by Brian Lewis
The three of them are unwavering. Passionate. Natia can tell that fire burns inside the revolutionary delegation.
“We had everything, and they had nothing… and they hated this. Elements within the old American government wanted nothing to do with either side. They didn’t realize the old country wouldn’t be the same. Lines were drawn, and they gave the factions vast swaths of territory. They cut the country up like a holiday turkey. They split the old American state into two new countries. The Democratic Republic of America to the east of the Missouri river which maintained its original government. With the New American States controlled by the KWR on the west side. Then there was New Manden, built on artificial land to the east of the DRA. So old America serves as a buffer between the NAS and New Manden.”
“I know the history.” Natia says. “I just wonder why you still refer to the DRA as ‘old America.’”
“Old habits, I know that’s old school revolutionary talk. I’m out of style with you, newsies.”
Natia sees the Butcher of Baltimore stand to his feet. His resentment and disgust for the future Mandenites are palpable.
“I’ll not be a signatory to a document that allows these insurrectionists to have whatever they want! They will have us all in chains if they have their way!”
“Chains! You want to talk about chains! That you are even allowed here is an affront to the peace talks. You’re a war criminal that deserves the hell you will receive in the afterlife.” The younger version of Khalil speaks with passion and conviction.
“And you’re a damned rebel traitor! You socialist scum! I’d do it all over again. You bet I would and if I had my way, your people would still be in those camps right now!” The Butcher of Baltimore laughs.
Younger Khalil, with fire in his eyes, pulls a short sword from his waist and leaps across the table. The blade slices through the Butcher’s neck like hot butter. Blood flows from the Butcher the way water flows over a cliff. Khalil’s face is covered in blood as it floods the table he stands on. Everyone leaps from their seats in shock, several delegates grab their own weapons and point them at each other.
Natia sees the look of pleasure over Khalil’s face, both of them, the memory bot and the man himself. Khalil, now older, looks on his younger self with delightful eyes. She’s disgusted on the inside.
“How’d the treaty not fall apart right there? Seeing as how you gave them every reason to walk away from the negotiating table?”
“You don’t understand Natia, they had nothing left but bluster. I had a mech right outside that could’ve blown their entire delegation to shreds. They lived based on whether we wanted them to.”
Natia shakes her head. “That was foolish Khalil… and mad.”
Khalil turns to face her with his eyes beaming at her. “It was war. You know, your grandfather had a similar reaction. He was a reformist, he wanted to change the system, not replace it with one of our own. Your grandfather and I had our disagreements, but we could always trust each other. We never worried about whether the other person had the others back.” He walks in front of her as the memory freezes in space. “Do you have my back Natia? Do you trust me… as I trust you?”
Natia considers her next words with care. “You use tactics that I would never use. You’re a fighter from the war, I am not… I’m a privileged beneficiary. I might have been born on the winning side, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t lost or struggled. I and many people in New Manden lost a lot. Entire families were wiped out… others had to start from nothing. But you were there. You were always there as a beacon of hope.”
I still sense apprehension in her. She wouldn’t give me a straight answer. Fine, let me take it up a notch. “There’s one last thing you have to see Natia.”
The memory melts away and reforms around them once again.
Now Natia stands in a kitchen with a younger Khalil and her grandparents. They sit at a table smiling and talking about the future and forming New Manden. A group of KWR soldiers storm into the home and begin shooting indiscriminately. Natia can hear a young girl crying in the background among the gunfire, screaming for her mother.
Natia turns to Khalil. “No, don’t show me this! I don’t want to see this!”
Khalil stands silent. Like a ghost in the middle of a virtual shootout as the pinging sounds of ricocheting bullets ring through the air.
“Stop it, Khalil! Enough is enough!” Natia drops to her knees and cries. She looks up and sees her grandmother take a bullet in the stomach. She falls back hard against the wall with a thud and slides down as a streak of blood follows her to the floor along the white wall.
Natia hears her grandfather scream as he too is shot, but in the back. Her mind cracks, and it becomes too hard to breathe. She loses focus and ignores the actions of Khalil at the moment. She collapses to the ground as if she herself has died with her family. The last thought she had was of her mother, then a little girl, and the fear she must’ve felt. She had no clue how much trauma her mother endured, but she knows exactly how she felt. Like a vicious cycle, she’d suffer a similar fate as her mother and father decades later.
“Natia… Natia are you ok?” The hazy image of Khalil comes into focus.
“Why am I still in this memory?!” Natia asks enraged as she looks around and sees that the KWR soldiers are now dead. The bodies of her grandparents lay motionless on the floor. “This was all your fault! If you hadn’t done what you did at the signing of the treaty, they wouldn’t have come after my family! My grandparents might still be alive! My parents too!”
Khalil looks towards the floor and back up and into Natia’s troubled eyes. “I know. If I had the ability to do things differently, I would.”
Natia dares look again, and she now sees the shared memory that she and Khalil have. The memory of her as a child, holding her dead father in her arms and sobbing without end. Khalil stands behind her with his hand outstretched. The younger Khalil asks, “do you trust me?”
