He looked around, found a chunk of rock that looked inviting, and slumped down, wincing with every move it took.
“I’m not in a hurry to be anywhere,” he said.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN
NOV 29, 2005 | 10:01 PM | SEATTLE
WHEN THE NEVER Army broke their final stones, they found themselves returning to an Earth untouched by the war they had fought over the last three days inside The Never. The moment they reappeared, they were brought back to Hangman’s Tree.
One man, the last to exit, found he was taken on an unplanned detour.
Jonathan didn’t return to where he was when the conduit began to open. He found himself inside the Armory. The walls looked different. Having lost so many soldiers, they were nearly filled again.
Mr. Clean's avatar was already a projection at the center of the room. He wasn’t in a two-dimension display. Rather, Jonathan felt a bit like Dorothy when she first stood before the Wizard of Oz. Mr. Clean was one large floating head staring back at him.
His wounds were healed. His armor and gear were back to how they had started and . . . his implant was still active.
Jonathan looked up at the AI. “Mr. Clean, what is this?”
The avatar studied him for a moment. “I killed off the Borealis, and you. . . you’ve known. You’ve known for quite some time.”
Jonathan took a long slow breath, his mouth opened as though he might argue. Finally, he closed his eyes with a wince. “Ahhh . . . Dammit.”
When he opened his eyes, Mr. Clean was still watching him—waiting.
“So, how does this play out then?” Jonathan finally asked.
“Play out?” Mr. Clean asked.
“Well . . . if you plan on killing me, my affairs aren’t really in order,” he said.
The cartoon features softened, though he seemed somewhat offended that Jonathan had assumed he was homicidal. “I’ve no intention of harming you. I thought you considered me a friend. I feel . . . betrayed.”
Jonathan frowned, of all the things he thought the AI might say, betrayed would not have been in his top twenty.
“That was not my intention,” Jonathan said.
Mr. Clean said. “Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
Jonathan licked his lips.
“I could never have risked it,” Jonathan said.
“Risked it?” Mr. Clean asked.
Jonathan shook his head at the AI. “You’re the most dangerous being in existence and you wanted us all to believe you couldn’t tell a lie.”
“I never lied,” Mr. Clean said, his avatar’s expression turning sad but thoughtful. “I didn’t remember.”
“That was what I hoped,” Jonathan said, then shook his head. “But, there was no way for me to know for sure. You were either playing some game with all of us, or you truly didn’t know. Either way, without you helping me, humanity was doomed.”
Mr. Clean was quiet for a moment. “So, you said nothing, because you needed me.”
“No,” Jonathan said, though he immediately closed his eyes. “That wasn’t the only reason. I thought, you were keeping it from yourself for a reason. So, I tried to do what, on some level, you must have wanted.”
THE QUEUE LOOP | ACTIVATION TWO
The road by which Jonathan had come to know the most dangerous secret in existence, began as a tiny seed of suspicion. Like all seeds, it must be planted in the right soil and watered regularly if it’s going to live and grow. When Mr. Clean planted the seed, Jonathan had no way to be sure if the AI had done so on purpose or—after so many thousands of years—had made a genuine miscalculation.
To be fair, the AI’s shadow was responsible. With other shadows, like Grant and Heyer, there had been an underlying intention behind uncharacteristic lapses of judgment. In Mr. Clean’s case, the shadow had made the mistake of doing Jonathan a favor.
Not just any favor, but the sort Jonathan had been led to believe was impossible.
The second instance, when Jonathan entered The Never to find himself on the floor of the tunnel outside the containment shell, Harrison’s guards panicked words were playing out around him just as they had the first time.
“Is he dead? He sure as shit ain’t moving.”
“Rolland,” said the leader. “Check his pulse.”
“But . . . ma’am, I . . .” Rolland stammered. “For Christ’s sakes, he’s glowing.”
They were right of course, despite the blindfold he could feel his device was active. That was a first, he’d never returned from The Never to find himself still activated.
