The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I catch my balance and get both hands into the opening, teetering on the rungs. With a grunt I push outward, and the doors open a few inches. I see more, and more of the line bursts against my chest, but I just curse and push harder, driving the doors open until I can clearly see the insanity on the other side, and step through into-

  INTERLUDE 1

  Fourteen years earlier, Joran Helkegarde stepped onto the second floor gantry walkway encircling the Alpha Station of the Multicameral Array, and let out a breath of awe and admiration.

  It hit him every time.

  Beside him Piers Sandbrooke laughed. He had an easy laugh to match his tousled blond hair and teasing blue eyes. "You're too easily impressed, Joran. Have you seen what they're doing at Gamma Array?"

  Joran didn't have much to say to that. It had taken eleven months to get the Alpha facility built, seven more to staff it and bring on the experimental volunteers, and he'd been over every inch of the plans a dozen times, written and rewritten the theories behind it until he could recite the equations in his sleep, and you'd think he'd be sick of it, but this? To actually see it, to feel it humming through him, to feel it really working? It blew his mind every time. The possibilities were endless. The possibility of today was immense.

  Before him lay the enormous, light-filled hall of Alpha Array. The ceiling stood twenty feet high, formed from an unprecedented single pour of glass. The clarity through it was astounding, like the polished steel reflecting mirror on the Hubble telescope; revealing the swirling white Siberian storm above in minute, high-resolution detail. Getting that made had cost nearly a hundred million in itself, but it was worth it.

  "They're still running their Array in a null chamber," Sandbrooke went on happily, ever ready to gossip. "In Delta, I mean. Nothing in or out, of course, but they've tried varying materials; like the floor, they've gone for rubber, not cement. Apparently there's some refraction, an echo, but that actually increases signal absorption? Preliminary figures are coming, I talked to Yeary, but …"

  Joran tuned him out, not caring about what the other stations in the Array were doing. He'd ceded a certain degree of experimental control from the outset, as long as his core vision remained intact. That had been the one condition he'd laid down when the SEAL came knocking, after his research proposal had been roundly rejected by every established scientific organization on the planet.

  Shows them, he thought idly. Shows Sandbrooke. His rise had been meteoric. If today went well, he was about to launch through the stratosphere.

  But for this moment, he admired the central asset in his Array. One story down from the metal gantry lay the Array floor, subdivided into a hundred ten-foot square allotments by means of slim dark lines grooved into the gray plastic floor. Within each square lay one of his crack, hand-selected team of one hundred sensitives, each bedded down like a perfectly planted potato. They lay on low plastic gurneys aligned North-South like compass-needle soldiers primed for battle, shaven-headed and wearing simple white hospital gowns. All were males between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-four, all lay with their eyes closed, and all of them wore the plastic neural caps with assorted pads suckered to their bald skulls, with thick bundles of cables running away like secondary spines.

  "… the walls, which are ten feet thick," went on Sandbrooke obliviously. "That's Gamma, from what I hear. As much of their signaling as they can reduce, so they say, though naturally all their habitation's in a shielded cage, like the Faraday rig you set up here, but not quite the same…"

  Joran let him fade again to a background drone. The scale of the plan was tremendous, representing billions in investment capital, all to make his pseudoscientific dream into a functioning reality. The breakthroughs they were making every day were going to rewrite human understanding of their place in the universe for generations to come, though of course those discoveries had slowed to a crawl of late. Today was the pivot point that would change all that, right up there with the moment the idea had first come to him, sitting in a Princeton doctoral lecture on the varied signals produced by a normal, bicameral brain talking to itself across its left and right hemispheres.

  "Consider the medium, not the message," the professor was saying, in explaining the speed limits to thought. In the brain, or so he explained, the 'medium' was the hard lines of brain matter; organic 'wires' that electrical impulses could transmit along. No matter how powerful or important the message, it could travel no faster than the wiring would allow.

  The idea had set Joran off in another direction entirely. The medium, not the message.

