by James Axler
Webb drew his hand in, pulling Kane over and down. Kane crashed to the floor with bone-jarring finality, Webb standing over him and still holding his wrist.
“Surprised?” Webb taunted. “Don’t be. You don’t get to be Supreme Magistrate without knowing how to rough-and-tumble.”
Kane squirmed there, struggling to get leverage as he lay front-first on the floor, drawing the older man down toward him. A moment later, Webb’s face was close to Kane’s as the Supreme Magistrate strained to free himself from the grip that he had instigated.
“Tell me something,” Kane snarled as the other Magistrates swarmed around the two men. “Why aren’t you affected by Terminal White?”
Webb’s lips pulled back in a superior smile despite the sudden pressure that Kane was putting on him. “Because somebody has to be there,” he began as two Magistrates point-blanked tranquilizing darts into Kane from both sides at once, “to make the decisions.”
Those final words were lost on Kane as the combined sedatives buzzed through his veins, sending him into a dark and chaotic sleep.
* * *
IN PROCESSING, THEY TOOK Kane’s slumbering body and subjected it to several tests to determine the subject’s level of health and detect any signs of disease. He had, of course, been scanned when he had been brought into the Magistrate department on Cappa Level, but this battery of tests was more rigorous, for the fear of disease and the threat of it spreading in the closed community of Ioville could not be underestimated.
Once the white-clad medical staff conducting the tests were satisfied that Kane was in acceptable health, now stripped naked and restrained on an examination table the same way that Brigid and Grant had been when they had entered the ville, they filed him through to a room that was referred to as the Surgical Theater. This room was entirely automated. The same process had been performed on every resident of Ioville, all except for Supreme Magistrate, to help amplify and thus ensure the success of Terminal White. As Webb had intimated, this system was still in the experimental stage, a proof-of-concept test being performed for the long-dead barons. What Webb had not explained was that the experiment was scheduled to run twenty years, one full generation of the human lifespan.
The theater itself was dark, the only light emanating from the laser guidance system that operated the sensitive robot arms to perform the so-called surgery needed to induct a new member into the ville. The procedure itself was very minor. One robot arm reached across Kane’s unconscious form, guided until it was perfectly placed above his eyes. Then the eyes were opened mechanically and a small amount of liquid was dropped into each eye to ensure that the pupils expanded as wide as they could go. The patient remained sleeping the whole time.
Once Kane’s eyes were open, a new light source appeared on the ceiling above him, directly in line with his face. This was the only light in the room. The light was a bright white in color and perfectly square in shape, with soft, rounded edges. In the center of the square a shape began to form, projected onto the previously blank canvas. The shape was a spiral, jet black so that it fiercely stood out against the pale background.
An automated voice gave a command over speakers set in the unit where the gurney rested. “Concentrate on the pattern,” it said in a gentle, soothing tone.
On-screen, the spiral began to rotate slowly, becoming larger until it almost touched the edges of the square.
“Concentrate on the pattern,” the soothing voice said again.
The rotation became a little faster and the spiral seemed to shudder where it spun, as if it was not quite balanced. The whole time, Kane remained sedated, tripping along at the very fringes of unconsciousness, obeying the command without any question.
For a moment, the spiral seemed to escape the square.
Other than the voice, the procedure was conducted in silence, with only the faint whirring of the motors powering the robot arms and the regular hiss of the machine that regulated the patient’s breathing via a breath mask that had been attached to Kane’s mouth.
Kane remained asleep the whole time.
Once the “surgery” was completed, and it took less than twenty minutes from start to finish, the wheeled gurney on which Kane’s sleeping form resided was moved by powerful electromagnets until it passed through the double doors that had ostensibly been designed, air-lock style, to keep the theater sterile. In actuality, it was there to prevent any resident of Ioville learning of the procedure.
Kane looked the same to the naked eye. However, deep in the channels of his ear, his vestibular system, which controlled balance in humans and other mammals, seemed to sway as if he was at sea. This change in the subject, whose only name was now a sequence of numbers like a bar code, adapted to and reinforced a subject’s responses to the curved air system of ventilation that was at the heart of the Terminal White project. In very simple terms, it worked a little like a hypnotist’s spinning pocket watch or coin, transfixing the subject with a vertiginous sense of unbalance, which created a high level of susceptibility. It also ensured that the wearer was no longer concerned with their own thoughts, that they became more like vessels who would accept and obey instructions.
And so Kane was inducted into the Terminal White program as a compliant citizen of Ioville, where he would join Brigid and Grant, serving the Supreme Magistrate, who in turn served the almost decade-old orders of the inhuman barons. Had Kane still had anything like his individual thoughts, he might have observed knowingly that wherever he and his crew went, they could always find someone trying to subjugate mankind for their own ends. Fear and subjugation—the old saws that had been at the heart of man’s history since the Annunaki had first set foot on the planet millennia ago.
But of course Kane had no thoughts left. Everything was Terminal White.
Communiqué to Ioville Magistrate 620M:
Check corridor 4-76, Delta Level. Food spillage may result in loss and personal harm. Please respond to protect citizens until cleanup crew arrives.
