slipped into a vertical stream of traffic and began rising up the face of a gargantuan tower. Blue-tinted windows and pristine white bactcrete walls shone dazzlingly bright in the artificial daylight cast by the Celestial Wall.
The car rocketed from level 50, where their precinct was located, to level 100, the closest level of air traffic to level 120 where the crime was supposed to occur. Hoff used his ARCs to check the time. A glowing green number appeared projected less than a millimeter from his eyes.
13:43.
They had half an hour.
"You ready?" Galan asked.
Hoff nodded.
The car raced down Second Street. Up ahead, a floating sign painted on their HUD showed Third Street, running across theirs. The car stopped at the intersection, waiting to turn left onto Third.
Traffic on Third stopped and their car made a quick left turn. On the corner they raced by a corkscrew-shaped tower with emerald green windows. The car accelerated quickly up to the district speed limit of 500 kilometers per hour. At that speed, buildings to either side of them seemed to grow closer together, forming a blurry tunnel of brightly-colored transpiranium. Overhead, on level 150, elevated streets cast not shadows but more artificial light. The underside of the streets glowed a dazzling cobalt blue, the color of a clear Avilonian sky.
Their destination appeared in the distance, marked on the HUD with a green diamond. Another smaller diamond appeared on a hotel balcony, 20 floors up, revealing the exact point where the jumper intended to plunge to her death.
The autopilot took them straight up to the hotel, and the hazy blue shields at the entrance to the hotel's hangar deactivated automatically to let them in. The car raced inside and glided to a stop right in front of the garage's lift tubes. Galan raced out of the car, his shimmering blue strategian's cape fluttering behind him as he ran. Hoff hurried to catch up, his own cape likewise fluttering. One of the lift tubes chimed and Galan ran inside. Hoff slipped through just as the doors were closing.
"What's the plan?" Hoff asked, watching as Galan's armored palms glowed to life. "Kill her before she can jump?"
Galan shot him a reproving look. "They're set to stun."
The lift tube opened into a luxurious lobby filled with white marble columns and floors. Twin fountains bubbled in the foyer, facing the elevated streets. Galan ran out, heading for another bank of lift tubes. Hoff mentally toggled through his own weapons while they ran. He selected grav guns. If Lena got too close to the edge, he could always pull her back.
"Omnius just sent me an update," Galan said while they waited for the next lift to arrive.
Hoff noted that they were attracting attention. Hotel guests and staff pointed and whispered, no doubt surprised to see two strategians out on patrol. They'll get used to it, he decided. Without a war to fight, even master strategians would be patrolling soon.
"What's the update?" Hoff asked.
"She's already on the balcony," Galan explained, as the lift opened and he strode inside. "We're going to sneak up behind her. You're going to stay out of sight as backup, while I distract her and try to talk her out of it."
Even as Galan said th
at, a more detailed version of that plan entered Hoff's mind. He saw Lena's room in his mind's eye. He saw where he was supposed to wait, just around the corner from the balcony, behind a panel of white chiffon curtains that was billowing in the breeze. Omnius wanted him to wait there with his cloaking shield active and his grav guns at the ready.
Hoff nodded and mentally activated his cloaking shield. His shiny silvery armor disappeared, replaced by a pale shadow projected over his ARCs.
Galan would be the distraction. Lena wouldn't be able to detect Hoff, because Omnius had disabled her armor, and she'd already shucked it. Now she stood in her black under suit, peering over the railing and contemplating the dizzying drop below her balcony.
Omnius could have simply used Lena's Lifelink to put her to sleep rather than have them rush in to stop her, but Hoff supposed that would only heighten Lena's suspicions of Omnius's power. She had to be allowed to think that Omnius would let her jump if that's what she really wanted. The illusion of choice would help her to overcome her doubts. Hoff frowned at the deception, but he supposed it was a necessary evil to help rehabilitate Lena from her suicidal depression.