  In that moment it had seemed that the old professor had simply never fully put the pieces together, while in Joran's head the potential clicked into place. His face had flushed and he'd looked around at his fellow PhD students, each of them a competitor for research money and university positions and ultimately scientific glory, and felt certain that every one of them had just glimpsed the same gaping hole in existing science that he had.

  But none of them had shown any sign of it.

  The medium was the essential question.

  Joran had left the lecture that second and raced to his room, where he'd stayed up all night working out the mathematical landscape of his theory. He'd known he wasn't the first to theorize a kind of 'medium' through which all thoughts passed, different from the 'hard' wiring of the brain, but he would certainly be the first to approach it in this way. All the evidence thus far was anecdotal.

  He dug into research, and found out that twins were perhaps the largest area of evidence to date, with various casual studies conducted that had come up with numerous findings that were either not replicated, or not explained via any meaningful theory. Sometimes these theories were about twins who'd never met each other, who could essentially read each other's minds. Others were about twins who could say where their twin was at any time, or twins who knew when their twin had just died or fallen sick or suffered an injury. Very little of the surrounding literature had an experimental basis, but the sheer amount of it still set Joran's mind alight.

  To explain these findings, there had to be a kind of underlying medium of thought that stood outside of hard wiring, even outside of the human body; a kind of invisible Wi-Fi that allowed the passage of ideas directly from mind to mind.

  In short, telepathy.

  He leaned on the railing and surveyed the hundred in his Array. He'd failed his PhD for this; the idea that a large enough set of calm, empty minds, in a remote enough location removed from any sort of disturbance, might be able to detect the underlying medium.

  The hydrogen line.

  It wasn't scientific enough for his professors or the university. They'd laughed at him behind his back.

  But it was working.

  He'd failed his PhD, but this was a vindication every day. The SEAL, his financial backers, barred him from publishing, but the preliminary reports already were mind-blowing, even as the first batch of one hundred were still adapting.

  Their minds were his blank slate, waiting for the line to write upon them. The message so far was unclear, but it was undeniably there. There was a medium, and there was a message.

  Telepathy was real.

  "Thirty minutes until exposure," Sandbrooke said, holding up his wristwatch. "We should clear the hall for prep."

  Joran turned to the man's easy grin and curious eyes, and wondered how much of it was a front. If anyone was the SEAL's inside man, it was Sandbrooke. He'd been Joran's contact point for the duration, the one who'd first brought him the offer and the one who'd helped him bring all this massive infrastructure about.

  "I've got new parameters to cycle in," Joran said, covering the lie smoothly. "Sovoy ran diagnostics on the last bout and this will be my response."

  Sandbrooke frowned slightly. "They're all in position. Shouldn't we have run pre-approval on that?"

  "Normally, yes, but this is time-sensitive. Planetary alignment."

  Sandbrooke's frown deepened, then he laughed. "You'r
e joking."

  "Of course I'm joking," Joran replied. "Mars is barely in the House of Venus, and won't be for another three months."

  Sandbrooke laughed more, eyed Joran to be sure, then laughed again. "So let's go cycle them in. We've got twenty-nine minutes."

  They walked swiftly along the gantry; their footsteps making a faint slapping on the metal flooring. To the right lay a stunning view of the building's exterior, seen through the flawless glass walls that rose twenty feet high to meet the glass ceiling. Outside there were cars, coaches and helicopters parked in the encircling lot, barely visible as snow swirled up the building's flank.

  "Sovoy didn't tell me about any specific findings," Sandbrooke said, steering Joran's gaze back inward. "I'm assuming these changes you want to make are associated with the mapping project?"

  "Mapping and contrast," Joran lied again. "Just another round of tests. Would you like to see them?"

  Sandbrooke waved a hand. He understood the macro-level theory but not the detail. "We'll check it with Sovoy."

  Round the edge of the hall they went, while below them attendants dressed in white moved amongst the hundred in the Array, applying gel to their black skull caps, adjusting dials to bring their resting brainwaves into harmony, seeing to any other minor disturbances and generally spreading calm.