Message ends.
Chapter 16
The operations room at the Cerberus redoubt had taken on a solemn quality. It had been five hours since anyone from CAT Alpha had made contact. In itself, this was not unusual—a field mission might see an agent out of touch for an extended period. However, what made it a source of worry for all concerned was the fact that the biolink transponders had ceased to register, which meant that not only did the Cerberus ops team not know where Kane and his crew were precisely, but also they could not confirm if they were even alive.
“Time since initial loss of signal?” Lakesh asked, one eye on the clock as he paced the large operations center.
“Five hours and oh-seven minutes since LOS,” an ops member called Farrell replied emotionlessly from his desk. Farrell had a shaven head, goatee beard and a gold hoop earring in one ear, and had served with Cerberus for a long time. He was skilled in surveillance and the operational procedures of the mat-trans among many other disciplines. Like most of the Cerberus staff, he was used to multitasking.
“Donald? Any progress with the transponders?” Lakesh asked, turning to his red-haired colleague.
“Nothing yet, Doctor,” Donald Bry replied from his terminal desk, shaking his mop of unruly red curls.
“Brewster? Any success with the satellite imaging?” Lakesh asked as he moved to stand behind Brewster Philboyd’s unruly desk.
Philboyd shook his head, receding blond hair slick with sweat. “I can’t penetrate the cloud cover of that blasted storm,” he admitted. “Heat imagery and triangulation are negative. It’s a bust, dammit.”
“Reba? Extrapolation from last received readings from the transponders?” Lakesh requested, turning to Reba DeFore where she sat at her own terminal to the side of the room, close to the doors. “Are our people still alive?”
“Nothing to indicate otherwise,”
she confirmed. “They should be fine, despite the cold. Their shadow suits will protect them.”
“From the weather, yes,” Lakesh mused grimly, “but what I really want to know is what else is out there. Did they run into something that has blocked our signal just as effectively as that snowstorm is blocking our view of the site?”
A youthful woman spoke up then from the back of the room, where she lounged catlike atop Lakesh’s own operations desk, bare legs raised as she cleaned her toenails with a six-inch combat knife with a serrated edge. The woman, whose name was Domi, was a strange sight in any environment, and perhaps more so here where technology and uniform dominated. Domi was an albino, with chalk-white skin and bone-white hair cropped in a pixie style, along with bewitching, bloodred eyes. She was a petite woman, barely five feet in height and built like a ballerina. Unlike the rest of the personnel in the room, Domi did not wear the white jumpsuit associated with the Cerberus staff. Rather, she chose to wear as few clothes as possible, just a crop top that clung to her small, pert breasts and a pair of cutoff shorts, leaving her legs, arms and feet bare. Many in the Cerberus staff were wary of Domi, believing her to be half-feral thanks to her Outlander upbringing, but she was a fierce combatant and loyal to her friends, who included not just Kane, Grant and Brigid, but also the other personnel of the Cerberus operation, most especially Lakesh with whom she was in love. “Get me a mat-trans window, an interphase window, and I’ll buzz out there and check out the situation,” she urged.
Lakesh looked up and smiled benignly as he fixed his gaze on his albino lover. “Domi, no,” he said. “As I’ve told you before, until we have some indication of what is going on out there it’s too dangerous to send another field team.”
“But that was an hour ago—” Domi whined.
“Forty-seven minutes,” Lakesh corrected.
“And besides, you don’t need to send a field team,” Domi insisted, ignoring him, “just me. I’ll scope things out and report back ASAP.”
Lakesh shook his head. “No, Domi.”
Domi propelled herself from the desk in a graceful, catlike leap that sent her almost halfway across the room, landing between the aisle of desks before pacing over to where Lakesh was standing. “I’m perfectly camouflaged for snow day,” she maintained, “plus I can handle myself out there. You know I can.” This last was said with a fierce jut of her jaw as she fixed Lakesh with her bloodred glare, her face close to his.
Lakesh took a deep breath and gathered his thoughts. “We are all concerned about the current circumstances of our colleagues, dearest one,” he told Domi gently, “but rushing in half-cocked has the potential to be catastrophic, putting both you and Kane’s team in jeopardy. Be patient, dearest one. Your time will come.”
Domi screwed up her face in irritation, her eyes still locked with her lover’s. “Fine,” she said finally. “I’ll ask again in an hour’s time, and then every hour after that.”
Lakesh smiled. “I look forward to that.”
Domi turned with a shrug of her shoulders and strode back across the room.
Lakesh turned back to Farrell at the comms desk. “Try hailing them again,” Lakesh said in a quiet tone. “Keep trying—not just vocal but use Morse code, use coded message. Let me know as soon as you hear anything. And Farrell?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t blurt anything out to the room,” Lakesh told him. “Just me for now.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
BRIGID BAPTISTE WAS BAFFLED.