Hoff's job would be to intervene, pulling Lena back up after she jumped. The experience of jumping and then being pulled back from the abyss, saved by Omnius at the last possible second, was apparently exactly what Lena needed to snap her out of it.
The entire sequence of events was burned into Hoff's mind. All he had to do was stick to the plan, and everything would go exactly as Omnius had predicted.
Not that he would do otherwise. Omnius already knew that he would stick to the plan—otherwise this case wouldn't have appeared on their job board at all. Even their act of choosing a case was an illusion. Omnius let them choose the job they wanted, but he already knew which one they would pick. Omnius could have simply removed all of the other cases on the job board to save them the trouble of contemplating the list, but studies had shown that humans become depressed and less efficient when they feel like they're following a set path—even if they know it's the path they would have taken when given the freedom to choose from available alternatives.
Hoff considered what all of that meant for human freedom. If the future can be predicted with certainty, then that means the future is set, and if it's set, then we're all just going through the motions. With or without Omnius, there's no such thing as freedom. And if we aren't really free, then isn't it better that Omnius helps us to make the right choices?
The more Hoff thought about it, the more he realized that Omnius's control over their lives was actually a good thing. His part in his own life was just to sit back and enjoy the ride. Yet with that realization, Hoff's own melancholy heightened to a feverish intensity, and he found himself identifying with the jumper they'd been sent to save. He felt helpless and trapped, like a prisoner.
The lift tube opened and they walked out onto level 120. The hallway was bright and airy; a luxuriant blue carpet paved the way for them. The walls glowed a soft white-gold, providing illumination. Galan led the way, striding quickly past half a dozen doors before stopping in front of room number 12001.
He didn't knock or use the control panel's key code. The door opened immediately for him, the security overridden by Omnius himself. On the other side Hoff saw the billowing white curtain, the open door to Lena's balcony, and beyond that, Lena herself. She sat on the railing with her legs dangling over the side and the wind skipping through her red hair, making it billow like the curtain. Hoff quietly followed Galan through the room.
"Don't do it, Lena," Galan said, his voice amplified by his helmet. Lena turned to see who had come in. She had to shout back to be heard over the wind.
"I know Omnius won't let me jump!"
"Then why bother trying?"
Hoff saw the curtain where he was supposed to wait, but he walked past it, following Galan onto the balcony. He needed to be closer to Lena to stop her from jumping.
Hoff? What are you doing?
He stopped just beyond the curtain, Omnius's voice having arrested his momentum. He felt guilty, but at the same time triumphant for having defied Omnius's control in some small way.
I can wait here just as easily, he thought back.
Omnius gave no reply, and Hoff wondered if this wasn't actually where he had been meant to wait all along. Perhaps Omnius had foreseen his defiance and taken it into account.
Galan stopped beside him. "Lena," he said.
"What?" she replied, sending him a sharp, angry look, her green eyes glowing bright in the light of her ARCs.
"Why do you want to die?"
"Why do you want to live?"
Galan gestured to the view. Pristine towers of mirror-coated windows soared across the chasm. Twenty floors up, elevated streets ran along the buildings and crossed the urban canyon with multiple bridges. "This is Etheria. It's paradise, Lena. Death, suffering, sickness, crime, and poverty, are all a thing of the past! Humanity has never had such an easy existence."
Lena looked away and peered over the edge again, leaning perilously close to a terrifying drop.
"You see those cars down there?" she said.
Hoff was cloaked, so he took advantage of that to walk up to the railing and peer over the edge with her. Galan walked up on the other side of her, keeping his distance, no doubt to avoid scaring her. Hoff saw the traffic on level 100 racing by in six orderly lanes. Each vehicle was traveling at 500 kilometers per hour, exactly a dozen meters from the ones in front and behind, all of them somehow staying dead center of their respective lanes.
Lena went on, her voice soft and wistful, "Those cars are all on autopilot, all of them have a set destination, and they never fly outside the lines. They never make any mistakes."
