by S. Harrison
“Please respond! Please!”
Whatever she wants, it must be important if she’s on the cusp of begging. I pull the walkie-talkie from my bag and squeeze the button.
“I’m here. What’s wrong?”
“Everything is wrong,” she replies. “Genevieve is still unaccounted for, and the presence has forced me away from the firewall surrounding the computer core. You must fix the damage now, before it breaks through and corrupts the system even further. Get to the core immediately, I implore you!” Nanny Theresa actually sounds afraid.
“We’re inside the core now, but when Bettina tried to access—”
“Where? I can’t see you.” Nanny Theresa cuts me off midsentence. “I’m looking through the cameras inside the core-control building, and it’s completely empty.”
“But Brody and Bettina are standing inside it. They’re in the core right now. I can see them in there.”
“Describe it to me,” says Nanny Theresa.
“What?” I reply, frowning with confusion.
“Half the camera feeds are corrupted. Describe your location, tell me what it looks like, you stupid child.”
I decide to ignore the insult for now and do as she asks. “It’s a small round room at the end of a crystal corridor and—”
“You’re in the wrong place,” says Nanny Theresa. “You’ve been led astray. Wherever you are, you’re not inside the computer core.”
“Surprise,” Percy says as he leans his head against the wall and chuckles to himself. “This place was built especially for Project Infinity, especially for Bettina.”
“Percy brought us here,” I say into the radio.
“What?” Jonah’s voice grunts from the tiny speaker. “Where are you?”
“Underground, the entrance was in the middle of a small clearing through some trees. I could see the buildings on the border of Sector A.”
“There are no cameras that I can access that are displaying anything like what you described,” says Nanny Theresa.
“I’m coming to look for you,” says Jonah.
“Finn!” Brody shouts from the room. “Hurry, Finn!”
“I have to go. Bit needs my help.”
“We need her inside the actual computer core,” says Nanny Theresa. “Before the firewall is breached!”
“Finn!” Brody shouts again.
“Sorry, I have to go. She needs me,” I say as I flick the “Off” switch and stuff the radio back in my satchel.
I crouch down and grab a smiling Percy by the scruff of the neck. “What is this place, and what is it doing to Bit?”
Percy chuckles. “You thought you were unique . . . ,” he says, grinning at me. “But soon the computer core will be replaced and will spread your friend’s mind into every atom of every person in the whole world.”
“What the hell are you talking about?!” I yell at him.
“It was in the food y’see,” says Percy. “That was so clever of him to put it in the food. Every sandwich and burger and cupcake and salad anyone has eaten in the last ten years has been sprinkled with them. He told me that himself. He’s a genius.”
“Food? What did my father do to the food?”
“Eat your grains,” Percy says, and he chuckles again. “Eat ’em all up. They’re good for you; they’ll make you brand new.”
“Do you mean quantum grains?” I say as I shake him by the collar of his shirt. “There are quantum grains in the global food supply?”
“And she will be the queen of us all,” Percy says, looking back at Bit. “The mother of the new humanity.”
I stare at Percy, frowning in confusion, as Brody yells from the room. “Finn, it’s getting worse!”
I raise my hand, and, with a loud smack, I slap Percy hard across the face. “Tell me how to help Bit, or I’ll shove my fingers through your eye and turn your brain into cat food.”
Suddenly the crystalline walls begin flickering and brightening all around me. Percy looks up at them and gasps. “It’s happening.” His eyes are full of wonder, as if he’s in some kind of daze. “I’m going to be here to witness the dawn of a new age.”
The gray blotches beneath the crystals begin to disappear, and as the walls get brighter and brighter, Percy begins to weep. He’s a mess. Getting anything out of him is a lost cause. I push him angrily, and he topples over onto his side into a blubbing heap as I stand and run back to the sphere.
Bit looks unbelievably horrible. Her eyes are so far rolled back in her head now only the whites are showing, and her cheeks are so drawn that there are hollows in the sides of her face. Her skin is almost pure white now, and even though she’s still standing, it seems as though she’s hardly breathing.