  "They look like an ocean, I think at times," said Sandbrooke as they neared the elevator down to the research floor. "A kind of conceptual ocean, all dressed in white."

  "They're more like boats," Joran answered. "The hydrogen line's the ocean."

  "What's the difference?" Sandbrooke asked. "Signal or medium, isn't that the whole point of this research? Everything receives, everything ultimately transmits? We're all floats bobbing on the water, while all our floats make up the water itself."

  "Touché. Shall we?"

  * * *

  The Array underfloor was a noisy kaleidoscope that always excited Joran. There was a feverish anticipation in the air, heightened in the approach to each full detection run on the line. All the two hundred and forty seven scientists present, along with a squad of oversight, security and administration officials forced on Joran by the SEAL, understood what was at stake with each attempt. They were prying open a Pandora's box of immense potential power.

  Joran felt the familiar excitement as he and Sandbrooke left the elevator. Red-rimmed eyes flicked their way, with nervous grins on pinched, exhausted faces. Many of these people had been up for more than twenty-four hours, instituting the new parameters. Keeping the true purpose of his plan a secret from the majority of them only made it more exciting; what he was doing was certainly a serious offence, possibly criminal, playing chicken with a billion investment dollars. He held everyone's career in his hands, to be determined by the results of the next several hours. He'd made the determination that the risk was worth it.

  The Array underfloor was made up of ten working teams, each arranged around a data pillar; a tree-thick spine of red cables carrying readouts from ten minds in the Array above, ending in Cadillac-sized supercomputers. Each clump was noisy now with last-minute checks.

  Sandbrooke strolled along by Joran's side cheerfully, waving at his favorites amongst the staff. "I always feel like I'm in a beehive," he said over the hubbub. "So many drones, following the Queen."

  Joran smiled. "And I'm the Queen?"

  Sandbrooke tipped an imaginary hat. "If the shoe fits."

  Joran's second in command, Garibaldi Sovoy, was waiting at his desk in the underfloor's approximate center, a skinny man in cut-short navy Capri pants with a check shirt, missing only the rainbow suspenders. He was grinning widely and squeezing a red stress ball in one hand.

  "Helkegarde," he said knowingly. "Sandbrooke."

  "You seem pleased with yourself," Sandbrooke said. "Have they started serving kale rice balls in the canteen again?"

  Sovoy was enjoying himself too much to let the slight even graze him. Holding a secret over Sandbrooke's head was plainly cheering him hugely. "I'm just glad to be alive, Sandbrooke. Breaking new ground in science. You wouldn't understand."

  Sandbrooke snorted. "I've heard about your new ground. Joran's told me about the parameters for today."

  "Has he?" Sovoy raised one eyebrow theatrically. "Well, then you'll know it's an exciting sequence with a slight modulation, requiring some final calibrations."

  "I'll see those calibrations, if you don't mind." Sandbrooke held out a hand. Sovoy put a clipboard into it.

  While Sandbrooke studied it, a mocked-up version for official consumption, Joran made his customary check-in. "Give me the full report, Sovoy. How are thirty-seven and sixty-three?"

  "Good. Their signals have stabilized. Turns out thirty-seven only had a mild cold; oxygen treatment sorted him out twelve hours ago. Sixty-three's been responding beautifully to stimulus training, and he says he hasn't thought about his dead mother once in the past three days."

  Joran nodded. Since the multicameral approach was a new field of science, nobody knew for sure what might throw off their readings. Each pattern on the hydrogen line was so slight that even a misaligned train of thought or a blockage in the sinuses could disrupt pattern detection. "Excellent. We are a go, then."

  "All go," Sovoy said, looking at Sandbrooke again and widening his grin. "Looks like you'll be out of a job soon."

  Sandbrooke set the clipboard down. "They'll always need hipster drovers. One day they may let us ride you, like rodeo clowns."

  Sovoy nodded seriously. "I can see you as a clown. A good career choice."

  Sandbrooke pointed at the clipboard. "Tighten those up. You're spinning your wheels in the fourth bracket."