Hoff nodded to himself. He knew where Lena was going with that.
"From the moment I wake up, till the moment I sync at night, I feel like I'm on autopilot. I feel like I'm one of those cars. Every choice I'm about to make has already been foreseen and ordained by Omnius. If he objects to something I want to do, then he finds a way to change my mind—case in point, you. There is no freedom."
Hoff heard Galan sigh. "Lena, just because Omnius knows the future doesn't mean you're not free to choose."
"The very fact that the future is knowable means that I'm not free."
"But that has nothing to do with Omnius. The kind of freedom you're talking about doesn't exist. And if it does it's nothing but random chaos."
"Yes, chaos... we used to think that was a bad thing."
"It is a bad thing."
Lena shook her head. "It's a strange feeling to remember how things used to be, and then to compare that with how things are now. You were born on Avilon, so you don't understand."
"I've been to the Null Zone," Galan replied. "I know what chaos looks like."
"Then you should know what I mean. Without sadness, happiness is empty and dull. Without rain, you can't appreciate the sun. Without darkness, the light isn't nearly as bright. Without chaos, order is maddening, and without death, life loses all its meaning."
"You're saying that you've taken paradise for granted. Perhaps you should live in the Null Zone for a while so that you can appreciate Etheria again."
"Perhaps I should," Lena admitted. "But then fifty years from now, after I've gone to the Null Zone, come back, and lived for another decade up here, I'll be back on this ledge hoping that Omnius will finally set me free."
"Not necessarily," Galan said. "If you want to jump off a balcony in the Null Zone, no one is going to stop you."
"Yes... that might be the best way then."
"You don't really want to jump," Galan said. "If you did, you would have chosen to become a Null first."
Lena turned to look at Galan, and Hoff turned to look at him, too. There was a strange light in the Peacekeeper's glowing blue eyes.
A fanatical gleam, Hoff decided.
"Maybe I just want answers," Lena replied. "Maybe I want the truth for a change."
> "What makes you think you've been told a lie?"
"Don't play dumb with me, Rovik. You were there. You saw Omnius lead us into a trap. He sent us to Dark Space knowing that we'd lose to the Sythians there. Why?"
Galan shook his head. "The answer you're looking for doesn't exist, Lena. Your questions are both asked and answered by your doubting mind. You've lost your faith, and now you've begun to question everything."
"So what if I have?"
"So what? Are you happy? No, you've robbed yourself of the peace and joy that come from living in a perfect world."
Lena snorted. "No peace can come from lies, Rovik. Now if you don't mind, I need to get on with my day." Lena flexed her arms, about to push off from the railing.
Hoff chose that moment to intervene. He de-cloaked and grabbed her arm.
"Wait—"
Lena startled so violently at his touch and the sound of his voice that she jerked out of his grasp and fell, tumbling from the balcony with a startled scream. Hoff gaped at what he'd done, watching her fall toward the racing lines of traffic below. He stood there watching, frozen with shock. Beside him Galan cursed and readied his own grav guns to arrest her fall. Hoff snapped out of it and fired, reaching out with both palms for the tumbling black speck that was Lena Faros.
But she was already too far away for his grav guns to get a lock.
"You fool!" Galan said, hopping up on the railing to jump after her. Hoff followed suit, and they jumped together, diving head first and making their bodies bullet-shaped in order to travel faster. Hoff felt the wind ripping at his cape, slowing him down. Beside him he saw Galan's cape fluttering like a torn parachute. Hoff reached up and tore his free, letting it float away.
Below him, Lena fell past the air traffic on level 100, miraculously avoiding a collision with the racing air cars. Hoff caught up fast, but his ARCs said she was 28 meters away—about 10 floors down. Now she was falling face down, arms and legs spread to slow her fall. Apparently she'd had a change of heart about jumping, but she had only seconds left before she would hit the elevated streets on level 75.
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