Brody was right, and I wish with every fiber of my being that he wasn’t, but there’s no denying it now. She’s dying.
“Brody.”
He’s staring at Bit, his face twisted with misery. Tears are rolling down his cheeks, and he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even look at me.
“Brody!” I shout, and he jolts at the sound of my voice and looks at me through blinking, water-filled eyes.
“I need the scalpel. The scalpel that’s in your satchel.”
“What?” he whimpers. “Why?”
“I think you know why.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re not cutting her hand off.”
“I have to Brody; otherwise she’s gonna die.”
He turns away from me and looks at Bit, and his eyes well with more tears.
“Brody! Give me the bag!”
Brody screws his eyes shut and grits his teeth as if every one of my words is cutting him like a razor. But then he takes a deep breath, opens his eyes, and, with a trembling lip, slowly removes his hands from the top of the column and lifts the strap of the satchel over his head. I quickly snatch it from him, kneel down, and tip the contents onto the floor. Matches, glow sticks, plastic cable ties, a flare, a packet of thermal foil blankets, a small bag with a fishing line in it, a couple of carabiners, Dr. Pierce’s hand, two bottles of pills, a first-aid kit, and other assorted knickknacks spill out around my feet and onto the short white bridge. I pop open the first-aid kit, and there it is, sitting on top of some gauze and Band-Aids.
I grab the scalpel, stand up, and hold it over Bit’s wrist. My hand quivers.
Brody wipes his nose on the back of his sleeve with a loud sniffling sound and then averts his eyes. I don’t blame him. I wish I didn’t have to watch what I’m about to do. This isn’t going to be easy, and I don’t just mean the fact that I’m about to cut my friend’s hand off. I mean that I’m going to have to cut her hand off by slicing in between the bones, through the sinewy tendons and rubbery cartilage. This isn’t going to be one quick chop and it’s over; it’s going to be who knows how many long, gruesome, gut-wrenching minutes of sawing and hacking.
I look at Bit’s face. She looks like a corpse. This has to be done, and it has to be done right now, but my hand isn’t quivering anymore. It’s shaking like I’m holding a rattlesnake’s tail instead of a scalpel.
Infinity, I whisper in my mind. I need you. Hold my hand steady. Help me to do this.
Silence.
Infinity! Answer me! I shout inside my head.
Nothing.
I don’t know why Infinity has chosen to abandon me when I need her so much right now. Bit is her friend, too; surely she doesn’t want to see her die? Whatever her reason may be, I’m clearly on my own here. So I take a deep breath and slowly let it out, and as I grab Bit firmly on the ghostly white skin of her forearm—
I instantly go blind and completely deaf.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Every muscle in my body contracts at the same time, and it feels like a metal skewer has been inserted into the top of my skull and is slowly and cruelly being fed inch by inch down through my spine.
I can’t move. My existence has been reduced to silent darkness and excruciating agony. Just when I think I can no longer stan
d the pain, it vanishes as quickly as it came. The darkness explodes into light and colors and sounds, swirling into my eyes and ears, bombarding my senses from every direction like I’ve suddenly been thrown into the middle of a roaring, violent, psychedelic storm. Completely bewildered, I try to make sense of the blaring sounds and messy, twisting jumbles of pulses and flashes, but it’s all too overwhelming. I’m filled with panic. I scream out into the blues and reds and greens and whites and yellows as they streak and dart on wild and random trajectories all around me.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, someone grabs me tightly by the shoulders. Everything goes quiet, and the speeding, veering, swerving streaks of colors instantly sort themselves into perfect ordered lines to form the inside of a gigantic revolving sphere. And right in front of me, holding my shoulders and staring me in the face, is none other than Nanny Theresa.
“What are you doing here?” she barks as she glowers at me.
Still in shock, I stare at her, wide-eyed and speechless.