  Joran placed a calming hand on each man's shoulder, stopping the back-and-forth. The results to come would be good news for them all. "We go in eighteen minutes," he said, reading off Sovoy's clock. "Wind up for final checks."

  "Winding up," said Sovoy, and spun around to his monitor.

  At seventeen minutes Joran sat at his desk with Sandbrooke hovering behind him. The Array of minds was represented on his screen by a grid of one hundred green lights; his placid, calm medium-detection pool. They had been trained to enter a coma-like meditative space. The architecture of their brains was as similar as he could find anywhere in the world. The environment around them was incredibly remote, to avoid any interfering signals. The hydrogen line up here was pure, and could be read.

  But could it be written upon?

  The new parameters today would break the final barrier between message and medium; for the first time his Array were not only going to receive.

  They were going to transmit.

  The SEAL had asked him to wait another year, gathering data, but after this they'd be falling over themselves to put his science into practical application. The world would hear. His silence would break, and everything would change.

  In seventeen minutes they would know.

  3. FREAK SHOW

  I stumble into a freak show.

  It's immense.

  I lurch forward through a flood of conflicting signals on the line, silver dots sparkling before my eyes, until I hit a railing and grip it so tightly it hurts, looking out.

  What I see defies comprehension. There's too much happening, too much chaos to pick out any patterns within, so all I see are details. Before me lies an enormous, light-filled hall as large as a football field, striped with dizzying shafts of light from above. The ceiling is all glass with no visible seams or supporting beams, laid over with ice in organic patches of blue and white, admitting drifts of light through which I see the swirling skies outside and the steady fall of snow. The walls on all sides are more seamless glass, giving the impression that this is some kind of atmospheric bubble pushed up through the Earth's snowy crust.

  The hall is a pit below. There's an encircling metal gantry one floor up; I'm standing on it. The floor below is a mottled gray, subdivided into square-shaped allotments by means of grooves, though the pattern is interrupted by
wreckage and motion. There are hospital bed-frames and mattresses scattered everywhere; tipped over, resting on their sides, in places torn apart to metal slats and bars and foam. There are sheets lying like a strange facsimile of dirty snow, wadded and spread, mildewed black. There are wilted pillows and sprayed papers, smeared marks on the floor and cement walls, and there are the bodies.

  I can't think, when I look at them. Their eyes catch me and I am frozen; petrified, shocked, disgusted. It feels like looking into a vision of hell. Single lines of data creep across my thoughts like an ancient computer loading a visual image, one row of pixels at a time.

  The ocean are here. Their gray bodies strain, as alive as they ever were, not lying silent like every one I've seen since Drake. Some of them wear thick black cables wrapped around their necks, shackling them to the center of each grooved square. Others roam freely, bouncing off the cement walls below, with arms missing, with whole portions of gray skin on their chests and waists peeled back, revealing dry gray muscle. They breathe as one and reach blindly toward me.

  But the ocean are easy, compared to the rest.

  There are demons here too. There are probably a dozen dotted throughout the hall; lurching against their bonds, each confined to a square though circular stain marks extend beyond the gray dividing lines, where they've stretched out their bodies in a thirteen-year bid for freedom. They dive and snap like rabid dogs. Their huge red bodies slap over the floor, jostling beds, pillows and bodies beneath them. The cold rising off them burns my eyes.

  And there are more. After that it only gets harder, because there are Istanbul lepers here too. Their jet-black bodies jerk like badly animated sprites, with strings of white skin flapping freely like a mummy's loosened wrappings. I can't count them, can barely track them as they fizz chaotically around their squares, dissolving and resolving in fits and jerks, twisting my perception back on itself. Some of them have slipped their chains and zigzag round the pit, manifesting with a crackle and a smudge of black before flashing away. Tracking them splinters my thinking. I remember the single one of them I killed in Istanbul, and the blast marks that explosion left in my mind. Fear joins the cold of the demons, and I try to pull back from the railing, but I can't move.