Causality (Quantum Gate Book 5)

by Eric Warren

  “If you could find a way to establish relays, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work,” Trymian said. “Though I don’t know how that’s possible, not when he’s got control of all the existing relays. You’d have to build new ones.”

  “Exactly,” David said. “Back in my world I used small portable devices to transmit comm signals over large distances. If we could build a network of them and deploy them around the city, I think we might be able to replace the inactive relays.”

  “An’ how’re you gonna build all these devices?” Jill asked. “It isn’t like we’ve got an assembly line with a bunch of workers to put ‘em together.”

  “No,” David replied. “But we do have you.”

  “Me?” Jill raised an eyebrow.

  “Anyone who could engineer and construct charging cubes from scratch, is bound to be pretty good at building comm relays.”

  Jill had to hide a smile. “Well, I—”

  “Save the modesty, we both know you can do it. We’ll build them together. And with a little luck it won’t take more than a few hours to get them up and running.”

  Jill couldn’t help the smile this time. Maybe this guy wasn’t so bad after all. How smart could he be if he was asking for her help? Plus, if they had the comm network up and running she could at least contact Frees, find out what was going on out there. See if Arista had found him yet.

  “Mr. Reynolds,” she said. “You got yourself a deal.”

  ***

  “Here’s the deal,” Jessika said as they made their way out of the hospital’s café. “I tracked Arista to London and I knew you couldn’t be far behind, but we couldn’t leave here immediately. They’ve—sorry, Charlie has patrols all over the city looking for us. I guess it’s like that everywhere. We had to wait until we were clear before we could go to London, and by the time we got there her signal had disappeared again. But guess who we happened to see as soon as we came through the gate?”

  “Me,” Frees replied, trying not to think about the incident again. Why had he been so insistent on helping Jonn? Was it his foolish pride? Or was it because he thought his goodwill might impress Arista? Either way, it had been a stupid decision.

  “Yep, and you were dead. As in doornail dead. But I remembered Arista telling me about how she wanted to transfer her parents’ consciousnesses from their old bodies into new ones. I thought why not give that a shot with you? I figured you were my best hope at finding where my daughter went. Because for some reason she disappeared off my screens.” She turned and winked at him. “Plus, I kind of liked you. I didn’t want to see you die.”

  This was the part he wasn’t looking forward to hearing. But he had to know all the details. They arrived in front of an elevator door and got in as soon as the doors slid open. “Command is on four,” she said, absently. The elevator was musty, like everything else in the building.

  “So, you removed my head,” Frees prompted, trying to keep Jessika on track.

  “Right, yes,” she said. “Well, we had to do more than just your head. We had to cut what remained of your primary transfer conduit—your spine—out of your back because there was a possibility we could restart your cortex using the correct inputs and I didn’t want to cut all those yet. We weren’t sure how long you’d been there or if we’d even be able to revive you.”

  “You cut out my spine,” Frees said, leaning back on the wall of the elevator for support. “And just…left the rest of me there.” He felt like he was going to be sick.

  “It was just parts; there was no need to take anything else with us,” Jessika replied. The doors to the elevator opened and he took a moment, then followed her into the hall. “We brought you back here and managed to ignite your cortex before it lost all cohesion. Normally that shouldn’t be possible, but I think it might have something to do with the fact you’ve been autonomous for so long. I didn’t have a lot of time to study it, but you had a very strong series of connections in your old cortex. I can only assume those were made through your ability to survive, adapt, and remember everything you’ve been through the past ten years.”

  “Does that mean any autonomous machine can be revived and moved into a new body?” Frees asked, weighing the implications. It was a radical idea, that the machines might not have to die after twenty-five years after all.

  “I wouldn’t say any machine,” Jessika said, stopping in front of two large double doors. “I’d say only a machine with sufficient experience living like you have. Being autonomous, it changed you somehow. Made you into something more than just a husk. Your will to survive, your will to continue to live, it’s in there somewhere. I can’t put my finger on it. But you are more than just the sum of your parts, Frees. You have evolved.”

  Evolved. His dream for all his kind. If it was possible for him, why not all of them as well?

  “Here, come on, we need to speak to the others,” Jessika said, placing her hand on the pad beside the door. They swung open toward them revealing a large space that reminded Frees of the infirmary back in Hogo-sha’s tower. Except all the beds had been replaced by desks and in the center where the nurse’s station should be was a large command center, complete with video feeds, monitors, and piles of equipment; all of it scrounged and cobbled together to form a surveillance system.

  “Ma’am,” one of the men manning the main station said as Jessika entered the space.

  “Where are Nicole and Arthur Jost?” Jessika asked, scanning the room.

  “Off checking the power converters on the refractor around the building. It was giving us some trouble earlier while you were in surgery.” He turned and nodded to Frees. They weren’t afraid of him. Jessika must have prepared them. Still, none of the humans here seemed surprised or scared to see him. It was a welcome change. Frees nodded back.