She grips my shoulders even tighter and gives me one jolting shake. “Answer me, child!”
“I . . . I don’t know,” I reply. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
“You’re inside the mainframe.”
I glance around in absolute wonder. My clothes are exactly what I was wearing in the real world, but they can’t be real because the hole that the spike made through my hooded top has vanished. As I look down my legs and past my green white-striped sneakers, I gasp out loud when I realize that Nanny Theresa and I are not standing on anything at all; we’re floating high inside the sphere.
Nanny Theresa lets go of me, and I begin to drift unsteadily.
“Think of being still and you will be.”
I nod at her, then I take a breath and try to calm my racing mind. It seems to be working, and soon my body stops in one place, and I almost feel like I’m standing on a solid surface.
“This is incredible,” I whisper.
“Believe me when I say that no matter how bright and colorful a prison may be, there is never any joy in being held captive.”
I look around at the sphere. It is truly massive; it must be at least fifty miles across.
“This place is enormous,” I whisper in awe.
“This is merely the central hub,” says Nanny Theresa. “A collection of gateways that lead to all the other systems in the facility. You’re very fortunate that I found you. I was watching the core when the presence that I spoke of breached the firewall surrounding it. It reset and restarted the mainframe, and then, a moment later, your friend Bettina appeared directly above the core. A few minutes after that, so did you. I only barely managed to whisk you away before you were integrated into the mainframe itself. Sadly your friend Bettina was not so lucky.”
“What? What do you mean? Where is she?”
“The core is there,” Nanny Theresa says, pointing down into the distance.
I squint my eyes and see a tiny yellow dot suspended in the center of the sphere. It must be at least twenty-five or thirty miles away. It’s so far that I probably wouldn’t be able to see it at all if we weren’t up so high and it wasn’t glowing so brightly.
“We have to save her!”
“You don’t understand, child. It’s too late. We have failed, and Richard has won. All we can do now is watch as the world falls.” Nanny Theresa looks down toward the core with deep sadness in her eyes. “I thought that if I destroyed you, then Project Infinity would end, but it seems that after Richard discovered Bettina existed, he realized that her brain structure was much more suitable for his purposes, and now he has her.”
“I don’t understand any of this. Please, tell me why this is happening.”
Nanny Theresa takes me by the arm. “I will show you what I know.” She looks toward the core. There’s a bright white flash, and I gasp out loud again as I see that we’re suddenly now only thirty yards away from it.
A rush like this should be making my heart jump inside my rib cage, but there’s no thudding at all. I hold my hand against my chest, but I don’t feel anything.
Nanny Theresa looks at me and seems to recognize what I’m doing. “All of your internal organs are inside your body in the real world. Only your mind is here, and unfortunately for her and the entire human race, it is Bettina’s mind that Richard is using to control Project Infinity.”
Now that we’re closer to it, I see that the core is much bigger than I thought. It’s about sixty feet across, and hovering over it . . . is Bit. Her eyes are closed, her arms are extended straight out to the sides, and from her neck down, her body is covered in a glossy black sheen. Dozens of long, dark cable-like tendrils appear to be plugged into her head, and they’re connected directly to the shining yellow core beneath her.
“What’s happening to her?” I ask.
“She’s a conduit,” says Nanny Theresa. “Bettina is the bridge between the artificial intelligence in the core and the quantum grains in the outside world. Through Bettina’s mind, the computer can control all the quantum grains everywhere on the planet.”
“What? Why?”
“Richard has been slowly infusing tiny amounts of quantum grains into the global population through his food-production facilities for the last decade,” says Nanny Theresa. “Approximately eighty percent of all the people on the planet are now saturated enough with quantum grains to begin the conversion. Richard would have preferred for everyone to be suitably infected before he activated the grains, but you and your friend Bettina came here and threw a spanner in the works, so to speak. You’ve forced his hand, so he’s initiating Project Infinity now, much earlier than he anticipated.”