The younger Natia responds, “yes.”
Khalil, now older, once again stands over a distraught Natia. “Do you still trust me? Can I depend on you to do what needs to be done?”
Natia didn’t hesitate. “You can depend on me to finish Project Maximus, Farima, whatever the hell you want to call it. But I do not trust you. Not anymore.”
Khalil grabs his head in pain, placing both his hands over his ears as if he hears a loud screeching sound. His eyes roll into the back of his head and he faints. Natia doesn’t hear a thing and doesn’t know what’s happening.
She remembers that she’s wearing her quantum sensor and feels the weight of it on her ear. Is it possible it has the power to break through this virtual construct the same way it broke through the fake AR trees in the bio-dome? Natia doesn’t know, but she will find out.
Grabbing her ear, she notices Khalil is unconscious on the floor. This is what she feared. If he is not conscious in SAR, he may lose control of the construct itself. She presses the button on the quantum sensor and in a flash, she sits in a blank white space.
Khalil’s body is still motionless on the ground. If Natia can call what they’re on top of a ground, in this place. There is no sound. No smell. There is nothing. Just an empty white space that stretches to infinity.
Natia looks at her hands and moves them around. She has all the sensory perceptions she’d have in the physical world. This is not the physical world, it’s a mental graveyard. Natia panics -
“I’m trapped!” Natia fears.
She visualizes an exit out of the SAR virtual world. Natia uses the quantum sensor and sees nothing right away. She thinks maybe the smart helmet only copied the sensor instead of rebuilding it in SAR. Those fears melt away as she sees results manifest like unlocking a cheat code in a game. A door materializes out of thin air in front of her.
She sprints towards it and busts through.
Natia now stands in an elegant living room. She recognizes it from pictures she’s seen of her grandparent’s home.
The quantum sensor, through SAR, has reconstructed her memory. She is at peace, unlike a moment ago. The sun shines bright outside, she can hear the birds sing through windows that are cracked open. She wants to be no other place than where she is. It smells like home. A home she’s never known.
“Natia, my child.” A voice speaks from behind.
Natia turns to see her grandparents standing in front of her.
Her eyes quiver. “This, this isn’t real.”
Her grandparents look at each other, puzzled.
“It’s as real as you want it to be.”
“How is this happening? I never met my grandparents. I don’t know how you spoke, how your voices sounded, nothing. How can the SAR AI rebuild something from nothing?”
“You’re not in SAR, but in a deeper level of consciousness. You built a backdoor within the SAR virtual world using the quantum sensor over your ear. Quantum technology, you will find, can do some pretty weird things.”
“It entangles you with us Natia, through space and time.” Her grandfather speaks.
“How do I get out of here?” Natia asks.
“With the same tool you just used, but we’ve come to warn you. Do not trust Khalil. He has a much darker agenda than you realize. There are many skeletons in his past.” A grave expression washes over her grandmother’s young face. “Many skeletons.”
They vanish.
Natia, frightened and confused, rushes back through the backdoor she built and into the empty white construct. Khalil is still on the ground but is groaning. He is coming to.
She places her finger on her ear again. “Show me how to get out of his hell.”
The white space melts away like ice cream on a sunny day. She and Khalil are now in a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, she sees an enormous image of her eyes cracked open as she lays in the chair in Khalil’s subterranean lab.
She grabs Khalil, still out of it from SAR overuse and hoists his body over her shoulders.
“Be lucky I’m not leaving you in here. Damn you, Khalil.” She exits the SAR construct.
Suddenly, Natia wakes and she’s no longer in suspended augmented reality. She quickly lifts herself from the chair and storms out of the room, leaving Khalil behind without a word. She wipes the tears from her eyes along the way. Assuming he’ll wake up at some point, she realizes she doesn’t care if he does or not.
Natia rushes upstairs and out of his range. If she doesn’t get far away from him, she feels she’s going to attack him.
Once outside, Natia bends over and pukes into a group of bushes. Snot runs from her nose, and her eyes are full of tears as her mind races. “He’s insane. He’s freaking insane! How dare he put me through that without telling me! All to do what? To test me! He lied to me! Do I trust him? I don’t trust him as far as I can see him now.” Natia knows she has to collect herself before entering the dorm section of the red brick building. She knows she can’t allow her team to see her this way. So she stands tall, straightens her t-shirt, and wipes the tears from her eyes.
Deep down inside, Natia is a changed woman. A sharp mental focus brings clarity to her purpose, now clearer. It’s no longer a question of whether Khalil will incite another war, but when. It’s no longer theoretical. He’s a madman whose agenda she must subvert. “How do I pull this off without being suspected? How do I tell The Collective about what’s happening?”
Natia paces back and forth for a moment. She knows pushing forward with her plan to alter Subject Alpha’s genes will be risky. They know the risks involved. They’ve already agreed. It’s Oba I have to worry about.
Coming to her senses, Natia heads back towards the main building. “We push forward. We must push forward. Our end justifies our tactics. The end could mean the difference between peace and war with millions of lives saved. We might have to break the law to do it. To do what’s right.”