  “When they get back give them a message. Let them know the husks are under the control of a gestalt AI named Charlie, and yes it’s the same one from Chicago. We need to get in contact with Trymian in London.”

  The tech typed something on his console. “London is still off-line, ma’am. Could it be on purpose?”

  Jessika turned, cursing under her breath. “Both Osaka and London are out of contact with the rest of the planetary communication grid. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

  “We didn’t have any comms in London, even between each other,” Frees said. “I assume they found Trymian because they left the palace alive, but we didn’t get a chance to discuss it.”

  Jessika put her hands on one of the consoles and leaned over it, glancing at the different monitors in the room. In the distance, LA glittered in the darkness, its’ lights a mixture of white, orange and blue. It was almost clear enough to see the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. “We need to find Arista,” she said. “Even if Osaka is in a blackout, I should still be able to track her. But I don’t want to risk going into Osaka without knowing her exact location. We could end up falling straight into a trap. And as you’ve noticed, we don’t have any soldiers around.”

  Frees had noticed, but he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t recognized anyone from his unit where he’d used Byron’s identity to infiltrate the colony back when they’d first arrived. And most of the bodies they’d seen in the colony had been the soldiers. They had bought time for everyone else to get away. “So what do we do?” Frees asked.

  Jessika stared at the monitors. “I don’t know.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  After a brief interview, Jairo had assigned Jonn quarters to clean himself up. Not that there was much to clean up; only patches of his skin remained, most of it gone with the replacement of components. Had he actually attempted to keep the skin it would have been a dozen different colors anyway and served little to no purpose. He wasn’t the same machine anymore, not really. After months of living in his own personal purgatory and swapping out pieces as he needed them to survive, a room to freshen up meant nothing to him.

  Regardless, he stared at what was left of his face in th
e mirror. On the side where skin remained a blue eye stared right back. He still hadn’t relinquished the code to turn it back to orange, despite having the knowledge. It wasn’t like he was hiding who he really was from anyone. But it had been a long time since he’d seen a mirror and he didn’t even recognize the person staring back at him. After everything he’d been through, he still had abandoned Arista. She’d needed him back there and he’d just stood there, silent. Because he knew it was his only chance at surviving. When he’d first made the offer to Arista to kill Charlie, he’d only been half-serious. He didn’t think she’d take him up on it, but when it became clear she and Frees were ready to kill him unless he could prove his worth, he’d had to commit. The truth was he did want to kill Charlie, he just didn’t want to die in the process.

  The entity—because that’s how Jonn thought of Charlie, as an entity, not a person—had caused him more than his fair share of damage and turmoil. Jonn had managed to spin a story about Charlie being in his head as a contributing factor to why his behavior was so erratic back in Chicago.

  But the truth was Jonn hadn’t succumbed to anything, except maybe his own self-loathing. He’d been upset Arista had left him there in that cell to rot while being whisked away by Frees. Disappointed in himself that he couldn’t have gotten her out of there himself and he’d failed her. And of course, he’d been scared Charlie would wipe him if he couldn’t provide some value. So he’d turned on her, and her face when he told her she’d be better off dead was an image that would never go away. He thought perhaps when he found them in the colony being close to her might make the loathing subside but it only made things worse. Now she and Blu had been banished from the tower and he was up here and safe. The only problem was his self-loathing had reached critical levels. By abandoning her a second time, he was making the same mistakes all over again.

  Jonn smashed the mirror with his fist, the metallic hand going straight through the plated glass and the wall behind it until it stopped on a load-bearing steel column. Jonn retracted his hand, sporting a new, small dent and let it hang at his side. He couldn’t do this again. He needed to make good on his promise, even though it might mean the end of his own life.

  Rewrapping his cloak as he walked, Jonn left his room and rode the elevators all the way to the top, bursting through the giant wooden doors into the council room.

  Mitsu, Takai, and Jairo all sat in their chairs, staring out over the city. As Jonn stormed in, their chairs turned to face him.

  “Accommodations not to your liking?” Jairo asked, his voice full of sarcasm.

  “I’ve changed my mind. I need to go with Arista,” Jonn said. “There’s something I need to do.”

  Jairo raised his hands in a placating gesture. “She’s disappeared off our cameras a few hours ago. We don’t know where she went.”

  “I have a proposition for you,” Jonn said, taking a few more steps forward, his cloak dragging on the ground behind him to reveal his skeletal legs and feet. “If you help me find her, I will upgrade all your Peacekeepers.”

  “Upgrade them? How?” Jairo asked, leaning forward.

  “I will give you the information on how they can take charge of their own programming internally. It’s how I changed my eye color back when I was still infiltrating the Cadre.”

  “What good—?” Takai began.

  “Not only will they have full, personal and unlimited autonomy to be whoever they want to be, they’ll also have the ability to hide from the husks. Because the husks are nothing more than sophisticated cameras, it is possible to modify how the other husks ‘see’ the Peacekeepers and erase them from the husks’ minds. The only way they could be seen is if the primary user—Charlie—sees them in person.”

