The bodyguards monitored police and EMS channels through their attaboys. Frosted I-glasses fed them real-time data from the vehicle’s sensors and high-altitude drones that scanned the route ahead for potential threats. They carried projectile and energy weapons. In the words of Bull Idwicki, the blustery Security Chief, “The men trained to protect you are highly skilled professionals ready to address any operational crisis.”
But Bel had learned from some of her contacts in Security that “operational crisis” was a code phrase used by the department for situations that excluded the presence of Paratwa assassins. Translated, it meant that in the event the Royal Caste gave the order to have her killed, the bodyguards would be as useless as everyone else in stopping it.
We have to do something about that. She wasn’t thinking specifically about the attack on headquarters. Realistically, she knew that if the Royal Caste wanted her dead, little could be done to prevent it. Assassinations, “Pa” killings in Nick’s parlance, as well as “Ma” attacks, such as the biotoxin that had devastated Quezon City, were nearly impossible to prevent.
Still, Pa and Ma attacks represented a minority of Paratwa-related incidents. Most of the conflicts involved some form of open battle, often with a company or battalion of soldiers pitted against a single assassin. Such firefights inevitably resulted in a terrible loss of human life, and even then, the Paratwa usually escaped. That led to the demoralizing perception among the citizenry that the assassins were invulnerable. Now that she was the director, she vowed to surreptitiously steer some of E-Tech’s vast resources toward the goal of finding a way to change that perception.
“ETA is ten minutes, ma’am,” the driver announced.
“Thank you.”
She was heading to the Imperius, the new convention center south of downtown. The E-Tech fundraiser, aimed at soliciting new patrons, had been planned months before Director Witherstone’s assassination. Bel would give opening remarks before introducing Doctor Emanuel as the main speaker.
She should be using the ride to fine-tune those remarks. Yet she found her thoughts again turning to this morning’s encounter with Nick.
What he’d revealed had extraordinary ramifications. She still found it difficult to accept that the Royals wanted her running E-Tech. If true, she couldn’t fathom their reasoning. Even more disturbing was that the Ash Ock apparently could function as two individuals rather than just halves of a single person.
But most surprising of all were the annoying notions churning through her since seeing Nick, notions that had nothing whatsoever to do with her advancement or Paratwa assassins.
He didn’t compliment me on my attire.
In preparation for their meeting she’d worn the only other A-line brocade dress she owned. She’d also donned a pair of slingback high heels. They were the same type of shoes she’d worn the day of the attack and which had earned his praise as she huddled in the closet.
But he didn’t utter a single compliment, not a word.
That she was dwelling on such things was absurd. She was acting like some preteen girl hyperventilating over a first crush.
She forced herself to view the situation logically. Why on earth would she expect praise from Nick? And why would she want it? He wasn’t her type. He came from a different time, a different world. He had a street savvy that was almost unheard of within E-Tech. The two of them had little in common.
She couldn’t deny that Nick’s combination of keen intelligence and shadowy skills was enticing. She’d always been attracted to such men. But he wasn’t exactly in the same financial sphere as Bel, as well as her family and friends, most of whom were quite well-off. Despite her egalitarian beliefs, she knew that romantic entanglements between those who came from wealth and those who didn’t rarely worked out.
What would her coworkers and the people close to her think if she and Nick began an intimate relationship? Her parents, who ran Lookati, an image and reputation management company franchised in hundreds of cities, would be mortified. They’d given her a rough time over her last boyfriend, Upton DeJesus, whom she’d broken up with less than a month ago. They’d never thought he was a good fit for her and although she hated to admit it, they’d been right. Still, Upton enjoyed a degree of fame for being on the vanguard of SATSI – Synaptic Alteration Through Surgical Induction – a radical and controversial technique for excising bad memories. Nick, by contrast, was a mere programmer.
And then there was the reality of Nick’s size to consider. She had no problem with it but knew that her parents and others would consider his proportionate dwarfism a negative. Even the fact that it was a growth hormone deficiency and not genetically rooted – any future child of theirs wouldn’t be impacted – still would leave them dead set against a wedding.
She shook her head, perplexed at where her thoughts had so quickly spiraled. Marriage and children? Am I that smitten?
A commotion outside the limo caught her eye. Two cops were pinning a man to the pavement. His grungy clothes suggested he was an unsec beggar. He’d probably been caught beyond the confines of one of the authorized mendicant zones. If so, he’d likely be stripped of his panhandling permit and deported back to the zoo.
She acknowledged a moment of sympathy for the man. The bifurcated world they lived in, with a functional high-tech civilization walled off from billions of unsec citizens like the beggar, was a grotesque mockery of her core beliefs. Bel saw an egalitarian society as the ideal. People shouldn’t have to live in such radically different worlds.
But they do.
The notion flashed her thoughts back to Nick.
We’re not going to have an intimate relationship. The idea is crazy.
Bel had never allowed herself to be guided by hormones and emotions. Even as a teen she’d prided herself on a high degree of self-control.
Then why do I keep having these fantasies of him being attracted to me and the two of us making love?