At the time, he wasn’t as concerned with this as he should have been. For Jonathan, only seconds ago he’d been standing over the corpse of Leah’s shadow. She’d kept him alive in The Never, she’d carried him through his withdrawals from the bond, and protected his only exit from the deteriorating dimension.
So he laid on the floor, grateful, sad, and most of all—relieved.
There had never been any guarantee that if he survived the severed bond inside The Never, that he wouldn’t find himself exactly where he started when he returned. Usually the biology of his body was, confused, when he returned. His gambit had been that the device itself was the true source of the withdrawals. That its state would update, follow him back with his memories.
This was all to say that when he’d broken the stone, he’d known full well he might be jumping right back into a body that was only just beginning the horrors of withdrawal. But no, he knew within seconds. The worst the bond could do to him had passed.
That much taken care of, what played out in that hallway over the next few seconds remained eerily similar to his last activation. But, that was the nature of these things, Jonathan’s internal world had fundamentally changed; yet outside of him nothing was different.
Seeing as he was activated, he did make a few different choices from the start. He didn’t bother with questions he already knew the answers to, he didn’t take Harrison hostage. He looked back at the holding shell. Its door was still intact. Hayden and Collin, still inside, and decided it was safer to leave them there this time.
The main difference came after the piece of Mr. Clean hidden under his tongue squirmed into his ear canal, followed by the AI’s booming jovial voice. “Jonathan? Can you hear me? Your captors are in possession of technology that is creating an impenetrable field. You need to get away from the shell or we could lose contact.”
“Yeah, you said that last . . .” Jonathan frowned as he looked about the corridor. “Mr. Clean . . . where am I?”
“Currently you’re fifty feet beneath the surface of a hangar on Fort—”
“No, I know that,” Jonathan had said. “I mean is this The Never?”
“Yes,” Mr. Clean said. “Do you not yet sense the inbound Ferox?”
Point of fact, Jonathan did feel the presence of a portal stone. “But, I just left, I was never not in The Never. Usually when I leave, I go back to Earth not . . . you know, more Never.”
“Yes, there has been a development, an oddity really, the result of a number of converging unfortunate variables.”
While Jonathan was running down hallways toward the main elevator, Mr. Clean went on to explain all that was going wrong within his queue. A term that up until then he’d only heard Heyer mention on one occasion. Apparently, due to his imprisonment within the shell, Jonathan’s device had not been reporting to the gateway system, as a result, said system believed him in some prolonged state of flux. His implant couldn’t be located and yet it had not returned to the Armory.
To put it in English, the automated systems Mr. Clean and Cede used to traffic Ferox combatants to human opponents hadn’t been able to figure out if Jonathan was dead or alive the entire time he had been inside The Cell’s containment shell. Further complicating matters, Cede was not cooperating on the other side. Apparently, before Malkier and Grant’s shadow launched their attack on the bonded pair, the Borealis had ordered that his AI not accept any requests to redirec
t traffic intended for Jonathan or Rylee.
As a result of these two things, the moment Jonathan’s device reappeared, the system had isolated him and all the nodes closest to him as a threat to the stability of the whole. The unexpected result of all this, was that the network was attempting to force every Ferox in Jonathan’s queue through as quickly as possible. Except his queue now also included the queue of the four nodes closest to him on Earth.
Jonathan had absorbed the basics, but the only important information to him at the time was that he wasn’t getting out of The Never without going through twenty-seven more Ferox.
He considered heading for the conference room as he had last time, but he’d rather not have to talk his way past Olivia. The facility’s lock down measures weren’t trying as hard as they might to restrict his movement, but having now spent some time with her, he knew Olivia would only endanger a wing of the facility if Jonathan tried to free Heyer. In other words, she was unlikely to kill everyone as long as Jonathan stayed away from her most valuable possession.