She sat alone now on the sofa that doubled for a bed in the apartment that she had been allocated and stared at the blank walls, thinking about the man who had burst through the door barely a minute after she had first been introduced to her safe new home. Was he the previous tenant maybe, disgruntled at having been ousted? He had seemed hot about something, that was for sure.
And yet—
And yet he had called her by a name, had seemed to know her. There was something in his gray-blue eyes when he had grabbed her—recognition.
Brigid wondered who the man was. Did she know him? She didn’t remember meeting him before. Not now.
And yet—
And yet when she said “before” she really meant before Ioville, before today, before her life had been affixed in this spot, with these tasks, with these clothes. Had there been something before this? she wondered. Had she lived somewhere else, perhaps not even a ville? The orientation she had passed through after Processing had told her that there were other villes, nine in all, ruled by the baron elite who had only her best interests at heart. Of course they did—why would she ever doubt that if that is what she had been told?
And yet—
And yet the man with the broad shoulders and the dark, tussled hair and the steely gray-blue eyes had sparked something in the back of her mind. A memory, maybe, but one hard for her to reach. A handsome man walking into her life, albeit just for a moment. It had to mean something.
Brigid thought back to the incident with the intruder. He had been sure of himself when he had entered the apartment. He had certainly known where he was going and for whom he was looking.
The authorities had responded quickly, praise the baron. The strange intruder had barely called her that name when they had arrived at her door and escorted him from the property. One of the other women, the ones who had shown her to her apartment, had told Brigid that the stranger had to be disarmed, that he had been carrying some kind of blaster, which, as she knew, was only allowed for Magistrates.
Brigid puzzled over the whole sequence of events, trying to recollect all the details.
He had addressed her by a name, she knew, but already that name was fading from her memory. What had it been?
Bap—?
Cap—?
Happiest—? Was it Happiest? A nickname of some kind, perhaps? That would imply that she knew the man, and there was a nagging feeling in her mind that maybe she did. She could not be sure now, but had she maybe addressed him by a name, too?
Game—?
Was that it? No, they had talked about a game and he had a name that sounded a little like that, she felt, but she couldn’t pin it down in her mind.
How long had she been here in Ioville? That was a question that she could not answer, for already Processing and Orientation felt like they had happened months—maybe even years—ago.
It was all a great big mystery.
Brigid adjusted the gray cap that resided on her head, straightening its peak so that she looked just like all the other workers who contributed to the manufacture on Epsilon Level. Whoever the man was, she felt reassured that if it mattered then the barons would tell her so and would instruct her what to do. They knew best, after all.
Brigid Baptiste stood up and paced over to the front door, ready to catch the trolleybus that would take her to her shift in the manufacturing rooms of Epsilon Level. She was not Brigid Baptiste in her mind, however—now she had another name, a designation, really. Her name now was Citizen 619F.
Communiqué to Ioville Magistrate 620M:
Restrict access to Epsilon Level, Tower 3. Sandcat armaments malfunction. Please respond to protect citizens. Engineering has been dispatched to address mechanical failure.
Message ends.
Chapter 17
Kane would never have given himself willingly to any regime. Not after everything he had suffered to gain his freedom—true freedom—from his days as a Magistrate under the iron heel of Baron Cobalt.
No, Kane would never have given himself willingly. But the newly designated Citizen 620M emerged from Orientation keen to serve the regime and uphold the principles of Ioville. He did not remember his talk with Supreme Magistrate Webb, did not recall anything that had been said in that long discussion about Terminal White and the conspiracy of barons, of how
they had refined a perfect system with which to control humans, to iron out the wrinkles that were known as free will.
In essence, Kane was no more. Sure, the man who stood now as Citizen 620M looked like Kane and sounded like Kane. He had the same cropped hair and steely gray-blue eyes, the same muscles and the same scars. To the keenest eye, Citizen 620M held himself a little differently to Kane, more erect and a little stiffer perhaps, closer in fact to the day of graduation in the Hall of Justice back in Cobaltville, when Kane had turned eighteen and been inducted full-time into the Magistrate Division. Now Kane—which is to say Citizen 620M—would carry himself that stiffly on all occasions, would march wherever he was required, would hold that same fixed, emotionless expression, eyes taking in everything around him, face giving nothing away.
He was Kane but he wasn’t. He was something that Salvo and Kane’s other trainers, going all the way up to Baron Cobalt himself, could only have dreamed of—a perfectly obedient, perfectly reliable soldier.
When the newly christened Citizen 620M emerged from Orientation he was ushered to Preparation, where he was suited up in a gray Magistrate’s uniform like the ones worn by the Mags who had captured him. At the breast, the uniform featured a white circle through which an upright line had been scored: Io.
Io was the name assigned to the ville but its significance was more than that. Unlike other villes, Ioville had not taken its name from its ruling baron. Indeed, on paper the ville was ruled equally by three barons—Ragnar, Cobalt and Snakefish, all of whom had evolved a few years previously into the would-be rulers of the earth, the Annunaki. No, Ioville drew its name from simple binary code used in computer programming. IO, one and zero, on and off. It was a chilling indication of just how the barons viewed humans—as nothing more than functions with flesh form.