Had Nick done something to engage her libido? He was certainly one of the more emotionally manipulative men she’d ever encountered. If he had slipped lusties or some other illicit pharma into her food or drink to trigger immediate sexual desire, she would have recognized the signs and quickly taken one of the commonly available antidotes. But he could have used one of the more subtle and harder-to-detect drugs that incited long-term emotional desire. “Pitstop” was the latest and most devious, having reached near-epidemic usage on campuses.
She shook her head, trying to gainsay such paranoid thoughts. Nick wasn’t like that, not deep down. She sensed an inherent goodness in him. He’d never pitstop a woman, slip her pheromone induction tranqs to force her to obsess over him.
Get a grip, Bel.
She needed to short-circuit these ridiculous thoughts by concentrating on the here and now. She unrolled the shiny new pad Tech-Apps had provided to replace her glitchy one and began a final review of her opening remarks at the fundraiser. After some heartfelt words and a moment of silence for Director Witherstone and the other victims, she would launch into her main points.
Supporting the Ecostatic Technospheric Alliance is one of the most important contributions you can make to the future of our civilization.
E-Tech was created to put the brakes on the profit-progress cycle that drives relentless technological advancement. Contrary to what you may have heard, we are not opposed to every new technology. Sci-tech growth and advancement are as important to us as they are to you.
But advancements must be made for the right reasons, and with a sense that the outcome will benefit society in general. Accelerating technological development merely to create and sustain small pockets of massive wealth in a bifurcated world of haves and have-nots is no longer a tenable path for humanity.
Unfettered sci-tech has enabled us to ascend from our animal roots to the most extraordinary accomplishments. But we’ve climbed too far, too fast. Human evolution changes us slowly but technology does so at breakneck speed. That dichotomy creates fricti
on, and that friction morphs into a dangerous energy that violently disrupts the social order – a social order already pushed to the edge by overpopulation.
The profit and progress cycle has accelerated to runaway levels. Product obsolescence once measured in years is now often charted in months or even weeks. Few of us can keep up.
And as we fall behind, as the twin gods of profit and progress achieve ever more formidable velocities, our vital cultural links break down. This leads to callous feelings, to hopeless feelings, to the idea that there is no future, that the complex social fabric that should unite us has been immutably damaged.
Most of us were taught in school that democratic capitalist societies are self-correcting, that they ultimately bring their worst binges under control. But that has not happened for a long time. Today, historians of all political stripes are convinced that too many years of unrestrained free-market capitalism on the part of the most advanced nations was a primary cause of unchecked sci-tech development, ultimately leading to the sec-unsec divide.
The bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that we’ve placed too few limits on our worst excesses, thus allowing them to get out of control. This Earth that we all share has been brought to the edge of destruction.
But there is hope. Our destiny is not preordained. By working together we can-
The limo screeched to a stop. Bel was thrown forward, almost dropping her pad.
The bodyguards came alert, drew their pistols.
A few meters ahead, a crowd had surged into the middle of the street between a pair of hulking skyscrapers. Traffic in both directions had been forced to halt. Bel estimated there were at least a hundred people. But she couldn’t see beyond the first few rows. It could be two or three times that.
“Flash mob,” the driver announced. “Police are on their way to break it up.”
“Who are they?” she asked. The mob carried no signs and shouted no messages. She couldn’t ascertain a common denominator. They were male and female, old and young and everything in between. Styles of garb ranged from business chic to party funk. Several appeared to be families with young children.
One young woman arrived late and dashed toward the crowd. Wheeling close behind her was a translucent mech stroller containing a sleeping baby, a girl judging by the pink canopy. Bel guessed the baby was about a year old and the woman her mother.
Whatever the mob’s rationale for forming, it didn’t seem to involve Bel or E-Tech. None of them were paying the slightest attention to the limo. It was apparently a coincidence that they’d chosen this moment to occupy the street.
“We locked onto their frequency,” the driver said. “There’s attaboy traffic coming from a man in the center of the mob. He’s broadcasting a countdown.”
“A countdown to what?”
“Don’t know. But it just hit twenty seconds.”
Bel had an uneasy feeling. If the crowd had been demographically similar, such as all young people, she would have assumed it was one of the frequent pranks or protests staged daily by flash mobs across the globe. But the faces that she could make out looked too intense, even for a serious protest.
“Can you get us out of here?” she asked.
“Sorry, ma’am. We’ll have to wait it out. We’re penned in. Traffic is snarled on the far side too.”
“Ten seconds,” the other bodyguard said.
The crowd turned in unison to face outward. In that instant, Bel knew what was happening.
“They’re doomers,” she whispered.
Every natural instinct warned her not to bear witness to the horror about to unfold. But primordial human curiosity got the best of her. She couldn’t turn away.
“Five seconds.”
She’d seen doomers before. Everyone had. But she’d viewed those incidents through the distancing effect of video, as newsphere items after the fact. This one was happening right now in front of her.
In unison, the crowd lifted its gaze to the heavens. Bel saw expressions ranging from resignation to rapture.
“Three… two… one…”
The end of the countdown would transmit a go signal to every attaboy, attagirl, pad or other com device in the mob. Each doomer would be wearing a form-fitting leotard dipped in military-grade incendiary. In theory, each would have the final decision as to whether they activated their fuses.