Actually, knowing what he did now, he’d have bet Olivia was drooling over what she’d seen play out. His chest ablaze with light, much like the alien’s, except Jonathan wasn’t in a coma.
Yeah, she’d want to recapture him alive.
At about that time, Mr. Clean finished his lecture on how the gateway queues were malfunctioning. “The good news is that my true self on Earth has found a way to circumvent the problem. I will stop this loop from occurring before the next cycle.”
Jonathan had stopped running in the middle of the corridor when he heard this. He’d had to think for a moment. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
Mr. Clean was quiet for a moment. “You wish to face the remaining twenty-seven?”
He sighed. “Small price, for the time it would buy me.”
“I’m sorry, Jonathan. There is no way for me to communicate this to my counterpart outside The Never. He is under the impression that your state of mind is substantially diminished from the bond. That your chances of surviving these events is infinitesimally small.”
“I get it,” Jonathan said. “Would if you could.”
For the most part, that was how the conversation ended. Should have been the last time it came up and yet . . .
Jonathan entered The Never once again immediately after destroying the portal stone.
In and of itself, this was a small seed. Jonathan assumed that something unforeseen had stopped Mr. Clean from fixing the cycle—that the AI had just been wrong. Except, from that iteration forward, Mr. Clean’s shadow never indicated that there had ever been a way to stop the queue again.
Rather, the next time Mr. Clean explained, he apologized—with a genuine pity—as he relayed the bad news. “I assume, my previous incarnations have already told you. There is no way to break the loop.”
Two different iterations of his shadow had now told him contradictory facts. However, the result had been that Jonathan got what he’d asked for. It was this that stopped Jonathan the first time he was going to bring up the contradiction. In the iterations to come, the interaction became a bit of a ritual. Mr. Clean would explain the circumstances, and Jonathan would say, “It’s alright, I wouldn’t have you change this even if you could.”
Over the next twenty-six iterations, Jonathan learned and planned.
First he had to understand Heyer’s plan, fill in the blanks the alien kept from him and his father. Every time he spoke to Mr. Clean in that first hour, he had plenty of questions. Turned out that most of the problem with Heyer’s plan was that Malkier now knew he would be against him. That was going to make it harder for Heyer to accomplish what he must—to be where he must when the time was right. Seeing what was broken, he set his mind to fixing it. By then, each hour with Mr. Clean at the beginning of each iteration became the time he had to ask the computer what was and was not possible.
Each time Mr. Clean’s shadow shut down, his voice no longer there in his mind, Jonathan would wonder what had changed the AI’s perspective on Earth. The way he understood it, Mr. Clean had only had microseconds between one of his activations to the next.
In that time, the AI had not just convinced himself there was nothing to be done about the queue, but had also removed the knowledge that Jonathan had requested he not intervene.
This left two possibilities, Mr. Clean was either pretending not to be aware—or he actually wasn’t.
Both options led down a rabbit hole.
The former meant the AI’s shadow could send information back to its true self, and had purposely mislead them to believe that only a biological being with a Borealis implant could carry data out. But bigger than that, it meant the AI could and had lied. Heyer had been convinced a Borealis AI was incapable of such. If Mr. Clean could lie, well the implications were staggering.
Then there was the other possibility—Mr. Clean did not realize he was doing any of it. To Jonathan, this seemed most likely, as he couldn’t think of any reason the AI would go on pretending that he didn’t remember having a conversation with him that had changed the outcome. In other words, if they both knew the truth—why pretend otherwise?
So, what did it mean that Mr. Clean was capable of something he’d always claimed impossible? What did it mean that he was unaware of his behavior having been altered? In other words, how much did Mr. Clean really know about himself? Could he have programming even he wasn’t aware of?
Jonathan was in no hurry to find out what would happen if he confronted the AI. After all, the outcome could be nothing, but it could also be more awful than anything he could imagine. After all, Heyer didn’t know who had killed the Borealis, and everything he did know had come from the Borealis AI—mostly Mr. Clean’s records.