Natia nears the facility, knowing her life will never be the same. She’s on a path she cannot walk away from now. The pit of her stomach burns with ambition and she is more headstrong than ever before. The mystique surrounding Khalil is now no more. No longer her mentor, now a dark entity capable of heinous acts of violence. So little she was aware of when she was ten.
As she reaches the door, she breaks down and drops to her knees and cries once again. She cannot remove the image of her grandparents and young mom from her head. Her hands tremble on the doorknob as she hoists herself back to her feet. The most important man in her life up to this point outside of Adan may have been indirectly responsible for her grandparent’s death.
She wipes away the tears again.
“Just wait, Khalil. That was the biggest mistake you’ve ever made. Nothing will stop me now.”
Chapter 10
Masterstroke of Deception
Node One—Manay City, 2082—Isle of Khalil—Khalil’s Compound
Khalil walks down the street with the sweet smell of smoke pleasing his nostrils. He cocks his gun, stops, and peers through his sights, gauging his surroundings. The streetlights and business lights are out. Large swaths of the nation have been without power for years. The power grid in Charlotte has been on-and-offline for months. Only floodlights offer visibility, for the fool smart enough to walk beneath them. The cars that aren’t already burned out will soon be as revolutionaries from the Freedom Syndicate follow him at his rear. He looks down at the dead bodies of the KWR soldiers, a peculiar sense of relief washes over him.
Up ahead Khalil can see the faint visage of a woman walking toward him through the smoke. A tall woman, unarmed. “Stop right there or I’ll shoot!”
This is not normal. This did not happen. She is out of place! Khalil panics as he realizes -
It is Acacia, in his virtual world. “Khalil, Dr. Oba is downstairs.”
Frustrated, Khalil puts his hands on his hips as the world of suspended augmented reality melts away around him. “I was about to engage with more KWR soldiers Acacia.”
Khalil has become even more obsessed with suspended augmented reality over the past week since the failed SAR testing of Natia. Part of it is a way to pass the time, but he enjoys the pleasure of reliving the Battle of Charlotte too. The week-long urban struggle that ended the Second Revolutionary War and elevated Khalil to the status of war hero.
“I figured you’d welcome new information about what Natia has been up to,” Acacia says.
Khalil waves off her defense. “Let him in.”
Khalil steps from the SAR platform. No longer in the underground facility, a team of C.O.M.M. soldiers moved it into a massive study lined with books. There are many rooms in his grand estate, but he made sure the SAR up-link rests next to his bedroom.
On the fly-in from Manden City, Acacia devised a great idea to create an informant. Turns out she was right, they only needed to find the right member of her team to lean on. It turns out, Oba is the path of least resistance to the information Khalil needs. One empty threat and Oba sang like all good informants sing.
The endgame is all that counts, the way I reach my end has never really mattered to me. People like Dr. Oba are replaceable if it comes to that. I will do anything to protect Node One and New Manden. This country will be the idyllic, destined utopia of utopias when I am through molding it. Most people don’t want to do what it truly takes to protect an envied civilization. If I have to destroy a few lives to further the greater good, so be it.
There is also the problem of the second explosion, the one Khalil didn’t authorize or know of.
No one was supposed to die.
While he explores the many worlds of the SAR network, he ponders on this peculiarity. Like any talented poker player, Khalil wears a mask to hide his true intentions.
The Worker’s Council was a masterstroke of deceit. Poor Natia, she will learn the hard way. Too bad it came to turning members of her team against her. Acacia said she believes someone used the opportunity we gave them as everyone was distracted to plant a much larger device. She has been… odd over the pa
st few days.
Khalil looks up, in walks Acacia. Behind her, Dr. Oba strides with his short, stubby hands on his belly. He looks up with his eyes bulging and mouth agape at the giant interior of the bottom chamber. Oba is sheepish, not able to make direct eye contact with Khalil. “Dr. Buhari, Natia and the rest of the team are headed to the ectogenesis room to augment Subject Alpha’s genome as I told you they would. They’ve been using the quantum sensors.”
“Now is the time to move,” Acacia says standing next to Khalil.
“Oba, have you engineered the synthetic memory sequences I requested?”
“I have.” He hands Khalil a small disc-shaped data-file.
“Good. As soon as they’re done, and they think they’ve outsmarted me, we move in.” Not that Khalil was that surprised by Natia’s secrecy. Khalil taught her for years to conceal her intentions and to always say less than what’s required.
Only, he never imagined she’d use his tactics against him.
Celebratory hugging and ego-stroking break out in the ectogenesis room. Natia and her team stand around the long, ovoid pill-shaped capsule that has the body of Subject Alpha—the first Homo Maximus. Three-dimensional printers line the interior walls of the capsule. They can see the metallic needles running on horizontal and vertical tracks along the interior. The needles place the last layer of skin on Subject Alpha’s dark brown photosynthetic form. An AR display to the side reads:
91% complete.
“You did it Natia. The gene-splicing technique is successful. Subject Alpha now has genes that code for optimism, empathy, and love, and we have given them enhancers to maximize their expression.” Araba says as she scrolls through screens on the AR display.