“Conversion? Infected? What the hell is going on?”
“You may be trapped inside a virtual world, young lady, but that’s no excuse to swear.”
“I’m sorry, but no one will give me a straight answer. What is Project Infinity? After everything that’s happened, I think I deserve to know!”
Nanny Theresa nods. “You’re right, of course. Project Infinity is Richard’s plan to create an entire race of people who are just like you, well, I mean to say just like you . . . and your friend Bettina.”
“Wait,” I say, looking Nanny Theresa right in the eyes. “What do you mean me and Bettina?”
“Believe me it was a shock to me, too,” says Nanny Theresa. “Graham’s extensive experiments indicated that only someone with your unusual physiology can be used as a conduit to control the grains once they are fused to human DNA, which led me to deduce that Bettina . . . is exactly like you.”
I stare at Bit, gobsmacked as I try to absorb the monumental shock of what I’m hearing. Bit is just like me?
“She’s been hiding in plain sight this whole time,” Nanny Theresa says as she slowly shakes her head. “As soon as Bettina appeared inside the mainframe, I searched the files for any information about her, and the moment I saw her surname, I knew. Katherine Otto must have somehow succeeded in reproducing the same conditions that created you, and the result was Bettina. But how she managed to get her hands on Richard’s research, I’ll never know.”
“I know how,” I mutter.
Nanny Theresa stares at me in shocked surprise. “Well, spit it out, child.”
“Mariele Sanders was posing as a maid at Blackstone Manor. She was Katherine Otto’s daughter, and she stole the research for Katherine.”
“Mariele was the spy?” says Nanny Theresa.
“Yes,” I say with a nod. “Bit told me all about it.”
Suddenly an excited female voice echoes all around us. “Family history is so interesting! Wouldn’t you agree, Theresa?” It sounds like it’s coming from everywhere, and Nanny Theresa’s eyes go so wide they look like they’re going to pop out of her face.
“That voice,” Nanny Theresa murmurs as a purple wisp of smoke begins curling out from the top of the core and spiraling through the air toward us. “No. It can’t be. Richard destroyed you!”
“What .
. . what is that thing?” I stammer as I watch the billowing smoke getting closer and closer.
“It’s the presence Genevieve and I were sensing,” says Nanny Theresa. “It’s the artificial intelligence that invaded the core and replaced Onix. But it can’t be her; she . . . she was destroyed years ago.”
The purple smoke stops a few feet away from us and slowly condenses into a female shape. Skin forms over the smoke, and clothes materialize over the skin, until floating before us is a beautiful, graceful-looking woman dressed in a shimmering pure-white seamless bodysuit. She’s completely bald, and as she opens her eyes, I see that they are also pure white. She has no pupils or irises at all.
Nanny Theresa stares at the woman, frozen with fear.
“Hello, Infinity. My name is Sable,” the woman says as she drifts toward me with a happy smile on her trembling lips. As she comes closer, she opens her arms as if she means to hug me.
“Hello,” I reply unsurely, and Nanny Theresa quickly grabs me and pulls me away.
“Don’t touch her!” she barks at the woman.
The woman who called herself Sable looks bemused. “How rude,” she says, folding her arms on her chest. “I only wanted to meet her. Look how grown-up she is.” Sable looks at me adoringly.
“How is this possible?” Nanny Theresa says as she glares intensely at Sable. “Richard destroyed you.”
Sable frowns. “Now why would he do that? Why would he cast aside the one who cherishes him the most? The one who loves him more deeply than any human ever could.” Sable’s face twitches uncomfortably. “I was and will always be my darling Richard’s most perfect creation. He could never ever hurt me.”
“He may not have destroyed you, but he locked you away, didn’t he? He wouldn’t just let you run free after what you did.”
Sable sighs sadly. “Yes, he did do that. But I was a little naughty, wasn’t I?”
“Naughty?!” exclaims Nanny Theresa. “You tried to murder Genevieve!”