A man at the edge of the mob was the first to immolate. One instant he was alive, the next a shadow writhing inside a pillar of blue-white flame.
Several more columns of fire erupted from deeper in the crowd. And then it seemed as though the rest of the mob ignited in unison. The fiery pillars touched one another and accelerated the conflagration. Flames from the mass suicide erupted twenty meters into the sky.
The limo had strong shielding, quandonium plates sandwiching a flow-through energy web. Bel knew it could withstand the high temperatures.
Not everyone had triggered their fuses. The young mother was dashing away from the inferno. For a hopeful moment, Bel thought she’d come to her senses.
Then she realized the mother was chasing the mech stroller. It had overridden her programming and was racing along the sidewalk to escape the flames. The stroller’s AI might be relatively primitive but it was smart enough to try sparing the baby from harm.
The mother clearly had other ideas. She was yelling at the top of her lungs for the stroller to stop and enraged it wasn’t obeying. Whoever had programmed the mech must have given it a strong independent streak when it came to preserving itself and its cargo.
“You’re coming with me!” the mother screeched. “We’re going to a better place!”
Bel didn’t pause to think about what to do. She simply reacted. Hopping from the limo, she ran toward the stroller, ignoring the bodyguards hollering for her to return.
Waves of heat blasted her. Although there was little smoke at street level, the air was thick with invisible gases from the incendiaries. She struggled to breathe while trying not to be overwhelmed by the vile odor of burning flesh.
The mother caught up to the stroller in front of a luxury emporium. The show window displayed holos of the latest in controllable housepets, black panthers and snow leopards with implanted microregulators.
The mother grabbed the stroller’s handle, pressed the manual override. The mech wheeled to a halt. Snarling, she reached down to retrieve the baby. The glint of translucent VR lenses covered her eyes, ready to be activated, ready to transport consciousness to some heavenly vista at the moment of corporeal ignition. Even through the lenses, Bel could see the madness in those eyes.
She lowered her shoulder and bodyslammed the mother in the guts. The woman went down hard, her head smashing into the pavement. Stunned, she tried to get up but only made it to her knees.
Bel picked up the baby from the stroller. Amazingly, the little girl wasn’t crying or in any noticeable way upset by events. She stared up at Bel with an expression of intense curiosity.
“She’s mine!” the woman screamed. “She goes where I go, to a better place!”
“Not today,” Bel warned, protectively cradling the infant.
With surprising speed, the woman roared to her feet and lunged at Bel. Her right hand dipped into her jacket pocket. Bel knew she was reaching for whatever device triggered her incendiary fuse.
We’re too close! The fire would consume all three of them. Bel turned away to shield the baby as best she could.
The woman ignited. But just as she disappeared into an upright stream of roaring flame, the bodyguards arrived.
They fired their thrusters. The mother flew backward under the weapons’ invisible energies. She crashed through the window of the emporium and disappeared into its depths, a twisting burning mass leaving a fiery debris trail. The display holos disintegrated, reforming seconds later into another set of big cats, cheetahs and jaguars.
Bel checked on the baby, sighed with relief when she realized the girl was OK.
The store inferno was esc
alating. The heat was becoming more intense. The driver was hollering for them to get back in the limo. The other bodyguard grabbed Bel’s shoulders and propelled her in that direction.
They reached the safety of the vehicle. She checked on the baby again, by this time expecting tears of confusion. But the tiny elfin face wore a smile.
The baby’s expression brought to mind Bel’s final words from those opening remarks she’d been rehearsing.
But there is hope. Our destiny is not preordained. By working together we can restore the Earth and again make it into a livable home.
Yet despite the baby’s expression and those uplifting words, she was stricken by doubt. Doomers were the ultimate expression of surrendering hope, but the feelings they espoused were increasingly embedded in all walks of society. Everywhere she turned, a global pessimism had taken root.
The words of her speech now seemed more like a taunt, as if some godlike jester had composed them in order to mock Bel’s naivete, to stain such human dreams, to destroy the idea that what was good and hopeful could triumph. Billions of citizens were convinced that the world was heading for an apocalypse. For the first time in her life, Bel found herself believing they could be right.
Twelve
With op names like Slag, Basher and Stone Face, Nick half-expected the three men to be dressed in loincloths and smell like day-old road kill. But the trio sauntering toward his booth in the rear of the Zilch tavern were garbed in biz casual, their dark jackets and turtleneck tees exuding a quiet professionalism. Their scents weren’t bad either, an amalgam of modest colognes and deodorants.
They slipped into his booth. Slag and Basher sat opposite him, Stone Face at his side. They registered no discernible reaction at his smallness, a good sign. People who exhibited surprise wouldn’t be suitable. He needed men who took the world as it came, who weren’t susceptible to amazement and its concurrent neurological impact of slowed reaction times.
“Thanks for coming,” Nick began.
“You told us you’d be alone,” Slag said. His accent was British and his index finger was pointing up at Sosoome. The fake feline was perched above the booth on a shelf, sharing it with a vintage wine bottle emblazoned with skull and crossbones.
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