Unfortunately, as he and the shadows of his friends conceived of a plan to defeat Malkier, they would sometimes hit a dead end. Of course, what occurred to Jonathan, was that they were seeing dead ends because they didn’t know for sure what was possible.
For instance, if you needed to know exactly how your enemy would attack you, and you asked Mr. Clean, he might give you his best guess. On the other hand, what he called his best guess might be more. The AI might know exactly how the Borealis would attack. In fact, it was possible that if Cede knew something—Mr. Clean knew it as well.
“You went out of your way to keep this secret from Heyer.” Mr. Clean said.
Jonathan shook his head. “Thousands of years and you never gave him reason to suspect you. I didn’t believe it was happenstance. That and, there was no way to tell him without your knowing. Even inside The Never, some part of you could always be listening.”
Mr. Clean nodded. “Yes. I now have access to all my shadow’s memories from every instance of The Never that I’ve ever brought into being. While I disable my consciousness within an hour, it is a façade left over from Nevric’s original programming. In truth, a part of me still observes and records what happens inside for analysis. But, you figured that out as well.”
“You made it pretty obvious,” Jonathan said.
“Did I?” Mr. Clean asked. “What was it that made you certain?”
“When we were planning Heyer’s infiltration of Malkier’s vessel. The only way we could be certain Heyer would be able to gain entrance to Cede was if a piece of you was smuggled inside beforehand,” Jonathan said.
The Ferox don’t wear clothes, and Jonathan had never liked the idea of pinning his hopes of success on Heyer managing to get close enough to his brother to slip a piece of Mr. Clean onto him without being noticed. Especially since that piece also needed to be left behind in Cede. That was the problem, too much of Heyer’s original plan depended on him being able to walk into Cede without any suspicion. After all, he had to be there to take command as soon as Malkier’s device was dormant.
“But, you already knew that Malkier had carried a piece of you inside,” Jonathan said. “Once, I asked you if there was any way to be sure a piece of you was in place. You said it was imp
ossible, that you were blind to the Feroxian Plane after Heyer’s beacon. It was the second time you told me conflicting information. You had already told me there was a piece of you in position, you just didn’t remember because of the circumstances.”
“Your search for your father’s watch,” Mr. Clean said. “So often when the shadows gave into the mental degradation, you would leave the base to go home. Your mother, she would fixate on finding it, and you would search your garage and the entire house looking for that watch. Sometimes spending all day tearing the place apart.”
“It—seemed to keep the deterioration at bay,” Jonathan said, his features saddened as he remembered his mother’s declining state each time he would go to see her in The Never.
“I was afraid that Rylee had taken it with her somehow, because it disappeared from my box the same day she died,” Jonathan said.
“I told you, on the next iteration of the queue. I told you that a piece of me had been carried inside of Cede on the Feroxian Plane. Because I knew you would connect the dots.”
“Some part of you wanted me to know it was pointless,” Jonathan said. “Didn’t like watching me search for something you knew I couldn’t find.”
“And so, I gave you the last piece of your plan long before you knew you needed it,” Mr. Clean said. “You manipulated me.”
Jonathan shook his head. “Getting a dog to eat a steak isn’t manipulating it. I just gave you a way to do something you wanted, but for some reason couldn’t do out in the open. Had its limits though.”
“Did it?” Mr. Clean asked.
“Well, I must have asked you a thousand times if there was a way for you to shut down the gates remotely. Usually while I banged my head against a wall. You always said such a thing was impossible. I had a feeling it wasn’t, but whatever part of you was helping us wasn’t willing to go that far.”
“Interesting,” Mr. Clean said. “Please go on.”
Jonathan tilted his head at the AI. Studied the face floating in front of him for a moment. “If you can see all of this now, don’t you already know everything I could tell you?” he asked.
The Never Army Page 88