  “We could protect ourselves from ever being attacked again?” Jairo asked.

  “Yes. The Peacekeepers would be able to explore their own minds, change whatever they wanted to change. Become who or whatever they wanted to be. It’s the next step.”

  Jairo seemed to consider this.

  “Is it dangerous?” Mitsu asked. “This program of yours?”

  Jonn shook his head. “It’s a complex set of instructions on how Peacekeepers can fully explore the limits of their own minds. Nothing more.”

  “In order to find Arista we’d have to drop Jairo’s dampening field. We can’t pick up human life signs with it on,” she added.

  “Okay,” Jonn said. “So?”

  “So as soon as the field is off husks will start pouring in looking for her. None of our people will be safe.”

  “Unless I give you the program first,” Jonn replied. “I give it to you now and on your word you drop the field so I can find her.”

  Jairo glanced between his two companions, all of them exchanging glances with each other. “Very well,” he said. “If you wish to waste your time and your life chasing after a human that is your choice. We have an agreement.”

  ***

  “Arista?” Blu’s voice was small and full of fear in the dark tunnel. Arista turned around, squinting in what little light illuminated the claustrophobic space. Had she needed to come down here a few months ago she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to do it. But as it was, they needed to get inside the tower, and this was the only way she could think to do it. A frontal assault obviously wouldn’t work, and she’d managed to get into the base of the tower this way before. She only hoped Jairo and the others hadn’t closed this little loophole.

  “What’s wrong?” Arista asked, coming up beside her.

  “I feel dizzy,” Blu said, “I don’t like it down here.” It had taken a couple of hours but they’d taken one of the side streets away from the tower and made their way back down into the subway system. Even though the Device wasn’t working anymore, Arista could still remember the mental map it had built for how she’d gotten on the subway and used the tunnels to access the lower levels of the tower via a series of very cramped exhaust corridors that connected the two. Unfortunately, it seemed all the subways had stopped running which meant they’d have to make the journey down to the station on foot. And it was hot, dark and uncomfortable down here and it was taking forever.

  “Dizzy how? Like you need some water?” she asked.

  “I just…I don’t know,” Blu said. Arista led her over to the wall, pressing Blu’s hands up against the cool stone.

  “Are you claustrophobic?” Arista asked.

  “I didn’t used to be,” Blu said. “I just feel sick to my stomach down here.”

  Of course. This tunnel was similar to the one where they’d found David, nearly dead after Charlie had crashed a vehicle into him. She was having a mild panic attack from the bad memories. “Here, sit down,” Arista said.

  “But the tower—”

  “It will still be there, just sit down with your back against the wall. Take deep breaths.”

  Blu did as she was told, drawing air in through her nose and back out through her mouth. Arista hunched right beside her, her human hand holding Blu’s arm. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on. I grew up in a building that might as well have been underground. Everything feels so cramped down here.”

  “Did you know I used to have a huge problem with claustrophobia?” Arista asked. “I remember as a kid being so happy Emily and Carver lived on a farm. But I had trouble even staying inside a bedroom; I though the walls might close in on me.”

  “Really?” Blu asked.

  “Now that I think about it, it probably had something to do with growing up in the colony. I can’t remember anything from that time, but I’d bet spending my formative years underground didn’t help. Never seeing a real sky, or the great, wide open.” She sighed. “After I started living with them and we would just drive it felt so freeing; everything felt so…infinite.” She slumped back against the wall beside Blu. “I failed them. They trusted me to help them live and I couldn’t do it.”

  “You did the best you could. Considering everything that’s happened I think they’
d be proud of you,” Blu said, still taking deep breaths.

  “I wish I could tell them one more time I loved them. And thank them for everything they did for me. Our last ‘conversation’ was half argument and half me just wanting to get off the phone so I could infiltrate the machines. So stupid.”

  “It wasn’t stupid,” Blu said. “Families aren’t perfect, and you can’t blame yourself for not knowing what would happen. You thought you’d get to talk to them again; I’m sure they didn’t blame you. Every time I screw up I think Dad’s always going to be mad because I made a mistake. But usually he’s just happy I’m okay.” She turned to Arista. “And you’re okay. Look at all you’ve done.”

  She was right. If she hadn’t accidentally burned her own hand off, Arista never would have met Frees, or Blu, or Jill. And she never would have found her biological parents. In some ways, she’d found one family while trying to save another. Now all she had to do was stop the one thing threatening all of it before she lost anyone else. She stood again. “Thanks. Self-forgiveness doesn’t come easily for me.”

  Blu laughed. “No kidding.” She stood as well. “I think the breathing helped. Where to?”

  Damn, this girl was resilient. It would have taken Arista an hour to calm down after a panic attack and Blu ready to go in only a few minutes. That was a very good sign; hopefully the trauma from the subway incident hadn’t grabbed hold of her psyche too tightly. “Not too much farther. There’s a small door right up here,” she said.